The Bride of the Mistletoe | Page 3

was once the old
pagan festival of the reappearing sun. It was the pagan festival when
the hands of labor took their rest and hunger took its fill. It was the
pagan festival to honor the descent of the fabled inhabitants of an upper
world upon the earth, their commerce with common flesh, and the
production of a race of divine-and-human half-breeds. It is now the
festival of the Immortal Child appearing in the midst of mortal children.
It is now the new festival of man's remembrance of his errors and his
charity toward erring neighbors. It has latterly become the widening
festival of universal brotherhood with succor for all need and nighness
to all suffering; of good will warring against ill will and of peace
warring upon war.
And thus for all who have anywhere come to know it, Christmas is the
festival of the better worldly self. But better than worldliness, it is on
the Shield to-day what it essentially has been through many an age to
many people--the symbolic Earth Festival of the Evergreen; setting
forth man's pathetic love of youth--of his own youth that will not stay
with him; and renewing his faith in a destiny that winds its ancient way
upward out of dark and damp toward Eternal Light.
This is a story of the Earth Festival on the Earth Shield.

I. THE MAN AND THE SECRET
A man sat writing near a window of an old house out in the country a
few years ago; it was afternoon of the twenty-third of December.
One of the volumes of a work on American Forestry lay open on the
desk near his right hand; and as he sometimes stopped in his writing
and turned the leaves, the illustrations showed that the long road of his
mental travels--for such he followed--was now passing through the
evergreens.
Many notes were printed at the bottoms of the pages. They burned there
like short tapers in dim places, often lighting up obscure faiths and

customs of our puzzled human race. His eyes roved from taper to taper,
as gathering knowledge ray by ray. A small book lay near the large one.
It dealt with primitive nature-worship; and it belonged in the class of
those that are kept under lock and key by the libraries which possess
them as unsafe reading for unsafe minds.
Sheets of paper covered with the man's clear, deliberate handwriting
lay thickly on the desk. A table in the centre of the room was strewn
with volumes, some of a secret character, opened for reference. On the
tops of two bookcases and on the mantelpiece were prints representing
scenes from the oldest known art of the East. These and other prints
hanging about the walls, however remote from each other in the times
and places where they had been gathered, brought together in this room
of a quiet Kentucky farmhouse evidence bearing upon the same object:
the subject related in general to trees and in especial evergreens.
While the man was immersed in his work, he appeared not to be
submerged. His left hand was always going out to one or the other of
three picture-frames on the desk and his fingers bent caressingly.
Two of these frames held photographs of four young children--a boy
and a girl comprising each group. The children had the air of being well
enough bred to be well behaved before the camera, but of being unruly
and disorderly out of sheer health and a wild naturalness. All of them
looked straight at you; all had eyes wide open with American frankness
and good humor; all had mouths shut tight with American energy and
determination. Apparently they already believed that the New World
was behind them, that the nation backed them up. In a way you
believed it. You accepted them on the spot as embodying that
marvellous precocity in American children, through which they early in
life become conscious of the country and claim it their country and
believe that it claims them. Thus they took on the distinction of being a
squad detached only photographically from the rank and file of the
white armies of the young in the New World, millions and millions
strong, as they march, clear-eyed, clear-headed, joyous, magnificent,
toward new times and new destinies for the nation and for humanity--a
kinder knowledge of man and a kinder ignorance of God.

The third frame held the picture of a woman probably thirty years of
age. Her features were without noticeable American characteristics.
What human traits you saw depended upon what human traits you saw
with.
The hair was dark and abundant, the brows dark and strong. And the
lashes were dark and strong; and the eyes themselves, so thornily
hedged about, somehow brought up before you a picture