The Bride of the Mistletoe | Page 9

the race encamps; he was brother to all brothers
who join work to work for common good. He was feeling for the
moment that through his hands ran the long rope of the world at which
men--like a crew of sailors--tug at the Ship of Life, trying to tow her
into some divine haven.
His task was ended. Would it be of service? Would it carry any
message? Would it kindle in American homes some new light of truth,
with the eyes of mothers and fathers fixed upon it, and innumerable

children of the future the better for its shining?
"Are you coming?" she called more quiveringly.
"I am coming," he called back, breaking away from his revery, and
raising his voice so it would surely reach her.

II. THE TREE AND THE SUNSET
She had quitted the house and, having taken a few steps across the short
frozen grass of the yard as one walks lingeringly when expecting to be
joined by a companion, she turned and stood with her eyes fixed on the
doorway for his emerging figure.
"To-morrow night," he had said, smiling at her with one meaning in his
words, "to-morrow night you will understand."
"Yes," she now said to herself, with another meaning in hers,
"to-morrow night I must understand. Until to-morrow night, then,
blinded and bewildered with holly and cedar let me be! Kind ignorance,
enfold me and spare me! All happiness that I can control or conjecture,
come to me and console me!"
And over herself she dropped a vesture of joy to greet him when he
should step forth.
It was a pleasant afternoon to be out of doors and to go about what they
had planned; the ground was scarcely frozen, there was no wind, and
the whole sky was overcast with thin gray cloud that betrayed no
movement. Under this still dome of silvery-violet light stretched the
winter land; it seemed ready and waiting for its great festival.
The lawn sloped away from the house to a brook at the bottom, and
beyond the brook the ground rose to a woodland hilltop. Across the
distance you distinguished there the familiar trees of blue-grass
pastures: white ash and black ash; white oak and red oak; white walnut
and black walnut; and the scaly-bark hickory in his roughness and the

sycamore with her soft leoparded limbs. The black walnut and the
hickory brought to mind autumn days when children were abroad,
ploughing the myriad leaves with booted feet and gathering their
harvest of nuts--primitive food-storing instinct of the human animal
still rampant in modern childhood: these nuts to be put away in garret
and cellar and but scantily eaten until Christmas came.
Out of this woods on the afternoon air sounded the muffled strokes of
an axe cutting down a black walnut partly dead; and when this fell, it
would bring down with it bunches of mistletoe, those white pearls of
the forest mounted on branching jade. To-morrow eager fingers would
be gathering the mistletoe to decorate the house. Near by was a thicket
of bramble and cane where, out of reach of cattle, bushes of holly
thrived: the same fingers would be gathering that.
Bordering this woods on one side lay a cornfield. The corn had just
been shucked, and beside each shock of fodder lay its heap of ears
ready for the gathering wagon. The sight of the corn brought freshly to
remembrance the red-ambered home-brew of the land which runs in a
genial torrent through all days and nights of the year--many a
full-throated rill--but never with so inundating a movement as at this
season. And the same grain suggested also the smokehouses of all
farms, in which larded porkers, fattened by it, had taken on posthumous
honors as home-cured hams; and in which up under the black rafters
home-made sausages were being smoked to their needed flavor over
well-chosen chips.
Around one heap of ears a flock of home-grown turkeys, red-mottled,
rainbow-necked, were feeding for their fate.
On the other side of the woods stretched a wheat-field, in the stubble of
which coveys of bob-whites were giving themselves final plumpness
for the table by picking up grains of wheat which had dropped into the
drills at harvest time or other seeds which had ripened in the autumn
aftermath.
Farther away on the landscape there was a hemp-field where
hemp-breakers were making a rattling reedy music; during these weeks

wagons loaded with the gold-bearing fibre begin to move creaking to
the towns, helping to fill the farmer's pockets with holiday largess.
Thus everything needed for Christmas was there in sight: the
mistletoe--the holly--the liquor of the land for the cups of hearty
men--the hams and the sausages of fastidious housewives--the turkey
and the quail--and crops transmutable into coin. They were in