ad picked up his violin, what a beautiful,
beautiful song he had found about it in the vibrant strings!

It was this same song, as it chanced, that he was playing in his room
that Saturday afternoon when the letter from Simeon Holly's long-lost
son John came to the Holly farmhouse.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Simeon Holly stood, with the letter in his
hand.

"Ellen, we've got a letter from--John," he said. That Simeon Holly
spoke of it at all showed how very far along HIS unfamiliar way he had
come since the last letter from John had arrived.

"From--John? Oh, Simeon! From John?"

"Yes."

Simeon sat down and tried to hide the shaking of his hand as he ran the
point of his knife under the flap of the envelope. "We'll see what--he
says." And to hear him, one might have thought that letters from John
were everyday occurrences.

DEAR FATHER: Twice before I have written [ran the letter], and received
no answer. But I'm going to make one more effort for forgiveness. May I
not come to you this Christmas? I have a little boy of my own now, and
my heart aches for you. I know how I should feel, should he, in years
to come, do as I did.

I'll not deceive you--I have not given up my art. You told me once to
choose between you and it--and I chose, I suppose; at least, I ran
away. Yet in the face of all that, I ask you again, may I not come to
you at Christmas? I want you, father, and I want mother. And I want you
to see my boy.

"Well?" said Simeon Holly, trying to speak with a steady coldness that
would not show how deeply moved he was. "Well, Ellen?"

"Yes, Simeon, yes!" choked his wife, a world of mother-love and longing
in her pleading eyes and voice. "Yes--you'll let it be--'Yes'!"

"Uncle Simeon, Aunt Ellen," called David, clattering down the stairs
from his room, "I've found such a beautiful song in my violin, and I'm
going to play it over and over so as to be sure and remember it for
father--for it is a beautiful world, Uncle Simeon, isn't it? Now,
listen!"

And Simeon Holly listened--but it was not the violin that he heard. It
was the voice of a little curly-headed boy out of the past.

When David stopped playing some time later, only the woman sat watching
him--the man was over at his desk, pen in hand.

John, John's wife, and John's boy came the day before Christmas, and
great was the excitement in the Holly farmhouse. John was found to be
big, strong, and bronzed with the outdoor life of many a sket