saddle. He
had never felt so happy and so free as he did this December morning.
Passing slowly by a deserted orchard, he could see the yellow larks
flying from tree to tree, and could hear the robins and the cat-birds
calling each other names, and mocking each other merrily. Now and then
he stopped his horse to watch a couple of quails leisurely hopping
across the road, and strained his ears to hear their thrum as they were
startled in the thicket. The very air seemed happy. Care and illness
slipped away as the sunshine slipped on the faces of the leaves. It was
December? No, it was summer with something thrown in that is never
present in our Northern June.

Ellesworth galloped along until his horse stumbled into a mud-hole.
Before him, in a hollow, a stream had to be forded in the usual Southern
way. Above and beyond, a cabin could be seen from whose outside chimney
smoke arose in a perpendicular column. Cocks crew in the distance, and
there was every indication that the outskirts of Cherokee were
represented in the hut before him. As Ellesworth halted in the deepest
part of the brook, allowing his horse to drink, he saw clusters of
mistletoe on the tops of slender trees. The dark green of this romantic
parasite set against the gray of the trees and their moss formed a new
picture for the Northerner. The glistening mistletoe with its white
berries recalled scenes that he had read about. Ellesworth had played
too lightly with life to have ever been seriously in love. The
flirtation of a few weeks or months and the solemn tenderness of devoted
love are not allied. The one passes into the other as seldom as silicon
passes into the cells of a fallen tree. Ellesworth had never gone beyond
conventional devotion: and this he had so far discreetly given to
married women. This emblem of Christmas troth actually growing before
his eyes, and seen by him in its native state for the first time,
produced a vague longing upon the young New Englander. He remembered a
precise and beautiful Boston girl, rich enough and all that, whom he had
vainly tried to consider in the light of a possible wife. What well-bred
surprise would she have poured upon him if he had attempted to claim the
right of the mistletoe branch! He had waited in order to give and
receive spontaneous, unconventional tokens of affection. He had dreamed
of walking in the fields by the side of the phantom he loved, clasping
her hand and swinging it with his, just like chi