s, since
there was to be no "present trading," no "money spending."
Nevertheless, they had drawn together by common consent, and it was
Christmas Eve. She knew it now: There is no arbitrary shutting out of
that for which Christmas stands. As its spirit was in the village, so
its spirit is in the world--denied indeed, put upon, crowned with
mockery, dragged in the dirt, bearing alien burdens, but through it all
immaculate, waiting for men to cross the threshold at which it never
ceases to beckon to a common heritage: Home of the world, with a
thousand towers shining with uncounted lights, lying very near--above
the village, at the end of the Old Trail Road, upon the earth at the end
of a yet unbeaten path--where men face the sovereign fact of humanhood.

... But all this lay within Mary's dumb thanksgiving that the child was
running at her side. And the vision that she saw streamed down from
Capella, of the brightness of an hundred of our suns, the star that
stood in the east above the village where she lived.

Lanterns glowed through the roadside shrubbery, little kindly lights,
like answers; and at a bend in the road voices burst about them, and
Buff Miles and the children, Gussie and Bennet and Tab and Pep and
little Emily, ran, singing, and closed about Mary and the child, and
went on with them, slipping into the "church choir Christmas carols,"
and more, that Buff had been fain to teach them. The music filled the
quiet night, rose, in the children's voices, like an invocation to all
time.

"One for the way it all begun,
Two for the way it all has run,
What three'll be for I do forget,
But what will be has not been yet.
So holly and mistletoe,
So holly and mistletoe,
So holly and mistletoe
Over and over and over, oh!"

Between songs the children whispered together for a minute.

"What's the new little boy's name?" asked Tab.

Nobody knew. That would be something to find out.

"Well," Tab said, "to-morrow morning, right after breakfast, I'm going
to bring Theophilus Thistledown down and _lend_ him to him."

"Ain't we going to bury Sandy Claus right after breakfast?" demanded
Gussie.

And all the children, even little Emily, answered:

"No, let's not."

They all went on together and entered Mary's gate. Those
within,--hearing the singing, had opened the door, and they brought them
through that deep arch of warmth and light. Afterward, no one could
remember whether or no