better for the moving, and whose
mother as yet had failed to materialize.

In the afternoon Harmony played at the hospital. Peter took her as the
early twilight was falling in through the gate where the sentry kept
guard and so to the great courtyard. In this grim playground men
wandered about, smoking their daily allowance of tobacco and moving to
keep warm, offscourings of the barracks, derelicts of the slums, with
here and there an honest citizen lamenting a Christmas away from home.
The hospital was always pathetic to Harmony; on this Christmas-Eve she
found it harrowing. Its very size shocked her, that there should be so
much suffering, so much that was appalling, frightful, insupportable.
Peter felt her quiver under his hand. A hospital in festivity is very
affecting. It smiles through its tears. And in every assemblage there
are sharply defined lines of difference. There are those who are going
home soon, God willing; there are those who will go home some time after
long days and longer nights. And there are those who will never go home
and who know it. And because of this the ones who are never going home
are most festively clad, as if, by way of compensation, the nurses
mean to give them all future Christmasses in one. They receive an
extra orange, or a pair of gloves, perhaps,--and they are not the less
grateful because they understand. And when everything is over they lay
away in the bedside stand the gloves they will never wear, and divide
the extra orange with a less fortunate one who is almost recovered.
Their last Christmas is past.

"How beautiful the tree was!" they say. Or, "Did you hear how the
children sang? So little, to sing like that! It made me think--of
angels."

Peter led Harmony across the courtyard, through many twisting corridors,
and up and down more twisting staircases to the room where she was to
play. There were many Christmas trees in the hospital that afternoon;
no one hall could have held the thousands of patients, the doctors, the
nurses. Sometimes a single ward had its own tree, its own entertainment.
Occasionally two or three joined forces, preempted a lecture-room, and
wheeled or hobbled or carried in their convalescents. In such case an
imposing audience was the result.

Into such a room Peter led Harmony. It was an amphitheater, the seats
rising in tiers, half circle above half circle, to the dusk of the
roof. In the pit stood the tree, candle-lighted. There was no other
il