doves--so kind and tender that the Woman, discovering His presence,
wasn't a bit frightened. Sweeping the hair back from her eyes, she
nodded to Him in the old friendly fashion in which she had been used to
greet Him in Eden.

"Can you make him do it again?" God asked.

He came nearer and leant above her shoulder. So she made the baby laugh
again.

"Could I make him?"

"Try," said the Woman.

So God wiggled the little toes, starting with the tiniest, and the Woman
whispered the five magic names to Him secretly so that He might say them
all correctly. "Peedy Peedy. Polly Loody. Lady Fissle. Lally Vassal. And
the Great Ormondon."

When God boomed out the last large sounding name, the baby doubled his
little fists, crowing and laughing unmistakably. Then God laughed, too,
and the Virgin, and all the Hosts of Heaven, and the Man and the Woman,
till at last the dog and the robin couldn't restrain themselves any
longer and joined in His laughter. When once they'd started laughing it
was difficult to stop. Besides, they didn't want to stop. They were
doing it for the first time and they liked the feeling of it. God
laughed till the tears streamed down His face. By the time He held up
His hand for silence, there was scarcely an angel who wasn't wearing his
halo crooked.

"That's done us all good," said God. "I must have a baby for my very own
exactly like him. I almost think that everybody ought to have babies."
Then catching sight of the dog and the robin, He added, "I mean the
animals, too."

He turned to the Man. "What day is this? I've not been counting since I
ceased to walk in Eden."

The Man answered humbly. "Dear God, it is the twenty-fifth of December."

"I must remember that," said God thoughtfully. And then to the Virgin,
"Come. It grows late. There is no one to light the lamps of Heaven. You
shall have your desire; for you, too, are a woman."

And the robins say that God did remember, for it was on the twenty-fifth
of December, centuries later, that his own son was born into the world.
They say that the limestone ridge within sight of Eden was the spot
where Bethlehem grew up after Eden vanished. They even say that the cave
to which Mary came on another winter's night, when the doors of the inn
had been closed against her, was the very same. There, where the world's
first baby had been born, she wrapped God's son in swaddling clothes and
laid him in a manger, for the cave had now become a stable. Perha