aced
their lowly place. The boughs rattled suddenly in the chill blast above
his head; the drifts fell about him. He glanced up mechanically to see
in the zenith a star of gracious glister, tremulous and tender, in the
rifts of the breaking clouds.

"I wonder ef it air the same star o' Bethlehem?" he said, thinking of
the great sidereal torch heralding the Light of the World. He had a
vague sense that this star has never set, however the wandering planets
may come and go in their wide journeys as the seasons roll. He looked
again into the glooming place, at the mother and her child, remembering
that the Lord of heaven and earth had once lain in a manger, and clung
to a humble earthly mother.

The man shook with a sudden affright. He had intended to wrest the child
from her grasp, and mount and ride away; he was roused from his reverie
by the thrusting upon him of his opportunity, facilitated a hundredfold.
Evelina had evidently forgotten something. She hesitated for a moment;
then put the baby down upon a great pile of straw among the horned
creatures, and, catching her shawl about her head, ran swiftly to the
house.

Absalom moved mechanically into the doorway. The child, still pensive
and silent, and looking tenderly infantile, lay upon the straw. A sudden
pang of pity for her pierced his heart: how her own would be desolated!
His horse, hitched in a clump of cedars, awaited him ten steps away. It
was his only chance--his last chance. And he had been hardly entreated.
The child's eyes rested, startled and dilated, upon him; he must be
quick.

The next instant he turned suddenly, ran hastily through the snow,
crashed among the cedars, mounted his horse, and galloped away.

It was only a moment that Evelina expected to be at the house, but the
gourd of salt which she sought was not in its place. She hurried out
with it at last, unprescient of any danger until all at once she saw the
footprints of a man in the snow, otherwise untrodden, about the
fodder-stack. She still heard the two axes at the wood-pile. Her father,
she knew, was at the house.

A smothered scream escaped her lips. The steps had evidently gone
into the stable, and had come out thence. Her faltering strength could
scarcely support her to the door. And then she saw lying in the straw
Elnathan Daniel, beginning to babble and gurgle again, and to grow
very pink with joy over a new toy--a man's glove, a red woollen glove,
accidentally dropped in the