the Christmas
offerings to the five saints. It proved that everybody, the world over,
had heard that they had settled down. Everybody in the four
hemispheres,--if there be four,--who had remembered the unselfish
service of these five, had thought this a fit time for commemorating
such unselfish love, were it only by such a present as a lump of coal.
Almost everybody, I think, had made Seth Corbet a confidant; and so,
while the five saints were planning their pretty tree for the sixteen
children, the North and the South, and the East and the West, were
sending myrrh and frankincense and gold to them. The pictures were hung
with Southern moss from Barthow. Boys, who were now men, had sent coral
from India, pearl from Ceylon, and would have been glad to send ice from
Greenland, had Christmas come in midsummer; there were diamonds from
Brazil, and silver from Nevada, from those who lived there; there were
books, in the choicest binding, in memory of copies of the same word,
worn by travel, or dabbled in blood; there were pictures, either by the
hand of near friendship, or by the master hand of genius, which brought
back the memories, perhaps, of some old adventure in "The
Service,"--perhaps, as the Kaulbach did, of one of those histories which
makes all service sacred. In five and twenty years of life, these women
had so surrounded themselves, without knowing it or thinking of it, with
loyal, yes, adoring friends, that the accident of their finding a fixed
home had called in all at once this wealth of acknowledgment from those
whom they might have forgotten, but who would never forget them. And, by
the accident of our coming together, we saw, in these heaps on heaps of
offerings of love, some faint record of the lives they had enlivened,
the wounds they had stanched, the tears they had wiped away, and the
homes they had cheered. For themselves, the five saints--as I have
called them--were laughing and crying together, quite upset in the
surprise. For ourselves, there was not one of us who, in this little
visible display of the range of years of service, did not take in
something more of the meaning of,--

"He who will be chief among you, let him be your servant."

The surprise, the excitement, the laughter, and the tears found vent in
the children's eagerness to be led to their tree; and, in three minutes,
Ellen was opening boxes, and Huldah pulling fire-crackers, as if they
had not been thrown off their balance. But, when