A few days before Christmas the three kings from the Orient came
stealing up our stairs in the gloaming. They wore cheap white cotton
raiment over their ordinary work-a-day clothes, and gilt-paper crowns on
their heads. They were small, thin kings. Melchior's crown was awry,
Kaspar felt very timid, and was continually stumbling over his train;
but Balthazar was brave as a lion, and nudged his royal brothers,--one
of whom was a girl, by the way,--putting courage into them with his
elbows; and the dear little souls sang their songs and got their
pennies, and their white robes vanished in the twilight as their
majesties trudged on towards the next house. There they would again
stand in an uncertain, tremulous row, and sing more or sing less,
according to the reception they met with, and put more or less
pennies--generally less, poor dears!--into their pockets. Poor, dear,
shabby little wise men,--including the one who was a girl,--you were
potentates whom it was a pleasure to see, and we trust you earned such
an affluence of Christmas pennies that you were in a state of ineffable
bliss when, at last, freed from the restraint of crowns and royal robes,
you stood in your poor home before your Christmas-tree. It may have been
a barren thing, but to your happy child-eyes no doubt it shone as the
morning star and blossomed as the rose.
Other apparitions foretelling the approach of Christmas visited us. One
was an old woman with cakes. Her prominent characteristic is staying
where she is put, or rather where she puts herself, which is usually
where she is not wanted. Buy a cake of this amiable old person, whose
breath (with all the respect due to age let it be said) smells
unquestionably of _schnapps_, and she will bless you with astounding
volubility. Her tongue whirls like a mill-wheel as she tearfully assures
us, "God will reward us,"--and _how_ she stays! Men may come and men may
go, but the old woman is still there, blessing away indefatigably. She
must possess, to a remarkable degree, those clinging qualities men
praise in woman. Indeed, her tendrils twine all over the house; and
when, through deep plots against a dear friend, we manage to lead her
out of our own apartment, it is not long before, through our dear
friend's counter-plots, the old woman stands again in our doorway with
her great basket on her head, smiling and weeping and bobbing and
blessing as she offers her wares. Queer old woman, rare old
plant!--though you cannot be said to beautify, yet, twining and clinging
and staying forever like the ivy-green, you were not so attractive as
the little shadowy kings, but you, too, heralded Christmas; and may you
have had a comfortable time somewhere with sausage and whatever is
nearest your heart in these your latter days! That she is not a poetical
figure in the Christmas picture is neither her fault nor mine. She may,
ages ago, have had a thrilling story, now completely drowned in
_schnapps_, but that she exists, and sells cakes according to the manner
described, is all we ever shall know of her.
Then the cakes themselves--"genuine Nurembergers," she called them--were
strange things to behold. Solid and brown, of manifold shapes and sizes,
wrapped in silver-paper, they looked impenetrable and mysterious. The
friends in council each seized a huge round one with an air as of
sailing off on a voyage of discovery, or of storming a fortress, and
nibbled away at it. As a massive whole it was strange and foreign, but
familiar things were gradually evolved. There was now and then a trace
of honey, a bit of an almond, a slice of citron, a flavor of vanilla, a
soupcon of orange.
Gazing out from behind her cake, one young woman remarks,
sententiously,--
"It's gingerbread with things in it."