'Naked boy, brown boy,
In the snow deep,
Piping, carolling
Folks out of sleep;
Little shoes, thin shoes,
Shoes so wet and worn'--
'But I bring the merry news
--Christ is born!
Rise, pretty mistress,
In your smock of silk;
Give me for my good news
Bread and new milk.
Joy, joy in Jewry,
This very morn!
Far and far I carry it
--Christ is born!'
She heard me with a grave face to the end; then pulling a handful of
straw, spread it in the empty manger and laid the doll there. No, I
forget; one moment she held it close to her breast and looked down on
it. The God who fashions children can tell where she learnt that
look, and why I remembered it ten years later, when they let me look
into the room where she lay with another babe in her clay-cold arms.
"Count forty," she went on, using the very words of Pretty Tommy, our
parish clerk: "count forty, and let fly with 'Now draw around--'"
"Now draw around, good Christian men,
And rest you worship-ping--"
We sang the carol softly together, she resting one hand on the edge
of the manger.
"Dick, ain't you proud of him? I don't see the spiders beginning,
though."
"The spiders?"
"Dick, you're very ig-norant. _Everybody_ knows that, when Christ
was laid in a manger, the spiders came and spun their webs over Him
and hid Him. That's why King Herod couldn't find Him."
"There, now! We live and learn," said I.
"Well, now there's nothing to do but sit down and wait for the wise
men and the shepherds."
It was a little while that she watched, being long over-tired.
The warm air of the chall weighed on her eyelids; and, as they
closed, her head sank on my shoulder. For ten minutes I sat,
listening to her breathing. Dinah rose heavily from her bed and lay
down again, with a long sigh; another cow woke up and rattled her
rope a dozen times through its ring; up at the house the fiddling
grew more furious; but the little maid slept on. At last I wrapped
the sack closely round her, and lifting her in my arms, carried her
out into the night. She was my master's daughter, and I had not the
courage to kiss so much as her hair. Yet I had no envy for the
dancers, then.
As we passed into the cold air she stirred. "Did they come? And
where are you carrying me?" Then, when I told her, "Dick, I will
never speak to you again, if you don't carry me first to the gate of
the upper field."
So I carried her to the gate, and sitting up in my arms she called
twice:
"Laban--Laban!"
"What cheer--O?" the hind called back. His lantern was a spark on
the hill-side, and he could not tell the voice at that distance.
"Have you seen him?"
"Wha-a-a-t?"
"The angel of the Lo-o-ord!"
"Wha-a-a-t?"
"I'm afraid we can't make him understand," she whispered.
"Hush; don't shout!" For a moment, she seemed to consider; and then
her shrill treble quavered out on the frosty air, my own deeper voice
taking up the second line--
"The first' Nowell' the angel did say
Was to certain poor shepherds, in fields as they lay,
--In fields as they lay, a-tending their sheep,
On a cold winters night that was so deep--
Nowell! Nowell!
Christ is born in Israel!"
Our voices followed our shadows across the gate and far up the field,
where Laban's sheep lay dotted. What Laban thought of it I cannot
tell: but to me it seemed, for the moment, that the shepherd among
his ewes, the dancers within the house, the sea beneath us, and the
stars in their courses overhead moved all to one tune,--the carol of
two children on the hill-side.
[1] Cow-house.