"But you did shut them up early in the afternoon."
"Yes, mother."
"Well?"
"It's awful cold, mother!"
"Yes?"
"They might freeze!"
"Yes?"
"Specially those little ones."
"Yes, I know, but what took you so long?"
"I did n't want 'em to freeze."
"Yes?"
"So I took a little one and put it on the roost in between two big
hens--a little one and a big one, a little one and a big one, to keep
the little ones warm; and it took a lot of time."
"Will you have another cup of warm milk?" she asks, pouring him more
from the pitcher, doing very well with her lips and eyes, it seemed to
me, considering how she ran the cup over.
Shall I take them back to the city for the winter--away from their
chickens, and cow and dog and pig and work-bench and haymow and
fireside, and the open air and their wild neighbors and the wilder
nights that I remember as a child?
"There it a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea--and music in its roar."
Once they have known all of this I can take them into town and not
spoil the poet in them.
"Make our boy interested in natural history if you can. It is better
than games. Keep him in the open air. Above all, you must guard him
against indolence. Make him a strenuous man. The great God has called
me. Take comfort in that I die in peace with the world and myself and
not afraid"--from the last letter of Captain Scott to his wife, as he
lay watching the approach of death in the Antarctic cold. His own end
was nigh, but the infant son, in whose life he should never take a
father's part, what should be his last word for him?
"Make our boy interested in natural history if you can. It is better
than games. Keep him in the open air."
Those are solemn words, and they carry a message of deep significance.
I have watched my own boys; I recall my own boyhood; and I believe the
words are true. So thoroughly do I believe in the physical and moral
value of the outdoors for children, the open fields and woods, that
before my children were all born I brought them here into the country.
Here they shall grow as the weeds and flowers grow, and in the same
fields with them; here they shall play as the young foxes and
woodchucks play, and on the same bushy hillsides with them--summer and
winter.
Games are natural and good. It is a stick of a boy who won't be "it."
But there are better things than games, more lasting, more developing,
more educating. Kittens and puppies and children play; but children
should have, and may have, other and better things to do than puppies
and kittens can do; for they are not going to grow up into dogs and
cats.
Once awaken a love for the woods in the heart of a child, and something
has passed into him that the evil days, when they come, shall have to
reckon with. Let me take my children into the country to live, if I
can. Or if I cannot, then let me take them on holidays, or, if it must
be, on Sunday mornings with me, for a tramp.
I bless those Sunday-morning tramps to the Tumbling Dam Woods, to
Sheppard's Mills, to Cubby Hollow, to Cohansey Creek Meadows, that I
was taken upon as a lad of twelve. We would start out early, and deep
in the woods, or by some pond or stream, or out upon the wide meadows,
we would wait, and watch the ways of wild things--the little marsh
wrens bubbling in the calamus and cattails, the young minks at play,
the big pond turtles on their sunning logs--these and more, a multitude
more. Here we would eat our crackers and the wild berries or buds that
we could find, and with the sunset turn back toward home.
We saw this and that, single deep impressions, that I shall always
remember. But better than any single sight, any sweet sound or smell,
was the sense of companionship with my human guide, and the sense that
I loved
"not man the less, but nature more,
From these our interviews."
If we _do_ move into town this winter, it won't be because the boys
wish to go.
[Illustration: The Christmas tree]
XVI
THE CHRISTMAS TREE
We shall not go back to town before Christmas, any way. They have a
big Christmas tree on the Common, but the boys declare they had rather
have their own Christmas tree, no matter how small; rather go into the
woods and mark it weeks ahead, as we always do, and then go bring it
home the day before, than to look at the tallest spruce that the Mayor
could fetch out of the forests of Maine and set up on the Common.
Where do such simple-minded children live, and in such primitive
conditions that they can carry an axe into the woods these days and cut
their own Christmas tree? Here on the Hills of Hingham, almost twenty
miles from Boston.
I hope it snows this Christmas as it did last. How it snowed! All day
we waited a lull in the gale, for our tree was still uncut, still out
in the Shanty-Field Woods. But all day long it blew, and all day long
the dry drifts swirled and eddied into the deep hollows and piled
themselves across the ridge road into bluffs and headlands that had to
be cut and tunneled through. As the afternoon wore on, the storm
steadied. The wind came gloriously through the tall woods, driving the
mingled snow and shadow till the field and the very barn were blotted
out.
"We _must_ go!" was the cry. "We'll have no Christmas tree!"
"But this is impossible. We could never carry it home through all
this, even if we could find it."
"But we 've marked it!"
"You mean you have devoted it, hallowed it, you little Aztecs! Do you
think the tree will mind?"
"Why--yes. Wouldn't you mind, father, if you were a tree and marked
for Christmas and nobody came for you?"
"Perhaps I would--yes, I think you 're right. It is too bad. But we
'll have to wait."
We waited and waited, and for once they went to bed on Christmas Eve
with their tree uncut. They had hardly gone, however, when I took the
axe and the lantern (for safety) and started up the ridge for the
devoted tree. I found it; got it on my shoulder; and long after nine
o'clock--as snowy and as weary an old Chris as ever descended a
chimney--came dragging in the tree.
We got to bed late that night--as all parents ought on the night before
Christmas; but Old Chris himself, soundest of sleepers, never slept
sounder! And what a Christmas Day we had. What a tree it was! Who
got it? How? No, old Chris did n't bring it--not when two of the boys
came floundering in from a walk that afternoon saying they had tracked
me from the cellar door clear out to the tree-stump--where they found
my axe!
I hope it snows. Christmas ought to have snow; as it ought to have
holly and candles and stockings and mistletoe and a tree. I wonder if
England will send us mistletoe this year? Perhaps we shall have to use
our home-grown; but then, mistletoe is mistletoe, and one is n't asking
one's self what kind of mistletoe hangs overhead when one chances to
get under the chandelier. They tell me there are going to be no toys
this year, none of old Chris's kind but only weird, fierce,
Fourth-of-July things from Japan. "Christmas comes but once a year,"
my elders used to say to me--a strange, hard saying; yet not so strange
and hard as the feeling that somehow, this year, Christmas may not come
at all. I never felt that way before. It will never do; and I shall
hang up my stocking. Of course they will have a tree at church for the
children, as they did last year, but will the choir sing this year,
"While shepherds watched their flock by night" and "Hark! the herald
angels sing"?
I have grown suddenly old. The child that used to be in me is with the
ghost of Christmas Past, and I am partner now with Scrooge, taking old
Marley's place. The choir may sing; but--
"The lonely mountains o'er
And the resounding shore
A voice of weeping heard and loud lament!"
I cannot hear the angels, nor see, for the flames of burning cities,
their shining ranks descend the sky.
"No war, or battle's sound,
Was heard the world around;
The idle spear and shield were high uphung"
on that first Christmas Eve. What has happened since then--since I was
a child?--since last Christmas, when I still believed in Christmas, and
sang with the choir, "Noel! Noel!"?
But I am confusing sentiment and faith. If I cannot sing peace on
earth, I still believe in it; if I cannot hear the angels, I know that
the Christ was born, and that Christmas is coming. It will not be a
very merry Christmas; but it shall be a most significant, most solemn,
most holy Christmas.
The Yule logs, as the Yule-tide songs, will be fewer this year. Many a
window, bright with candles a year ago, will be darkened. There will
be no goose at the Cratchits', for both Bob and Master Cratchit have
gone to the front. But Tiny Tim is left, and the Christ Child is left,
and my child is left, and yours--even your dear dreamchild "upon the
tedious shores of Lethe" that always comes back at Christmas. It takes
only one little child to make Christmas--one little child, and the
angels who companion him, and the shepherds who come to see him, and
the Wise Men who worship him and bring him gifts.
We can have Christmas, for unto us again, as truly as in Bethlehem of
Judea, a child is born on whose shoulders shall be the government and
whose name is the Prince of Peace.
Christ is reborn with every child, and Christmas is his festival.
Come, let us keep it for his sake; for the children's sake; for the
sake of the little child that we must become before we can enter into
the Kingdom of Heaven. It is neither kings nor kaisers, but a little
child that shall lead us finally. And long after the round-lipped
cannons have ceased to roar, we shall hear the Christmas song of the
Angels.
"But see! the Virgin blest
Hath laid her Babe to rest--"
Come, softly, swiftly, dress up the tree, hang high the largest
stockings; bring out the toys--softly!
I hope it snows.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Hills of Hingham, by Dallas Lore Sharp