Faith Gartney's Girlhood

by A. D. T. Whitney

"And if any painter drew her, He would paint her unaware, With a halo round the hair." Mrs. Browning.

There were dark portents abroad. Rumors, and threats, and prognostications of fear and strife teemed in the columns of each day's sheet of news, and pulsed wildly along the electric nerves of the land; and men looked out, as into a coming tempest, that blackened all the southerly sky with wrath; and only that the horror was too great to be believed in, they could not have eaten and drunken, and bought and sold, and planted and builded, as they did, after the age-old manner of man, in these days before the flood that was to come.

Civil war, like a vulture of hell, was swooping down from the foul fastness of iniquity that had hatched her in its high places, and that reared itself, audaciously, in the very face of Heaven.

And a voice, as of a mighty angel, sounded "Woe! woe! woe! to the inhabiters of earth!"

And still men but half heard and comprehended; and still they slept and rose, and wrought on, each in his own work, and planned for the morrow, and for the days that were to be.

And in the midst of all, came the blessed Christmastide! Yes! even into this world that has rolled its seething burden of sin and pain and shame and conflict along the listening depths through waiting cycles of God's eternity, was Christ once born!

And little children, of whom is the kingdom, in their simple faith and holy unconsciousness, were looking for the Christmas good, and wondering only what the coming joy should be.

The shops and streets of Mishaumok were filled with busy throngs. People forgot, for a day, the fissure that had just opened, away there in the far Southland, and the fierce flames that shot up, threatening, from the abyss. What mattered the mass meetings, and the shouts, and the guns, along those shores of the Mexican Gulf? To-night would be Christmas Eve; and there were thousands of little stockings waiting to be hung by happy firesides, and they must all be filled for the morrow.

So the shops and streets were crowded, and people with arms full of holiday parcels jostled each other at every corner.

There are odd encounters in this world tumble that we live in. In the early afternoon, at one of the bright show cases, filled within and heaped without with toys, two women met—as strangers are always meeting, with involuntary touch and glance—borne together in a crowd—atoms impinging for an instant, never to approach again, perhaps, in all the coming combinations of time.