“Merry Christmas,” shouted a peace-making Episcopalian and the crowd took up the greeting, “Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!” till the hills gave back the echo.
The tired oxen drew the dismantled tree out of the village. The tired little Santa Claus cuddled sleepily within the encircling arm of the old one but they left behind them the spirit of the Christmas-tide. In the village “Merry Christmas!” still sounded from house to house and along the streets. The sticky children shouted it to one another; the women from their door-ways told it to passers-by; old men, nodding and smiling as they fumbled with jack-knife and tobacco and young men lounging on the corners, all told it to one another. Red Baptists told it to Yellow Baptists and Presbyterians to Methodists, and some unthinkingly told it to persons they were not on speaking terms with, then looked ashamed but repeated it. By and by the shadows came down into the valley, crept to the summits of the eastern ridge, slipped over and the village lay in darkness and in peace.
But high up on the mountain side, in a lonely hut that had not been visited by the Christmas tree, Carolina cuddled her little boy to sleep, crooning softly and sadly:
“While shepherds watched their flocks by night,
All seated on the ground.”
II
CREEDS AND DEEDS
The Episcopalians met next morning to trim the tree. They had the candles and candies and tinsel decorations sent them by the foreign Santa Claus whom Grover Cleveland had tried to track, and for every member of their congregation they had made little stockings of net. These they proceeded to fill with candy and to hang upon the tree, discussing meanwhile the perambulating tree of the previous day.
“There was nary somebody passed by,” said one, restoring with a bit of lemon stick the equilibrium of a tilted stocking, “the babies got something, every last one of ’em, and the niggers too, so fur as I know.”
“Every one was free to go to the first Christmas celebration,” said the young girl who taught the two-months-a-year free-school. “The shepherds came from the fields, and the angels came from heaven, and I have read that the wise men who came were from so far removed parts of the earth that they didn’t even speak the same language.”
“You reckon they was all Episcopals?”
“No, but when they went away they were all Christians.”