and clasped each other's hands, and feasted abundantly, and took "a cup of kindness," and grew so warm with what they had and what they would have, that when Euroclydon and all the rest of them did come, and that right early, their gratitude never froze, but wintered it through; and so Thanksgiving remains even until now.
Dear Starry Day, when three generations met together and—not to betray confidences—"righteousness and peace kissed each other." What friendships were brightened in thy fire-light! what wrongs were roasted under thy fore-stick! Thy turnovers are imperishable as the Pleiades. Thy chickens of the nankeen legs tucked up in a coverlet of crust, and, brooded in the bake-kettle by its great coal-laden cover, how comfortable they were! Out of the glowing cavern of the brick oven, squatted in the wall beside the fireplace like an exaggerated cat, what gusts of fragrance from thy turkeys, breasted like dead knights in armor, "whose souls are with the saints, we trust;" what whiffs of Indian pudding! what blended breezes of abundance! Thy doughnuts of orthodox twist, and tinted like cedar wood, yet heap the bright tin pans of memory. Thy mighty V's of mince pies yet slant to the angle of perfect content, and fit and fill the mouth of recollection.
Surely heart and stomach are next-door neighbors, for now, Thanksgiving, thy dear old faces smile a welcome home; thy dear old faces, every one unchanged, undimmed, unsent away. Rouse the fire to a hearty roar of greeting! Wheel out the great table laden like the palm of Providence. Bring forth the empty chairs. Let us "ask a blessing!" Let us give thanks!
Christmas.
Methuselah died pretty well along in his years of discretion, but a world at his age would hardly have been out of its swaddling bands. There is a star, less than two thousand years old, that lights a day for us, the fairest, youngest of all the spangled multitude—the very Benjamin of Heaven. The telescope of the astronomer never summoned it. Numbered in the celestial census, I am sure it will not be there when the constellations are rolled together as a scroll. It is immortal as the candle of the Lord. It is the Star in the East that lights up Christmas for us with a wonderful radiance.
If there is ever a time in all the year when the two worlds touch, I think it is Christmas Eve. What less than a first small act of faith is that hanging a million of empty stockings by a million pins at night, and then tumbling the trundle-beds of Christendom with the delightful and sleepless expectancy that they will find them all filled in the morning? Let a man play Saturn and eat his children and be done with it; but let him not set a dog on their angels—a cur of a fact, that should have been born with its nose in a muzzle, upon Santa Claus or Kriss Kringle, and worry him out of the children's sweet kingdom of dreams.
Whoever wants to make his children older than any wholesome grandfather ought to be, has only to strip the world stark naked before their faces; bare all its exquisite mystery that keeps one pair of burnished interrogation-points for ever dancing in another pair of eyes, resolve the thrones and paradises and angels they see in the plighted clouds, into a heavy and delusive fog; and, by-and-by, for the quicksilverish atoms of humanity that hunt out every grain of true gold in the rubbish of life, full of marvel and fancy and poetry as any old ballad, he will have a row of little desiccated, unspeculative, philosophical donkeys all draped in wet blankets.
I visited, not long ago, the house where something happened to me when I narrowly escaped being too young to be counted, but you can never guess what was the first thing I looked for. It was not, as you might think, the threshold worn smooth and beautiful by the touch of feet that have played truant forever, nor the dear home-room with its altar-place for beech and maple offerings, nor yet the nook of darkness under the stairs where goblins and ogres held sweet counsel together by night.
It was only the old chimney-top my eyes first sought, to whose rugged edges and sooty mouthpiece a thousand boatswain winds had put their lips and whistled up the storms for eighty years. It was the homeliest structure that ever seemed beautiful to anybody. Shall I tell you why? Down that chimney the angel descended with my first Christmas gift. What was the ladder of Jacob to me then, has turned, at last, into a rude unlettered monument to the dead past.
They whom I surprised with my "Merry Christmas," in the gray of the morning, have gone away for the everlasting holidays. The children with whom I joined hands and hearts are—where are they? There are fences in the graveyard tipped with funeral urns of black. There are broken slabs of marble bearing names that have fallen out of human speech. There are hard, grim men. There are meek and sad-eyed women, full of care. Has the sparkle of life utterly vanished from the cup? Can the sleigh-bells' chime and the glittering nights and the laugh of young girls and the measure of old songs charm no more?