Ben Hutchins is the colony’s shrewd buyer. He drives his own car out through the country, and contracts for the fruit that is put up in our cannery. They made me the first colony president, and each year have insisted on reëlecting me. Next year I am going to decline. I don’t want to get into the presidential rut. Jimmy Shaw is foreman of the job department in our printery. Jimmy has had a romance which he has given me permission to tell some time.
My son George and his family are with us. This year we are expecting Walter and his family for a visit. I was able also to bring Miss Marsh out to our colony. I feel that I owe her a very big debt.
Miss Marsh has let her hair grow gray; and the color now in her cheeks has been put there by the Californian sunshine. But she looks years younger than when she was trying to live an artificial youth. She is, in fact, quite radiant. For she is satisfying a big heart-hunger. My wife always contended that she was a lonely little creature. But even Mattie was surprised to discover that Miss Marsh’s loneliness was due to a craving motherhood. She is now one of the nurses who have the care of the colony’s children. For we have about thirty children-orphans who would have been sent to state institutions. We have adopted them, and are bringing them up and educating them. We father and mother, uncle and aunt, and grandfather and grandmother them. Happy little Miss Marsh is seldom seen without one of our colony babies in her arms.
VI
It is Christmas Eve. I have seated myself by my typewriter in my cozy study, to write the last lines of this story. Mattie is down at the Auditorium, helping to trim the Christmas tree for the children. I just came up from there. Our picturesque little vine-covered bungalow is on the hill. The Christmas tree had so many helpers that I was not needed. Miss Marsh is joyously superintending the whole thing. Our different members are coming and going. Each brings an armful of presents.
I stood a while and watched their beaming, happy faces. Most of them have known a good many Christmas Eves. One-a hearty old Pacific sea-captain of eighty-showed me some toy ships he had whittled out with his knife. He called my attention to all the proper nautical detail. No builder of big ocean liners could have felt more pride in his accomplishment. I watched him carefully place the toy ships with the other presents underneath the Christmas tree; and the fact was impressed upon me that he had caught the real Christmas spirit. He had created something, which would carry his own creative joy into the lives of others. And is not this-the carrying of one’s own creative joy into the lives of others-the very essence of the thing which we vaguely call “service”?
When I reached the brow of the hill on my way home from the Auditorium, I halted and looked back at our little Youthland Colony, lying there in the moonlight. Out beyond, the moonbeams made a glistening pathway to it across the dusky waters of the old Pacific. At the back, rose the dim shapes of the mountains. The sweet odor of orange-blossoms filled the air. In this beautiful spot our little group was trying to realize the creative life-the life of continued growth and usefulness. Deep emotion stirred within me.
My gaze traveled out over the moonlighted ocean, and I thought of the many peoples of the globe celebrating this Christmas Eve. Gratitude for my own wonderful opportunity made me want to help these others. For I knew that nations, like individuals, were suffering in the grip of the old-age spirit-that effort of fear to strangle growth and progress. If only mankind might learn that the value of a nation depends upon the usefulness of all of its men and women, upon the youth-spirit, which is courageous, venturesome, and optimistic enough to make the whole human race one great world-family.
Off in the distance the old mission bell began to ring. It was sending out its mediæval understanding of the Christmas message, which the Voice spoke to the Shepherds of old. But we, in our Youthland Colony, have learned that the Voice, all down through the years, has been trying to make man understand that he must follow the guiding star and find the tidings of great joy in the birth of his own creative self-the God Power within his own being. When a man gains this interpretation of the Voice’s message he becomes an influence for growth and progress in the Great Life-Adventure-
HE FINDS YOUTH!