"Oh, look, Harold! Now you'll stop!"
Through the large empty keyhole of the locked doors an object was making its way: first one long green finger appeared, and then a second, and then a third—those three sacred fingers—as old as Buddha! They made their way into the air of the library, followed by a foot or more of timber; and the fingers and arm taken together constituted a broken-off bough of the Christmas Tree: sign of peace and good will on earth on that Eve: a true modern miracle!
But the member of the military institute did not see it in that light; what it suggested to him was the memory of certain green twigs that in earlier years had played stingingly around a pair of bare disobedient legs—wanton disturbers of common household peace; and as he stood there remembering, his recollection was further assisted by certain minatory movements of the sacred bough itself in the keyhole—a reminder that the same hand was now at the end of the switch. It was not the miraculous that persuaded him: it was the much too natural! But then is not the natural in such a case miraculous enough? To take a small green cylinder of vegetable tissue and apply it to a larger unclad cylinder of animal tissue, with a spasmodic contraction of muscular tissue, and get a moral result from the gray matter of the distant brain: is not that miraculous enough? If people must hunt for miracles and must have them, can they not find all they want in the natural?
There was stillness in the library as that green bough slowly disappeared. The rabbit and the robin, the latter badly torn, got put back upon the shelves in their respective volumes. And presently there was nothing more to be seen but four laughing children.
And now it was getting late. Outside and all over the land snow was falling—the longed-for snow of Christmas Eve. And the last thing to chronicle regarding the afternoon was a reading.
The little gray-toned lad with the mop of whitish hair and the profile of white flint had straggled back to the story which had absorbed him earlier that day—The Book of the World's Great Battles; and he had read to his listeners seated around him the story of the sad battle of Hastings when Saxon Harold fell, and green Saxon England with its mighty throne was lost to fair-haired Saxon men and women—for a long, sad time.
This boy was living very close to the mind of a father who was watching the history of his country; and his own brain was full of small echoes, which perhaps did not echo very fully and truly.
"That is the kind of battle we are going to fight," he said. "England had to fight her immigrants, and we some day shall have to fight our immigrants! Because they will bring into our country old things from their old countries, and we won't have those old things. They are the ones that brought in this silly old Santa Claus."
"If there is a war," said the son of the doctor, "I'll be the surgeon; and I know of two salves already—one for wounds that are open and one for wounds that might as well be. It's a salve that father got in France; and they may have used it at the battle of Waterloo; that's why there were so many soldiers limping around afterwards."