V
WHEN A FATHER FINDS OUT ABOUT A SON
Christmas had passed, bringing up the train of its predecessors—the merry and sad parade of the years.
It departed a little changed, and it left the whole world a little changed by the new work of new children—by that innumerable army of the young who are ever usurping the earth from the old; who successively refashion it in their own image, and in turn growing old themselves leave it to the young again to refashion still further: leaving it always to the child, the destroyer and saviour of the race.
And yet it is the Child that amid all changes believes that it will escape all change.
Christmas had passed, and human nature had settled once more to routine and commonplace, starting to travel across another restful desert of ordinary days before it should reach another exhausting oasis of the unusual. The young broke or threw away or forgot their toys; the old lifted once more to their backs familiar burdens with a kind of fretful or patient liking for them.
The sun began to return with his fresh and ancient smiling. For a while after Christmas snows were deeper and dryer, but then began to fall more rarely and melt more swiftly. February turned its unfinished work over to March, and March received it, and among other things brought to its service winds and daffodils. The last flakes of snow as they sank through the sod passed the snowdrop pushing upward—the passing of the snowdrops of winter and of spring. In the woods wherever there was mistletoe—that undying pledge of verdure into which naturalists of old believed that the whole spirit of the tree had retreated for safety from the storm—wherever there was mistletoe, it began to withdraw from sight and hide itself amid young leaves bursting forth everywhere—universal annunciation that what had seemed dead yet lived. Out of the ground things sprouted and rose that had never lived before; but on old stocks also, as on the tops of old trees about the doctor's house, equally there was spring. For while there is life, there is youth; and as long as there is youth, there is growth. Life is youth, wholly youth; and death is not the end of age nor of old age, but only the ending of youth: of briefer youth or extended youth, but always of youth.
Ploughing began in the Kentucky fields, and after the plough the sower went forth to sow. Dr. Birney as he drove along turnpikes and lanes looked out of his buggy and saw him. Beside him was his son, and the doctor was busy sowing also, sowing the seeds of right suggestion. Sometimes they met child patients whom the doctor had brought through the epidemic, they stopped and chatted triumphantly.