“May they not after all be gathered elsewhere, strangely altered yet the same? Is some other star their safe habitation? Were they right, sheep that they were, in thinking themselves immortal? Are they now in some other world?”
“What know we? What knew he? That was the mystery.”
The winds caught the word and carried it away:
“Mystery—mystery—mystery.”
“Our fathers remembered the day when he went into the woods and cut down one of our people and took it into his house. On the evergreen he set the star: they were for his youth and his immortality. Around those emblems children pressed their faces and reaching out plucked gifts from the branches. The myriads and myriads of the children! What became of them?”
“Be still!” whispered the fir tree above. “At that moment, while you spoke, I felt the soft fingers of a child searching my boughs. Was not this what in human times they called Christmas Eve? There they are again, the fingers of a child!”
“Hearken!” whispered the fir below. “Down in the valley elfin horns are blowing and elfin drums beat. Do you not hear them—faint and far away. And that sound—was it not the bells of the reindeer! It passed: it was a wandering soul of Christmas.”
“But they are all around me! They are all around you! Myriads and myriads are coming, are on the way toward us, the last of their Christmas trees. The souls of all children, wide-awake, are gathering about us ere we pass into the earth’s sleep.”
“The souls of the children visit us ere we sleep.”
Not long after this the fir standing below spoke for the last time: