"The road to Arles."
"Ah, my poor child! The Kings don't come that way. They come from the East. You should have gone out to meet them on the road to Saint-Remy. And what a sight you have missed! Oh, how beautiful it was when they came marching into Maillane—the drums, the trumpets, the pages, the camels! Mon Dieu, what a commotion! What a sight it was! And now they are in the church, making their homage before the manger in which the little Christ-Child lies. But never mind; after supper you shall see them all."
Then we would sup quickly, and so be off to the church, crowded with all Maillane. Barely would we be entered there when the organ would begin, at first softly and then bursting forth formidably, all our people singing with it, with the superb noël:
In the early morning
I met a train
Of three great Kings who were going on a journey!
High up before the altar, directly above the manger in which the Christ-Child was lying, would be the glittering bello estello; and making their homage before the manger would be the Kings whom it had guided thither from the East: old white-bearded King Melchior with his gift of incense; gallant young King Gaspard with his gift of treasure; black King Balthazar the Moor with his gift of myrrh. How reverently we would gaze on them, and how we would admire the brave pages who carried the trains of their long mantles, and the hump-backed camels whose heads towered high above Saint Mary and Saint Joseph and the ox and the ass.
Yes, there they were at last—the Kings!
Many and many a time in the after years have I gone a-walking on the Arles road at nightfall on the Eve of the Kings. It is the same—but not the same. The sun, over beyond the Rhône, is dipping toward the Cévennes; the leafless trees are red in the low sun-rays; across the fields stretch the black lines of cypress; even the old man, as long ago, is scratching in the hedge by the roadside for snails. And when darkness comes quickly, with the sun's setting, the owls hoot as of old.
But in the radiant glory of the sunset I no longer see the dazzle and the splendour of the Kings!
"Which way went they, the Kings?"
"Behind the mountains!"