Being now at home again, and alone, the only person in the house awake, my thoughts are drawn back, by a fascination which I do not care to resist, to my own childhood. Straight in the middle of the room, cramped in the freedom of its growth by no encircling walls or soon-reached ceiling, a shadowy tree arises; and, looking up into the dreamy brightness of its top,—for I observe in this tree the singular property that it appears to grow downward towards the earth,—I look into my youngest Christmas recollections.
All toys at first, I find. But upon the branches of the tree, lower down, how thick the books begin to hang! Thin books, in themselves, at first, but many of them, with deliciously smooth covers of bright red or green. What fat black letters to begin with!
"A was an archer, and shot at a frog." Of course he was. He was an apple-pie also, and there he is! He was a good many things in his time, was A, and so were most of his friends, except X, who had so little versatility that I never knew him to get beyond Xerxes or Xantippe: like Y, who was always confined to a yacht or a yew-tree; and Z, condemned forever to be a zebra or a zany.
But now the very tree itself changes, and becomes a bean-stalk,—the marvellous bean-stalk by which Jack climbed up to the giant's house. Jack,—how noble, with his sword of sharpness and his shoes of swiftness!
Good for Christmas-time is the ruddy color of the cloak in which, the tree making a forest of itself for her to trip through with her basket, Little Red-Riding-Hood comes to me one Christmas eve, to give me information of the cruelty and treachery of that dissembling wolf who ate her grandmother, without making any impression on his appetite, and then ate her, after making that ferocious joke about his teeth. She was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red-Riding-Hood, I should have known perfect bliss. But it was not to be, and there was nothing for it but to look out the wolf in the Noah's Ark there, and put him late in the procession on the table, as a monster who was to be degraded.
O the wonderful Noah's Ark! It was not found seaworthy when put in a washing-tub, and the animals were crammed in at the roof, and needed to have their legs well shaken down before they could be got in even there; and then ten to one but they began to tumble out at the door, which was but imperfectly fastened with a wire latch; but what was that against it?
Consider the noble fly, a size or two smaller than the elephant; the lady-bird, the butterfly,—all triumphs of art! Consider the goose, whose feet were so small, and whose balance was so indifferent that he usually tumbled forward and knocked down all the animal creation! consider Noah and his family, like idiotic tobacco-stoppers; and how the leopard stuck to warm little fingers; and how the tails of the larger animals used gradually to resolve themselves into frayed bits of string.
Hush! Again a forest, and somebody up in a tree,—not Robin Hood, not Valentine, not the Yellow Dwarf,—I have passed him and all Mother Bunch's wonders without mention,—but an Eastern king with a glittering scymitar and turban. It is the setting-in of the bright Arabian Nights.