When the last light had burned out, the doors were closed, and far into the night the prisoners sang the Christmas carols of their childhood, free from distress, grief, and all spitefulness.
And as the last light flickered out behind the high walls the thin figure of a man with his coat collar up over his ears and his hat pulled over his face crept along the prison wall. Through the night air he heard the voices singing, “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.”
Clasping his hands tightly together and raising them aloft into the darkness, he cried: “I thank thee, father. Thy guilt has been atoned for ten times over.”
FOOTNOTES:
[17] Reprinted from the “Living Age” by permission.
HONORABLE TOMMY[18]
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
It was the day before Christmas, long ago, when Christmas was seldom observed in New England. There were two houses in the village separated by a wide yard in which the grass, of a dirty dun color, lay like a frost-woven mat underfoot, crunching when the children sped over it.
It was difficult to understand what the boy and girl found amusing in that dismal wintry yard, flanked on one side by the Dunbar farmhouse, with its enormous barns and outbuildings, on the other by the more modern house where the Roseberrys lived. There was probably nothing except the indomitable spirit of youth. The boy, Tommy Dunbar, and the girl, Cora Roseberry, raced back and forth between the leafless, creaking old cherry trees. They made leaps over a ledge of rock. The girl gave little squeals of merriment from time to time. The boy, although radiant, was silent. They were pretty children, but the fashions of their day detracted from their beauty.
The girl, charmingly graceful, pink and white, with long blond curls, wore a hoop skirt and a frock of royal Stuart plaid. She wore white stockings and ugly half-low shoes, a red knitted hood, and a shawl over her mother’s sontag. As she ran, the fringed corners of the blue and green plaid shawl flew out.