Christmas in Storyland

by Unknown

The spruce, with the flitting cardinal on its boughs, stood at the side of the bishop’s grounds between his slate-roofed and ivy-clad house and the brick orphan asylum.

The bishop’s bedroom was on the same side of the house as the spruce, and just now the bachelor bishop himself was at a window of the square bay of this chamber, looking out upon his grounds and the big evergreen in the bleak and wintry setting. He was just becoming acquainted with the spruce and his side yard.

The robe that he wore at the moment had less of the episcopal dignity than that of the cardinal in the evergreen; the bishop’s was a gray-and-black dressing-gown, and it was tied about his body with a gray-and-black cord and tassels.

His expression, or what could be seen of it,—for this square-featured, clean-shaven bishop wore a green celluloid shade over his eyes,—was rueful. It was the first Christmas after his arrival from a distant state to be head of this Southern diocese. And behold, three weeks after his coming, here he was—ill with the measles!

He was in his venerable predecessor’s house, and that was why the stately spruce and the cardinal were new to him.

The dwelling, in its old grounds, with a small, slate-roofed church to the left of it and the asylum to the right of it, stood on the car-line a little way out from the chief city of the diocese. The wife of the late bishop had owned it long before trolley-cars were dreamed of; had built the church and the asylum, and given them to her husband’s diocese; had died, and left the dwelling to her husband. When, within a year, he followed her, he had left the place as an episcopal residence for his successors.

The old bishop’s pensioned servants remained, integral parts of the institution. Neither a new broom nor a new bishop must sweep too clean. Even one who has authority, when he finds himself among the old associations and traditions and institutions of a sedate community, must move slowly.

The bishop found the household of which he was bachelor proprietor somewhat dreary. There was old Mrs. Dyer, the housekeeper, a distant relative of the old bishop’s, gold-spectacled, tall and spare. There was old Aunty Sally, the colored cook, silver-spectacled, short and fat. There was Thomas, the colored coachman and gardener, gray-haired, and, for the time, confined to his room over the tool-house by rheumatism. There was old white Tim, the general factotum and furnace-tender of the asylum, the rectory and the church; he had gone to town that morning for his Christmas purchases, and so far, at four o’clock in the afternoon, had not returned. In this venerable company the new bishop felt a mere infant in arms, an infant with measles!—the more so, because from the beginning he had refused to have a trained nurse, and had put himself into the hands of Mrs. Dyer and Aunt Sally.

The house overflowed with flowers and delicacies that his good people, few of whom he yet knew, had sent him. But to-day as he stood at his window and gazed out on the winter scene he was feeling lonely and a little aggrieved. No doubt it was the bleakness of the day and the nearness of the Christmas season under the present conditions of captivity, that depressed him.

In a direct line across from him, at no great distance, stood the asylum; its side windows looked on his own, and both sets of windows looked upon the spruce-tree. As he had barely established himself in his present residence when he took the measles, he had had no chance to become acquainted with the asylum, or its affairs, or its inmates.