Some persons said that it could not have been done without the help of the hook and ladder from the engine-house two miles away. Others were convinced that unofficial ladders and orchard-pruning implements had done it.
Whatever the truth of the matter is, the orphan asylum certainly knew nothing about it, for that was wrapped in measles, and could not have peeped. As for the bishop, not for worlds would he have done such a thing.
However, Mr. S. Claus and his friends did achieve it, and when Christmas day dawned, clear and crisp and cold, the bishop and the asylum and Mrs. Dyer and Aunt Sally gazed out upon a transformed spruce-tree.
Everything was on it that should be on a tree for hungry birds—and more. For besides cranberries in strings, pop-corn in festoons, grain in gold and scarlet cornucopias, ginger-bread men, red apples, tallow candles, half loaves of bread, biscuits, there were many things that were there not to be eaten, but to make a glitter.
His grace the cardinal, a scarlet splash against the winter blue sky, was poised upon the very topmost black tip of the glorious old evergreen. And not only the two jays, but a dozen other handsome and noisy jays, as well as the speckled sapsuckers and many smaller birds, hung in mid-air about the branches, rapt and almost motionless. As the vested choir from the choir-room that adjoined the asylum crossed the yard through the brick cloister for the seven-o’clock service at the little church, they sang with hearty voices:
“O morning stars, together
Proclaim the holy birth!
And praises sing to God, the King,
And peace to men on earth.”
The bishop and Gwinie and the many little children of the asylum, all warmly wrapped in big blankets, gazed out on the scene through their frosty windows; and among those marching in the choir through the cloister were Mr. Blythe and the grocer’s boy, robed and beaming, and singing most heartily of all.