Born was the King of Israel!
The carolers were down from the little cabins on the hillside where they had slept with a figment of roof between them and the stars, and the cries of Merry Christmas beat upon our doors until we all came together, in noisy collision; on the porches, and swept in to strip the line of stockings. The babies dropped on the floor with their pouches, dumping their toys frankly between their outspread legs, laughing, crooning, and picking, with tiny, pointed fingers, at the mystery of things. It was with them, as the wise woman had said, all bubbling contentment and delight. Little tin wagons bounded over the floor, any side up, two babies abreast, and every mouth blew upon squeakers and trumpets the blasts of which were mercifully tempered to the short wind of the little lambs. Our own gifts unmasked, with even-handed justice, our inner foibles, but the children’s came to the breakfast table with them in a spirit of peace. Live stock surrounded every plate, and cattle fed from porcelain mangers, and became entangled in patent breakfast foods.
As breakfast ended, a call came from the doorway, “Who wants to come with me to the woods and pick out a Christmas tree?” It was she of the Yerba Buena wreath and shoe-top skirt. We all wanted to come. This finding of the tree was to be a ceremony. Though a faint mist was still a-drift, no one cared, and a few wraps made the children snug.
A dozen tangled little paths lead down among the chaparral to the redwoods, and here the children gathered from everywhere, laughing and calling among the undergrowth, scattering, breaking, and running down the steep paths exactly as a brood of quail run and call and scatter through the mesquite under the convoy of their crested leader.
“The Woodsman! The Woodsman! First we must find a woodsman with an ax to cut the Christmas-tree,” called the leader. “He used to live over here. Who can find him?”
Her brood scurried here and there, unconsciously led where she would, beating up the brush, when suddenly, shouting with delight, they came full upon a man with an ax—a flannel-shirted man with a kind face and a great, broad, shining ax.
“Yes, I am the Woodsman,” he called. “May I cut a Christmas-tree for you this morning?” He came forward, and jumped straight into the story, without preliminaries. The whole flock surged down upon him and off to find the tree, accepting his being there with his ax as children do accept pleasant things. We all went down into the winding wood road, almost roofed over by redwood plumes, the little children stopping to consult gravely with the Woodsman about the suitability of trees two hundred feet high or saplings of a century’s growth, squinting up trunks, considering, rejecting, earnestly intent, each one, upon finding the perfect tree. The older conspirators, half lost in brake and fern, kept close behind.
“This one I think will do,” cried the Woodsman at last, and he lifted his ax.
At that moment from the hollow trunk of a redwood another figure stepped out, and all the children started, he was so strange.
“I am the Spirit of the Woods,” he said in a deep voice; “I come to plead with you for the life of this tree.”