Clara Dargan Maclean.
THE STORY OF THE YEAR-GIFTS
TO BE TOLD TO THE CHILDREN ON NEW YEAR’S EVE
By Robert Wilson Neal
There was an old man, and he was very old indeed—so old that he did not know his own age, though he knew the age of every boy and girl, and every man and woman, and every city, and every country, in the world—so old that he had seen the mountains rise out of the land and the continents out of the great oceans. He was very, very old indeed, you see; the oldest man that ever was. He had long, white hair and a long, white beard that fell quite down to his waist.
But though he was so very old, he was very strong and healthy, so that no one ever thought that he would die. And because he was so, he was able to accomplish everything. He was never idle and never had been—no, not for one minute. He worked while people slept and while they played; no one ever knew him to stop. That is why he had done so very, very much. For he had formed great peoples so long ago that nobody but he knows anything about them; and many, many centuries ago had written wonderful stories that we still read; and had built great churches and palaces, and painted beautiful pictures, and carved beautiful statues, and composed wonderful music, and had discovered wonderful new ways of doing things and wonderful elements in earth and air that nobody had thought of, and had done so many things that ought to be done, that I believe a thousand men could not tell all of them if they wrote all their lives.
He was very good, too, for he meant that everything he did should make people happier. But oftentimes he made mistakes, and did things wrong, or seemed to, and then people suffered—sometimes only a few people for a little while, and sometimes many people for years and years. But as soon as he saw that he had done wrong or that things were not going as they should, he set to work to undo his mistake and make things come right; and he never stopped until he did this, so that people came to say that he would bring everything right in the end if only it were left to him. And though he was so busy and so old, he was always glad when he had done good and was always happy with people he had helped.
He had millions of children, too—millions alive and millions dead. All the people in the world were his children. If there were a baby Hottentot born, it was his; and if there were a little Greenlander born, that was his, too. Even the greatest man that ever lived, whom we all love, whether we think or not that he was just a man, like others, was his child, and knew it; for this is what he meant when he said, “The hour is come.”
Now you may be very sure that this kind, strange old man loved his children or he would not have worked so very long and hard for them. So every twelve months he gave each of them a wonderful present; not one kind of present for one and another for another, but just the same thing for everybody. The little beggar-boy, standing on his frost-nipped feet by the king’s road, got just the same as the king who rattled past in his chariot and never gave him even a copper; the poor Indian squaw, with nothing to wear but an old wolf skin, got just the same as the beautiful lady who had wonderful silken dresses and diamond necklaces and shoes with golden buckles. Yet everybody got just what he wanted, and would not even think of trading off his present for anything else in the world.
There never has been and never will be anything worth so much as a single one of these presents. If a boy, or a girl, or a man either, had all the silver mines of Mexico, and all the gold mines of the Yukon, and all the diamond fields of South Africa, they would not be worth as much as just one of these presents, for the presents could be used in any way and for anything. Yet all that this kind old man asked of people was, please to use the gifts the best they knew how. If they did so, they were all happier, but if they did not, they became very miserable, and even the gifts themselves were a sorrow to them.