“Oh, how lovely is the evening, is the evening, is the evening!”
And in a minute, from first one place and then another the others took it up, them that had sung it in singing school, years ago—
“When the bells are sweetly chiming, sweetly chiming, sweetly chiming”
and they sung it like a round, which it is, with a great fine booming bass of
“Ding dong, ding dong, ding dong”
all through it. Do you know that round? If you don’t, get it; and get some folks together somehow, and sing it. It lets you taste the evening. But I can’t tell you the way it seemed to us there in Friendship Village, met together after so many years, and singing together like we was all one Folk. One Folk.
They sung other songs, while the dusk came on. Abner Dawes was sitting on the platform, and he kept Chris on his knee—I loved him for that. There wasn’t a set program. First one would start a song from somewheres in the crowd, and then another.... And all the time I was waiting for it to get dark enough to do what I had planned to be done—and what I’d had men working at near all the night before to get ready. And when the dark come thick enough, and just at the end, I remember of their singing “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton,” I thought it was time.
I gave the word to them that were waiting. And suddenly, right there in the midst of the Square, the great green tree, that had been the Friendship Village Christmas tree, glowed softly alight from top to bottom, all in the green branches, just like it had glowed on Christmas Eve. They’d done the work good, and as if they liked it—and the bulbs were in so deep in the green that not a soul had noticed all day. And there was the Christmas tree, come back.
“Oh....” they says, low, all over the Square. And nobody said anything else. It was as if, awake and alive in that living tree, there was the same spirit that had been there on Christmas Eve, the spirit that we’ve got to keep alive year long, year round, year through.
I’d whispered something to Abner, and he come down from the platform and went over close to the tree. And of a sudden he lifted Chris in his arms, high up among the lit branches. And in everybody’s hush he says clear: