she felt the warmth of the fur. "It's comfy," she sobbed. "It fits exactly." And then, "Oh, Man, I'm frightened. What have you done? You gave me a present once before."

The Man was making a club out of a tree. As he stripped it of its branches, he answered boastfully, "It was I and the dog; we did it together. You were cold, so we stole the hyena's coat from him. All the animals are angry. They know that we shall do again what we have done once. They feel safe no longer. They say it must be stopped. They want to get back the hyena's coat from us."

"And they will, oh, my master," the dog interrupted, "unless we protect ourselves. Through the wilderness, not many miles from here, a limestone ridge rises above the forest. In the limestone ridge there is a cave. If we can win our way to it before our enemies come together, we can stand in the entrance and guard the Woman."

So the dog ran ahead growling with such fierceness that everything fled from his path. Behind him came the Man carrying the Woman very closely because he loved her, and trailing his tremendous club. By dawn, before their enemies could guess their purpose, they had gained the cave. By the time the animals had held their conference and decreed that the Man and the dog must be punished, they had escaped and were ready to defy all comers.

IV

From that moment a new and exciting kind of life started. Not an hour out of the twenty-four was free from anxiety. Always, whether it was day or night, the Man and the dog had to take turns at guarding the entrance. The Man gathered piles of stones and learnt how to throw them unerringly. The dog trusted to his teeth and the fear which his bark inspired. The animals were furiously determined; they never ceased from attempting to surprise them. Quite often they would have succeeded, had it not been for the robin, who hiding in the bushes, overheard their strategies and flew back to the Man in time with warnings.

The cave was well chosen. It was approached by a steep and narrow path. Only one enemy could attack at once, so the defenders were always able to roll down bowlders on him before he gained a footing. That was how they treated the lion, when he came thrashing his tail and roaring on the first morning to make them prisoners. They gave a rock a big shove and knocked him over like a ninepin. He was so hurt in his feelings that he sulked in bed for a week; for many more weeks he was easily tired. Seeing that he was the King of the Beasts and the President of their Conference, this made the animals the more indignant and the more determined that the Man and the dog must be punished. The next to attempt their capture were the elephant and the rhinoceros. They boasted that they weren't afraid of rocks; nevertheless they came together to back up each other's courage. Half way up the slope they stuck. They were too heavy for so steep a path. The ground crumbled from under them, the dog worried them, the Man struck them, and away they went, bumping down the hill, rolling over and over. They never stopped till they had reached the bottom, where they lay on their backs with their feet in the air, grunting and panting like a pair of upturned locomotives.

At first the Man and the dog regarded the enmity they had aroused in the light of a huge joke; they got a good deal of fun out of fighting. But the sporting side of the affair ceased to appeal to them when they were compelled to recognize the seriousness of their predicament. They were absolutely cut off from supplies at a season when food was running short. They had to sneak out at night at the risk of capture to get anything to eat at all. They had a sick woman on their hands who cried not for food, but for delicacies. Instead of gathering strength, she grew steadily weaker. And then there was the matter of sleep; it was as scarce as food. They hardly snatched a wink of it. When they weren't on guard or fighting, they were soothing her fretfulness, foraging for her or thinking up some new method of keeping her warm. It was damp in the cave; sunlight rarely tiptoed farther than the entrance. It didn't take them long to discover that the hyena's coat had been as dearly purchased as the forbidden fruit that had lost them the garden. Peace, which they might have concluded in the early days, was now entirely out of the question. Even an offer to return the hyena's coat wouldn't have made any impression. They had carried hostilities too far; there wasn't an animal whom they had not wounded and who wasn't mad with them clean through from the point of his nose to the tip of his tail. Often and often, standing in the entrance to his cave, the Man would gaze longingly across the bronzy roof of the forest to the distant shining of the padlocked gates of Eden. He was farther than ever from the garden now with its tranquil blessedness. If only he hadn't learnt to steal! Stealing had been the cause of his downfall—first the forbidden fruit and then the hyena's coat. If he had been less enterprising and more obedient, he would still have been the friend of God. After a wakeful night he crept to the entrance to discover that the worst thing of all had happened.

"A worse thing!" you exclaim. "I thought you were going to tell us a cheerful Christmas story."

And so I am: but all the unfortunate part comes first—that's the way the robins tell it. If you'll be patient and read on, you'll find this is the very cheerfullest story that was ever told in earth or heaven. You may not have noticed that we've not yet come to the first laugh. The Woman has smiled and the hyena has scoffed; but no one has laughed. It's when we come to the first laugh that the happiness commences.

V

The worst thing of all that the Man discovered when he crept to the cave-entrance after a wakeful night, was this: with a terrible stealthy silence snow was drifting down so that even the distant shining of the gates of Eden was blotted out. It was frightening; snow had never fallen in the world before. If it had, the Man had not seen it. Within the walls of the garden summer had been perpetual. He stood there staring out forlornly at the misty sea of shifting whiteness. It chilled him to the bone. It seemed to him that the pillars of the sky had collapsed and the dust of the moon and stars was falling. Soon everything would be buried and the world itself would be no more. He looked at the calendar which he had scratched upon the wall. It was the twenty-fourth day of December. He wondered whether God knew what was happening and whether He had planned it. Then he gave up wondering, for behind him, from the blackness of the cave, the Woman called.

"Oh, Man," she cried, "I cannot bear this any longer!"

He groped his way to her and raised her in his arms so that her head lay on his breast. Even in the darkness he could see the glow of her hair, like the shadow of flame growing fainter and fainter.

"My Woman," he whispered, "what can I do for you?" And again he whispered, "What can I do for you?"

She pressed her face close to his before she answered, petting him the way she had been used to do in Eden. "Do for me? Nothing. You've tried with your remedies—you've tried so hard. Poor you! If we could only find God——"

"If we could," the Man said, "but——"

And then they both grew silent, for how could they find God when He had climbed back to Heaven, destroying the sky-blue stairs behind Him?

"Perhaps, He still walks in Eden." It was the Woman who had spoken. "If you were to go and watch through the bars of Eden till He comes and were to call to Him—if you were to tell Him that I cannot bear it any longer and that we're sorry, so sorry—that we did it in our ignorance——" Without ending what she was saying, she fell to sobbing.

He didn't dare to tell her that the moon and stars