THE DOCTOR'S CHRISTMAS EVE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO

ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA

MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

THE DOCTOR'S CHRISTMAS EVE

Secretum meum mihi

Francis of Assisi

BY

JAMES LANE ALLEN

author of "the bride of the mistletoe," "the choir

invisible," "a summer in arcady," etc.

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1910

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1910,

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1910.

Norwood Press

J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

TO THE SOWER

PREFACE

This work now published under the title of "The Doctor's Christmas Eve" is the one earlier announced for publication under the title of "A Brood of the Eagle."

"The Doctor, Herbert and Elsie's father, our nearest neighbor, your closest friend now in middle life—do you ever tire of the Doctor and wish him away?"

"The longer I know him, the more I like him, honor him, trust him."

—The Bride of the Mistletoe.

CONTENTS

PART FIRST

PAGE

I

The Children of Desire 1

II

When a Son finds out about his Father 32

III

The Books of the Year 69

IV

The Book of the Years 107

V

Evergreen and Thorn Tree 195

PART SECOND

I

Two Other Winter Snowbirds at a Window 213

II

Four in a Cage 233

III

The Realm of Midnight 258

IV

Time-spirit and Eternal Spirit 271

V

When a Father finds out about a Son 285

VI

Living out the Years 297

PART I

THE DOCTOR'S CHRISTMAS EVE

I

THE CHILDREN OF DESIRE

The morning of the twenty-fourth of December a quarter of a century ago opened upon the vast plateau of central Kentucky as a brilliant but bitter day—with a wind like the gales of March.

Out in a neighborhood of one of the wealthiest and most thickly settled counties, toward the middle of the forenoon, two stumpy figures with movements full of health and glee appeared on a hilltop of the treeless landscape. They were the children of the neighborhood physician, a man of the highest consequence in his part of the world; and they had come from their home, a white and lemon-colored eighteenth-century manor house a mile in their rear. Through the crystalline air the chimneys of this low structure, rising out of a green girdle of cedar trees, could be seen emptying unusual smoke which the wind in its gambolling pounced upon and jerked away level with the chimney-tops.

But if you had stood on the hill where the two children climbed into view and if your eye could have swept round the horizon with adequate radius of vision, it would everywhere have been greeted by the same wondrous harmonious spectacle: out of the chimneys of all dwellings scattered in comfort and permanence over that rich domestic land—a land of Anglo-Saxon American homes—more than daily winter smoke was pouring: one spirit of preparation, one mood of good will, warmed houses and hearts. The whole visible heaven was receiving the incense of Kentucky Christmas fires; the whole visible earth was a panorama of the common peace.

The two dauntless, frost-defying wayfarers—what Emerson, meeting them in the depths of a New England winter, might have called two scraps of valor—were following across fields and meadows and pastures one of the footpaths which children who are friendly neighbors naturally make in order to get to each other, as the young of wild creatures trace for themselves upon the earth