The Strange Visitation

A   WILD night, with a gale of wind, a wind that scratched and tore and howled at doors and windows like an angry cat spitting and spluttering—its miauling voice now rising, now sinking—at one moment savage, at another querulous, but always incessant of complaint, with a threatening under snarl of restless rage in its tone. A wild night!—full of storm and quarrel, with occasional dashes of cold rain sweeping down on the shrieking blast like gusts of angry tears—a noisy night in which the elements were at open war with themselves, making no secret of their hostile intentions—and yet it was the one night of all nights in the year when “peace and goodwill” were the suggested influences of the time. For it was Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve! What a wonderful anniversary it is, if we would but pause in our reckless and senseless rush onward to the grave, just to think quietly about it for a moment! Long, long ago—yet but a short while since—if we count by the world’s great epochs of civilisation wherein a little two thousand years are but a moment—a host of Angels descended from heaven and sang a joyous hymn of general amnesty to mankind on the first Christmas Eve that ever was—and according to the noble poesy of high-thinking, God-revering John Milton:

“No war or battle’s sound

Was heard the world around,

The idle spear and shield were high up hung;

The unhookèd chariot stood

Unstain’d with hostile blood,

The trumpet spake not to the armèd throng;

And kings sat still with awful eye

As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by.

“And peaceful was the night

Wherein the Prince of Light

His reign of peace upon the earth began;

The winds, with wonder whist,

Smoothly the waters kist,

Whisp’ring new joys to the mild oceàn,

Who now hath quite forgot to rave,

While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmèd wave!”

One wonders if—in those far-off days of angel-singing—there was such a thing as a millionaire? Not a merely “rich” man;—not a “Wise Man of the East,” who, possessing knowledge and insight as well as wealth, hastened to bring his gold with frankincense and myrrh, and to lay these reverently in the humble manger which served as cradle to a Child, whose vast power was destined to conquer and subdue all the mightiest kings of the earth:—but an actual money-gorged, banknote-stuffed ruler of some octopus-like “Trade,” whose tentacles clutched and held everything within its reach—some owner of huge factories where human creatures “sweated” their lives out to fill his pockets, and died in their hundreds,—perchance their thousands—in order that he, like some monstrous bloated leech, should swell to the point of bursting on the blood he sucked from their throbbing arteries! Was there such an one existing in the miracle days when the “Glory to God in the Highest!” rang from star to star, from point to point of the myriad constellations, like a great wave of melody breaking against illimitable and endless shores? Surely not!—else there would have been some break in the music!—some ugly jar in the divine chorus! For instance, if there had at that time been living a multi-millionaire at all resembling the one whose strange experiences are now about to be related, the angels would have fled in dismay and weeping from the spectacle of a soul so warped from good, so destitute of sympathy, so drained and dry of every drop of the milk of human kindness, and so utterly at variance with the “peace and goodwill” of which they sang!