The Christmas Holly

ON a Christmas Eve, many years ago, before I had learned to accept Life as it is,—as it must ever be while Man needs the discipline of reverses, and while the ways of God are known but to Himself,—a checquered scene, always; often grey and lowering; sometimes black with midnight and chill with storm—on a certain Christmas Eve, then, when I was young, unreasonable and rebellious, I took a long, lonely walk into the country. The afternoon suited my temper, and both were gloomy. Low heavens of clouded steel that yet seemed, now and then, to shiver with the still, biting air, and with each shudder, to let down a few wandering flakes of snow; a bleak landscape of commons, blasted by invisible frost; of sterile hills, that must have been stony and bare in the sunniest springtime,—and for a horizon, a girdle of leafless woods, stretching up motionless boughs against the pitiless sky; in the hollow formed by the amphitheatre of hills, an artificial pond—too intensely tame in form and surroundings to deserve the name of lake, or be mistaken for aught but what it was, viz., a pool dug and filled with a single eye to the production of ice for the next summer’s use,—this was the picture that greeted my outlooking sight. Within was the dull, icy calm of stoical misanthropy; distrust of my fellows, which stubbornly refused to ask of heavenly wisdom the solution of the human enigma that had baffled, in disgusting me.

Into the midst of this sunless mood came a surprise Right before me, in my steady but aimless track across the waste, was a clump of dwarf trees, poor, puny things that must have had a hard coming-up. I marvelled, in surveying them, that the germs from which they had struggled had had the courage to sprout in such a barren spot. In the centre of the coppice, head and shoulders above his fellows, arose a holly sapling, brave with leaves of glossy green and scarlet berries. The only smile in the drear expanse, it was in itself a whole fountain of cheer. The soil about the trunk might be frozen to stone-like hardness, but below, the great heart of Mother Earth pulsed warmly still; throwing up, at each beat, sap into the hardy frame of her winter-child; strength to the lusty limbs; verdure to the spiky leaves; blushes to the coral beads. And while I looked, a bevy of brown-coated plump-breasted snow-birds whirled noisily across the plain, and alighted, with much twittering and a deal of happy, useless fluttering, among the inviting branches.