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                       THE DOCTOR'S CHRISTMAS EVE




                             [Illustration]

                         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

                                   I
                                                        PAGE
            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- 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 some new map of old hereditary traits and
cravings. For the goal of their journey they were hurrying toward a
house not yet in sight but hardly more than a mile ahead, where they
were to spend Christmas Day and share in an old people's and children's
Christmas-Tree party on Christmas Night--and where also they were to put
into execution a plot of their own: about which a good deal is to be
narrated.

They were thus transferring the nation's yearly festival of the home
from their own roof-tree to that of another family as the place where it
could be enacted and enjoyed. The tragical meaning of this arrangement
was but too well understood by their parents. To them the abandonment of
their own fireside at the season when its bonds should have been
freshened and deepened scarcely seemed an unnatural occurrence. The
other house had always been to them as a secondary home. It was the
residence of their father's friend, a professor in the State University
situated some miles off across fine country. His two surviving children,
a boy and a girl of about their own ages, had always been their intimate
associates. And the woman of that household--the wife, the mother--all
their lives they had been mysteriously impelled toward this gentlewoman
by a power of which they were unconscious but by which they had been
swayed.

The little girl wore a crimson hood and a brown cloak and the boy a
crimson skull cap and a brown overcoat; and both wore crimson mittens;
and both were red-legged and red-footed; for stockings had been drawn
over their boots to insure warmth and to provide safeguard against
slipping when they should cross the frozen Elkhorn or venture too
friskily on silvery pools in the valley bottoms.

The chestnut braids of the girl falling heavily from under her hood met
in a loop in the middle of her broad fat back and were tied there with a
snip of ribbon that looked like a feather out of the wing of a bluejay.
Her bulging hips overreached the borders of the narrow path, so that the
boy was crowded out upon the rough ground as he struggled forward close
beside her. She would not allow him to walk in front of her and he
disdained to walk behind.

"Then walk beside me or go back!" she had said to him, laughing
carelessly.

She looked so tight inside her wrappings, so like a jolly ambulatory
small barrel well hooped and mischievously daubed here and there with
vermilion, that you might have had misgivings as to the fate of the
barrel, were it to receive a violent jolt and be rolled over. No thought
of such mishap troubled her as she trotted forward, balancing herself as
lightly on her cushioned feet as though she were wind-carried
thistledown. Nor was she disturbed by her selfishness in monopolizing
the path and forcing her brother to encounter whatsoever the winter
earth obtruded--stumps of forest trees, brambles of blackberry, sprouts
of cane, or stalks of burdock and of Spanish needle. His footing was
especially troublesome when he tried to straddle wide corn-rows with his
short legs; or when they crossed a hemp-field where the butt-ends of the
stalks serried the frost-gray soil like bayonet points. Altogether his
exertions put him out of breath somewhat, for his companion was fleet
and she made no allowance for his delays and difficulties.

Her hands, deep in the fleece-lined mittens, were comfortably warm; but
she moreover kept them thrust into a muff of white fur, which also
looked overfed and seemed of a gay harmony with its owner. This muff she
now and then struck against her flexed knees in a vixenish playfulness
as one beats a tambourine on a bent elbow; and at a certain point of the
journey, having glanced sidewise at him and remarked his breath on the
icy air, she lifted it to her mouth and spoke guardedly from behind
it:--

"Remember the last thing Papa told us at the window, Herbert: we were to
keep our mouths closed and to breathe through our noses. And remember
also, my child, that we were to rely upon--_especially_ to rely
upon--the ribs and the diaphragm! I wonder why he thought it necessary
to tell us that! Did he suppose that as soon as we got by ourselves or
arrived at the Ousleys', we'd begin to rely upon something else, and
perhaps try to breathe with our spines and elbows?"

Her eyes sparkled with mischief, and her laughter had the audacity of a
child's satire, often more terrible in its small world than a sage's in
his larger one. The instant she spoke, you recognized the pertness and
precocity of an American child--which, when seen at its best or at its
worst, is without precedent or parallel among the world's children. She
was the image of a hard bold crisp newness. Her speech was new, her
ideas were new, her impertinence was new--except in this country. She
appeared to have gathered newness during her short life, to be newer
than the day she was born. The air was full of frost spangles that
zigzagged about her as she danced along; they rather seemed like
particles of salt especially provided to escort her character. If it had
been granted Lot's wife with tears of repentance to dissolve away the
crystals of her curiosity and resume the duties of motherhood,--though
possibly permeated by a mild saline solution as a warning,--that
salt-cured matron might admirably have adapted herself to the decrees of
Providence by producing Elsie.

The boy as she administered her caution stopped; and shutting his own
red mouth, which was like hers though more generous, he drew a long
breath through his nostrils; then, throwing back his head, he blew this
out with an open-mouthed puff, and a column of white steam shot up into
the blue ether and was whirled away by the wind. He stood studying it
awhile as it disappeared, for he was a close observer always--a
perpetual watcher of the thing that is--sometimes an observer fearful to
confront. Then he sprang forward to catch up with his sharp-tongued
monitress, who had hurried on. As he came alongside, he turned his face
toward her and made his reply, which was certainly deliberate enough in
arriving:--

"We have to be _taught_ the best way to breathe, Elsie; as anything
else!"

The defence only brought on a fresh attack:--

"I wonder who teaches the young of other animals how to breathe! I
should like to know who teaches kittens and puppies and calves and
lambs how to breathe! How _do_ they ever manage to get along without
country doctors among them! Imagine a middle-aged sheep--old Dr.
Buck--assembling a flock of lambs and trying to show them how to
breathe!" Judging from Elsie's expression, the lambs in the case could
not have thought very highly of this queer and genial Dr. Buck.

"But _they_ are all four-legged creatures, Elsie; and _they_ breathe
backward and forward; if you are a two-legged animal and stand up
straight, you breathe up and down: it's quite different! It's easier!"

"Then I suppose the fewer legs a thing has, the harder it is to