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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
