By
every sign it gave the house showed that it was marshalling its whole
happiness.
One thing only seemed to make a signal of distress from afar. The oak
tree beside the house, whose roots coiled warmly under the
hearth-stones and whose boughs were outstretched across the roof,
seemed to writhe and rock in its winter sleep with murmurings and
tossings like a human dreamer trying to get rid of an unhappy dream.
Imagination might have said that some darkest tragedy of forests long
since gone still lived in this lone survivor--that it struggled to
give up the grief and guilt of an ancient forest shame.
The weather moderated in the afternoon. A warm current swept across
the upper atmosphere, developing everywhere behind it a cloud; and
toward sundown out of this cloud down upon the Shield snow began to
fall. Not the large wet flakes which sometimes descend too late in
spring upon the buds of apple orchards; nor those mournfuller ones
which drop too soon on dim wild violets in November woods, but winter
snow, stern sculptor of Arctic solitudes.
* * * * *
It was Christmas Eve. It was snowing all over the Shield.
Softly the snow fell upon the year's footprints and pathways of
children and upon schoolhouses now closed and riotously deserted.
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