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I remember one of the children gave it me at the Sunday school, and I've never had this frock on since. Isn't it strange? She stood looking at the card an ordinary enough little picture of a robin on a bough, with 'Merry Christmas' in one corner a mixture of sadness and almost reverence in her young face. 'Last Christmas' seemed so very long ago to Frances.
It pleases every sense to which it can be addressed, the touch, the smell, the sight, the taste; and when it falls, in the still October days, it pleases the ear. It is a call to a banquet, it is a signal that the feast is ready. The bough would fain hold it, but it can now assert its independence; it can now live a life of its own.
The birds that lived in the wood had broken out into sudden singing as she stole in, hungry for silence, passionate to be alone; and at the foot of every tree she cried "Hush! Hush!" to the bedtime nests. When all but one were still, she slipped the hood from her face and listened to her own bird, the night-jar, toiling at his hopeless love from a bough on which already hung a little star.
Lady Hannah answered: "The Mother-Superior of the Convent of the Holy Way at Gueldersdorp has an orphan ward, a singularly lovely girl of nineteen or twenty, whose surname is Mildare. And it struck me just now I don't know why now, and never before that she might be " "Bough never said nothing to me about any girl. What like is this one?"
O thou exalted bough of the divine Lote-Tree! ...When thou art disdained and rejected by the wicked doers be not cast down; and at the power and stiffneckedness of the presumptuous be neither vexed nor sick at heart; for such is the way of heedless souls, from time out of mind. ‘O the misery of men! No Messenger cometh unto them but they laugh Him to scorn!’
Just then they paused from their task, or perhaps it was at length completed, and flying to a bough of the peach tree a few yards away, perched there together amidst the bright bloom, and nestling against each other, twittered forth their song of joy and love. It was at this moment that Sihamba walked up to the stoep as though to speak to me.
And yet," thought the traveller, "suppose I light this match, and smoke my pipe, and shake out the dottle here in the grass the grass might catch fire, for it is dry like tinder; and while I snatch out the flames in front, they might evade and run behind me, and seize upon yon bush of poison oak; before I could reach it, that would have blazed up; over the bush I see a pine-tree hung with moss; that, too, would fly in fire upon the instant to its topmost bough; and the flame of that long torch how would the trade-wind take and brandish that through the inflammable forest!
Venning sat down astride a branch with his back to the trunk. "May as well rest awhile till they come up." "That's a queer-looking branch underneath," said Compton, following suit, and dropping a piece of bark on a bough that had attracted his attention. "It's covered all over with little squares of velvet moss. See!"
Then he noticed that it had been freshly cut. "It's Lew's brush," cried Charley. "He must have been here." He sank on his knees close to the blazing bough, and heedless of smoke and flame began to examine the ground carefully. He ran his fingers lightly over the leaves, feeling for footprints. At first he found nothing. Then he discovered the impression of a heel.
He ascends the tree to a low bough, and making a hollow in the folds of his robes, he crops with a golden pruning hook the mistletoe and so catches it as it falls. Then it is blessed and scattered among the throng, and the priest prays that each one so receiving it may receive also the divine favor and blessing of which it is Nature's emblem.
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