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Winter saith: When last in the feast-hall the Yule-fire flickered, The foot of no foeman fared over the snow, And nought but the wind with the ash-branches bickered: Next Yule ye may deem it a long time ago. Autumn saith: Loud laughed ye last year in the wheat-field a-smiting; And ye laughed as your backs drave the beam of the press.
Then he turned a little and looked at the houses of the Thorp lying dark about the snowy ways under the starlit heavens of the winter morning: dark they were indeed and grey, save where here and there the half-burned Yule-fire reddened the windows of a hall, or where, as in one place, the candle of some early waker shone white in a chamber window.
In illustration of this home-seeking trait, I have from my friend Mistral the story that his own grandfather used to tell regularly every year when all the family was gathered about the yule-fire on Christmas Eve: It was back in the Revolutionary times, and Mistral the grandfather only he was not a grandfather then, but a mettlesome young soldier of two-and-twenty was serving with the Army of the Pyrénées, down on the borders of Spain.
Indeed, as I understood from the Vidame's orders, the remainder of our old almond was to be cut up and distributed over the estate and about the neighborhood and so the life went out from it finally in a Christmas blaze that brightened many homes. In the cities, of course, the case is different; and, no doubt, on many a chill hearth no yule-fire burns.
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