It was only the old chimney-top my eyes first sought, to whose rugged edges and sooty mouthpiece a thousand boatswain winds had put their lips and whistled up the storms for eighty years. It was the homeliest structure that ever seemed beautiful to anybody. Shall I tell you why? Down that chimney the angel descended with my first Christmas gift. What was the ladder of Jacob to me then, has turned, at last, into a rude unlettered monument to the dead past.
They whom I surprised with my "Merry Christmas," in the gray of the morning, have gone away for the everlasting holidays. The children with whom I joined hands and hearts are--_where_ are they? There are fences in the graveyard tipped with funeral urns of black. There are broken slabs of marble bearing names that have fallen out of human speech. There are hard, grim men. There are meek and sad-eyed women, full of care. _Has_ the sparkle of life utterly vanished from the cup? Can the sleigh-bells' chime and the glittering nights and the laugh of young girls and the measure of old songs charm no more?
Oh, Comrades! oh, Sweethearts! Let me give you a touch of the time when happiness was the very cheapest thing in the round world: let me give you "a merry Christmas" out of the loneliness!
But children are not out of fashion, and so the world is not bankrupt. Herod--he deserves the compliment and he shall have it--Herod was nothing less than devilish shrewd when he fancied he could quench Christmas in the blood of the children; for if ever two things were made for each other, a merry child and a merry Christmas are the two.
What the poor creatures did that were born and grown before the clock of the Christian era struck "one" nobody can tell. We all _need_ such days--the young that they may never grow old; the old that they may always be young. I think it might be written among the beatitudes:
"Blessed are they whose sons are all boys and whose daughters are all girls."
It was when Cæsar Augustus decreed that "all the world" should be enrolled--an edict never to be repeated on the planet until the coming of the Seventh Angel--and everybody was on the move to report in his native city--for in that country the leap from a howling wilderness to a city was as easy as a panther's--if it didn't _howl_ it had a _mayor_!