We must seek for the accessories and circumstances usually introduced by the painters in the old legendary traditions then accepted and believed. (Protevangelion, xiv.) Thus one legend relates that Joseph went to seek a midwife, and met a woman coming down from the mountains, with whom he returned to the stable.  But when they entered it was filled with light greater than the sun at noonday; and as the light decreased and they were able to open their eyes, they beheld Mary sitting there with her Infant at her bosom.  And the Hebrew woman being amazed said, “Can this be true?” and Mary answered, “It is true; as there is no child like unto my son, so there is no woman like unto his mother.”

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These circumstances we find in some of the early representations, more or less modified by the taste of the artist.  I have seen, for instance, an old German print, in which the Virgin “in the posture and guise of worshippers,” kneels before her Child as usual; while the background exhibits a hilly country, and Joseph with a lantern in his hand is helping a woman over a stile.  Sometimes there are two women, and then the second is always Mary Salome, who, according to a passage in the same popular authority, visited the mother in her hour of travail.

The angelic choristers in the sky, or upon the roof of the stable, sing the Gloria in excelsis Deo; they are never, I believe, omitted, and in early pictures are always three in number; but in later pictures, the mystic three become a chorus of musicians Joseph is generally sitting by, leaning on his staff in profound meditation, or asleep as one overcome by fatigue; or with a taper or a lantern in his hand, to express the night-time.

Among the accessories, the ox and the ass are indispensable.  The introduction of these animals rests on an antique tradition mentioned by St. Jerome, and also on two texts of prophecy:  “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib” (Isaiah i. 3); and Habakkuk iii. 4, is rendered, in the Vulgate, “He shall lie down between the ox and the ass.”  From the sixth century, which is the supposed date of the earliest extant, to the sixteenth century, there was never any representation of the Nativity without these two animals; thus in the old carol so often quoted—­

  “Agnovit bos et asinus
  Quod Puer erat Dominus!”

In some of the earliest pictures the animals kneel, “confessing the Lord.” (Isaiah xliii. 20.) In some instances they stare into the manger with a most naive expression of amazement at what they find there.  One of the old Latin hymns, De Nativitate Domini, describes them, in that wintry night, as warming the new-born Infant with their breath; and they have always been interpreted as symbols, the ox as emblem of the Jews, the ass of the Gentiles.