THE PROMISE OF THE DAWN.

A Christmas story.

A winter’s evening.  Do you know how that comes here among the edges of the mountains that fence in the great Mississippi valley?  The sea-breath in the New-England States thins the air and bleaches the sky, sucks the vitality out of Nature, I fancy, to put it into the brains of the people:  but here, the earth every day in the year pulses out through hill or prairie or creek a full, untamed animal life,—­shakes off the snow too early in spring, in order to put forth untimed and useless blossoms, wasteful of her infinite strength.  So when this winter’s evening came to a lazy town bedded in the hills that skirt Western Virginia close by the Ohio, it found that the December air, fiercely as it blew the snow-clouds about the hill-tops, was instinct with a vigorous, frosty life, and that the sky above the clouds was not wan and washed-out, as farther North, but massive, holding yet a sensuous yellow languor, the glow of unforgotten autumn days.

The very sun, quite certain of where he would soonest meet with gratitude, gave his kindliest good-night smile to the great valley of the West, asleep under the snow:  very kind to-night, just as calm and loving, though he knew the most plentiful harvest which the States had yielded that year was one of murdered dead, as he gave to the young, untainted world, that morning, long ago, when God blessed it, and saw that it was good.  Because, you see, this was the eve of a more helpful, God-sent day than that, in spite of all the dead:  Christmas eve.  To-morrow Christ was coming,—­whatever he may be to you,—­Christ.  The sun knew that, and glowed as cheerily, steadily, on blood as water.  Why, God had the world!  Let them fret, and cut each other’s throats, if they would.  God had them:  and Christ was coming.  But one fancied that the earth, not quite so secure in the infinite Love that held her, had learned to doubt, in her six thousand years of hunger, and heard the tidings with a thrill of relief.  Was the Helper coming?  Was it the true Helper?  The very hope, even, gave meaning to the tender rose-blush on the peaks of snow, to the childish sparkle on the grim rivers.  They heard and understood.  The whole world answered.

One man, at least, fancied so:  Adam Craig, hobbling down the frozen streets of this old-fashioned town.  He thought, rubbing his bony hands together, that even the wind knew that Christmas was coming, the day that Christ was born:  it went shouting boisterously through the great mountain-gorges, its very uncouth soul shaken with gladness.  The city itself, he fancied, had caught a new and curious beauty:  this winter its mills were stopped, and it had time to clothe the steep streets in spotless snow and icicles; its windows glittered red and cheery out into the early night:  it looked just as if the old burgh had done its work, and sat down, like one of its own