Surely there never was such a Christmas eve before!  The frozen air glistened grayly up into heaven itself, he thought; the snow-covered streets were alive, noisy,—­glad into their very cellars and shanties; the sun was sorry to go away.  No wonder.  His heartiest ruby-gleam lingered about the white Virginia heights behind the town, and across the river quite glorified the pale stretch of the Ohio hills.  Free and slave. (Adam was an Abolitionist.) Well, let that be.  God’s hand of power, like His sunlight, held the master and the slave in loving company.  To-morrow was the sign.

The cobbler stopped on the little swinging foot-bridge that crosses the creek in the centre of the city.  The faint saffron sunset swept from the west over the distant wooded hills, the river, the stone bridge below him, whose broad gray piers painted perpetual arches on the sluggish, sea-colored water.  The smoke from one or two far-off foundries hung just above it, motionless in the gray, in tattered drifts, dyed by the sun, clear drab and violet.  A still picture.  A bit of Venice, poor Adam thought, who never had been fifty miles out of Wheeling.  The quaint American town was his world:  he brought the world into it.  There were relics of old Indian forts and mounds, the old times and the new.  The people, too, though the cobbler only dimly saw that, were as much the deposit and accretion of all dead ages as was the coal that lay bedded in the fencing hills.  Irish, Dutch, whites, blacks, Moors, old John Bull himself:  you can find the dregs of every day of the world in any mill-town of the States.  Adam had a dull perception of this.  Christmas eve came to all the world, coming here.

Leaning on the iron wires, while the unsteady little bridge shook under him, he watched the stunned beams of the sun urging themselves through the smoke-clouds.  He thought they were like “the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ’Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make His paths straight.’” It wakened something in the man’s hackneyed heart deeper even than the thought of the woman he had prayed for.  A sudden vision that a great Peace held the world as did that glow of upper light:  he rested in its calm.  Up the street a few steps rose the walls of the old theatre, used as a prison now for captured Confederates:  it was full now; he could see them looking out from behind the bars, grimy and tattered.  Far to the north, on Mount Woods, the white grave-stones stood out clear in the darkening evening.  His enemies, the busy streets, the very war itself, the bones and souls of the dead yonder,—­the great Peace held them all.  We might call them evil, but they were sent from God, and went back to God.  All things were in Him.

I tell you, that when this one complete Truth got into this poor cobbler’s brain,—­in among its vulgar facts of North and South, and patched shoes, and to-morrow’s turkey,—­a great poet-insight looked out of his eyes for the minute.  Saint John looked thus as he wrote that primitive natal word, “God is love.”  Cobblers, as well as Saint John, or the dying Herder, need great thoughts, and water from God to refresh them, believe me.