planned out work through the long night:  success to come, but with his wife nearest his heart, and the homely farm-house and the old schoolmaster in the centre of the picture.  Such an humble castle in the air!  Christmas morning was surely something to him.  Yet, as the night passed, he went back to the years that had been wasted, with an unavailing bitterness.  He would not turn from the truth, that, with his strength of body and brain to command happiness and growth, his life had been a failure.  I think it was first on that night that the story of the despised Nazarene came to him with a new meaning,—­One who came to gather up these broken fragments of lives and save them with His own.  But vaguely, though:  Christmas-day as yet was to him the day when love came into the world.  He knew the meaning of that.  So he watched with an eagerness new to him the day breaking.  He could see Margaret’s window, and a dim light in it:  she would be awake, praying for him, no doubt.  He pondered on that.  Would you think Holmes weak, if he forsook the faith of Fichte, sometime, led by a woman’s hand?  Think of the apostle of the positive philosophers, and say no more.  He could see a flickering light at dawn crossing the hall:  he remembered the old schoolmaster’s habit well,—­calling “Happy Christmas” at every door:  he meant to go down there for breakfast, as he used to do, imagining how the old man would wring his hands, with a “Holla! you’re welcome home, Stephen, boy!” and Mrs. Howth would bring out the jars of pine-apple preserve which her sister sent her every year from the West Indies.  And then——­Never mind what then.  Stephen Holmes was very much in love, and this Christmas-day had much to bring him.  Yet it was with a solemn shadow on his face that he watched the dawn, showing that he grasped the awful meaning of this day that “brought love into the world.”  Through the clear, frosty night he could hear a low chime of distant bells shiver the air, hurrying faint and far to tell the glad tidings.  He fancied that the dawn flushed warm to hear the story,—­that the very earth should rejoice in its frozen depths, if it were true.  If it were true!—­if this passion in his heart were but a part of an all-embracing power, in whose clear depths the world struggled vainly!—­if it were true that this Christ did come to make that love clear to us!  There would be some meaning then in the old schoolmaster’s joy, in the bells wakening the city yonder, in even poor Lois’s thorough content in this day,—­for it would be, he knew, a thrice-happy day to her.  A strange story that of the Child coming into the world,—­simple!  He thought of it, watching, through his cold, gray eyes, how all the fresh morning told it,—­it was in the very air; thinking how its echo stole through the whole world,—­how innumerable children’s voices told it in eager laughter,—­how even the lowest slave half-smiled, on waking, to think it was Christmas-day, the day that Christ was born.