We shall see hereafter how far we can follow these traces, and what they tell us of the past history of glaciers, and of the changes the climates of our globe have undergone.
* * * * *
STEPHEN YARROW.
A CHRISTMAS STORY.
Sometime in the year 1856, a family named Yarrow moved into the neighborhood where I then lived, and rented a small house with a bit of ground attached to it, on one of the rich bottom-farms lying along the eastern shore of the Ohio. The mother, two or three children, and their dog Ready made up the quiet household: not one to attract notice from any cause. People soon knew Martha Yarrow,—all that was in her. She was Western- and farm-born; whatever Nature had given her of good or bad, therefore, thrust itself out at once with pungent directness.
The family supported themselves by selling their poultry and vegetables to the hucksters, leading an eventless life enough, until the change occurred, some five years after they came into the neighborhood, of which I am going to tell you.
I called it a Christmas Story, not so much because it happened on a Christmas, as because the meaning of it seemed suited to that day; and I thought, too, that nobody grows tired of Christmas stories, especially if he chance to have been born in one of those families where the day is kept in the old fashion: it roots itself so deep, that memory, in whatever quaint superstition, or homely affection for mother or brother, or unreasoning trust in God, may outlive our childhood, and underlie our older years. And surely that is as just, as wise a thing,—to strip off for a child the smirched trading-dress of one day at least, and send it down through the long procession of the years with its true face bared, to waken in him a live sense of man’s love and God’s love. Some one, perhaps, had done this for this woman, Mrs. Yarrow, long ago; for, let the months before and after be bare as they chose, she kept this day of Christmas with a feverish anxiety, more eager than her children even to make every moment warm and throb with pleasure, and enjoying them herself, to their last breath, with the whole zest of a nervous, strong-blooded nature. Yet she may have had another reason for it.
The evening before the Christmas of which we write, she had gone out to the well with her son before closing the house for the night.