In any case the final draft is sure to leave much to be desired; but even so, the gain has been great.  The pupil writer has constantly been measuring his work by standards of recognized excellence in form and in creative power; as a result he has learned to appreciate the short story from the art side.  Moreover, he has had a large freedom in his work that has relieved it of drudgery.  And, best of all, he has been doing original work with plastic material; and to work with plastic material is always a source of joy, whether it be the mud that the child makes into pies, the clay that the artist moulds into forms of beauty, or the facts of life that the creative imagination of the writer shapes into literature.

THE FIRST CHRISTMAS TREE

A STORY OF THE FOREST

BY HENRY VAN DYKE

This story is placed first because it is of the type that first delighted man.  It is the story of high adventure, of a struggle with the forces of nature, barbarous men, and heathen gods.  The hero is “a hunter of demons, a subduer of the wilderness, a woodman of the faith.”  He seeks hardships and conquers them.  The setting is the illumitable forest in the remote past.  The forest, like the sea, makes an irresistible appeal to the imagination.  Either may be the scene of the marvellous and the thrilling.  Quite unlike the earliest tales, this story is enriched with description and exposition; nevertheless, it has their simplicity and dignity.  It reminds us of certain of the great Biblical narratives, such as the contest between Elijah and the prophets of Baal and the victory of Daniel over the jealous presidents and princes of Darius.  In “The First Christmas Tree,” as in many others of these stories, a third person is the narrator.  But the hero may tell his own adventures.  “I did this.  I did that.  Thus I felt at the conclusion.”  Instances are Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” and Stevenson’s “Kidnapped.”  But whether in the first or third person, the story holds us by the magic of adventure.

THE FIRST CHRISTMAS TREE

[Footnote:  From “The First Christmas Tree,” by Henry Van Dyke.  Copyright, 1897, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.]

I

THE CALL OF THE WOODSMAN

The day before Christmas, in the year of our Lord 722.

Broad snow-meadows glistening white along the banks of the river Moselle; pallid hill-sides blooming with mystic roses where the glow of the setting sun still lingered upon them; an arch of clearest, faintest azure bending overhead; in the centre of the aerial landscape the massive walls of the cloister of Pfalzel, gray to the east, purple to the west; silence over all,—­a gentle, eager, conscious stillness, diffused through the air like perfume, as if earth and sky were hushing themselves to hear the voice of the river faintly murmuring down the valley.