ther across all those years that laughing freak of their young blood
was still more romantic than the original escapade. But as I went on
looking at Irene, with the bloom of her immortal youth upon her, I grew
jealous of the General's share in that historic night. Well, never mind,
it is I who take her to the theatre nowadays--and, after all, I think I
prefer her to go dressed just as she is.

XXI

A CHRISTMAS MEDITATION

Christmas already! However welcome its coming, Christmas always seems to
take us by surprise. Is the year really so soon at the end of its
journey? Why, it seems only yesterday that it needed a special effort of
remembrance to date our letters with the new "_anno domini_." And have
you noticed that one always does that reluctantly, with something almost
of misgiving? The figures of the old year have a warm human look, but
those of the new wear a chill, unfamiliar, almost menacing expression.
Nineteen hundred and--we know. It is nearly "all in." It has done its
best--and its worst. Between Christmas Day and New-Year it has hardly
time to change its character. Good or bad, as it may have been, we feel
at home with it, and we are fain to keep the old almanac a little longer
on the wall. But the last leaves are falling, the days are shortening.
There is a smell of coming snow in the air, and for weeks past it has
already been Christmas in the shops.

Yes, however it strikes us, we are a year older. On the first of January
last we had twelve brand-new months of a brand-new year to spend, and
now the last of them is all but spent. We had a new spring to look out
for, like the coming of one's sweetheart, a new summer bounteous in
prospect with inexhaustible wealth of royal sunshine, a new autumn, with
ruddy orchards and the glory of the tapestried woods; and now of the
four new seasons that were to be ours but one remains:

And here is but December left and I,
To wonder if the hawthorn bloomed in May,
And if the wild rose with so fine a flush
Mantled the cheek of June, and if the way
The stream went singing foamed with meadow sweet,
And if the throstle sang in yonder bush,
And if the lark dizzied with song the sky.
I watched and listened--yet so sweet, so fleet,
The mad young year went by!

Strange, that feeling at the end of the year that somehow we have missed
it, have failed to experience it a