eneath it lay a carpet of pure white. The snow
was clustered in exquisite shapes upon its plumy branches; wrapping the
tree top with its little cross shoots, as a white robe might wrap a
figure with outstretched arms.

There were no tapers to be seen, but northern lights shot up into the
dark blue sky, and just over the fir-tree shone a bright, bright star.

"Jupiter looks well to-night," said the old Professor in the town
observatory, as he fixed his telescope; but to the child it seemed as
the star of the Christmas Angel.

His mother had really heard him call, and now came and put him back to
bed again. And so ended the second of the Three Christmas Trees.

* * * * *

It was enough to have killed him, all his friends said; but it did not.
He lived to be a man, and--what is rarer--to keep the faith, the
simplicity, the tender-heartedness, the vivid fancy of his childhood.
He lived to see many Christmas trees "at home," in that old country
where the robins are redbreasts, and sing in winter. There a heart as
good and gentle as his own became one with his; and once he brought his
young wife across the sea to visit the place where he was born. They
stood near the little white house, and he told her the story of the
Christmas trees.

"This was when I was a child," he added.

"But that you are still," said she; and she plucked a bit of the
fir-tree and kissed it, and carried it away.

He lived to tell the story to his children, and even to his
grandchildren; but he never was able to decide which of the two was
the more beautiful--the Christmas Tree of his dream, or the Spruce Fir
as it stood in the loveliness of that winter night.

This is told, not that it has anything to do with any of the Three
Christmas Trees, but to show that the story is a happy one, as is right
and proper; that the hero lived, and married, and had children, and was
as prosperous as good people, in books, should always be.

Of course he died at last. The best and happiest of men must die; and
it is only because some stories stop short in their history, that every
hero is not duly buried before we lay down the book.

When death came for our hero he was an old man. The beloved wife, some
of his children, and many of his friends had died before him, and of
those whom he had loved there were fewer to leave than to rejoin. He
had had a short illness, with little pain, and was now lying on his
deathbed in one of t