, and bits of candle which Fuchs had fitted
into pasteboard sockets. Its real splendours, however, came from the
most unlikely place in the world--from Otto's cowboy trunk. I had never
seen anything in that trunk but old boots and spurs and pistols, and
a fascinating mixture of yellow leather thongs, cartridges, and
shoemaker's wax. From under the lining he now produced a collection of
brilliantly coloured paper figures, several inches high and stiff enough
to stand alone. They had been sent to him year after year, by his old
mother in Austria. There was a bleeding heart, in tufts of paper lace;
there were the three kings, gorgeously apparelled, and the ox and the
ass and the shepherds; there was the Baby in the manger, and a group
of angels, singing; there were camels and leopards, held by the black
slaves of the three kings. Our tree became the talking tree of the
fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.
Grandmother said it reminded her of the Tree of Knowledge. We put sheets
of cotton wool under it for a snow-field, and Jake's pocket-mirror for a
frozen lake.

I can see them now, exactly as they looked, working about the table in
the lamplight: Jake with his heavy features, so rudely moulded that his
face seemed, somehow, unfinished; Otto with his half-ear and the savage
scar that made his upper lip curl so ferociously under his twisted
moustache. As I remember them, what unprotected faces they were; their
very roughness and violence made them defenceless. These boys had no
practised manner behind which they could retreat and hold people at a
distance. They had only their hard fists to batter at the world with.
Otto was already one of those drifting, case-hardened labourers who
never marry or have children of their own. Yet he was so fond of
children!

XII

ON CHRISTMAS MORNING, when I got down to the kitchen, the men were just
coming in from their morning chores--the horses and pigs always had
their breakfast before we did. Jake and Otto shouted 'Merry Christmas!'
to me, and winked at each other when they saw the waffle-irons on the
stove. Grandfather came down, wearing a white shirt and his Sunday coat.
Morning prayers were longer than usual. He read the chapters from Saint
Matthew about the birth of Christ, and as we listened, it all seemed
like something that had happened lately, and near at hand. In his prayer
he thanked the Lord for the first Christmas, and for all that it ha