at joy.

What a night that was!--this night--Christmas Eve. He wondered he had
not thought of it before. And the light still shines, and the angel
waits, and the eternal hosts proclaim peace on earth, good-will toward
men, and summon us all to go and follow the shepherds and see--what? A
little child cradled in a manger. The mountaineer, leaning on his gun
by the rail-fence, looked through the driving snow with the lights of
divination kindling in his eyes, seeing it all, feeling its meaning as
never before. Christ came thus, he knew, for a purpose. He could have
come in the chariots of the sun or on the wings of the wind. But He was
cradled as a little child, that men might revere humanity for the sake
of Him who had graced it; that they, thinking on Him, might be good to
one another and to all little children.

As he burst into the door of his house the elations of his high religious
mood were rudely dispelled by shrill cries of congratulation from his
wife and her mother. For the news had preceded him. Ephraim Blinks with
his fiddle had stopped there on his way to play at some neighboring
merry-making, and had acquainted them with the result of processioning
Purdee's land.

"We'll go down thar an' live!" cried his wife, with a gush of joyful
tears. "Arter all our scratch-in' along like ten-toed chickens all this
time, we'll hev comfort an' plenty! We'll live in Grinnell's good house!
But ter think o' our trials, an' how pore we hev been!"

"This air the Purdees' day!" cried the grandmother, her face flushed
with the semblance of youth. "Arter all ez hev kem an' gone, the
jedg-mint o' the Lord hev descended on Grinnell, an' he air cast out.
An' his fields, an' house, an' bin, an' barn, air Purdee's!"

The fire flared and faded; shadows of the night gloomed thick in the
room--this night of nights that bestowed so much, that imposed so much
on man and on his fellow-man!

"Ain't the Grinnell baby got _no_ home?" whimpered the hereditary enemy.

The mountaineer remembered the Lord of heaven and earth cradled, a
little Child, in the manger. He remembered, too, the humble child
smiling its guileless good-will at the fence. He broke out suddenly.

"How kem the fields Purdee's," he cried, leaning his back against the
door and striking the puncheon floor with the butt of the gun till it
rang again and again, "or the house, or the bin, or the barn? Did he
plant 'em? Did he build 'em? Who made 'em his'n?"

"The law!" e