wards the log fire, while the third, Newton, stood with his back to
the great hearth, and his coat-tails well divided. The other men were
scattered about the room, one or two writing at tables, three or four
reading the evening papers, and the rest talking and sipping whiskey
and water, or only talking or only sipping whiskey and water. As the
conversation proceeded around the fireplace, however, one after another
joined the group there, until the circle included every man in the room.

It had begun by Lesponts, who had been looking intently at Newton for
some moments as he stood before the fire with his legs well apart
and his eyes fastened on the carpet, breaking the silence by asking,
suddenly: "Are you going home?"

"I don't know," said Newton, doubtfully, recalled from somewhere
in dreamland, but so slowly that a part of his thoughts were still
lingering there. "I haven't made up my mind--I'm not sure that I can go
so far as Virginia, and I have an invitation to a delightful place--a
house-party near here."

"Newton, anybody would know that you were a Virginian," said McPheeters,
"by the way you stand before that fire."

Newton said, "Yes," and then, as the half smile the charge had brought
up died away, he said, slowly, "I was just thinking how good it felt,
and I had gone back and was standing in the old parlor at home the
first time I ever noticed my father doing it; I remember getting up and
standing by him, a little scrap of a fellow, trying to stand just as
he did, and I was feeling the fire, just now, just as I did that night.
That was--thirty-three years ago," said Newton, slowly, as if he were
doling the years from his memory.

"Newton, is your father living?" asked Lesponts. "No, but my mother is,"
he said; "she still lives at the old home in the country."

From this the talk had gone on, and nearly all had contributed to it,
even the most reticent of them, drawn out by the universal sympathy
which the subject had called forth. The great city, with all its
manifold interests, was forgotten, and the men of the world went back to
their childhood and early life in little villages or on old plantations,
and told incidents of the time when the outer world was unknown, and
all things had those strange and large proportions which the mind of
childhood gives. Old times were ransacked and Christmas experiences
in them were given without stint, and the season was voted, without
dissent, to have been far ahead