s home, had slipped away
into eternity through the white gate of ghosts and dreams.

Philip's heart was pumping painfully as he came, dazed and staring, to
the place where the apparition had vanished. It was a giant beech tree,
all of two hundred and fifty years old, and around its base ran a broken
wooden bench, where pretty girls of Fairfield had listened to their
sweethearts, where children destined to be generals and judges had
played with their black mammies, where gray-haired judges and generals
had come back to think over the fights that were fought out. There were
letters carved into the strong bark, the branches swung down
whisperingly, the green tent of the forest seemed filled with the memory
of those who had camped there and gone on. Philip's feet stumbled over
the roots as he circled the veteran; he peered this way and that, but
the woodland was hushed and empty; the birds whistled above, the grasses
rustled below, unconscious, casual, as if they knew nothing of a
child-soul that had wandered back on Christmas day with a Christmas
message, perhaps, of good-will to its own.

As he stood on the farther side of the tree where the little ghost had
faded from him, at his feet lay, open and conspicuous, a fresh, deep
hole. He looked down absent-mindedly. Some animal--a dog, a rabbit--had
scratched far into the earth. A bar of sunlight struck a golden arm
through the branches above, and as he gazed at the upturned, brown dirt
the rays that were its fingers reached into the hollow and touched a
square corner, a rusty edge of tin. In a second the young fellow was
down on his knees digging as if for his life, and in less than five
minutes he had loosened the earth which had guarded it so many years,
and staggering with it to his feet had lifted to the bench a heavy tin
box. In its lock was the key, and dangling from it a long bit of
no-colored silk, that yet, as he untwisted it, showed a scarlet thread
in the crease. He opened the box with the little key; it turned
scrapingly, and the ribbon crumbled in his fingers, its long duty done.
Then, as he tilted the heavy weight, the double eagles, packed closely,
slipped against each other with a soft clink of sliding metal. The young
man stared at the mass of gold pieces as if he could not trust his
eyesight; he half thought even then that he dreamed it. With a quick
memory of the mortgage he began to count. It was all there--ten thousand
dollars in gold! He lifted his he