ied up the drive toward the
house, he felt a new significance in the words "Home, Sweet Home," and
shuddered at the recollection that he had, in the thirty odd hours since
he left it, given up the hope of ever seeing it again.

It was a little difficult, though, on this prosaic home-coming, to
realize all he had passed through since he last saw the red house, with
its long, dignified front, its triangular pediment rising up against the
dark-blue night sky, and the group of rambling outbuildings, stables,
laundries, barns, all built with a magnificent disregard of the value of
space, which straggled away indefinitely to the right, in a grove of big
trees and a tangle of brush-wood.

Lines of bright light streaming between drawn window curtains showed
bright patches on the lawn and the shrubs near the house. As Max passed
through the iron gate which shut in the garden from the park, a group of
men and boys, shouting, encouraging one another with uncouth cries,
rushed out from the stable yard toward the front of the house.

"What's the matter?" asked Max of a stable boy, whom he seized by the
shoulders and stopped in the act of uttering a wild whoop.

"It's the log, sir," replied the lad, sobered by the sudden appearance
of the young master, who seemed in no hilarious mood.

"The log! What log?"

"Master has ordered one for Christmas, sir, the biggest as could be
got," answered the boy, who then escaped, to rush back and join the
shouting throng.

And Max remembered that his father, in his passionate determination to
have a real old English Christmas, with everything done in the proper
manner, had given this order to the head gardener a few days before.

By this time the group had become a crowd. A swarm of men and boys,
conspicuous among whom were all the idlers and vagabonds of the
neighborhood, came along through the yard in one great, overwhelming
wave, hooting, yelling, trampling down the flower-beds with, their
winter covering of cocoanut fiber, breaking down the shrubs, tearing
away the ivy, and spreading devastation as they went.

Poor Mr. Wedmore had instructed his servants not to prevent the
villagers from joining in the procession. There was something
reminiscent of feudal times, a pleasant suggestion of the cordial
relation between the lord of the manor of the Middle Ages and his
tenants and dependents, in this procession of the Yule log up to the
great house. And Mr. Wedmore, full of his fancy for th