children--that your arms may grow
used to this loving. Another kiss from mother? Blessed Ones! A billion
more, for nights and mornings, for all day long of all the years,
waiting here on mother's lips. And now to sleep. Christmas _is_
to-morrow. Hush! To-morrow. Yes; to-morrow. Go t' sleep! Go t' sleep!"
And upon the flying heels of Night--but still far over seas from the
blustering white Northwest where Pattie Batch was waiting at Swamp's End
in the woods--the new Day, with jolly countenance, broad, rosy and
delighted, was somewhere approaching, in a gale of childish laughter,
blithely calling in its westward sweep to all Christian children to
awaken to their peculiar and eternal joy.

* * * * *

It was Christmas weather in the big woods: a Christmas temperature like
frozen steel--thirty below in the clearing of Swamp's End--and a
rollicking wind, careering over the pines, and the swirling dust of snow
in the metallic air. A cold, crisp crackling world! A Christmas land,
too: a vast expanse of Christmas colour, from the Canadian line to the
Big River--great, grave, green pines, white earth and a blood-red
sunset! The low log-cabins of the lumber camps were smothered in snow;
they were fringed with pendant ice at the eaves, and banked high with
drifts, and all window-frosted. The trails were thigh deep and drifting.
The pines--their great fall imminent, now--flaunted long, black arms in
the gale; they creaked, they swished, they droned, they crackled with
frost. It was coming on dusk. The deeper reaches of the forest were
already dark. Horses and teamsters, sawyers, road-monkeys, axemen,
swampers, punk-hunters and all, floundered from the bush, white with dry
snow, icicled and frosted like a Christmas cake, to the roaring
bunk-house fires, to a voracious employment at the cooks' long tables,
and to an expanding festival jollity. Town? Sure! Swamp's End for
Christmas--the lights and companionship of the bedraggled shanty
lumber-town in the clearing of Swamp's End! Swamp's End for Gingerbread
Jenkins! Swamp's End for Billy the Beast! Swamp's End--and the roaring
hilarity thereof--for man and boy, straw-boss and cookee, of the
lumber-jacks! Presently the dim trails from the Cant-hook cutting, from
the Bottle River camps, from Snook's landing and the Yellow Tail works,
poured the boys into town--a lusty, hilarious crew, like loosed
school-boys on a lark, giving over, now, to the only distrac