The Project Gutenberg eBook, The First Christmas Tree, by Henry Van Dyke,
Illustrated by Howard Pyle
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Title: The First Christmas Tree
A Story of the Forest
Author: Henry Van Dyke
Release Date: June 25, 2005 [eBook #16134]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
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THE FIRST CHRISTMAS TREE
A Story of the Forest
by
HENRY VAN DYKE
Illustrated by Howard Pyle
Charles Scribner's Sons
New York
University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.
MDCCCXCVII
[Illustration--So they took the little fir from its place]
CONTENTS
I The Call of the Woodsman
II The Trail Through the Forest
III The Shadow of the Thunder-Oak
IV The Felling of the Tree
ILLUSTRATIONS
Photogravures from Original Drawings by Howard Pyle.
So they took the little fir from its place . . . (Frontispiece)
The fields around lay bare to the moon . . .
The sacred hammer of the God Thor . . .
Then Winfried told the story of Bethlehem . . .
I
THE CALL OF THE WOODSMAN
I
The day before Christmas, in the year of our Lord 722.
Broad snow-meadows glistening white along the banks of the river
Moselle; pallid hill-sides blooming with mystic roses where the
glow of the setting sun still lingered upon them; an arch of
clearest, faintest azure bending overhead; in the center of the
aerial landscape of the massive walls of the cloister of Pfalzel,
gray to the east, purple to the west; silence over all,--a
gentle, eager, conscious stillness, diffused through the air like
perfume, as if earth and sky were hushing themselves to hear the
voice of the river faintly murmuring down the valley.
In the cloister, too, there was sile
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