Every year sweeps a broader circle
for your horizon, grooves a deeper channel for your experience. Through
sun and shade and shower you ripen to a large and liberal life.

Yours is the deep joy, the unspoken fervor, the sacred fury of the
fight. Yours is the power to redress wrong, to defend the weak, to
succor the needy, to relieve the suffering, to confound the oppressor.
While vigor leaps in great tidal pulses along your veins, you stand in
the thickest of the fray, and broadsword and battle-axe come crashing
down through helmet and visor. When force has spent itself, you withdraw
from the field, your weapons pass into younger hands, you rest under
your laurels, and your works do follow you. Your badges are the scars
of your honorable wounds. Your life finds its vindication in the deeds
which you have wrought.

The possible to-morrow has become the secure yesterday. Above the tumult
and the turbulence, above the struggle and the doubt, you sit in the
serene evening, awaiting your promotion.

Come, then, O dreaded years! Your brows are awful, but not with frowns.
I hear your resonant tramp far off, but it is sweet as the May-maidens'
song. In your grave prophetic eyes I read a golden promise. I know that
you bear in your bosom the fulness of my life. Veiled monarchs of
the future, shining dim and beautiful, you shall become my vassals,
swift-footed to bear my messages, swift-handed to work my will.
Nourished by the nectar which you will pour in passing from your crystal
cups, Death shall have no dominion over me, but I shall go on from
strength to strength and from glory to glory.

* * * * *

THE PROMISE OF THE DAWN.

A CHRISTMAS STORY.

A winter's evening. Do you know how that comes here among the edges of
the mountains that fence in the great Mississippi valley? The sea-breath
in the New-England States thins the air and bleaches the sky, sucks
the vitality out of Nature, I fancy, to put it into the brains of the
people: but here, the earth every day in the year pulses out through
hill or prairie or creek a full, untamed animal life,--shakes off the
snow too early in spring, in order to put forth untimed and useless
blossoms, wasteful of her infinite strength. So when this winter's
evening came to a lazy town bedded in the hills that skirt Western
Virginia close by the Ohio, it found that the December air, fiercely
as it blew the snow-clouds about the hill-tops, was instinc