James Lane Allen

“ Thus there was no Christmas Tree; and Christmas Eve brought no joy to children except [pg 259] that of waiting for Christmas morning. Not until they went to sleep or feigned slumber; not until fires died down in chimney-corners where socks and stockings hung from a mantelpiece or from the backs of maternal and paternal chairs—not till then did the Sleigh of the White World draw near across the landscape of darkness. Out of its realm of silence and snow it was suddenly there!—outside the house, laden with gifts, drawn by tireless reindeer and driven by its indefatigable forest-god. ”

“ A great surgeon of France centuries ago was accustomed to say of a convalescent patient: 'God cured him; I dressed him.' I do not know whether, if I dared speak for the science of medicine near the close of the nineteenth century, I could say that. That is not the language of science now. If science thanks anything, it thanks other sciences and respects itself. But I will say that I might not have been able to save the life of your son if he had not been a healthy child—and a happy one; for happiness in a child is of course one of its signs of health. ”

“ Elizabeth dipped her fingers into her finger-bowl, and with admiration watched Elsie in her beauty and bouncing proportions: for she was a beautiful child—with the beauty of round healthy vegetables displayed on market stalls, causing you to feel comfortable and human. As for Elizabeth, her thinness had been her pathos: from earliest childhood she had been made to realize on school playgrounds and in all juvenile companies that very thin children win no kind of leadership: with an instinct sure and no doubt wise, children uniformly give their suffrages to the fat, and vote by the pound. ”

“ In the room was the spiritual hymn of the whole earth from the beginning until now: that somewhere in the universe there is a Father and a Fatherland; that on a dying planet under a dying sun amid myriads of dying stars there is something that does not die—the Youth of Man. In that youth all that had been best in him will come to fullest life; all that was worst will have dropped away.
The room was very still awhile.
Then upon its intense stillness there broke a sound—faint, far away through the snow-thickened air—a melody of coming sleigh-bells. ”

“ All except one: the profession of medicine remained indivisible. For that is the profession which has but a single ideal, a single duty, a single work, and but one patient—Man."
The silence had become too deep for words.
The young hunter quietly got up and lit his candle and squared himself in the middle of the floor, pale with the sacred fire of a youth's ideal.
"I am going to be a Kentucky country doctor. Good night!" He strode heavily out of the room, and his stride on the stairway sounded like an upward march toward future glory. ”

“ He felt assured that in treating the sick there are cases where every suggestion of happiness that can reach a patient draws him back toward life: every suggestion of unhappiness lowers his vitality and helps to roll him over the precipice: the final push need be a very slight one. The melody of sleighbells falling on the ears of the sick children that afternoon might have the weight of a sunbeam on delicate scales and tip the balances as he wished: he believed that many a time the weight of a mental sunbeam was all that was needed to decide the issue. ”

“ Of course we can't care as much for old times as they do; but be reasonable, Harold!"
"I can't be reasonable that way. Haven't they always told us never to pretend? Haven't they always taught us not to have secrets? Haven't they always said that a house with a secret in it wasn't a good home for children? Why can't Christmas be as open as all out of doors? Isn't that what they call being American—to be as open as all out of doors? It's the little immigrants who have secrets in them."
At that moment there was a sound of feet, muffled with yarn stockings, stamping triumphantly on the porch. ”

“ It may be one of the vast forces in Nature which we are but now beginning to observe—one of her instincts of intuitive selection which announces itself instantly and is never to be reversed: such an instinct as governs the mating of other lives not human. But there it is in our own species for us to make out of it what we can. There are men who for the rest of their lives look back upon the mere sight of some woman, a solitary brief meeting with her, as though that were their natural and perfect union. ”

“ Out of such a cabin without a bolt and with its mere latchstring there walked forth a new type of American man, the Nation's man, who as a child had trusted the open door in his father's house, and as a man trusted the door of humanity: nor had within himself secret nor secrecy, nor trick nor guile, nor double-dealing nor cruelty, nor vindictiveness nor revenge—the naked American, unpollutable iron of its [pg 231] strength and honor, Child of the New Childhood, Man of the New Manhood, with the great silence in him that is in the Great. ”

“ The vast multitude of physicians and surgeons now camped around the morning of life, waiting to receive the incoming generations on the rosy mountain-tops of its dawn—nearly all these would be withdrawn; they would move across the landscape of the world and pitch their tents on the plains of waning daylight; there to receive the ragged and broken army that came staggering from the battle-field, every soldier more or less wounded, every soldier more or less weary; there to give them a twilight of least suffering, their sundown of peace ”

“ When the evening was over and the moment had come to leave, she was at the side of her husband again; and under the chandelier in the hall she suddenly looked up to it with a beautiful mystical rapture and consecration—as if to the mistletoe of her bridal eve.
And now more years—years—years! But what effect have years upon the master passions? What are five years to a master Hatred? What are ten years to Revenge? What are twenty to Malice? What is half a century to Patience, or fourscore years to Loyalty, or fourscore and ten to Friendship, or the last stretch of mortality to waiting Love? ”

“ The shorn group of them were soon to pass out of it into a vaster world: the young lover of the hearth had become the middle-aged lover of humanity.
And through the reverie ran thoughts of the other man who had been near during all this time—defrauded of her—his ideal; baffled in his desire; a man with a love of her that had been a long prayer and a madness: to whom she owed her life: this other man to be left behind here amid the old familiar fields—with his love of her ruining his home.
The doctor got out of his buggy noiselessly. ”

“ Elizabeth was nondescript. Her hair was golden-red and as soft as woven wind. Her skin had the fairness of peach bloom when bees are coming and going in the sunlit air and there is such sweetness. Under her eyes lay a deeper flush like that sometimes seen on a child's face [pg 216] after a first day's sunburn by the waterside in springtime. Her own face might have been called the face of four crescents. Two of the crescents you always saw—her eyebrows, twin down-curved bands of palest gold. In order to see the other crescents, you had only to tell Elizabeth some story. ”

“ Happiness; Happiness has been before his eyes; Happiness has filled his ears; Happiness has held him in its arms; Happiness has danced for his feet; Happiness has rocked him to sleep; Happiness has smiled over him when he awoke. He has not known anything but Happiness because Happiness has been his mother. And so, if he owes the preservation of his life to Happiness, he owes it to the instinct of maternal imitation."
The doctor had heard this carolling of maternity with full approval—this heaven-rising skylark song of motherhood ”

“ I believe you will be one more great Kentucky country doctor. And whatever race you may have to run in this world, whether you win or whether you lose, I know it will be a hard, a gallant, struggle: that is all the thoroughbred can ever do. Having delivered over to you everything I own and retaining only the things I cannot will away,—my judgment, my confidence in you, and my devotion to you,—I wager these that you will win life's race and win it gloriously. ”

“ And as the doctor sat in his library that morning with this final announcement to him of how things sown were growing in the nature of his little boy, it seemed to him the moment to call upon Nature for a settlement—Nature who never fails to collect a bill, but who never pays one. And sitting there with the whole subject before him as a physician studying his own case, he asked of Nature whether without any will of his own she had not started him in life with too great susceptibility to the power of suggestion. ”

“ The spring advanced; tide of new life overflowed the land. Dr. Birney and his boy were seen driving on all bright days: not toward the sick necessarily; sometimes they were on their way to a creek or pond to fish.
There was a tragic change in the doctor, and there was a grave change in his son. The father's face began to show the responsibility of handling a case that was becoming more difficult; on a landscape of growing things—growing with the irresistible force of Nature, how was he to arrest the growth of things in the nature of a child? ”