Christmas Eve and Christmas Day: Ten Christmas storiesHale, Edward Everett
General
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day: Ten Christmas stories
Hale, Edward Everett
Christmas stories, American; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
The savage people showed the strangers a poor little booth to sleep in,
and went away to their own lairs, with many prostrations, for they
really thought them "children of the sun."
Oello and her husband laughed very heartily when they knew they were
alone. Oello made him promise to go in the morning early for potatoes,
and oca, and mashua, which are two other tubers like potatoes which grow
there. "And we will show them," said she, "how to cook them." For they
had seen by the evening feast, that the poor savage people had no
knowledge of the use of fire. So, early in the morning, he went up a
little way on the lake shore, and returned with strings of all these
roots, and with another string of fish he had caught in a brook above.
And when the savage people waked and came to Oello's hut, they found her
and her husband just starting their fire,--a feat these people had never
seen before.
He had cut with his copper knife a little groove in some soft palm-wood,
and he had fitted in it a round piece of iron-wood, and round the
iron-wood had bound a bow-string, and while Oello held the palm-wood
firm, he made the iron-wood fly round and round and round, till the pith
of the palm smoked, and smoked, and at last a flake of the pith caught
fire, and then another and another, and Oello dropped other flakes upon
these, and blew them gently, and fed them with dry leaves, till they
were all in a blaze.
The savage people looked on with wonder and terror. They cried out when
they saw the blaze, "They are children of the sun,--they are children of
the sun!"--and ran away. Oello and her husband did not know what they
said, and went on broiling the fish and baking the potatoes, and the
mashua, and the oca, and the ulloco.
And when they were ready, Oello coaxed some of the children to come
back, and next their mothers came and next the men. But still they said,
"They are children of the sun." And when they ate of the food that had
been cooked for them, they said it was the food of the immortals.
Now, in Oello's home, this work of making the fire from wood had been
called menial work, and was left to servants only. But even the princes
of that land were taught never to order another to do what they could
not do themselves. And thus it happened that the two young travellers
could do it so well. And thus it was, that, because they did what they
could, the savage people honored them with such exceeding honor, and
because they did the work of servants they called them gods. As it is
written: "He who is greatest among you shall be your servant."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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