Jasper Larrabee stood transfixed, gazing at that tremulous, luminous astral presence with a strange superstitious thrill at his heart. It hardly seemed merely a star, so alien to his mind was its aspect in the erst untenanted spaces whence it blazed, so freighted with occult significance. Had the moment been charged with some wonderful apotheosis, some amplification of its pure white lustre into the benignant splendors of a vision of angels, the transformation could scarcely have exceeded the capacities of that breathless, insistent expectation which the ignorant mountaineer lifted toward it. For his was a simple faith, and his untaught mind had learned no doubts. And had never these nights of ours communion with celestial pursuivants? Did never the flutter of an angel's wing illumine far perspectives that darkle heavily over the earth? Was this rare fluid, which we call the air, so dense; were its sensitive searching vibrations, known as waves of light and sound, so dull, that it should feel naught, reveal naught, when the angel of the Lord flashed through the stars and the wind, through blossoming woods or bleak snows of deserts, and into the haunts and the homes of men? So many had come! He did not know that they were alien to the nineteenth century, and that the most spiritual-minded of to-day would account for their sudden vision as from prosaic natural causes,--as mental aberration, or the distortions of a diseased fancy, or the meaningless phantasmagoria of somnolent cerebration. To him it seemed that they had been with man from the very beginning; and why should their presence here be stranger than his own? Their very numbers served to coerce credibility. So many had come! To kings, to wanderers in the wilderness, to prophets, to shepherds, in dreams and in the broad daylight, they came: to stand with a gleaming sword before the gates of Paradise, and to sing in the starry advent of a new day,--On earth peace, good will toward men; to bring the immortal lilies of the Annunciation, and to tread the ways of the fiery furnace; to touch the bursting bonds of saints in prison, and to roll away the stone from the sepulchre of all the world; to minister to the Christ alike in the shadows of Gethsemane and amongst the splendors of the Mount of the Transfiguration!