“I don’t think any of you, beloved children and dear ones, can quite understand what tonight means to me personally.” He cleared his throat and looked over at Billie. “I haven’t had a real Christmas here since Billie’s father was a little boy. I didn’t want a real Christmas either. Christmas meant no more to me than to some old owl up in the woods, maybe not as much. But tonight has warmed my heart, built up a good old fire in it just as you start one going in some old disused rock fireplace that has been stone cold for years. “When I was a boy this old house used to be opened up as it is tonight, decorated with evergreen and hemlock and guests in every room at Christmas time. I didn’t live here then. My grandfather, old Judge Winthrop Ellis, was alive, and my father had married and moved over to the white house on the wood road between Maple Lawn and the old burial ground. You can still find the cellar of it and the old rock chimney standing. I used to trot along that wood road to school up at Gayhead where Doris and Helen have been going, and I had just one companion on that road, the perkiest, sassiest, most interesting female I ever met in all my life.” He stopped and chuckled, and Cousin Roxy rubbed her nose with her forefinger and smiled. “We knew every spot along the way, where the fringed gentians grew in the late fall, and where to find arbutus in the spring. The best place to get black birch and where the checker-berries were thickest. Maybe just now, it won’t mean so much to you young folks, all these little landmarks of nature on these old home roads and fields of ours, but when the shadows begin to lengthen in life’s afternoon, you’ll be glad to remember them and maybe find them again, for the best part of it all is, they wait for you with love and welcome and you’ll find the gentians and the checker-berries growing in just the same places they did fifty years ago.” Jean saw her father put out his hand and lay it over her mother’s. His head was bent forward a trifle and there was a wonderful light in his eyes. “And all I wanted to say, apart from the big welcome to you all, and the good wishes for a joyous season, was this, the greatest blessing life has brought me is that Roxana has come out of the past to sit right over there and show me how to have a good time at Christmas once again. God bless you all.” “Oh, wasn’t he just a dear,” Kit said, rapturously, when it was all over, and they were driving back home under the clear starlit sky. “I do hope when I’m as old as the Judge, I’ll have a flower of romance to sniff at too. Cousin Roxy watched him just as if he were sixteen instead of sixty.” “You’re just as sentimental as Helen and me,” Jean told her, teasingly. “Well, anybody who wouldn’t get a thrill out of tonight would be a toad in a claybank. And Jean, did you see Father’s face?”