Mary Christmas talked not only with her lips. She talked with her brows, her eyes, her hands, her whole body, in a mighty effort to convey by means of harsh, newly found words the story of her life to these, her new friends. Her country lay far across the ocean, across warm inland seas and great sand-swept deserts. It was a high land of tumbling, rockbound red hills and towering, snow-crowned mountains, of broad valleys with streams, of wide, treeless pastures--the homes of thousands of sheep. It was a land of bitter winters and dry, hot summers, thick with dust, which the wind whirled in great storms from the bordering deserts. Against the cold of those winters the people dug their homes in the sloping hillsides, long narrow houses with space for both men and animals, houses roofed with sods and partitioned with stones; and these dwellings were proof also against the hot, parching winds of summer. It was a land over which people had passed for centuries, people of many races, one succeeding another in the march of years, all journeying from the East to the West--hordes of people, sweeping onward with the mercilessness of locusts or of the country’s own burning wind. It was a land where in the spring snow-fed streams glistened on the high mountain-sides and slipped crystal clear through the valleys, with here and there the sound of tiny silver bells. Above all, it was the oldest land in all the world--older than India, than Egypt, than China with her walled towns, older than Jerusalem with Solomon’s Temple, older than the white, ancient cities of Assyria and Babylonia. Its red hills and snowy mountains and wide pastures and clear rivers had been there when Methuselah rounded his nine-hundredth year, and when Enoch took his solemn walk with God. Mary Christmas loved this land. Even John understood that. When she talked of its clear waters and of its wandering flocks of sheep, a wistfulness haunted her voice like a melody; when she explained to the puzzled children how great bands of people had again and again laid it waste and desolate, numberless years before they were born, the sadness of long centuries burdened her words; when she spoke of its great age, her tones echoed like those of the organ at church, until in one supreme outburst of reverence she rose from her chair, her face uplifted, her arms spread wide after the manner of the ancient prophet in benediction upon his people.