“What’s Ascension eve, Mary Christmas?” Mary Christmas looked at them in perplexed surprise, and then at the church spire, just visible through the blossoming trees. Evidently she was doubtful as to the sufficiency of New England Congregationalism in the nineties. “It is the eve of the day when our Lord ascended into Heaven,” she said slowly. “On that night, in my country, at one moment which no one knows, all the water everywhere is still. Rivers and streams do not move. In that moment stones and flowers and stars and all creatures speak to one another. If you should hide in a cave in the mountain and hear them, you would never feel sadness any more.” The tense softness of her voice as she said those last words mingled with the hum of bees in the quiet orchard. The children were silent as they looked at her, even the boys vaguely conscious that this was no time to speak. She leaned back against the gray trunk of the apple tree, her body relaxed, her quick hands listless in her lap, her mouth still and thoughtful. Only her eyes under their dark brows were not still. They were as though haunted by living flames that soared upward from the fire in her heart. Mary Wescott saw them burning there, and understood all at once that Beauty had kindled them--the irresistible, torturing loveliness that lies in ancient, lip-worn tales, consecrated forever by their own mystic grace and by the simple faith of a people’s childhood. In mid-afternoon, when their mother called Mary Christmas to a lunch of sandwiches and milk before she should again take to the road with her great pack, the children followed her to the house, fairly dazed by all the unfamiliar things which they had heard. When she had gone, they would sort out all these bewildering events and persons and places and put them in orderly, well-kept mental niches, to be taken out and reviewed one at a time: the Garden of Eden with its Tree of Life; the ark and its one transcendent plank; Saints Jacob and Gregory; the penitent pilgrim with his silver box; Armenian hills and valleys in the single magic moment of Ascension eve. But now, overpowered by the wealth to which they had become the heirs, they could only stand and watch her as she ate her lunch and talked with their father and mother about the roads she would travel during the next few days and her prospects for the summer.