So the children played on undisturbed. While the snow covered the fields, they enacted Saint Jacob, his toiling, unsuccessful ascent of Ararat, and the visit from the plank-bearing angel; and in the first thaw they used the moist, easily packed snow for the construction of Saint Gregory’s well, the home of the kind widow, and a rather diminutive palace of the wicked king. In the summer, reënforced by all the children within a wide radius, they ran screaming through the open fields, now as hordes of barbarians, devastating the land of Mary Christmas, now as bloodthirsty Turks, bent on massacre. But the acknowledged favorite was the story of the journey of Mary Christmas, sick, in the donkey-cart to Etchmiadzin and of her healing in the great church. This they played again and again with William Howe’s big Newfoundland as the donkey, Cynthia and Mary alternately as the sick child and her anxious mother, Roger as the priest in the church, and William himself, on account of his necessary provision for the journey, as the joyous father. When John looked wistful at having no part, they made him the little brother, who with the mother welcomed his sister’s glad return home, under the old tamarack tree at the bottom of the field. Curiously enough, perhaps, they did not play the penitent pilgrim, though it would seem that his triumphant journey with Saint Gregory’s hand beneath his cloak might have afforded the best sort of dramatic material. Whether it lacked for them a certain concrete vividness which the other stories held, or whether, actuated by some strange, instinctive reserve, not unknown to childhood, they forbore to portray in visible form the many miraculous deeds wrought by the hand of the saint, one will never know; but the older members of the company never proposed its performance, and its stirring details were kept alive among them only by oral tradition. And yet, although the players, as a whole, never presented the journeyings of the good bishop, the story was enacted by one of their number, who, going alone after the manner of the pilgrim himself, wrought his holy deeds in the silence of the snow-covered woods and pastures. That one was Cynthia Wescott. Since Mary Christmas had first told her stories, she had held this one as the tale of tales; and as the months in their quick succession left her longer and more awkward in arms and legs and more wondering and wistful in heart, its loveliness haunted her until it hurt by its very grace and beauty.