CHRISTMAS HOLLY [Illustration] [Illustration: THE CHRISTMAS HOLLY] BY MARION HARLAND New York: _SHELDON & Co., PUBLISHERS, 498 & 500 BROADWAY._ 1867. _Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by SHELDON & Co., In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York._ _Stereotyped by_ SMITH & MCDOUGAL, _84 Beckman St._ SALUTATORY. On a Christmas Eve, many years ago, before I had learned to accept Life as it is,--as it must ever be while Man needs the discipline of reverses, and while the ways of God are known but to Himself,--a checquered scene, always; often grey and lowering; sometimes black with midnight and chill with storm--on a certain Christmas Eve, then, when I was young, unreasonable and rebellious, I took a long, lonely walk into the country. The afternoon suited my temper, and both were gloomy. Low heavens of clouded steel that yet seemed, now and then, to shiver with the still, biting air, and with each shudder, to let down a few wandering flakes of snow; a bleak landscape of commons, blasted by invisible frost; of sterile hills, that must have been stony and bare in the sunniest springtime,--and for a horizon, a girdle of leafless woods, stretching up motionless boughs against the pitiless sky; in the hollow formed by the amphitheatre of hills, an artificial pond--too intensely tame in form and surroundings to deserve the name of lake, or be mistaken for aught but what it was, viz., a pool dug and filled with a single eye to the production of ice for the next summer’s use,--this was the picture that greeted my outlooking sight. Within was the dull, icy calm of stoical misanthropy; distrust of my fellows, which stubbornly refused to ask of heavenly wisdom the solution of the human enigma that had baffled, in disgusting me.