"In the world where thou art vanished, All dear things are ever young. I as thou will soon be vanished, I like thee from nought am sprung. "Slumber, slumber! Why awaken? No one now believes in thee. I shall sleep while worlds are shaken-- No one will believe in me." It was the poorest, most faltering, yet most faithful voice--the mere note of a linnet long before the singing season has begun. As it died out, she descended from her premature perch and went with her repudiated book to the shelves where it must be put--not to be taken down again. In the shadow of the library and with the uncertainty of her glasses, she fumbled as she sought the place, and the volumes on each side collapsed together. Whereupon a large key slid from the top and fell to the floor. With a low cry of delight--but of regret also--she seized it and held it up:-- "Oh, Harold, the key! I have found it!" As the others hurried to her, she said to Elsie, as though boys were not fine enough to understand anything so fine:-- "It was like mamma to hide the key _there_! She gave it to the old Christmas stories to keep and guard!" * * * * * Soon after this the children were not seen in the room. Some one came for them, and they were made ready for supper. After supper they were kept well guarded in another part of the house; and at an earlier hour than usual the little flock were herded up-stairs and at the top divided along masculine and feminine by-paths toward drowsy folds. No lights were brought into the room where they had been playing. The red embers of the anthracite sank lower under their ashes: all was darkness and silence for the mysteries of Christmas Eve. III THE REALM OF MIDNIGHT A QUARTER of a century ago or more the German Christmas Tree--the diffusion of which throughout the world was begun soon after the close of the Napoleonic wars--had not made its way into general use throughout the rural districts of central Kentucky. The older Dutch and English festivals which had blent their features into the American holiday was the current form celebrated in blue-grass homes. The German forest-idea had been adopted in the towns for churches and other public festivities; and in private houses also that were in the van of the world-movement. But out in the country the evergreen had not yet enriched the great winter drama of Nature with its fresh note of the immortal drawn from a dead world: the evergreen was to eyes there the evergreen still, as the primrose to other eyes had been the primrose and nothing more.