Once, at Christmas, the children, imbued with the holiday spirit, wanted a tree. A tree was easily procured by Nathan and hauled home on his sled. Mrs. Forge and Edith strung popcorn and made paper chains. Johnathan, in a spirit of holiday generosity, gave his wife five dollars. The children got a dollar apiece with which to buy presents. Mrs. Forge bought a much-needed underskirt with most of her money, knitting the children mufflers and keeping her purchases down to a few pathetic gifts in the local “five-and-ten.” She searched long for a gift for Johnathan. She finally chose a little painted picture of a scene in the Bay of Naples, Vesuvius smoking in the background. She said it was “so pretty.” The gifts made a rather thin exhibit on the tree. Christmas morning, when the tree was denuded, Johnathan got his picture, opened it, threw back his head and roared. Mrs. Forge had hunted a long time for Johnathan’s gift. The little picture meant a blind, vague, piteous groping after Beauty in her crushed and maltreated soul. It was “so pretty.” But Johnathan failed utterly to grasp its erudite potentialities. He spent the greatest part of that Christmas morning making fun of the picture. He got a string and hung it around his neck, sandwich-board fashion. He said he admired his wife’s tastes in frames; he had a rubber-heel placard at his shop which would fit it exactly. Mrs. Forge, who had parted with seventy-five cents which she might better have used for stockings, finally fled the room in tears. During the ensuing year, the picture was facetiously referred to as “Mother’s Volcano.” Johnathan, by the way, gave his wife a new bread board and Edith a fancy calendar. Nathan received a small, leather-bound copy of the New Testament. It was a red-letter Christmas! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XIV CONSIDER THE WORM I By the time he had reached seventeen Nathan had attained what it too often requires discouraging years for older persons to negotiate. He had lifted his handicapped, browbeaten young shoulders above the drab-colored dead level of village mediocrity. Fourteen of his poems had been printed intermittently as “boxed” features on the front page of the _Daily Telegraph_. The village, therefore, had been forced to admit—grudgingly to be sure, but nevertheless to admit—that if he kept it up long enough, and nothing stopped him, and the quality of his verse showed improvement instead of deterioration, and no one surpassed him, and the _Telegraph_ kept out of bankruptcy, and the Federal constitution wasn’t amended so as to prohibit poetry altogether—somewhere down long vistas of future years he might possibly be expected to approach a fair-to-middlin’ resemblance to a near-celebrity.