“All the greatest names up and down the terrible field of his history--there were just as many that he threw away: he dwelt in half the light of his race.” If there had been a clock to measure the hour it must now have been near midnight as it was reckoned in old human times. Suddenly the fir below spoke out hopefully: “May they not after all be gathered elsewhere, strangely altered yet the same? Is some other star their safe habitation? Were they right, sheep that they were, in thinking themselves immortal? Are they now in some other world?” “What know we? What knew he? That was the mystery.” The winds caught the word and carried it away: “Mystery--mystery--mystery.” “Our fathers remembered the day when he went into the woods and cut down one of our people and took it into his house. On the evergreen he set the star: they were for his youth and his immortality. Around those emblems children pressed their faces and reaching out plucked gifts from the branches. The myriads and myriads of the children! What became of them?” “Be still!” whispered the fir tree above. “At that moment, while you spoke, I felt the soft fingers of a child searching my boughs. Was not this what in human times they called Christmas Eve? There they are again, the fingers of a child!” “Hearken!” whispered the fir below. “Down in the valley elfin horns are blowing and elfin drums beat. Do you not hear them--faint and far away. And that sound--was it not the bells of the reindeer! It passed: it was a wandering soul of Christmas.” “But they are all around me! They are all around you! Myriads and myriads are coming, are on the way toward us, the last of their Christmas trees. The souls of all children, wide-awake, are gathering about us ere we pass into the earth’s sleep.” “The souls of the children visit us ere we sleep.” Not long after this the fir standing below spoke for the last time: “Comrade, it is the end for me. The cap of snow is on my head. I follow all things.” The snow closed over it. The other fir now stood alone. The snow crept higher and higher. Late in the long night it communed once more, solitary: “I, then, close the train of earthly things. And I was the emblem of immortality; let the highest be the last to perish! Power, that put forth all things for a purpose, you have fulfilled, without explaining it, that purpose. I follow all things into their sleep.” The sun rose clear: all the mountain tops were white and cold and at peace. The long war between the crystal and the planet was over: the snowflake had conquered. The earth was dead. NINE HUNDRED AND FIFTY COPIES OF THIS BOOK PRINTED ON VAN GELDER HAND-MADE PAPER AND THE TYPE DISTRIBUTED IN THE MONTH OF OCTOBER MDCCCCXIV End of Project Gutenberg's The Last Christmas Tree, by James Lane Allen