The native-born in the land of "Do Without" have for the most part never heard of Christmas trees or the giving of gifts, but they know the old legend which says that at the hour when the Saviour was born in a manger the bare and frozen elder bushes come to momentary bloom again in the thickets and the "critters and beasties" kneel down in their stalls, answering to some dumb mandate of reverence. This, however, is myth, and the fact is more substantially recognized that at this period the roisterous ride the highways, shooting and yelling, and the whiskey jug is tilted and tragedy often bares her fangs. But Dorothy and Parish Thornton had each other, and the cloud that their imaginations had always pictured as hanging over the state border had been dispelled. Their hearts were high, too, with the reflection that when spring came again with its fragrances and whispers from the south there would be the blossoming of a new life in that house, as well as along the slopes of the inanimate hills. But now on Christmas morning, as Dorothy looked out of a window, whose panes were laced with most delicate traceries of frost rime, there was a thorn-prickle of fear in her heart. Parish came in and stood looking outward over her shoulder, and his smile flashed as it had done that first day when it startled her, because, before she had seen it, she had read of just such a smile in a journal written almost a century and a half ago. "Hit's plum beautiful--out thar," she murmured, and the man's arm slipped around her. It might almost have been the Kenneth Thornton who had seen Court life in England who gallantly responded, "Hit's still more beautiful--in _hyar_." There had been an ice storm the night before, following on a day of snowfall, and the mountain world stood dazzling in its whiteness with every twig and branch glaced and resplendent under the sun. On the ice-bound slopes slept shadows of ultramarine, and near the window the walnut tree stood, no more a high-priest garbed in a green mantle or a wind-tossed cloak of orange-brown, but a warrior starkly stripped of his draperies and glitteringly mailed in ice. He stood with his bold head high lifted toward the sky, but bearing the weight of winter, and when it passed he would not be found unscarred. Already one great branch dropped under its freighting, and as the man and woman looked out they could hear from time to time the crash of weaker brethren out there in the forests; victims and sacrifices to the crushing of a beauty that was also fatal. Until spring answered her question, Dorothy reflected, she could only guess how deep the blight, which she had discovered in the fall, had struck at the robustness of the old tree's life. For all its stalwartness its life had already been long, and if it should die--she closed her eyes as though to shut out a horror, and a shudder ran through her body.