children--these are not the most disinterested and spring from the
truest affection. It is no easy feat to have lived with a man for ten,
fifteen, twenty years; to know his weakness thoroughly; to measure the
wide distance from the heroic stature for which we took him, and the
size into which thorough knowledge shrinks him; to have borne with all
his eccentricities, his fault finding, his natural selfishness; to
have discovered and to have known for years that he is after all like
the rest of us only human, and yet at every recurring Christmas to
send our affections back to the beginning and with a fresh and
unimpaired love give him the mystic password of our hearts in a gift.
If I sometimes laugh at the devices of my wife to find out what it is
I want, I do not have the faintest smile at the patient and loving
heart that inspires them. I do not know that I ever saw an angel, but,
though her hair is tinged with gray, and youth has long since left her
face, I never hear my wife, with her bright smile on Christmas morning,
asking the old, girlish question, "What do you think I've got for you,"
that I don't see in it that sort of absolution for the past and
benediction for the future which it is said only angels bring.

* * * * *

Ah, I expected to see you here! I knew you would come! Why? Ah, my
boy, every veteran knows well what comes after picket firing. Let me
see: at church with her, concerts, soirees--where else could you be
to-day but in here buying a present? Why, you bought her that last
Christmas! Oh, I see, this Christmas it is for another girl! Come now,
don't look conscious over it. The girls can't help it; they will change
now and then, It is not their fault, but still it will happen. My boy,
the business you are now in has by no means been reduced to a fixed
science. No calculation yet made has reduced to a certainty any way