men--the hams and the sausages of fastidious housewives--the turkey
and the quail--and crops transmutable into coin. They were in sight
there--the fair maturings of the sun now ready to be turned into
offerings to the dark solstice, the low activities of the soil
uplifted to human joyance.

One last thing completed the picture of the scene.

The brook that wound across the lawn at its bottom was frozen to-day
and lay like a band of jewelled samite trailed through the olive
verdure. Along its margin evergreens grew. No pine nor spruce nor
larch nor fir is native to these portions of the Shield; only the wild
cedar, the shapeless and the shapely, belongs there. This assemblage
of evergreens was not, then, one of the bounties of Nature; they had
been planted.

It was the slender tapering spires of these evergreens with their note
of deathless spring that mainly caught the eye on the whole landscape
this dead winter day. Under the silvery-violet light of the sky they
waited in beauty and in peace: the pale green of larch and spruce
which seems always to go with the freshness of dripping Aprils; the
dim blue-gray of pines which rather belongs to far-vaulted summer
skies; and the dark green of firs--true comfortable winter coat when
snows sift mournfully and icicles are spearing earthward.

These evergreens likewise had their Christmas meaning and finished the
picture of the giving earth. Unlike the other things, they satisfied
no appetite, they were ministers to no passions; but with them the
Christmas of the intellect began: the human heart was to drape their
boughs with its gentle poetry; and from their ever living spires the