Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 342 pages of information about Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools.

Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 342 pages of information about Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools.
Richard Watson Gilder
The House and the Road J.P.  Peabody
The Mystic Cale Young Rice
  (In The Little Book of Modern Verse, Ed. by J.B.  Rittenhouse.)
A Winter Ride Amy Lowell
  (In The Little Book of Modern Verse.)
The Ride Clinton Scollard
  (In Songs of Sunrise Lands.)

CHRISTMAS IN THE WOODS

DALLAS LORE SHARP

(In The Lay of the Land)

On the night before this particular Christmas every creature of the woods that could stir was up and stirring; for over the old snow was falling swiftly, silently, a soft, fresh covering that might mean a hungry Christmas unless the dinner were had before morning.

But when the morning dawned, a cheery Christmas sun broke across the great gum swamp, lighting the snowy boles and soft-piled limbs of the giant trees with indescribable glory, and pouring, a golden flood, into the deep spongy bottoms below.  It would be a perfect Christmas in the woods, clear, mild, stirless, with silent footing for me, and everywhere the telltale snow.

And everywhere the Christmas spirit, too.  As I paused among the pointed cedars of the pasture, looking down into the cripple at the head of the swamp, a clear wild whistle rang in the thicket, followed by a flash through the alders like a tongue of fire, as a cardinal grosbeak shot down to the tangle of greenbrier and magnolia under the slope.  It was a fleck of flaming summer.  As warm as summer, too, the staghorn sumac burned on the crest of the ridge against the group of holly trees,—­trees as fresh as April, and all aglow with berries.  The woods were decorated for the holy day.  The gentleness of the soft new snow touched everything; cheer and good-will lighted the unclouded sky and warmed the thick depths of the evergreens, and blazed in the crimson-berried bushes of the ilex and alder.  The Christmas woods were glad.

Nor was the gladness all show, mere decoration.  There was real cheer in abundance; for I was back in the old home woods, back along the Cohansey, back where you can pick persimmons off the trees at Christmas.  There are persons who say the Lord might have made a better berry than the strawberry, but He didn’t.  Perhaps He didn’t make the strawberry at all.  But He did make the Cohansey Creek persimmon, and He made it as good as He could.  Nowhere else under the sun can you find such persimmons as these along the creek, such richness of flavor, such gummy, candied quality, woodsy, wild, crude,—­especially the fruit of two particular trees on the west bank, near Lupton’s Pond.  But they never come to this perfection, never quite lose their pucker, until midwinter,—­as if they had been intended for the Christmas table of the woods.

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Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.