Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

VOICES FROM THE PAST 349
So to the generations of our father I would present this view of
him and entreat them that tlicy emulate his example.
It is Christmas eve, and as Adelaide and I sit alone in our
home it is strange, and yet, perhaps, not strange, that my mind
has taken a leap back over some sixty years. I see our father
arise and go out under the Christmas stars. It is a night
much like this very night upon which I write — a blanket of
white on the ground, and deep blue, star-gemmed sky above.
We children see our father return, with his hair as white as the
snow and his face with some of the starlight glow in it. He
seats himself and begins to write. What he wrote that Christmas
eve so long ago was in a hymnal we see no longer in our
churches, but at one time his adaptation of the words of that
Christmas hymn were sung at this glad time. He changed
the lines of the more ancient hymn here and there to suit his
feeling of beautiful expression.
Through the long, long silence it floats to me adown the
air of this very Christmas eve:
When, marshaled on the nightly plain,
The glittering hosts bestud the sky,
One star alone of all the train
Attracts the eastern sage's eye.
A voice from every star there breaks
Throughout eve's radiant diadem;
One star alone the Saviour speaks —
It is the Star of Bethlehem.
It almost seems that the voices of the past are clearer to-night
than even the voices of my grandchildren as they make their
merry plans for the morrow or disclose some secret not yet to
be told the others at home.
We count ourselves happy that we have lived in the
nineteenth century — "the age on ages teUing to be living is
sublime!" It was indeed the beginning of a glorious era. We
have seen its radiant beams spreading forth, not only over our
own country, but, like the statue of Liberty Enlightning the
World, it shines out across the sea. The accomplishment of