THE DOCTOR'S CHRISTMAS EVE. James Lane Allen
you mind about the children's epidemic! I'll take care of the children's epidemic," repeated the doctor, pulling the long-faced, autumn-faced prodigy of all questions between his knees and looking him over with secret solicitude. "We'll not talk about sick children, but about two well children—thanked be the Father of all children! So you and Elsie are going away to help celebrate a Christmas Tree."
"Yes; but when are you going to have a Christmas Tree of our own?"
Now, that subject had two prongs, and the doctor seized the prong that did not pierce family affairs—did not pierce him. He settled down to the subject with splendid warmth and heartiness:—
"Well, let me see! You may have your first Christmas Tree as soon as you are old enough to commence to do things for other people; as soon as you can receive into your head the smallest hard pill of an idea about your duty to millions and millions and millions of your fellow medicine takers. Can you understand that?"
"Gracious! That would be a big pill—larger than my head! I don't see what it has to do with one miserable little dead pine tree!"
The doctor roared.
"It has this to do with one miserable dead pine tree: don't you know yet that Christmas Trees are in memory of a boy who was once exactly your age and height—and perhaps with your appetite—and with just as many eyes and possibly even more questions? The boy grew up to be a man. The man became a teacher. The teacher became a neighborhood doctor. The neighborhood doctor became the greatest physician of the world—and he never took a fee!"
"Ah, yes! But he wasn't a better doctor than you are, was he? If he'd come into this neighborhood and tried to practise, you'd soon have ousted him, wouldn't you, with your doses and soups and jellies?"
"Humph!" grunted the doctor with a wry twist of the mouth; "I suppose I would! Yes; undoubtedly I'd have ousted him! He could never have competed with me in my practice; never! But we won't try that hard little pill of an idea any more. We'll drop the subject of Christmas Trees for one more year. Perhaps by that time you can take the pill as a powder! So! I hear you are going to attend a dancing party; we'll talk about the party. And you are going over there to stay all night. I wish I were going. I wish I were going over there to stay all night," reiterated the man, with an outrush of solemn tenderness that reached back through vain years, through so many parched, unfilled years.
"I wish so, too," cried the boy, instantly burying his face on his father's coat-sleeve, then lifting it again and looking at him with a guilty flush which the doctor did not observe.
"Oh, do you! We won't say anything more about that, though I'm glad you'd like to have me along. Now then; go and have a good time! And take long steps and large mouthfuls! And you might do well to remember that a boy's stomach is not a birdnest to be lined with candy eggs."
"I think candy eggs would make a very good lining, better than real eggs; and about half the time you're trying to line me with them, aren't you? With all the sulphur in them! And I do hate sulphur, and I have always hated it since the boy at my desk in school wore a bag of it around his neck under his shirt to keep off diseases. My! how he smelt—worse than contagion! Candy eggs would make a very good lining; even the regular soldiers get candy in their rations now. And they don't have to eat new-laid eggs of mornings! Think of an army having to win a hard-fought battle on soft-boiled eggs! They don't have to do that, do they?"
"They do not!" said the doctor. "They positively do not! But we won't say anything more about eggs—saccharine or sulphurous. What are you going to do at the party?"
"I am going to dance."
"Alone? O dear! All alone? You'd better go skate on the ice! Not all alone?"
"I should say not! With my girl, of course."
"That's better, much better. And then what?"
"I am going to promenade, with my girl on my arm."
"On both arms, did you say?"
"No; on one arm."
"Which?"
"Either."
"That sounds natural! (Heart action regular; brain unclouded; temperature normal.) And then? What next?"
"I'm going to take the darling in to supper."
"Hold on! Not so fast! Suppose there isn't any supper—for the darling."
"Don't say that! It would nearly kill me! Don't you suppose there'll be any supper?"
"I'm afraid there will be. Well, after the darling has had her fatal supper? (Of course you won't want any!) What then?"
"What else is there to do?"
"You don't look as innocent as you imagine!"
"You don't have to confess what you'd like to do, do you? Would you have told your father?"
"I don't think I would."
"Then I won't tell you."
"Then you needn't! I don't wish to know—only it must not be on the cheek! Remember, you are no son of mine if it's on the cheek!"
"I thought I heard you say that got people into trouble."
"Maybe I did. I ought to have said it if I didn't; and it seems to be the kind of trouble that you are trying to get into. (Temperature rising but still normal. Respiration deeper. All symptoms favorable. No further bulletins deemed necessary.) Well, then? Where were we?"
"Anyhow, I've never thought of cheeks when I've thought of that; I thought cheeks were for chewing."
"Guardian Powers of our erring reason! Where did you get that idea—if sanity can call it an idea?"
"Watching our cows."
The doctor laughed till tears ran down his face.
"You can't learn much about kissing by watching anybody's cows, Governor," he said, wiping the tears away. "Not about human kissing. You must begin to direct your attention to an animal not so meek and drivable. You must learn to consider, my son, that hornless wonder and terror of the world who forever grazes but never ruminates!"
For years, in talking with a mind too young wholly to understand, he had enjoyed the play of his own mind. He knew only too well that there are few or none with whom a physician may dare have his sportive fling at his fellow-creatures, at life in general. From a listener who never sat in harsh judgment and who would never miscarry his random words, he had upon occasion derived incalculable relief.
"Anyhow, I have learned that cows have the new American way of chewing; so they never get indigestion, do they?"
"If they do, they cannot voice their symptoms in my mummied ears," said the doctor, who often seemed to himself to have been listening to hue and cry for medicine since the days of Thotmes. "However, we won't say anything further about that! What else are you going to do over there? This can't possibly be all!"
"To-night we children are going to sit up until midnight, to see whether the animals bellow and roar and make all kinds of noise on Christmas Eve. We know they don't, but we're going to prove they don't!"
"Where did you pick up that notion?"
"Where did you pick it up when you were a boy?"
"I fail to remember," admitted the doctor with mock dignity, damaged in his logic but recalling the child legend that on the Night of the Nativity universal nature was in sympathy with the miracle. All sentient creatures were wakeful and stirring, and sent forth the chorus of their cries in stables and barns—paying their tribute to the Divine in the Manger and proclaiming their brotherhood with Him who was to bring into the world a new gospel for them also.
"I don't know where I got that," he repeated. "Well, after the animals bellow and roar and make all kinds of noise, then what?"
"There isn't but one thing more; but that is best of all!"
"You