THE CHRISTMAS BISHOP
Sometimes, against the dark faces of the housefronts, window shadeswere rolled up, like eyelids opening, on home-pictures that remindedthe Bishop it was Christmas night
See page 140
The Christmas Bishop
BY
WINIFRED KIRKLAND
Author of “Introducing Corinna,” “The Home-Comers,” etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY
LOUISE G. MORRISON
BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1913
By SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
(Incorporated)
THE VAIL-BALLOU CO.,
Binghamton, N. Y.
[Pg 1]
THE CHRISTMAS BISHOP
PART I
Christmas morning, blue-black, pricked with stars against the Bishop’swindow panes. Westbury lay asleep beside its curving river, the greatold houses with gardens that ran terraced to the bank, the churches,the college, even the new teeming tenements at the bending of thewater, all lay asleep in the Christmas dawning. The Bishop alone wasawake, and against the darkness before his eyes pictures raced. He hadbeen a poet once, so long ago that when sometimes they sang his hymnsin church he had forgotten they were his, but he still kept the poet’strick of thinking in pictures during those strangely alert momentsbetween sleep and full awakening. The pictures fell into the march of apoem.
It was a storied city built upon two hills cleft[Pg 2] by a valley.On the twin crests towered great palaces and a temple. Where thehills sank toward the north, there were terraced streets and narrowclimbing byways. There were markets and booths and all the signs ofmultitudinous life, but throughout all the place one heard no sound,saw nothing that moved, yet one knew that the whole city throbbed withthe pulse-beats of innumerable homes. A gray pall hung low, as if theabrupt Oriental dawn had been arrested; the gray dimmed the marble ofthe palaces, and dulled the temple gold. In the silent gloom one waited.
One did not know whence he had come, the Child who was suddenly there,in the streets of that city without stars, a sacred city once; butwherever he knocked upon the portal, quickly all within woke to life,and became a teeming, bustling household; again, when he withdrew, allwas once more silence and darkness.
He was a tiny child, barefoot and pale, some little lost waif from themountains who had come seeking his kinsfolk amo