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{ii} 

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THE
CHRISTMAS
HOLLY

BY
MARION HARLAND

New York:
SHELDON & Co., PUBLISHERS,
498 & 500 BROADWAY.
1867.
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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by
SHELDON & Co.,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States, for the
Southern District of New York.


Stereotyped by Smith & McDougal, 84 Beckman St.

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N a Christmas Eve, many years ago, before I had learned to accept Lifeas it is,—as it must ever be while Man needs the discipline ofreverses, and while the ways of God are known but to Himself,—achecquered scene, always; often grey and lowering; sometimes black withmidnight and chill with storm—on a certain Christmas Eve, then, when Iwas young, unreasonable and rebellious, I took a long, lonely walk intothe country. The afternoon suited my temper, and both were gloomy. Lowheavens of clouded steel that yet seemed, now and then, to shiver withthe still, biting air, and with each shudder, to let down a fewwandering flakes of snow; a bleak landscape of commons, blasted byinvisible frost; of sterile hills, that must have been stony and bare inthe sunniest springtime,—and for a horizon, a girdle of leafless woods,stretching up motionless boughs against the pitiless sky; in the hollowformed by the amphitheatre of hills, an artificial pond—too intenselytame in form{vi} and surroundings to deserve the name of lake, or bemistaken for aught but what it was, viz., a pool dug and filled with asingle eye to the production of ice for the next summer’s use,—this wasthe picture that greeted my outlooking sight. Within was the dull, icycalm of stoical misanthropy; distrust of my fellows, which stubbornlyrefused to ask of heavenly wisdom the solution of the human enigma thathad baffled, in disgusting me.

Into the midst of this sunless mood came a surprise Right before me, inmy steady but aimless track across the waste, was a clump of dwarftrees, poor, puny things that must have had a hard coming-up. Imarvell

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