It was the night before Christmas in the little mountain church near Wolfe’s Store. The small, low-roofed, raftered chapel was illumined as brightly as coal oil lamps in the early stage of their development could do it; a hemlock tree, decked out with candles and tinsel stood to one side of the altar, an almost red-hot ten-plate stove on the other, while the chancel and rafters were twined and garlanded with ground pine and ilex, or winter berries. In one of the rear pews sat a very good looking young couple, a former school teacher revisiting the valley, and his favorite pupil. Lambert Girtin and Elsie Vanneman were their names.

The young man, who was a veteran of the Civil War, possessed the right to wear the Congressional medal, and while teaching at the little red school house on the pike near the road leading to Gramley’s Gap, had noticed and admired the fair Elsie, so different from the rest of his flock. She was the daughter of a prosperous lumberman, a jobber in hardwoods, and her mother was above the average in intelligence and breeding, yet Elsie in all ways transcended even her parents.

She had seemed like a mere child when he left her at the close of the term the previous Christmas, but he could not evict her image from his soul. It was mainly to see her, though he would have admitted this to no one, that induced him to revisit the remote valley during the following holiday season. The long drive in the stage through drifted roads had seemed nothing to him, he was so elated at the thought of reviving old memories at the sight of this most beloved of pupils.

In order not to arouse any one’s suspicions, he did no more than to inquire how she was at the general store and boarding house where he stopped.

“You would never know her,” exclaimed old Mother Wolfe, the landlady. “Why, she’s a regular young lady, grown a head taller,” making a gesture with her hand to denote her increased stature.

On Christmas Eve there was to be the usual entertainment at the Union Church, and Lambert Girtin posted himself outside the entrance to wait for the object of his dreams. The snow was drifted deep, and it was bitterly cold, yet social events were so rare in the mountains that almost every one braved the icy blasts to be present. It was not long before he was rewarded by a sight of Elsie Vanneman. It was remarkable how tall she’d grown! As he expressed it to himself, “An opening bud became a rose full-blown” in one short year!

She of course recognized him, and greeted him warmly, and they entered the church together. Inside by the lamplight he had a better chance to study her appearance more in detail than by the cold starlight on the church steps. She had grown until she was above the middle height, yet had literally taken her figure and her grace with her. She was slender, yet shapely, dainty and graceful in the extreme. Her violet eyes were even more deeply pensive than of yore, her cheeks were pink and white, her lips red and slightly full. Her hair was a golden or coppery brown, and shone like those precious metals in the reflected light of the lamps and the stove; the slight upward turn of her nose still remained.

How demure, earnest and sincere she was! In the intervening year he had never seen her like in Bellefonte, Altoona or Pittsburg. She seemed to be happy to be with him again, minus the restraint existing between a pupil and teacher. Instinctively their fingers touched, and they held hands during most of the evening.

Towards the end of the sermon, which was long and loud, and gave the young couple plenty of opportunity to advance their love making unnoticed, Girtin whispered to her: “Have you an escort home, dear Elsie?”

The answer was a hesitating “Yes.”

The young man felt his heart give a jolt, then almost stop throbbing, and an instant hatred of some unknown rival made his blood boil furiously. How could she act that way? She had, even as his pupil, been indifferent to all of the opposite sex except him, and during the period of their separation her sprightly letters had borne evidence of tender sentiments, to the utter exclusion of all others. Had he not believed in her, he would not have taken that long journey back into the mountains, that many might have been glad to quit for good. Her beauty and her grace had haunted him, and he had determined to wed her, until this sign of duplicity had been sprung on him. Of course she did not know he was coming, and had made the fatal arrangements before; yet, if she cared for him as he did for her, she would not be making engagements with the boys, especially at her tender age.

He tried to console himself by noticing a shade of regret flit over her blushing face after she said the fateful words, but until the close of services he was ill at ease and scarcely opened his mouth. At the benediction he managed to stammer “Good evening,” and was out of the church in the frosty starlight night before any one else.

With long strides he walked up the snowy road ahead of the crowd who had followed him. The sky was very clear, and the North Star, “The Three Kings,” or Jacob’s Rake, Job’s Coffin, and other familiar constellations, were glimmering on the drifted snow. Instead of observing the stars, had he looked back he would have seen that the “escort” she referred to was none other than a girl friend, Katie Moyer, and both, Elsie in particular, would have been only too happy to have a sturdy male companion to see them through the snow banks.

As a result of his disappearance, Elsie was as unhappy and silent as Girtin had been, as she floundered about in the drifts. Despite her gentle, sunny nature, she was decidedly out of sorts when she reached home at the big white house near the Salt Spring. She gave monosyllabic answers to her parents in response to their queries as to how she had enjoyed the long-looked for Christmas entertainment. She did not sleep at all that night, but tossed about the bed, keeping her friend awake, and on Christmas Day was in a rebellious mood. Her mother reminded her how ungrateful she was to be so tearful and sullen in the face of so many blessings and gifts.

There was no stage or sleigh out of the valley on Christmas Day, else Girtin would have departed. He moped about all day, telling those who asked the matter that he was ill. Elsie, knowing that he was still in the valley, hoped up to bedtime that he would at least come to pay her a brief Christmas call, but supper over, and no signs of him, she was uncivil to her mother to such a degree that her friend openly said that she was ashamed of her.

Though Katie and she were rooming together, it did not deter her mother, goaded by the remarks of the younger children to visit her room while they were undressing, saying “that she deserved a good dose of the gad,” and, ordering her to lay face downward on the bed, administered a good, old-fashioned spanking with the flax-paddle. After this humiliating chastisement in the presence of her friend, the unhappy girl cried and sobbed until morning.

It was a wretched ending for what might have been a memorable Christmas for Lambert Girtin and Elsie Vanneman.

The next morning the young man managed to hire a cutter and was driven to Bellefonte, leaving the valley with deep regrets. Through friends in the valley he learned afterwards that Elsie had gone as a missionary to China.

Life ran smoothly in some ways for Lambert Girtin, for he became uniformly successful as a business man. The oil excitement was at its height, and he was sent by a large general supply house in Pittsburg to open a store in Pithole City, “the Magic City,” to the success of which he contributed so much that he was given an interest in the concern.

At heart he was not happy. He could never focus his attentions on any woman for long, as in the background he always saw the slender form, the blushing face, the pansy-like eyes and the copper-brown, wavy hair of his mountain sweetheart, Elsie Vanneman. Her loveliness haunted him, and all others paled beside her. He was in easy circumstances to marry; friends less opulent were taking wives and building showy homes with Mansard roofs, along the outskirts of the muddy main thoroughfare of Pithole City, where landscape gardening often consisted of charred, blackened pine stumps and abandoned oil derricks.

Sometimes, in his spiritualspiritual loneliness, he betook himself to strange companions. One of these was a Chinese laundryman, a prototype of Bret Harte’s then popular “Heathen Chinee,” who seemed to be a learned individual, despite his odd appearance. Girtin, who had read of the exploits of the Fox sisters and other exponents of early spiritualism, was unprepared for the learning and insight possessed by this undistinguished Celestial.

Drawn to him at first because he could possibly tell about conditions in China, where Elsie was supposed to be, he became gradually more and more absorbed by the laundryman’s philosophic speculations. The fellow confided at length that he was married, and had five children at Tien-Tsin, to whom he was deeply attached. He would have died of a broken heart to be so far away from them but for the power he had developed by concentrating on the image of his native mountains, which yearning was reciprocated, and at night he claimed that his spirit was drawn out of his body and “hopped” half the span of the globe to the side of his loved ones. There must be something after all in the old Scotch quotation, “Oh, for my strength, once more to see the hills.”

Girtin expressed a strong desire to be initiated into these compelling mysteries. In order to cultivate his psychic sense, the Chinaman induced him to smoke opium, which, while repellent to Girtin, he undertook in order to reach his desired object. If he had been a man of any mental equilibrium, he would have secured a leave of absence from business and gone to China and claimed the fair Elsie, if she was still unmarried. He would not do that because he was still tortured by the memory of her preferring another at the moment when his hopes had been highest, yet he wanted to see her, hoping that he could do so without her knowing it.

The results attained were beyond his expectations. He quickly mastered his soul and “hopped” to the interior of China. Elsie was there, surrounded by her classes; at twenty-one more wondrously lovely and beautiful than when he had parted from her that frosty night, with the Dipper and Jacob’s Rake shining so clearly in the heavens.

Though there were many missionaries and foreign officials who would have courted her, her dignity and quiet reserve were impenetrable. Was she so because of the love for the youth who was to escort her home from church that night, or did she cherish the memory of her whilom schoolmaster admirer? These were the thoughts that annoyed him by day, the “hang over” of his spiritual adventures at night.

The opium and the intense mental concentration were taking a lot out of him. He became sallow and irritable, and neglected many business opportunities. One of the head partners of the firm in Pittsburg was going to Pithole City “to have it out with him,” as the mountain folks would say. Before he could reach the scene word was telegraphed that Lambert Girtin, frightfully altered in appearance, was found dead one morning in a bunk back of the Charley Wah Laundry at Pithole.

He had no relatives in the town, and his sisters, who could not come on, telegraphed to bury him in the new Mount Moriah Cemetery, now all overgrown and abandoned, like Pithole itself! There could be no doubt as to his death, as Bill Brewer, just coming into fame as the “Hick Preacher,” officiated at the obsequies. So Lambert Girtin was quickly forgotten in most all quarters. If he was remembered for a time, it was in the remote valley in which he had taught school, and where news of his early demise occasioned profound regret.

Years passedpassed, and Elsie Vanneman, after giving some of the best years of her life to missionary activities in various parts of China, resigned her position, in consequence of a shattered nervous system, caused by overwork during a great earthquake, where she ministered to thousands of refugees, and started for home. Her parents had died while she was in the “Celestial Kingdom,” but she had a number of brothers and sisters who were glad to welcome her, and with whom she planned a round of visits.

She was only thirty when she returned, a trifle paler and a few small lines around her mouth, but otherwise a picture of saintliness and loveliness. One of the first bits of news she heard on reaching the valley was of the ignominious end of Lambert Girtin in a Chinese laundryman’s shack–"a promising career cut short," all allowed.

It was shocking to Elsie, as she had dreamed of this young man nearly every night from a certain period of her stay in China. She was on the street during the great quake, and as the earth cracked and swallowed countless victims, she fancied she saw a European, the counterpart of Girtin, plunged into the deadly abyss. She had come home with the intention of learning definite news of him, and if he was not the earthquake victim, and still lived, perhaps to renew their old-time interests.

She had been so upset by his failure to call, or even to write, after the Christmas eve at the little country church, that she had never communicated with him again. Her dreams had been most vividly realistic, as if he had been really near to her in China, and she could not make herself believe that he was dead in Pithole City, Pennsylvania.

Owing to this piece of bad news, she did not remain as long in the valley as she had planned, and almost from the day of her arrival had pined to be back in the Far East. The valley seemed dull, anyway; saw-mills were making it as treeless as China; she hated to see Luther Guisewhite destroy those giant original white pines, which reared their black-topped spiral heads along the foot of the mountains on the winter side; the wild pigeons no longer darkened the sky with their impressive flights, the flying squirrels were being shot out in Fulmer’s Sink, near her old home; her parents were gone–everything was different.

Unsettled and dissatisfied, especially after a visit to the girl who had accompanied her home on the eventful Christmas Eve, now the mother of eight handsome children, she decided to return to China. The vast herds of buffaloes that had impeded the progress of her train on her first journey westward were gone. The Indians who occasionally furnished a touch of color to the prairie landscape, likewise had disappeared. Civilization was spreading through the Great West.

She timed her arrival in San Francisco so as to be there shortly after the arrivalarrival of a ship from China, so as to go back on its return journey. She would have several days to wait in the City of the Golden Gate but it was quaint and picturesque, the time would pass quickly.

One evening–she was not afraid, as she knew the language and customs of the Celestials–she decided to take a stroll through the famous Chinese Quarter. As she was walking along, her head down, her mind abstracted and noticing little, some one touched her on the arm. Looking around, as if to resent a familiarity, to her bewilderment she beheld her long-lost friend, Lambert Girtin.

“Lambert Girtin!” she said, in amazed tones.

“Elsie Vanneman–it is surely you?” he replied.

“Of all people, after all these years! I had been hearing that you died five years ago in the oil regions somewhere; what are you doing?”

The ex-schoolmaster took hold of both of her hands, there in the crowded, moving throngs of Chinatown, saying: “I came in from China today, after what I thought was a hopeless search for you. Years ago, after our separation, a Chinaman showed me how to visit China in my dreams, and be close to you. It took a whole lot of mental concentration, was pulling me down physically. I kept it up too long, for one night I dreamed I was in a terrible earthquake. It was so vivid that my physical as well as my spiritual being was translated to China, and I found myself there penniless. But, search as I may, I could not find you. If I died in the oil regions, it must have been another physical self, shed as a snake does his skin, for the Lambert Girtin who stands before you is fully alive, and resolved never to part from you again.”

Old memories came to Elsie Vanneman, conquering her fears, and her face flushed as in schoolgirl days: "You speak of our ‘separation’–pray, tell me more about it; why did you leave me so abruptly and run away that Christmas Eve after meeting? I could never understand why you did not even come to wish me a ‘Merry Christmas’ the next day. Why didn’t you ever write me a line? What did I do to merit such neglect?"

“What did you do?” replied Girtin, drawing her aside from the passing stream of pig-tailed humanity into a shadowy doorway. “It doesn’t seem very serious now, but it hurt me a whole lot at the time. You told me you had an engagement with some one to see you in from church, and I was angry and jealous, for I had been imagining that your thoughts had only been of me, that you cared for no one else.” “replied the girl with alacrity.

Girtin turned as pale as death; his sufferings, mental and physical, his wanderings, physical and actual, his wasted years, all had been caused by a misunderstanding. He was at a loss for words for some time, but he held on to Elsie’s hands, looking into her beautiful, ethereal face, the vari-colored light of a Chinese lantern shining down on her coppery-gold hair.

“Do you care for me at all, now?” he said, at length.

“Yes, I think I do; I must, or I would not have came back all the way from China to hunt you,” she answered.

“Then we have both suffered,” he said, sadly. “What shall we do now?” “she said.

“That’s where I want to go,” he replied, “if I can ever live down that dying story in Pithole City.” “said Elsie. "There was a case in our valley of a soldier reported as killed at Gettysburg; they sent his body home, began paying his widow a pension; she married a former sweetheart, and then, worse than ‘Enoch Arden,’ he appeared as if from the grave. He had no explanations to make, and our mountain people asked no questions, all having faith in supernatural things. Neither will I ask any of you. I have seen too much in the east to make me disbelieve anything, or that we can die two or three times under stress of circumstances, shedding our physical selves–to use youryour words–as snakes do their skins. I am only happy I did not marry some one else, as I was tempted to do when I imagined you were engulfed in the earthquake."

That night in Chinatown for once a misunderstanding ended happily.