There are some stars to which, in my boyhood, I was wont to lay special claim. Perhaps everybody is. I never thought of their being out of the jurisdiction of the State of New York, where I first began to "see stars," not meaning those early experiments upon the glare ice of Leonard's Pond, when my heels went up like Mercury's, and my head went down like the flintlock of an old Queen's arm. One large ripe star used to tremble just over the edge of Clinton's Woods—I loved to fancy it would lodge sometime, and I would go a-nutting for worlds as I did for beech-nuts—a star with such a warm and human sort of light, so like an earthly fire-side somewhere, with the door open, that it always inspired a home feeling, and I counted it as much among the belongings of that particular landscape as the daisies in the pasture, and not more than a breath or two farther off.

I have heard since that it has charmed no end of poets to write verses to it that never were sent; that it is called Venus, when it deserves an honest womanly name—Mary or Rachel, Ruth or Eve. Is it not strange that we christen a great beautiful world as we would not dare name anybody's daughter, unless her mother had an extra pair of feet in daily use, or her father were content to be called "Towzer"—at least now that the turbaned "aunty," who opened her mouth like a piano and laughed clear across the plantation, has been "amended" and counted in among the souls to be saved.

If the heathen began the nomenclature of the skies, pray let it be ended by Christians. There are no Alexanders about, to be crying for new worlds. They are glittering into the field of view every night or two, and the business of naming goes on after the fashion of dead and dusty idolaters. Had Adam made such work "calling names" when the Lord bade him, he would have been sent down on his knees there in Eden to weed onions unto tears and repentance. Let our star-finders give them a hint—those keen fellows who shall, by-and-by, roll that date of theirs, Anno Domini 3,000, over and over like a school of dolphins—that we, at least, have abandoned Latin and Greek gods; that our poultry are quite safe for all anybody in America, be he fool or philosopher, ordering a cock served up to Æsculapius.

But if ever anything thoroughly belonged to the owner, the heavenly Dipper—that magnificent utensil knobbed at the angles and riveted along the handle with seven stars—belonged to me. I should have clutched it long ago if, like the dagger of Shakespeare's man, it had only hung "the handle toward my hand;" as much household ware as its humble cousin forty times removed, that hung by a little chain beside the well. From that celestial dipper—or so I thought—the dews were poured out gently on the summer world. It was the only thing about the house perfectly safe from thieves and rust; for was it not of a truth a treasure laid up in heaven? And how sadly right I was; for there, only last night, blazed the Dipper as if it were fire-new, while the home of my boyhood has faded out like a dream and vanished away.

There was yet another trinket of domesticated heaven, if I may say so. No matter what name the Chaldeans called it by, to me it will always be the star in the well. A gray sweep swayed up above that well like an acute accent; and in its round liquid disc, that gave me glance for glance, I used to see sometimes the double of a star straight from the top of heaven. It was plainer than any pearl that "ever lay under Oman's green water." They that drank at that well in the old days, long ago sat down by the river of crystal in the Kingdom of Life, but its dark disc, like a strange unwinking eye, still watches the zenith from its depths, and sometimes a star is let down into it till it kindles as if lighted by a thought.

That handful of household stars is a part of my heritage. No matter how dim the night, how disastered the sky, I close my eyes and they yet rise strangely beautiful and shine across the cloudy world even as they always shone since their illustrious kindred began to sing together. The prayer of the athletic savage was "for light." But our terrestrial day is only a veil thick-woven of sunbeam warp and woof. The dewy hand of Night withdraws it, and lo! the heavens are all abroad! Let Ajax mend his prayer, and let the burden be for calm unclouded night.

But there is another constellation not less precious than my sidereal possessions—a cluster of day-stars as resplendent as if they were called Arcturus every one. They shine with a warm and genial ray—undimmed, thank God! by any care or cloud. Time is not, as most men think, a natural product. It is only fragments of duration fashioned into shape. The whirling worlds of God are so much burnished machinery for making times and seasons. They ripple the everlasting current of white and dumb duration. It swells in ages, undulates in years; and all along the ceaseless solemn flow, sparkle like syllables of song the days of all our lives. The tumbling planets end their work, and man's begins. Whoever stamps the image and superscription of a worthy deed, a sterling truth, a splendid fact, upon a day, has hallowed and brightened it evermore. The day a man is born who rallies the sluggish race and puts it on its honor for all time, stands out from the rank and file of the dull almanac and halts you like a sentinel. The day a man is dead who gave some other day a might and meaning it never had before, is strewn with immortelles and borne abreast with marching ages.

Take a twenty-fifth of January, one hundred and eleven years ago—standing there in its place as plain as yesterday, illuminated all over, like an old saint's legend, with Scottish song that comes to a man like the beat of his heart,—and tell me if you think it worth while for anybody to be born on that recurring day with any hope of wresting it from "Robert Burns, Poet"? True, the Ettrick Shepherd saw the light on a twenty-fifth, but the best we can do for him is to let his "Skylark" warble up to the top of the wintry morning if it can.

The Man of Mount Vernon endowed February, that cheapest of the months, with a twenty-second it never owned before; took what had been a blank white leaf between a brace of nights, so bent back upon it the radiant truth of all his life, that, independent of the sun, it shines right on—the radiant truth that the man of truest symmetry is the man of truest power.

And what more can any one do for that seventh of February than he did to be born in it, whom Dombey shall lead gently by the hand far down another age, for whom Little Nell shall plead with a forgetful world, and who left us the voice of Tiny Tim for a perpetual benediction—"God bless us, Every one!"

The old-time Fourth.

I would not give much for the American who has nowhere in the year a day domed like a tower and filled with a chime of bells. Now, the Fourth of July is one of my days with stars in it, and bells withal, that shine and ring and roar out of my childhood with an eloquence that always sets the heart pounding with the concussion of the anvil and the feet keeping step to the frolic of Yankee Doodle. It lights up the time when you could stand upright under life's Eastern eaves; when day broke in the thunder of a six-pounder, and the sun came up to the clangor of the village bell, and the bare and barkless spar they had raised and planted the night before, budded like Aaron's rod, and blossomed out with the broad field of stars.

On comes the drum-major, now with "eyes to the front all," and now facing the music with backward step, his arms swaying up and down, the horizontal baton grasped firmly in his hands, as if he were working the band with a brake, and playing streams of martial melody on mankind. Then the snarl of the snare-drums, all careened for punishment like refractory boys of the old-fashioned stripe, and the growl of the big bass brother at their heels, and the fifes warbling up and down in the grumble and roar, possessed and summoned up my soul—shall I say it and give thanks?—possess and summon up my soul to-day. Then came the flag with an eagle on it, and two spontoons beside it to pierce that eagle's enemies. Then the patriots of the Revolution, who remembered when there was no such thing as a Fourth of July with a big F; old smoky fellows, two or three, with eagles in their eyes—old fellows gnarled like the hemlock, but honored like the pine, that had smelled powder at Bennington; and the orator of the day with an eagle in his eye; and the clergyman who had prayed a short prayer and fired a long gun at Yorktown or somewhere, with an eagle in his eye.

Then, to the tune of "Bonaparte crossing the Rhine," out stepped the white-legged infantry, with breasts and backs of blue, each with an eagle sewed upon a bright tin plate, all garnished round with stars and fastened to his hat, and that eagle's royal tail feathering out at the top the while, to plume him up like Henry of Navarre.

Then came the riflemen in green frock-coats and caps befringed, and horns slung at their sides, that once were tossed defiant upon a shaggy head that might have answered back the bulls of Bashan, and had, for anything you know, an eagle in its eye; and on they went, their rifles lightly borne to the order of "Trail—ARMS!" Ah, it was "the hunters of Kentucky" all over again. It was the whole Boone family in the flesh. It was an apparition of the dark and bloody ground.

Then, with the warble of bugle and much clatter, clang and ring of hoofs and spurs and scabbards, the old-fashioned troopers rode by with eagles in their eyes; their holsters, small packages of thunder and lightning, at the saddle-bow; their shiny cylinders of portmanteaus snugly strapped behind; the terrible frown of a bear-skin cap lowering on every brow, its jaunty feather, tipped with emblematic blood, springing out of the fur like the blossom of a magnified and glorified bull-thistle—and the flare of the red-coats set the scene and your heart on fire together!

Then came the citizens by twos, as the pairs went into the ark, and the girls in white frocks with sashes and ribbons of blue, as if they had just torn out of heaven and brought away with them some fragments of azure for token; but there are no eagles any more in the line—only white doves and angels unfallen. Then the mouth of the orator was opened—a coop of rhetorical eagles, and they flew abroad and swooped down upon our feelings and bore them aloft triumphant, and perched upon our souls and made eyries in our lofty hearts, and we were better and braver for it all. Then came the dinner in a "bower"—have you quite forgotten the dining-hall of green branches?—with such dainty roasters as the Gentle Elia would have wept over and then devoured, and toasts that foamed over the tops of the goblets and set themselves aright in the cups; and a flight of hurrahs went up with the eagles—and the day was done.

Do you think I would exchange that dear absurd old day for "the pomp and circumstance" of any later pageant? A Fourth-of-Julyism has somehow become an object of contempt. People tell us, but not always in good English, that speeches are idle, because they have heard that silence is golden, and, like the green spectacles of Moses and the talk of the rascal in the Vicar of Wakefield, should be labeled "fudge." As if it was not an idea clothed in a snug jacket of words, and not a deed at all, that first gave the Fourth of July a meaning and a gift to mankind! As if the elder Adams' recipe to pickle the day—I write with no irreverence—to pickle the day in "villainous saltpetre" would not be sure to keep it! As if the roar of artillery—thank God for the blank cartridges of Independence!—were anything more than that eloquent whisper uttered under the shadow of King's Mountain in the old North State, "these colonies are, and of right ought to be, free," translated into the dialect of gunpowder! Shine on, starry day of my boyhood! Thy thunders, thy eagles, and thy memories, be they blessed forever!

Thanksgiving.

I am sorry for the man—especially the woman—who has nowhere a day or two touched with some tender grace; a day of which, travel fast and far as he may, he is never out of sight; that warms his heart for him, makes him gentler, purer, younger than before, more like a woman and just as much of a man. Everywhere else in Christendom the year has three hundred and sixty-five days, but in America it has a day of grace, and as much a New England product as Joel Barlow or Indian corn: for we count three hundred and sixty-five days and Thanksgiving.

As everybody knows, the day was the most blessed of blunders. Those single-minded, grand old fellows—old when they were young—that drifted across the sea in the cup of a Flower like a parcel of bees, bringing, some of them, their stings with them, and from whose rude beginnings this broad continent now hums like a hive in June, had garnered their corn, and tugged up their back-logs, and kicked the light snow of "squaw winter" from their Spanish-leather boots, and hung up their tall hats on the pegs behind the door, and picked their flints for such game as red Indian and black bear, and spread open their Bibles, and made ready for a sojourn before the fire; then came one of the American savages they never shot at—to-wit: Indian Summer.

So they made ready for a second planting right away, and declared it a goodly land, where a very thin slice of autumn was sandwiched between two summers, and decreed a Thanksgiving, and called the neighbors together, and lifted up their voices and sang some such quaint song as—

and clasped each other's hands, and feasted abundantly, and took "a cup of kindness," and grew so warm with what they had and what they would have, that when Euroclydon and all the rest of them did come, and that right early, their gratitude never froze, but wintered it through; and so Thanksgiving remains even until now.

Dear Starry Day, when three generations met together and—not to betray confidences—"righteousness and peace kissed each other." What friendships were brightened in thy fire-light! what wrongs were roasted under thy fore-stick! Thy turnovers are imperishable as the Pleiades. Thy chickens of the nankeen legs tucked up in a coverlet of crust, and, brooded in the bake-kettle by its great coal-laden cover, how comfortable they were! Out of the glowing cavern of the brick oven, squatted in the wall beside the fireplace like an exaggerated cat, what gusts of fragrance from thy turkeys, breasted like dead knights in armor, "whose souls are with the saints, we trust;" what whiffs of Indian pudding! what blended breezes of abundance! Thy doughnuts of orthodox twist, and tinted like cedar wood, yet heap the bright tin pans of memory. Thy mighty V's of mince pies yet slant to the angle of perfect content, and fit and fill the mouth of recollection.

Surely heart and stomach are next-door neighbors, for now, Thanksgiving, thy dear old faces smile a welcome home; thy dear old faces, every one unchanged, undimmed, unsent away. Rouse the fire to a hearty roar of greeting! Wheel out the great table laden like the palm of Providence. Bring forth the empty chairs. Let us "ask a blessing!" Let us give thanks!

Christmas.

Methuselah died pretty well along in his years of discretion, but a world at his age would hardly have been out of its swaddling bands. There is a star, less than two thousand years old, that lights a day for us, the fairest, youngest of all the spangled multitude—the very Benjamin of Heaven. The telescope of the astronomer never summoned it. Numbered in the celestial census, I am sure it will not be there when the constellations are rolled together as a scroll. It is immortal as the candle of the Lord. It is the Star in the East that lights up Christmas for us with a wonderful radiance.

If there is ever a time in all the year when the two worlds touch, I think it is Christmas Eve. What less than a first small act of faith is that hanging a million of empty stockings by a million pins at night, and then tumbling the trundle-beds of Christendom with the delightful and sleepless expectancy that they will find them all filled in the morning? Let a man play Saturn and eat his children and be done with it; but let him not set a dog on their angels—a cur of a fact, that should have been born with its nose in a muzzle, upon Santa Claus or Kriss Kringle, and worry him out of the children's sweet kingdom of dreams.

Whoever wants to make his children older than any wholesome grandfather ought to be, has only to strip the world stark naked before their faces; bare all its exquisite mystery that keeps one pair of burnished interrogation-points for ever dancing in another pair of eyes, resolve the thrones and paradises and angels they see in the plighted clouds, into a heavy and delusive fog; and, by-and-by, for the quicksilverish atoms of humanity that hunt out every grain of true gold in the rubbish of life, full of marvel and fancy and poetry as any old ballad, he will have a row of little desiccated, unspeculative, philosophical donkeys all draped in wet blankets.

I visited, not long ago, the house where something happened to me when I narrowly escaped being too young to be counted, but you can never guess what was the first thing I looked for. It was not, as you might think, the threshold worn smooth and beautiful by the touch of feet that have played truant forever, nor the dear home-room with its altar-place for beech and maple offerings, nor yet the nook of darkness under the stairs where goblins and ogres held sweet counsel together by night.

It was only the old chimney-top my eyes first sought, to whose rugged edges and sooty mouthpiece a thousand boatswain winds had put their lips and whistled up the storms for eighty years. It was the homeliest structure that ever seemed beautiful to anybody. Shall I tell you why? Down that chimney the angel descended with my first Christmas gift. What was the ladder of Jacob to me then, has turned, at last, into a rude unlettered monument to the dead past.

They whom I surprised with my "Merry Christmas," in the gray of the morning, have gone away for the everlasting holidays. The children with whom I joined hands and hearts are—where are they? There are fences in the graveyard tipped with funeral urns of black. There are broken slabs of marble bearing names that have fallen out of human speech. There are hard, grim men. There are meek and sad-eyed women, full of care. Has the sparkle of life utterly vanished from the cup? Can the sleigh-bells' chime and the glittering nights and the laugh of young girls and the measure of old songs charm no more?

Oh, Comrades! oh, Sweethearts! Let me give you a touch of the time when happiness was the very cheapest thing in the round world: let me give you "a merry Christmas" out of the loneliness!

But children are not out of fashion, and so the world is not bankrupt. Herod—he deserves the compliment and he shall have it—Herod was nothing less than devilish shrewd when he fancied he could quench Christmas in the blood of the children; for if ever two things were made for each other, a merry child and a merry Christmas are the two.

What the poor creatures did that were born and grown before the clock of the Christian era struck "one" nobody can tell. We all need such days—the young that they may never grow old; the old that they may always be young. I think it might be written among the beatitudes:

"Blessed are they whose sons are all boys and whose daughters are all girls."

It was when CÆsar Augustus decreed that "all the world" should be enrolled—an edict never to be repeated on the planet until the coming of the Seventh Angel—and everybody was on the move to report in his native city—for in that country the leap from a howling wilderness to a city was as easy as a panther's—if it didn't howl it had a mayor!

Among those who came to Bethlehem on this errand were a man and his wife from Nazareth, and, as the tavern was crowded, they went to the barn, and there the Chief of Children was born, and cradled in a manger.

And that was the first Christmas.

There were Angels without, who brought their glory with them, and they stood and sang, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to the men of good will!"

And that was the first Christmas Carol.

A few Shepherds watching their flocks not far away came just as they were, in their every-day clothes, and wondered and glorified, and were glad.

And that was the first Christmas Party.

Some travelers from the East—and wise, as you may know, by the cardinal point—were seeking the Christmas, but no one could tell them anything, till a Star journeyed on before, and halted, like Gibeon's sun, over where the young child was—ah, always now as then, find Christmas and a child is not far off—and they unfolded their treasures, and gave him gold and frankincense and myrrh.

And that was the first Christmas Gift.

The shepherds are dead, the "wise men" are East, and the angels in Heaven. But the star and the child and the manger are everywhere. Come, let us have a frolic together! Even the turkey has a merry-thought in its breast; and are we not better than a flock of turkeys? Let us advertise for a good digestion and a downy pillow, and a pleasant dream and a Merry Christmas. Let us do it in these words:

• Wanted—A debtor to be forgiven.
• Wanted—A wrong to be forgotten.
• Wanted—A heart to be lightened.
• Wanted—A home to be brightened.

Wherever the Star halts, there shall be no lack of carols. Bid the singers begin! And the same old manger chorus swells sweetly again—"On earth peace to the men of good will!" Shine on, gentle Star! Merry Christmas, Good Night!