Page:Armistice Day.djvu/365

Rh here. Although they have their flower time at Christmas, they do not love the dear Christ-child any the less for that, and they welcome His birthday as gladly as any of you. In fact, if they had not loved the Christ-child very dearly, there would not have been any story to tell; but you see they did; so this was the way it happened.

It was really the fault of the Andes mountains; though they certainly did not mean to do any harm and never even knew they did. Now the Argentine Republic is on the Atlantic Ocean side of South America, and Chile on the Pacific side, and the Andes mountains rise between. These are very, very high mountains, so high that the snow never melts on their tops, but stays there both in summer and in winter, as on our Rockies; in fact, they are really the southern end of the Rockies, with a different name. Since the mountains are so very high, and so snowy, and rocky, and very steep, you can easily see that it would be hard work for surveyors to scramble up with their tripods to find out just where the boundary line between the two countries really ought to be. So they just did what they could, and the places that did not seem to matter much they took for granted. Thus it happened that in some places nobody knew where the boundary line really was; but the rulers of both countries thought they knew, and you may be sure they thought it was