Page:Under the Sun.djvu/122

98 the damsels of the land, instead of nestling in chinchilla or sable’s fur, stand about in a rural manner, much as did the Hesperids. We know too that in that land there was once a magic tree with golden pagoda coin for fruit, which strong men, coming across the sea in ships of trade, shook at will. But vegetables are not auriferous now. The Golden Pippin is a species of apple unhappily extinct, and Sir Epicure Mammon was not far from the mark when he lumped Jason’s Fleece, Jove’s Shower, and the Hesperian Garden as “all abstract riddles of the philosopher’s stone.”

But though the tree is gone, the country is much what it was in the Genesis of Anglo-India — the antediluvian period that preceded the Mutiny of 1857. It is still a land of juggling seasons. December comes round as usual, and with it Christmas Day and its marigolds; and men, having no work to do, —

I have spent Christmas in England, and there was honest merriment enough. And on the doorstep without, birds and beggars alike shared in the sudden flow of Christmas goodwill.

I have also spent Christmas Day in India, but not all the marigolds of Cathay will firk up Christmas spirits, or make me throw crumbs to a blue-jay. The blue-jay would not eat them in the first place, for there are plenty of flying things abroad for him to eat. But even if that unpleasant bird, with its very un-Christmas plumage of sunny blue, were to turn frugivorous for the nonce to humor me, since “Christmas comes but once a year,” I would not feed him. I have no Yule-tide