A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN ERANCE:

T was Christmas Eve, and the streets of the old French city of Tours were
thronged with people hurrying to the Cathedral for the Christmas mass.
It lacked but fifteen minutes of midnight, and a few belated peasants from the
adjoining village of St. Symphorien quickened their pace as they approached the
great stone bridge. Among them was a sweet-faced young woman, Félicie Gar-
nier, proprietress of a tiny vegetable shop in the street of the Tranchée. She
led by the hand her little eight-year-old sou who at that moment was standing
perfectly still in the surprise of his new experience. ‘¢ Come, my little man,”
said the good Félicie, smiling down proudly upon her brave Pierre, “we must
walk faster. The bridge, the Rue Royale and voild, we are at the Cathedral.”
The child’s face was radiant. It was the first time in his life that he had been
beyond their little shop door after dark.

The scene was far more wonderful than any he had pictured to himself, as
his mother had described it, over her washing by the river-side. “The river
will not look like this,’ she had said one day,
straightening back for a moment of rest from
~-7 bending over the linen which she was vigor-
ously beating on a smooth
stone. “ See, now it is blue,
like the sky; but at night
when the sky is black above
it, the river too grows black.”
“How then can we find our
way?” queried the boy.

    
  

Sy SCN, the lamps, my Pierre.
exe The lamps shine bright on the

aed AW -y bridge and a thousand lights are in
SAS NC" the windows of the great houses, and the
NX good God will guide us safely to the Cathedral, that we
“NoT LIKE THIS,” satD FELICE. may kneel before the beautiful manger and pray for the
soul of the beloved papa.” And Pierre sat silent, won-

dering how his own beautiful Loire could grow black and ugly and dark.

And now the evening of his long anticipation had come. There lay the
river below, dark and mysterious but beautiful still, its ripples gleaming like
burnished metal in the half darkness, and shimmering merrily in the bright
light cast from the bridge lamps. Beyond lay the old town with its many lights
—an enchanted city, and over all stretched the great starry heavens. The city,
the river, the sky were all wrapped in solemn darkness made visible by myriad