[ADodb-general] _!" They hardly knew her, she moved among them so flushed and laughing and conformable,

[Hebard <mo...@ad...>]

 only just. It is just to the sky and discovers it to be dominant; to
trees, and their lines are seen to be alive, like leaves; to folk, and
no disguise avails. Summer gives complements and accessories to the good
things in a human face. Winter affords nothing save disclosure. In the
uncompromising cleanness of that wash of Winter light, Ebenezer Rule was
himself, for anybody to see. Looking like countless other men, lean,
alert, preoccupied, his tall figure stooped, his smooth, pale face like
a photograph too much retouched, this commonplace man took his place in
the day almost as one of its externals. With that glorious pioneer trio,
mineral, vegetable and animal; and with intellect, that worthy tool, he
did his day's work. His face was one that had never asked itself, say,
of a Winter morning: _What else?_ And the Winter light searched him
pitilessly to find that question somewhere in him. Before the Simeon
Buck North American Dry Goods Exchange, Simeon Buck himself had just
finished shoveling his walk, and stood wiping his snow shovel with an
end of his muffler. When he saw Ebenezer, he shook the muffler at him,
and then, over his left shoulder, jabbed the air with his thumb. "Look
at here," he said, his head reenforcing his gesture toward his show
window, "look what I done this morning. Nice little touch--eh?" In the
show window of the Exchange--Dry Goods Exchange was just the name of it
for the store carried everything--a hodgepodge of canned goods, lace
curtains, kitchen utensils, wax figures, and bird cages had been ranged
round a center table of golden oak. On the table stood a figure that was
as familiar to Old Trail Town as was its fire engine and its sprinkling
cart. Like these, appearing intermittently, the figure had seized on the
imagination of the children and grown in association until it belonged
to everybody, by sheer use and wont. It was a _papier-mache_ Santa
Claus, three feet high, white-bearded, gray-gowned, with tall pointed
cap--rather the more sober Saint Nicholas of earlier days than the
rollicking, red-garbed Saint Nick of now. Only, whereas for years he had
graced the window of the Exchange, bearing over his shoulder a little
boug