The morning of the twenty-fourth of December a quarter of a century ago opened upon the vast plateau of central Kentucky as a brilliant but bitter day – with a wind like the gales of March.
Out in a neighborhood of one of the wealthiest and most thickly settled counties, toward the middle of the forenoon, two stumpy figures with movements full of health and glee appeared on a hilltop of the treeless landscape. They were the children of the neighborhood physician, a man of the highest consequence in his part of the world; and they had come from their home, a white and lemon-colored eighteenth-century manor house a mile in their rear. Through the crystalline air the chimneys of this low structure, rising out of a green girdle of cedar trees, could be seen emptying unusual smoke which the wind in its gambolling pounced upon and jerked away level with the chimney-tops.
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He said this cheerfully. It was his idea – and he tried to enforce it at home – that young children must never, if possible, make the acquaintance of the words bad and sad– nor of the realities that are masked behind them. He especially believed that what the old are familiar with as life's tragic laws ought never to be told to children as tragic: what is inevitable should never be presented to them as misfortunes.
Therefore he now declared that the sick are in all neighborhoods as he might have stated that there are wings on all birds, or leaves on all growing apple trees.
