THE FIRST CHRISTMAS TREE - A German Children's Tale of the Forest

The

First

Christmas Tree

A GERMAN CHILDREN’S STORY OF THE FOREST

By

Henry Van Dyke

Illustrated By

Howard Pyle

Originally Published By

Charles Scribner's Sons, New York

[1897]

Resurrected By

Abela Publishing, London

[2019]

The First Christmas Tree

Typographical arrangement of this edition

© Abela Publishing 2019

This book may not be reproduced in its current format in any manner in any media, or transmitted by any means whatsoever, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, or mechanical ( including photocopy, file or video recording, internet web sites, blogs, wikis, or any other information storage and retrieval system) except as permitted by law without the prior written permission

of the publisher.

Abela Publishing,

London

United Kingdom

ISBN-: 978-X-XXXXXX-XX-X

email:

[email protected]

Website

Abela Publishing

ABELA: Zulu – to share or distribute

Acknowledgements

Abela Publishing

acknowledges the work that

Henry Van Dyke

and

Howard Pyle

did in creating and illustrating

The First Christmas Tree

in a time well before any electronic media was in use.

10% of the net profit from the sale of this book

will be donated to Charities.

So they took the little fir from its place

Table of Contents

I The Call of the Woodsman

II The Trail Through the Forest

III The Shadow of the Thunder-Oak

IV The Felling of the Tree

Illustrations

Photogravures from Original Drawings

by

Howard Pyle

So they took the little fir from its place…Frontispiece

The fields around lay bare to the moon

The sacred hammer of the God Thor

Then Winfried told the story of Bethlehem

I

The Call

of the

Woodsman

THE day before Christmas, in the year of our Lord 722.

Broad snow-meadows glistening white along the banks of the river Moselle; pallid hill-sides blooming with mystic roses where the glow of the setting sun still lingered upon them; an arch of clearest, faintest azure bending overhead; in the center of the aerial landscape of the massive walls of the cloister of Pfalzel, gray to the east, purple to the west; silence over all,—a gentle, eager, conscious stillness, diffused through the air like perfume, as if earth and sky were hushing themselves to hear the voice of the river faintly murmuring down the valley.

In the cloister, too, there was silence at the sunset hour. All day long there had been a strange and joyful stir among the nuns. A breeze of curiosity and excitement had swept along the corridors and through