Some
times, more especially at Christmas time, he gets on an old, and now
uncertain steed called Memory, and rides back to all the castles he
has lived in. So beautiful when he built them, so brightly painted by
Hope and Pride and Ambition and all the other celebrated artists of
that day; now so dingy and wrecked that you would hardly know them,
and some clear faded out of sight. The castle, little one, that you
are now living in has over the front door in big letters CHRISTMAS,
and from its window you see such lots of fun that you will never have,
such lots of presents that you will never get, and such a lot of
imagining that you will never see realized. After this week is over,
you will take down the big sign over the door, close the blinds, and
stand watching with grieved heart while your castle fades into the
air. There is nothing on earth, as you will see when you are old, that
is not something like these castles in Spain, and but One Thing, that
is not tainted with their evanescent life. God grant, little one, that
at the end of our lives, you and I may have clung to that one thing,
and that we may have so lived that the many mansions of our Father in
a fairer world may not be for us--castles in Spain.
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