Rock Crystal

This lovely tale was written over 100 years ago as a "Christmas offering." To read it today is like a return journey to times more simple and more human - the intimacy and seclusion of a village community set in an orderly and harmonious world.

On Christmas Eve, two small children lose their way among the icefields of a glacier, far from their secure familiar setting. How earth and nature combine to save two tiny human beings erring, with the fortitude of innocence, in the overwhelming vastness of rocks and ice and inhuman silence, is a miracle achieved in a wholly natural manner, a tale permeated with a sense of wonder.

Marianne Moore, who gave this Christmas Tale its English form, regards it as "a thing of mystic beauty."