Once upon a time there was a young girl, who had the pretty name of Oello. I say, once upon a time, because I do not know when the time was,–nor do I know what the place was,–though my story, in the main, is a true story. I do not mean that I sat by […]

A STORY FOR CHILDREN. I. There was a King of Hungary whose name was Adelbert. When he lived at home, which was not often, it was in a castle of many towers and many halls and many stairways, in the city of Buda, by the side of the river Donau. He had four daughters, and […]

I. CHRISTMAS EVE. “They’ve come! they’ve come!” This was the cry of little Herbert as he ran in from the square stone which made the large doorstep of the house. Here he had been watching, a self-posted sentinel, for the moment when the carriage should turn the corner at the bottom of the hill. “They’ve […]

I. A QUESTION OF NOURISHMENT. “And how is he?” said Robert, as he came in from his day’s work, in every moment of which he had thought of his child. He spoke in a whisper to his wife, who met him in the narrow entry at the head of the stairs. And in a whisper […]

CHAPTER I. Alice MacNeil had made the plan of this Christmas-tree, all by herself and for herself. She had a due estimate of those manufactured trees which hard-worked “Sabbath Schools” get up for rewards of merit for the children who have been regular, and at the last moment have saved attendance-tickets enough. Nor did Alice […]

CHAPTER I. ANOTHER GENERATION. “Here he comes! here he comes!” “He” was the “post-rider,” an institution now almost of the past. He rode by the house and threw off a copy of the “Boston Gazette.” Now the “Boston Gazette,” of this particular issue, gave the results of the drawing of the great Massachusetts State Lottery […]

The first Christmas in New England was celebrated by some people who tried as hard as they could not to celebrate it at all. But looking back on that year 1620, the first year when Christmas was celebrated in New England, I cannot find that anybody got up a better fete than did these Lincolnshire […]

The first Christmas this in which a Roman Senate has sat in Rome since the old-fashioned Roman Senates went under,–or since they “went up,” if we take the expressive language of our Chicago friends. And Pius IX. is celebrating Christmas with an uncomfortable look backward, and an uncomfortable look forward, and an uncomfortable look all […]

A STORY FOR CHILDREN. This is a story about some children who were living together in a Western State, in a little house on the prairie, nearly two miles from any other. There were three boys and three girls; the oldest girl was seventeen, and her oldest brother a year younger. Their mother had died […]

[From the Ingham Papers.] “Passengers for Philadelphia and New York will change cars.” This annoying and astonishing cry was loudly made in the palace-car “City of Thebes,” at Pittsburg, just as the babies were well asleep, and all the passengers adapting themselves to a quiet evening. “Impossible!” said I, mildly, to the “gentlemanly conductor,” who […]

A Christmas Story A gray morning, the deck wet, the iron all beaded with frost, all the longshoremen in heavy pea-jackets or cardigans, the whole ship in a bustle, and the favored first-class passengers just leaving. One sad-looking Irish girl stands with her knit hood already spotted with the rime, and you cannot tell whether […]

CHAPTER I IN ACCOUNT I have a little circle of friends, among all my other friends quite distinct, though of them. They are four men and four women; the husbands more in love with their wives than on the days when they married them, and the wives with their husbands. These people live for the […]

[From the papers of Captain FREDERIC INGHAM.] I PREPARATION I have no sort of objection now to telling the whole story. The subscribers, of course, have a right to know what became of their money. The astronomers may as well know all about it, before they announce any more asteroids with an enormous movement in […]

PART I I was born in the year 1842, in the city of New York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first in England. He got a good estate by merchandise, and afterward lived at New York. But first he had married my […]

A Washington Christmas [No. This story also is “Invented Example.” But it is founded on facts. It is a pleasure to me, writing fifty-four years after the commission intrusted to me by the late Mrs. Fales, to say that that is a real name, and that her benevolence at a distance is precisely represented here. […]

FROM THE INGHAM PAPERS. [When my friends of the Boston Daily Advertiser asked me last year to contribute to their Christmas number, I was very glad to recall this scrap of Mr. Ingham’s memoirs. For in most modern Christmas stories I have observed that the rich wake up of a sudden to befriend the poor, […]

BY J. THOMAS DARKAGH (LATE C.C.S.). I see that an old chum of mine is publishing bits of confidential Confederate History in Harper’s Magazine. It would seem to be time, then, for the pivots to be disclosed on which some of the wheelwork of the last six years has been moving. The science of history, […]

[This story originated in the advertisement of the humbug which it describes. Some fifteen or twenty years since, when gift enterprises rose to one of their climaxes, a gift of a large sum of money, I think $10,000, was offered in New York to the most successful ticket-holder in some scheme, and one of $5,000 […]

Early in May, 1850, just at the time we now know that brave Sir John Franklin and the remnant of his crew were dying of starvation at the mouth of Back’s River, the “Resolute” sailed first for the Arctic seas, the flag-ship of Commodore Austin, with whose little squadron our own De Haven and his […]

[This sketch was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly for October, 1858, just at the time that the first Atlantic Cable, whose first prattle had been welcomed by the acclamations of a continent, gasped its last under the manipulations of De Sauty. It has since been copied by Mr. Prescott in his valuable hand-book of […]