As the moon sent a white beam through the little square window of old Uncle Tim’s cabin, it formed a long panel of light upon its smoke-stained wall, bringing into clear view an old banjo hanging upon a rusty nail. Nothing else in the small room was clearly visible. Although it was Christmas eve, there […]

You would never have guessed that her name was Idyl–the slender, angular little girl of thirteen years who stood in her faded gown of checkered homespun on the brow of the Mississippi River. And fancy a saint balancing a bucket of water on top of her head! Yet, as she puts the pail down beside […]

Nearly everybody in New Orleans knew Old Easter, the candy-woman. She was very black, very wrinkled, and very thin, and she spoke with a wiry, cracked voice that would have been pitiful to hear had it not been so merry and so constantly heard in the funny high laughter that often announced her before she […]

CHAPTER I The black duck had a hard time of it from the beginning–that is, from the beginning of her life on the farm. She had been a free wild bird up to that time, swimming in the bay, playing hide-and-seek with her brothers and sisters and cousins among the marsh reeds along the bank, […]

There was a great sensation in the old Coppenole house three days before Christmas. The Freys, who lived on the third floor, were going to give a Christmas dinner party, and all the other tenants were invited. Such a thing had never happened before, and, as Miss Penny told her canary-birds while she filled their […]

“You des gimme de white folks’s Christmas-dinner plates, time they git thoo eatin’, an’ lemme scrape ’em in a pan, an’ set dat pan in my lap, an’ blow out de light, an’ go it bline ! Hush, honey, hush, while I shet my eyes now an’ tas’e all de samples what’d come out’n dat […]

I It was nearly midnight of Christmas Eve on Oakland Plantation. In the library of the great house a dim lamp burned, and here, in a big arm-chair before a waning fire, Evelyn Bruce, a fair young girl, sat earnestly talking to a withered old black woman, who sat on the rug at her feet. […]

His mother named him Solomon because, when he was a baby, he looked so wise; and then she called him Crow because he was so black. True, she got angry when the boys caught it up, but then it was too late. They knew more about crows than they did about Solomon, and the name […]