There was a mattress in
another corner, with a pile of bedquilts and a sheet.

The fire had burned down to a coal. It shone on the mantle with a sickly
glare; and this was the only light there was.

To the mantle-piece were pinned four little stockings, each waiting
open-mouthed for a gift from Santa Claus.

Below them crouched a woman, weeping bitterly.

The woman was Clara Hague; and she was weeping because the Christmas
dawn would find those little mouths unsatisfied.

Our "Air" is getting mournful,--too mournful for this hour of great joy.
The _Te Deum Laudamus_, not the _Miserere_, is for outbursts of gladness
like these.

Let it sing of the carriage that surprised the man from his fiddle and
the woman from her tears by its thunder in the quiet street.

Let it sing of the warm-hearted brother, forgetting the bitterness of
the past, his pockets replenished from a well-saved hoard, who rushed
in, startling the little sleepers with his joyous greeting. Let it chant
the praises of the hampers of wine, and fowls, and dainties, and the
bundles of toys, that same lumbering carriage contained. And last, but
not least, let it thrill with the glad shout of a little newsboy, who,
frantic with delight, hurried on a new gray suit and a pair of bran-new
boots, a present received that very day from his then unknown uncle,
John Redfield.

STORY OF A BEAST.

It was a dirty, grasping little office, vile enough to have been built
by the Evil One; and the occupant was a dirty, grasping little man,
cruel enough to have been made out of its scraps. It was a hard,
remorseless little door, that took in a visitor at a gulp and closed
after him with a bite. If the luckless caller happened to be a debtor,
the fantastic barbarity of his reception was positively infernal. The
jerk of grotesque ferocity that greeted him was like the "hoop la!" of a
demonized gymnast. The straight-backed chair looked like a part of the
stiff, angular man. The yellow-wash on the wall seemed to have caught
its reflex from the faded face, and stared grimly at deep lines of
avarice ironed into it. Even the mud on the floor, the dust on the
table, and the cobwebs on the ceiling maliciously conspired against him,
and asserted themselves in every seam of his threadbare clothes. But the
face,--stern, stony, relentless, an uncertain compromise between the
ghastly severity of a German etching and the constipated austerity of
old pictures of the saints,-