Beasleys Christmas Party

Beasley's Christmas Party

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Beasley's Christmas Party, by Booth
Tarkington #14 in our series by Booth Tarkington
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Title: Beasley's Christmas Party
Author: Booth Tarkington
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BEASLEY'S CHRISTMAS PARTY
BY
BOOTH TARKINGTON
ILLUSTRATED BY RUTH SYPHERD CLEMENTS
October, 1909.

TO
JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

I
The maple-bordered street was as still as a country Sunday; so quiet
that there seemed an echo to my footsteps. It was four o'clock in the
morning; clear October moonlight misted through the thinning foliage
to the shadowy sidewalk and lay like a transparent silver fog upon the
house of my admiration, as I strode along, returning from my first
night's work on the "Wainwright Morning Despatch."
I had already marked that house as the finest (to my taste) in
Wainwright, though hitherto, on my excursions to this metropolis, the
state capital, I was not without a certain native jealousy that
Spencerville, the county-seat where I lived, had nothing so good. Now,
however, I approached its purlieus with a pleasure in it quite unalloyed,
for I was at last myself a resident (albeit of only one day's standing) of
Wainwright, and the house--though I had not even an idea who lived
there--part of my possessions as a citizen. Moreover, I might enjoy the
warmer pride of a next-door-neighbor, for Mrs. Apperthwaite's, where I

had taken a room, was just beyond.
This was the quietest part of Wainwright; business stopped short of it,
and the "fashionable residence section" had overleaped this "forgotten
backwater," leaving it undisturbed and unchanging, with that look
about it which is the quality of few urban quarters, and eventually of
none, as a town grows to be a city--the look of still being a
neighborhood. This friendliness of appearance was largely the
emanation of the homely and beautiful house which so greatly pleased
my fancy.
It might be difficult to say why I thought it the "finest" house in
Wainwright, for a simpler structure would be hard to imagine; it was
merely a big, old-fashioned brick house, painted brown and very plain,
set well away from the street among some splendid forest trees, with a
fair spread of flat lawn. But it gave back a great deal for your glance,
just as some people do. It was a large house, as I say, yet it looked not
like a mansion but like a home; and made you wish that you lived in it.
Or, driving by, of an evening, you would have liked to hitch your horse
and go in; it spoke so surely of hearty, old-fashioned people living
there, who would welcome you merrily.
It looked like a house where there were a grandfather and a
grandmother; where holidays were warmly kept; where there were
boisterous family reunions to which uncles and aunts, who had been
born there, would return from no matter what distances; a house where
big turkeys would be on the table often; where one called "the hired
man" (and named either Abner or Ole) would crack walnuts upon a
flat-iron clutched between his knees on the back porch; it looked like a
house where they played charades; where there would be long
streamers of evergreen and dozens of wreaths of holly at
Christmas-time; where there were tearful, happy weddings and great
throwings of rice after little brides, from the broad front steps: in a
word, it was the sort of a house to make the hearts of spinsters and
bachelors very lonely and wistful--and that is about as near as I can
come to my reason for thinking it the finest house in Wainwright.