Trifles for the Christmas Holidays | Page 6

the sighs of the suffering?

Shall it burst into mad hilarity at the revelry, or wail with the sharp
cries of the poor?
It was a painted house, but the paint had worn off; it had a garden, but
the garden was choked with weeds; its two rooms were once
handsomely furnished, but the furniture was now common and old. It
was once a fashionable street; but fashion had fled before the victorious
eagles of trade. The tenants of that house were once happy and
prosperous. What are they now?
The occupant of the back room was a man, and the occupants of the
front room a woman and her children.
He was sitting at a rude deal table; before him were scattered some
dirty sheets of music, and around him the place was dreary and bare.
By the light of a tallow dip he was playing, in screeching tones, the
commonest of ditties and polkas by note. His coat was once of the
richest; but now it was old and threadbare. His hands were once white
and elegantly shaped; now they were dirty, and blue with cold. His face
once beamed with contentment; now it was worn with care and marked
by the hard lines of penury.
The other room was darker, and, if possible, more dreary. There were
two trundle-beds in a corner, and four bright beings, oblivious to the
discomfort, in the happy sleep of childhood. 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,--in that, one fixed idea had blotted out every other vestige of
humanity. Each starting vein, bone, and muscle on the hungry visage

had "stand and deliver" scarred all over it. The eager metallic glitter of
his eyes, the rigid harshness of his mouth, and the nameless craving
that seemed to speak from his lean, attenuated cheeks, united to make
the name of Hardy Gripstone and Beast synonymous. He looked like a
beast, he ate like a beast, he lived like a beast.
Beast started out of every bristle on his unkempt head; it shone in the
unhealthy gloss of his battered hat; it wallowed on the stock that clung
around his dirty neck; it glistened in the grease on his dingy clothes; it
starved on his thin, claw-like hands; it flourished in the grime
imbedded under