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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
William Dean Howells' "The Complete Short Stories" presents a rich tapestry of American life at the turn of the 20th century, encapsulated in tales that blend realism with keen psychological insight. Howells, a prominent figure in American literature, employs a nuanced literary style characterized by its meticulous character development and social commentary. His stories intricately explore themes such as class, morality, and the human condition, reflecting the cultural dynamics of post-Civil War America in an era that was rapidly embracing modernity while grappling with its consequences. Howells, often dubbed the "Dean of American Letters," was deeply influenced by his experiences as a journalist, editor, and literary critic, and his commitment to realism stems from his desire to depict life authentically. His friendships with fellow literary giants like Mark Twain and Henry James undoubtedly shaped his narrative techniques and thematic explorations. Howells' own background, including his humble beginnings and progressive views, fueled his desire to narrate the complexities of everyday life and the struggles faced by the common man. This collection is an essential read for those interested in the evolution of American literature. Howells' short stories serve not only as entertaining narratives but also as a mirror reflecting societal values of his time. Readers will appreciate the timelessness of his themes, making "The Complete Short Stories" a valuable addition to both literary study and casual reading. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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The Complete Short Stories
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection brings together more than forty tales and children’s stories by William Dean Howells, complemented by autobiographical reminiscences and an appreciative essay by a contemporary critic. The purpose is twofold: to present, in a single volume, the breadth of Howells’s short fiction for adults and younger readers, and to illuminate that fiction with the author’s own recollections and with a contemporaneous portrait of his achievement. An illustrated format underscores the accessibility and immediacy of his scenes. Readers will find not only narrative variety but also a sustained artistic program, revealing how Howells shaped American realism through compact forms as well as through longer works.
Howells is a central figure in American literary realism, known for attending to ordinary experience, social nuance, and the moral texture of everyday decisions. He favored clarity of language, an understated tone, and a humane, observant wit. Rather than relying on sensational plots, his stories typically trace the pressure of manners, conscience, and circumstance upon middle-class lives. The result is fiction that feels intimate without being intrusive, skeptical without being cynical. Across these pages, readers encounter a writer who believed that seeing people as they are—often in domestic settings—could yield both ethical insight and lasting aesthetic satisfaction.
The short stories gathered here model Howells’s distinctive craft: conversational narration, gently comic irony, and an eye for the revealing detail. He arranges encounters in parlors, streets, boardinghouses, and small-town offices, letting speech rhythms and minor gestures carry meaning. Conflict is frequently inward, and resolution arises less from contrivance than from character. He is alert to social types but avoids caricature, preferring sympathy tempered by scrutiny. The prose moves with an ease that conceals its discipline, allowing moments of moral hesitation and tentative hope to emerge naturally. In story after story, Howells tests the resources of realism within concise, resonant frames.
The volume CHRISTMAS EVERY DAY and Other Stories introduces Howells’s gifts as a writer for children and families. The premises are playful, yet the execution is shaped by the same ethical tact that marks his adult fiction. Wishes, pranks, misunderstandings, and small adventures open onto lessons about patience, generosity, and responsibility, offered without undue solemnity. The humor is gentle, the pace lively, and the situations recognizable. These tales welcome younger readers while also rewarding adults who appreciate storytelling that respects a child’s intelligence and sense of wonder, achieving delight without abandoning the realism of everyday feelings and consequences.
BOY LIFE extends this interest in youthful experience by drawing scenes of work, play, and community from Howells’s broader writings. The selections emphasize character, honesty, and the discovery of social bonds, presenting boyhood not as spectacle but as apprenticeship to citizenship and empathy. The tone is companionable rather than didactic; mischief appears, but it is framed by developing judgment. In these pieces, readers can watch the techniques of the realist—close attention to talk, place, and custom—translated for younger audiences. The result is a bridge between Howells’s domestic realism and a tradition of American juvenile literature attentive to everyday life.
BETWEEN THE DARK AND THE DAYLIGHT gathers stories that explore the thresholds—temporal, moral, and psychological—where certainty gives way to reflection. Howells is drawn to moments when habits loosen and characters reconsider themselves, whether at dusk, in unfamiliar rooms, or amid shifting social expectations. The prose remains serene, but undercurrents of anxiety and desire complicate ordinary scenes. Without resorting to melodrama, these stories test the limits of self-knowledge and tact. They exemplify Howells’s belief that narrative can register quiet crises as powerfully as public upheavals, keeping faith with realism while acknowledging the ambiguities that accompany change.
THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE and Other Things in Prose and Verse showcases Howells’s formal flexibility. Stories stand beside brief verse, allowing readers to see how his tonal palette extends from humor to pathos, from domestic comedy to reflective lyricism. The juxtaposition clarifies his technique: the narrative pieces develop character through talk and situation, while the poems distill moods and images that the prose implies. Together they reveal an artist attentive to measure and moderation, willing to experiment within the bounds of clarity. The volume broadens the sense of his achievement, demonstrating that his realism accommodates both narrative breadth and lyrical concentration.
A FEARFUL RESPONSIBILITY and Other Stories turns on questions of conscience: what one owes to others and to oneself when sentiment, principle, and circumstance conflict. Howells frames such dilemmas in recognizably social settings—at home, at work, sometimes abroad—so that moral pressure arises from plausible relationships rather than contrived peril. The stories do not preach; they invite judgment by giving readers the evidence of behavior and conversation. In keeping with his method, outcomes emerge from temperament more than plot machinery. The volume thus represents a core strand of Howells’s art, where sympathy and scrutiny meet in balanced narrative inquiry.
BUYING A HORSE, a compact and humorous piece, distills Howells’s satiric gift. The familiar transaction becomes a study in self-deception, bargaining, and the soft evasions of everyday commerce. The comedy is observational rather than cruel, and the language is precise without pedantry. By treating a mundane errand as a social text, Howells demonstrates how realism can be both entertaining and diagnostic. He exposes the small vanities that accompany practical affairs while preserving goodwill toward his characters. The sketch stands as a reminder that his realism thrives on ordinary subjects presented with exactness, patience, and lightly worn wisdom.
The reminiscences A BOY’S TOWN and YEARS OF MY YOUTH provide a personal context for the fiction. In them, Howells recalls places, people, and formative experiences that shaped his sensibility and craft. He reflects on the textures of community life and on the habits of observation that later informed his stories. These prose memories do not merely decorate the collection; they clarify the sources of his realism—its confidence in everyday speech, its trust in modest scenes, its commitment to fairness. Read alongside the tales, they reveal continuities between lived experience and narrative method without collapsing art into autobiography.
The opening essay, WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS by Charles Dudley Warner, situates the author among his contemporaries and articulates a contemporary view of his aims. As a critical preface, it offers an external perspective on Howells’s principles and practice, helping readers understand how his work was received and discussed. Its presence underscores the collection’s historical awareness: the fiction and reminiscences are framed by a peer’s considered appraisal. This combination of primary texts and early criticism enables a fuller appreciation of Howells’s place in American letters and invites readers to approach the stories with both enjoyment and informed attention.
Taken together, these works exhibit the unifying themes and stylistic hallmarks that define Howells’s legacy: fidelity to ordinary life, moral inquiry without moralism, a temperate humor, and prose that favors clarity over flourish. The illustrations accompanying the texts encourage fresh engagement with his scenes and characters, while the range of genres—short stories, children’s tales, verse, reminiscences, and criticism—demonstrates the versatility of his realism. This volume invites reading across audiences and ages, showing how a sustained attention to modest events can yield durable art and how sympathy, precisely rendered, becomes a form of knowledge.
Author Biography
William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was an American novelist, critic, and editor whose steady advocacy of realism reshaped U.S. literature from the post–Civil War decades into the early twentieth century. Born in Ohio and active across Boston and New York publishing circles, he combined a journalist’s eye with a moralist’s concern for ordinary life. His prose is noted for clarity, humor, and a conscientious attention to everyday speech. Across novels, stories, essays, and memoirs, he sought to portray the middle-class experience without melodrama, favoring ethical nuance over sensational plots. The volumes in this collection sample his range, from children’s tales to reflective autobiographical writing.
Raised in the Ohio River valley, Howells had limited formal schooling but an intensive apprenticeship in the world of printing and newspapers, where he learned style, timing, and audience. His early journalism culminated in a campaign sketch of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 that brought him national notice. In the early 1860s he served as U.S. consul in Venice, an appointment that exposed him to European art and letters at a formative moment. The discipline of daily diplomatic reports and the observation of urban life abroad reinforced his preference for fact over extravagance, preparing the ground for the realist aesthetic he later articulated.
Returning from Europe after the Civil War, Howells entered Boston’s literary world and, in the 1870s, rose to the editorship of The Atlantic Monthly. From that vantage he shaped taste as much as he produced it, arguing that fiction should observe contemporary manners and moral choices with sympathy and restraint. He supported contemporaries such as Mark Twain and Henry James, and introduced readers to European currents he esteemed. His criticism, prefaces, and essays helped legitimize realism as a central method. The editorial habit—a balance of discernment and generosity—would also characterize his own fiction, with plots anchored in everyday situations rather than contrived sensationalism.
His short fiction shows this ethos in concentrated form. Christmas Every Day and Other Stories adapts moral insight to family reading, using playful premises to illuminate kindness and consequence. Between the Dark and the Daylight gathers tales attentive to social ambiguities and the thin line between perception and conscience. The Daughter of the Storage and Other Things in Prose and Verse mixes stories with reflective pieces and poetry, revealing his flexible voice. A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories explores duty, error, and remorse, while Buying a Horse distills his humor into a pointed sketch. Boy Life renders youthful scenes with candor and tact.
Howells’s autobiographical prose complements his fiction by tracing the experiential sources of his realism. A Boy’s Town revisits his Midwestern childhood, recalling streets, schools, entertainments, and speech with loving particularity and an ethnographer’s care for custom. Years of My Youth surveys his early formation as a writer and editor, linking apprenticeship, travel, and reading to the convictions that governed his mature work. These reminiscences avoid grand confession in favor of measured remembrance, emphasizing community habits and the moral weather of ordinary days. They show how observation, sympathy, and a commitment to everyday reality were not doctrines imposed but habits long practiced.
As a critic, Howells argued that realism was not merely a technique but an ethical orientation: literature should engage contemporary life honestly, without caricature, and with humane scrutiny of motives. He wrote steadily on new books, defended innovative drama and fiction, and urged readers to value the representative over the exceptional. He supported contemporaries such as Mark Twain and Henry James, and he admired and promoted European realists like Tolstoy and Turgenev, as well as modern drama by Ibsen. Charles Dudley Warner’s introductory essay in this collection situates Howells among his peers, attesting to the respect he earned as a guiding voice in American letters.
In later decades Howells continued to publish novels, stories, and essays, and he brought his editorial instinct to magazines based in New York, including Harper’s Magazine, sustaining a conversation about literary standards into the new century. He remained productive through the 1910s and died in 1920. His legacy endures in the American realist tradition he did so much to define: attentive to speech, skeptical of melodrama, earnest about moral consequence, and humane toward ordinary experience. The works gathered here—spanning children’s tales, sketches, stories, and memoirs—offer an accessible path into his achievement and explain why he is still read as a patient, clarifying observer of modern life.
Historical Context
William Dean Howells’s short fiction spans the United States’ transformation from the antebellum decades through the Progressive Era. Born in 1837 and active into the 1910s, he wrote under the shadow of the Civil War, the surge of industrial capitalism, and the rise of urban, middle-class life. This collection gathers children’s tales, realist sketches, travel-inflected stories, and autobiographical recollection, mirroring a culture moving from rural towns to metropolitan centers. The pieces register shifts in manners and morals as railroads, immigration, and mass print created new readers and new subjects. Read together, they trace how ordinary Americans negotiated change—through family rituals, workplace habits, travel, consumption, and evolving ideas of responsibility.
Howells’s career was inseparable from the magazine economy that shaped American realism. As assistant editor and then editor of The Atlantic Monthly in the late 1860s and 1870s, he refined the short story to suit educated, periodical readers and fostered a national conversation about truthful representation. He promoted contemporaries such as Mark Twain and Henry James, and advocated models from Turgenev and Tolstoy, arguing for fidelity to ordinary experience over melodrama. The Atlantic’s Boston-based networks, together with Harper’s and other New York houses, gave his stories a steady audience. Serial publication rhythms encouraged compact, dialogue-rich pieces in which social nuance mattered as much as event.
The national crisis of the 1860s formed the crucible of Howells’s early public life. He wrote a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and served as United States consul in Venice during the Civil War years, experiences that broadened his political and cultural horizons. The war’s disruptions—separations, mobility, and moral testing—echo through his later tales’ concerns with conscience, obligation, and community bonds. Reconstruction’s unsettled aftermath heightened his attention to civic ethics in daily life. Without dramatizing battles, he depicts the quieter work of rebuilding norms and trust, examining how households, workplaces, and small associations reconstituted social order in the war’s wake.
The Gilded Age’s spectacular growth and inequities supplied the social backdrop for much of the short fiction gathered here. Rapid industrialization, new corporate structures, and urban expansion produced fresh patterns of success and anxiety among professionals and clerks—the very readers of the magazines that carried his work. Stories in collections such as Between the Dark and the Daylight examine the gray zones of respectability, credit, and reputation in a market culture. Howells’s realism scrutinizes the ethics of everyday decisions under modern pressure, preferring the moral drama of misgivings, evasions, and small courtesies to courtroom theatrics or frontier violence.
Howells repeatedly returned to Americans abroad, a scene he knew from his consular years and from the postwar democratization of the Grand Tour. Steamship travel, guidebooks, and art tourism made Italy and other European destinations accessible to the aspiring middle class. A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories reflects this milieu of transatlantic contact, where notions of taste, religion, and national character are tested amid galleries and pensions. The cosmopolitan setting allowed him to juxtapose New World innocence with Old World institutions, exploring how Protestant inflections of conscience met Catholic ritual, and how tourists’ ideals fared under the practicalities of language, money, and etiquette.
The rise of children’s periodicals and holiday publishing in the late nineteenth century provided a forum for moral fantasy with a modern twist. Christmas Every Day and Other Stories participates in the era’s domestication of Christmas as a family-centered festival increasingly shaped by advertising, gift-giving, and department store culture. Howells’s tales entertain while tempering excess, inviting young readers to imagine abundance yet consider limits. They reflect a pedagogical ideal common to the time: cultivate sympathy and self-restraint through engaging narratives rather than stern sermonizing, using the magazine page’s intimacy and the season’s sentiment to align pleasure with ethical reflection.
Boy Life and the reminiscence A Boy’s Town draw on Howells’s Ohio childhood amid printing offices, river trade, and village institutions in the 1840s and 1850s. These texts preserve the textures of a region transitioning from frontier routes to rail connections, and from ad hoc schooling to more formal classrooms. They record the crafts, chores, and amusements of boys who lived within dense neighborhood surveillance and communal rituals. By recalling vernacular speech, amateur theatricals, and the rhythms of the pressroom, Howells historicizes the self-help and civic boosterism that small towns prized, even as they looked toward the opportunities and dislocations of national markets.
Years of My Youth belongs to a broader postbellum appetite for life-writing that documented how individuals navigated expansion and upheaval. Autobiographical reminiscence offered a bridge between private memory and public history, often circulating first in magazines and then in books. Howells uses the mode to chart apprenticeship—literary, political, and ethical—linking early newsroom discipline to later editorial authority and critical influence. The memoir context illuminates how his short stories derive their authority from observed detail and patterned social experience. It also shows the debt to antebellum institutions such as the lyceum and the mechanics’ library, which framed reading as civic improvement.
Technological change in communication and transport quietly structures many of these pieces. Telegraph lines, suburban trains, and faster mail made the intimate letter and the casual visit operate on new timetables. Before automobiles normalized private mobility, the horse mediated status and practicality, a world lampooned in Buying a Horse. That humorous sketch depends on the everyday bargaining culture of fairs and curbside markets, where reputation and shrewd talk were currency. Such vignettes record an economy in transition, capturing how new efficiencies coexisted with older forms of exchange and how etiquette evolved to manage risk in face-to-face transactions.
Reform currents flowing through the late nineteenth century—temperance, social purity, settlement work, and labor advocacy—shaped Howells’s moral horizon. From the mid-1880s he used editorial platforms to argue for humane realism and to weigh public controversies, positions that sometimes drew criticism. His affiliation with anti-imperialist efforts after 1898 and sympathy for civil liberties inform a fiction attentive to power exercised in ordinary settings. The stories typically avoid agitprop, but they register a world in which conscience must accommodate structural change. Encouraging readers to practice fairness in small dealings, they align with Progressive Era ideals that measured reform by everyday conduct as much as by legislation.
Howells’s psychological realism owes debts to European exemplars he recommended to American audiences. Through friendships and critical engagement with Henry James and respect for writers like Turgenev and Tolstoy, he modeled narratives where motive is contested and perception partial. Between the Dark and the Daylight suggests the liminal hour when certainties soften: the middle-class parlor becomes a stage for hesitation, rationalization, and retraction. This inwardness parallels contemporary scientific and philosophical currents—from popular psychology to pragmatism—that relocated drama from public acts to private deliberation, providing readers a disciplined method for interpreting character without relying on sensational coincidence.
Regionalism—often called “local color”—provided one of the late nineteenth century’s most influential frameworks, and Howells both promoted and practiced it. As an editor he championed writers who mapped distinctive communities; in his own work he evokes Ohio towns, New England resorts, and Italian neighborhoods with restrained dialect and social exactness. The aim was not quaintness for its own sake, but fidelity to manners and speech that anchored ethical inquiry in place. This orientation resists mythic frontiers and emphasizes the ordinary street, shop, or boardinghouse where modern Americans learned how to read class signals, negotiate obligations, and absorb cultural difference.
Immigration and urban growth marked the early twentieth century phases of Howells’s writing. The Daughter of the Storage and Other Things in Prose and Verse, appearing in the mid-1910s, belongs to a moment when Eastern and Southern European arrivals reshaped neighborhoods and labor markets, and when new tenement reforms, charities, and municipal services altered city life. Howells’s later sketches and stories often meet these realities obliquely—through shop floors, rental houses, and chance encounters—rather than through policy debates. The settings register the density and anonymity of the modern city, inviting reflection on how sympathy and fairness operate when customary village oversight has thinned.
Religion and secular ethics intersect throughout the collection in ways typical of Protestant-inflected American culture. Howells treats faith less as dogma than as a vocabulary for daily virtue—truth-telling, charity, and modesty—amid a public sphere increasingly guided by commerce and science. His tourist fictions stage Protestant-Catholic contrasts without exoticism, while his domestic tales deploy Sabbath tones in playful registers. The result is a moral style that resists revivalist sensationalism and prefers conversational persuasion. In this, the stories mirror broader nineteenth-century trends: liberal theology, the Social Gospel’s attention to social structures, and a preference for character-building over miracle or martyrdom.
Humor and decorum—hallmarks of the so-called genteel tradition—shape the tones of these works. Howells disarms readers with the mild irony of Buying a Horse or the comic premise of Christmas Every Day, inviting ethical self-scrutiny through laughter rather than scolding. This strategy suited family reading circles and the mixed audiences of leading magazines, where editors balanced entertainment with uplift. The satire is rarely cruel; it exposes vanity, credulity, and self-interest within a social code that values civility. Such humor also reflects the constraints of the periodical marketplace, which favored tactful criticism that could circulate widely without violating prevailing norms of taste.
The presence of illustrations in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century editions situates the collection within a visual culture remade by new printing technologies. Wood-engraved images in earlier magazines gave way to halftone reproduction by the 1890s, enabling more naturalistic scenes of parlors, streets, and travel. Pictures guided readers’ attention to clothing, posture, and interiors—the very details Howells prized as social evidence. Illustrated holiday stories, in particular, relied on recognizable domestic iconography: lamps, fir trees, and shop windows. The synergy between image and text supported realist aims, teaching readers to decode the material signs of class, aspiration, and propriety in an era fascinated by surfaces.
The introduction by Charles Dudley Warner locates Howells among late nineteenth-century arbiters of taste. Warner—an essayist associated with Hartford’s literary circle and coauthor with Mark Twain of The Gilded Age—shared Howells’s commitment to polished, observational prose. His appraisal underscores the networks of editors, lecturers, and critics who curated national letters from New England and New York. Presenting Howells as a standard-bearer of realism, Warner connects him to a generation that sought to civilize the booming republic through style and restraint. The introduction thus serves as a historical document in its own right, exemplifying contemporary expectations for a moralized, urbane literature of manners and ideas. The collection thus registers a continuing debate over realism’s cultural authority and the uses of fiction as social pedagogy. Late nineteenth-century reviewers labeled Howells the “Dean of American Letters,” praising his steadiness even as others faulted him for caution. In essays and editorial columns of the late 1880s and 1890s he linked literary form to civic conscience, a stance that colored expectations for his stories. Readers were encouraged to take aesthetic pleasure in exact observation while judging conduct by reasonable standards. The result is a corpus that models taste, sympathy, and fairness as civic virtues, proposing literature as practice for living responsibly in modern society.
Synopsis (Selection)
Introduction: WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (Charles Dudley Warner)
This critical sketch situates William Dean Howells within American letters, outlining the qualities that define his realism—close attention to ordinary lives, moral inquiry, and gentle humor. It frames the fiction and reminiscences that follow as studies in manners and conscience, highlighting his preference for everyday dramas over sensational plots.
Christmas Every Day and Other Stories
A suite of playful tales where wishes, mishaps, and family negotiations reveal the limits and rewards of desire. The title piece turns an extravagant wish into a comic lesson about abundance and gratitude, while companion stories prize imagination anchored in common sense. The tone is genial and conversational, balancing whimsy with quietly practical morals.
Boyhood and Youth: BOY LIFE; A BOY'S TOWN; YEARS OF MY YOUTH
Across fiction and memoir, Howells maps the textures of growing up—games, schoolrooms, chores, first scruples—rendered with affectionate precision. BOY LIFE offers story-like episodes of boys’ adventures and misadventures, A BOY'S TOWN recreates small-town rhythms and community types, and YEARS OF MY YOUTH reflects on experiences that shaped his sensibility as a writer. Together they trace the formation of character out of ordinary occasions, in a tone that is warm, amused, and increasingly reflective.
Between the Dark and the Daylight
These stories inhabit the twilight between certainty and doubt, where polite surfaces give way to moral hesitation and private unease. Howells builds drama from conversational misunderstandings, social expectation, and the pressure of conscience rather than from outward crisis. The mood is quiet and probing, characteristic of his psychological realism.
The Daughter of the Storage and Other Things in Prose and Verse
A varied collection mixing stories with poems and occasional pieces, it showcases Howells’s range from domestic comedy to meditative lyric. Narratives turn on chance meetings, family obligations, and the small surprises of everyday life, while the verse and sketches offer alternate angles—satiric, elegiac, or playful—on the same concerns. The result is a mosaic of forms unified by clear-eyed observation and humane wit.
A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories
At the center is an ethical predicament whose consequences ripple through reputation and self-respect, surrounded by tales that examine duty, temptation, and the costs of decision. Howells treats high stakes without melodrama, letting social nuance and dialogue reveal what is at risk. The tone is sober but compassionate, committed to the realism of motives and manners.
Buying a Horse
A comic anatomy of a seemingly simple purchase that becomes a maze of advice, haggling, and second thoughts. The piece skewers self-importance and the folk-wisdom of practical men, showing how vanity and prudence tangle in everyday transactions. Light, ironic, and observational, it distills Howells’s gift for turning common experience into social comedy.
The Complete Short Stories of William Dean Howells: 40+ Tales & Children’s Stories (Illustrated)
Introduction:
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Howells, William Dean, author, b. in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, 1 March, 1837. His ancestors on the father's side were Welsh Quakers, and people of substance; his great-grandfather introduced the manufacture of flannel into his town and built three mills; his grandfather, impelled by his democratic sympathies, emigrated to this country, and became an ardent Methodist; while his father adopted the beliefs of Swedenborg, in which young Howells was educated. In all these generations the family was a cultivated race, living in an atmosphere of books and moral and literary refinement. His father had, for the time and place, a good collection of books, but it was mostly poetry, and familiarity with this doubtless decided the nature of his early literary efforts. Almost as soon as he could read he began to make verses and put them in type in his father's printing-office. In his inherited literary tastes and refinement and liberal and undogmatic religious tendency, in the plain living of his early years and his learning a trade, in his contact with a thoroughly democratic society, in the early habit of self-dependence and the knowledge of the realities of life, it is evident what has given the man his charm as a writer, his courage of opinion, his sturdy Americanism, and his profound sympathy with common life. When he was three years old his father removed to Hamilton, Ohio, and bought the Hamilton “Intelligencer,” a weekly journal, in the office of which Howells learned to set type before he was twelve years old. In 1849, the elder Howells, unable, conscientiously, to support a slave-holding president, sold his newspaper, and removed with is family to Dayton, Ohio, where he purchased the Dayton “Transcript,” a semi-weekly newspaper, which he turned into a daily. After a struggle of two years, this enterprise completely failed, not, however, from any want of industry, for all the sons worked at the case, and young Howells often set type till eleven o'clock at night, and then arose at four in the morning to deliver newspapers. The announcement of the catastrophe in business was accepted with American insouciance. “We all,” says the author, “went down to the Miami river, and went in swimming.” In expectation, which was disappointed, of taking the superintendence of a projected paper-mill, the elder Howells took his family to Greene county, where they remained a year. During this year, in a log house, the author had his sole experience of roughing it, away from the amenities of civilization, an experience which he has turned to account in a charming sketch of his boyhood. In 1851, when the father was clerk of the house at the state capital, Howells worked as a compositor on the “Ohio State Journal,” earning four dollars a week, which he contributed to the family treasury. It was here that he made the acquaintance of John J. Piatt, an intimacy which stimulated his poetical tendency. In 1851 the family removed to Ashtabula, and all found employment on the “Sentinel,” which the elder Howells purchased; but this newspaper was subsequently transferred to Jefferson, where it continued under the management of the family. Before this last removal the talents of the young author had attracted attention; at the age of nineteen he was the Columbus correspondent of the Cincinnati “Gazette,” and when he was twenty-two he was made the news editor of the “State Journal” at Columbus. During his residence in Columbus he published poems in the “Atlantic Monthly,” the first entitled “By the Dead,” and in one year five others, “The Poet's Friends,” “The Pilot's Story,” “Pleasure Pain,” “Lost Beliefs,” and “Andenken.” Upon the nomination of Lincoln in 1860, Howells wrote his life, and from the profits of this book, $160, he made his first excursion into the world, visiting Montreal and Boston, where he formed the acquaintance of James Russell Lowell, then editor of the “Atlantic Monthly,” who introduced him to Oliver Wendell Holmes. By President Lincoln he was appointed consul to Venice, and he resided in that city from 1861 till 1865, devoting his leisure hours to the mastering of the Italian language and literature, and the general cultivation of letters. The earliest fruits of this residence were a series of papers on “Venetian Life,” first published in book-form in England, in which was at once recognized the advent of a new writer of uncommon power, one capable of conveying to the reader exquisite delight merely by the charm of an original style, as vivid as it was subtle and flexible. The sketches had the novelty of realism; never was Venice so perfectly photographed, and the reader was agreeably surprised to find that the intrinsic romance of the city of the lagoons was heightened rather than diminished by this delicate and sympathetic analysis. Returning home well equipped for newspaper work, by a knowledge of foreign politics and literature, and the acquisition of French and Italian, Howells was for some time an editorial writer on the New York “Tribune” and the “Times,” and a salaried contributor of the “Nation,” and in 1866 he was made by James T. Fields assistant editor of the “Atlantic Monthly.” In 1872 he became its editor, which post he retained till 1881, when he resigned and was succeeded by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Besides his strictly editorial work on this periodical, he contributed to it a vast amount of criticism, miscellaneous sketches, and fiction. During this period he was an occasional contributor to the “North American Review” of papers on Italian literature, and, residing in Cambridge, he was a valuable member of the coterie that gathered at Longfellow's house to assist in the translation of Dante. About this time. he began his acquaintance with Spanish literature. While editor of the “Atlantic Monthly,” he edited with delightful introductory essays a series of “Choice Autobiographies.” His first tentative attempt at a story in “Their Wedding Journey” was so successful with the public that it determined his career as a writer of fiction, and since he dissolved his connection with the “Atlantic” he has pursued the career of a professional man of letters, devoting himself mainly to fiction, with the occasional production of plays, travel sketches, and literary criticism. Since 1881 most of his work has had a preliminary publication in “The Century” and “Harper's Magazine.” In 1882-’3 Mr. Howells was again in Europe with his family, spending some time in England and revisiting Italy. Since his return his residence has been in Boston. In 1886 he made a salaried connection with “Harper's,” taking charge of a new and critical department called the “Editor's Study,” and contributing exclusively to its pages. In this department he exposes and explains his theory of modern fiction, taking part with signal courage and acumen in that conflict which is always raging, under one name or another, between the idealists and the realists. To his apprehension there is a new spirit in the world, or a new era in fiction, which concerns itself with life as it actually is, has a profound sympathy with humanity, and reckons more important the statement of the facts of life than the weaving these facts, by any process of selection, which in a painter would be called “composition,” into any sort of story, more or less ideal. Anything ceases to be commonplace when it is frankly and exactly stated. In this new literary movement, the novels of the past seem unreal and artificial. This tendency is best exemplified in the modern Russian school, which is remorseless in its fidelity to the actual, the lowly, the sordid, the sinful, and the sorrowful in life, and accepts the inevitable, the fateful, without sarcasm, but with a tender pity. Because he portrays life as it is, or rather has the power of transferring the real, throbbing, human life, and not merely its incidents, to his pages as no writer has done before, Mr. Howells regards Count Leo Tolstoi as the first of all novelists that have written. Howells adds to his theory of realism the notion that genius is merely the power of taking conscientious pains. In practice he is a methodical and industrious worker, with a keen literary conscience, mindful of the responsibilities of a writer, serious in mind, but genial and even gay in temperament, and a delightful talker and companion. Mr. Howells married in Paris, 24 Dec., 1862, Elinor G. Mead, sister of Larkin G. Mead, the sculptor. They have three children, two girls and a boy. Besides his occasional uncollected writings, some translations, and four popular farces, “The Parlor Car,” “The Sleeping Car,” “The Register,” and “The Elevator,” the writings of Mr. Howells are “Poems of Two Friends,” with John J. Piatt (Columbus, Ohio, 1860); “Life of Abraham Lincoln” (1860); “Venetian Life” (London and New York, 1866); “Italian Journeys” (1867); “Suburban Sketches” (1868); “o Love Lost, a Poem of Travel” (1868); “Their Wedding Journey” (Boston, 1871); “A Chance Acquaintance” (1873); “A Foregone Conclusion” (1874); “Out of the Question” (Boston, 1876): “Life of Rutherford B. Hayes” (New York, 1876); “A Counterfeit Presentment” (1877); “Choice Biographies,” edited with essays (8 vols., 1877-’8); “The Lady of the Aroostook” (1878); “The Undiscovered Country” (1880); “A Fearful Responsibility, and other Tales” (1882); “Dr. Breen's Practice” (1883); “A Modern Instance” (1883); “A Woman's Reason” (1884); “Three Villages” (1885): “The Rise of Silas Lapham” (1885); “Tuscan Cities” (1885); “A Little Girl among the Old Masters,” drawings by his daughter (1886); “The Minister's Charge” 11886); “Indian Summer” (1886); “Modern Italian Poets” (1887); and “April Hopes” (New York, 1887).
Short Stories:
CHRISTMAS EVERY DAY and Other Stories
Christmas Every Day
The little girl came into her papa's study, as she always did Saturday morning before breakfast, and asked for a story. He tried to beg off that morning, for he was very busy, but she would not let him. So he began:
“Well, once there was a little pig—”
She put her hand over his mouth and stopped him at the word. She said she had heard little pig-stories till she was perfectly sick of them.
“Well, what kind of story shall I tell, then?”
“About Christmas. It's getting to be the season. It's past Thanksgiving already.”
“It seems to me,” her papa argued, “that I've told as often about Christmas as I have about little pigs.”
“No difference! Christmas is more interesting.”
“Well!” Her papa roused himself from his writing by a great effort. “Well, then, I'll tell you about the little girl that wanted it Christmas every day in the year. How would you like that?”
“First-rate!” said the little girl; and she nestled into comfortable shape in his lap, ready for listening.
“Very well, then, this little pig—Oh, what are you pounding me for?”
“Because you said little pig instead of little girl.”
“I should like to know what's the difference between a little pig and a little girl that wanted it Christmas every day!”
“Papa,” said the little girl, warningly, “if you don't go on, I'll give it to you!” And at this her papa darted off like lightning, and began to tell the story as fast as he could.
Well, once there was a little girl who liked Christmas so much that she wanted it to be Christmas every day in the year; and as soon as Thanksgiving was over she began to send postal-cards to the old Christmas Fairy to ask if she mightn't have it. But the old fairy never answered any of the postals; and after a while the little girl found out that the Fairy was pretty particular, and wouldn't notice anything but letters—not even correspondence cards in envelopes; but real letters on sheets of paper, and sealed outside with a monogram—or your initial, anyway. So, then, she began to send her letters; and in about three weeks—or just the day before Christmas, it was—she got a letter from the Fairy, saying she might have it Christmas every day for a year, and then they would see about having it longer.
The little girl was a good deal excited already, preparing for the old-fashioned, once-a-year Christmas that was coming the next day, and perhaps the Fairy's promise didn't make such an impression on her as it would have made at some other time. She just resolved to keep it to herself, and surprise everybody with it as it kept coming true; and then it slipped out of her mind altogether.
She had a splendid Christmas. She went to bed early, so as to let Santa Claus have a chance at the stockings, and in the morning she was up the first of anybody and went and felt them, and found hers all lumpy with packages of candy, and oranges and grapes, and pocket-books and rubber balls, and all kinds of small presents, and her big brother's with nothing but the tongs in them, and her young lady sister's with a new silk umbrella, and her papa's and mamma's with potatoes and pieces of coal wrapped up in tissue-paper, just as they always had every Christmas. Then she waited around till the rest of the family were up, and she was the first to burst into the library, when the doors were opened, and look at the large presents laid out on the library-table—books, and portfolios, and boxes of stationery, and breastpins, and dolls, and little stoves, and dozens of handkerchiefs, and ink-stands, and skates, and snow-shovels, and photograph-frames, and little easels, and boxes of water-colors, and Turkish paste, and nougat, and candied cherries, and dolls' houses, and waterproofs—and the big Christmas-tree, lighted and standing in a waste-basket in the middle.
She had a splendid Christmas all day. She ate so much candy that she did not want any breakfast; and the whole forenoon the presents kept pouring in that the expressman had not had time to deliver the night before; and she went round giving the presents she had got for other people, and came home and ate turkey and cranberry for dinner, and plum-pudding and nuts and raisins and oranges and more candy, and then went out and coasted, and came in with a stomach-ache, crying; and her papa said he would see if his house was turned into that sort of fool's paradise another year; and they had a light supper, and pretty early everybody went to bed cross.
Here the little girl pounded her papa in the back, again.
“Well, what now? Did I say pigs?”
“You made them act like pigs.”
“Well, didn't they?”
“No matter; you oughtn't to put it into a story.”
“Very well, then, I'll take it all out.”
Her father went on:
The little girl slept very heavily, and she slept very late, but she was wakened at last by the other children dancing round her bed with their stockings full of presents in their hands.
“What is it?” said the little girl, and she rubbed her eyes and tried to rise up in bed.
“Christmas! Christmas! Christmas!” they all shouted, and waved their stockings.
“Nonsense! It was Christmas yesterday.”
Her brothers and sisters just laughed. “We don't know about that. It's Christmas to-day, anyway. You come into the library and see.”
Then all at once it flashed on the little girl that the Fairy was keeping her promise, and her year of Christmases was beginning. She was dreadfully sleepy, but she sprang up like a lark—a lark that had overeaten itself and gone to bed cross—and darted into the library. There it was again! Books, and portfolios, and boxes of stationery, and breastpins—
“You needn't go over it all, papa; I guess I can remember just what was there,” said the little girl.
Well, and there was the Christmas-tree blazing away, and the family picking out their presents, but looking pretty sleepy, and her father perfectly puzzled, and her mother ready to cry. “I'm sure I don't see how I'm to dispose of all these things,” said her mother, and her father said it seemed to him they had had something just like it the day before, but he supposed he must have dreamed it. This struck the little girl as the best kind of a joke; and so she ate so much candy she didn't want any breakfast, and went round carrying presents, and had turkey and cranberry for dinner, and then went out and coasted, and came in with a—
“Papa!”
“Well, what now?”
“What did you promise, you forgetful thing?”
“Oh! oh yes!”
Well, the next day, it was just the same thing over again, but everybody getting crosser; and at the end of a week's time so many people had lost their tempers that you could pick up lost tempers anywhere; they perfectly strewed the ground. Even when people tried to recover their tempers they usually got somebody else's, and it made the most dreadful mix.
The little girl began to get frightened, keeping the secret all to herself; she wanted to tell her mother, but she didn't dare to; and she was ashamed to ask the Fairy to take back her gift, it seemed ungrateful and ill-bred, and she thought she would try to stand it, but she hardly knew how she could, for a whole year. So it went on and on, and it was Christmas on St. Valentine's Day and Washington's Birthday, just the same as any day, and it didn't skip even the First of April, though everything was counterfeit that day, and that was some little relief.
After a while coal and potatoes began to be awfully scarce, so many had been wrapped up in tissue-paper to fool papas and mammas with. Turkeys got to be about a thousand dollars apiece—
“Papa!”
“Well, what?”
“You're beginning to fib.”
“Well, two thousand, then.”
And they got to passing off almost anything for turkeys—half-grown humming-birds, and even rocs out of the Arabian Nights—the real turkeys were so scarce. And cranberries—well, they asked a diamond apiece for cranberries. All the woods and orchards were cut down for Christmas-trees, and where the woods and orchards used to be it looked just like a stubble-field, with the stumps. After a while they had to make Christmas-trees out of rags, and stuff them with bran, like old-fashioned dolls; but there were plenty of rags, because people got so poor, buying presents for one another, that they couldn't get any new clothes, and they just wore their old ones to tatters. They got so poor that everybody had to go to the poor-house, except the confectioners, and the fancy-store keepers, and the picture-book sellers, and the expressmen; and they all got so rich and proud that they would hardly wait upon a person when he came to buy. It was perfectly shameful!
Well, after it had gone on about three or four months, the little girl, whenever she came into the room in the morning and saw those great ugly, lumpy stockings dangling at the fire-place, and the disgusting presents around everywhere, used to just sit down and burst out crying. In six months she was perfectly exhausted; she couldn't even cry any more; she just lay on the lounge and rolled her eyes and panted. About the beginning of October she took to sitting down on dolls wherever she found them—French dolls, or any kind—she hated the sight of them so; and by Thanksgiving she was crazy, and just slammed her presents across the room.
By that time people didn't carry presents around nicely any more. They flung them over the fence, or through the window, or anything; and, instead of running their tongues out and taking great pains to write “For dear Papa,” or “Mamma,” or “Brother,” or “Sister,” or “Susie,” or “Sammie,” or “Billie,” or “Bobbie,” or “Jimmie,” or “Jennie,” or whoever it was, and troubling to get the spelling right, and then signing their names, and “Xmas, 18—,” they used to write in the gift-books, “Take it, you horrid old thing!” and then go and bang it against the front door. Nearly everybody had built barns to hold their presents, but pretty soon the barns overflowed, and then they used to let them lie out in the rain, or anywhere. Sometimes the police used to come and tell them to shovel their presents off the sidewalk, or they would arrest them.
“I thought you said everybody had gone to the poor-house,” interrupted the little girl.
“They did go, at first,” said her papa; “but after a while the poor-houses got so full that they had to send the people back to their own houses. They tried to cry, when they got back, but they couldn't make the least sound.”
“Why couldn't they?”
“Because they had lost their voices, saying ‘Merry Christmas’ so much. Did I tell you how it was on the Fourth of July?”
“No; how was it?” And the little girl nestled closer, in expectation of something uncommon.
Well, the night before, the boys stayed up to celebrate, as they always do, and fell asleep before twelve o'clock, as usual, expecting to be wakened by the bells and cannon. But it was nearly eight o'clock before the first boy in the United States woke up, and then he found out what the trouble was. As soon as he could get his clothes on he ran out of the house and smashed a big cannon-torpedo down on the pavement; but it didn't make any more noise than a damp wad of paper; and after he tried about twenty or thirty more, he began to pick them up and look at them. Every single torpedo was a big raisin! Then he just streaked it up-stairs, and examined his fire-crackers and toy-pistol and two-dollar collection of fireworks, and found that they were nothing but sugar and candy painted up to look like fireworks! Before ten o'clock every boy in the United States found out that his Fourth of July things had turned into Christmas things; and then they just sat down and cried—they were so mad. There are about twenty million boys in the United States, and so you can imagine what a noise they made. Some men got together before night, with a little powder that hadn't turned into purple sugar yet, and they said they would fire off one cannon, anyway. But the cannon burst into a thousand pieces, for it was nothing but rock-candy, and some of the men nearly got killed. The Fourth of July orations all turned into Christmas carols, and when anybody tried to read the Declaration, instead of saying, “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary,” he was sure to sing, “God rest you, merry gentlemen.” It was perfectly awful.
The little girl drew a deep sigh of satisfaction.
“And how was it at Thanksgiving?”
Her papa hesitated. “Well, I'm almost afraid to tell you. I'm afraid you'll think it's wicked.”
“Well, tell, anyway,” said the little girl.
Well, before it came Thanksgiving it had leaked out who had caused all these Christmases. The little girl had suffered so much that she had talked about it in her sleep; and after that hardly anybody would play with her. People just perfectly despised her, because if it had not been for her greediness it wouldn't have happened; and now, when it came Thanksgiving, and she wanted them to go to church, and have squash-pie and turkey, and show their gratitude, they said that all the turkeys had been eaten up for her old Christmas dinners, and if she would stop the Christmases, they would see about the gratitude. Wasn't it dreadful? And the very next day the little girl began to send letters to the Christmas Fairy, and then telegrams, to stop it. But it didn't do any good; and then she got to calling at the Fairy's house, but the girl that came to the door always said, “Not at home,” or “Engaged,” or “At dinner,” or something like that; and so it went on till it came to the old once-a-year Christmas Eve. The little girl fell asleep, and when she woke up in the morning—
“She found it was all nothing but a dream,” suggested the little girl.
“No, indeed!” said her papa. “It was all every bit true!”
“Well, what did she find out, then?”
“Why, that it wasn't Christmas at last, and wasn't ever going to be, any more. Now it's time for breakfast.”
The little girl held her papa fast around the neck.
“You sha'n't go if you're going to leave it so!”
“How do you want it left?”
“Christmas once a year.”
“All right,” said her papa; and he went on again.
Well, there was the greatest rejoicing all over the country, and it extended clear up into Canada. The people met together everywhere, and kissed and cried for joy. The city carts went around and gathered up all the candy and raisins and nuts, and dumped them into the river; and it made the fish perfectly sick; and the whole United States, as far out as Alaska, was one blaze of bonfires, where the children were burning up their gift-books and presents of all kinds. They had the greatest time!
The little girl went to thank the old Fairy because she had stopped its being Christmas, and she said she hoped she would keep her promise and see that Christmas never, never came again. Then the Fairy frowned, and asked her if she was sure she knew what she meant; and the little girl asked her, Why not? and the old Fairy said that now she was behaving just as greedily as ever, and she'd better look out. This made the little girl think it all over carefully again, and she said she would be willing to have it Christmas about once in a thousand years; and then she said a hundred, and then she said ten, and at last she got down to one. Then the Fairy said that was the good old way that had pleased people ever since Christmas began, and she was agreed. Then the little girl said, “What're your shoes made of?” And the Fairy said, “Leather.” And the little girl said, “Bargain's done forever,” and skipped off, and hippity-hopped the whole way home, she was so glad.
“How will that do?” asked the papa.
“First-rate!” said the little girl; but she hated to have the story stop, and was rather sober. However, her mamma put her head in at the door, and asked her papa:
“Are you never coming to breakfast? What have you been telling that child?”
“Oh, just a moral tale.”
The little girl caught him around the neck again.
“We know! Don't you tell what, papa! Don't you tell what!”
Turkeys Turning the Tables
“Well, you see,” the papa began, on Christmas morning, when the little girl had snuggled in his lap into just the right shape for listening, “it was the night after Thanksgiving, and you know how everybody feels the night after Thanksgiving.”
“Yes; but you needn’t begin that way, papa,” said the little girl; “I’m not going to have any moral to it this time.”
“No, indeed! But it can be a true story, can’t it?”
“I don’t know,” said the little girl; “I like made-up ones.”
“Well, this is going to be a true one, anyway, and it’s no use talking.”
All the relations in the neighborhood had come to dinner, and then gone back to their own houses, but some of the relations had come from a distance, and these had to stay all night at the grandfather’s. But whether they went or whether they stayed, they all told the grandmother that they did believe it was the best Thanksgiving dinner they had ever eaten in their born days. They had had cranberry sauce, and they’d had mashed potato, and they’d had mince-pie and pandowdy, and they’d had celery, and they’d had Hubbard squash, and they’d had tea and coffee both, and they’d had apple-dumpling with hard sauce, and they’d had hot biscuit and sweet pickle, and mangoes, and frosted cake, and nuts, and cauliflower—
“Don’t mix them all up so!” pleaded the little girl. “It’s perfectly confusing. I can’t hardly tell what they had now.”
“Well, they mixed them up just in the same way, and I suppose that’s one of the reasons why it happened.”
Whenever a child wanted to go back from dumpling and frosted cake to mashed potato and Hubbard squash—they were old-fashioned kind of people, and they had everything on the table at once, because the grandmother and the aunties cooked it, and they couldn’t keep jumping up all the time to change the plates—and its mother said it shouldn’t, its grandmother said, Indeed it should, then, and helped it herself; and the child’s father would say, Well, he guessed he would go back, too, for a change; and the child’s mother would say, She should think he would be ashamed; and then they would get to going back, till everything was perfectly higgledy-piggledy.
“Oh, shouldn’t you like to have been there, papa?” sighed the little girl.
“You mustn’t interrupt. Where was I?”
“Higgledy-piggledy.”
“Oh yes!”
Well, but the greatest thing of all was the turkey that they had. It was a gobbler, I tell you, that was nearly as big as a giraffe.
“Papa!”
It took the premium at the county fair, and when it was dressed it weighed fifteen pounds—well, maybe twenty—and it was so heavy that the grandmothers and the aunties couldn’t put it on the table, and they had to get one of the papas to do it. You ought to have heard the hurrahing when the children saw him coming in from the kitchen with it. It seemed as if they couldn’t hardly talk of anything but that turkey the whole dinner-time.
The grandfather hated to carve, and so one of the papas did it; and whenever he gave anybody a piece, the grandfather would tell some new story about the turkey, till pretty soon the aunties got to saying, “Now, father, stop!” and one of them said it made it seem as if the gobbler was walking about on the table, to hear so much about him, and it took her appetite all away; and that made the papas begin to ask the grandfather more and more about the turkey.
“Yes,” said the little girl, thoughtfully; “I know what papas are.”
“Yes, they’re pretty much all alike.”
And the mammas began to say they acted like a lot of silly boys; and what would the children think? But nothing could stop it; and all through the afternoon and evening, whenever the papas saw any of the aunties or mammas round, they would begin to ask the grandfather more particulars about the turkey. The grandfather was pretty forgetful, and he told the same things right over. Well, and so it went on till it came bedtime, and then the mammas and aunties began to laugh and whisper together, and to say they did believe they should dream about that turkey; and when the papas kissed the grandmother good-night, they said, Well, they must have his mate for Christmas; and then they put their arms round the mammas and went out haw-hawing.
“I don’t think they behaved very dignified,” said the little girl.
“Well, you see, they were just funning, and had got going, and it was Thanksgiving, anyway.”
Well, in about half an hour everybody was fast asleep and dreaming—
“Is it going to be a dream?” asked the little girl, with some reluctance.
“Didn’t I say it was going to be a true story?”
“Yes.”
“How can it be a dream, then?”
“You said everybody was fast asleep and dreaming.”
“Well, but I hadn’t got through. Everybody except one little girl.”
“Now, papa!”
“What?”
“Don’t you go and say her name was the same as mine, and her eyes the same color.”
“What an idea!”
This was a very good little girl, and very respectful to her papa, and didn’t suspect him of tricks, but just believed everything he said. And she was a very pretty little girl, and had red eyes, and blue cheeks, and straight hair, and a curly nose—
“Now, papa, if you get to cutting up—”
“Well, I won’t, then!”
Well, she was rather a delicate little girl, and whenever she over-ate, or anything,
“Have bad dreams! Aha! I told you it was going to be a dream.”
“You wait till I get through.”
She was apt to lie awake thinking, and some of her thinks were pretty dismal. Well, that night, instead of thinking and tossing and turning, and counting a thousand, it seemed to this other little girl that she began to see things as soon as she had got warm in bed, and before, even. And the first thing she saw was a large, bronze-colored—
“Turkey gobbler!”
“No, ma’am. Turkey gobbler’s ghost.”
“Foo!” said the little girl, rather uneasily; “whoever heard of a turkey’s ghost, I should like to know?”
“Never mind, that,” said the papa. “If it hadn’t been a ghost, could the moonlight have shone through it? No, indeed! The stuffing wouldn’t have let it. So you see it must have been a ghost.”
It had a red pasteboard placard round its neck, with First Premium
