So, this is to warn you that there is no subterfuge about this
story--and you might come upon stockings hung to the mantel and plum
puddings and hark! the chimes! and wealthy misers loosening up and
handing over penny whistles to lame newsboys if you read further.
Once I knocked at a door (I have so many things to tell you I keep on
losing sight of the story). It was the front door of a furnished room
house in West 'Teenth Street. I was looking for a young illustrator
named Paley originally and irrevocably from Terre Haute. Paley doesn't
enter even into the first serial rights of this Christmas story; I
mention him simply in explaining why I came to knock at the door--some
people have so much curiosity.
The door was opened by the landlady. I had seen hundreds like her. And
I had smelled before that cold, dank, furnished draught of air that
hurried by her to escape immurement in the furnished house.
She was stout, and her face and lands were as white as though she had
been drowned in a barrel of vinegar. One hand held together at her
throat a buttonless flannel dressing sacque whose lines had been cut
by no tape or butterick known to mortal woman.
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