Tarkington, Booth, 1869-1946 / 2008-07-26 00:00:00

EBOOK BEASLEY'S CHRISTMAS PARTY ***


Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.


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.
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