A CHRISTMAS ACCIDENT

A Christmas Accident

STORIES BY
ANNIE ELIOT TRUMBULL

A Christmas Accident and Other Stories. 16mo. Cloth	$1.00
Rod's Salvation and Other Stories. 16mo. Cloth	1.00
A Cape Cod Week. 16mo. Cloth	1.00
Mistress Content Cradock. Cloth. 16mo.	1.00

A. S. BARNES & CO., Publishers,
New York.

A Christmas Accident

And Other Stories

By

Annie Eliot Trumbull

Of the stories included in this volume, the first originally appeared in the Hartford Courant; "After—the Deluge," in the Atlantic Monthly; "Mary A. Twining," in the Home Maker; "A Postlude" and "Her Neighbor's Landmark," in the Outlook; "The 'Daily Morning Chronicle,'" in The New England Magazine; and "Hearts Unfortified," in McClure's Magazine. To the courtesy of the editors of these periodicals I am indebted for permission to reprint them.

Contents

A Christmas Accident

In the other house there were five children, and, as Mr. Gilton said, they made too large a family, and they ought to have gone somewhere else. Possibly they would have gone had it not been for the fence; but when Mr. Gilton put it up and Mr. Bilton told him it was three inches too far on his land, and Mr. Gilton said he could go to law about it, expressing the idea forcibly, Mr. Bilton was foolish enough to take his advice. The decision went against him, and a good deal of his money went with it, for it was a long, teasing lawsuit, and instead of being three inches of made ground it might have been three degrees of the Arctic Circle for the trouble there was in getting at it. So Mr. Bilton had to stay where he was.

It was then that the yards began to take on those little differences that soon grew to be very marked. Neither family would plant any vines because they would have been certain to heedlessly beautify the other side, and consequently the fence, in all its primitive boldness, stood out uncompromisingly, and the one or two little bits of trees grew carefully on the farther side of the enclosure so as not to be mixed up in the trouble at all. But Mr. Gilton's grass was cut smoothly by the man who made the fires, while Mr. Bilton only found a chance to cut his himself once in two weeks. Then, by and by, Mr. Gilton bought a red garden bench and put it under the tree that was nearest to the fence. No one ever went out and sat on it, to be sure, but to the Bilton children it represented the visible flush of prosperity. Particularly was Cora Cordelia wont to peer through the fence and gaze upon that red bench, thinking it a charming place in which to play house, ignorant of the fact that much of the red paint would have come off on her back. Cora Cordelia was the youngest of the five. All the rest had very simple names,—John, Walter, Fanny, and