The Christmas Hirelings (Children's Book). Mary Elizabeth Braddon

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      Preface

       Table of Contents

      I had long wished to write a story about children, which should be interesting to childish readers, and yet not without interest for grown-up people: but that desire might never have been realized without the unexpected impulse of a suggestion, dropped casually in the freedom of conversation at a table where the clever hostess is ever an incentive to bright thoughts. The talk was of Christmas; and almost everybody agreed that the season, considered from the old-fashioned festal standpoint, was pure irony. Was it not a time of extra burdens, of manifold claims upon everybody’s purse and care, of great expectations from all sorts of people, of worry and weariness? Except for the children! There we were unanimous.

      Christmas was the children’s festival — for us a rush and a scramble, and a perpetual paying away of money; for them a glimpse of Fairyland.

      “If we had no children of our own,” said my left-hand neighbor, “we ought to hire some for Christmas.”

      I thought it was a pretty fancy; and on that foundation built the little story of the Christmas Hirelings, which is now reproduced in book form from last year’s Christmas Number of the Lady’s Pictorial, and which I hope even after that wide circulation all over the English-speaking world may find a new public at home — the public of mothers and aunts and kind uncles, in quest of stories that please children. This story was a labour of love, a holiday task, written beside the fire in the long autumn evenings when the south-west wind was howling in the Forest trees outside.

      The living models for the three children were close at hand, dear and familiar to the writer; and Moppet’s long words and quaint little mannerisms are but the pale reproduction of words and looks and gestures in the tiny girl who was then my next-door neighbor, and who is now far away in the shadow of the Himalayas.

      The character of Mr. Danby, whom some of my critics have been kind enough to praise, was suggested by the following passage in the first series of the “Greville Memoirs,” copied in my commonplace-book long ago, when everybody was reading those delightful reminiscences: —

      “Old Creevy — an attorney or barrister — married a widow, who died a few years ago. She had something, he nothing. His wife died, upon which event he was thrown upon the world with about two hundred a year, or less, no home, few connections, a great many acquaintance, a good constitution, and extraordinary spirits. He possesses nothing but his clothes, no property of any sort; he leads a vagrant life, visiting a number of people who are delighted to have him, and sometimes roving about to various places as fancy happens to direct, and staying till he has spent what money he has in his pocket. He has no servant, no home, no creditors; he buys everything as he wants it at the place he is at; he has no ties upon him, and has his time entirely at his own disposal and that of his friends. He is certainly a living proof that a man may be perfectly happy and exceedingly poor, or rather without riches, for he suffers none of the privations of poverty, and enjoys many of the advantages of wealth. I think he is the only man I know in society who possesses nothing.”

      M. E. B.

       LYNDHURST,

       November 1st, 1894.