Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking

Book excerpt: "Christmas Classics" is proud to present you a carefully selected range of fiction and prose for the most beautiful time of the year. Besides best-known classics we also offer a huge variety of out-of-print books and titles long forgotten. You can spot them easily by the red book cover and the golden bells in the middle. A plantation below the city is the setting for a climax in "Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking." By means of a freight-car, Dick arrives in the "big, almsgiving, long-suffering city of the South, the cold weather paradise of tramps." After a cautious survey that includes the levee "pimpled with dark bulks of merchandise," the long line of Algiers across the river, the tugs, the ferries and the Italian luggers, Dick climbs warily down and starts, whistling, toward Lafayette Square to meet a pal. But a friendly policeman warns Dick of a new and inhospitable city ordinance, and he departs hastily for the open road. A stall keeper in the French Market gives him breakfast, and he is almost happy until Chalmette with its "vast and bewildering industry" frightens him and drives him along a country road hemmed in on one side by the high green levee and on the other by a mysterious, frog-haunted, mosquito infested marsh ...