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<p>Always have I been on the lookout for the Impossible, always on the trail of the Unattainable. Someday, perhaps, I shall find a sleeping-car with a name that means something, an intelligent West Indian hallboy in a New York apartment building, a boardinghouse whose inmates occasionally smile, a man born in Manhattan, a 60-cent <span xml:lang="fr">table d’hôte</span> that serves six oysters the portion instead of four, a Southerner who leaves you in doubt as to his birthplace longer than ten minutes after the introduction, and myself writing a Christmas story. But that will happen ten days after the millennium, and as the millennium is to be magazineless—</p>
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<p>Every June I am asked to write a Christmas story. Every August I promise, vow, insist, swear that it shall be ready in two weeks. And every November I protest that I am sorry, but I couldn’t think of anything new and—well, next year, sure. It was so last year and the year before. It was so this year. And I said to myself that next year it would not be so. I would spend Christmas Eve looking about me. I would get copy from a cop, material from a mater, plot from a messenger boy. And behold! it was Christmas Eve.</p>
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<p>It was Christmas Eve, to give a synopsis of preceding chapters. I will fine-toothcomb the town for an idea next summer, quoth I. And so I walked, rode and taxi-cabbed. I spoke to waiters, subway guards, chauffeurs and newsboys and tried to draw from them some bit of life, some experience that might make a story, a Christmas story, <abbr epub:type="z3998:initialism">C.O.D.</abbr>, at twenty cents a word. But there was not a syllable in the silly bunch, not a comma in the comatose lot.</p>
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<p>And then I wandered into Grand Street and I saw that which made me instinctively clutch my fountain pen. A man, unswept, unmoneyed and unstrung, was about to hurl a brick into a pawnbroker’s window. His arm was raised and he was as deliberate as <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Tri-Digital Brown of Chicago trying to lessen the average of <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> John P. Hanswagner of Pittsburgh. (I always spell Pittsburgh with the final “h”; it’s a final h of a town.)</p>
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<p>And then I wandered into Grand Street and I saw that which made me instinctively clutch my fountain pen. A man, unswept, unmoneyed and unstrung, was about to hurl a brick into a pawnbroker’s window. His arm was raised and he was as deliberate as <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Tri-Digital Brown of Chicago trying to lessen the average of <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> John P. Hanswagner of Pittsburgh. (I always spell Pittsburgh with the final <i epub:type="z3998:grapheme">h</i>; it’s a final <i epub:type="z3998:grapheme">h</i> of a town.)</p>
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<p>“Here, Bill,” I said, “I wouldn’t do that.”</p>
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<p>“Oh, yes, you would,” he responded.</p>
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<p>Which was my chance. “Let us withdraw to yonder inn,” I said, like a head chorus-man whose object is to “get ’em off,” “and we can discuss things.”</p>
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