#MyCOSTrade $ETH

The Gift of the Magi

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That’s all. And of this, sixty cents was in pennies. I had been saving the pennies one and two at a time by denting the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher, until my cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it.

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. Tomorrow will be Christmas.

Now there was nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did. Which instigated a moral reflection that life should be lived in the crying and sneezing and smiling, with sneezing predominating. While the mistress of the home gradually withdrew from stage one to stage two, take a look at the apartment. A furnished flat renting for eight dollars a week. It was not exactly a description of the homeless, but it certainly carried that word, as it was looking for a beggar’s brigade.

In the lower hall was a mailbox that no one could get any mail into, and a button that no human finger could pull out a ring. There was also a card bearing the name 'Mr. James Dillingham Young'.

The 'Dillingham' card had floated in the air during an earlier, more prosperous period, when its possessor was earning thirty dollars a week. Now, when the income had shrunk to twenty dollars, the letters of 'Dillingham' looked blurred, as if they were seriously thinking of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his apartment on the upper floor, he was called 'Jim' and embraced by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, who we had previously been introduced to as Della, warmly. This is marvelous. Della finished her cry and wiped her cheeks with a powder rag. She stood by the window and looked dully at a gray cat walking on a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months.