Christmas Stories for Children

THE CHRISTMAS MASQUERADE*
MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN
On Christmas Eve the Mayor's stately mansion presented a beautiful appearance. There
were rows of different coloured wax candles burning in every window, and beyond them
one could see the chandeliers of gold and crystal blazing with light. The fiddles were
squeaking merrily, and lovely little forms flew past the windows in time to the music.
There were gorgeous carpets laid from the door to the street, and carriages were
constantly arriving and fresh guests tripping over them. They were all children. The
Mayor was giving a Christmas Masquerade tonight to all the children in the city, the
poor as well as the rich. The preparation for this ball had been making an immense
sensation for the last three months. Placards had been up in the most conspicuous points
in the city, and all the daily newspapers had at least a column devoted to it, headed with
"THE MAYOR'S CHRISTMAS MASQUERADE," in very large letters.
The Mayor had promised to defray the expenses of all the poor children whose parents
were unable to do so, and the bills for their costumes were directed to be sent in to him.
Of course there was great excitement among the regular costumers of the city, and they
all resolved to vie with one another in being the most popular, and the best patronized on
this gala occasion. But the placards and the notices had not been out a week before a
new Costumer appeared who cast all the others into the shade directly. He set up his
shop on the corner of one of the principal streets, and hung up his beautiful costumes in
the windows. He was a little fellow, not much bigger than a boy of ten. His cheeks were
as red as roses, and he had on a long curling wig as white as snow. He wore a suit of
crimson velvet knee-breeches, and a little swallow-tailed coat with beautiful golden
buttons. Deep lace ruffles fell over his slender white hands, and he wore elegant knee
buckles of glittering stones. He sat on a high stool behind his counter and served his
customers himself; he kept no clerk.
It did not take the children long to discover what beautiful things he had, and how
superior he was to the other costumers, and they begun to flock to his shop immediately,
from the Mayor's daughter to the poor ragpicker's. The children were to select their own
costumes; the Mayor had stipulated that. It was to be a children's ball in every sense of
the word.
So they decided to be fairies and shepherdesses, and princesses according to their own
fancies; and this new Costumer had charming costumes to suit them.
It was noticeable that, for the most part, the children of the rich, who had always had
everything they desired, would choose the parts of goose-girls and peasants and such
like; and the poor children jumped eagerly at the chance of being princesses or fairies
for a few hours in their miserable lives.
When Christmas Eve came and the children flocked into the Mayor's mansion, whether
it was owing to the Costumer's art, or their own adaptation to the characters they had
chosen, it was wonderful how lifelike their representations were. Those little fairies in
their short skirts of silken gauze, in which golden sparkles appeared as they moved with
their little funny gossamer wings, like butterflies, looked like real fairies. It did not seem
possible, when they floated around to the music, half supported on the tips of their
dainty toes, half by their filmy purple wings, their delicate bodies swaying in time, that
they could be anything but fairies. It seemed absurd to imagine that they were Johnny
Mullens, the washerwoman's son, and Polly Flinders, the charwoman's little girl, and so
on.
The Mayor's daughter, who had chosen the character of a goose-girl, looked so like a
true one that one could hardly dream she ever was anything else. She was, ordinarily, a
slender, dainty little lady rather tall for her age. She now looked very short and stubbed
and brown, just as if she had been accustomed to tend geese in all sorts of weather. It
was so with all the others—the Red Riding-hoods, the princesses, the Bo-Peeps and with
every one of the characters who came to the Mayor's ball; Red Riding-hood looked
round, with big, frightened eyes, all ready to spy the wolf, and carried her little pat of
butter and pot of honey gingerly in her basket; Bo-Peep's eyes looked red with weeping
for the loss of her sheep; and the princesses swept about so grandly in their splendid
brocaded trains, and held their crowned heads so high that people half-believed them to
be true princesses.
But there never was anything like the fun at the Mayor's Christmas ball. The fiddlers
fiddled and fiddled, and the children danced and danced on the beautiful waxed floors.
The Mayor, with hi

Christmas Stories for Children