Produced by Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net A NAPA CHRISTCHILD. --AND-- BENICIA'S LETTERS. BY CHARLES A. GUNNISON PRESS OF COMMERCIAL PUBLISHING COMPANY. TO THE MOTHER AND SISTERS OF EDOUARD STOLTERFOHT, This Christmas book is offered, to keep in memory sunny winter days, spent in Rostock, Hohen Niendorf bei Kroepelin, and Gross Kussewitz, and with the added hope that Poppendorf bei Bentwish will not forget that I wrote in the house-book-- You have a gentle cure for parting's pain; It is your German word Aufwiederseh'n. These are just old-fashioned Christmas tales, to be read before an open fire, with a heart full of charity for me. There is no modern realism in them, for every word is a lie, the telling of which has given me the greatest pleasure. I have also stolen a quotation from Hawthorne, which is the best thing in the book, and last I have had the exquisite joy of bloodless murder in killing one of my people. Thus, you see, I need your charity truly, for I have broken deliberately, for your entertainment, Three out of a possible Ten. CHARLES A. GUNNISON, In the Embarcadero Rd. Palo Alto, Santa Clara. _Christmas, 1896._ [Illustration: Scroll] A Napa Christchild. I. An evening sky, broken by wandering clouds, which hastening onward toward the north, bear their rich gifts of longed-for rain to the brown meadows, filling the heavens from east to west with graceful lines and swelling bosoms, save, just at the horizon where the sun descended paints a broad, lurid streak of crimson, glowing amid the deepening shadows, a coal in dead, gray ashes. Darker grows the streak, as a stain of blood, while the clouds about it now assume a purple tinge with gloomier shadings; suddenly in the centre of the lurid field starts out as if that moment born to Earth, with clear, silver light, the Evening Star. The colour slowly fades till all is dead and ashy, and the silver star drops down below the purpled hills, leaving for a moment a soft, trembling twilight; the dense clouds then rolling in between, blot out the last sign of departed day and night is come.