...buy a present for her beloved husband, Jim. And the next day is Christmas. Faced with such a situation, Della promptly bursts into tears on the couch, which gives the narrator the opportunity to tell us a bit more about the situation of Jim and Della. The short of it is they live in a shabby flat and they're poor. But they love each other. Once Della's recovered herself, she goes to a mirror to let down her hair and examine it. Della's beautiful, brown, knee-length hair is one of the two great treasures of the poor couple. The other is Jim's gold watch. Her hair examined, Della puts it back up, sheds a tear, and bundles up to head out into the cold. She leaves the flat and walks to Madame Sofronie's hair goods shop, where she sells her hair for twenty bucks. Now she has $21.87 cents. With her new funds, Della is able to find Jim the perfect present: an elegant platinum watch chain for his watch. It's $21, and she buys it. Excited by her gift, Della returns home and tries to make her now-short hair presentable (with a curling iron). She's not convinced Jim will approve, but she did what she had to do to get him a good present. When she finishes with her hair, she gets to work preparing coffee and dinner. Jim arrives at 7pm to find Della waiting by the door and stares fixedly at her, not able to understand that Della's hair is gone. Della can't understand quite what his reaction means. After a little while, Jim snaps out of it and gives Della her present, explaining...
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...UNIT ONE THE GIFT OF THE MAGI By O. Henry I. Introduction O. Henry, whose real name was William Sydney Porter (1867 – 1910), is famous chiefly for his short stories. These stories are usually set amid the poorer working – class life of the cities, the characters being ordinary simple people with their daily living to earn, a life which O.Henry knew well. But the stories are not mere realistic sketches. O. Henry had both the craftsmanship of a writer and the compassion of a man. As a writer he constructs a clever plot with an unforeseen and an unexpected climax suddenly released so that the reader is kept guessing till the last moment what the outcome is to be. As a man he saw the drab surrounding and narrow circumstances which he described, but he lit them with sympathy and humour. Though in most of his stories humour seems to be predominant, yet the sympathy is always there, so the humour is warmed and enriched by its humanity. The story that follows, however, is an example of the reverse process. There are more tears in it than laughter. Yet laughter is implied and one might say that because of it the tears are touched with a more tender compassion. II. Text One dollar and eighty – seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two and a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One...
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...Jojo Moyes a fter you Contents CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER TWELVE CHAPTER THIRTEEN CHAPTER FOURTEEN CHAPTER FIFTEEN CHAPTER SIXTEEN CHAPTER SEVENTEEN CHAPTER EIGHTEEN CHAPTER NINETEEN CHAPTER TWENTY CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE CHAPTER THIRTY ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FOLLOW PENGUIN For my grandmother, Betty McKee chapter one The big man at the end of the bar is sweating. He holds his head low over his double Scotch, but every few minutes he glances up and out, behind him, towards the door. A fine sheen of perspiration glistens under the strip-lights. He lets out a long, shaky breath, disguised as a sigh, and turns back to his drink. ‘Hey. Excuse me?’ I look up from polishing glasses. ‘Can I get another one here?’ I want to tell him it’s really not a good idea, it won’t help, it might even put him over the limit. But he’s a big guy and it’s fifteen minutes till closing time and, according to company guidelines, I have no reason to tell him no, so I walk over, take his glass and hold it up to the optic. He nods at the bottle. ‘Double,’ he says, and slides a fat hand down his damp face. ‘That’ll be seven pounds twenty, please.’ It’s a quarter to eleven on a Tuesday night and the Shamrock and Clover, East City...
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...___________________________ LIVING HISTORY Hillary Rodham Clinton Simon & Schuster New York • London • Toronto • Sydney • Singapore To my parents, my husband, my daughter and all the good souls around the world whose inspiration, prayers, support and love blessed my heart and sustained me in the years of living history. AUTHOR’S NOTE In 1959, I wrote my autobiography for an assignment in sixth grade. In twenty-nine pages, most half-filled with earnest scrawl, I described my parents, brothers, pets, house, hobbies, school, sports and plans for the future. Forty-two years later, I began writing another memoir, this one about the eight years I spent in the White House living history with Bill Clinton. I quickly realized that I couldn’t explain my life as First Lady without going back to the beginning―how I became the woman I was that first day I walked into the White House on January 20, 1993, to take on a new role and experiences that would test and transform me in unexpected ways. By the time I crossed the threshold of the White House, I had been shaped by my family upbringing, education, religious faith and all that I had learned before―as the daughter of a staunch conservative father and a more liberal mother, a student activist, an advocate for children, a lawyer, Bill’s wife and Chelsea’s mom. For each chapter, there were more ideas I wanted to discuss than space allowed; more people to include than could be named; more places visited than could be described. If I mentioned...
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