Sealed Orders Author:Elizabeth Stuart Phelps General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1879 Original Publisher: Houghton, Osgood and Company Subjects: Fiction / General Fiction / Classics Fiction / Literary Fiction / Short Stories Juvenile Fiction / General Literary Criticism / American / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the o... more »riginal. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: OLD MOTHER GOOSE. When Thamre consented to sing for the citizens of Hav- ermash, last year, nobody was more surprised than the citizens of Havermash themselves. It was characteristic of Havermash to have attempted it. Nothing is too good for Havermashers. Were St. Cecilia prima donna for a season, it would appear to them quite natural to seek her services. Have they not a brown-stone post-office and a senator, a street railway and a county jail, a local newspaper, an author (the public need scarcely be reminded of the " Havermash Hand-Organ : a Tale of Love and Poverty "), and a shoe and leather trade ? Transcending all, is not their city charter two years old ? When the Happy Home Handel Association, headed by little Joe Havermash (grandson of the original shoe and leather man, whose wooden cobbler's shop occupied the site of the present post-office in 1793), took upon itself the performance of an " oratorio " last Christmas eve, " We will have Thamre," said Joe, serenely. Still, when Joe came home from Boston, breathless and radiant, one night early in the season, with Thamre's tiny contract (she wrote it on a card, he said, with her glove on, just in going out, and the card was as sweet now -- see ! -- as the glove, and the glove had just the smell of one English violet, no more) to sing in the stone post-office at eight o'clock on Christmas eve, on such and such conditions (simple eno...« less