In Rochester, Richard Watts’s 1579 charity still gives six poor travellers a night’s lodging and fourpence, and on Christmas Eve the narrator makes himself the seventh and stands them all a supper. Over the fire he tells of Richard Doubledick, a dissolute private who becomes a hero of the Napoleonic wars under an officer he can never forget.
One of Dickens’s Christmas numbers, short and moving, for a December evening. Download the free EPUB.