Christmas Eve - “A Burglar's Christmas”
The exposition of “A Burglar’s Christmas” grants a standard Christmas setting: “Two very shabby looking young men stood at the corner of Prairie Avenue and Eightieth Street, looking despondently at the carriages that whirled by. It was Christmas Eve, and the streets were full of vehicles; florists' wagons, grocers' carts and carriages. The streets were in that half-liquid, half-congealed condition peculiar to the streets of Chicago at that season of the year. The swift wheels that spun by sometimes threw the slush of mud and snow over the two young men who were talking on the corner.” The goings-on in the streets designate that people are shopping and priming themselves for Christmas. Also, the incidence of snow supplements the distinctive Christmas scene; snow does not daunt shoppers. However, the ‘shabby men’s’ dejection deduces that they are in an impasse, so their Christmas may not be emphatically jolly.
The Imagery of Percy Bixby’s Bookkeeping - “The Bookkeeper's Wife”
Cather expands, “He loved his desk, he loved his books, which had no handwriting in them but his own. He never thought of resenting the fact that he had written away in those books the good red years between twenty-one and twenty-seven. He would have hated to let any one else put so much as a pen-scratch in them. He liked all the boys about the office; his desk, worn smooth by the sleeves of his alpaca coat; his rulers and inks and pens and calendars. He had a great pride in working economics, and he always got so far ahead when supplies were distributed that he had drawers full of pencils and pens and rubber bands against a rainy day.” This imagery renders Percy Bixby a workhorse who unreservedly bestows his lifecycle to bookkeeping. Accordingly, he is in custody of all the bookkeeping chronicles at the organization. Apart from fraud propensities, Percy would pass as an enthusiastic professional who accomplishes his answerability of shielding the company through remarkable and steadfast bookkeeping. However, his bizarre fanaticism with bookkeeping hints at the measured prevarications that he would not aspire to be excavated should other workforces be allotted the bookkeeping onuses.
