The Steadfast Tin Soldier

A boy received a box of twenty-five tin soldiers for his birthday. All were the same except one, who had only one leg because the tin had run out. Even so, he stood just as firmly as the rest. On the table stood a paper castle, and in its doorway a little paper ballerina standing on one leg. The soldier thought she was just like him, and he loved her at once.

A jealous jack-in-the-box warned him away, and the next morning the soldier fell from the window ledge into the street. Two boys put him in a paper boat and sent him sailing down the gutter, into a dark drain where a rat demanded his passport, and out into a canal, where a fish swallowed him whole. Through it all he stood straight, shouldered his gun, and never cried out.

The fish was caught and sold, and when the cook cut it open, there was the tin soldier, back in the very same house. He saw the ballerina again. But a child tossed him into the stove, and a breeze blew the ballerina in after him. In the morning the maid found only a little tin heart in the ashes, and the ballerina’s spangle, burned black.