It was the evening before Christmas. Great big snowflakes were falling, carpeting the pavements. A little girl, bare-headed and barefoot, was out walking in the cold.
Her mother had given her shoes – but they’d been too big for her and she’d lost them crossing the street.
Then a boy had run off with them… Her feet ached with the cold and her hands were all red and numb. But the poor little girl didn’t dare go home.
She hadn’t sold even one box of matches – not one. Her father would beat her for sure. The icy wind pinched at her cheeks and whirled around her neck.Exhausted and chilled to the bone, she found what shelter she could against a wall at the corner of the street.
She was so cold, poor girl. If she could just strike one match at least she could warm her fingers a little! "Just one", she thought, "daddy won’t even notice".
So she took a match from its box and struck it. The little girl cupped her hands round it and for a moment, it seemed as if she was sitting in front of an iron stove with a fine blaze crackling away inside.
She would have stretched out her legs to heat them, but suddenly, the stove disappeared.
The match had gone out.