The Coal That Kept Burning

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The story

The governess tells of a lump of coal left in a Victorian stocking on Christmas morning, which the child is told to keep in the grate. It burns for years without going out, and the family grows quietly richer.

How it begins

I was engaged in the autumn of the year eighteen seventy-one to instruct the two daughters of Mr. Edmund Harrow, a dealer in shipping and insurance, in a tall grey house on Wimbledon Park Road. I mention the house at once because I have since been asked, by more than one unkind person, why I did not leave it, and the answer is that I did not understand until it was far too late that a house can be a creature with its own appetite. The family was prosperous in the way that makes a governess grateful and a little wary. There were silver candlesticks in every room, a piano…