The Christmas Miracle and The Riddle of The Rocks (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781835522899)

1. 'The Christmas Miracle' is a short story written by Charles Egbert Craddock, the pen name of Mary Noailles Murfree. The story follows a man named Jubal Kennedy, who was of the temperament impervious to spiritual subtleties, fain to reach conclusions with the line and rule of mathematical demonstration.

Thus, all unreceptive, he looked through the mountain gap, as through some stupendous gateway, on the splendors of autumn; the vast landscape glamorous in a transparent amethystine haze; the foliage of the dense primeval wilderness in the October richness of red and russet; the "hunter's moon," a full sphere of illuminated pearl, high in the blue east while yet the dull vermilion sun swung westering above the massive purple heights.

He knew how the sap was sinking; that the growths of the year had now failed; presently all would be shrouded in snow, but only to rise again in the reassurance of vernal quickening, to glow anew in the fullness of bloom, to attain eventually the perfection of fruition.

And still he was deaf to the reiterated analogy of death, and blind to the immanent obvious prophecy of resurrection and the life to come.

2. The Riddle of The Rocks is an entertaining tale about two Tennessee families feuding over land and religion.

Mary Noailles Murfree (1850-1922) was an American fiction writer of novels and short stories who wrote under the pen name Charles Egbert Craddock. Being lame from childhood, she turned to reading the novels of Walter Scott and George Eliot.

In the 1870's she had begun writing stories for Appleton's Journal under the penname of "Charles Egbert Craddock" and by 1878 she was contributing to the Atlantic Monthly.

She is considered by many to be Appalachia's first significant female writer and her work a necessity for the study of Appalachian literature, although a number of characters in her work reinforce negative stereotypes about the region.

She has been favorably compared to Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett, creating post-Civil War American local-color literature.