Peter Grant is twelve, an orphan who sells baked potatoes in the streets and shares a cellar with old Sally Graham, and on the last night of the year he is out in a blizzard with three coppers to show for it. A white-haired gentleman once told him not to trade on Sundays, and Peter has not forgotten. In the second story, Borrowed Feathers, Nettie Clifford is left at home to keep house while her mother and elder sister holiday at Scarborough, until a godmother arrives by cab with a trunk of gowns and an invitation. Ruth Lamb wrote for the religious presses and knew the price of coal and bread. The volume closes with a piece by another Lamb entirely: Charles Lamb's essay A Dissertation upon Roast Pig, from the Essays of Elia. Fifty paintings by Millais and Grimshaw and their contemporaries, from snowbound lanes to hearthside interiors, restore the wintry world of Peter's New Year's Eve.