I. Some Letters
Paris, October 4.
Harold, how could you send methat story? How could you write it, print it? My own story, that I told you in confidence—if there is such a thing! I am too astounded, too hurt, to write about it. I don’t know what to make of it, or of you. Anne Armitage.
I
The incident I am about to relate was told me in London, last July, by one of my American friends, Mr. John W. Kerley of Syracuse (N.Y.). It seemed to me something very unusual, and I wrote it out at once, as I am accustomed to do in the case of any story that I hear which seems to me to contain somewhat of human truth.
Browne went to the dance feeling genuinely depressed, for the doctor had just warned him that his heart was weak and that he must be exceedingly careful in the matter of exertion.
“Dancing?” he asked, with that assumed lightness some natures affect in the face of a severe shock—the plucky instinct to conceal pain.
“Well—in moderation, perhaps,” hummed the doctor. “Not wildly!“ he added, with a smile that betrayed something more than mere professional sympathy.
The man whose story is here to be told was the wealthiest and most influential person in his parish; his name was Thord Overaas. He appeared in the priest’s study one day, tall and earnest.
“I have gotten a son,” said he, ” and I wish to present him for baptism.”
“What shall his name be?”
“Finn,—after my father.”
“And the sponsors?”
They were mentioned, and proved to be the best men and women of Thord’s relations in the parish.
“Is there anything else?” inquired the priest, and looked up.
We were on our way home from Inishmore, where we had spent two days; Peter O’Flaherty among his relatives—for everyone on the island was kin to him—I among friends who give me a warm welcome when I go to them. The island lies some seventeen miles from the coast. We started on our homeward sail with a fresh westerly wind. Shortly after midday it backed round to the north and grew lighter. At five o’clock we were stealing along very gently through calm water with our mainsail boom out against the shroud. The jib and foresail were drooping in limp folds. An hour later the mainsheet was hanging in the water and the boat drifted with the tide. Peter, crouching in the fore part of the cockpit, hissed through his clenched teeth, which is the way in which he whistles for a wind. He glanced all round the horizon, searching for signs of a breeze. His eyes rested finally on the sun, which lay low among some light, fleecy clouds. He gave it as his opinion that when it reached the point of setting it ”might draw a light air after it from the castward.” For that it appeared we were to wait I shrank from toil with the heavy sweeps. So, I am sure, did Peter, who is a good man in a boat but averse from unnecessary labour. And there was really no need to row. The tide was carrying us homeward, and our position was pleasant enough. Save for the occasional drag of a block against the horse we had achieved unbroken silence and almost perfect peace.
The history of that awful struggle is well known—I have not the intention to record it here, but only to relate some part of what I saw of it; my purpose not instruction, but entertainment.
I was an officer of the staff of a Federal brigade. Chickamauga was not my first battle by many, for although hardly more than a boy in years, I had served at the front from the beginning of the trouble, and had seen enough of war to give me a fair understanding of it. We knew well enough that there was to be a fight: the fact that we did not want one would have told us that, for Bragg always retired when we wanted to fight and fought when we most desired peace. We had manoeuvred him out of Chattanooga, but had not manoeuvred our entire army into it, and he fell back so sullenly that those of us who followed, keeping him actually in sight, were a good deal more concerned about effecting a junction with the rest of our army than topush the pursuit. By the time that Rosecrans had got his three scattered corps together we were a long way from Chattanooga, with our line of communication with it so exposed that Bragg turned to seize it. Chickamauga was a fight for possession of a road.
Act I
“You dear old boy,” said the girl, “I am sure I wish it could be, with all my heart, if I have any heart.”
“I don’t believe you have,” replied the boy gloomily.
“Well, but, Reg, consider; you’ve got no money.”
“I’ve got five thousand pounds. If a man can’t make his way upon that he must be a poor stick.”
“You would go abroad with it and dig, and take your wife with you—to wash and cook.”
Costa, the bear-tamer, was well known all along the Carpathian Mountains; on the Hungarian side of the chain of mountains as well as on the Rumanian side. Of the hundreds of gypsies, roving to and fro between the villages, dancing their bears before inns and on the marketplaces, more than half bought their bears from Costa.
A bear tamed by Costa was worth a fortune. It could dance on all fours and waltz on its hind legs to the sound of a tambourine or the music of a flute, it turned somersaults, could stand on its head, roll a log or an empty barrel, stand at attention and do a thousand other cute things to amuse children and grown-ups.
I
In the daily strenuous life of a great hotel there are periods during which its bewildering activities slacken, and the vast organism seems to be under the influence of an opiate. Such a period recurs after dinner when the guests are preoccupied by the mysterious processes of digestion in the drawing-rooms or smoking-rooms or in the stalls of a theatre. On the evening of thisnocturne the wellknown circular entrance-hall of the Majestic, with its tessellated pavement, its malachite pillars, its Persian rugs, its lounges, and its renowned stuffed bears at the foot of the grand stairway, was for the moment deserted, save by the head hall-porter and the head night-porter and the girl in the bureau. It was a quarter to nine, and the head hall-porter was abdicating his pagoda to the head night-porter, and telling him the necessary secrets of the day. These two lords, before whom the motley panorama of human existence was continually being enrolled, held a portentous confabulation night and morning. They had no illusions; they knew life. Shakespeare himself might have listened to them with advantage.
Written After Three Hours’ Browsing in a New Britannica Set
Picture to yourself an early spring afternoon along the banks of the river Aa, which, rising in the Teutoburger Wald, joins the Werre at Herford and is navigable as far as St. Omer.
Branching bryophytu spread their flat, dorsiventral bodies, closely applied to the sub-stratum on which they grew, and leafy carophyllaces twined their sepals in prodigal profusion, lending a touch of color to the scene. It was clear that nature was in preparation for her estivation.
