Family Life Books

Chapter I The Shadow of Change "Harvest is ended and summer is gone," quoted Anne Shirley, gazing across the shorn fields dreamily. She and Diana Barry had been picking apples in the Green Gables orchard, but were now resting from their labors in a sunny corner, where airy fleets of thistledown drifted by on the wings of a wind that was still summer-sweet with the incense of ferns in the... more...

I An Irate Neighbor A tall, slim girl, "half-past sixteen," with serious gray eyes and hair which her friends called auburn, had sat down on the broad red sandstone doorstep of a Prince Edward Island farmhouse one ripe afternoon in August, firmly resolved to construe so many lines of Virgil. But an August afternoon, with blue hazes scarfing the harvest slopes, little winds whispering elfishly... more...

INTRODUCTION If any of James Stephens' books might be thought to have need of an Introduction it would be the delightful story that is called "Mary, Mary" on one side of the Atlantic Ocean and "The Charwoman's Daughter" on the other. It was written in 1910, when the author was known as the poet of "Insurrections" and the writer of a few of the mordant studies that... more...

CHAPTER I.BESSIE AND I AND BESSIE’S MOTHER. “Why, Charlie, you sha’n’t talk so about my mother! I won’t allow it.” “It does sound a little rough, my dear; but I can’t help it. She does exasperate me so. She doesn’t show a proper deference for your husband, my dear. We are married now, and she ought to give up her objections to me. I can’t be expected to place myself in her leading... more...

I. Mrs. Dewsbury's lawn was held by those who knew it the loveliest in Surrey. The smooth and springy sward that stretched in front of the house was all composed of a tiny yellow clover. It gave beneath the foot like the pile on velvet. One's gaze looked forth from it upon the endless middle distances of the oak-clad Weald, with the uncertain blue line of the South Downs in the background.... more...

CHAPTER ONE However archaic and conventional it may sound, it is the literal fact that young Scott Brenton was led into the ministry by the prayer of his widowed mother. Furthermore, the prayer was not made to him, but offered in secret and in all sincerity at the Throne of Grace. "Oh, my dearest Lord and Master," she prayed, at her evening devotions upon her knees and with her work-roughened... more...

Along a pleasant Kentucky road that followed nature rather than art in its curves and meanderings, straying beside a brook awhile before it decided to cross, lingering in cool, leafy hollows, climbing a sudden little hill to take a look out over the rolling countryside—along this road a single-footing mare went steadily, carrying a woman who rode cross-saddle, with a large china vase tucked under one... more...

APRON-STRINGS CHAPTER I "I tell you, there's something funny about it, Steve,—having the wedding out on that scrap of lawn." It was the florist who was speaking. He was a little man, with a brown beard that lent him a professional air. He gave a jerk of the head toward the high bay-window of the Rectory drawing-room, set down his basket of smilax on the well-cared-for Brussels that,... more...

EDITH TRIES TO EXPLAIN. “I do think Edith is the queerest girl I ever saw in all my life!” said Marty Ashford. “Don't jump up and down behind my chair that way, Marty,” said her mother; “you shake me so that I can scarcely hold my needle. What does Edith do that is so queer?” “Oh, she's always putting ten into things.” “Putting ten into things?” “Yes'm. I mean when... more...

PROLOGUE I never met Gabrielle Hewish. I suppose I should really call her by that name, for her marriage took the colour out of it as surely as if she had entered a nunnery, and adopted the frigid and sisterly label of some female saint. Nobody had ever heard of her husband before she married him, and nobody ever heard of Gabrielle afterwards, except those who were acquainted with the story of Arthur... more...