Chapter I THE GUILD OF GOSSIPS The Needlework Guild, which met every Thursday at eleven o'clock, on this particular Thursday was meeting with Mrs. Tate. It was the last meeting before adjournment for the summer, and though Mrs. Pryor, the president, had personally requested a large attendance, the attendance was small. In consequence, Mrs. Pryor was displeased. "Mercy, but it's warm in... more...

INTRODUCTION Nature in her ever-constant, ever-changing phases is indispensable to man, his whole existence depends upon her, and she influences him in manifold ways, in mind as well as body. The physical character of a country is reflected in its inhabitants; the one factor of climate alone gives a very different outlook to northerner and southerner. But whereas primitive man, to whom the darkness of... more...

I. Egyptian Looms. HORIZONTAL LOOMS. IN the tomb of Chnem-hotep, at Beni Hasan, there is a wall painting of a horizontal loom with two weavers, women, squatting on either side, and at the right in the background is drawn the figure of the taskmaster. There are also figures represented in the act of spinning, etc. For the present we are concerned with the weaving only. Fig. 1.—Horizontal Loom, Tomb of... more...

I Out of eighty or ninety days that we passed in Switzerland there must have been at least ten that were fair, not counting the forenoons before it began to rain, and the afternoons when it cleared up. They said that it was an unusually rainy autumn, and we could well believe it; yet I suspect that it rains a good deal in that little corner of the Canton Vaud even when the autumn is only usually rainy.... more...

THE PROLOGUE. These two captives (pointing to PHILOCRATES and TYNDARUS), whom you see standing here, are standing here because—they are both [1] standing, and are not sitting. That I am saying this truly, you are my witnesses. The old man, who lives here (pointing to HEGIO's house), is Hegio—his father (pointing to TYNDARUS). But under what circumstances he is the slave of his own father, that... more...

"In the spring of 1840, the attention of the New York police was attracted by the many cases of well-known men found drowned in the various waters surrounding the lower portion of our great city. Among these may be mentioned the name of Elwood Henderson, the noted tea merchant, whose remains were washed ashore at Redhook Point; and of Christopher Bigelow, who was picked up off Governor's... more...

CHAPTER I THE AUNTS 'Child, be mother to this child.'—E. B. BROWNING.   t was seven o'clock on an autumn morning nearly a hundred years ago. A misty October morning, when the meadows looked grey with the heavy dew, and the sky was only just beginning to show pale blue through the haze which veiled it. There was a certain little hamlet, just a few cottages clustered together beside a... more...

THROUGH THE FIELDS The sunniest place upon the hillside was the little pasture in which the old mare was grazing, moving slowly about and nipping at the short grass as if that which lay directly under her nose could not be nearly as choice as that which she could obtain by constant perambulation. A blithe voice awoke the echoes with a fragment of an old song. The mare looked up and gave a welcoming... more...

AN INLAND VOYAGE The morning train from Benton, rumbling and puffing along its way through outlying farmland, and sending its billows of smoke like sea rollers across the pastures, drew up, ten miles from the city, at a little station that overlooked a pond, lying clear and sparkling at the base of some low, wooded hills. An old-fashioned, weather-beaten house, adjacent the station, and displaying a... more...

CHAPTER I Professor Spence sat upon an upturned keg—and shivered. No one had told him that there might be fog and he had not happened to think of it for himself. Still, fog in a coast city at that time of the year was not an unreasonable happening and the professor was a reasonable man. It wasn't the fog he blamed so much as the swiftness of its arrival. Fifteen minutes ago the world had been an... more...