Chapter I WHICH INTRODUCES HER “Gypsy Breynton. Hon. Gypsy Breynton, Esq., M. A., D. D., LL. D., &c., &c. Gypsy Breynton, R. R.” Tom was very proud of his handwriting. It was black and business-like, round and rolling and readable, and drowned in a deluge of hair-line flourishes, with little black curves in the middle of them. It had been acquired in the book-keeping class of Yorkbury... more...

The Age of the Countess Matilda of Tuscany The eleventh century, which culminated in the religious fervor of the First Crusade, must not on that account be considered as an age of unexampled piety and devotion. Good men there were and true, and women of great intellectual and moral force, but it cannot be said that the time was characterized by any deep and sincere religious feeling which showed itself... more...

CHAPTER I BILLY WRITES A LETTER Billy Neilson was eighteen years old when the aunt, who had brought her up from babyhood, died. Miss Benton's death left Billy quite alone in the world—alone, and peculiarly forlorn. To Mr. James Harding, of Harding & Harding, who had charge of Billy's not inconsiderable property, the girl poured out her heart in all its loneliness two days after the... more...

CHAPTER I I MAKE NO EFFORT TO DEFEND MYSELF I am quite sure it was my Uncle Rilas who said that I was a fool. If memory serves me well he relieved himself of that conviction in the presence of my mother—whose brother he was—at a time when I was least competent to acknowledge his wisdom and most arrogant in asserting my own. I was a freshman in college: a fact—or condition, perhaps,—which should... more...

CHAPTER I. ANCESTRY—BIRTH—EARLY EDUCATION—A CLERK IN A GROCERY STORE—APPOINTMENT—MONROE SHOES—JOURNEY TO WEST POINT—HAZING —A FISTICUFF BATTLE—SUSPENDED—RETURNS TO CLERKSHIP—GRADUATION. My parents, John and Mary Sheridan, came to America in 1830, having been induced by the representations of my father's uncle, Thomas Gainor, then living in Albany, N. Y., to try their fortunes... more...

A Preface With Some Revised Ideas IT HAS BEEN ten years since I wrote the prefatory "Declaration" to this now enlarged and altered book. Not to my generation alone have many things receded during that decade. To the intelligent young as well as to the intelligent elderly, efforts in the present atmosphere to opiate the public with mere pictures of frontier enterprise have a ghastly unreality.... more...

I. Let us visit Switzerland and look around us in the glorious country of mountains, where the forest rises out of steep rocky walls; let us ascend to the dazzling snow-fields, and thence descend to the green plains, where the rivulets and brooks hasten away, foaming up, as if they feared not to vanish, as they reached the sea. The sun beams upon the deep valley, it burns also upon the heavy masses of... more...

CHAPTER I SOME COMPARISONS "…and so at noon with Sir Thomas Allen, and Sir Edward Scott and Lord Carlingford, to the Spanish Ambassador's, where I dined the first time…. And here was an Oxford scholar, in a Doctor of Laws' gowne…. And by and by he and I to talk; and the company very merry at my defending Cambridge against Oxford."—PEPYS' Diary (May 5, 1669). In writing of... more...

AN ARCTIC JOURNAL. The evils attendant on a hurried outfit and departure, as is the usual man-of-war custom, were in no wise mitigated in the case of the Royal Naval Expedition, fitted out at Woolwich, in 1850, to search for Sir John Franklin's Squadron; and a general feeling of joy at our departure prevailed amongst us, when, one fine morning, we broke ground from Greenhithe. The... more...

The symptoms of cutaneous disease may be objective, subjective or both; and in some diseases, also, there may be systemic disturbance. What do you mean by objective symptoms? Those symptoms visible to the eye or touch. What do you understand by subjective symptoms? Those which relate to sensation, such as itching, tingling, burning, pain, tenderness, heat, anæsthesia, and hyperæsthesia. What do you... more...