Stars (At Locheven)Have you walked in the woodsWhen twilight wraps a veil of mistAround the gray-green treesIn early spring?It is then the snow-white trilliumGleam like stars from the carpetOf last year’s leaves:And tall white violets glowLike clouds of nebulæ along the path.And flecked, like points of lightIn the quiet pools of waterAmong the gray-green boles,Are the stars of heaven. Curling and... more...

A young lady, just returned from college, was making a still-hunt in the house for old things—old furniture, old china, and old books. She had a craze for the antique, and the older things were the more precious they were in her eyes. Among other things she found an old scrap-book that her mother and I thought was safe under lock and key. She sat in a sunny place and read it page by page, and, when... more...

CHAPTER I HERO VERSUS GENTLEMAN Miss Fanny Glen's especial detestation was an assumption of authority on the part of the other sex. If there was a being on earth to whom she would not submit, it was to a masterful man; such a man as, if appearances were a criterion, Rhett Sempland at that moment assumed to be. The contrast between the two was amusing, or would have been had not the atmosphere been... more...

PrefacePrefaceThe notes presented in this volume were gathered, as will easily be perceived, a number of years ago and on an expectation not at that time answered by the event, and were then published in the United States. The expectation had been that they should accompany a series of drawings, and they themselves were altogether governed by the pictorial spirit. They made, and they make in appearing... 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...

"Perplex'd in the extreme.""The memory of past favors is like a rainbow, bright, vivid andbeautiful." The professor, sitting before his untasted breakfast, is looking the very picture of dismay. Two letters lie before him; one is in his hand, the other is on the table-cloth. Both are open; but of one, the opening lines—that tell of the death of his old friend—are all he has... more...

PART ONEMARGERY was sitting under the cherry tree with a certain air of expectancy. She seemed to be waiting for something or some one. Willie Jones's head popped over the back fence and Willie Jones himself, a tin pail in one hand, dropped into the Blair yard and made for the cherry tree. But Margery still gazed earnestly, tensely, into nothing. Willie Jones, evidently, was not the object of her... more...

A Little Princess 1 Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares. She sat with her feet tucked under her, and leaned against her father, who held... more...

LITTLE PRESENT. The Squirrel leaps from tree to tree. The Hive doth hold the honey-bee. The pretty Butterfly is seen, When little girls trip o’er the green. The Owl until the evening sleeps. The Serpent on his belly creeps. The Lion roars, the woods resound. The raging Bull tears up the ground. The Raven for his food doth cry. The Eagle soars exceeding high. Whilst the Plowman drives his Plow. Betty... more...

She had been talking of dying only the evening before, with a friend, and had described her own sensations after a long illness when she had been at the point of death. "I suppose," she said, "that I was as nearly gone as any one ever was to come back again. There was no pain in it, only a sense of sinking down, down—through the bed as if nothing could hold me or give me support... more...