| | 21 | Author: | Phillips, David Graham, 1867-1911 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Grain of Dust.  | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | INTO the offices of Lockyer, Sanders, Benchley,
Lockyer & Norman, corporation lawyers, there drifted
on a December afternoon a girl in search of work at
stenography and typewriting. The firm was about the
most important and most famous — radical orators often
said infamous — in New York. The girl seemed, at a
glance, about as unimportant and obscure an atom as
the city hid in its vast ferment. She was blonde — tawny
hair, fair skin, blue eyes. Aside from this hardly
conclusive mark of identity there was nothing positive,
nothing definite, about her. She was neither tall nor
short, neither fat nor thin, neither grave nor gay. She
gave the impression of a young person of the feminine
gender — that, and nothing more. She was plainly
dressed, like thousands of other girls, in darkish blue
jacket and skirt and white shirt waist. Her boots and
gloves were neat, her hair simply and well arranged.
Perhaps in these respects — in neatness and taste — she
did excel the average, which is depressingly low. But
in a city where more or less strikingly pretty women,
bent upon being seen, are as plentiful as the blackberries
of Kentucky's July — in New York no one would
have given her a second look, this quiet young woman
screened in an atmosphere of self-effacement. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 22 | Author: | Phillips, David Graham, 1867-1911 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Price She Paid. | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | HENRY GOWER was dead at sixty-one—the end of
a lifelong fraud which never had been suspected, and
never would be. With the world, with his acquaintances
and neighbors, with his wife and son and
daughter, he passed as a generous, warm-hearted,
good-natured man, ready at all times to do anything
to help anybody, incapable of envy or hatred or
meanness. In fact, not once in all his days had he ever
thought or done a single thing except for his own
comfort. Like all intensely selfish people who are wise,
he was cheerful and amiable, because that was the
way to be healthy and happy and to have those around
one agreeable and in the mood to do what one wished
them to do. He told people, not the truth, not the
unpleasant thing that might help them, but what they
wished to hear. His family lived in luxurious comfort
only because he himself was fond of luxurious comfort.
His wife and his daughter dressed fashionably and
went about and entertained in the fashionable,
expensive way only because that was the sort of life
that gratified his vanity. He lived to get what he
wanted; he got it every day and every hour of a life
into which no rain ever fell; he died, honored, respected,
beloved, and lamented. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 24 | Author: | Romeyn, Henry | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | 'Little Africa': The Last Slave Cargo Landed in the United States | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Among the passengers of the "Roger B. Taney," Captain
Timothy Meaher, plying between Mobile and Montgomery, Ala. in
April, 1858, were a number of Northern gentlemen returning to their
homes after a winter spent in the South. The trip occupied several
days, and as might have been expected, the slavery question was a
fruitful theme of discussion. Captain Meaher, though born in
Gardiner, Maine, had removed, when a mere lad, to the Gulf States,
and accumulated quite a fortune for those days; a large portion of
which was in "chattels" employed on his half dozen steamboats, or
on cotton plantations in the interior of the state, and in lumbering
among the pines and cypress lands near the coast. Of course he was
a defender of "the institution," and, in reply to the expressed belief
of one of his passengers that "with the supply by importation from
Africa cut off and any further spread in the Territories denied, the
thing was doomed," he declared that, despite the stringent measures
taken by most of the civilized powers to crush out the over-sea
traffic, it could be still carried on successfully. In response to the
disbelief expressed by his opponent, he offered to wager any
amount of money that he would "import a cargo in less than two
years, and no one be hanged for it." | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 38 | Author: | Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Innocents Abroad | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | FOR months the great pleasure excursion
to Europe and the Holy Land was chatted about in the newspapers everywhere
in America and discussed at countless firesides. It was a novelty in the
way of excursions — its like had not been thought of before, and it
compelled that interest which attractive novelties always command. It was
to be a picnic on a gigantic scale. The participants in it, instead of
freighting an ungainly steam ferry-boat with youth and beauty and pies and
doughnuts, and paddling up some obscure creek to disembark upon a grassy
lawn and wear themselves out with a long summer day's laborious frolicking
under the impression that it was fun, were to sail away in a great
steamship with flags flying and cannon pealing, and take a royal holiday
beyond the broad ocean in many a strange clime and in many a land renowned
in history! They were to sail for months over the breezy Atlantic and the
sunny Mediterranean; they were to scamper about the decks by day, filling
the ship with shouts and laughter — or read novels and poetry in the shade
of the smokestacks, or watch for the jelly-fish and the nautilus over the
side, and the shark, the whale, and other strange monsters of the deep;
and at night they were to dance in the open air, on the upper deck, in the
midst of a ballroom that stretched from horizon to horizon, and was domed
by the bending heavens and lighted by no meaner lamps than the stars and
the magnificent moon-dance, and promenade, and smoke, and sing, and make
love, and search the skies for constellations that never associate with
the "Big Dipper" they
were so tired of; and they were to see the ships of twenty
navies — the customs and costumes of twenty curious
peoples — the great cities of half a world — they were to
hob-nob with nobility and hold friendly converse with kings and
princes, grand moguls, and the anointed lords of mighty empires! It
was a brave conception; it was the offspring of a most ingenious
brain. It was well advertised, but it hardly needed it: the bold
originality, the extraordinary character, the seductive nature, and
the vastness of the enterprise provoked comment everywhere and
advertised it in every household in the land. Who could read the
program of the excursion without longing to make one of the party? I
will insert it here. It is almost as good as a map. As a text for
this book, nothing could be better: | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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