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UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875[X]
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University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 (34)
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1Author:  Duganne A. J. H. (Augustine Joseph Hickey) 1823-1884Add
 Title:  Bianca, or, The star of the valley  
 Published:  2001 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: DUSK was deepening over the Alpine summits, and huge shadows stalked slowly downward, broadening gloomily through the valleys. All nature was sinking into the sealed quiet of a winter's night, only to be broken, during the long hours, by the rumbling thunders of shifting fields of snow in the passes and declivities of the mountains, or perchance the sudden rushing crash of an avalanchine slide of gathered ice, bearing terror and destruction to the slumbering villages below.
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2Author:  Duganne A. J. H. (Augustine Joseph Hickey) 1823-1884Add
 Title:  The Prince Corsair, or, The three brothers of Guzan  
 Published:  2001 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
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3Author:  Duganne A. J. H. (Augustine Joseph Hickey) 1823-1884Add
 Title:  The tenant-house, or,, Embers from poverty's hearthstone  
 Published:  2001 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: WHEN a stranger, under guidance and protection of police, or a home missionary, fearlessly breaking bread with outcasts, penetrates some gloomy court or narrow alley in the great Christian city of New York, he beholds destitution and squalor of most repulsive feature: he discovers tottering buildings crowded with sickly and depraved human beings; stalwart, malign-looking men, glancing furtively at every passer-by; brazen-browed women, with foul words upon their reeking lips; children of impure thoughts and actions, leering with wicked precocity. When he enters the wretched abiding-places of these unhappy people, he may find, amid associations of vice and uncleanness, many suffering and patient souls bearing earthly martyrdom with serene trust in their Heavenly Father, and plucking, even out of their “ugly and venomous” adversity, the “jewel” of immortal peace. Such struggling ones do not dwell long in the darkness and dolor of their probation; for the celestial ladders, let down from Mercy's throne, rest quite as often upon the black pavement of a tenant-court as amid the flowers that tesselate a palace garden; and up, unceasingly, on the shining rounds, glide disenthralled spirits of the poor and lowly watchers for their Lord. “Your letter was received yesterday, and I have spent the hours since in weeping and prayer. I have prayed for you, dear Charles! with my heart sobbing, well-nigh to break. O could I ever dream that you would leave me for another? But I must not chide you—God knows how I love you, dearest—I would lay down my life for you cheerfully, without a murmur. But it is a hard sacrifice you require of me—to give you up to another woman, Charles! when you have sworn to love no other one but your Margaret. You tell me you do not love the lady—that you will marry her only for your worldly prospeets! O Charles! I feel this is all wrong; but, alas! what dare I say to you? I am poor—without fortune but my deep love—God knows, I would resign a throne for your affection, if I were a queen, instead of a portionless girl. Charles! what was it that you said?—O Heaven! did I understand your meaning?—that your love for me would remain unchanged, and we should be happy after your marriage! After your marriage, Charles! Do you not know me better? Do you think I would consent to do wrong, even of my great love for you? No, Charles! after your marriage, we must never meet more! Beloved, bear with me—it is the last time I shall annoy you. You will wed the lady, Charles! Do not wrong her trust!— be kind to her when she becomes your—wife! make her happy! love her—and forget me! I shall not live a great while, dear Charles; for my heart will break, in thinking of the past, and of my hopes, all, all withered. Farewell, dearest! I submit to your wishes, but I must never see you after you are another's. Adieu, Charles!— for the last time, my Charles! God bless and protect you! Dear, dear Charles — husband!—I resign you. Farewell, forever! “My dearest Rebecca,”—so the note ran—“I am thinking of you by day, dreaming of you at night, adoring you always. I have much to tell you, sweet one, and must see you to-day. Fail not to meet me, at the usual hour, at our trysting-place, darling of my soul.
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4Author:  Eggleston Edward 1837-1902Add
 Title:  The Hoosier school-master  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: “WANT to be a school-master, do you? You? Well, what would you do in Flat Crick deestrick, I'd like to know? Why, the boys have driv off the last two, and licked the one afore them like blazes. You might teach a summer school, when nothin' but children come. But I 'low it takes a right smart man to be school-master in Flat Crick in the winter. They'd pitch you out of doors, sonny, neck and heels, afore Christmas.” “Dear Sir: Anybody who can do so good a thing as you did for our Shocky, can not be bad. I hope you will forgive me. All the appearances in the world, and all that anybody says, can not make me think you anything else but a good man. I hope God will reward you. You must not answer this, and you hadn't better see me again, or think any more of what you spoke about the other night. I shall be a slave for three years more, and then I must work for my mother and Shocky; but I felt so bad to think that I had spoken so hard to you, that I could not help writing this. Respectfully, “i Put in my best licks, taint no use. Run fer yore life. A plans on foot to tar an fether or wuss to-night. Go rite off. Things is awful juberous. “This is what I have always been afraid of. I warned you faithfully the last time I saw you. My skirts are clear of your blood. I can not consent for your uncle to appear as your counsel or to go your bail. You know how much it would injure him in the county, and he has no right to suffer for your evil acts. O my dear nephew! for the sake of your poor, dead mother—”
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5Author:  Eggleston Edward 1837-1902Add
 Title:  The mystery of Metropolisville  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: METROPOLISVILLE is nothing but a memory now. If Jonah's gourd had not been a little too much used already, it would serve an excellent turn just here in the way of an apt figure of speech illustrating the growth, the wilting, and the withering of Metropolisville. The last time I saw the place the grass grew green where once stood the City Hall, the corn-stalks waved their banners on the very site of the old store—I ask pardon, the “Emporium”—of Jackson, Jones & Co., and what had been the square, staring white court-house—not a Temple but a Barn of Justice—had long since fallen to base uses. The walls which had echoed with forensic grandiloquence were now forced to hear only the bleating of silly sheep. The church, the school-house, and the City Hotel had been moved away bodily. The village grew, as hundreds of other frontier villages had grown, in the flush times; it died, as so many others died, of the financial crash which was the inevitable sequel and retribution of speculative madness. Its history resembles the history of other Western towns of the sort so strongly, that I should not take the trouble to write about it, nor ask you to take the trouble to read about it, if the history of the town did not involve also the history of certain human lives—of a tragedy that touched deeply more than one soul. And what is history worth but for its human interest? The history of Athens is not of value on account of its temples and statues, but on account of its men and women. And though the “Main street” of Metropolisville is now a country road where the dog-fennel blooms almost undisturbed by comers and goers, though the plowshare remorselessly turns over the earth in places where corner lots were once sold for a hundred dollars the front foot, and though the lot once sacredly set apart (on the map) as “Depot Ground” is now nothing but a potato-patch, yet there are hearts on which the brief history of Metropolisville has left traces ineffaceable by sunshine or storm, in time or eternity. “I should have come to see you and told you about my trip to Metropolisville, but I am obliged to go out of town again. I send this by Mr. Canton, and also a request to the warden to pass this and your answer without the customary inspection of contents. I saw your mother and your step-father and your friend Miss Marlay. Your mother is failing very fast, and I do not think it would be a kindness for me to conceal from you my belief that she can not live many weeks. I talked with her and prayed with her as you requested, but she seems to have some intolerable mental burden. Miss Marlay is evidently a great comfort to her, and, indeed, I never saw a more faithful person than she in my life, or a more remarkable exemplification of the beauty of a Christian life. She takes every burden off your mother except that unseen load which seems to trouble her spirit, and she believes absolutely in your innocence. By the way, why did you never explain to her or to me or to any of your friends the real history of the case? There must at least have been extenuating circumstances, and we might be able to help you. “Dear Sir: You have acted very honorably in writing me as you have, and I admire you now more than ever. You fulfill my ideal of a Christian. I never had the slightest claim or the slightest purpose to establish any claim on Isabel Marlay, for I was so blinded by self-conceit, that I did not appreciate her until it was too late. And now! What have I to offer to any woman? The love of a convicted felon! A name tarnished forever! No! I shall never share that with Isa Marlay. She is, indeed, the best and most sensible of women. She is the only woman worthy of such a man as you. You are the only man I ever saw good enough for Isabel. I love you both. God bless you! “Dear Sir: Your poor mother died yesterday. She suffered little in body, and her mind was much more peaceful after her last interview with Mr. Lurton, which resulted in her making a frank statement of the circumstances of the land-warrant affair. She afterward had it written down, and signed it, that it might be used to set you free. She also asked me to tell Miss Minorkey, and I shall send her a letter by this mail. I am so glad that your innocence is to be proved at last. I have said nothing about the statement your mother made to any one except Miss Minorkey, because I am unwilling to use it without your consent. You have great reason to be grateful to Mr. Lurton. He has shown himself your friend, indeed. I think him an excellent man. He comforted your mother a great deal. You had better let me put the writing your mother left, into his hands. I am sure he will secure your freedom for you. “My Dear, Good Friend: The death of my mother has given me a great deal of sorrow, though it did not surprise me. I remember now how many times of late years I have given her needless trouble. For whatever mistakes her personal peculiarities led her into, she was certainly a most affectionate mother. I can now see, and the reflection causes me much bitterness, that I might have been more thoughtful of her happiness without compromising my opinions. How much trouble my self-conceit must have given her! Your rebuke on this subject has been very fresh in mind since I heard of her death. And I am feeling lonely, too. Mother and Katy have gone, and more distant relatives will not care to know an outlaw. “My Dear Miss Marlay: I find that I can not even visit you without causing remarks to be made, which reflect on you. I can not stay here without wishing to enjoy your society, and you can not receive the visits of a `jail-bird,' as they call me, without disgrace. I owe everything to you, and it would be ungrateful, indeed, in me to be a source of affliction and dishonor to you. I never regretted my disgrace so much as since I talked with you last night. If I could shake that off, I might hope for a great happiness, perhaps.
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6Author:  English Thomas Dunn 1819-1902Add
 Title:  Ambrose Fecit, or, The peer and the printer  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: I must have been about eighteen years old, or thereabouts, when, on a holiday in June, I walked out, and strolled by the high road to the country beyond Puttenham. The highway led me to a common over which it crossed; and there, musing over the commonplace events of the week, I wandered over the knolls of gravelly soil, and among the furze-bushes, watching the donkies as they cropped the scanty blades of grass, and indulged occasionally in a tit-bit, in the way of a juicy thistle. Tired at length, I sat me down to rest under a thorn-bush by the road-side, and was thus seated when I heard the sound of voices. Looking up, I saw a man approach, who was leading by the hand a little girl who appeared to be about ten years of age. I was struck with the appearance of the couple, and so scanned them closely. “My dear young friend—A letter, received as you left us last night, called me direct to London, without an opportunity to bid you more than this farewell, or to express, as I ought, my sense of your kindness. Zara sends her love to you, and the enclosed souvenir. May God have you in his holy keeping. “Herewith you have a copy of my portrait of little Zara, whose untimely fate in being whisked away by a grim, grey-bearded ogre, you have so much lamented. I think that I have not only caught the features, but the whole spirit of her extraordinary face. I should like your criticism on that point, for you were so fond of her that her expression must be firmly fixed on your mind. “My dear Ambrose:—Read this letter as carefully as you like, and then—burn it. “My dear Ambrose:—You have been nearly four years absent from England, and I have done my best to send and keep you away. Now, I write to you to urge you to come back.
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7Author:  unknownAdd
 Title:  Good company for every day in the year  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: I CONFESS it, I am keenly sensitive to “skyey influences.” I profess no indifference to the movements of that capricious old gentleman known as the clerk of the weather. I cannot conceal my interest in the behavior of that patriarchal bird whose wooden similitude gyrates on the church spire. Winter proper is well enough. Let the thermometer go to zero if it will; so much the better, if thereby the very winds are frozen and unable to flap their stiff wings. Sounds of bells in the keen air, clear, musical, heart-inspiring; quick tripping of fair moccasoned feet on glittering ice-pavements; bright eyes glancing above the uplifted muff like a sultana's behind the folds of her yashmack; school-boys coasting down street like mad Greenlanders; the cold brilliance of oblique sunbeams flashing back from wide surfaces of glittering snow or blazing upon ice-jewelry of tree and roof. There is nothing in all this to complain of. A storm of summer has its redeeming sublimities, — its slow, upheaving mountains of cloud glooming in the western horizon like new-created volcanoes, veined with fire, shattered by exploding thunders. Even the wild gales of the equinox have their varieties, — sounds of wind-shaken woods, and waters, creak and clatter of sign and casement, hurricane puffs and down-rushing rain-spouts. But this dull, dark autumn day of thaw and rain, when the very clouds seem too spiritless and languid to storm outright or take themselves out of the way of fair weather; wet beneath and above, reminding one of that rayless atmosphere of Dante's Third Circle, where the infernal Priessnitz administers his hydropathic torment, — “A heavy, cursed, and relentless drench, — The land it soaks is putrid”; — or rather, as everything, animate and inanimate, is seething in warm mist, suggesting the idea that Nature, grown old and rheumatic, is trying the efficacy of a Thompsonian steam-box on a grand scale; no sounds save the heavy plash of muddy feet on the pavements; the monotonous, melancholy drip from trees and roofs; the distressful gurgling of water-ducts, swallowing the dirty amalgam of the gutters; a dim, leaden-colored horizon of only a few yards in diameter, shutting down about one, beyond which nothing is visible save in faint line or dark projection; the ghost of a church spire or the eidolon of a chimney-pot. He who can extract pleasurable emotions from the alembic of such a day has a trick of alchemy with which I am wholly unacquainted. Whereas Charles Stuart, King of England, is and standeth convicted, attainted and condemned of High Treason and other high Crimes; and Sentence upon Saturday last was pronounced against him by this Court, To be put to death by the severing of his head from his body; of which Sentence execution yet remaineth to be done: “It begins: — `Dear Uncle,' (I had always instructed the child so to call me, rather than father, seeing we can have but one father, while we may be blessed with numerous uncles) `I suppose you will wonder how I came to be at St. Louis, and it is just my being here that I write to explain. You know how my husband felt about Nelly's death, but you cannot know how I felt; for, even in my very great sorrow, I hoped all the time, that by her death, John might be led to a love of religion. He was very unhappy, but he would not show it, only that he took even more tender care of me than before. I have always been his darling and pride; he never let me work, because he said it spoiled my hands; but after Nelly died, he was hardly willing I should breathe; and though he never spoke of her, or seemed to feel her loss, yet I have heard him whisper her name in his sleep, and every morning his hair and pillow were damp with crying; but he never knew I saw it. After a few months, there came a Mormon preacher into our neighborhood, a man of a great deal of talent and earnestness, and a firm believer in the revelation to Joseph Smith. At first my husband did not take any notice of him, and then he laughed at him for being a believer in what seemed like nonsense; but one night he was persuaded to go and hear Brother Marvin preach in the school-house, and he came home with a very sober face. I said nothing, but when I found there was to be a meeting the next night, I asked to go with him, and, to my surprise, I heard a most powerful and exciting discourse, not wanting in either sense or feeling, though rather poor as to argument; but I was not surprised that John wanted to hear more, nor that, in the course of a few weeks, he avowed himself a Mormon, and was received publicly into the sect. Dear Uncle, you will be shocked, I know, and you will wonder why I did not use my influence over my husband, to keep him from this delusion; but you do not know how much I have longed and prayed for his conversion to a religious life; until any religion, even one full of errors, seemed to me better than the hardened and listless state of his mind. “`My first wife, Adeline Frazer Henderson, departed this life on the sixth of July, at my house in the city of Great Salt Lake. Shortly before dying she called upon me, in the presence of two sisters, and one of the Saints, to deliver into your hands the enclosed packet, and tell you of her death. According to her wish, I send the papers by mail; and, hoping you may yet be called to be a partaker in the faith of the saints below, I remain your afflicted, yet rejoicing friend, “To-day I begged John to write, and ask you to come here. I could not write you since I came here but that once, though your letters have been my great comfort, and I added a few words of entreaty to his, because I am dying, and it seems as if I must see you before I die; yet I fear the letter may not reach you, or you may be sick: and for that reason I write now, to tell you how terrible a necessity urged me to persuade you to such a journey. I can write but little at a time, my side is so painful; they call it slow-consumption here, but I know better; the heart within me is turned to stone, I felt it then — Ah! you see my mind wandered in that last line; it still will return to the old theme, like a fugue tune, such as we had in the Plainfield singing-school. I remember one that went, `The Lord is just, is just, is just.' — Is He? Dear Uncle, I must begin at the beginning, or you never will know. I wrote you from St. Louis, did I not? I meant to. From there, we had a dreary journey, not so bad to Fort Leavenworth, but after that inexpressibly dreary, and set with tokens of the dead, who perished before us. A long reach of prairie, day after day, and night after night; grass, and sky, and graves; grass, and sky, and graves; till I hardly knew whether the life I dragged along was life or death, as the thirsty, feverish days wore on into the awful and breathless nights, when every creature was dead asleep, and the very stars in heaven grew dim in the hot, sleepy air — dreadful days! I was too glad to see that bitter inland sea, blue as the fresh lakes, with its gray islands of bare rock, and sparkling sand shores, still more rejoiced to come upon the City itself, the rows of quaint, bare houses, and such cool water-sources, and, over all, near enough to rest both eyes and heart, the sunlit mountains, `the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.'
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8Author:  Hall Baynard Rush 1798-1863Add
 Title:  Frank Freeman's barber shop  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: Our southern coast, as the reader doubtless knows, is fringed with a net-work of islands, many of which have not yet a growth sufficient for introduction to a school atlas. Some of these miniature lands are not inhabited and rarely visited; while others are, at certain seasons, resorts for “marooning”—a picnic sort of life passed for weeks in extemporaneous sheds of boards and canvas. A few of the islets are large enough for one or more plantations; and, hence, are like immense gardens in which are embowered lordly mansions with spacious lawns in front and comfortable “quarters” at convenient distances—a negro village of neat cabins, usually white-washed, and always each surrounded with its own domain of truck-patch, and boasting of its henhouse, pig-pen, and other offices. “Nephew, I send $2,000—I know your scruples. But I will positively take no denial. See here— don't refuse the additional—I'll pitch it in the fire, if you send any back. You'll have it hard enough with the remaining $2,000. “Edward, my dearest:—May the Lord sustain you!—and He will. But we have both been long prepared for this:—Dr. Jordan thinks there is no hope of my life beyond next summer! Edward! can we not meet once—the last? And your dear wife—my much beloved—my only daughter, since Sophia preceded me home!—will she not come again? Ah! Edward! if I might go to my rest— in your arms and hers! “Edward! oh, Edward!—I would—but, no! no! you never can believe me now! I call God to witness—I never, no never, loved any but you—I love none other now! By the unutterable agony of my frenzied soul, do not for God's sake, oh! do not curse me!.... Good God! can it be possible! I did not mean it! I know not why I did it! I have not—I have not! I will not! Oh! say, Edward! is it not a dream?—wake me from it! Forgive, forgive, forgive me! Bid me come and lie down at your feet and die! Call me only once by the dear name—and then kill me! Oh! why, why did you not command me to stay ever near you! You were to blame—no! no! how dare I reproach? One trial, Edward—but one! I would give the universe—I would give my life—God knows I would—to stand where I did for a moment.... Vain! I cannot—cannot!—I am going mad!.... But I am not—I am not so fallen! I will not so fall! I will leap into the sea first!..... Stay! don't curse me! Pray for me! Yes, yes, I that laughed at prayer, now with deep groanings of my soul, and with my face in the dust call on you, Edward! my wronged husband, and as a minister of Christ, to pray for me. I am penitent—I have not sinned—I will die rather! I will plunge into the ocean. Oh! dear Edward!—husband, dear husband! and for the last, I write those sacred words— farewell, farewell!” “Rev. and very dear Brother:—I remain, this year, at Point Lookout, where we shall establish our new paper. It is to be called “The Scarifier and Renovator.” I expect to edit awhile, myself. We'll make an impression on the soul-killers. Besides, I can do a vast amount of good here, in other ways. I have been instrumental, by the blessing of God, in freeing more than twenty-five, since my last, in March! Most of them, with a little help from my secret assistants in the lower countries, succeeded (you will be rejoiced to learn) in bringing off property enough to pay expenses, and afford a handsome remuneration. I forwarded the poor fugitives to the old fellow—you know where. “Master!—a dear name yet—though I appear as a traitor!—a name I shall ever love, even if my new friends(?) constrain me to use their cold language. Yes, dear master! you knew me better than I know myself: you would never let me vow! Oh! I remember that one sermon—`Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?' They look on me as noble and free!—alas!—I feel myself a slave now, and worse than before; I have become in my own eyes `a dog!'—I have done it. “Rev. and dear Sharpinton:—My soul is fairly on fire—it fairly cries out, `Away with the accursed slavers from the earth!' Oh, heavens! doctor, they've killed our Somerville; and in defence of his press! Freedom!—where's our right to publish the truth—the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Don't tell me of freedom! Union or no union! down with the gag-loving, press-muzzling, slavery-aiding, colonization-scheming, God-defying, double-dyed, negro-lashing, humanity-crushing, base, grovelling, truckling villains, that, in face of the sun, will assault and pull down a printing-office, and pitch the types into the street, and shoot down, spite of law, justice, and rights of man, the noble Somerville, and standing to defend his rights! It hadn't ought to be the 19th century! no, it hadn't ought to!— I know it cannot be done; but, still, follow me, ye friends of the poor, down-trodden, brute-degraded, blood-squeezed, and sweat-defrauded sons of Africa! oh! ye men of tried souls, ye true Americans, and we will drive the accursed South into the earth-girdling ocean! I did you a great, a very great wrong—and I am very sorry for it. And yet I always more than half believed you must be true. God be thanked—that dear Edward redeemed you—how would I now feel, if that infernal dealer had got you!—poor Edward, how he looked when he got my note and bid up the $4,000! “* * I told uncle I would write about Sarah —your dear mother. She died many months ago, and very suddenly, and full six weeks before we left the north or arrived at Evergreen. And while you now mourn that you can never see her again—yet 15 you will rejoice your oversight had nothing to do with her death. God, Frank, is kind to his people, that they may not have over much sorrow!
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9Author:  Hawthorne Nathaniel 1804-1864Add
 Title:  The house of the seven gables  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: Half-way down a by-street of one of our New England towns, stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely-peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon-street; the house is the old Pyncheon-house; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon-elm. On my occasional visits to the town aforesaid, I seldom fail to turn down Pyncheon-street, for the sake of passing through the shadow of these two antiquities, — the great elm-tree, and the weather-beaten edifice.
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10Author:  Hawthorne Nathaniel 1804-1864Add
 Title:  The snow-image  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: One afternoon of a cold winter's day, when the sun shone forth with chilly brightness, after a long storm, two children asked leave of their mother to run out and play in the new-fallen snow. The elder child was a little girl, whom, because she was of a tender and modest disposition, and was thought to be very beautiful, her parents, and other people who were familiar with her, used to call Violet. But her brother was known by the style and title of Peony, on account of the ruddiness of his broad and round little phiz, which made everybody think of sunshine and great scarlet flowers. The father of these two children, a certain Mr. Lindsey, it is important to say, was an excellent but exceedingly matter-of-fact sort of man, a dealer in hardware, and was sturdily accustomed to take what is called the common-sense view of all matters that came under his consideration. With a heart about as tender as other people's, he had a head as hard and impenetrable, and therefore, perhaps, as empty, as one of the iron pots which it was a part of his business to sell. The mother's character, on the other hand, had a strain of poetry in it, a trait of unworldly beauty, — a delicate and dewy flower, as it were, that had survived out of her imaginative youth, and still kept itself alive amid the dusty realities of matrimony and motherhood.
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11Author:  Herbert Henry William 1807-1858Add
 Title:  The cavaliers of England, or, The times of the revolutions of 1642 and 1688  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: It is the saddest of all the considerations which weigh upon the candid and sincere mind of the true patriot, when civil dispute is on the eve of degenerating into civil war, that the best, the wisest, and the bravest of both parties, are those who first fall victims for those principles which they mutually, with equal purity and faith, and almost with equal reason, believe to be true and vital; that the moderate men, who have erst stood side by side for the maintenance of the right and the common good — who alone, in truth, care for either right or common good — now parted by a difference nearly without a distinction, are set in deadly opposition, face to face, to slay and be slain for the benefit of the ultraists — of the ambitious, heartless, or fanatical self-seekers, who hold aloof in the beginning, while principles are at stake, and come into the conflict when the heat and toil of the day are over, and when their own end, not their country's object, remains only to be won. “You know too much — you know too much!” cried Jasper, furious but undaunted. “One of us two must die, ere either leaves this room.” “Agnes: By God's grace I am safe thus far; and if I can lie hid here these four days, can escape to France. On Sunday night a lugger will await me off the Greene point, nigh the 35 mouth of Solway. Come to me hither, to the cave I told thee of, with food and wine so soon as it is dark. Ever my dearest, whom alone I dare trust.
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12Author:  Herbert Henry William 1807-1858Add
 Title:  The chevaliers of France  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
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13Author:  Herbert Henry William 1807-1858Add
 Title:  The knights of England, France, and Scotland  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
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14Author:  Herbert Henry William 1807-1858Add
 Title:  Persons and pictures from the histories of France and England  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: England was happy yet and free under her Saxon kings. The unhappy natives of the land, the Britons of old time, long ago driven back into their impregnable fastnesses among the Welsh mountains, and the craggy and pathless wilds of Scotland, still rugged and hirsute with the yet uninvaded masses of the great Caledonian forest, had subsided into quiet, and disturbed the lowland plains of fair England no longer; and so long as they were left free to enjoy their rude pleasures of the chase and of internal welfare, undisturbed, were content to be debarred from the rich pastures and fertile corn-fields which had once owned their sway. The Danes and Norsemen, savage Jarls and Vikings of the North, had ceased to prey on the coasts of Northumberland and Yorkshire; the seven kingdoms of the turbulent and tumultuous Heptarchy, ever distracted by domestic strife, had subsided into one realm, ruled under laws, regular, and for the most part mild and equable, by a single monarch, occupied by one homogeneous and kindred race, wealthy and prosperous according to the idea of wealth and prosperity in those days, at peace at home and undisturbed from without; if not, indeed, very highly civilized, at least supplied with all the luxuries and comforts which the age knew or demanded—a happy, free, contented people, with a patriarchal aristocracy, and a king limited in his prerogatives by the rights of his people, and the privileges of the nobles as secured by law. “My dear wife—farewell! Bless my boy—pray for me, and let the true God hold you both in his arms. “I received your letter with judignation, and with scorn return you this answer, that I cannot but wonder whence you gather any hopes that I should prove, like you, treacherous to my sovereign; since you cannot be ignorant of my former actions in his late majesty's service, from which principles of loyalty I am no whit departed. I scorn your proffers; I disdain your favor; I abhor your treason; and am so far from delivering up this island to your advantage, that I shall keep it to the utmost of my power for your destruction. Take this for your final answer, and forbear any further solicitations: for if you trouble me with any more messages of this nature, I will burn the paper, and hang up the messenger. This is the immutable resolution, and shall be the undoubted practice of him who accounts it his chiefest glory to be his majesty's most loyal and obedient subject. It would have been a difficult thing, even in England, that land of female loveliness, to find a brighter specimen of youthful beauty than was presented by Rosamond Bellarmyne, when she returned to her home, then in her sixteenth year, after witnessing the joyful procession of the 29th of May, which terminated in the installation of the son in that palace of Whitehall from which his far worthier father had gone forth to die. “We hereby grant free permission to the Count de Grammont to return to London, and remain there six days, in prosecution of his lawful affairs; and we accord to him the license to be present at our palace of Whitehall, on the occasion of his betrothal to our gracious consort's maid-of-honor, the beautiful Mistress Elizabeth Hamilton.
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15Author:  Herbert Henry William 1807-1858Add
 Title:  Wager of battle  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: In the latter part of the twelfth century—when, in the reign of Henry II., fourth successor of the Conqueror, and grandson of the first prince of that name, known as Beauclerc, the condition of the vanquished Saxons had begun in some sort to amend, though no fusion of the races had as yet commenced, and tranquillity was partially restored to England—the greater part of the northern counties, from the Trent to the mouths of Tyne and Solway, was little better than an unbroken chase or forest, with the exception of the fiefs of a few great barons, or the territories of a few cities and free borough towns; and thence, northward to the Scottish frontier, all was a rude and pathless desert of morasses, moors, and mountains, untrodden save by the foot of the persecuted Saxon outlaw. “King Henry II. to the Sheriff of Lancaster and Westmoreland, greeting—Kenric, the son of Werewulf, of Kentmere, in Westmoreland, has showed to us, that whereas he is a free man, and ready to prove his liberty, Sir Foulke d'Oilly, knight and baron of Waltheofstow and Fenton in the Forest of Sherwood, in Yorkshire, claiming him to be his nief, unjustly vexes him; and therefore we command you, that if the aforesaid Kenric shall make you secure touching the proving of his liberty, then put that plea before our justices, at the first assizes, when they shall come into those parts, to wit, in our good city of Lancaster, on the first day of December next ensuing, because proof of this kind belongeth not to you to take; and in the mean time cause the said Kenric to have peace thereupon, and tell the aforesaid Sir Foulke d'Oilly that he may be there, if he will, to prosecute thereof, against the aforesaid Kenric. And have there this writ. “In the case of Kenric surnamed the Dark, accused of deer-slaying, against the forest statute, and of murder, or homicide, both alleged to have been done and committed in the forest of Sherwood, on the 13th day of September last passed, the grand inquest, now in session, do find that there is no bill, nor any cause of process.
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16Author:  Holland J. G. (Josiah Gilbert) 1819-1881Add
 Title:  The bay-path  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: It snowed incessantly. Far up in the fathomless grey the shooting flakes mingled in dim confusion, or crossed each other's lines in momentary angles, or came calmly down for a brief space, and then fled traceless into the tempest; and all, as they met the breath of the blast, became its burden, and were swept in blinding and spiteful clouds to the earth. All around, the storm was vocal. The pines hissed like serpents, and the old oak, catching the wild roar of his children in the far north-east, as it came on and on, over writhing and bowing forests, took up the same strong strain, and, struggling like a giant, sent it off triumphantly to the south-western hills. “To John Searles, constable of Springfield. These are in his majesty's name to require you presently uppon the recite hereof that you attach the body of John Woodcock uppon an execution granted to Mr George Moxon by the Jury against the said John Woodcock for an action of slander: and that you keepe his body in prison of irons until he shall take some course to satisfie the said George Moxon: or else if he neglect or refuse to take a ready course to satisfie the said execution of £6 13s 4d granted by the jury that then you use what means you can to put him out to service and labor till he make satisfaction to the said Mr George Moxon for the said £6 13s 4d, and also to satisfie yourself for such charges as you shall be at for the keeping of his person: And when Mr Moxon and yourself are satisfied, then you are to discharge his person out of prison. Fail not at your peril.* * Copied from the Record of the original Document.
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17Author:  Holland J. G. (Josiah Gilbert) 1819-1881Add
 Title:  Miss Gilbert's career  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: Dr. Theophilus Gilbert was in a hurry. He had been in a hurry all night. He had been in a hurry all the morning. While the village of Crampton was asleep, he had amputated the limb of a young man ten miles distant, attended a child in convulsions on his way home, and assisted in introducing into existence an infant at the house of his next-door neighbor—how sad an existence—how terrible a life—neither he nor the poor mother, widowed but a month, could imagine. “Gentlemen:—Will you allow me to call your attention to a novel, just completed by my daughter, Miss Fanny Gilbert, entitled, `Tristram Trevanion, or, The Hounds of the Whippoorwill Hills, by Everard Everest, Gent.?' I am not, perhaps, a reliable judge of its merits. Paternal partiality and exclusive devotion to scientific and business pursits may, in a degree, unfit me to decide upon the position in the world of art and the world of popular favor it is calculated to achieve. In fact, I have not relied upon my own judgment at all. The book has been read to competent literary friends, and their voice is unanimous and most enthusiastic in its favor. The impression is that it cannot fail to be a great success. With your practical eyes, you will recognize, I doubt not, in the title of the book, the characteristic poetic instincts of the writer, and her power to clothe her conceptions in choicest language. We have concluded to offer this book to your celebrated house for publication. It is our desire that it may come before the public under the most favorable auspices—such, in fact, as your imprint alone would give it. I think I can promise you the undivided support of the local press, as I certainly will pledge all the personal efforts on behalf of the volume which my relations to the writer will permit me to make. I may say to you, in this connection, that I have a large medical practice, extending throughout the region, and that I know nearly every family in the county. Please reply at once, and oblige, &c., &c. “Dr. Sir—Yours about book Tristram, &c., rec'd. Novels except by well-known writers not in our line, and we must decline. “My Dear Sir—Your favor, relating to the manuscript novel of your daughter, is at hand, and has been carefully considered. The title of the book seems to us to be exceedingly attractive, and, in a favorable condition of the market, could not fail of itself to sell an entire edition. Unfortunately, the market for novels is very dull now, and, still more unfortunately for us, our engagements are already so numerous, that were the market the best, we should not feel at liberty to undertake your book. We could not possibly make room for it and do it justice. Thanking you for your kind preference of our house, we remain, “Dear Sir—I have carefully read your daughter's manuscript novel, `Tristram Trevanion,' and find it quite interesting, though I doubt whether it can ever achieve much success. I should say that it is a very young novel—written by one who has seen little of life, and much of books. The invention manifested in the incidents is quite extraordinary, and displays genius, though the characters are extravagant. But I do not write to criticize the book. Worse books have found many buyers. I accept it on the terms upon which we settled, as it is; but there are one or two points touching which I wish to make some suggestions. The hero, Tristram Trevanion, does not marry Grace Beaumont, as he ought to do. I think I understand the public mind when I say that it will demand that this marriage take place. It could be done by altering a few pages. Again, I think that the public will demand that the Jewish dwarf, Levi, be made in some way to suffer a violent death at the hand of Trevanion. One word about the title. I confess to its music, but it seems to me to be so smooth as to present no points to catch the popular attention. Besides, I find that the `Hounds of the Whippoorwill Hills' make their appearance but once in the story, and have no claim upon the prominence given them on the title-page. Your daughter will think it very strange, no doubt; but I believe that the sale of the book would be increased by making the title rougher—more startling. How does this look to you—`Tristram Trevanion, or Butter and Cheese and All;' or this—`Tristram Trevanion, or The Dwarf with the Flaxen Forelock'? There is another course which is probably preferable to this, viz.: that of making a title which means nothing, and will puzzle people—a title that defines and explains nothing—bestowed in a whim, as we sometimes give a child a name. What would your daughter think of `Rhododendron,' or `Shucks'? “This night I take one of the most important steps of my life. My father and I have had a long conversation about you, in which he has endeavored, by promises and threats, to make me renounce you, and break my pledge to you. I have reasoned with him, besought him, on my knees begged of him to relent, but all to no purpose. He forbids you the house, and commands me to renounce you forever, or to renounce him. He was very angry, and is implacable. I have taken the alternative he offers me. I shall leave New York to-night. I leave without seeing you, because I fear that an interview would shake my determination; but I am yours—yours now, and yours forever. I shall go where you will not find me, and, if you love me—ah! Frank, I know you do— you will make no search for me. I shall not write to you, because money will buy the interception and miscarriage of letters, but I shall think of you, and pray for you every day, nay, all the time. “Come!
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18Author:  Holmes Mary Jane 1825-1907Add
 Title:  Millbank, or, Roger Irving's ward  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: EVERY window and shutter at Millbank was closed. Knots of crape were streaming from the bell-knobs, and all around the house there was that deep hush which only the presence of death can inspire. Indoors there was a kind of twilight gloom pervading the rooms, and the servants spoke in whispers whenever they came near the chamber where the old squire lay in his handsome coffin, waiting the arrival of Roger, who had been in St. Louis when his father died, and who was expected home on the night when our story opens. Squire Irving had died suddenly in the act of writing to his boy Roger, and when found by old Aleck, his hand was grasping the pen, and his head was resting on the letter he would never finish. “Heart disease” was the verdict of the inquest, and then the electric wires carried the news of his decease to Roger, and to the widow of the squire's eldest son, who lived on Lexington avenue, New York, and who always called herself Mrs. Walter Scott Irving, fancying that in some way the united names of two so illustrious authors as Irving and Scott shed a kind of literary halo upon one who bore them. “My Dear Boy — For many days I have had a presentiment that I had not much longer to live, and, as death begins to stare me in the face, my thoughts turn toward you, my dear Roger —.” “My Dear Boy, — For many days I have been haunted with a presentiment that I have not much longer to live. My heart is badly diseased, and I may drop away any minute, and as death begins to stare me in the face, my thoughts turn toward you, the boy whom I have been so proud of and loved so much. You don't remember your mother, Roger, and you don't know how I loved her, she was so beautiful and artless, and seemed so innocent, with her blue eyes and golden hair. Her home was among the New Hampshire hills, a quarter of a mile or so from the little rural town of Schodick, whose delightful scenery and pure mountain air years ago attracted visitors there during the summer months. Her father was poor and old and infirm, and his farm was mortgaged for more than it was worth, and the mortgage was about to be foreclosed, when, by chance, I became an inmate for a few weeks of the farmhouse. I was stopping in Schodick, the hotel was full, and I boarded with Jessie's father. He had taken boarders before, — one a young man, Arthur Grey, a fast, fashionable, fascinating man, who made love to Jessie, a mere child of sixteen. Her letter, which I inclose, will tell you the particulars of her acquaintance with him, so it is not needful that I go over with them. I knew nothing of Arthur Grey at the time I was at the farm-house, except that I sometimes heard him mentioned as a reckless, dashing young man. I was there during the months of August and September. I had an attack of heart disease, and Jessie nursed me through it, her soft hands and gentle ways and deep blue eyes weaving around me a spell I could not break. She was poor, but a lady every whit, and I loved her better than I had ever loved a human being before, and I wanted her for my wife. As I have said, her father was old and poor, and the farm was mortgaged to a remorseless creditor. They would be homeless when it was sold, and so I bought Jessie, and her father kept his home. I know now that it was a great mistake; know why Jessie fainted when the plan was first proposed to her, but I did not suspect it then. Her father said she was in the habit of fainting, and tried to make light of it. He was anxious for the match, and shut his eyes to his daughter's aversion to it. “My husband: — It would be mockery for me to put the word dear before your honored name. You would not believe I meant it when I have sinned against you so deeply and wounded your pride so sorely. But oh, if you knew all which led me to what I am, you would pity me even if you condemned, for you were always kind, too kind by far to a wicked girl like me. But I am not so bad as you imagine. I have left you, I know, and left my darling baby, and he is here with me, but by no consent of mine. I am not going to Europe. I am going to Charleston, where Lucy is, and shall mail this letter from there. Every word I write will be true, and you must believe it and teach Roger to believe it, too, for I have not sinned as you suppose, and Roger need not blush for his mother except that she deserted him. I am writing this quite as much for him as for you, for I want him to know something of his mother as she was years ago, when she lived among the Schodick hills, in the dear old house which I have dreamed about so often, and which even here on the sea comes up so vividly before me, with the orchard where the mountain shadows fell so early in the afternoon, and the meadows where the buttercups and clover-blossoms grew. Oh, I grow sick, and faint, and dizzy when I think of those happy days and contrast myself as I was then with myself as I am now. I was so happy, though I knew what poverty meant; but that did not matter. Children, if surrounded by loving friends, do not mind being poor, and I did not mind it either until I grew old enough to see how it troubled my father. My mother, as you know, died before I could remember her, and my aunt Mary, my father's only sister, and cousin Lucy's mother, took her place and cared for me. “Squire Irving — Dear Sir — It becomes my painful duty to inform you that not long after the inclosed letter from your wife was finished, a fire broke out and spread so fast that all hope of escape except by the life-boats was cut off. Your wife felt from the first a presentiment that she should be drowned, and brought the letter to me, asking that if I escaped, and she did not, I would forward it at once to Millbank. I took the letter and I tried to save her, when the sea ingulfed us both, but a tremendous wave carried her beyond my reach, and I saw her golden hair rise once above the water and then go down forever. I, with a few others, was saved as by a miracle, — picked up by a vessel bound for New York, which place I reached yesterday. I have read Jessie's letter. She told me to do so, and to add my testimony to the truth of what she had written. Even if it were not true, it would be wrong to refuse the request of one so lovely and dear to me as Jessie was, and I accordingly do as she bade me, and say to you that she has written you the truth. “Mrs. Irving tells me you were very kind to me,” she wrote, “and though I have no recollection that you or any one but Celine came near me, I am grateful all the same, and shall always remember your kindness to me both then and when I was a child, and such a care to you; I am deeply grateful to all who have done so much for me, and I wish them to know it, and remember me kindly as I do them. I am going away soon, and I want to take with me all I brought to Millbank. I have the locket, but the little dress I cannot find. Mrs. Irving thinks you took it in the chest. Did you, and if so, will you please send it to me at once by express, and oblige, “Mr. Irving: Can you forgive me when you hear who I am, and will you try to think of me as you did in the days which now seem so very far in the past. I have been your ruin, Roger. I have brought to you almost every trouble you ever knew, and now to all the rest I must add this, that I am the child of your worst enemy, Arthur Grey. Don't hate me for it, will you? Alice, who is much better than I, would say it was God's way of letting you return good for evil. I wish you would think so, too, and I wish I could tell you all I feel, and how grateful I am to you for what you have done for me. If I could I would repay it, but I am only a girl, and the debt is too great ever to be cancelled by me. May Heaven reward you as you deserve. ROGER had written to Frank, congratulating him upon his approaching marriage, but declining to be present at the wedding. He wished to know as little as possible of the affairs at Millbank, and tried to dissuade Hester from her visit to Mrs. Slocum. But Hester would go, and three days before the great event came off she was installed in Mrs. Slocum's best chamber, and had presented that worthy woman with six bottles of canned fruit, ten yards of calico, and an old coat of Aleck's, which, she said, would cut over nicely for Johnny, Mrs. Slocum's youngest boy. After these presents, Hester felt that she was not “spunging,” as she called it, and settled herself quietly to visit, and to reconnoitre, and watch the proceedings at Millbank. And there was enough to occupy her time and keep her in a state of great excitement. “Magdalen has been very anxious for you to come to Beechwood, and I should now extend an invitation for you to do so, were it not that we have decided to leave at once for Europe. We sail in the `Persia' next week, immediately after my daughter's marriage, which will be a very quiet affair. Hoping to see and know you at some future time, I am
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19Author:  Holmes Mary Jane 1825-1907Add
 Title:  Rose Mather  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: The long disputed point as to whether the South was in earnest or not was settled, and through the Northern States the tidings flew that Sumter had fallen and the war had commenced. With the first gun which boomed across the waters of Charleston bay, it was ushered in, and they who had cried, “Peace! peace!” found at last “there was no peace.” Then, and not till then, did the nation rise from its lethargic slumber and shake off the delusion with which it had so long been bound. Political differences were forgotten. Republicans and Democrats struck the friendly hand, pulse beat to pulse, heart throbbed to heart, and the watchword everywhere was, “The Union forever.” Throughout the length and breadth of the land were true, loyal hearts, and as at Rhoderic Dhu's command the Highlanders sprang to view from every clump of heather on the wild moors of Scotland, so when the war-cry came up from Sumter our own Highlanders arose, a mighty host, responsive to the call; some from New England's templed hills, with hands inured to toil, and hearts as strong and true as flint; some from the Empire, some the Keystone State, and others from the prairies of the distant West. It mattered not what place had given them birth; it mattered little whether the Green Mountains of Vermont, the granite hills of New Hampshire, or the shadowy forests of Wisconsin had sheltered their childhood's home; united in one cause they rallied round the Stars and Stripes, and went forth to meet, not a foreign foe, but alas, to raise a brother's arm against another brother's arm in that most dreadful of all anarchies, a national civil war. “Dear Mother: Pray don't think you've seen a ghost when you recognize my writing. You thought me dead, I suppose, but there's no such good news as that. I'm bullet-proof, I reckon, or I should have died in New Orleans last summer when the yellow fever and I had such a squabble. I was dreadfully sick then, and half wished I had not run away, for I knew you would feel badly when you heard how I died with nobody to care for me, and was tumbled into the ground, head sticking out as likely as any way. I used to talk about you, old Martha said, and about Rose, too. Dear little Rose. I actually laid down my pen just now, and laughed aloud as I thought how she looked when I treated her to those worms; telling her I had a necklace for her! Didn't she dance and didn't Tom thrash me, too, till I saw stars! Well, he never struck me a blow amiss, though I used to think he did. I was a sorry scamp, mother,—the biggest rascal in Boston. But I've reformed. I have, upon my word, and you ought to see how the people here smile upon and flatter me, telling me what a nice chap I am, and all that sort of thing. “My dear Mrs. Mather—I am sure you will pardon the liberty I am taking. My apology is that I feel so deeply for you, for I understand just what you are suffering,—understand how wearily the hours drag on, knowing as you do that with the waning daylight his step will not be heard just by the door, making in your heart little throbs of joy, such as no other step can make. I am so sorry for you, and I had hoped you at least might be spared, but God in his wisdom has seen fit to order it otherwise, and we know that what He does is right. Still it is hard to bear,—harder for you than for me, perhaps, and when this morning I heard the car signal given, I knelt just where I did when my own husband went away, and asked our Heavenly Father to bring your Willie back in safety, and, Mrs. Mather, I am sure He will, for I felt, even then, an answer to my prayer, —something which said, `It shall be as you ask.' “My dear Mr. Captin Carleton:—I can't help puttin' dear before your name, you seem so nigh to me since Isaac told how kind you was to him. I'm nothin' but a shrivelled, dried up widder, fifty odd years old, but I've got a mother's heart big enough to take you in with my other boys. I know you are a nice, clever man, but whether you're a good one, as I call good, I don't know, though bein' you come from Boston I'm afraid you're a Unitarian, and I'll never quit prayin' for you till I know. That's about all I can do, for I'm poor a'most as Job's turkey; but if there's any shirts or trouses, or the like o' that wants makin', let me know, for I don't believe your mother or sister is great at sewin'. Mrs. Marthers ain't, I know, though as nice a little body as ever drawed the breath. Your wife is dead, too, they say, and that comes hard agin. I know just how that feels, for my man died eighteen years ago last October, a few weeks before Isaac was born. “Dear Mother: We've met the rascals, and been as genteelly licked as ever a pack of fools could ask to be. How it happened nobody knows. I was fitin' like a tiger, when all on a sudden I found us a-runnin' like a flock of sheep; and what is the queerest of all, is that while we were takin' to our heels one way the Rebels were goin' it t'other, and for what I know, we should of been runnin' from each other till now if they hadn't found out the game, and so turned upon us. My dear, dear, darling Annie:—It will be days, perhaps, before you see this letter, and ere it reaches you somebody will have told you that your poor George is dead! Are you crying, darling, as you read this? Do the tears fall upon the words, `poor George is dead?' Don't cry, my precious Annie. It makes my heart ache to think how you will sorrow and I not there to comfort you. It's hard to die away from home, but not so hard as it would once have been, for I hope I am a different man from the one who bade you good-bye a few short months ago; and, darling, it must comfort you to know that your prayers, your sweet influence have led the wanderer home to God. We shall meet again in Heaven, Annie,—meet where partings are unknown. It may be many years, perhaps, and the grass upon my grave may blossom many times ere you will sleep the sleep which knows no waking but at the last you'll come where I am waiting you. I know I shall be there, Annie. All the harassing doubts and fears are gone. Simple faith in the Saviour's promise has taken them away, and left me perfect peace. God bless you, Annie darling, and grant that as you have guided me, so you may guide others to that home above, where I am going so fast. You have made me very happy since you have been my wife, and I bless you for it. It makes my death pillow easier to know that not one bitter word has ever passed between us,—nothing but perfect confidence and love. I was not good enough for you, darling. None knows that better than myself. You should have married one of gentler blood and higher birth than I, a poor mechanic. I have always felt this more than you, perhaps, and have tried so hard not to shame you with my homespun ways. had I lived, I should have improved constantly beneath your refining influence, but that is all past now, and it is well, perhaps, that it is so. As you grew older you might have felt there was a lack in me, a something which did not satisfy the cravings of your higher nature, and though you might not have loved me less, you would have seen that we were not wholly congenial. I am well enough in my way, but I am not a suitable companion for a girl of culture like yourself, and I've often wondered that you should have chosen me. But you did, and again I bless you for it. Never, never, was year so happy as the one I spent with you, my darling, darling Annie, and I was looking forward to many such, but God has decreed it otherwise, and what he does we know is right. I shall never see you again! and though they will bring me back to you, I shall not feel your tears upon my face, or see you bending over my coffin-bed! Still I know you will do this, and that makes it necessary for me to tell what, perhaps, has been too long withheld, because I would spare you if possible. “I am not all bad,” he said; “and on that quiet morning, when beneath the cover of the Virginia woods I lay, watching the Union soldiers coming so bravely on, there was a dizziness in my brain, and a strange, womanly feeling at my heart, while a sensation I cannot describe thrilled every nerve when I saw in the distance the Stars and Stripes waving in the summer wind. How I wanted to warn them of their danger, to bid them turn back from the snare so cunningly devised, and how proud I felt of the Federal soldiers when contrasting them with ours. I fancied I could tell which were the Boston boys, and there came a mist before my eyes, as I thought how your dear hands and those of little Rose had possibly helped to make some portion of the dress they wore. “Will was badly wounded,—lay on the field all night;—Jimmie missing,—supposed to be a prisoner. I am well. “Army of Potomac, and about as licked out an army as you ever seen. To all it may concern, and 'specially Miss Anny Graam. I send you my regrets greetin', and hopin' this will find you enjoyin' the same great blessin'. Burnside has made the thunderinest blunder, and more'n a million of our boys is dead before Fredericksburgh. Mr. Mathers was about riddled through, I guess, and the Corporal, —wall, may as well take it easy,—I fit for him like a tiger, till they nocked me endways, and I played dead to save my life. But the Corporal's a goner,—took prisoner with an awful cut on his neck; and now what I'm going to tell you is this: the night before the battle I came upon him prayin' like a priest, kneelin' in an awful mud-puddle, and what he said was somethin' about Heaven, and Anny, whitch, beggin' your pardon, I think means you, and so I ast him in case of bad luck, if I should write and tell you. I don't think he could have ben in a vary sperritual frame of mind, for he told me to mind my bisiness, but I don't lay it up agin him, and when them too tall, lantern-jawed sons of Balam grabbed him as he was tryin' to skedaddle with the blood a spirtin' from his neck, I pitched inter 'em, and give 'em hale columby for a spell, till they nocked me flat and I made bleeve dead as I was tellin' you. Don't feel bad, Miss Graam. Trust luck and keep your powder dry, and mabby he'll come back sometime. “I mistrusted he was there,” Bill wrote; “and so when me and and some other fellow-travellers was safely landed in purgatory, I went on an explorin' tower to find him. But you bet it want so easy gettin through that crowd. Why, the camp-meetin' they had in the Fair Grounds in Rockland, when Marm Freeman bust her biler hollerin,' was nothin' to the piles of ragged, dirty, hungry-lookin' dogs; some standin' up, some lyin' down, and all lookin' as if they was on their last legs. Right on a little sand-bank, and so near the dead line that I wonder he didn't get shot, I found the Corp'ral, with his trouses tore to tatters, and lookin' like the old gal's rag-bag that hangs in the suller-way. Didn't he cry, though, when I hit him a kelp on the back, and want there some tall cryin' done by both of us as we sat there flat on the sand, with the hot sun pourin' down on us, and the sweat and the tears runnin' down his face, as he told me all he'd suffered. It made my blood bile. I've had a little taste of Libby, and Bell Isle, too; but they can't hold a candle to this place. Miss Graam, you are the good sort, kinder pius like; but I'll be hanged if I don't bleeve you'll justify me in the thumpin' lies I told the Corp'ral that day, to keep his spirits up. Says he, `Have you ever ben to Rockland since Fredericksburg?' and then I tho't in a minute of that nite in the woods when he prayed about Anny; and ses I to myself, `The piusest lie you ever told will be that you have been home, and seen Miss Graam, with any other triflin' additions you may think best;' so I told him I had ben hum on a furbelow, as the old gal (meanin' my mother) calls it. And I seen her, too, says I, Miss Graam, and she talked an awful sight about you, I said, when you orto have seen him shiver all over as he got up closer to me, and asked, `What did she say?' Then I went on romancin', and told him how you spent a whole evenin' at the ole hut, talkin' about him, and how sorry you was for him, and couldn't git your natural sleep for thinkin' of him, and how, when I came away, you said to me on the sly, `William, if you ever happen to meet Mr. Carleton, give him Anny Graam's love, and tell him she means it.' Great Peter! I could almost see the flesh come back to his bones, and his eyes had the old look in 'em, as he liked to of hugged me to death. I'd done him a world of good, he said, and for some days he seemed as chipper as you please; but nobody can stan' a diet of raw meal and the nastiest watter that ever run; and ses I to myself, Corp'ral will die as sure as thunder if somethin' don't turn up; and so, when I got the hang of things a little, and seen how the macheen was worked, sez I, `I'll turn Secesh, though I hate 'em as I do pizen.' They was glad enuff to have me, bein' I'm a kind of carpenter and jiner, and they let me out, and I went to work for the Corp'ral. I'll bet I told a hundred hes, fust and last, if I did one. I said he was at heart Secesh; that he was in the rebel army, and I took him prisoner at Manassas, which, you know was true. Then I said his sweetheart, meanin' you, begging your pardon, got up a row, and made him jine the Federals, and promise never to go agin the flag, and that's how he come to be nabbed up at Fredericksburg. I said 'twan't no use to try to make him swear, for he thought more of his gal's good opinion than he did of liberty, and I set you up till I swan if I bleeve you'd a knowed yourself, and every one of them fellers was ready to stan' by you, and two of 'em drinked your helth with the wust whisky I ever tasted. One of 'em asked me if I was a fair specimen of the Northern Army, and I'll be darned if I didn't tell him no, for I was ashamed to have 'em think the Federals was all like me. I guess, though, they liked me some; anyway, they let me carry something to the Corp'ral every now and then, and I bleeve he'd die if I didn't. I've smuggled him in some paper and a pencil, and he is going to wright to you, and I shall send it, no matter how. The rebs won't see it, and I guess it's pretty sure to go safe. I must stop now, and wright to the old woman. “My dear Annie,” he wrote, “I do not know that this letter will ever reach you. I have but little hope that it will. Still it is worth trying for, and so here in this terrible place, whose horrors no pen or tongue can adequately describe, I am writing to you, who I know think sometimes of the poor wretch starving and dying by inches in Andersonville. Oh, Annie, you can never know what I have suffered from hunger and thirst, and exposure and filth, which makes my very blood curdle and creep, and from that weary homesickness which more than aught else kills the poor boys around me. When I first came here I thought I could not endure it, and though I knew I was not prepared, I used to wish that I might die; but a little drummer boy from Michigan, who took to me from the first, said his prayers one night beside me, and the listening to him carried me back to you, who, I felt sure, prayed for me each day. And so hope came back again, with a desire to live and see your dear face once more. Mylittle drummer boy, Johnny, was all the world to me, and when he grew too sick to sit or stand, I held his poor head in my lap, and gave up my rations to him, for he was almost famished, and ate eagerly whatever was brought to us. We used to say the Lord's Prayer together every night, when a certain star appeared, which he playfully called his `mother,' saying it was her eye watching over him. It was a childish fancy, but we grow childish here, and I, too, have given that star a name. I call it `Annie,' and I watch its coming as eagerly as did the little boy, who died just as the star reached the zenith and was shining down upon him. His head was in my lap, and all there was left of my coat I made into a pillow for him, and held him till he died. His mother's address is —, Michigan. Write to her, Annie, and tell her how Johnny died in the firm hope of meeting her again in heaven. Tell her he did not suffer much pain,—only a weakness, which wasted his life away. Tell her the keepers were kind to him, and brought him ice-water several times. Tell her, too, of the star at which he gazed so long as he had strength.
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20Author:  Holmes Mary Jane 1825-1907Add
 Title:  Tempest and sunshine  
 Published:  2003 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: It was the afternoon of a bright October day. The old town clock had just tolled the hour of four, when the Lexington and Frankfort daily stage was heard rattling over the stony pavement in the small town of V—, Ky. In a few moments the four panting steeds were reined up before the door of the Eagle, the principal hotel in the place. “Mine host,” a middle-aged, pleasant-looking man, came bustling out to inspect the new comers, and calculate how many would do justice to his beefsteaks, strong coffee, sweet potatoes, and corn cakes, which were being prepared in the kitchen by Aunt Esther.* * Pronounced “Easter.” “Sir—“Upon further reflection, I think it proper to decline your polite invitation for to-night. “Sir:—When I became engaged to you I was very young, and am still so; consequently, you will hardly be surprised, when you learn that I have changed my mind, and wish to have our engagement dissolved. “—Can it be that you are sick? I do not wish to think so; and yet what else can prevent your writing? I have not a thought that you are forgetful of me, for you are too pure, too innocent, to play me false. And yet I am sometimes haunted by a vague fear that all is not right, for a dark shadow seems resting over me. One line from you, dearest Fanny, will fill my heart with sunshine again—” “I hardly know how to write what I wish to tell you. If I knew exactly your opinion concerning me, I might feel differently. As it is, I ardently hope that your extreme youth prevented my foolish, but then sincere attentions, from making any very lasting impression on you. But why not come to the point at once? Fanny, you must try and forget that you ever knew one so wholly unworthy of you as I am. It gives me great pain to write it, but I am about to engage myself to another. “Sir:—Have you, during some weeks past, ever wondered why I did not write to you? And in enumerating to yourself the many reasons which could prevent my writting, has it ever occurred to you, that possibly I might be false? Can you forgive me, Dr. Lacey, when I tell you that the love I once fancied I bore you, has wholly subsided, and I now feel for you a friendship, which I trust will be more lasting than my transient, girlish love. “Why, in the name of all the Woodburns and Camerous that ever were or ever will be, didn't you tell me what kind of mussy, fussy, twisted up things both Mrs. Cameron Senior, and Mrs. Cameron Senior's daughter, are. Why, the very first evening of our arrival, Mrs. Senior met me on the steps, and hugged me so hard that I really thought she was opposed to the match, and meant to kill me at once. In her zeal she actually kissed off both veil and bonnet, and as the latter disappeared, and she got a view of my face, on which the dust and cinders were an inch thick, she exclaimed, `Oh, bootiful, bootiful! Why, Frank, half hasn't been told me.'
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