| | 184 | Author: | Stewart, Donald Ogden | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | A Parody Outline of History  | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | On a memorable evening in the year 1904
I witnessed the opening performance of
Maude Adams in "Peter Pan''. Nothing in
the world can describe the tremendous enthusiasm
of that night! I shall never forget
the moment when Peter came to the front of
the stage and asked the audience if we believed
in fairies. I am happy to say that I
was actually the first to respond. Leaping at
once out of my seat, I shouted "Yes—Yes!''
To my intense pleasure the whole house almost
instantly followed my example, with the
exception of one man. This man was sitting
directly in front of me. His lack of enthusiasm
was to me incredible. I pounded him on
the back and shouted, "Great God, man, are
you alive! Wake up! Hurrah for the fairies!
Hurrah!'' Finally he uttered a rather feeble
"Hurrah!'' Childe Roland to the dark tower
came. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 187 | Author: | Stewart, Calvin | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Uncle Josh Weathersby's "Punkin Centre Stories" | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE author was born in Virginia, on a little patch of land, so poor
we had to fertilize it to make brick. Our family, while having cast
their fortunes with the South, was not a family ruined by the war; we
did not have anything when the war commenced, and so we held our own. I
secured a common school education, and at the age of twelve I left home,
or rather home left me—things just petered out. I was slush cook on an
Ohio River Packet; check clerk in a stave and heading camp in the knobs
of Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia; I helped lay the track of the M. K.
& T. R. R., and was chambermaid in a livery stable. Made my first
appearance on the stage at the National Theatre in Cincinnati, Ohio, and
have since then chopped cord wood, worked in a coal mine, made cross
ties (and walked them), worked on a farm, taught a district school (made
love to the big girls), run a
threshing machine, cut bands, fed the machine and ran the engine. Have
been a freight and passenger brakeman, fired and ran a locomotive; also
a freight train conductor and check clerk in a freight house; worked on
the section; have been a shot gun messenger for the Wells, Fargo
Company. Have been with a circus, minstrels, farce comedy, burlesque
and dramatic productions; have been with good shows, bad shows, medicine
shows, and worse, and some shows where we had landlords singing in the
chorus. Have played variety houses and vaudeville houses; have slept in
a box car one night, and a swell hotel the next; have been a traveling
salesman (could spin as many yarns as any of them). For the past four
years have made the Uncle Josh stories for the talking machine. The Lord
only knows what next! | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 188 | Author: | Tarkington, Booth, 1869-1946 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Alice Adams | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE patient, an old-fashioned man, thought
the nurse made a mistake in keeping both of
the windows open, and her sprightly disregard
of his protests added something to his hatred
of her. Every evening he told her that anybody
with ordinary gumption ought to realize that night
air was bad for the human frame. "The human
frame won't stand everything, Miss Perry,'' he
warned her, resentfully. "Even a child, if it had
just ordinary gumption, ought to know enough not to
let the night air blow on sick people—yes, nor well
people, either! `Keep out of the night air, no matter
how well you feel.' That's what my mother used to
tell me when I was a boy. `Keep out of the night
air, Virgil,' she'd say. `Keep out of the night air.' '' | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 189 | Author: | Tarkington, Booth, 1869-1946 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Conquest of Canaan | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | A DRY snow had fallen steadily
throughout the still night, so that
when a cold, upper wind cleared the
sky gloriously in the morning the
incongruous Indiana town shone in a
white harmony—roof, ledge, and earth as evenly
covered as by moonlight. There was no thaw;
only where the line of factories followed the big
bend of the frozen river, their distant chimneys like
exclamation points on a blank page, was there a
first threat against the supreme whiteness. The
wind passed quickly and on high; the shouting of
the school-children had ceased at nine o'clock with
pitiful suddenness; no sleigh-bells laughed out on
the air; and the muffling of the thoroughfares
wrought an unaccustomed peace like that of Sunday.
This was the phenomenon which afforded the
opening of the morning debate of the sages in the
wide windows of the "National House.'' | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 190 | Author: | Tarkington, Booth, 1869-1946 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Flirt | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | Valentine Corliss walked up Corliss Street the hottest afternoon
of that hot August, a year ago, wearing a suit of white serge
which attracted a little attention from those observers who were
able to observe anything except the heat. The coat was shaped
delicately; it outlined the wearer, and, fitting him as women's
clothes fit women, suggested an effeminacy not an attribute of
the tall Corliss. The effeminacy belonged all to the tailor, an
artist plying far from Corliss Street, for the coat would have
encountered a hundred of its fellows at Trouville or Ostende this
very day. Corliss Street is the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, the
Park Lane, the Fifth Avenue, of Capitol City, that smoky
illuminant of our great central levels, but although it esteems
itself an established cosmopolitan thoroughfare, it is still
provincial enough to be watchful; and even in its torrid languor
took some note of the alien garment. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 191 | Author: | Tarkington, Booth, 1869-1946 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Magnificent Ambersons; illustrated by Arthur William Brown | | | | Published: | 2000 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | MAJOR AMBERSON had "made a fortune" in 1878, when other people were losing
fortunes, and the magnificence of the Ambersons began then. Magnificence,
like the size of a fortune, is always comparative, as even Magnificent Lorenzo
may now perceive, if he has happened to haunt New York in 1916; and the Ambersons
were magnificent in their day and place. Their splendour lasted throughout
all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city,
but reached its topmost during the period when every prosperous family with
children kept a Newfoundland dog. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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