| | 102 | Author: | Jewett, Sarah Orne | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | In Dark New England Days  | | | | Published: | 1994 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | THE last of the neighbors was going home; officious Mrs. Peter
Downs had lingered late and sought for additional housework with
which to prolong her stay. She had talked incessantly, and
buzzed like a busy bee as she helped to put away the best
crockery after the funeral supper, while the sisters Betsey and
Hannah Knowles grew every moment more forbidding and unwilling to
speak. They lighted a solitary small oil lamp at last as if for
Sunday evening idleness, and put it on the side table in the
kitchen. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 108 | Author: | Kropotkin, Peter | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Maxím Górky | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | FEW writers have established their reputation so rapidly as
Maxím Górky. His first sketches (1892-95), were
published in an obscure provincial paper of the Caucasus, and were
totally unknown to the literary world, but when a short tale of his
appeared in a widely-read [illustration omitted] review, edited by
Korolénko, it at once attracted general attention. The
beauty of its form, its artistic finish, and the new note of strength
and courage which rang through it, brought the young writer
immediately into prominence. It became known that
Maxím Górky was the pen-name of quite a young
man, A. Pyeshkoff, who was born in 1868 in Nizhni Novgorod, a
large town on the Volga; that his father was a merchant, or an
artisan, his mother a remarkable peasant woman, who died soon
after the birth of her son, and that the boy, orphaned when only
nine, was brought up in a family of his father's relatives. The
childhood of Górky must have been anything but happy, for
one day he ran away and entered into service on a Volga River
steamer. Later he lived and wandered on foot with the tramps in
South Russia, and during these wanderings he wrote a number of
short stories which were published in a newspaper of Northern
Caucasia. The stories proved to be remarkably fine, and when a
collection of all that he had hitherto written was published in 1900,
in four small volumes, the whole of a large edition was sold in a
very short time, and the name of Górky took its place—to
speak of living novelists only—by the side of those of
Korolénko and Tchéhoff, immediately after the
name of Leo Tolstóy. In Western Europe and America his
reputation was made with the same rapidity, as soon as a couple of
his sketches were translated into French and German, and
retranslated into English. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 110 | Author: | Lang, Andrew | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | Angling Sketches | | | | Published: | 2001 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | These papers do not boast of great sport. They are truthful, not like the tales
some fishers tell. They should appeal to many sympathies. There is no false
modesty in the confidence with which I esteem myself a duffer, at fishing. Some
men are born duffers; others, unlike persons of genius, become so by an infinite
capacity for not taking pains. Others,
again, among whom I would rank myself, combine both these elements of
incompetence. Nature, that made me enthusiastically fond of fishing, gave me
thumbs for fingers, short-sighted eyes, indolence, carelessness, and a temper
which (usually sweet and angelic) is goaded to madness by the laws of matter and
of gravitation. For example: when another man is caught up in a branch he
disengages his fly; I jerk at it till something breaks. As for carelessness, in
boyhood I fished, by preference, with doubtful gut and knots ill-tied; it made
the risk greater, and increased the excitement if one did hook a trout. I can't
keep a fly-book. I stuff the flies into my pockets at random, or stick them into
the leaves of a novel, or bestow them in the lining of my hat or the case of my
rods. Never, till 1890, in all my days did I possess a landing-net. If I can
drag a fish up a bank, or over the gravel, well; if not, he goes on his way
rejoicing. On the Test I thought it seemly to carry a landing- net. It had a
hinge, and doubled up. I put the handle through a button- hole of my coat: I saw
a big fish rising, I put a dry fly over
him; the idiot took it. Up stream he ran, then down stream, then he yielded to
the rod and came near me. I tried to unship my landing-net from my button-hole.
Vain labour! I twisted and turned the handle, it would not budge. Finally, I
stooped, and attempted to ladle the trout out with the short net; but he broke
the gut, and went off. A landing-net is a tedious thing to carry, so is a creel,
and a creel is, to me, a superfluity. There is never anything to put in it. If I
do catch a trout, I lay him under a big stone, cover him with leaves, and never
find him again. I often break my top joint; so, as I never carry string, I
splice it with a bit of the line, which I bite off, for I really cannot be
troubled with scissors and I always lose my knife. When a phantom minnow sticks
in my clothes, I snap the gut off, and put on another, so that when I reach home
I look as if a shoal of fierce minnows had attacked me and hung on like leeches.
When a boy, I was--once or twice--a bait-fisher, but I never carried worms in
box or bag. I found them under big stones, or in the fields, wherever I had the luck. I
never tie nor otherwise fasten the joints of my rod; they often slip out of the
sockets and splash into the water. Mr. Hardy, however, has invented a
joint-fastening which never slips. On the other hand, by letting the joint rust,
you may find it difficult to take down your rod. When I see a trout rising, I
always cast so as to get hung up, and I frighten him as I disengage my hook. I
invariably fall in and get half-drowned when I wade, there being an
insufficiency of nails in the soles of my brogues. My waders let in water, too,
and when I go out to fish I usually leave either my reel, or my flies, or my
rod, at home. Perhaps no other man's average of lost flies in proportion to
taken trout was ever so great as mine. I lose plenty, by striking furiously,
after a series of short rises, and breaking the gut, with which the fish swims
away. As to dressing a fly, one would sooner think of dressing a dinner. The
result of the fly-dressing would resemble a small blacking-brush, perhaps, but
nothing entomological. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 116 | Author: | Locke, William John | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Fortunate Youth | | | | Published: | 1998 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | PAUL KEGWORTHY lived with his mother, Mrs. Button, his stepfather, Mr. Button,
and six little Buttons, his half brothers and sisters. His was not an ideal
home; it consisted in a bedroom, a kitchen and a scullery in a grimy little
house in a grimy street made up of rows of exactly similar grimy little houses,
and forming one of a hundred similar streets in a northern manufacturing town.
Mr. and Mrs. Button worked in a factory and took in as lodgers grimy single men
who also worked in factories. They were not a model couple; they were rather, in
fact, the scandal of Budge Street, which did not itself enjoy, in Bludston, a
reputation for holiness. Neither was good to look upon. Mr. Button, who was
Lancashire bred and born, divided the yearnings of his spirit between strong
drink and dog-fights. Mrs. Button, a viperous Londoner, yearned for noise. When
Mr. Button came home drunk he punched his wife about the head and kicked her
about the body, while they both exhausted the vocabulary of vituperation of
North and South, to the horror and edification of the neighbourhood. When Mr.
Button was sober Mrs. Button chastised little Paul. She would have done so when
Mr. Button was drunk, but she had not the time. The periods, therefore, of his
mother's martyrdom were those of Paul's enfranchisement. If he saw his
stepfather come down the street with
steady gait, he fled in terror; if he saw him reeling homeward he lingered about
with light and joyous heart. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
| 120 | Author: | Mitchell, S. Weir | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The Autobiography of a Quack | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | AT this present moment of time I am what the doctors call an interesting case,
and am to be found in bed No. 10, Ward 11, Massachusetts General Hospital. I am
told that I have what is called Addison's disease, and that it is this pleasing
malady which causes me to be covered with large blotches of a dark mulatto tint.
However, it is a rather grim subject to joke about, because, if I believed the
doctor who comes around every day, and thumps me, and listens to my chest with
as much pleasure as if I were music all through—I say, if I really
believed him, I should suppose I was going to die. The fact is, I don't believe
him at all. Some of these days I shall take a turn and get about again; but
meanwhile it is rather dull for a
stirring, active person like me to have to lie still and watch myself getting
big brown and yellow spots all over me, like a map that has taken to growing. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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