THE COMEDY THAT WROTE ITSELF AS RELATED BY G. A. RICHARDSON. I. How pleasant it is to have money, heigho!How pleasant it is to have money! Sings (I think) Clough. Well, I had money, and more of it than I felt any desire to spend; which is as much as any reasonable man can want. […]

From the Memoirs of Joshua Frampton, Esq., late Honorary Physician to the Wells, and Surgeon. I cannot pass this year 1790 without speaking of a ridiculous adventure which, but that it providentially happened at the close of our season, when the Spa was emptying and our fashionables talked more of packing their trunks than of […]

I. Cleeve Court, known now as Cleeve Old Court, sits deep in a valley beside a brook and a level meadow, across which it looks southward upon climbing woods and glades descending here and there between them like broad green rivers. Above, the valley narrows almost to a gorge, with scarps of limestone, grey and […]

Particulars concerning the end of Mistress Catherine Johnstone, late of Givens, in Ayrshire; from a private relation made by the young woman Kirstie Maclachlan to the Reverend James Souttar, A.M., Minister of the Parish of Wyliebank, and by him put into writing. I had been placed in my parish of Wyliebank about a twelvemonth before […]

A PASSAGE FROM THE ORAL HISTORY OF ARDEVORA. I. Woman Suffrage? It’s surprising to me how light some folks will talk– with a Providence, for all they know, waiting round the corner to take them at their word. I put my head in at the Working Man’s Institute last night, and there was the new […]

From the Military Memoir of Capt. J. de Courcy, late of the North Wilts Regiment. There were four of us on top of the coach that night–the driver, the guard, the corporal and I–all well muffled up and swathed about the throat against the northwest wind; and we carried but one inside passenger, though he […]

A passage from the Memoirs of Manuel (or Manus) McNeill, agent in the Secret Service of Great Britain during the campaigns of the Peninsula (1808-1813). A Spanish subject by birth, and a Spaniard in all his up-bringing, he traces in the first chapter of his Memoirs his descent from an old Highland family through one […]

“Trust in good verses then:They only shall aspire,When pyramids, as menAre lost i’the funeral fire.” As the tale is told by Plato, in the tenth book of his Republic, one Er the son of Arminius, a Pamphylian, was slain in battle; and ten days afterwards, when they collected the bodies for burial, his body alone […]

CHAPTER I. ‘In all his life he never engaged in a law suit. Reader, try if you can go so far and be so good a man.’ Thus concludes the epitaph of Doctor Unonius, upon a modest stone in the churchyard of Polpeor, in Cornwall, of which parish he was, during his life, the general […]

CHAPTER I. Millionaire though he was, Mr Markham (nee Markheim) never let a small opportunity slip. To be sure the enforced idleness of Atlantic crossing bored him and kept him restless; it affected him with malaise to think that for these five days, while the solitude of ocean swallowed him, men on either shore, with […]

Troy–not for the first time in its history–is consumed with laughter; laughter which I deprecate, while setting down as an impartial chronicler the occasion and the cause of it. You must know that our venerable and excellent squire, Sir Felix Felix-Williams, has for some years felt our little town getting, as he puts it, ‘beyond […]

Outside the railway station Colonel Baigent handed his carpet-bag to the conductor of the hotel omnibus, and stood for a moment peering about in the dusk, as if to take his bearings. ‘For The Dragon, sir?’ asked the conductor. ‘The Dragon?’ Yes, certainly,’ echoed Colonel Baigent, aroused by the name from the beginnings of a […]

[From the Memoirs of a Pierrot.] I had come with high expectations, for Mr Felix, a bachelor of sixty-five, was reputed to have made for thirty years this particular cabinet his idol. Any nabob or millionaire can collect. Mr Felix, being moderately well to do, had selected. He would have none but the best; and […]

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century there lived at Dolphin House, Troy, a Mr Samuel Pinsent, ship-chandler, who by general consent was the funniest fellow that ever took up his abode in the town. He came originally from somewhere in the South Hams, but this tells us nothing, for the folk of the […]

[August, 1644. The Story is told by Ralph Medhope, Captain of the Twenty-second (or Gray-coat) Troop of Horse in the Parliament Army, then serving in Cornwall.] We were eight men in the picket. My cornet, Ned Penkevill, rode beside me; our trumpeter, Israel Hutson, a pace or two behind; with five troopers following. I could […]

[The scene is the kitchen of a small farm-house above the Walkham River, on the western edge of Dartmoor. The walls, originally of rough granite, have had their asperities smoothed down by many layers of whitewash. The floor is of lime-ash, nicely sanded. From the ceiling–formed of rude, unplaned beams and the planching of the […]

[The story is told by Will Fleming, of the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-law, and sometime Cornet of the 32nd Troop of Horse in the Parliament Army, then (December, 1643) quartered at Farnham, on the Hants border.] CHAPTER I. I dare say that, since the world began and men learned to fight, was never an army moderately […]

Under the green shore that faces the port, and at a point that, as the meeting-place of river and harbour, may be called indifferently by either name, lay a slim-waisted barque at anchor, with a sand-barge alongside. The time was a soft and sunny morning in early January– a day that was Nature’s breathing space […]

CHAPTER I. Sergeant David Wilkes, of the First (Royal) Regiment of Foot–third battalion, B Company–came trudging with a small fatigue party down the sandy slopes of Mount Olia, on the summit of which they had been toiling all day, helping the artillerymen to drag an extra 24-pounder into battery. They had brought it into position […]

I daresay they never saw, and perhaps never will see, one another. I met them on separate railway journeys, and the dates are divided by five years almost. One boy was travelling third-class, the other first. The age of each when I made his very slight acquaintance (with the one I did not even exchange […]