THE BOY CHIEF, THE INFANT POLITICIAN, AND THE PIRATE PRODIGY CHAPTER I It was a quiet New England village. Nowhere in the valley of the Connecticut the autumn sun shone upon a more peaceful, pastoral, manufacturing community. The wooden nutmegs were slowly ripening on the trees, and the white pine hams for Western consumption were […]

He was a spare man, and, physically, an ill-conditioned man, but at first glance scarcely a seedy man. The indications of reduced circumstances in the male of the better class are, I fancy, first visible in the boots and shirt; the boots offensively exhibiting a degree of polish inconsistent with their dilapidated condition, and the […]

I had been sauntering over the clover downs of a certain noted New England seaport. It was a Sabbath morning, so singularly reposeful and gracious, so replete with the significance of the seventh day of rest, that even the Sabbath bells ringing a mile away over the salt marshes had little that was monitory, mandatory, […]

He came toward me out of an opera lobby, between the acts,–a figure as remarkable as anything in the performance. His clothes, no two articles of which were of the same color, had the appearance of having been purchased and put on only an hour or two before,–a fact more directly established by the clothes-dealer’s […]

He asked me if I had ever seen the “Remus Sentinel.” I replied that I had not, and would have added that I did not even know where Remus was, when he continued by saying it was strange the hotel proprietor did not keep the “Sentinel” on his files, and that he, himself, should write […]

It was in a Pullman sleeping-car on a Western road. After that first plunge into unconsciousness which the weary traveler takes on getting into his berth, I awakened to the dreadful revelation that I had been asleep only two hours. The greater part of a long winter night was before me to face with staring […]

“Once, when I was a pirate–!” The speaker was an elderly gentleman in correct evening dress, the room a tasteful one, the company of infinite respectability, the locality at once fashionable and exclusive, the occasion an unexceptionable dinner. To this should be added that the speaker was also the host. With these conditions self-evident, all […]

NOTES BY AN EARLY RISER I have always been an early riser. The popular legend that “Early to bed and early to rise,” invariably and rhythmically resulted in healthfulness, opulence, and wisdom, I beg here to solemnly protest against. As an “unhealthy” man, as an “unwealthy” man, and doubtless by virtue of this protest an […]

CHAPTER I It was nearly two o’clock in the morning. The lights were out in Robinson’s Hall, where there had been dancing and revelry; and the moon, riding high, painted the black windows with silver. The cavalcade, that an hour ago had shocked the sedate pines with song and laughter, were all dispersed. One enamoured […]

As I opened Hop Sing’s letter, there fluttered to the ground a square strip of yellow paper covered with hieroglyphics, which, at first glance, I innocently took to be the label from a pack of Chinese fire-crackers. But the same envelope also contained a smaller strip of rice-paper, with two Chinese characters traced in India […]

He always thought it must have been fate. Certainly nothing could have been more inconsistent with his habits than to have been in the Plaza at seven o’clock of that midsummer morning. The sight of his colorless face in Sacramento was rare at that season, and, indeed, at any season, anywhere publicly, before two o’clock […]

I think we all loved him. Even after he mismanaged the affairs of the Amity Ditch Company, we commiserated him, although most of us were stockholders, and lost heavily. I remember that the blacksmith went so far as to say that “them chaps as put that responsibility on the old man oughter be lynched.” But […]

He lived alone. I do not think this peculiarity arose from any wish to withdraw his foolishness from the rest of the camp, nor was it probable that the combined wisdom of Five Forks ever drove him into exile. My impression is, that he lived alone from choice,–a choice he made long before the camp […]

It was at a little mining-camp in the California Sierras that he first dawned upon me in all his grotesque sweetness. I had arrived early in the morning, but not in time to intercept the friend who was the object of my visit. He had gone “prospecting,”–so they told me on the river,–and would not […]

I have seen her at last. She is a hundred and seven years old, and remembers George Washington quite distinctly. It is somewhat confusing, however, that she also remembers a contemporaneous Josiah W. Perkins of Basking Ridge, N. J., and, I think, has the impression that Perkins was the better man. Perkins, at the close […]

The American consul for Schlachtstadt had just turned out of the broad Konig’s Allee into the little square that held his consulate. Its residences always seemed to him to wear that singularly uninhabited air peculiar to a street scene in a theatre. The facades, with their stiff, striped wooden awnings over the windows, were of […]

They were partners. The avuncular title was bestowed on them by Cedar Camp, possibly in recognition of a certain matured good humor, quite distinct from the spasmodic exuberant spirits of its other members, and possibly from what, to its youthful sense, seemed their advanced ages–which must have been at least forty! They had also set […]

“Then it isn’t a question of property or next of kin?” said the consul. “Lord! no,” said the lady vivaciously. “Why, goodness me! I reckon old Desborough could, at any time before he died, have ‘bought up’ or ‘bought out’ the whole lot of his relatives on this side of the big pond, no matter […]

I don’t suppose that his progenitors ever gave him that name, or, indeed, that it was a NAME at all; but it was currently believed that–as pronounced “See UP”–it meant that lifting of the outer angle of the eye common to the Mongolian. On the other hand, I had been told that there was an […]

Only one shot had been fired. It had gone wide of its mark,–the ringleader of the Vigilantes,–and had left Red Pete, who had fired it, covered by their rifles and at their mercy. For his hand had been cramped by hard riding, and his eye distracted by their sudden onset, and so the inevitable end […]