I The willows haunted the lake more gloomily, trailed their old branches more dejectedly, than when Dr. Hiram Webster had, forty years before, bought the ranchos surrounding them from the Moreno grandees. Gone were the Morenos from all but the archives of California, but the willows and Dr. Hiram Webster were full of years and […]

Morton Blaine returned to New York from his brief vacation to find awaiting him a frantic note from John Schuyler, the man nearer to him than any save himself, imploring him to “come at once.” The appeal was supplemented with the usual intimation that the service was to be rendered to God rather than to […]

(Republished from the Smart Set) It was an old cemetery, and they had been long dead. Those who died nowadays were put in the new burying-place on the hill, close to the Bois d’Amour and within sound of the bells that called the living to mass. But the little church where the mass was celebrated […]

Weigall, continental and detached, tired early of grouse-shooting. To stand propped against a sod fence while his host’s workmen routed up the birds with long poles and drove them towards the waiting guns, made him feel himself a parody on the ancestors who had roamed the moors and forests of this West Riding of Yorkshire […]

I The great author had realized one of the dreams of his ambitious youth, the possession of an ancestral hall in England. It was not so much the good American’s reverence for ancestors that inspired the longing to consort with the ghosts of an ancient line, as artistic appreciation of the mellowness, the dignity, the […]

Characters: James Hamilton, Mary Fawcett, Rachael Lavine, two slaves. Place: Nevis, British West Indies. Time: The month of April, 1756. [A large room, with open windows, to which are attached heavy inside wooden shutters furnished with iron bars. Beyond the windows are seen masses of tropical trees and foliage, green and more brilliantly hued, filled […]

(This story first appeared in Vanity Fair, London, in 1892) Her husband was dying, and she was alone with him. Nothing could exceed the desolation of her surroundings. She and the man who was going from her were in the third-floor-back of a New York boarding-house. It was summer, and the other boarders were in […]

(Published in Vanity Fair, London, in 1895) People were beginning to wonder if an American, having captured a title and worn it for five years, would renounce it for mere good looks and brains; in other words, if Lady Carnath, formerly Miss Edith Ingoldsby, of Washington, and still earlier–before her father had found leisure to […]

I The first twenty-three years of Andrew Webb’s life were passed in that tranquillity of mind and body induced by regular work, love of exercise, and a good digestion. He lived in a little flat in Harlem, with his widowed mother and a younger sister who was ambitious to become an instructor of the young […]