I IT WAS THE DAY of Madame de St. Cyr’s dinner, an event I never missed; for, the mistress of a mansion in the Faubourg St. Germain, there still lingered about her the exquisite grace and good-breeding peculiar to the old regime, that insensibly communicates itself to the guests till they move in an atmosphere […]

SHE had remained, during all that day, with a sick neighbor,–those eastern wilds of Maine in that epoch frequently making neighbors and miles synonymous,–and so busy had she been with care and sympathy that she did not at first observe the approaching night. But finally the level rays, reddening the snow, threw their gleam upon […]

CERTAINLY there was a house there, half-way up Great Hill, a mansion of pale cream-colored stone, built with pillared porch and wings, vines growing over some parts of it, a sward like velvet surrounding it; the sun was flashing back from the windows — but — Why? Why had none of the Godsdale people seen […]

THERE was a certain weakness possessed by my ancestors, though in nowise peculiar to them, and of which, in common with other more or less undesirable traits, I have come into the inheritance. It was the fear of dying in poverty. That, too, in the face of a goodly share of pelf stored in stocks, […]

I THE hospital of the prison was little more than a whitewashed corridor with bald daylight coming through the high gratings. The nurse was neither soft-footed nor soft-hearted. But the woman occupying one of the cots there was as oblivious of outer circumstances as if she were in the middle of a cloud. It was, […]