A Rough Shaking

It was a day when everything around seemed almost perfect: everything does, now and then, come nearly right for a moment or two, preparatory to coming all right for good at the...

The sun in England seems to shine because he cannot help it; the sun in Italy seems to shine because he means it, and wants to mean it. Thus he shone the next morning, including...

Without knowing it, he was approaching the sea. Walking along a chain of downs, he saw suddenly from the top of one of them, for the first time in his memory though not in his l...

After a year or two, Mr. Porson became anxious lest the boy should grow up too unlike other boys--lest he should not be manly, but of a too gently sad behaviour. He began, there...

That there had been a fair not far off will partly account for what follows. As Clare sat resting, which was all he could do, with sleep fled and food nowhere, a roar of a diffe...

Marway was a fine, handsome fellow, whose manners, where he saw reason, soon won him favour, and two of the young men in the office were his ready slaves. Every moment of the ne...

I need hardly say that by this time all the beasts with any friendliness in them had for Clare a little more than their usual amount of that feeling. But there was one between w...

Clare had been in the bank more than a year, and not yet had Mr. Shotover discovered why he did not quite trust him. Had Clare known he did not, he would have wondered that he t...

Miss Tempest was the last of an old family, with scarce a relation, and no near one, in the world. Hence the pieces of personal property that had continued in the possession of...

From the fact that his hostess made him no answer when he breathed the hope of a job in her garden, Clare concluded that he had presumed in suggesting the thing to her, and that...

The sweepings of the mill-floor did not last them long, and by the time they saw rising before them the spires and chimneys of the small county town to which the road had been l...

Clare followed, wondering, but nowise anxious. He saw nothing to make him anxious. The captain looked a good man, and a good man was a friend to Clare! But when he entered the s...

The dawn came at last, and soon after the dawn footsteps, but they approached only to recede. When the door at length opened, it was but to let a pair of eyes glance round on th...

Before Clare had done his thinking, darkness had fallen, and, weary to the very bones, he threw himself on the bed beside the baby. The dog jumped up and laid himself at his fee...

Clare was yet in his tenth year when an unhealthy summer came. The sun was bright and warm as in other summers, and the flowers in field and garden appeared as usual when the ho...

The two men came after at their ease. No sooner was Nimrod on the road, however, than he began to quicken his pace. He quickened it fast, and within a minute or so was trotting...

This enemy was a trouble, more or less, to every decent person in the neighbourhood. It was well his mother was a widow, for where she was only powerless to restrain, the father...

So void of self-assertion was Clare, so prompt at the call of whoever needed him, so quiet yet so quick, so silent in his sympathetic ministrations, so studious and so capable,...

In a few moments they were safe in the thicket at the foot of what had been their enemy and was now their friend--the garden-wall. How many things and persons there are whose ot...

Though as comfortable as one could be who so sorely lacked food, Clare slept lightly. His baby was heavy on his mind, and he woke very early--woke at once to the anxious thought...

When Clare looked up he saw nothing between him and the sky. They had dragged the caravan from above him, and he had not moved. Abdiel indeed waked at the first pull, but had la...

A strange smell was in Clare’s nostrils, and as he went down the steps inside, it grew stronger. He did not dislike it; but it set him thinking why it should so differ from that...

Mr. Porson was a man about five and forty; his wife was a few years younger. His theories of religion were neither large nor lofty; he accepted those that were handed down to hi...

Tommy rose rubbing his forehead, and crying quietly. He did not dare say a word. It was well for him he did not. Clare, perplexed and anxious about the baby, was in no mood to a...

He had not long to wait. That very afternoon, going a message for the head-clerk, he met Ann walking with a young lady--who must be Miss Shotover. Neither sister seemed happy wi...

At the end of the wall was a rough boarded fence, in contact with it, and reaching, some fifty yards or so, to a hovel in which a blacksmith, of unknown antecedents, had taken p...

When Mr. Goodenough appeared at the house-door with the boy, his wife’s face expressed what her tongue dared not utter without some heating of the furnace behind it. But Clare n...

Tommy, out in the moonlight, found himself in a waste yard, scattered over with bits of iron, mostly old and rusty. It was not an interesting place, for it was not likely to aff...

Once clear of the well and the wall, Clare set off running like a gaze-hound. Such was the change produced in him by joy and the satisfaction of hope, that when he entered the s...

Clare went over the wall and the well without a notion of what he was going to do, except look for work. He had eaten half a loaf, and now drew in his cap some water from the we...

As Clare came down the next morning but one, there was the child again on the dark narrow stair. She had no doll. Her hands lay folded in her lap. She sat on the same step, the...

Simpson, the bully of Clare’s childhood, went limping about on a crutch, permanently lame, and full of hatred toward the innocent occasion of the injury he had brought upon hims...

He went into the street with a white face and a dazed look--not from any hardship he had experienced during his confinement, for he had been in what to him was clover, but becau...

“Now, Tommy,” said Clare, having eaten his half loaf, “I’m going out to look for work, and you must take care of baby. You’re not to feed her--you would only choke her, and wast...

“When I had a home,” remarked Clare, “our servant said the cook was queen of the kitchen: I don’t want to be rude, ma’am, but I must do as she told me.”

How shall a man describe what passed in the mind of a childless wife, with a motherless boy in her arms! It is the loveliest provision, doubtless, that every child should have a...

Things went on for nearly a month, every one thriving but Clare. Yet was Clare as peaceful as any, and much happier than Tommy, to whose satisfaction adventure was needful.

Within a fortnight or so after the police had dismissed him, blowing him loose on the world like a dandelion-seed in the wind, Clare had an adventure which not only gave him ple...

The place to which the good people carried the gift of the earthquake--carried him with much anxiety and more exultation--had no very distinctive features. It had many fields in...

Clare got out of the crowd, and was soon beyond sight of anyone that knew what had taken place, his heart exulting that he had saved his friend who trusted in him. He hurried on...

So Clare went once more into the street, where Abdiel was again watching for him, and stood on the pavement, not knowing which way to turn. The big policeman had told him that n...

The next morning Clare happened to do something not altogether to the farmer’s mind. It was a matter of no consequence--only cleaning that side of one of the cow-houses first wh...

He had but one enemy, and he did not make him such: he was one by nature. For he was so different from Clare that he disliked him the moment he saw him, and it took but a day to...

The lingering, long-drawn-out _table d’hôte_ dinner was just over in one of the inns on the _cornice_ road. The gentlemen had gone into the garden, and some of the ladies to the...

But, alas! Clare had made another enemy--the lad whose attempt to change the bandboxes he had foiled. The fellow followed him, lurkingly, all the way home--on the watch for fit...

It was a lovely spring morning. The sun was about thirty degrees above the horizon, shining with a liquid radiance, as if he had already drawn up and was shining through the dew...

With the new day came the fresh necessity for breakfast, and the fresh interest in the discovery of it. But breakfast is a thing not always easiest to find where breakfasts most...

One cold day in a stormy March, the wind was wildly blowing broken clouds across the heavens, and now rain, now sleet, over the shivering blades of the young corn, whose tender...

When Clare awoke, he knew he had been asleep a long time. It was, notwithstanding, quite dark, and there was something wrong with him. His head ached: it had never ached before....

The head-clerk, while he had not a word against him, as he confessed to Mr. Shotover, yet thought Clare would never make a man of business. When pressed to say on what he ground...

They had opened the menagerie in a certain large town. It was the evening-exhibition, and Clare was going his round with his wand of office, pointing to the different animals, a...

Travelling on in vague hope, meeting with kindness enough to keep him alive, but getting no employment, sleeping in what shelter he could find, and never missing the shelter he...

Clare scrambled to his feet, and surveyed the man who had thus roused him. He had a vague sense of having seen him before, but could not remember where. Feeling faint, and findi...

They turned their faces again toward the centre of the town, and resumed their walk, taking in more of what they saw than while they had not yet had the second instalment of the...

“No, Tommy,” said Clare, drawing back, “I can’t trust you! You would eat it all; and if I died of hunger, what would become of baby, left alone with you? I don’t feel at all sur...

When Clare woke from his first sleep, which he did within an hour--for he was too hungry to sleep straight on, and the door, imperfectly closed by Tommy, had come open, and let...

Clare’s next day went much as the preceding, only that he was early at the shop. When his dinner-hour came, he ran home, and was glad to find Tommy and the dog mildly agreeable...

Clare sped jubilant. But soon came a check to his jubilation: it was one thing to drop from the wall, and quite another to climb to the top of it without the help of the door! T...

At the shop of a draper and haberdasher, where one might buy almost anything sold, Clare’s new friend stopped and walked in. He asked to see Mr. Maidstone, and a shopman went to...

That part of the human race which is fond of dolls, may now imagine the pleasure of the cook in going to the town in the omnibus to buy everything for a live doll so big as Clar...

It would take a big book to tell all the things of interest that happened to Clare in the next few weeks. They would be mainly how and where he found refuge, and how he and Abdi...

Who ever had a sovereign for the first time in his life, and did not feel rich? Clare trudged along merrily, and Abdiel shared his joy. They had to sleep out of doors neverthele...

As the evening drew on, and began to settle down into night, a new care arose in the mind of the elder boy. Where were they to pass the darkness?--how find shelter for sleep? It...

They had not slept long, when they were roused by a hideous clamour and rattling at the door, and thunderous blows on the wooden sides of the shed. Clare woke first, and rubbed...

One night sir Harry, lying awake, heard a movement in the state-room, and got up. It was a still, star-lit night. The frigate was dreaming away northward with all sail set. Thro...

The door to the kitchen was open: Tommy must be in the garden again! When he reached the nursery, as he called it to himself, he found the baby as he had left her, but moaning a...