Admiral's Light

Thrusting his tousled head through the trap-door, Miles made his third and last inspection for the night. Fierce yellow light flooded the glass cage; against the panes, like res...

Athwart the dim panes of the bedchamber, hackmatack boughs swayed to the chill drone of a dying wind. A rigid profile against twilight, the old man spoke as to some third presen...

As warmth in a dying man, so life in the village of Kilmarnock had retreated from the extremities. Gray cabins stood for the most part with sunken roof and yawning window; here...

At breakfast Tony discoursed readily as ever, smiled as engagingly, with glances no less frank, provocative, or droll. Twice he forced old Mr. Bissant to brighten his cloudy mor...

“Signs ain’t no great, I never ’lowed,” said Ella thoughtfully. Sweeping her knife in a neat semicircle, she pared the dough round the edge of a tin plate. The sweet, steamy bre...

The house, as they plunged down the last hill at midnight, showed orange squares above and below,--the windows in both stories, lighted as for some rare festivity. The sight was...

Stars, frost, and glimmer of snow blended into a bluish, dim suffusion, a hyperborean obscurity that was neither light nor darkness. The figure ahead showed as a blotch of dense...

That compact, as Miles stood waiting before the library fire, seemed reward enough, not only for their lesser troubles of last night, but for whatever might come, of greater. Th...

Some weeks later, at dusk on a calm evening, Miles and his sole companion sat outdoors for the first time that year. A little bench--Tony’s handiwork--girdled the hackmatack, so...

The birds, after a dawning chorus of vehement, almost theatric joy, made their first short flights from cover to cover among the elms. The rim of eastern hills had grown incande...

He took the stairs at a bound, stumbling in the dark. Below, while he mounted, an uproar broke out. “Come ahead! No! I told ye! Wait, hol’ on! What, leave him? Stave ’er in!” Th...