Adventures in indigence, and other essays

It is doubtful whether the present volume should be looked on as a collection of essays, or might not more aptly be called a book of personal experience. The true essayist offer...

But though to the outward eye these visitors played upon the harp and violin, how much more indeed did they play upon me! Young, and sensitive, and as yet unsounded, how, with d...

Poverty is a variable term and much subject to comparison. Some will allow it only to those who have been born to it. To have been always half-starved, these think, and to carry...

Stony pause. I looked coldly at her. It seemed, for a moment, that the irresistible force really _had_ met the immovable body. Then all at once, she put her head down on her arm...

She raised her old bloodshot eyes, not to me, but to heaven. I have seen the same look in the eyes of an old dog teased by a pert mongrel, and crippled and rendered helpless by...

Is it not probable, remembering my own experience, that Musgrove, Mamie, Margaret, and the others had with their very indigence acquired a compensating fortune and, by reason of...

So he triumphed--yet without pride; nor did one hear in his spirit's victory any hint of animosity, or talk of reprisals, or bitterness, or demand for indemnities, or hidden hat...

Doctor Highway loved truth, he hated falsehood, and this with so much fervor and so little compromise that he was pointed out by some as an atheist. He was perpetually inviting...

There was, further, my mother's youngest sister, who was better than any legend. I would rather have inherited, as I did then, that love-story of hers, than very considerable wo...

I have no way of knowing whether any Daniel rose to warn them. If so, he was not heeded. The feast went on uninterrupted. Or, it is possible, too, they had not the requisite edu...

Charles Lamb, in his "Grace Before Meat," protests--very endearingly, it seems to me--against the custom of particular thankfulness for food. He suspects that it had its origin...

Joseph held the door open; a fine heraldic gesture--the flat of his palm against it, the fingers spread, his head flung back, his eyes tributary ahead of him; his whole pose say...