Boston

The decision to write this novel was taken at nine-thirty P.M. (Pacific Coast time), August 22nd, 1927: the occasion being the receipt of a telephone message from a newspaper, t...

It was the parlor-maid who found Old Josiah in the morning, seated at his desk, his head fallen forward upon his arms. He might have been asleep, but his dinner-coat told her th...

The “jitney bus” from Boston came speeding down the highway, and when it got into North Plymouth it stopped in front of the cordage company’s plant. There climbed out a little o...

Snow in the air, whirled here and there by unpurposed winds; snow on the ground, thrown back from sidewalks and turning them into trenches. Guards and policemen, pacing in front...

The days passed; and one of them rang a bell in the soul of Cornelia Thornwell. She had kept her vow, she had won the wager with herself. For a whole year she had taken care of...

Cornelia declined three invitations, to live in three different mansions, and got herself an apartment on the north side of Beacon Hill, where the poor live near enough to the r...

The day of glory, sung in the “Marseillaise,” had arrived; the American troops stopped the first German onslaught, and began their counter-advance which was to end the war. The...

Rupert Alvin would have worried more about his runaway daughter, if he had not had so many troubles at home to keep him occupied. It seemed as if all the devils in Puritan New E...

Thus the poet; and never more aptly than of that web which the fates wove about the lives of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Their two friends Cornelia and Betty were to s...

Plymouth Court-house stands at the head of the square, a large and stately building of red brick, with ivy climbing the walls, and white colonial entrances, and a niche containi...

On the 11th of September, 1920, the grand jury of Norfolk County brought indictments against Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, charging them with the murder of the paymaster...

Quincy Thornwell was dining with his Aunt Cornelia. He called her that, scrupulously, though he was only two years her junior; he had done it, scrupulously, for forty-five years...

Springtime in New England! Not all the giant factories with belching smoke, not all the dingy tenements, billboards, hot-dog stands and filling stations could conceal the fact t...

“Court!” shouted the bailiff, and pounded on the floor with his “wand.” It was the court-room at Dedham, in Norfolk County, instead of Plymouth, so it was a different bailiff, b...

Four times each day the prisoners made their march down the middle of the street, accompanied by military escort. Four times each day the jury made a march, from their hotel to...

Sacco and Vanzetti were back in their cells: the former in jail in Dedham while his appeals were heard, the latter in Charlestown State Prison, working at his old sentence of fi...

Judge Webster Thayer was considering the various motions for a new trial, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti was manufacturing automobile license plates in Charlestown State Prison; in his...

Betty Alvin was now twenty-six years of age; old enough to know better, as her family and friends insisted, but she continued to give her time to the stirring up of social disco...

Cornelia Thornwell would wake up in the middle of the night, trembling, in a cold sweat. They were going to murder Bart and Nick! Impossible to fool herself any longer; they did...

While presidents of great colleges delivered baccalaureate sermons and partook of graduation banquets, the two wops waited in jail, with the grim sentence hanging over their hea...

On July twenty-ninth it was announced that the decision would be given out on the third of August. That was a Wednesday, the day the Governor’s council met; and this fact might...

Sacco and Vanzetti, brought up from Dedham jail on the first day of July, had been put into the death cells. When the Governor granted the first reprieve of thirty days, to allo...

“This is our career and our triumph,” Bart had proclaimed; and assuredly never had “a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler” caused such excitement in the world. On Saturday, t...

In a room in the Hotel Bellevue, adjoining the State House, five lawyers from New York, all volunteers in the case, had worked all Sunday night and part of Monday, eighteen cons...

Even at that late hour there were men and women who could not make up their minds to let Sacco and Vanzetti die. There were protestants who would not cease marching. In Salem St...