Cottage Folk

“And I might ha’ been drownded dead, I might,” added Daisy with impressiveness, though of course without any understanding of the words which she repeated merely as she had hear...

One day, coming home from the next station where she had been to see a married sister, Letty found herself alone in the same carriage with Bob Frewin, who had had occasion to go...

“I b’lieve father ’d kill me if he knowed as I’d been with ye to-night,” she whispered. “Ye don’t know what ’e’s like, father. It’s bad enough when ’e ’aven’t got the drink in ’...

Through the sheet of wet a thick, squat figure pounded along the shining road towards the farm. Bess could see it from the parlour window where she was dusting the china. It was...

But at the station they told him that there was no train for an hour and a half, and he turned into the “Public” hard by to get something to keep up his spirits before starting.

“If you’d believe it,” she was saying shyly, “there were a time when I were nigh to fancyin’ Mr. Hewson myself. Not that there iver were much atween us, and I don’t know as I co...

The girl blushed. She was pretty enough, but she was thin and pale, not to say wan, and her cotton dress was poor covering for the wintry day, and her ill-fitting black jacket a...

“Ye ’adn’t no call to come round ’ere at this time o’ night,” said she in her old defiant tone—but her voice was low, for, stirred as she was, she still remembered the sleeping...

“I think o’ the example, ma’am,” she whispered, her eyelids positively quivering with righteousness as she proceeded to her work. “I’ve done more for Mrs. Wood than I should ha’...

But the old habit of the past five years was upon him still. He could not endure that the little footsteps should lag painfully, and that the little voice that had been so dear...

A year had passed away. It was autumn again, and Lucy Wood sat out on the threshold above her brick steps and gazed down into the marsh, and across it to the distant town and ha...

Was ’Melia repenting already, and was it really of her folly that she was repenting—of the folly of her wild and misguided craving? Or was she mourning the broken tryst that it...

“Come,” she whispered, “let’s get ’ome to supper,” and she tried to hurry up the road, but not before Mrs. Cave had placed herself abreast of them, and holding out a friendly ha...

Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please see the transcriber’s note at the end of this text for details regarding the handling of the few textual i...

“Seems as though God A’mighty did ought to give me another chance,” she said with a sigh, “if it were on’y for this. For I shan’t be able to pay ye back else.”

=The Morning Post.=—‘Boldly conceived, probing some of the darkest depths of the human soul, the tale has a vigour and breadth of touch which have been surpassed in none of Mr....

=The Saturday Review.=—‘There is a great deal as well as a great variety of incident in the story, and more than twenty years are apportioned to it; but it never seems over-crow...

=Vanity Fair.=—‘The main thread of the story is powerful and pathetic; but there are lighter touches, wit and humour, and here and there what seem like shadows of people we have...