David Malcolm

When with a last desperate spurt I ran into the clearing, I saw the Professor sitting in the cabin door, smoking his pipe and basking in the sunshine as though life held no trou...

I was not long at McGraw University before I had attained my ambition to be like Boller of '89. I draped my legs in wide folds of shepherd's plaid; the corners of a purple silk...

Through what quiet lanes of trivial circumstance do we move toward the momentous events of our lives? We go our way, whistling thoughtlessly; we turn a corner and stand face to...

Fifth Avenue was in those days a favorite resort of mine. Every morning I plunged into the rush downtown I dived from the elevated railway station into the tatterdemalion life o...

It was well for me that in my hours of absence fear had brought my parents to a just estimate of my character and to a truer appreciation of my essentiality to their happiness....

Harlansburg, with practical sense, shields itself from northern winds by a high hill, spreading over the barren southern slope. Trade clings to the river-front, in a compact mas...

When I sat again on the great divan, I said to myself that, after all, the alien mind who designed this room had worked with cunning; he must have seen in his fancy the very pic...

I dined with the Blights. It had been a month since the afternoon when I talked with Penelope, and this evening in December I went to the house with hope high that in seeing her...

For myself I should have chosen the hut where I first met the Professor above the home to which he led me in the early morning. If the old was tumble-down, dark and ill-furnishe...

The words of Penelope Blight fell on my ears as chillingly as the rattler's whir. That the prophecies of Mr. Pound and Squire Crumple had come to nothing was little consolation...

In those last days at college, when in moments of contemplation I sketched with free imagination a long and unbroken career of success, whether I would or not, Gladys Todd was a...

Spring came and with it the Todds. All that winter they had been so far from me, often so far from my thoughts even, that the remembrance of them would bring a shock like a sudd...

taking root on earth. My own life began ten years before that May morning, but on that May morning began my story. Then I rode all unconscious of it. I was simply going fishing...

That the Professor, with fear at his heels and the devils of retribution clutching at his flying coat-tails, should have plunged into silence when the bush closed around him was...

I have travelled far in my life, travelled the seven seas by sail and steam, and on horse and camel crossed plain and desert. The Pacific, the Indies, the Arctic--I count over t...

"Penelope!" I exclaimed, holding out both hands as though her joy at the meeting must match mine and she would spring forward to seize them. Then I checked my ardor, for it was...

My mother was a McLaurin of Tuckapo Valley. In the mid-part of the eighteenth century, when that valley was a wild forest, her great-grandfather, Angus McLaurin, came out of the...

To Nathan, the white mule, I owed it that I was able to take good care of Penelope Blight in the first hours of my guardianship. But for him I should have brought her face to fa...

I have spoken casually, in this rambling story of mine, of young Marshall, a fellow-lodger at Miss Minion's. He was the Brummel of the boarding-house. The fact that he occupied...

Penelope and I were standing before a great gray-stone house. I carried my eyes from the doors of iron grill-work over the severe breadth of wall, broken only by rank above rank...

To most of us the Professor's speech had been pessimism compact; to me it was inspiring, though wofully lacking in details. I seemed to be marking time. The duties which lay at...

But one day was left to me before I went to my new life, and yet I was still asking myself if I was taking care of Penelope. I had set myself to go through life alone, regarding...

There was no doubt in my mind that Penelope Blight was engaged to marry Talcott. They announced the fact when they rode the length of the Avenue together in a hansom. But had I...

Time, the philosopher said, takes no account of humanity. "The activest man sets around mostly," I once heard Stacy Shunk remark as he sat curled up on the store-porch, nursing...

You can well understand the elation with which I announced my success to Gladys Todd. It was magnified by the month of disappointment, and to her I felt that I owed a debt. Thou...

I had thought this morning that at last I was to see a pitched battle, for the Greek army was well intrenched in the hills north of Pharsala and made some show of a stand there....

And I looked down at her proudly, as though this were another of the innumerable new and clever ideas which she has a way of discovering and expressing so concisely.

She was standing by the gate, and from my perch on the back of the off-wheeler, I smiled down on her with boyish self-assurance. The idea of my tumbling into the water! The idea...