Episodes before thirty

A strong emotion, especially if experienced for the first time, leaves a vivid memory of the scene where it occurred. I see a room in a New York boarding-house. I can touch the...

We arrived in New York towards the end of October, coming straight from five months in the Canadian backwoods. Before that, to mention myself first, there had been a year in Can...

The Islington Jersey Dairy, Messrs. Cooper and Blackwood, started business with a retail office in College Street, a number of milk carts bearing our names in black lettering up...

At the time we met, this friend of mine had been out from Oxford--New College, I think--a year or so, and with a Cambridge man about his own age, had been running a sporting goo...

These notes aim at describing merely certain surface episodes, and would leave unmentioned of set purpose those inner activities which pertain to the intimate struggles of a gro...

“This is my partner, Mr. Blackwood,” he was saying, as he came from the dining-room door, accompanied by an undersized little man with sharp, beady eyes set in a face like a rat...

The influences that decided the purchase of the Hub were emotional, at any rate, not rational; there lay some reaction in me, as of revolt. “You can do things out here you could...

One effect of these long, unhappy months, anyhow, was to emphasize another, and that the principal side, of my nature. The daily effort of forcing myself to do what I hated so i...

At length the bitter, sparkling winter was over, the sleigh-bells silent, the covered skating-rinks all closed. The last remnants of the piled-up snow had melted, and the sweet...

Gradually, thus, contact with ordinary people and experiences with certain facets, at least, of practical life had begun to give me what is called a knowledge of the world. The...

Kay and I arrived in New York on a crisp, sunny afternoon with sixty dollars in hand out of the original hundred set by for the purpose, and took a room in the Imperial Hotel, B...

If any young man learning values wants to know the quickest way to study the seamy side of life, to understand the darkest aspects of human nature, and incidentally, to risk the...

As a new “bum reporter,” however, I had a hectic life, but rapidly made friends with the other men, and a mutual loathing of the work brought us easily together. Friday was pay-...

In the East 19th Street room, meanwhile, things were going from bad to worse. Kay’s touring company delayed its starting, and consequently his salary. Boyde’s huntsman’s job, eq...

Next day there was a racing west wind that sent the clouds scudding across a bright blue sky. The doctor was to come at 3 o’clock. Boyde, in very optimistic mood, had gone out e...

The days passed; I grew slowly better; the wound still had to be drained and bandaged, and the doctor kept me to my bed. Kay, writing from Toronto, had contrived to send us ten...

Boyde was in cheerful, smiling mood. He put some grapes on the bed, asked how I felt, and told me about his trip to Patterson and his failure to get the organist job. “It’s bitt...

The episode, though far from being finished, had a shattering effect upon me. If a friend, so close to me by ties of affection and gratitude, could act like this, how would othe...

It is a mercy one cannot see the future. In that New York misery, present and to follow, had I known that some fifteen years later I should be my own master, living more or less...

It was, perhaps, the undigested horror of those days, as also their unsatisfied yearnings after beauty, that tried to find expression fifteen years later in writing. Once they w...

A few days after the doctor’s secret had been laid bare I received a brief, curt letter from McCloy to say he could not keep my place open for ever; how soon was I coming back?...

The search for Boyde was a prolonged nightmare: used several times already, this phrase alone describes it. It lasted over a fortnight. Every night, from nine o’clock till two,...

It was on the Tuesday before Christmas that I caught Boyde; the day also before the White Star steamers sailed. The cold was Arctic, a biting east wind swept the streets. There...

My first sight of him was sitting among the rows of prisoners, waiting to be called. He looked ill and broken, he made a pleading sign to me. As a reporter I had the right to in...

McCloy took me back on the _Evening Sun_, according to his promise, about mid-January, and about the same time Mrs. Bernstein sold her house and moved to another lower down the...

Among the “incidents” that stand out from the dim, miserable smudge of fifteen months, is one that centres about a strange figure, and a most lovable fellow, named Angus Hamilto...

Some people, examining the alternate ups and downs of life, have thought to detect a rhythm in it: like every other expression of energy, from heat to history, from sound to civ...

If it is impossible to recapture the boyish moods of those early days, it is also difficult not to import into these notes the point of view and feelings that belong to later li...

Worthy of more detailed description, however, is the figure of an old, old man I met about this time, a dignified, venerable and mysterious being, man of the world, lawyer, musi...

The personality of Alfred H. Louis is identified with New York for me; he accompanied my remaining years there, guide, philosopher and friend. He took in hand that indiscriminat...

It was with a singular young man, who claimed proudly to be the illegitimate son of a certain duke, that I found myself presently in the eau de Cologne business. A long difficul...

Six weeks later, when the torrid summer heat was waning and September breezes had begun to cool the streets, the nights, at any rate, I found myself a reporter on the staff of t...