Joking apart

Just to show the sort of thing one has to put up with in life, take the writing of this book as an instance. It was getting along splendidly. Chapter after chapter was piled up;...

The Henrys have not drifted apart lately; they are as near together now as ever they were. In fact, they are far less likely to drift apart now than they were at first. They are...

Cook comes rushing up. “Sorry to have kept you, m’m,” she says, “but I had to chop a few sticks for the kettle; the fire had gone that low. Now, master, come to me and we’ll rid...

Dear William and his facts were most enjoyable when taken together with Henry’s quiet visions, and when Mrs. Beehive crossed the field of their united activities there was indee...

All personal remarks are to imaginative persons a heavy strain on endurance. Their imagination at once conjures up a loathly picture of themselves in the circumstances suggested...

“Martha, Martha,” said Polly, reprovingly. “You have that worst type of mind--if it can be called a mind--that labours a point until it breaks. Everything that I have said to yo...

Perhaps the reason why many of us behave so much as usual is that, although there are many varieties of conduct available, we have got into a nervous habit of eliminating most o...

But it took me three cold, wet, weary, underfed weeks in October to discover all this. Reginald took his election very seriously; so did his rival. Millport was shaken by the wa...

On my way to Paradise Terrace I met the same little school-teacher lady whom I had first seen attacking the preoccupied mother of the baby who was so contentedly grasping the ca...

He went off this morning at eleven, and I worked on without him until luncheon. Then I was shown some more of the social machinery of Millport; that part of it which decides in...

I said that I didn’t, because I dislike anything that sits still and looks heavy while I am working. “That’s right, that’s right,” she said, patting my hand. “Now do you see tha...

She has a beautiful character, and if only they had not frightened her as a little girl, no one could have been more charming. They began by telling her how easily shocked the a...

In the eye of God I believe the last state of that man to be worse than the first, and that the middle state partakes of the vices and virtues of both. Papa is often self-made,...

The volumes in the series are works with the same tendency as Michael Fairless’s remarkable book, from which the series gets its name: books which express a deep feeling for Nat...