Kit and Kitty: A Story of West Middlesex

THERE is, or at least there used to be, along the back of Hounslow Heath, a lane, which leaves the great Western road on the right-hand side, and goes off alone. The soil is ver...

DOES it lighten a man’s calamities, or does it increase their burden, to know that they are spread abroad and talked of by his fellow-men? No man wishes to be famous for his evi...

ALL through the following day, we were forced to be hard at work, whether we liked it or not, gathering a large lot of early apples, such as Keswick, Sugarloaf, and Julien, whic...

DOWNY BULWRAG was indeed in trouble—not brought on by his evil deeds, as good people might have imagined; or at any rate not so caused directly, according to present knowledge,...

THERE were many worse men in the world even then—and the number increases with population—than the gallant Sir Cumberleigh Hotchpot. The principal source of the evil in him was...

IN the calm May night, I left my desolate home, to learn the cause and meaning of its desolation. Some men might have doubted whether it was worth their while to trace the dark...

A STRANGE thing befell me on my way home, which I would have avoided describing if I could; for my adventures have but little interest, except so far as they are concerned with...

FOR as much as three weeks I had been full of pride, in taking my Kitty about everywhere—even by the seaside, where I knew very little, but luckily she knew less, in spite of he...

A GREAT observer of these latter days has advised us to abstain from deep research into the origin of our own names. Otherwise we might become convinced of a lamentable want of...

NOW my Uncle Cornelius Orchardson (a stout and calm fruit-grower, called in contumely “Corny the topper” by strangers who wanted his growth for nothing) professed and even pract...

IT could hardly be expected that my Uncle Corny should grow very miserable about this matter. He knew that young people of the ordinary cast tumble into love and tumble out agai...

AS we walked very slowly through the wilderness of thistles, which had once been a fair park trimly kept, I disturbed the mind of Sam—which was busy with abstruse calculations o...

ONCE I met a man who was a mighty swimmer, spending half his waking time in the water, and even sleeping there sometimes, according to his own account; though I found it rather...

MISS PARSLOW, although she pretended to be rough, and to love dogs better than the human race (for which she could give fifty reasons), was as truly soft of heart as the gentles...

IT was natural that my hatred of that heinous race should be doubled. Violence and falsehood in the fiercer times, cunning and falsehood in these latter days had robbed two gene...

IF any one had told me, so lately as last week, that Sam and myself would be sworn allies upon matters of the deepest interest, within fifty years of such a prophecy, I should h...

NOT much time could we have together in the land of Goshen, where the boils and blains of the ungodly world are not yet sprinkled in the radiant air. Uncle Corny gave us for our...

AT this beginning of my great trouble, I used to be worried, more than common sense would warrant, by the easy way in which other people took my distress, even while I was among...

IN spite of all said to the contrary, I believe that young people, upon the whole, are more apt to ponder than the old folk are. At least, if to ponder means—as it should—to wei...

IT is a bad thing for any man to be always beating his own bounds, and treading the track of his own grounds, and pursuing the twist of his own affairs—though they be even love...

WE arranged that our watchman—as my uncle called him, thinking it much more respectable than spy—should hire a room from our friend Mrs. Wilcox, who could help him in many ways....

“A DISCONTENTED and sour man,” said my Uncle Corny, one Saturday night when I had dropped into supper, “is as likely as not—unless he prays to God every morning of his life—to t...

IT is vain for any man to say that, in the deepest depths of woe, he can receive no scrap of comfort from the tenderness of others. Words may help him very little; commonplace e...

“COME and see who we have got here,” wrote my uncle, not quite grammatically; but the relatives are enough to puzzle any one who has not had Latin antecedents—if on the strength...

THAT last suggestion was most delicious, but it came too late to relieve the pang of the horrible idea first presented. I could not help wondering at my own slow wit, which ough...

WORSE troubles than those of the troublesome body were visiting one worth a thousand of me. Captain Fairthorn was still in Scotland, while his fair daughter was being worried, a...

IT was on Wednesday, the fifteenth of May, as fine a day as ever shone from heaven, that my Uncle Corny came up to our cottage, soon after we had finished breakfast. I had done...

SO far as my experience goes, it has never been an easy thing to find a man in whom the sense of justice is adjusted perfectly. That is to say, not overdrawn, nor strained to a...

“WE are on the straight road now,” said Tonks, as soon as he had heard my story; “and jigger me if we don’t hunt her down. But luck can give five stone to skill, whether the cou...

NEVERTHELESS, that vision, if it was a vision, cheered me. The more I thought of it, the more I felt that it meant something; and though free as any man can be from human supers...

“YOU must not let it drop, Kit; you can’t let it drop,” said Aunt Parslow, as she sat in our parlour, the next day, having ordered Parker’s fly, as soon as she received my lette...

“POSSIBLY I might do something with him,” said Mr. Golightly to me one day; “I have not much power of persuasion; but if I put a few simple truths before him, and showed him the...

EVERY allowance should be made for a man who is in deep trouble. Not because it is his due, for that would count but little; but because he expects it, which he never does of hi...

Although there was a little help of moonlight, Sam drove home very carefully; for the more a man has to do with horses, the better he knows where the risk is. And I saw that his...

SUCH is the balance of human events—if the phrase be held admissible—that the moment any member of our race is likely to strike the stars with his head sublime, he receives a ha...

HOTCHPOT HALL has been a fine old place, as any one would say who looks at it; and it would have been a fine place still, if the owners had been of like quality. “It taketh its...

AT this time, I slept, or lay down to sleep, on a couple of good-sized chairs in the kitchen, with a cushion laid along them, which had come from my uncle’s pew in Sunbury churc...

THINGS were not going very smoothly now with Mr. Donovan Bulwrag. Three of the four months allowed him by his father had passed already; yet no date was fixed, or seemed likely...

WHEN I gave Uncle Corny, as I was bound to do, a full account of that day’s work, he was mightily pleased, and clapped me on the back for having spoken so plainly to that haught...

WE were all pretty sure that this discovery of Tony’s concerned us deeply, and might lead to something, if followed up at once with luck and skill. But we thought it more import...

ALL these things compelled me to think about them, because they were so different from what might have been expected. When first I lost my wife, and knew that I had been robbed...

WHILE that bitter war was raging, I enjoyed a peaceful and gentle season. It happened that I had come up our village, on a matter of strict business, at a time of day not at all...

ALTHOUGH no token had passed between us, and no currency been set up, of that universal interchange, which my Uncle and Tabby termed “courting,” I felt a very large hope now, th...

OF all those things I had no knowledge, till it came upon me suddenly; except that I heard from time to time, both through Mrs. Marker and Mrs. Wilcox, and even Miss Coldpepper,...

was written in a small clear hand, and dated on the very day after my visit to her, and the purport of it was to comfort me and persuade me to wait with all endurance, until I s...

I HAD missed “the enjoyment of that bad weather”—as one of our workmen called it, when he drew his wages _gratis_—through having too much at the outset. There had been at least...

I DID not want any pot of money. And even if I had been filled with that general desire, Henderson’s suggestion would have had no charm for me. But I resolved to do a much wiser...

ALL Leatherheadians used to admit, and could show good reason for doing so, that my great-aunt Parslow was the cleverest woman, as well as the most respectable in the place. But...

WHEN any man has once got into a racing state of mind, it is not fair to his bodily health to keep him in a wheatfield. Sam Henderson had been expected, by his bride and her fem...

THERE are ever so many kinds of baskets used in Covent Garden Market, some of good measure, and some of guess, and some of luck altogether, like a Railway’s charges. They come f...

IT is out of my power to say, because I have never studied human nature—having more than I can properly get through with trees and animals—but according to the little I have see...

NOW anybody may suppose, who looks at things too sensibly, that true love never yet has chosen time and place more foolishly, for coming to grand issue, and obtaining pledge for...

THERE must have been a fearful scene, about an hour before we reached that spot. Two powerful wills were in collision—one hard as steel, the other trenchant and resistless as re...

THAT season, there was no Christmas-tide for me; no “Happy New Year,” to wish to others, and be wished; nor even so much as a Valentine’s Day, to send poems to girls, and get ca...

WHEN the butter that truly is butterine, and the “Cheddar” of the Great Republic, are gracefully returned to our beloved grocer, with a feeble prayer for amendment, what does he...

“NEVER wur any luck in a wadding, as wur put off from app’inted day. For why? Why, because it be flying in the vace of the Lard, as hath app’inted ’un.”

WHILE these things thus were growing near me, as I learned soon afterwards, in our place there was no sign yet of anything encouraging. My Uncle Corny, who had always vowed that...

THE character of Captain Fairthorn—better known to the public now as Sir Humphrey Fairthorn, but he had not as yet conferred dignity upon Knighthood—will be understood easily by...

THERE are very few things that have the power to please us both in heart and mind, even when they have the will to do it, which is very seldom. Great events in our lives flash b...

BY this time it had become clear to me, that whatever my thoughts were and my longings—such as those who are free from them call romantic—there was nothing proper for me to do,...

THERE seem to be many ways of taking the very simplest fact we meet and if any man was sure to take things by his own light, it was my good Uncle. When a friend, or even a usefu...

EVERYBODY knows, as he reads his newspaper, that nothing has ever yet happened in the world with enough of precision and accuracy to get itself described, by those who saw it, i...

“Either a man is honest through and through, or else he is a thief all over. It is humbug to talk as if a fellow didn’t know when he is stealing, or when he is not. He knows it...

THE shape of a tree is not decided by the pruner only. When the leader is stopped, with an eye towards the wind, and the branches clipped to a nicety of experience and of foreth...

BUT what I had heard about Downy Bulwrag rooted itself more and more in my mind. Since the departure of Tony Tonks (who would never have been invited to that grand dinner, for e...

MY name is Christopher Orchardson, of Sunbury in Middlesex; and I have passed through a bitter trouble, which I will try to describe somehow, both for my wife’s sake and my own,...

EVERY one, who can call to mind that year of bad weather, 1860, will bear me out in saying that it showed no weakness, no lack of consistency to the last. Rain and chill were th...