Mad Shepherds, and Other Human Studies

There is nothing that so embases and enthralls the Souls of men, as the dismall and dreadfull thoughts of their own Mortality, which will not suffer them to look beyond this sho...

And here it may be recorded that one day, towards the end of his life, he received a letter from Canada containing a remittance for fifty pounds. The writer, Major ---- of the N...

For it so happened that Providence, in equipping the lady for her world-mending mission, had forgotten to give her a pleasant voice. Now if there was one thing in the world whic...

Others followed. I was struck by the fact that nearly all the songs were of an extremely melancholy nature--the chief objects celebrated by the Muse being withered flowers, litt...

Now Chandrapál was more subtle than all the guests in Deadborough Hall. With great adroitness he managed to introduce the very topics on which, as he well knew, the Minister had...

"Not _all_ on it," said Snarley, "only bits here and there. That's what the bigness o' things teaches you. It's my opinion as there are two sorts o' words--shutters-in and opene...

Such was the second madness of Shepherd Toller. Things from the abyss of Time that float upwards into dreams--sleeping things whose breath sometimes breaks the surface of our wa...

In the last period of his life, however, gleams of his earlier Methodism occasionally shot through, and showed plainly enough of whom he was thinking. As with most men of his cr...

To-night, however, there was another object in the room, of so alien a nature that any self-respecting ham or flitch, had it possessed a reasonable soul, would have been sorely...

"Ah! there's lots as comes lookin' round, nowadays. More than there used to be. Why, bless your life, I remember the time when you nivver seed a soul in this village except the...

"Well, I see 'em, quarter of a mile oop the road, crouching oonder t'hedge"--he spoke Yorkshire[4]--"wet to skin, and she nowt on but a cotton blouse. So I sez to her, 'My dear,...