Memoirs of a Midget

There had been no need to reserve the small hours for these ruminations. The next few days were wet and windy; every glance at the streaming panes cast my mind into a sort of va...

One of the many perplexing problems that now hemmed me in was brushed away by Fortune that afternoon. Between gloomy bursts of reflection on Fanny's, Mr Crimble's, Mrs Bowater's...

But our brief hour was drawing to an end. We were now passing little groups of country people and children in the quiet evening. We ourselves talked no more. The old pony plodde...

When my eyes opened next morning, a strange, still glare lay over the ceiling, and I looked out of my window on a world mantled and cold with snow. For a while I forgot the feve...

So it was with a deep sigh--half of regret at being called away, and all of joy at the thought of seeing my old friend again--that I followed Marvell's coat-tails over the thres...

A morning or two afterwards we set out on our homeward journey--the sea curdling softly into foam on its stones, a solitary ship in the distance on its dim, blue horizon. We wer...

If it was the child of wrath in me that hungered at times after the night, woods, and solitude to such a degree that my very breast seemed empty within me; it was now the child...

Was there suspicion in the face of Mrs Bowater that evening? Our usual familiar talk dwindled to a few words this supper-time. The old conflict was raging in my mind--hatred of...

Next day, after a long lying-in-wait, I intercepted Adam Waggett and beckoned him into the shrubbery. First I questioned him. A bill of the circus, he told me, had already been...

But a devil of defiance had entered into me. With a face as snakily sweet as I could make it, I made my daintiest bow to Mrs Monnerie's guests--to Lord Chiltern, a tall, stiffis...

And then--well, life plays strange tricks. In a week or two London had swallowed me up. How many times, I wonder, had I tried in fancy to picture Mrs Monnerie's town house. How...

When I awoke, the morning sky was gay with sunshine, there was a lisping and gurgling of starlings on the roof, the roar of the little river in flood after the rains shook the a...

Time and circumstance have strangely divided me from the Miss M. of those days. I look back on her, not with shame, but with a shrug of my shoulders, a sort of incredulous toler...

When precisely I began to speculate _why_ I was despatched into this world so minute and different I cannot say. Pretty early, I fancy, though few opportunities for comparison w...

Her head was turned away from me, a striped parasol leaned over her shoulder. With a faintly defiant tilt of her beautiful head, as if exclaiming, "See, Strangeness, I come!" sh...

Miss Monnerie's visits were less punctual though more frequent than Percy Maudlen's. "And where is the toadlet?" I heard him drawl one afternoon as I was being carried downstair...

Mrs Monnerie had rifled her collections for my use--pygmy Venetian glass, a silver-gilt breakfast and tea service, pygmy porcelain. There were absurd little _mechanical_ knick-k...

I had been dismissed. But Mrs Monnerie's anger had a curious potency. For a moment I could scarcely see out of my eyes, and the floor swayed under me as I scrambled down from my...

The next afternoon Mrs Bowater was out when Dr Phelps made his call. It was Fanny who ushered him into the room. He felt my pulse again, held up the phial of medicine to the lig...

A carpenter of the name of Bates was called in, so distant a relative of Mrs Bowater's apparently that she never by nod, word, or look acknowledged the bond. Mr Bates held my la...

One supper-time I ventured to ask Mrs Bowater if she would hand me down a tall, thin, dark-green volume, whose appearance had particularly taken my fancy. A simple enough reques...

Susan's visits to her aunt were now less frequent. Percy's multiplied. Duty seemed to have become a pleasure to him. Mrs Monnerie's gaze would rest on him with a drowsy vigilanc...

"DEAR MR CRIMBLE,--I regret my words this afternoon. Bitterly. Indeed I do. But still truth is important, isn't it? _One we know_ hasn't been too kind to either of us. I still s...

Those last few days of August dragged on--days of a burning, windless heat. Yet, as days, I enjoyed them. On some upper branch of my family tree must have flourished the salaman...

We jogged on sluggishly up the hill, and at last, in our velvety quiet, as if at a preconcerted signal, Pollie and I turned and looked at one another, and broke into a long, mir...

In the midst of my eighteenth year fortune began to darken. My mother had told me little of the world, its chances and changes, cares and troubles. What I had learned of these c...

Out of a cab from a livery stable Mrs Bowater and I alighted at our London terminus next morning, to find positively awaiting us beside the wooden platform a first-class railway...

For many days my mind was an empty husk, yet in a constant torment of longing, daydream, despair, and self-reproaches. Everything I looked at had but one meaning--that she was n...

My showman, his hard face sleek with sweat, insisted on counting out three huge platelike crown pieces into my lap--for a douceur. I brushed them off on to the ground. "Only to...

I stumbled off, feeling smaller and smaller as I went, more and more ridiculous and insignificant, as indeed I must have appeared; for distance can hardly lend enchantment to an...

A tense excitement seized him. His face turned a dusky yellow. How curious it is to see others as they must sometimes see ourselves. Should _I_ have gasped like that, if Mr Crim...

In happier circumstances, the next morning's post might have reassured me. Two letters straddled my breakfast tray, for I always had this meal in my own room. One of them was fr...

At last there came a post which brought me, not a sermon from Miss Fenne, nor gossip from Pollie, but a message from the Islands of the Blest. All that evening and night it lay...

Not that in an existence so passive riddles never came my way. As one morning I brushed past a bush of lads' love (or maidens' ruin, as some call it), its fragrance sweeping me...

Once more I sat down, but this time in the midst of what seemed to me a rather unpleasant silence, as if the room had grown colder: a silence which was broken only by the distan...

One such afternoon Rose and I were sitting quietly together in the sunshine on the green grass bank when a smart, short step sounded in the lane, and who should come springily p...

I grew a little weary of the beautiful snow in the days that followed my first talk with Mr Crimble, and fretted at the close air of the house. The last day of the year the wind...

With this dwarf tree in my arms, when came the auspicious afternoon, I followed Lady Pollacke's parlourmaid--her neat little bonnet tied with a bow under her ear--down my Batese...

Some few years ago a brief account of me found its way into one or two country newspapers. I have been told, that it reappeared, later, in better proportion, in the Metropolitan...

Instead of its being a month as had been arranged, it was over six weeks before I was deposited again with my elegant dressing-case--a mere flying visitor--on Mrs Bowater's door...

Then instantly I discovered the cause of the bird's alarm. At first I fancied that this strange figure was at some little distance. Then I realized that his stature had misled m...

Mrs Monnerie had paid for elbow room. It was the last "Private View" in this world we were to share together. The sight of her capacious figure with its great bonnet and the bro...

Am I sorry that almost beside myself with this new affliction, and bewildered and frightened by the incessant coming and going of strangers in the house, I refused to be carried...

"DEAR FANNY,--I have given Mr Crimble your message; first, exactly in your own words, though he did not quite hear them, and then, leaving out a little. You may be angry at what...

Mrs Bowater's departure from England--and it seemed as if its very map in my mind had become dismally empty--was not my only anxiety. My solicitors had hitherto been prompt; the...

I trod close in Mrs Bowater's track as she convoyed me through a sea of greenery breaking here and there to my waist and even above my hat. Summer had been busy in Wanderslore....

The fact is, Miss M.'s connection with good society was rapidly drawing to a close. My smoky little candle had long since begun to gutter and sputter and enwreathe itself in a w...

When next Fanny and I met, it was in the cool grey-green summery drawing-room at Monk's House, and Mrs Monnerie and Susan shared tea with us. One covert glance at Mrs Monnerie's...

Thus then I came of age, though not on St Rosa's day. However dramatic and memorable, I grant it was not a courteous method of acknowledging Lord Chiltern's courtesy. In the goo...

My landlady was already awaiting me at the place appointed, and we walked off together towards the house. It had been a prudent arrangement, for we met and passed at least half...

Still the slow train bumped on, loath to drag itself away from the happy harvest fields. Darkness was near when we ourselves alighted at our destination, mounted into a four-whe...

"There, miss, don't take on," Mrs Petrie was saying. "The poor thing's coming round now. Slipping dead off out of things--many's the time I've wished I could--even though you _h...

The sun had burned for some hours in the heavens, when bleeding with thorns and on fire with nettles and stinking mayweed, I dragged myself out of the undergrowth into a low-lyi...

Noiselessly turned the wheels in the grass. We were descending the hill. A jolt, and we were in the road. A hedgerow shut us out from the two shrouded watchers by the tent. The...

And yet again I pause--long after these last words were written--to look back across the intervening years at that young woman. What, indeed, was her insane mind seeking: what a...