Category: Novels

Mrs. Farrell

West Pekin is one of those country places which have yielded to changing conditions and have ceased to be the simple farming towns of a past generation. The people are still farmers, but most of them are no longer farmers only. In the summer they give up the habitable rooms of...

Chapters

8. Chapter VIII

At the best, love is fatal to friendship; the most that friendship can do is to listen to love’s talk of itself and be the confident of its rapturous joys, its transports of des...

13. Chapter XIII

The summer was past, but the pageant of autumn was yet undimmed. In the wet meadows of the lowlands, even in the last days of August, before the goldenrod was in its glory, the...

10. Chapter X

Gilbert knelt at the side of the man who was his friend again, and caught up his head and dashed his face from the pool, while a groan broke from his own lips--the anguish of th...

11. Chapter XI

Easton began to show signs of decided convalescence. Day by day he became more susceptible of the kindnesses which his sympathizers yearned to lavish upon him, all the more arde...

6. Chapter VI

It was much later than his wonted hour when Easton woke next morning, and found a scrap of paper stuck between the mirror and its frame, on which Gilbert had written: “Off for t...

5. Chapter V

Mrs. Gilbert kept her word, and presented the young men to each of the boarders; but for all that, the talk did not become general. After dinner she went off for a nap, and the...

3. Chapter III

In the evening Gilbert walked over to Woodward farm from the hotel where he and Easton had stopped that morning, and called on his sister-in-law. He had brought word from her hu...

4. Chapter IV

They were at work on the foundations of the First Church in West Pekin when tidings came of the battle of Lexington, and the masons laid down their trowels, and the carpenters t...

1. Chapter I

West Pekin is one of those country places which have yielded to changing conditions and have ceased to be the simple farming towns of a past generation. The people are still far...

9. Chapter IX

It had been rather too warm on Saturday. On Sunday the breeze that draws across Woodward farm almost all summer long, from over the shoulder of Scatticong, had fallen, and the l...

7. Chapter VII

That evening Gilbert found his sister-in-law well of her headache, and disposed to celebrate the charm of a headache that always went off with the going down of the sun. He resp...

15. Chapter XV

In an orchestra chair at the theater sat a stout, good-natured-looking gentleman, iron gray where he was not bald, with a double chin smooth-shaven between iron-gray whiskers, a...

12. Chapter XII

It was already dark when Gilbert knocked at his sister-in-law’s door. She was sitting in the chair from which she had risen at parting with Mrs. Farrell, and into which she sank...

2. Chapter II

Mrs. Belle Farrell, one of the summer boarders, stood waiting at the side of the road for Rachel Woodward, who presently appeared on the threshold of the red schoolhouse, with s...

14. Chapter XIV

The next morning, after Mrs. Farrell had gone, Rachel went with mechanical exactness about the work of putting in order the room where Easton had lain sick. Her mother came to t...