My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4)

I returned to Europe touching at Bombay and getting just a whiff of the intoxicating perfume of that wonder-land with its noble, though sad, spiritual teaching which is now begi...

The Fremont House, Kendrick’s hotel was near the Michigan Street Depot. In those days when Chicago had barely 300,000 inhabitants, it was an hotel of the second class. Mr. Kendr...

Early in January there was a dress rehearsal of the Trial Scene of “The Merchant of Venice.” The Grandee of the neighborhood who owned the great park, Sir W. W. W., some M.P.’s,...

So far I had had more good fortune than falls to the lot of most youths starting in life; now I was to taste ill-luck and be tried as with fire. I had been so taken up with my o...

Smith met me at the station: he was thinner than ever and the wretched little cough shook him very often in spite of some lozenges that the doctor had given him to suck: I began...

Now began for me a most delightful time. Sommerfeld relieved me of nearly all the office work: I had only to get up the speeches, for he prepared the cases for me. My income was...

In my thirteenth year the most important experience took place of my schoolboy life. Walking out one day with a West Indian boy of sixteen or so, I admitted that I was going to...

That railway journey to Lawrence, Kansas, is as vivid to me now as if it had taken place yesterday yet it all happened more than fifty years ago. It was a blazing hot day and in...

I meant to write nothing but the truth in these pages; yet now I’m conscious that my memory has played a trick on me: it is an artist in what painters call foreshortening: event...

Memory is the Mother of the Muses, the prototype of the Artist. As a rule she selects and relieves out the important, omitting what is accidental or trivial. Now and then, howev...

Supper at the Gregory’s was almost over when I entered the dining-room: Kate and her mother and father and the boy Tommy were seated at the end of the table, taking their meal:...

A stolen kiss and fleeting caress as we met on the deck at night were all I had of Jessie for the rest of the voyage. One evening landlights flickering in the distance drew crow...

If I tried my best, it would take a year to describe the life in that English Grammar School at R.... I had always been perfectly happy in every Irish school and especially in t...

Prompted by Dell, before leaving Chicago I bought some books for the winter evenings, notably Mill’s “Political Economy”; Carlyle’s “Heroes and Hero Worship” and “Latter Day Pam...

We arrived, if I remember rightly, on a Wednesday and put our cattle and horses in the stockyards near the Michigan Street depot. As I have related, we sold on Thursday and Frid...

Humanity. And so I front this foreword with the lovely figure of Venus Queen, and I close it with the face of Christ as seen by Rubens when He forgave the adulterous woman.