Rhoda of the Underground

The benediction of God was in the sunshine that lay still and bright upon green fields and blooming gardens. The town, marshaled along the river side, nestled quietly under the...

Rhoda Ware rushed into her father’s office, her cheeks wet with recent tears, her voice vibrating on the verge of sobs. Dr. Ware looked up from the medical work he was reading i...

We blundering humans are much given to looking back over our lives and saying, “There we made a mistake. If it were to do over again we would do thus and so, and then things wou...

Charlotte Ware, alone in the living-room, rocked violently back and forth a few times, apparently as an outlet for her indignation, then turned her flushed cheeks and snapping e...

For a moment he gazed in speechless astonishment. “It seems to me, Mr. Delavan,” he presently found tongue to say, “that you are being rather precipitate. Have you spoken to Rho...

“That’s just right, Rhoda.” Charlotte nodded at herself in the mirror and smiled with satisfaction as she turned this way and that, surveying her reflection at different angles....

Through all the afternoon Rhoda stayed in her room, thinking over her adventure of the morning and considering whether it would be to her mother or her father that she would tel...

Dr. Ware noiselessly closed the door of his wife’s bedroom and walked softly downstairs. “Can we have supper at once, Rhoda?” he inquired of his daughter at the door of the dini...

It was still early the next day when Horace Hardaker appeared at Dr. Ware’s east gate and looked anxiously around for signs of life. After a little he saw Jim at work in the sta...

So it happened that when Jefferson Delavan came back to consciousness Mrs. Ware was bending over him, extreme anxiety in her look. Dr. Ware had found that his manifest injuries...

“But it doesn’t seem quite right to me to stay there so much when I’m not going to marry him. I know he--still loves me and if I spend so much time with him he’ll think I’m just...

Mid-October came, and the day of local elections in three of the northern states. The whole country was waiting on the tiptoe of expectancy for the result. Pennsylvania was the...

Charlotte ran upstairs from the veranda and dashed into her sister’s room. “Do look out, Rhoda,” she called. “It’s that crazy peddler, Chad Wallace. He’s asking father if he can...

Almost as much heartened by the result of the presidential election as if it had been a victory, Dr. Ware and his friends and political co-workers in Hillside lost no time in re...

At the dinner table Mrs. Ware’s eyes rested with loving anxiety upon her first-born. “She is surely growing thinner and paler,” was her motherly thought. “Poor child! If she wou...

“I assure you, Mr. Hanscomb, that nothing of the sort has been going on in my house. Dr. Ware’s sympathies, it is true, are with the anti-slavery cause, but he is not a nigger-s...

When Jefferson Delavan received the mail containing the three letters from Hillside his lover’s eye saw at once the envelope bearing the handwriting of Rhoda Ware. Everything el...

Rhoda was standing between the rows of lilac that hedged the walk to the front gate, inspecting the swelling buds and saying to herself with pleasure that they looked as if they...

After the discovery of the hiding place in the woodshed, Dr. Ware and his Underground co-workers thought it best for a little while to receive no runaways in his house. For it w...

Letters from Mrs. Ware and Charlotte told of much gaiety and of days that were an unceasing round of enjoyment. Charlotte wrote that it was “heaven upon earth” and that never be...

Rhoda’s heart was high with expectation of success when she and Mary Ellen started upon the journey to Cleveland. The runaway, in her new gown and a bonnet and veil, played her...

In the depths of humiliation Rhoda mourned over the fiasco of her attempt to guide Mary Ellen to freedom. But she soon found that the fiasco itself was bearing a rich crop of re...

Hardaker had just gone over with her an outline of the address he would make in summing up her case. It was intended for the people outside the court room, near and far, who wou...

The lilac bushes were again in bud and Rhoda Ware was looking at them, pulling down here and there a tall one to see if it was not farther advanced than the rest, and reckoning...

During the late summer and autumn of that year Rhoda and her father and their friends watched with the keenest interest, as did people all over the country, the struggle in Illi...

A year and a half and more went by before Rhoda again saw Delavan. The campaign of 1860, with its grim earnestness and sober exaltation, had passed. She had been stirred by it t...