Rogues and vagabonds

1. A Battery of Maroons, or imitation Cannon 2. A Bengal Light 3. Sky Rockets 4. A Saxon Wheel 5. Tourbillions 6. Phenomenon Box and Mime 7. Line Rockets 8. A Metamorphose with...

Caleb was in such a turmoil of jealous agitation for several hours after the grand finale as to be almost beside himself; and although Madame Oriano, in high good humour over th...

Accidents in firework factories occurred so often in those days, when the law had not yet recognised gunpowder as a means to provide popular diversion and taken steps in the Exp...

So, Caleb Fuller married Letizia Oriano and tamed her body, as without doubt he would have succeeded in taming the body of any woman of whom he had lawfully gained possession.

On a wet and gusty afternoon in the month of March, 1882, Bram Fuller, now a stripling of sixteen, sat in one of the dingiest rooms of that great gloomy house his grandfather ha...

Mr. Blundell did not believe in allowing the public to suffer in ignorance of who he was. This was not merely due to a desire to advertise himself and his goods. He was genuinel...

It was when Bram was twenty-three that he first found himself in the same company as Nancy O’Finn. She was then a tall dark-haired girl of eighteen with misted blue lakes for ey...

The first thing that Bram and Nancy vowed to each other was that they would never accept anything but a joint engagement. It sounded so easy at first, but during the next four y...

The snowy air had painted the ceiling of the room a lurid grey when Letizia woke her father and mother next morning. She was standing up in her cot, holding the footrails of the...

“Now listen, Letizia, you’re to be a very good little girl and do anything that Mrs. Pottage tells you without arguing,” Nancy admonished her small daughter before she left Star...

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” averred Letizia entirely impenitent. “My lamb what Santy Claus gave me saided I was a very good little girl. He saided ‘Oh, Tizia, you _is_ a good lit...

There was not much money left when the funeral expenses had been paid and Nancy had bought her mourning—those poor black suits of woe that in their utter inadequacy even to symb...

Of all the great stations in the world Euston alone preserves in its Tartarian architecture the spirit in which the first railway travellers must have set out. So long as Euston...

“Mrs. Fuller has been so excited ever since the letter came to say that you would pay a visit to Lebanon House,” the nurse stopped to tell Nancy at the head of the stairs, befor...

The only other occupant of the railway-carriage was a nun who sat in the farther corner reading her breviary or some pious book. Letizia soon fell fast asleep, her head pillowed...

“I’m not really at all used to children,” she sniffed angrily. “Supposing if she was to take it into her silly little head to go and jump out of the window? There’s no knowing w...

On Monday morning with a lighter heart than she had known for many weeks Nancy left Miss Fewkes. She had ten shillings and a few odd coppers when she stepped out of the tall thi...

As if fortune had had no other object in view but the trial of Nancy’s character by adversity, she had no sooner handed over Letizia to the care of the Sisters than she secured...

Business having brought me to Bristol, I found myself at the Princess’s Theatre last night, and I want to tell you how very much I enjoyed your performance of the Baroness—a dif...

St. Joseph’s School was a pleasant early Victorian house with white jalousies encircled by a deep verandah of florid ironwork. The garden, even for the spacious northwest of Lon...

Nancy was lost at first in the _pensione_ to which Kenrick had entrusted her. The bareness of it seemed to reflect the bareness of her own mind amid the unmeaning sounds of a st...

“I found that I could get away from England for a few days,” he announced. “And I thought I’d come and ascertain for myself how you really were getting on.”

It seemed as if fortune was anxious to compensate Nancy for the sudden shattering of her operatic dreams. The very first agent to whom she went on her return to London greeted h...

_Cœur de Lion_ suffered from cardiac depression in the heat of July and ceased to beat half-way through the month. Although Mr. Percy Mortimer offered Nancy a part in his autumn...

Nancy was considerably startled when Letizia at the age of nineteen entered the chorus of the Vanity Theatre. She had old-fashioned ideas about the dignity of her profession, an...