Rosin the Beau

I SIT down to write my story for you, the life-story of old Rosin the Beau, your friend and true lover. Some day, not far distant now, my fiddle and I shall be laid away, in the...

OUR village was not far from the sea, and my mother often took me down to the beach. It was a curving beach of fine sand, bright and warm, and the rocks that shut it in were war...

I WAS twelve years old when my mother died. She had no illness, or none that we had known of; the sweet soul of her slipped away in the night like a bird, and left the body smil...

I WAS twenty years old when the change came in my life. I remember the day was cold and bleak, an early spring day. My father had had an accident a few days before. In one of hi...

AN ox-team was lumbering along the road towards us. The huge oxen lurched from side to side, half-asleep, making nothing of their load of meal-sacks piled high in air; their dri...

I COULD write a whole book about the summer that followed this spring day, when I first met Yvon de Ste. Valerie. Yes, and the book would be so long that no mortal man would hav...

IT was in the grist-mill loft, too, that Yvon brought forward his great plan, what he called the project of his life,--that of taking me back to France with him. I remember how...

THE pictures come back fast and thick upon my mind. I suppose every life, even the quietest, has its picture-book, its record of some one time that seems filled with beauty or j...

THIS was one day of many, my dear. They came and went, and I thought each one brighter than the last. When I had been a month at Chateau Claire, I could hardly believe it more t...

THE shock of my awakening was so violent, the downfall of my air-castles so sudden and complete, that I think for awhile I had little sense of what was going on. Yvon came to my...

THE disturbance of my mind had been so great, that all this while I had forgotten the letter of which Mme. de Lalange had spoken the night before. I had seen it when I first wen...

HERE ends, my dear child, the romance of your old friend's life; if by the word romance we may rightly understand that which, even if not lasting itself, throws a brightness ove...