Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man

With the New Year had descended upon John Flint an obsessing and tormenting spirit which made him by fits and starts moody, depressed, nervous, restless, or wholly silent and ab...

When I was first seen prowling along the roads and about the fields stalking butterflies and diurnal moths with the caution of a red Indian on the warpath and the stealth of a t...

Laurence at last hung out that shingle which was to tingle Appleboro into step with the Time-spirit. It was a very happy and important day for the judge and his immediate friend...

Now I am only an old priest and no businessman, so of course I do not know just how Hunter was set like a hound upon the track of those circumstances that, properly manipulated,...

There was a glamour upon it. One knew it was going to grow into one of those wonderful and shining days in whose enchanted hours any exquisite miracle might happen. I am perfect...

Almost up to Christmas the weather had been so mild and warm that folks lived out of doors. Girls clothed like the angels in white raiment fluttered about and blessed the old st...

Mary Virginia's voice trailed into silence and she sank back into her chair, staring somberly at the fire. Her face marked with tears, the long braids of her hair over her shoul...

Little by little, so quietly as to be unnoticeable in the working, but with, cumulative effect; built under the surface like those coral reefs that finally rear themselves into...

Timid tentative rifts and wedges of blue had ventured back into the cold gray sky, and a stout-hearted robin or two heralded spring. One morning coming from mass I saw in the th...

On a cold gray morning in December two members of my flock, Poles who spoke but little English and that little very badly, were on their way to their daily toil in the canning f...

The wind that precedes the dawn was blowing, a freakish and impish wind though not a vicious one. One might imagine it animated by those sportive and capricious nature-spirits a...

When Mary Virginia was graduated, my mother sent her, to commemorate that very important and pleasant occasion, one of her few remaining treasures--a carved ivory fan which Le B...

Mary Virginia had gone, weeping and bewept, and the spirit of youth seemed to have gone with her, leaving the Parish House darkened because of its absence. A sorrowful quiet bro...

It is impossible for me to put down in her own words what Mary Virginia told the Butterfly Man and me. Also, I have had to fill in gaps here and there, supplying what was lackin...

If I have not heretofore spoken of Mary Virginia, it is because all that winter she and Mrs. Eustis had been away; and in consequence Appleboro was dull enough. For the Eustises...

"Now there was my cousin Eliza," Miss Sally Ruth Dexter once said to me, "who was forced to make her home for thirty years in Vienna! She married an attaché of the Austrian lega...

"I've got to go! I've got to go!" He repeated it as one repeats an incantation. "I've got to go!" And he went on methodically assorting and packing. Even at this moment of obses...

Summer stole out a-tiptoe, and October had come among the live-oaks and the pines, and touched the wide marshes and made them brown, and laid her hand upon the barrens and the c...

With February the cold that the Butterfly Man had wished for came with a vengeance. The sky lost its bright blue friendliness and changed into a menacing gray, the gray of storm...

whatever, that I can conjure up--she has thrown me over, jilted me--Mary Virginia, Padre! And I'm to forget her. _I'm to forget her, you understand?_ Because she can't marry me....

On a morning in late March, with a sweet and fresh wind blowing, a clear sun shining, and a sky so full of soft white woolly clouds that you might fancy the sky-people had turne...