The fog

I straddled, precariously balanced, atop a seven-foot fence marking the northern boundary of the little Vermont school yard. As this was the opening morning for the September te...

Caleb Gridley, the girl’s father, ran the tannery in the larger town of Paris, twenty miles west of the Foxboros. He was a big-bodied, small headed man, with iron fists, a pavin...

Over the meadows and far away in the dreamy hush of summer days; lying amid scented haycocks and watching the castling clouds drift away like floating fairy isles in a sea of tu...

In the heart of a man there are many chambers. Some of these chambers have locked doors and behind them the world may not penetrate. Dusty, discarded shrines are there with the...

Looking back on those days in Foxboro Center now, Nathan and I think of them as Nuggets of Time from the Golden Mine of Boyhood, unalloyed. I would like to transcribe whole page...

My mother’s savings were exhausted in the spring of 1900. The payments on her pension were delayed. The good woman was almost alone in the world with a seam-ripping, button-burs...

Mrs. Gracia Theddon, writing in her upstairs library the Saturday morning after her visit to the Orphanage, was disturbed by one Murfins, her butler. Murfins merely thrust in hi...

As I was Nathan Forge’s squire, Elinore became my Heart’s Desire. Which may read like “peanut” poetry but which really did possess so much poetry at the time that I am allowing...

If the child were precocious in a queer, matronly way, her clouded parentage and life at the Home were mainly responsible. She was intensely feminine and affectionate, fiercely...

In the summer of 1904, the Methodist Sunday school held a picnic six miles up the river. It was a popular place for picnics,—a glen sloping down to a bathing beach, roofed with...

Cora Hastings, Nathan’s last teacher and the good woman, by the way, who did more than all others to encourage his literary fluency and poetical promise, took it upon her sparse...

“The Elms” school for girls consisted of a trio of high-pillared Colonial buildings on the main street of Mount Hadley, Massachusetts. They stood behind lofty arches of towering...

A favorite retreat for most of the Paris boys in those days was the region known as “down the river.” From the Process Works dam to the mill pond at Hastings Crossing flowed a w...

The village, therefore, had been forced to admit—grudgingly to be sure, but nevertheless to admit—that if he kept it up long enough, and nothing stopped him, and the quality of...

Madelaine Theddon was seventeen that autumn. She was one of those rare girls who seem to slip subtly into maturity while contemporaries of equal age are giggling over pimply-fac...

Miss Carol Gardner came to Paris from Ohio—pronounced “A-higher”—and when the boy met her, “to his eye there was but one beloved face on earth and that was shining on him.”

It was a rainy Sunday afternoon in March. Nathan lay on his bed and tried to read. But his book was developing into a love story, weak and asinine beside the greater love story...

Commencement Week was Mardi Gras for Mount Hadley in a refined, dignified, academic way. While The Elms was chiefly a college-preparatory school, many of its graduates were goin...

Jake was the father of the Richards girl who had remained at work in the Forge factory during the “strike.” He had three boys and four other girls. The Richards family lived on...

The office chanced to be empty as he entered. He looked around. It was difficult to believe that this was the same room in which just a few hours before he had held the girl he...

Jasper Ruggles, the grandfather, had started life as one of those peddlers who drove about New England in a cart resembling a small-sized circus wagon of flaming scarlet. He swa...

It was four-thirty of a gray afternoon in March. The local police force tilted back in its chair with its feet on its desk and perused the day’s issue of the _Telegraph_ with th...

Madelaine Theddon had returned from a matinée one spring afternoon when she was met by the announcement that a gentleman had been waiting an hour. Gordon Ruggles arose to greet...

We hear much comment about Genius in this clay-and-paint age. Mediocrity is amazed that there can be persons capable of doing many things and doing them exceptionally well. It f...

The Grand Hotel in Yokohama, Japan, is built close to the edge of Tokio Bay. Only the width of a macadam street separates it from a walled embankment with a twenty-foot drop dow...

It was the day of the Harvard-Pennsylvania boat race. Madelaine Theddon had come from Boston to cheer for the crimson. Gordon met her and after the races off Court Square they w...

Old Caleb had traveled much since he lost his Duchess and disposed of his tannery. He had made money and knew how to make more money, but for the first time in his life he had b...

America was not going to preserve her neutrality and keep from the European shambles much longer. As the days passed and 1917 drew closer, there was less and less doubt about it.

Nathan was facing the prospect of a dreary, rainy Sunday in a Wilkes-Barre hotel when that “turning-point” telegram arrived from Thorne. Since that day in Springfield when he ha...

The afternoon and evening before Nathan’s departure he spent with me. An arrangement was finally effected whereby Mrs. Forge received the money accruing from the sale of Nathan’...

The Czar had been deposed in the opening weeks of March. Sturmer, Golitsyn and Protopopov had been arrested. The Imperial Russian family were under tragic detention in Tsarkoë-S...

“We’re entraining on the ‘eleven o’clock’ for New York to-night, Madge. I’m supposed to have my men on the transport to-morrow at noon.” Gordon pulled back a khaki sleeve and lo...

Take your atlas, find Siberia, locate Vladivostok in the northwest corner of the Japan Sea and trace your finger inland. Follow the Trans-Siberian railroad. One branch will trav...

But Nathan had one more terrific experience to suffer before he was finished with the Russian bedlam,—an experience and an aftermath beside which all that has gone before—everyt...

The man never would have become so exhausted in so short a time as a night and a morning and a journey through fifteen miles of muddy slough, if he had not lost far more blood f...

A man’s brain may play queer pranks in life’s Great Moments. Came to Nathan then some lines he had written long ago, even as it was coming to the woman, intuitively, subconsciou...

Snow began covering Siberia east of Baikal. It seemed as though winter arrived in a night. Still there were many mornings when the high, cold sunshine glinted in a trillion jewe...

Not only had the war ended in precisely the way the war should end, but Nathan and Madelaine had lived through that horrible winter of 1918-1919 in the typhus pest house that wa...

The backlash of a typhoon blown up from the China Sea made rough sailing the first two days of the voyage. Passengers kept to their staterooms. But the third evening Madelaine d...

Never did weeks speed past so swiftly as they did that summer. October was approaching almost before we realized it, least of all Nathan. What with acclimating himself at his ne...

He had often smiled over the acclaimed nervousness and general distress of certain young fathers, awaiting the arrival of their first-born. He was not smiling now. Suppose the c...