The Shoes of Fortune

'Twas a long journey to the prison of Bicêtre, which is two miles to the south of the city of Paris, a great building that had once (they say) been a palace, but now in the time...

And all this time it may well be wondered where was my remorse for a shot fired on the moor of Mearns, for two wretched homes created by my passion and my folly. And where, in t...

I fastened the rope about a chimney-head with some misgivings that by the width and breadth of the same I was reducing our chance of ever getting down to the lower building, as...

Whoever it was that moved at the instigation of Madame on my behalf, he put speed into the business, for the very next day I was told my sous-lieutenancy was waiting at the head...

The occasion for this precaution in our correspondence was beyond my comprehension; nevertheless I was too proud to have the patronage of so fine a woman to cavil at what system...

A week passed with no further incident particularly affecting this history. With my reduced and antique mentor I studied _la belle langue_, sedulous by day, at night pacing the...

I have no intention here of narrating at large what happened in my short career as a soldier of the French Army, curious though some of the things that befell me chanced to be....

That night was like the day, with a full moon shining. The next afternoon I rode into Borrowstounness, my horse done out and myself sore from head to heel; and never in all my l...

It was under the lash of a natural exasperation I went up Mademoiselle's stairs determined on an interview. Bernard (of all men in the world!) responded to my knock. I could hav...

Dunkerque in these days (it may be so no longer) was a place for a man to go through with his nose in his fingers. Garbage stewed and festered in the gutters of the street so th...

Two days after, the _Roi Rouge_ came to Dunkerque; Horn the seaman went home to Scotland in a vessel out of Leith with a letter in his pocket for my people at Hazel Den, and I d...

Of the town of Paris that is so lamentably notable in these days I have but the recollection that one takes away from a new scene witnessed under stress of mind due to matters m...

It was the first of May. But for Father Hamilton's birds, and some scanty signs of it in the small garden, the lengthened day and the kindlier air of the evenings, I might never...

It seemed for a while as if we were fated to lie forgotten in Bicêtre till the crack of doom; not that we were many days there when all was done, but that in our natural hourly...

It was the last, for many months, I was to see of my countrywoman. Before the crow of the cock next morning I was on the unending roads, trundling in a noisy vehicle through pit...

What this marvel betokened was altogether beyond my comprehension, but the five men were no sooner gone than I clapped on my hat and drew up the collar of my coat and ran like f...

It was plain from the first that my overhearing of the plot must compel Thurot to the step he took. He was not unkind, but so much depended on the absolute secrecy of the things...

Of our voyage across the Channel there need be no more said than that it was dull to the very verge of monotony, for the wind, though favourable, was often in a faint where our...

The priest, poor man! aged a dozen years by his anxieties since I had seen him last, was dubious of his senses when I entered where he lodged, and he wept like a bairn to see my...

We carried this elation all through England with us. Whatever town we stopped at flags were flying, and the oldest resident must be tipsy on the green for the glory of the Briti...

And now I come to an affair of which there have been many accounts written, some of them within a mile or two of the truth, the most but sheer romantics. I have in my mind notab...

It is an odd thing, chance--the one element to baffle the logician and make the scheming of the wisest look as foolish in the long run as the sandy citadel a child builds upon t...

The funeral was over before I cared to examine my bequest, and then I went to it with some reluctance, for if a pair of shoes was the chief contents of the brass-bound chest, th...

Father Hamilton was not aware of the extent of it, but he knew I was in a correspondence with the sous-officer. More than once he had seen us in the _salle dépreuve_ in a manife...

Kilbride and I parted company with the others once we had got within the lines of Holland; the cateran (as I would sometimes be calling him in a joke) giving them as much money...

Thurot turned the key on me with a pleasantry that was in no accordance with my mood, and himself retired to the round house on deck where his berth was situated. I sat on a for...

While it may be that the actual crisis of my manhood came to me on the day I first put on my Uncle Andrew's shoes, the sense of it was mine only when I met with Captain Thurot....

It was a gay place, London, in the days I write of, however it may be now, though Father Hamilton was prone occasionally to compare it unfavourably with the Paris of his fancy,...

The place stank with bilge and the odour of an ill-trimmed lamp smoking from a beam; the fragments of the skipper's supper were on the table, with a broken quadrant; rats scurri...

I began these chronicles with a homily upon the pregnancy of chance that gives the simplest of our acts ofttimes far-reaching and appalling consequences. It is clear that I had...

For the most part of a year I toiled and moiled like any crofter's son on my father's poor estate, and dreary was the weird I had to dree, for my being there at all was an adver...

It was the seventh of March, the first day I heard the laverock that season, and it sang like to burst its heart above the spot where the lad fell with a cry among the rushes. I...

It was a night--as often happens in the uplands of our shire in autumn weather--of vast and brooding darkness: the world seemed to swound in a breathless oven, and I had scarcel...

When I come to write these affairs down after the lapse of years, I find my memory but poorly retains the details of that terrific period between the cry of Risk and the moment...

An air of westerly wind had risen after meridian and the haar was gone, so that when I stood at the break of the poop as the brigantine crept into the channel and flung out bill...

Uncle Andrew settled for the remainder of his time into our domestic world at Hazel Den as if his place had been kept warm for him since ever he went away. For the remainder of...

He pushed me from the chamber as I had been a stranger intruding, and I went to the trance door and looked out at the stretching moorlands lit by an enormous moon that rose over...

When I went on deck next morning there was something great ado. We were out of sight of land, sailing large, as the old phrase went, on a brisk quarter breeze with top-sails atr...

I had seen yon remnant of a man in the Tolbooth cell, and an immediate death upon the gallows seemed less dreadful than the degradation and the doubt he must suffer waiting wear...

I came down from my cam-ceiled room to a breakfast by candle-light in a morning that was yet stormy. The landlord himself waited on me ['twas no other than Ralph Craig that's no...

Clancarty and Thurot were playing cards, so intent upon that recreation that I was in the middle of the floor before they realised who it was the servant had ushered in.