The Tenants: An Episode of the '80s

Not long since I had a visit from Gwynne Peters' oldest boy. The little fellow is twelve, and, as I abstained from any embarrassing and inconvenient demonstrations of affection...

Doctor Vardaman's house wore something of a festive look on Friday night when the "all-star cast," as some ribald jeerer had christened them, of "William Tell," began to arrive....

Mazie Pallinder's visit to her relatives, the Lees and Randolphs, was prolonged until the Easter holidays, which came the last week in March that spring. It is a fact, verified...

If Gwynne Peters had supposed at the outset that the new tenants would remain long unacquainted with their set of erratic landlords, the "quite a few gentlemen and some ladies"...

Doctor Vardaman viewed the departure of his guests with mingled relief and chagrin; the evening had not ended quite according to his expectations, and he could not decide whethe...

Mrs. Peters died rather suddenly the spring of the Centennial year. That, or the fact that hers was the first funeral I ever went to, has served to fix the date in my memory. Gw...

It was over at last--the party was over; like everything else in life, things had turned out neither quite so good nor quite so bad as we had expected. "Mrs. Tankerville" was a...

About this time all the papers were giving considerable attention in the columns which they headed variously: "Social Doings," "Among the Four Hundred,"--a phrase just then comi...

Doctor Vardaman was not a wealthy man; he occupied what he considered the golden mean, the "neither poverty nor riches" of the Preacher; enough to live in a simple, uncalculatin...

They were tearing down the old Gwynne house the other day as we drove past, and it was not without a twinge of sentimental regret that we beheld the spectacle. The old Gwynne ho...

It seemed written, foreordained, Gwynne Peters used to say, half in amusement, half in distaste, that his grandfather's house should forever be either completely retired from no...

Fate, who, as Doctor Vardaman's favourite classic assures us, calls, equal-footed, upon carpenters and kings, must surely have laid a directing hand on the old gentleman's shoul...

It will be seen that, by the close of their period, Doctor Vardaman had grown to be pretty familiar in the Pallinder household. Mazie professed a prodigious admiration for him....

Next day the crash came. The papers revelled in it; the Pallinders' affairs occupied the place of honour (or at least of supreme notoriety) in the first column of the first page...

Doctor Vardaman's house was called, in the day when it was built, a Swiss cottage. It was a story and a half high, with a steep-pitched roof, garnished with a kind of scalloped...

It was a _coup-de-theatre_, falling as pat as if prearranged, an unthinkable accident; the melodrama was becoming entirely too melodramatic, according to Doctor Vardaman's notio...

Among the forgotten fashions of the years from eighteen-eighty to eighty-five was that of giving our parties, evening or afternoon, for young people or old, of whatever kind, in...

When I meet some fellow-performer in the Pallinder theatricals nowadays we seldom fail to hark back to that noteworthy occasion before we have had out our talk. There were many...

Before "William Tell" was half over it became evident that Teddy's place was more than filled. There were those among the audience who assured me later that they had penetrated...

Many warm-hearted people felt a great sympathy for Doctor Vardaman in his isolation and solitude after Miss Clara's death; I suspect that had the doctor been an old maid instead...

Herewith began another volume in the saga of the old Gwynne house. After nearly fifty years of Gwynnes, it must now pass to other ownership. The thing happens every day, and sho...

Lent dragged or slipped or scurried along according to the varying tempers of those that watched it go; of late years the speed of its passage has increased noticeably, it seems...