Three little maids

CHAP. PAGE I. TWELVE O’ THE CLOCK 11 II. PRETENDING 21 III. FAMILY MATTERS 35 IV. A WINTER SUNDAY 41 V. WHICH RUSHES FOURTEEN THOUSAND MILES AWAY 53 VI. ‘BROWNSES’ HOUSE’ 66 VII...

CHAP. PAGE XVII. RHYME AND RHYTHM 187 XVIII. TEN AT TABLE 194 XIX. GWENDOLEN TREVALLION AND A SOLDIER BRAVE AND TRUE 208 XX. THE ‘GERMAN SAUSAGE’ LAND 218 XXI. ‘GOOD-BYE, GOOD-B...

There was the listening hush of midnight in the house. No light burned in any of the rooms, but through the windows, where the blinds were up, a woe-begone struggling moon shone...

“Far away and yet so near us, lies a land where all have been, Played beside its sparkling waters, danced along its meadows green, Where the busy world we live in, and its noise...

It was a pleasant smiling-faced place this English home of the three little maids. Phyl and Dolly would like to have heard it was old enough to call it a “venerable pile” or an...

On Sunday evenings it had always been the custom for the little girls to gather round their mother, and talk of their funny little plans, tell of their past week’s naughtinesses...

To the lad swinging monotonously on the gate, the straight grey road that lay in front of his house seemed to run on to dull eternity. Far away where the horizon cut it off from...

About six o’clock in the evening Clif went back again from his “sulking-place.” His heart was a tender one when the crust that gathered there was pierced, and something brought...

A disinterested observer would have imagined they were pretending they were blind, for they were moving slowly up and down the room close to the wall with their finger-tips feel...

Unbolstered in such ways of hope, their thoughts flew to wild extremes; Phyl was ill again, and was confined to bed; the harsh biting winters always caught at her poor little ch...

Surely this was a great step Mrs. Conway had decided, almost by herself, upon taking? To cut herself adrift from friends and relatives, to leave this land of her birth, and her...

In after days the last month spent in England seemed like a dream to the children. There was a fortnight during which packing-cases and new flat cabin-trunks came to the house,...

“Your eyes ’ll drop out in a minute,” was the elder sister’s remark, delivered sleepily. And indeed there seemed some danger of that horrible accident happening, for Dolly had l...

“Yesterday now is a part of forever With glad days and sad days and bad days that never Shall visit us more with their bloom and their blight, Their fulness of sunshine or sorro...

Moondi-Moondi, Sunnymeade yclept, lay parched and panting beneath the sun of another summer. Dr. Wise’s cottage showed little change; perhaps the walls were dirtier, certainly t...

It almost came to pass that in a month “Brownses” was empty again. After a long talk with Dr. Wise and the clergyman Mrs. Conway was aghast at the prospect before her. There wer...

“Not so, not cold! but very poor instead! Ask God who knows! for frequent tears have run The colours from my life, and left so dead And pale a stuff, it were not fitly done To g...

With the constant derision that so much boy companionship brought at Sunnymeade, Jennie and Suey had been forced to retire from adventurous lives, and now, wrapped in soft old h...

“I know of no sweeter emotion, and hardly of a greater one, than when a young man takes a sheaf of paper in his hand and, striding about his room, boldly resolves to turn it int...

The half-past five train whistled shrilly at the station, and Phyl dropped hastily down from the low branch of the quince-tree where the afternoon sun had found and left her bur...

So every one took up their usual evening employment. Clif and Mrs. Wise played chess in the drawing-room, and Ted in a quiet corner not far away buried himself in a book. In the...

The dining-room was in an uproar, and it was to be feared nobody’s home-lessons were well done. Weenie had had a map of Europe to do; she also had recently expended the sum of a...

In his bedroom there still hung his old school-suit, his sunburnt hat, his shabby mackintosh—Phyl could not realize that he would never again come stamping and clattering up the...

A sudden gust of wind in the house would bring scraps of papers floating from everywhere, and if any one had troubled to pick them up and read them, the eye would be sure to be...

The printer of their School Magazine had undertaken to print and publish this new one for twenty-five pounds a month. He was interested in the little venture, and really gave th...

There came a day when Phyl and Dolly dashed in from the Post-office with scarlet faces. There had been among the letters one with a queer German stamp upon it, and, secure in a...

True she had occasionally been bitten with a desire to emulate her sisters, and the results had been so unique that Mrs. Wise had carried them off and placed them in her “put-aw...

Dolly and Phyl kept them, it goes without saying, but no one ever saw theirs, they kept them so carefully hidden away. Weenie’s of course flung about the house everywhere, and e...

One week’s mail brought seven separate letters from the “German Sausage Land.” It had evidently been a safety-valve for the excited lad to actually seal and post a letter every...

“‘Two added to one, if that could be done,’ It said, ‘with one’s fingers and thumbs,’ Recollecting with tears how in earlier years It had taken no pains with its sums.”

Downhill for a space, then over a feeble creek, and springing steeply up again ran the green road that branched off from the red and more important one of the lonely suburb, and...

A boy with a large parcel had just entered the gate, and had actually had the temerity to approach the house in the way Dolly had done, regardless of flower-borders. At the mome...