Tramping on Life An Autobiographical Narrative

One day, as I lay there, reading Shelley, or was it my Vergil that I was puzzling out line by line, with occasional glances at the great ship seeming to sail into me--myself poi...

Settled there in "the jungles," we hilariously voted to crown the cook our king. We held the ceremony, presenting him with a crown made out of an old tin pan, which one of the m...

Then the game unaccountably shifted into seeing who could pull up the most corn stalks, beginning at an equal marked-off space out in each row and rushing back with torn-up hand...

"What a nice Sunday," Phoebe had said, looking out at the window. "Jenny," she continued to her roommate, "I have a feeling I'd like to go to church this morning...."

"I'm afraid your cousin Phoebe will come to no good end some day, if she don't watch out," said my grandmother to me, "and I don't like you to play with her much.... I'm going t...

It was not a difficult matter to procure them. She would bring them up to us and hand them in through the chuck-hole, which the village blacksmith had repaired and once more rei...

Randall served great hilarity to the party by trying to breed his gelded horse to his mare ... the mare kicked and squealed, indignant at the cheat, looking back, flattening her...

Still undetected, I scrambled along an aisle between them and put myself away in a sort of life-preserver closet. Not till I had heard the familiar throb of the propeller in mot...

I stood beside the ropes as the people of Laurel surged by, many of them shaking me by the hand ... Vanna came by, with the big football player with her, bulking behind her slig...

I was a huge chap, with a girdle of leaves about my waist ... strange, tropic leaves ... there was black hair all over my body ... there was a little, red fire back in the cave'...

"Well, you _are_ a queer fish ... there never was anyone like you in the family, except your mother. She used to read and read, and read. And once or twice she wrote a short sto...

On a cold day of blowing snow, "Pete" came tramping in to town ... his high boots laced to the knees, a heavy alpaca coat about him ... he had come all the way from Philadelphia...

In the groves adjoining the colony, for a mile on either side, wherever there was a big tree, a circular seat had been built about it. It was on one of these that we sat down, w...

"You see, Gregory, if you win two of these races, we'll get the banner that goes to the class that makes the greatest number of points ... you must do it for us ... we have neve...

And he sighed and turned his face to the wall as if the thought troubled him, and he wished to dismiss it. Then, in a moment, he whirled about, changed and furious. He rose to a...

The week before I was to set out my father calmly discovered to me that he intended I should work on a farm as a hand for the next four years, when I reached Ohio ... was even w...

"I do thank you ... that explains why the atmosphere up at the office of the _National_ was as cold as the refrigerator-box of a meat car, when I was up there an hour ago ... bu...

Spalton's originality and genius would in the end have of itself produced a rupture between them ... few women are at home with genius, much as they clasp their hands in ecstasy...

After he had delivered a brief talk on God and The Soul, questions were invited--meant only to be politely put, that the speaker might shine. But my question was not put for the...

"Come on and take your medicine ... I'm goin' away to-morrow to Halton, and I want to leave you something to remember me by--so that you'll obey Ma and Millie while I'm gone. If...

There was nothing he did not discuss, in memorable phrase and trenchant, clever epigram. For he saw that I believed in him, worshipped whole-heartedly at his shrine of genius, a...

There was the big, black Jamaica cook ... as black as if he was polished ebony ... a fine, big, polite chap, whom everyone liked. He had a white wife in Southampton (the sailors...

A belated student at college, twenty-five years of age ... a tramp for the sake of my art ... as I sat in my cold room ... propped up by my one overturned chair ... in bed ... b...

She laughed engagingly with feminine inconsequence and stooped down to recover a slight, silver bracelet that had slipped off over one of her small hands. I caught a brief glimp...

Barton was a strange, strong-minded, ignorant man. Hardly able to compose a sentence in correct English, he employed educated, but unresourceful assistants who furnished the goo...

"Now," explained the captain, "what's happened has happened ... it's up to you to make the best of it ... we had to shanghai you," and he explained the case in full ... and if h...

The azure beauty of those days!... tramping northward with nothing in the world to do but swap stories and rest whenever we chose, about campfires of resinous, sweetly smelling...

I opened the door to admit a pale, young chap, who expertly flirted the ashes off a cigarette as he said, leaning his head sidewise, that he represented the Kansas City _Star_....

Now I am writing these things just as I was told them by my grandmother. For I have utterly no remembrance of my mother. Consumption ran in her family. And bearing and giving bi...

"Father says meat is no good ... maybe he's right about killing animals. He says it wouldn't be half so bad if everyone killed their own meat, instead of making brutes out of me...

We sank down together on a small knoll under the low-spreading branches of a live oak. We watched the man who we thought had observed our antics bobbing off down the road, as if...

"My boy ... come in ... my God, you're all wet ... you look frail, too." A pity shone in his eyes. "Minnie, call up Ally Merton ..." turning to me, "I have, as you can see, no c...

I walked, with a guilty feeling of too much sentimentality, back into the "stack" at the university library. I took down book after book of the great English poets, and pressed...

Hildreth heaved a sigh of content as we walked into her mother's flat again. Her mother was still at Eden ... alone ... taking care of Daniel, for whom she had a great love.

I now devoted myself exclusively to poetry--the reading of it. I always had a book in my pocket. I read even at meals, despite my father's protests that it was bad-mannered.

Hildreth was very wise and very patient with one who was as yet a mere acolyte in love's ways and uses ... she taught me many things, and I adored her for it--as little by littl...

I pictured to myself the beautiful woman who had drowned herself; I burned with her unhappiness ... I felt her hovering near me ... I thought of the lovely passion we had known...

I could stay and finish my play and, having disposed of it, come likewise to the city, and rent a flat, and she would come and live with me again. I am sure she was sincere in t...