Saxe Holm's Stories Second Series.

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MY TOURMALlNE. I Had arrived, late one November afternoon, at a wretched little tavern in a small village in Maine. I was very unhappy. It was of no consequence to me that I was young; it was of no consequence to me that I had superb health. I was very unhappy. How compassionately middle age smiles, looking back upon the miseries of its healthy youth ! How gladly to-day would I be sent away in disgrace from college, to rusticate for six months in a country parson's house, if I could feel the warm, strong blood bound in my veins, as it bounded that night when I jumped from the top of the stage to the ground under the ugly, creaking sign of that village tavern. It was a dismal afternoon. A warm rain was slowly filtering down through the elm-trees with which the street was too thickly shaded. The ground was sprinkled with golden-yellow leaves, and little pools of muddy water filled every footprint on the grass-grown sidewalk. A few inertand dispirited men lounged on the tavern steps with that look of fossilized idleness which is peculiar to rural New England. In other countries, idlers look as if they were idling because they liked it; or perhaps because illness or lack of employment had forced them to idle; but the New England idler, on the steps of his native tavern, or by the stove of his native store, looks as if he had been there since the prehistoric ages, and had no more volition or interest in his situation than a pterodactyl five hundred feet under ground. Spite of the rain, I had persisted in riding on the outside of the stage. I took a perverse pleasure in being wet through, and chilled to the marrow. I remember I even thought that I hoped I should take cold and have a rheumatic fever, so that the President might see what had come of sending a fellow down ...