I knew how well my friend liked me, because he shook my hand with his head turned away. Then the grey glove of the beautiful lady touched my shoulder-the lightest touch in all the world -as I stood close to the carriage while Poor Jr. climbed in. "Good-bye. Thank you-and God bless you " she said, in a low voice. And I knew for what she thanked me. The driver cracked his whip like an honest Neapolitan. The horses sprang forward. "Addio, addio " I sang with the musicians, waving and waving and waving my handkerchief to the departing carriage. Now I saw my friend lean over and take the beautiful lady by the hand, and together they stood up in the carriage and waved their handkerchiefs to me. Then, but not because they had passed out of sight, I could see them not any longer. They were so good-that kind Poor Jr. and the beautiful lady; they seemed like dear children-as if they had been my own dear children.
The maple-bordered street was as still as a country Sunday; so quiet that there seemed an echo to my footsteps. It was four o'clock in the morning; clear October moonlight misted through the thinning foliage to the shadowy sidewalk and lay like a transparent silver fog upon the house of my admiration, as I strode along, returning from my first night's work on the "Wainwright Morning Despatch." I had already marked that house as the finest (to my taste) in Wainwright, though hitherto, on my excursions to this metropolis, the state capital, I was not without a certain native jealousy that Spencerville, the county-seat where I lived, had nothing so good. Now, however, I approached its purlieus with a pleasure in it quite unalloyed, for I was at last myself a resident (albeit of only one day's standing) of Wainwright, and the house-though I had not even an idea who lived there-part of my possessions as a citizen. Moreover, I might enjoy the warmer pride of a next-door-neighbor, for Mrs. Apperthwaite's, where I had taken a room, was just beyond.
Stoke the fire, grab a cup of hot cocoa, and curl up with this heartwarming Christmas tale from beloved American author Booth Tarkington. Set in an unnamed state in the Midwest, Beasley's Christmas Party follows the adventures of a journalist who has just moved to town to join the staff of the local newspaper. Soon after arriving, he becomes aware of an interesting and eccentric local character named David Beasley whose political prospects are on the rise. With a surprising Christmas Eve climax, this story will renew your faith in the human spirit.
Newton Booth Tarkington (July 29, 1869 - May 19, 1946) was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. Booth Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, the son of John S. Tarkington and Elizabeth Booth Tarkington. He was named after his maternal uncle Newton Booth, then the governor of California.
The patient, an old-fashioned man, thought the nurse made a mistake in keeping both of the windows open, and her sprightly disregard of his protests added something to his hatred of her. Every evening he told her that anybody with ordinary gumption ought to realize that night air was bad for the human frame. "The human frame won't stand everything, Miss Perry," he warned her, resentfully. "Even a child, if it had just ordinary gumption, ought to know enough not to let the night air blow on sick people yes, nor well people, either 'Keep out of the night air, no matter how well you feel.' That's what my mother used to tell me when I was a boy. 'Keep out of the night air, Virgil, ' she'd say. 'Keep out of the night air.'" "I expect probably her mother told her the same thing," the nurse suggested. "Of course she did. My grandmother--" "Oh, I guess your GRANDmother thought so, Mr. Adams That was when all this flat central country was swampish and hadn't been drained off yet. I guess the truth must have been the swamp mosquitoes bit people and gave 'em malaria, especially before they began to put screens in their windows. Well, we got screens in these windows, and no mosquitoes are goin' to bite us; so just you be a good boy and rest your mind and go to sleep like you need to."
There is a midland city in the heart of fair, open country, a dirty and wonderful city nesting dingily in the fog of its own smoke. The stranger must feel the dirt before he feels the wonder, for the dirt will be upon him instantly. It will be upon him and within him, since he must breathe it, and he may care for no further proof that wealth is here better loved than cleanliness; but whether he cares or not, the negligently tended streets incessantly press home the point, and so do the flecked and grimy citizens. At a breeze he must smother in the whirlpools of dust, and if he should decline at any time to inhale the smoke he has the meager alternative of suicide.
Penrod sat morosely upon the back fence and gazed with envy at Duke, his wistful dog. A bitter soul dominated the various curved and angular surfaces known by a careless world as the face of Penrod Schofield. Except in solitude, that face was almost always cryptic and emotionless; for Penrod had come into his twelfth year wearing an expression carefully trained to be inscrutable. Since the world was sure to misunderstand everything, mere defensive instinct prompted him to give it as little as possible to lay hold upon. Nothing is more impenetrable than the face of a boy who has learned this, and Penrod's was habitually as fathomless as the depth of his hatred this morning for the literary activities of Mrs. Lora Rewbush-an almost universally respected fellow citizen, a lady of charitable and poetic inclinations, and one of his own mother's most intimate friends.
When Johnnie comes marching home again, Hurrah Hurrah We'll give him a hearty welcome then, Hurrah Hurrah The men with the cheers, the boys with shouts, The ladies they will all turn out, And we'll all feel gay, when Johnnie comes marching home again The old man and the little boy, his grandson, sat together in the shade of the big walnut tree in the front yard, watching the "Decoration Day Parade," as it passed up the long street; and when the last of the veterans was out of sight the grandfather murmured the words of the tune that came drifting back from the now distant band at the head of the procession. "Yes, we'll all feel gay when Johnnie comes marching home again," he finished, with a musing chuckle. "Did you, Grandpa?" the boy asked. "Did I what?" "Did you all feel gay when the army got home?" "It didn't get home all at once, precisely," the grandfather explained. "When the war was over I suppose we felt relieved, more than anything else." "You didn't feel so gay when the war was, though, I guess " the boy ventured. "I guess we didn't."
There is a fertile stretch of flat lands in Indiana where unagrarian Eastern travellers, glancing from car-windows, shudder and return their eyes to interior upholstery, preferring even the swaying caparisons of a Pullman to the monotony without. The landscape lies interminably level: bleak in winter, a desolate plain of mud and snow; hot and dusty in summer, in its flat lonesomeness, miles on miles with not one cool hill slope away from the sun. The persistent tourist who seeks for signs of man in this sad expanse perceives a reckless amount of rail fence; at intervals a large barn; and, here and there, man himself, incurious, patient, slow, looking up from the fields apathetically as the Limited flies by. Widely separated from each other are small frame railway stations-sometimes with no other building in sight, which indicates that somewhere behind the adjacent woods a few shanties and thin cottages are grouped about a couple of brick stores.
