Ancestors: A NovelAtherton, Gertrude Franklin Horn
General
Ancestors: A Novel
Atherton, Gertrude Franklin Horn
British -- United States -- Fiction; California -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Love stories; Political fiction
circumstances have forced them into the hands of a class of men that
make their living out of them, and whose natural destiny was
pocket-picking and the Rogues' Gallery--and if the best of us combine
one day to do you honor, we can carry you to places as distinguished as
any in your own country. Great and disinterested men have succeeded
against tremendous odds in times as parlous as these, and others have
the same opportunity here and now."
The judge wound up his homily with a little peroration on Abraham
Lincoln and then left Gwynne to the California codes. The large new
stone office building of which Judge Leslie was the chief tenant stood
at the corner of a street a block above Main; Gwynne glancing over the
top of his tome could see a procession of teams, men lounging in the
doorway of a grocery store, and the spars of fishing-boats waiting for
the tide. His mind played him a curious trick. Piccadilly was before him
with its great hotels, its splendid old stone houses upon which the fogs
and the grime of London had demonstrated their poetical mission, the
classic entrance to the Park, the crowds of smart men and women;
Piccadilly at eight on a summer's evening choked with broughams and
hansoms, in which the light mantles barely concealed the shoulders and
jewels of the women. He had loved the outside life of London, returning
to it from afar with an ever fresh and boyish pleasure, the keener
perhaps because he knew that all doors were open to him and that he was
one of the great lions, not of those for whom the stranger must search
"Who's Who" upon his return from a function where half the guests had
made their little mark. He saw the lofty towers with their delicate
tracery, cutting the smoke on the banks of the Thames, the little room
below where he had made men, old and bored and suspicious, listen to
him; the more confident in his power to command their attention because
he knew that they had read and discussed, agreed with and denounced, his
sound contributions to colonial literature. The scene dissolved into a
wave of homesickness that made him choke and spring to his feet. Then he
swore at himself and returned to his codes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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