Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 15
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Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 15
Literature -- Collections
The oxen lowed approval, the sheep bleated, the birds screamed, the
fishes flapped their tails. I, for myself, stood mute and
self-condemned. What answer but one was possible? Had I been myself on
the bench I could not have hesitated. The fatal sentence of
condemnation was evidently about to be uttered, when the scene became
indistinct, there was a confused noise, a change of condition, a sound
of running feet and of many voices. I awoke. I was again in the
railway carriage; the door was thrown open; porters entered to take
our things. We stepped out upon the platform. We were at the terminus
for which we had been originally destined. Carriages and cabs were
waiting; tall powdered footmen flew to the assistance of the duke and
duchess. The station-master was standing hat in hand, and obsequiously
bowing; the minister's private secretary had come to meet his right
honorable chief with the red dispatch box, knowing the impatience with
which it was waited for. The duke shook hands with the archbishop
before he drove away. "Dine with us to-morrow?" he said. "I have had a
very singular dream. You shall be my Daniel and interpret it for me."
The archbishop regretted infinitely that he must deny himself the
honor; his presence was required at the Conference. "I too have
dreamt," he said; "but with your Grace and me the realities of this
world are too serious to leave us leisure for the freaks of
imagination."
HENRY B. FULLER
(1859-)
New England blood reveals itself in certain characteristics of Mr.
Henry B. Fuller's fiction, though his grandfather took root in Chicago
even after its incorporation in 1840. Born in the "windy city," of
prosperous merchant stock, he is of the intellectual race of Margaret
Fuller; and the saying of one of his characters, "Get the right kind
of New England face, and you can't do much better," shows his liking
for the transplanted qualities which began the good fortunes of the
Great West.
Family councils decreed that he should fill an important inherited
place in the business world; but temperament was too strong for
predestination. He might have been an architect, he might have been a
musician, had he not turned out a novelist. But a creative artist he
was constrained by nature to become. His first story, unacknowledged
at first, and entitled 'The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani,' attracted
little notice until it fell by chance under the eye of Professor
Norton of Cambridge, who sent it with a kindly word to Lowell. This
fine critic wrote a cordial letter of praise to the author, and the
book was republished by the Century Company of New York in 1892 and
widely read. 'The Chatelaine of La Trinite,' his next venture,
appeared as a serial in the Century Magazine during the same year.
Both of these stories have a European background; in both a certain
remoteness and romantic quality predominates, and both have little in
common with this workaday world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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