The Amouretta landscape, and other storiesAdams, Adeline
General
The Amouretta landscape, and other stories
Adams, Adeline
American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, American
Did both boys become sculptors? Oh, no, nothing so tragic as that.
Apollos is the sculptor, but Phineas went into architecture; he knows
more about stone walls than he did before the fire. Since the fire, the
two are fast friends, and work together when they can. They are the two
young fellows who lately captured the commission for that big Unknown
Heroism monument the papers have been printing pictures of. I think
they’ll make good, too. But you never would have guessed it would end
that way, if you had seen them together at the Academy. The rosy-eared
Apollos!
THE MARQUIS GOES DONKEY-RIDING
I
My great-grandmother was by no means an accomplished French scholar. Was
yours? And even in English, my great-grandmother’s spelling was far from
faultless. In those well-thumbed receipt-books of hers, written by her
own hand, and still beautifully legible, you will note that she sometimes
doubles the _t_ in butter, and sometimes not; she generally gives an _h_
to sugar, and seldom allows an egg more than one _g_ to stand on. But the
far-flung fame of her cooking did not suffer in consequence. And had her
prowess in languages and in orthography been equal to her skill in the
household arts of her day (spinning, weaving, brewing, and the like), my
cousin Felix might never have known the joyous adventures of a collector
of Lafayette silver. For frankly, it was my great-grandmother, who, owing
to a slip in her French, first sent the marquis on his donkey-riding.
Lafayette in Egypt! Cousin Felix never rested until he got to the bottom
of the matter.
Felix Bradford, you must know, is one of the great color manufacturers
of the age. Tube colors, of course. There’s more in the business,
and perhaps less in the tubes, than one would expect. But Felix is a
thoroughly good sport; and twenty years ago, finding that he was making
a comfortable income from the art of painting (other men’s painting),
he decided to become a collector of something besides money. Colonial
silver, for example; and he hoped to include among his treasures the lost
Lafayette porringer, from which as a child he had often been spiritually
fed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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