Suburban SketchesHoughton, Mifflin, 1884 - 255 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
aboard afternoon amusement answered appeared arms asked Aunt Melissa baby beach beauty behold Benicia Street boat Boston Bowdoin Square burlesque Calchas canker-worms character Charles Lamb Charlesbridge charm cheerful Coliseum contributor Cousin Lucy crowd day's pleasure door doubt dressed Dublin eyes face fact fancy feel felt flattering Freddy friends gayety gentleman girl grace half hand Hapford heart hope horse-car Irish Italian Johnson Jonathan Tinker Jubilee kind kitchen knew La Belle Hélène lady living look lost child ment mind morning moving Nahant Nantasket Beach ness never night opéra bouffe passed passengers pathetic perhaps person piebalds poor pretty race Sallie scene seats second mate seemed sentiment sort soul spectacle spirit suburban summer things thought Thucydides tion turned walk wander Wharf whole whooping-cough women young
Popular passages
Page 152 - Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho...
Page 147 - Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves; And ye, that on the sands with printless foot Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him When he comes back...
Page 22 - But, after all, it was in puddings that Mrs. Johnson chiefly excelled. She was one of those cooks — rare as men of genius in literature — who love their own dishes ; and she had, in her personally childlike simplicity of taste, and the inherited appetites of her savage forefathers, a dominant passion for sweets. So far as we could learn, she subsisted principally upon puddings and tea. Through the same primitive instincts, no doubt, she loved praise. She openly exulted in our artless flatteries...
Page 82 - Venerable men! you have come down to us, from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives, that you might behold this joyous day. You are now where you stood fifty years ago, this very hour, with your brothers, and your neighbors, shoulder to shoulder, in the strife for your country. Behold, how altered! The same heavens are indeed over your...
Page 21 - It was only her barbaric laughter and lawless eye that betrayed how slightly her New England birth and breeding covered her ancestral traits, and bridged the gulf of a thousand years of civilization that lay between her race and ours.
Page 31 - I mean that this was his figurative attitude; his actual manner, as he lolled upon a chair beside the kitchen window, was so eccentric, that we felt a little uncertain how to regard him, and Mrs. Johnson openly described him as peculiar. He was so deeply tanned by the fervid suns of the New Hampshire winter, and his hair had so far suffered from the example of the sheep lately under his charge, that he could not be classed by any stretch of compassion with the blonde and straight-haired members of...
Page 27 - The first week of her service she was obedient and faithful to her duties, but relaxing in the atmosphere of a house which seems to demoralize all menials, she shortly fell into disorderly ways of lying in wait for callers out of doors, and, when people rang, of running up the front steps, and letting them in from the outside. As the season expanded, and the fine weather became confirmed, she modified even this form of service, and spent her time in the fields, appearing at the house only when nature...
Page 28 - She could never have been a woman of strong logical faculties, but she had in some things a very surprising and awful astuteness. She seldom introduced any purpose directly, but bore all about it, and then suddenly sprung it upon her unprepared antagonist. At other times she obscurely hinted a reason, and left a conclusion to be inferred ; as when she warded off reproach for some delinquency by saying in a general way that she had lived...
Page 20 - A gayety not born of the things that bring its serious joy to the true New England heart — a ragged gayety, which comes of summer in the blood, and not in the pocket or the conscience, and which affects the countenance and the whole demeanor, setting the feet to some inward music, and at times bursting into a line of song or a child-like and irresponsible laugh — gives tone to the visible life, and wakens a very friendly spirit in the passer, who somehow thinks there of a milder climate, and...