Manalive
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MANALIVE - CONTENTS - THE ENIGMAS OF INNOCENT SMITH. CHAP-PAGE I. How THE GREAT WIND CAME TO BEACON H OUSE . . . 7 11. THE L UGGAG O E F AN OPTIMIST 36 PART 11. THE EXPLANATIONS OF INNOCENT SMITH. i v CO NIE NlS. 111. THE R OUN R D O AD OR, THE DESERTION CHARGE . . . 291 1V. THE W ILD W EDDING O S R , THE PO LYGAMY CHARGE 339 V. How THE GREAT T A T I ND W ENT FROM BE, CO H N O US . E 376 PART I. T...
MoreMANALIVE - CONTENTS - THE ENIGMAS OF INNOCENT SMITH. CHAP-PAGE I. How THE GREAT WIND CAME TO BEACON H OUSE . . . 7 11. THE L UGGAG O E F AN OPTIMIST 36 PART 11. THE EXPLANATIONS OF INNOCENT SMITH. i v CO NIE NlS. 111. THE R OUN R D O AD OR, THE DESERTION CHARGE . . . 291 1V. THE W ILD W EDDING O S R , THE PO LYGAMY CHARGE 339 V. How THE GREAT T A T I ND W ENT FROM BE, CO H N O US . E 376 PART I. THE ENIGMAS OF INNOCENT SMITH. Chapter I. HOW THE GREAT WIND CAME TO BEACON HOUSEI A WIND sprang high. in the west, like a - - wave of unreasonable happiness, and tore eastward. across England, trailing . with it the frosty J scent of forests and the cold intoxication of the sea. In a million holes and corners it refreshed1 a man like-a flagon, and astonished him like a blow. l - In1 the inmost chambersof intricate and embowered houses it woke 1ike. a domestic explosion, littering the floor with some professor papers tillJ they seemed as precious as fugitive. or blowing out. the-candle by which a boy . rea Trcasure Island and wrapping him in, roaring 1 dark. But everywhere it bore drama into . undramatic lives, and carried the trump of crisis across the world. Many a harassed mother in a mean backyard had looked at five dwarfish shirts on the clothes-line as at some small, sick tragedy it was as if she had hanged her five children. The wind came, and they were full and kicking as if five fat imps had . sprung into them and far down in her oppressed subconsciousness she half remembered those coarse comedies of her fathers when the elves still dwelt in the homes of men. Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden , had tossed herself into the hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she might have tossed herself into the Thames and that wind rent the waving wall of woods and lifted the hammock like a balloon, and showed her shapes of quaint cloud far beyond, and pictures of bright villages far below, as if she rode heaven in a fairy boat. Many a dusty clerk or curate, plodding a telescopic MANALIVE. 9 road of poplars, thought for the hundredth time thaF they were like the plumes of a hearse when this invisible energy caught and swung and clashed them round his head like a wreath or salutation of seraphic wings. There was in it something more inspired and authoritative even than the old wind of th proverb for this was the good wind that blows nobody harm. The flying blast struck London just where it scales the northern heights, terrace above terrace, as precipitous as Edinburgh. It was round about this place that some poet, probably drunk, looked up astonished at all those streets gone skywards, and thinking vaguely of glaciers and roped mountaineers gave it the name of Swiss Cottage, which it has never been able to shake off. At some stage of those heights a terrace of tall gray houses, mostly empty and almost as desolate as the Grampians, curved round at the western end, so that the last build la 10 MANALIVE. ing, a boarding establishment called Beacon House, offered abruptly to the sunset its high, narrow, and towering termination, like the prow of some deserted ship. The ship, however, was not wholly deserted. The proprietor of the boarding-house, a Mrs. Duke, was one of those helpless persons upon whom fate wars in vain she smiled vaguely both before and after all her calamities she was too soft to be hurt. But by the aid or rather under the orders of a strenuous niece she always kept the remains of a clientele, mostly of young but listless folks. And there were actually five inmates standing disconsolately about the garden when the great gale broke at the base of the terminal tower behind them, as the sea bursts against the base of an outstanding cliff. All day that hill of houses over London had been domed and sealed up with cold cloud...
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