قراءة كتاب Dr. Lavendar's People

The children used to come up a flagstone path to the side door, and then step down two steps into an entry. Two rooms opened on this entry; in one the children sat at small, battered desks and studied; in the other Miss Baily heard their lessons, sitting at a table covered with a red cloth, which had a white Grecian fret for a border and smelled of crumbs. On the wall behind her was a faded print of "Belshazzar's Feast"; in those days this was probably the only feasting the room ever saw—although on a thin-legged sideboard there were two decanters (empty) and a silver-wire cake-basket which held always three apples. Both rooms looked out on the garden—the garden and, in fine weather, Mr. David Baily! ... Ah, me—what it was, in the dreary stretches of mental arithmetic, to look across the flower-beds and see Mr. David—tall and dark and melancholy—pacing up and down, sometimes with a rake, oftener with empty hands; always with vague, beautiful eyes fixed on some inner vision of heart-broken memory. Miss Ellen's pupils were confident of this vision because of a tombstone in the burial-ground which recorded the death of Maria Hastings, at the romantic age of seventeen; and, as everybody in Old Chester knew, Mr. Baily had been in love with this same seventeen-year-old Maria. To be sure, it was thirty years ago; but that does not make any difference, "in real love," as any school-girl can tell you. So, when David Baily paced up and down the garden paths or sat in the sunshine under the big larch we all knew that he was thinking of his bereavement.

In the opinion of the older girls, grief had wrecked Mr. David's life; he had intended to be a clergyman, but had left the theological school because his eyes gave out. "He cried himself nearly blind," the girls told each other with great satisfaction. After that he tried one occupation after another, but somehow failed in each; which was proof of a delicacy of constitution induced by sorrow. Furthermore, he seemed pursued by a cruel fortune—"Fate," the girls called it. Elderly, unromantic Old Chester did not use this fine word, but it admitted pursuing disaster.

For instance: there was the time that David undertook the charge of a private library in Upper Chester, and three months afterwards the owner sold it! Then Mr. Hays found a job for him, and just as he was going to work he was laid up with rheumatism. And again Tom Dilworth got him a place as assistant book-keeper; and David, after innumerable tangles on his balance-sheet, was obliged to say, frankly, that he had no head for figures. But he was willing to do anything else—"any honest work that is not menial," he said, earnestly. And Tom said, why, yes, of course, only he'd

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