Ballantyne a Novel
Book I Chapter First ninety-three Americans who made the late March passage from Boston to Liverpool, in a still year recent, not OFthe one stepped upon English soil with so strong a sense of familiar proprietorship as Marion Lacy, Boston born, Boston bred, and with distinct and lifelong appreciation of her birthright and what it involved. Nantucket, it is true, claimed the father and Plymouth the mother but Boston has always admitted that these two names stand for perhaps as valuable and coherent a background as her own, and yields deference accordingly, the three as one in inheritance and tradition. To Marion it had meant always rather an embar rassment of riches, for the two old houses opened their doors every summer, each so full of attractions that choice seemed impossible. What could be more fascinating to a child, or for that matter to anybody, than the quaint houses of the old island, filled with strange spoils from many lands, presided over by gray-headed, almost barnacled, se
...a captains, quot walks built about who still went up daily to the the cluster of chimneys on each roof of the roomy old dwellings, and swept the horizon for ships that had made for other harbors long ago Often Marion followed, lost in dreams of the dead and gone ancestors, matron and maid, who from the same quot walks quot had read every sign of wind and wave, and waited, as sailors wives and sweet hearts must, for many a ship that never came home. There they were now, all of them, in the little grave yard on the windy hill, where the curls so blew into her eyes that it was hard to spell out the names on the crumbling headstones, chief among them that of old Peter Folger, surveyor, architect, school-master, lay-preacher, and poet, this last in such fashion only as Puritan limitations admitted. In the bookcase in her grandfather s room, owned by his father before him, Marion had found the little volume, once famous, the burst of manly, valiant, quotA Looking-Glass ungrammatical doggerel, for the Times,quot in which the quot quot plain speaker sent out from the remote and mist-encircled island a voice whose plea for spiritual freedom still sounds clear and strong as many a voice that has followed. Standing in the big wooden chair to bring herself on a level with the shelf which held this and other treasures of the same order, the small Marion, with infinite trouble from the long s s, spelled out the verses, which fastened themselves in her memory, and which she repeated with the deep conviction that not Washington him self had quite the same claim to distinction. I am for peace and not for war, And that s the reason why I write more plain than some men do, That used to dawb and lie. But I shall cease and set my name To what I now insert. Because to be a libeller, I hate with all my heart. From Sherborn town where now I dwell, My name I do put here, Without offence, your real friend, It is Peter Folger.quot Grandfather had explained it carefully, never amazed at any form of question from this child, whose deep blue eyes held more questions than smiles, and who listened with grave consideration, nodding approval quot at the end...
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