ot very well, and
Mary is all I have, you know."
My mother was in tears by this time, but Aunt Bridget was not content
with her triumph. Sweeping downstairs she carried her complaint to my
father, who ordered that I was to be taken out of my mother's charge on
the ground that she was incapable of attending to my upbringing--a task
which, being assigned to my Aunt Bridget, provided that I should
henceforward live on the ground floor and eat oaten cake and barley
bonnag and sleep alone in the cold room over the hall while Betsy Beauty
ate wheaten bread and apple tart and slept with her mother in the room
over the kitchen in which they always kept a fire.
FIFTH CHAPTER
The altered arrangements were a cause of grief to my mother, but I am
bound to confess that for me they had certain compensations. One of them
was the greater ease with which I could slip out to Tommy the Mate, who
had been a sailor before he was a gardener, and was still a fine old
salt, with grizzled beard and shaggy eyebrows, and a merry twinkle in
what he called his "starboard" eye.
I think Tommy was one of the few about my father's house who were really
fond of me, but perhaps that was mainly because he loathed aunt Bridget.
He used to call her the Big Woman, meaning that she was the master and
mistress of everything and everybody about the place. When he was told
of any special piece of her tyranny to servant or farmhand he used to
say: "Aw, well, she'll die for all"; and when he heard how she had
separated me from my mother, who had nothing else to love or live for,
he spat sideways out of his mouth and said:
"Our Big Woman is a wicked devil, I'm thinking, and I wouldn't trust
[shouldn't wonder] but she'll burn in hell."
What definite idea I attached to this denunciation I do not now recall,
but I remember that it impressed me deeply, and that many a night
afterwards, during the miserable half-hours before I fell asleep with my
head under the clothes in the cold bedroom over the hall to which (
Notka biograficzna
Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine CH, KBE (May 14, 1853August 31, 1931), usually known as Hall Caine, was a British author. He is best known as a novelist and playwright of the late Victorian and the Edwardian eras. In his time he was exceedingly popular and at the peak of his success his novels outsold those of his contemporaries. Many of his novels were also made into films. His novels were primarily romantic in nature, involving the love triangle, but they did also address some of the more serious political and social issues of the day.
Harold MacGrath (September 4, 1871 - October 30, 1932) was a bestselling American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. Also known occasionally as Harold McGrath, he was born in Syracuse, New York. As a young man, he worked as a reporter and columnist on the Syracuse Herald newspaper until the late 1890s when he published his first novel, a romance titled Arms and the Woman. According to the New York Times, his next book, The Puppet Crown, was the No.7 bestselling book in the United States for all of 1901. From that point on, MacGrath never looked back, writing novels for the mass market about love, adventure, mystery, spies, and the like at an average rate of more than one a year. He would have three more of his books that were among the top ten bestselling books of the year. At the same time, he penned a number of short stories for major American magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, and Red Book magazine. Several of MacGraths novels were seriali
Mabel Collins (9 September 1851 - 31 March 1927) was a theosophist and author of over 46 books. She was born in St Peter Port, Guernsey.