United States or Sint Maarten ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The stable yard was empty but for the Gordon setter dozing by the pump-trough. Across from the kitchens came the sound of the servants' voices chattering. Honoria had never made friends with the servants. She tilted her straw hat further over her eyes, and sauntered up the drive with her hands behind her; through the great gates and out upon the towans.

Often when I ought to have been busy at some task which my father had set to me, I was otherwise occupied throwing stones at the birds that settled on the walls and hedges; observing the bees on the kidney-bean flowers, piercing the base of each corolla to reach the honey; or, at a disused pump-trough containing stagnant water, watching the larvæ of the gnats as they came wriggling to the surface, putting out their tails to breathe, and then descending.

It took him some time to make his way out into the main road, but he did it at last, straightening his wet hair under the old cap. "It's so like a dog to die that way! I'll try, just once, how the world looks when I face it." He sat down outside of a blacksmith's forge, the only building in sight, on the pump-trough, and looked wearily about. His head fell now and then on his breast from weakness.

A half-dozen families live there, all of them small tenant farmers, save the ferryman a strapping, good-natured fellow, who appears to be the nabob of the community. Several hollow sycamore stumps house sows and their litters; but the only cow in the neighborhood is owned by a young man who, when I came up, was watering some refractory mules at a pump-trough.

When the childish Paul came out of the kitchen-door into that three-sided well of a brick-paved yard, and walked towards the printing-office at the far end of the narrow strip of garden, the first door beyond the pump-trough led him to a flight of stairs.