The End of the World: A Love Story

culiarity, that it is all beautiful, from Pittsburgh to Cairo. Through the trees, on which the buds were just bursting, August looked out on the golden roadwa

and antique windows, and by an ingenious transformation the chimney, usually such a disfigurement to a log-house, was made to look like a round donjon keep. But it was strangely composite, and I am afraid Mr. Ruskin would have considered it somewhat confused; for while it looked like a rude castle to those who appr

jon chimney he pulled an alarm-cord. Immediately the head of Andrew Anderson was thrust out of a Gothic hole--you could not call it a window. His uncut hair, rather darker than auburn, fell down to his waist, and his shaggy red beard lay upon

uage was as archaic and perhaps as incongruous as his architecture. And then throwing out

story of the house, and the neighbors, who always had access to the lower rooms, regarded the upper part of the castle with mysterious awe. August was often plied with questions about it, but he always answered simply that he didn't think Mr. Anderson would like to have it

CA

pted Cervantes, Le Sage, Molière, Swift, Hood, and the then fresh Pickwick of Boz. To these he added the Georgia Scenes of Mr. Longstreet, insisting that they were quite equal to Don Quixote. I can only stop to mention one other department in his Academy. One case was devoted to the "Best Stories," and an admirable set they were! I wish that anything of mine were worthy to go into such company. His purity of feeling, almost ascetic, led him to reject Boccaccio, but he admitted Chaucer and some of Balzac's, and Smollett, Goldsmith, and De Foe, and Walter Scott's best, Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Bernardin St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia," and "Three Months under th

for wood meant time, and time meant communion with his books. All of his domestic arrangements were carried on

? Grand old Dan Chaucer! Or, shall we study magical philosophy with Roger Bacon--the Friar, the Admirable Doctor? or read good Sir Thomas More? What would Sir Thomas have said if he could have thought that he would

ight, with the tenderness of a woman, and with the air of

IUM AT TH

sit down on my sedilium, and let us hear how this uncivil and inconstant world treats you. It can not deal worse with you than it has with me. But I have had my revenge on it! I have been revenged! I have done as I pleased, and defied the world and all its hollow conventiona

s superficial. He and Andrew were bosom friends, and as he had often opened his heart to the master of the castle before, so now he had no di