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Henry M. Brooks - "The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New England Sunday"

Annie Fellows Johnston - "The Legend of the Bleeding heart"

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Michael Wolff has written a supercilious yet star-struck portrait of Rupert Murdoch, the planet’s most notorious press baron.

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In this novel of the 17th century, Morrison performs her deepest excavation yet into America’s history and exhumes our twin original sins: the enslavement of Africans and the near extermination of Native Americans.

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Malcolm Gladwell says success depends not only on brains and drive, but on where we come from — and what we do about it.

Various - Famous Stories Every Child Should Know

V >> Various >> Famous Stories Every Child Should Know




Here is the letter:

LEVANT, 2 deg. 2' S. at 131 deg. W.

DEAR FRED:

I try to find heart and life to tell you that it is all over
with dear old Nolan. I have been with him on this voyage
more than I ever was, and I can understand wholly now the
way in which you used to speak of the dear old fellow. I
could see that he was not strong, but I had no idea the end
was so near. The doctor has been watching him very
carefully, and yesterday morning came to me and told me that
Nolan was not so well, and had not left his state-room--a
thing I never remember before. He had let the doctor come
and see him as he lay there--the first time the doctor had
been in the state-room--and he said he should like to see
me. Oh, dear! do you remember the mysteries we boys used to
invent about his room in the old _Intrepid_ days? Well, I
went in, and there, to be sure, the poor fellow lay in his
berth, smiling pleasantly as he gave me his hand, but
looking very frail. I could not help a glance round, which
showed me what a little shrine he had made of the box he was
lying in. The Stars and Stripes were triced up above and
around a picture of Washington, and he had painted a
majestic eagle, with lightnings blazing from his beak and
his foot just clasping the whole globe, which his wings
overshadowed. The dear old boy saw my glance, and said, with
a sad smile, "Here, you see, I have a country!" And then he
pointed to the foot of his bed, where I had not seen before
a great map of the United States, as he had drawn it from
memory, and which he had there to look upon as he lay.
Quaint, queer old names were on it, in large letters:
"Indiana Territory," "Mississippi Territory," and "Louisiana
Territory." I suppose our fathers learned such things: but
the old fellow had patched in Texas, too; he had carried his
western boundary all the way to the Pacific, but on that
shore he had defined nothing.

"O Captain," he said, "I know I am dying. I cannot get home.
Surely you will tell me something now?--Stop! stop! Do not
speak till I say what I am sure you know, that there is not
in this ship, that there is not in America--God bless
her!--a more loyal man than I. There cannot be a man who
loves the old flag as I do, or prays for it as I do, or
hopes for it as I do. There are thirty-four stars in it now,
Danforth. I thank God for that, though I do not know what
their names are. There has never been one taken away: I
thank God for that. I know by that that there has never been
any successful Burr, O Danforth, Danforth," he sighed out,
"how like a wretched night's dream a boy's idea of personal
fame or of separate sovereignty seems; when one looks back
on it after such a life as mine! But tell me--tell me
something--tell me everything, Danforth, before I die!"

Ingham, I swear to you that I felt like a monster that I had
not told him everything before. Danger or no danger,
delicacy or no delicacy, who was I, that I should have been
acting the tyrant all this time over this dear, sainted old
man, who had years ago expiated, in his whole manhood's
life, the madness of a boy's treason? "Mr. Nolan," said I,
"I will tell you everything you ask about. Only, where shall
I begin?"

Oh, the blessed smile that crept over his white face! and he
pressed my hand and said, "God bless you! Tell me their
names," he said, and he pointed to the stars on the flag.
"The last I know is Ohio. My father lived in Kentucky. But I
have guessed Michigan and Indiana and Mississippi--that was
where Fort Adams is--they make twenty. But where are your
other fourteen? You have not cut up any of the old ones, I
hope?"

Well, that was not a bad text, and I told him the names in
as good order as I could, and he bade me take down his
beautiful map and draw them in as I best could with my
pencil. He was wild with delight about Texas, told me how
his cousin died there; he had marked a gold cross near where
he supposed his grave was; and he had guessed at Texas. Then
he was delighted as he saw California and Oregon,--that, he
said, he had suspected partly, because he had never been
permitted to land on that shore, though the ships were there
so much. "And the men," said he, laughing, "brought off a
good deal beside furs." Then he went back--heavens, how
far!--to ask about the _Chesapeake_, and what was done to
Barron for surrendering her to the _Leopard_, and whether
Burr ever tried again--and he ground his teeth with the only
passion he showed. But in a moment that was over, and he
said, "God forgive me, for I am sure I forgive him." Then he
asked about the old war--told me the true story of his
serving the gun the day we took the _Java_--asked about dear
old David Porter, as he called him. Then he settled down
more quietly, and very happily, to hear me tell in an hour
the history of fifty years.

How I wished it had been somebody who knew something! But I
did as well as I could. I told him of the English war. I
told him about Fulton and the steamboat beginning. I told
him about old Scott, and Jackson; told him all I could think
of about the Mississippi, and New Orleans, and Texas, and
his own old Kentucky. And do you think, he asked who was in
command of the "Legion of the West." I told him it was a
very gallant officer named Grant, and that, by our last
news, he was about to establish his headquarters at
Vicksburg. Then, "Where was Vicksburg?" I worked that out on
the map; it was about a hundred miles, more or less, above
his old Fort Adams and I thought Fort Adams must be a ruin
now. "It must be at old Vick's plantation, at Walnut Hills,"
said he: "well, that is a change!"

I tell you, Ingham, it was a hard thing to condense the
history of half a century into that talk with a sick man.
And I do not now know what I told him--of emigration, and
the means of it--of steamboats, and railroads, and
telegraphs--of inventions, and books, and literature--of the
colleges, and West Point, and the Naval School--but with the
queerest interruptions that ever you heard. You see it was
Robinson Crusoe asking all the accumulated questions of
fifty-six years!

I remember he asked, all of a sudden, who was President now;
and when I told him, he asked if Old Abe was General
Benjamin Lincoln's son. He said he met old General Lincoln,
when he was quite a boy himself, at some Indian treaty. I
said no, that Old Abe was a Kentuckian like himself, but I
could not tell him of what family; he had worked up from the
ranks. "Good for him!" cried Nolan; "I am glad of that. As I
have brooded and wondered, I have thought our danger was in
keeping up those regular successions in the first families."
Then I got talking about my visit to Washington. I told him
of meeting the Oregon Congressman, Harding; I told him about
the Smithsonian, and the Exploring Expedition; I told him
about the Capitol and the statues for the pediment, and
Crawford's Liberty, and Greenough's Washington: Ingham, I
told him everything I could think of that would show the
grandeur of his country and its prosperity; but I could not
make up my mouth to tell him a word about this infernal
rebellion!

And he drank it in and enjoyed it as I cannot tell you. He
grew more and more silent, yet I never thought he was tired
or faint. I gave him a glass of water, but he just wet his
lips, and told me not to go away. Then he asked me to bring
the Presbyterian "Book of Public Prayer" which lay there,
and said, with a smile, that it would open at the right
place--and so it did. There was his double red mark down the
page; and I knelt down and read, and he repeated with me,
"For ourselves and our country, O gracious God, we thank
Thee, that, notwithstanding our manifold transgressions of
Thy holy laws, Thou hast continued to us Thy marvellous
kindness," and so to the end of that thanksgiving. Then he
turned to the end of the same book, and I read the words
more familiar to me: "Most heartily we beseech Thee with Thy
favour to behold and bless Thy servant, the President of the
United States, and all others in authority"--and the rest of
the Episcopal collect. "Danforth," said he "I have repeated
these prayers night and morning, it is now fifty-five
years." And then he said he would go to sleep. He bent me
down over him and kissed me; and he said, "Look in my Bible,
Captain, when I am gone." And I went away.

But I had no thought it was the end. I thought he was tired
and would sleep. I knew he was happy, and I wanted him to be
alone.

But in an hour, when the doctor went in gently, he found
Nolan had breathed his life away with a smile. He had
something pressed close to his lips. It was his father's
badge of the Order of the Cincinnati.

We looked in his Bible, and there was a slip of paper at the
place where he had marked the text--

"They desire a country, even a heavenly: wherefore God is
not ashamed to be called their God: for He hath prepared for
them a city."

On this slip of paper he had written:

"Bury me in the sea; it has been my home, and I love it. But
will not someone set up a stone for my memory at Fort Adams
or at Orleans, that my disgrace may not be more than I
ought to bear? Say on it:

"_In Memory of_

"PHILIP NOLAN,
"_Lieutenant in the Army of the United States._

"He loved his country as no other man has
loved her; but no man deserved less at
her hands."




IX

THE NUeRNBERG STOVE


August lived in a little town called Hall. Hall is a favourite name
for several towns in Austria and in Germany; but this one especial
little Hall, in the Upper Innthal, is one of the most charming
Old-World places that I know, and August for his part did not know any
other. It has the green meadows and the great mountains all about it,
and the gray-green glacier-fed water rushes by it. It has paved
streets and enchanting little shops that have all latticed panes and
iron gratings to them; it has a very grand old Gothic church, that has
the noblest blendings of light and shadow, and marble tombs of dead
knights, and a look of infinite strength and repose as a church should
have. Then there is the Muntze Tower, black and white, rising out of
greenery and looking down on a long wooden bridge and the broad rapid
river; and there is an old schloss which has been made into a
guard-house, with battlements and frescoes and heraldic devices in
gold and colours, and a man-at-arms carved in stone standing life-size
in his niche and bearing his date 1530. A little farther on, but close
at hand, is a cloister with beautiful marble columns and tombs, and a
colossal wood-carved Calvary, and beside that a small and very rich
chapel: indeed, so full is the little town of the undisturbed past,
that to walk in it is like opening a missal of the Middle Ages, all
emblazoned and illuminated with saints and warriors, and it is so
clean, and so still, and so noble, by reason of its monuments and its
historic colour, that I marvel much no one has ever cared to sing its
praises. The old pious heroic life of an age at once more restful and
more brave than ours still leaves its spirit there, and then there is
the girdle of the mountains all around, and that alone means strength,
peace, majesty.

In this little town a few years ago August Strehla lived with his
people in the stone-paved irregular square where the grand church
stands.

He was a small boy of nine years at that time--a chubby-faced little
man with rosy cheeks, big hazel eyes, and clusters of curls the brown
of ripe nuts. His mother was dead, his father was poor, and there were
many mouths at home to feed. In this country the winters are long and
very cold, the whole land lies wrapped in snow for many months, and
this night that he was trotting home, with a jug of beer in his numb
red hands, was terribly cold and dreary. The good burghers of Hall had
shut their double shutters, and the few lamps there were flickered
dully behind their quaint, old-fashioned iron casings. The mountains
indeed were beautiful, all snow-white under the stars that are so big
in frost. Hardly anyone was astir; a few good souls wending home from
vespers, a tired post-boy who blew a shrill blast from his tasseled
horn as he pulled up his sledge before a hostelry, and little August
hugging his jug of beer to his ragged sheepskin coat, were all who
were abroad, for the snow fell heavily and the good folks of Hall go
early to their beds. He could not run, or he would have spilled the
beer; he was half frozen and a little frightened, but he kept up his
courage by saying over and over again to himself, "I shall soon be at
home with dear Hirschvogel."

He went on through the streets, past the stone man-at-arms of the
guard-house, and so into the place where the great church was, and
where near it stood his father Karl Strehla's house, with a sculptured
Bethlehem over the doorway, and the Pilgrimage of the Three Kings
painted on its wall. He had been sent on a long errand outside the
gates in the afternoon, over the frozen fields and broad white snow,
and had been belated, and had thought he had heard the wolves behind
him at every step, and had reached the town in a great state of
terror, thankful with all his little panting heart to see the oil-lamp
burning under the first house-shrine. But he had not forgotten to call
for the beer, and he carried it carefully now, though his hands were
so numb that he was afraid they would let the jug down every moment.

The snow outlined with white every gable and cornice of the beautiful
old wooden houses; the moonlight shone on the gilded signs, the lambs,
the grapes, the eagles, and all the quaint devices that hung before
the doors; covered lamps burned before the Nativities and Crucifixions
painted on the walls or let into the wood-work; here and there, where
a shutter had not been closed, a ruddy fire-light lit up a homely
interior, with the noisy band of children clustering round the
house-mother and a big brown loaf, or some gossips spinning and
listening to the cobbler's or the barber's story of a neighbour, while
the oil-wicks glimmered, and the hearth-logs blazed, and the chestnuts
sputtered in their iron roasting-pot. Little August saw all these
things as he saw everything with his two big bright eyes that had such
curious lights and shadows in them; but he went heedfully on his way
for the sake of the beer which a single slip of the foot would make
him spill. At his knock and call the solid oak door, four centuries
old if one, flew open, and the boy darted in with his beer, and
shouted, with all the force of mirthful lungs, "Oh, dear Hirschvogel,
but for the thought of you I should have died!"

It was a large barren room into which he rushed with so much pleasure,
and the bricks were bare and uneven. It had a walnut-wood press,
handsome and very old, a broad deal table, and several wooden stools
for all its furniture; but at the top of the chamber, sending out
warmth and colour together as the lamp sheds its rays upon it, was a
tower of porcelain, burnished with all the hues of a king's peacock
and a queen's jewels, and surmounted with armed figures, and shields,
and flowers of heraldry, and a great golden crown upon the highest
summit of all.

It was a stove of 1532, and on it were the letters H.R.H., for it was
in every portion the handwork of the great potter of Nuernberg,
Augustin Hirschvogel, who put his mark thus, as all the world knows.

The stove no doubt had stood in palaces and been made for princes, had
warmed the crimson stockings of cardinals and the gold-broidered shoes
of archduchesses, had glowed in presence-chambers and lent its carbon
to help kindle sharp brains in anxious councils of state; no one knew
what it had been or done or been fashioned for; but it was a right
royal thing. Yet perhaps it had never been more useful than it was now
in this poor desolate room, sending down heat and comfort into the
troop of children tumbled together on a wolfskin at its feet, who
received frozen August among them with loud shouts of joy.

"O, dear Hirschvogel, I am so cold, so cold!" said August, kissing its
gilded lion's claws. "Is father not in, Dorothea?"

"No, dear. He is late."

Dorothea was a girl of seventeen, dark-haired and serious, and with a
sweet, sad face, for she had had many cares laid on her shoulders,
even whilst still a mere baby. She was the eldest of the Strehla
family; and there were ten of them in all. Next to her there came Jan
and Karl and Otho, big lads, gaining a little for their own living;
and then came August, who went up in the summer to the high Alps with
the farmers' cattle, but in winter could do nothing to fill his own
little platter and pot; and then all the little ones, who could only
open their mouths to be fed like young birds--Albrecht and Hilda, and
Waldo and Christof, and last of all little three-year-old Ermengilda,
with eyes like forget-me-nots, whose birth had cost them the life of
their mother.

They were of that mixed race, half Austrian, half Italian, so common
in the Tyrol; some of the children were white and golden as lilies,
others were brown and brilliant as fresh-fallen chestnuts. The father
was a good man, but weak and weary with so many to find for and so
little to do it with. He worked at the salt-furnaces, and by that
gained a few florins; people said he would have worked better and kept
his family more easily if he had not loved his pipe and a draught of
ale too well; but this had only been said of him after his wife's
death, when trouble and perplexity had begun to dull a brain never too
vigorous, and to enfeeble further a character already too yielding. As
it was, the wolf often bayed at the door of the Strehla household,
without a wolf from the mountains coming down. Dorothea was one of
those maidens who almost work miracles, so far can their industry and
care and intelligence make a home sweet and wholesome and a single
loaf seem to swell into twenty. The children were always clean and
happy, and the table was seldom without its big pot of soup once a
day. Still, very poor they were, and Dorothea's heart ached with
shame, for she knew that their father's debts were many for flour and
meat and clothing. Or fuel to feed the big stove they had always
enough without cost, for their mother's father was alive, and sold
wood and fir cones and coke, and never grudged them to his
grandchildren, though he grumbled at Strehla's improvidence and
hapless, dreamy ways.

"Father says we are never to wait for him: we will have supper, now
you have come home, dear," said Dorothea, who, however she might fret
her soul in secret as she knitted their hose and mended their shirts,
never let her anxieties cast a gloom on the children; only to August
she did speak a little sometimes, because he was so thoughtful and so
tender of her always, and knew as well as she did that there were
troubles about money--though these troubles were vague to them both,
and the debtors were patient and kindly, being neighbours all in the
old twisting streets between the guard-house and the river.

Supper was a huge bowl of soup, with big slices of brown bread
swimming in it and some onions bobbing up and down: the bowl was soon
emptied by ten wooden spoons, and then the three eldest boys slipped
off to bed, being tired with their rough bodily labour in the snow all
day, and Dorothea drew her spinning-wheel by the stove and set it
whirring, and the little ones got August down upon the old worn
wolfskin and clamoured to him for a picture or a story. For August was
the artist of the family.

He had a piece of planed deal that his father had given him, and some
sticks of charcoal, and he would draw a hundred things he had seen in
the day, sweeping each out with his elbow when the children had seen
enough of it and sketching another in its stead--faces and dogs'
heads, and men in sledges, and old women in their furs, and
pine-trees, and cocks and hens, and all sorts of animals, and now and
then--very reverently--a Madonna and Child. It was all very rough, for
there was no one to teach him anything But it was all life-like, and
kept the whole troop of children shrieking with laughter, or watching
breathless, with wide open, wondering, awed eyes.

They were all so happy: what did they care for the snow outside? Their
little bodies were warm, and their hearts merry; even Dorothea,
troubled about the bread for the morrow, laughed as she spun; and
August, with all his soul in his work, and little rosy Ermengilda's
cheek on his shoulder, glowing after his frozen afternoon, cried out
loud, smiling, as he looked up at the stove that was shedding its head
down on them all:

"Oh, dear Hirschvogel! you are almost as great and good as the sun!
No; you are greater and better, I think, because he goes away nobody
knows where all these long, dark, cold hours, and does not care how
people die for want of him; but you--you are always ready: just a
little bit of wood to feed you, and you will make a summer for us all
the winter through!"

The grand old stove seemed to smile through all its iridescent surface
at the praises of the child. No doubt the stove, though it had known
three centuries and more, had known but very little gratitude.

It was one of those magnificent stoves in enamelled faience which so
excited the jealousy of the other potters of Nuernberg that in a body
they demanded of the magistracy that Augustin Hirschvogel should be
forbidden to make any more of them--the magistracy, happily, proving
of a broader mind, and having no sympathy with the wish of the
artisans to cripple their greater fellow.

It was of great height and breadth, with all the majolica lustre which
Hirschvogel learned to give to his enamels when he was making love to
the young Venetian girl whom he afterwards married. There was the
statue of a king at each corner, modelled with as much force and
splendour as his friend Albrecht Duerer could have given unto them on
copperplate or canvas. The body of the stove itself was divided into
panels, which had the Ages of Man painted on them in polychrome; the
borders of the panels had roses and holly and laurel and other
foliage, and German mottoes in black letter of odd Old-World
moralising, such as the old Teutons, and the Dutch after them, love to
have on their chimney-places and their drinking cups, their dishes and
flagons. The whole was burnished with gilding in many parts, and was
radiant everywhere with that brilliant colouring of which the
Hirschvogel family, painters on glass and great in chemistry as they
were, were all masters.

The stove was a very grand thing, as I say: possibly Hirschvogel had
made it for some mighty lord of the Tyrol at that time when he was an
imperial guest at Innspruck and fashioned so many things for the
Schloss Amras and beautiful Philippine Welser, the Burgher's daughter,
who gained an Archduke's heart by her beauty and the right to wear his
honors by her wit. Nothing was known of the stove at this latter day
in Hall. The grandfather Strehla, who had been a master-mason, had dug
it up out of some ruins where he was building, and, finding it without
a flaw, had taken it home, and only thought it worth finding because
it was such a good one to burn. That was now sixty years past, and
ever since then the stove had stood in the big desolate empty room,
warming three generations of the Strehla family, and having seen
nothing prettier perhaps in all its many years than the children
tumbled now in a cluster like gathered flowers at its feet. For the
Strehla children, born to nothing else, were all born to beauty; white
or brown, they were equally lovely to look upon, and when they went
into the church to mass, with their curling locks and their clasped
hands, they stood under the grim statues like cherubs flown down off
some fresco.

"Tell us a story, August," they cried, in chorus, when they had seen
charcoal pictures till they were tired; and August did as he did every
night, pretty nearly, looked up at the stove and told them what he
imagined of the many adventures and joys and sorrows of the human
being who figured on the panels from his cradle to his grave.

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