Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Quest of the Golden Girl, a Romance by Richard Le Gallienne
page 30 of 215 (13%)
My heart flooded over with tender pity for these poor sweet
women--though perhaps chiefly for my own sad lot in not
encountering them,--and I conceived a great comprehensive
love-poem to be entitled "The Girls that never can be Mine."
Perhaps before the end of our tramp together, I shall have a few
verses of it to submit to the elegant taste of the reader, but at
present I have not advanced beyond the title.



CHAPTER XI


AN OLD MAN OF THE HILLS, AND THE SCHOOLMASTER'S STORY

While occupying myself with these no doubt wanton reflections on
the unfair division of opportunities in human life, I was
leisurely crossing the common, and presently I came up with a
pedestrian who, though I had little suspected it as I caught
sight of him ahead, was destined by a kind providence to make
more entertaining talk for me in half an hour than most people
provide in a lifetime.

He was an oldish man, turned sixty, one would say, and belonging,
to judge from his dress and general appearance, to what one might
call the upper labouring class. He wore a decent square felt
hat, a shabby respectable overcoat, a workman's knitted
waistcoat, and workman's corduroys, and he carried an umbrella.
His upper part might have belonged to a small well-to-do
tradesman, while his lower bore marks of recent bricklaying.
DigitalOcean Referral Badge