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

Doctor Grimshawe's Secret — a Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne
page 79 of 315 (25%)
between themselves and the rest of the town remained as scanty as ever.
Still, the grim, shaggy Doctor was seen setting doggedly forth, in all
seasons and all weathers, at a certain hour of the day, with the two
children, going for long walks on the sea-shore, or into the country,
miles away, and coming back, hours afterwards, with plants and herbs
that had perhaps virtue in them, or flowers that had certainly beauty;
even, in their season, the fragrant magnolias, leaving a trail of
fragrance after them, that grow only in spots, the seeds having been
apparently dropped by some happy accident when those proper to the
climate were distributed. Shells there were, also, in the baskets that
they carried, minerals, rare things, that a magic touch seemed to have
created out of the rude and common things that others find in a homely
and ordinary region. The boy was growing tall, and had got out of the
merely infantile age; agile he was, bright, but still with a remarkable
thoughtfulness, or gravity, or I know not what to call it; but it was a
shadow, no doubt, falling upon him from something sombre in his warp of
life, which the impressibility of his age and nature so far
acknowledged as to be a little pale and grave, without positive
unhappiness; and when a playful moment came, as they often did to these
two healthy children, it seemed all a mistake that you had ever thought
either of them too grave for their age. But little Elsie was still the
merrier. They were still children, although they quarrelled seldomer
than of yore, and kissed seldomer, and had ceased altogether to
complain of one another to the Doctor; perhaps the time when Nature saw
these bickerings to be necessary to the growth of some of their
faculties was nearly gone. When they did have a quarrel, the boy stood
upon his dignity, and visited Elsie with a whole day, sometimes, of
silent and stately displeasure, which she was accustomed to bear,
sometimes with an assumption of cold indifference, sometimes with
liveliness, mirth in double quantity, laughter almost as good as real,
DigitalOcean Referral Badge