Passages from the English Notebooks, Volume 1. by Nathaniel Hawthorne
page 78 of 362 (21%)
page 78 of 362 (21%)
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she having been partially conscious throughout, and having felt the wind
blowing on her, and lifting the shroud from her feet,--for I presume she was to be buried in Oriental style, without a coffin. Long after, in London, when she was speaking of this dream, her husband told her the facts, and she fainted away. Whenever it is now mentioned, her face turns white. Mr. ------, her son, was born on shipboard, on the coast of Spain, and claims four nationalities,--those of Spain, England, Ireland, and the United States; his father being Irish, his mother a native of England, himself a naturalized citizen of the United States, and his father having registered his birth and baptism in a Catholic church of Gibraltar, which gives him Spanish privileges. He has hereditary claims to a Spanish countship. His infancy was spent in Barbary, and his lips first lisped in Arabic. There has been an unsettled and wandering character in his whole life. The grandfather of Madam ------, who was a British officer, once horsewhipped Paul Jones,--Jones being a poltroon. How singular it is that the personal courage of famous warriors should be so often called in question! May 20th.--I went yesterday to a hospital to take the oath of a mate to a protest. He had met with a severe accident by a fall on shipboard. The hospital is a large edifice of red freestone, with wide, airy passages, resounding with footsteps passing through them. A porter was waiting in the vestibule. Mr. Wilding and myself were shown to the parlor, in the first instance,--a neat, plainly furnished room, with newspapers and pamphlets lying on the table and sofas. Soon the surgeon of the house came,--a brisk, alacritous, civil, cheerful young man, by whom we were shown to the apartment where the mate was lying. As we went through the |
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