The first of the three stories, ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,’ is the slightest and simplest. Mr. Barton, a curate, with an income of eighty pounds a-year, with an angelic but sickly wife and a host of hungry little children, allows himself to be duped by the title of a ‘Countess Czerlaski,’ the handsome English widow of a Polish dancing-master. The countess quarrels with her brot...
Paperback: 238 pages
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag (October 20, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 3849673839
ISBN-13: 978-3849673833
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
Amazon Rank: 3380355
Format: PDF ePub fb2 djvu ebook
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I needed to become accustomed to 19th Century writing in the beginning of the first novella but once I did, all three of them flowed. The stories were both heartbreaking and extremely "modern" classic tales of life in the English countryside; they ar...
idmain, and throws herself on the hospitality of the Bartons. Her visit lasts beyond all reasonable time, the unfortunate couple are eaten up by the expense of providing for her, Mr. Barton's character is aspersed on account of his kindness to her, and Mrs. Barton dies of working for her. Mr. Barton loses his curacy, goes into another neighbourhood, and, after many years, revisits his wife's grave in company with his children. The next story tells how the Rev. Maynard Gilfil loved Tina Sarti, an Italian orphan, who had been brought to England by Sir Christopher and Lady Cheverel, and lived under their shadow in a dignified country house. Tina, however, had fixed her affections on Sir Christopher's nephew, Captain Wybrow; and when the captain pays court to a beautiful, rich, and lofty heiress, the little Italian girl is so exasperated by his conduct, that she resolves to stab him at an appointed interview. She is happily spared this crime, as, on reaching the place of meeting, she finds the faithless captain dead from a sudden attack of heart-disease. After a decent interval she marries Mr. Gilfil, but dies in giving birth to her first child; and Mr. Gilfil is represented to us (as the writer professes to have known him) in age—a clergyman of the ‘old school, a good deal of a humourist, and to outward appearance as unromantic a person as need be, but keeping a chamber in his house sacred to the memory of his wife, and cherishing in his heart a lifelong sorrow for his early bereavement. The last “Scene of Clerical Life’ shows how Robert Dempster, a brutal and drunken attorney in a little country town, came by his vices to a bad end—how his wife Janet, who had taken to drinking in order to support his outrageous treatment of her, was reclaimed—and how Mr. Tryan, an “evangelical' curate, who had contributed to her reformation, succeeded in establishing an evening lecture at the parish church in the face of strong opposition, and died in consequence of his zealous pastoral labours.
