A Suburban Pastoral And Other Tales

Excerpt from A Suburban Pastoral: And Other Tales In their walks about Southwick it was often agreed between Sproat and Clitheroe that the one or the other of them ought to have an uncle living somewhere in the environs. But each insisted that the duty of providing him lay with the other: Clitheroe on the ground that he had come to town several months the later and was therefore a comparative stranger; Sproat because, as he maintained, Clitheroe carried about him nepotic suggestions. "You look like a man with lots of uncles," said Sproat, "and I don't." It must be acknowledged that the credit of inventing this avuncular fable belonged to Sproat. It happened of a windy March twilight, when Clitheroe looked at his watch and said: "Quarter of six. Come, we must be getting back to the boarding house." "Now," answered Sproat, who was balancing dreamily on the top rail of a fence, "if you only had an uncle somewhere out this way, with a well-stocked sideboard and a lot of pretty daughters! Then we could fetch up at his house and take dinner, and spend the evening around the fire. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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In his speech at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy in 1894, among many other good things, Mr. Andrew Lang said: "The thrifty plan of giving us sermons, politics, fiction, all in one stodgy sandwich, produces no permanent literature, produces but temporary 'tracts for the times.' Fortunately we have among us many novelists-young ones, luckily-who are true to the primitive and eternal, the Fijian canons of fiction. We have Oriental romance from the author of 'Plain Tales from the Hills.' We have the humor and tenderness-certainly not Fijian, I admit-which produces that masterpiece 'A Window in Thrums'; we have the adventurous fancy that gives us 'A Gentleman of France, ' 'The Master of Ballantrae, ' 'Micah Clarke, ' 'The Raiders, ' 'The Prisoner of Zenda.'" The last of these books was by Anthony Hope Hawkins, whom Mr. Lang thus classed among potential immortals. This romance has made him within the last three months fairly famous. Walter Besant, too, has stamped it with his high approval, and the English and American press have been unusually unanimous in their praise.