To the Minute; Two Tales of Life's Perplexities (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1916. Excerpt: ... TO THE MINUTE CHAPTER I I SET THE CLOCK THERE are some things so out of the pale of common experience--intuitions so compelling, coincidences so startling, that the mind, accustomed as it is to the usual, refuses to accept them as real, and for one unreasoning instant, if no more, feels the oppression of forces hitherto unknown and possibly hitherto denied. Of such a coincidence I write, one trifling in itself, but perhaps for that very reason the more disturbing. I had come into town on the four o'clock train. Though a native of the village, I had no interest in it and so made not a single stop between the station and the old homestead in which I had been born. I had been a rebellious boy and had run away from home before I was fifteen. By home, I mean the house where my grandfather held full sway. Orphaned in infancy, I had been brought up under the harsh tyranny of a man who had but one thought--to live on as little as possible and make everyone about him do the same. Had I been of a more patient disposition, I should probably have inherited such property as he had to leave, but being the boy I was, and a runaway to boot, I awoke one fine day to find the little pittance due me willed to my cousin Judith, an orphan like myself and like myself much in need (or so I had understood) of any and all good fortune which might come her way. It was on her behalf I was making this return visit to Granville. Though grandfather had been dead two months, --having committed suicide one fine evening in his chagrin, as some said, at finding he could no longer support himself on ten cents a day, --she had never made the first move to profit by his bequest, refusing even to change her very humble abode for the more commodious one to which she had fallen heir. Why she had a...