So Very Human Volume 1; A Tale of the Present Day (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. 1882 Excerpt: ...and remarks lavished upon him by these light-hearted and fair-haired demoiselles. An inquiry after his maternal parent was lost in air, and a theory advanced as to his good-nature fell for ever dead and unanswered, so far as he was concerned. Even an altered tone and style in their observations, so soon as he had passed them, entirely escaped him. The fact is, his thoughts were bent on the Old Bailey and vengeance; and Webb's Fields, with all its past traditions and present features, its beauties and blemishes, its pebbly gravel, which might have been triturated from the stony hearts of generations of defunct attorneys long since struck off the rolls of mortality and gone home to another, and, let us hope, so far as their bedevilments are concerned, a better world--Webb's Fields, with its benchers and wenchers, its clerks and its sparks, its fogeys and its bogeys, its knots of porters, if not its porters' knots, its pigeons, sparrows, nursery children, dining-halls, pump, and clock, was to him A simple square and nothing more. "Simple " with its gravel cemented with widows' tears; its pavements worn with the weary feet of baffled litigants, heavy with ruined hopes, but lighter for the loss of the gold which the rapacious talons of the legal harpies therein congregating had filched and torn away? "Simple " with the true stories that might be told of it peopling with ghastly shapes and curdling with their dim and dreary revelations the dull and misty air? "Simple " with fi. fa. and ca. sa. whispering in the gusty breezes that whirled the dust of dead men's bones, and yellow parchments, and unswept offices in your face, and echoing by night the shrill scream of oath from the slums that border the greater portion of two sides of th...