The Loom of Destiny (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. 1907. Excerpt: ... had to begin all over again and keep eating up until the men were all gone. Tigers, in fact, from the first day Teddie overheard Bud Persons expatiating on their ferocity, had a peculiar fascination for him; only sometimes they invaded his dreams by night and made him wake with feelings of unutterable terror. The child, as he grew older, also took a strange delight in watching people pass up and down the Place. He would suppose with himself that some Great Power had ordained that if a man did not pass before he had taken twenty breaths he would have to drop down dead. By the hour he would patiently sit and test this supposition, glorying over each victory and depressed by each defeat. Then he took passionately to papers, books, and pictures. He came across a number of old "Illustrated News," with pictures of the siege of Paris, and over these pictures of war and adventure he would pore by the hour. He had refused to go to the Night School, and could not read, but he made up stories for each illustration, and it was not until the pages were worn to shreds and tatters that he found it possible to forego this pleasure. Then he grew more adventurous in spirit and stole beyond the borders of the Place into unknown country, and even ventured so far away as Washington Square. It was here that life really opened up for him, for it was while following after an Italian organgrinder that he came upon the Avenue with its smooth pavement, its hurrying carriages, and its long vista of white-globed lamp-posts leading afar off into the mysteriously alluring Unknown. From the first, that Unknown Country enchanted the child. Just why it was he did not know, and never could tell, but day by day he stole away from the gloom and smells of Perkins Place and trudged off to the ...