Temple Bar (Volume 116) (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. 1899. Excerpt: ... comparable to the solid liking which often binds together a small household, yet to one departing bare and decried it seems better than nothing. Clarendon looks on in rueful silence, as she begins at once, with unrepining common-sense, to cut her coat according to her cloth. "You will not even take your maid with you?" Mrs. Etheredge smiles. "That she may corrupt my ' general's' mind with high tales of the steward's room?--hardly " The difficulty and labour of a demenagement is in proportion to the amount to be demenaged; and as Mrs. Etheredge has naught but herself, the girlish nothings she brought with her eight years ago, and such pretty trifles as she has bought during that period with her own pin-money, to remove, her exodus is accomplished without difficulty ere October is more than halfway through his crimson and umber course. "Naked go I out," repeats she once more, as what she knows to be the last glimpse of the palace where she has reigned meets her dethroned eyes. And that chapter of her life is closed. - "Bichmond is only a village, but it is one of the prettiest villages near London." This 1820 resume of the royal borough's charms has, alas now only an historical value. But, as in the case of a handsome woman, whose face partially survives the shipwreck of her figure, so, though all other beauties of the little town have vanished under the sordid advance of brick and mortar, the view from the Terrace still smiles as in the last-century days when the neighbouring ladies used to have their coffee-cups and card-tables set out on summer evenings in the rustic privacy of its elm-tree shade. Upon that view the tiny furnished house taken for Mrs. Etheredge by her husband's late secretary--his one consolation is that she is still completely...