At the Back of Beyond (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A LINGERING GUEST When Mrs. Van Herder died at her house on Marksville Avenue, New York, leaving a legacy of $100 to each servant who had been over three years in her employment, the Irish girl Rose Byrne could claim the bequest, having scrubbed the Van Herder floors for five long years; and ten minutes after she heard of her good fortune, she had firmly made up her mind what she would do with it: she would go home straightway. Home for Rose lay across the Atlantic, on the storm-beaten shore of the County Mayo, and a dozen twelve months had passed since she had seen it except in dreams. If the legacy had come sooner, she might, while waiting for the liner to sail, have spent much of her time and of her hundred dollars in the purchase of presents and clothes, wherewithal to glorify her rejoining of her family circle. But by now so many a precious stone had dropped out of that ring of hers, that she knew she would find only a few safe in its setting. An old grandmother and a married sister were all the near relations left to welcome her back. This, and the prudencelearned from experience, made her preparations sober and thrifty. " I'm thinkin'," she said to herself, " that I'll do better to not be buyin' till I get home, for then I'll have a notion of what's wantin'. Buyin' things for them now is the same as puttin' the right keys into the wrong keyholes; there's naught amiss wid the keys themselves, only they won't open the locks. Them stores do be oncommon iligant, but sure I'll wait." Rose, in fact, was thinking that the things most wanted at home would probably be quite common and not elegant at all; and when she reached Kilgowran, she very soon saw that her conjectures were even righter than she had expected them to be. Her grandmother's white- walled, brown-thatched cabi...