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When the slow years of youth were gone and the hastening time of
manhood had come, the first thing that Henry DeGolyer, looking
back, could call from a mysterious darkness into the dawn of memory
was that he awoke one night in the cold arms of his dead mother.
That was in New Orleans. The boy's father had aspired to put the
face of man upon lasting canvas, but appetite invited whisky to mix
with his art, and so upon dead walls he painted the trade-mark
bull, and in front of museums he exaggerated the distortion of the
human freak. After the death of his mother, the boy was taken to
the Foundlings' Home, where he was scolded by women and
occasionally knocked down by a vagabond older than himself. Here he
remembered to have seen his father but once. It was a Sunday when
he came, years after the gentle creature, holding her child in her
arms, had died at midnight. The painter laughed and cried and
begged an old woman for a drink of brandy. He went away, and after
an age had seemed to pass the matron of the place took the boy on
her lap and told him that his father was dead, and then, putting
him down, she added: "Run along, now, and be good."
Lying along the Arkansas River, a few miles below Little Rock,
there is a broad strip of country that was once the domain of a
lordly race of men. They were not lordly in the sense of conquest;
no rusting armor hung upon their walls; no ancient blood-stains
blotched their stairways-there were no skeletons in dungeons deep
beneath the banquet hall. But in their own opinion they were just
as great as if they had possessed these gracious marks of medieval
distinction. Their country was comparatively new, but their fathers
came mostly from Virginia and their whisky came wholly from
Kentucky. Their cotton brought a high price in the Liverpool
market, their daughters were celebrated for beauty, and their sons
could hold their own with the poker players that traveled up and
down the Mississippi River. The slave trade had been abolished,
and, therefore, what remained of slavery was right; and in proof of
it the pulpit contributed its argument. Negro preachers with wives
scattered throughout the community urged their fellow bondsmen to
drop upon their knees and thank God for the privilege of following
a mule in a Christian land. The merciless work of driving the
negroes to their tasks was performed by men from the North. Many a
son of New England, who, with emotion, had listened to Phillips and
to Garrison, had afterward hired his harsh energies to the slave
owner.
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Bolanyo (Paperback)
The Perfect Library; Opie Read
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R409
Discovery Miles 4 090
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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This Is A New Release Of The Original 1898 Edition.
This Is A New Release Of The Original 1904 Edition.
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