Transcriber's Note
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variationsin hyphenation have been standardised but all other spelling andpunctuation remains unchanged.
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
Marsena
and Other Stories of the Wartime
Marsena
and Other Stories of the Wartime
BY
HAROLD FREDERIC
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1894
Copyright, 1894, by
Charles Scribner's Sons
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
To my Friend
EDMUND JUDSON MOFFAT
CONTENTS
| PAGE | |
| Marsena, | 1 |
| The War Widow, | 97 |
| The Eve of the Fourth, | 149 |
| My Aunt Susan, | 185 |
Marsena
MARSENA
I.
Marsena Pulford, what time the villageof Octavius knew him, was a slenderand tall man, apparently skirting upon thethirties, with sloping shoulders and a romanticaspect.
It was not alone his flowing black hair, andhis broad shirt-collars turned down after the ascertainedmanner of the British poets, whichstamped him in our humble minds as a livingbrother to "The Corsair," "The Last of theSuliotes," and other heroic personages engravedin the albums and keepsakes of the period.His face, with its darkling eyes and distinguishedfeatures, conveyed wherever it wentan impression of proudly silent melancholy.In those days—that is, just before the war—onecould not look so convincingly and uniformlysad as Marsena did without raising thegeneral presumption of having been crossed inlove. We had a respectful feeling, in his case,4that the lady ought to have been named Iñez,or at the very least Oriana.
Although he went to the PresbyterianChurch with entire regularity, was never seenin public save in a long-tailed black coat, andin the winter wore gloves instead of mittens,the local conscience had always, I think, sundryreservations about the moral character ofhis past. It would not have been reckonedagainst him, then, that he was obviously poor.We had not learned in those primitive times tomeasure people by dollar-mark standards. Underordinary conditions, too, the fact that hecame from New England—ha