Therese Tyler
Published: 2013-09
Total Pages: 112
Get eBook
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 edition. Excerpt: ... THE DUSTY ROAD It was a bleak afternoon in January. The sun had been shining brightly all day; but its unsparing light only made Philadelphia look colder. The northwest wind whistled down from the dry Canadian ice-fields, and its breath was like the point of a knife. Travelling at a rate of thirty-five miles an hour, it rushed to the frozen Schuylkill; there it paused a moment and gathered fuller force in the tunnel of the river; then, with strength renewed after its long journey, it whirled up clouds of grime from the railroads and factories along the water's edge and drove them through every available crack of door or window-frame in the houses on the east side, till to the people inside, shivering over their fires, the very stone walls hardly seemed to afford protection. The Andersons' house stood near the Schuylkill, and only a few hundred yards from the terminus of a railroad. The wind seemed to make it the object of special attentions; the loose window-frames rattled ominously, the crazy furnace-flue refused to draw; through tiny cracks in the neglected walls the locomotive dust came filtering in, and covered everything with a coat of depressing grey. A sudden gust tore the rickety kitchen door off its hinges; and Mrs. Anderson, standing over the carpenter who was repairing it so that she could make sure he was working all the time she paid him for and not letting her in for unnecessary extravagance, calculated ruefully that now she would not be able to afford the new dress she had planned to wear to Mrs. Coxe's bridge party. It would have been a tight squeeze to manage it in any case, and now it would be hopeless. She must either go in her archaic black silk, or beg a second-hand garment from 7 someone, and trust to her own skill...