GEORGE MACDONALD

WHO HE WAS AND WHERE HE WAS. WHEN he had been at school for about three weeks, the boys called him Six-fingered Jack; but his real name was Willie, for his father and mother gave it him-not William, but Willie, after a brother of his father, who died young, and had always been called Willie. His name in full was Willie Macmichael. It was general...

The Romance of Photogen and Nycteris I. Watho THERE was once a witch who desired to know everything. But the wiser a witch is, the harder she knocks her head against the wall when she comes to it. Her name was Watho, and she had a wolf in her mind. She cared for nothing in itself - only for knowing it. She was not naturally cruel, but the wolf h...

There was a boy who used to sit in the twilight and listen to his great-aunts stories. She told him that if he could reach the place where the end of the rainbow stands he would find there a golden key. ""And what is the key for?"" the boy would ask. ""What is it the key of? What will it open?"" ""That nobody knows,"" his aunt would reply. ""He ...

WHO HE WAS AND WHERE HE WAS. Mr Macmichael was a country doctor, living in a small village in a thinly-peopled country; the first result of which was that he had very hard work, for he had often to ride many miles to see a patient, and that not unfrequently in the middle of the night; and the second that, for this hard work, he had very little p...

I do not intend to carry my story one month beyond the hour when I saw that my boyhood was gone and my youth arrived; a period determined to some by the first tail-coat, to me by a different sign. My reason for wishing to tell this first portion of my history is, that when I look back upon it, it seems to me not only so pleasant, but so full of ...

Stephen Archer was a stationer, bookseller, and newsmonger in one of the suburbs of London. The newspapers hung in a sort of rack at his door, as if for the convenience of the public to help themselves in passing. On his counter lay penny weeklies and books coming out in parts, amongst which the Family Herald was in force, and the London Journal...

How I Came to know Clare Skymer. It was a day when everything around seemed almost perfect: everything does, now and then, come nearly right for a moment or two, preparatory to coming all right for good at the last. It was the third week in June. The great furnace was glowing and shining in full force, driving the ship of our life at her best sp...

To My Father. I. Take of the first fruits, Father, of thy care, Wrapped in the fresh leaves of my gratitude

THE STABLE YARD It was one of those exquisite days that come in every winter, in which it seems no longer the dead body, but the lovely ghost of summer. Such a day bears to its sister of the happier time something of the relation the marble statue bears to the living form; the sense it awakes of beauty is more abstract, more ethereal; it lifts t...

MY DEAR SIR, KENSINGTON, May, 1864. Allow me, with the honour due to my father's friend, to inscribe this little volume with your name. The name of one friend is better than those of all the Muses. And permit me to say a few words about the story.-It is a Romance. I am well aware that, with many readers, this epithet will be enough to ensure con...