A Portentous History - 1911 Author:Alfred Lord Tennyson General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1911 Original Publisher: W. Heinemann Subjects: History / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Milli... more »on-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER IV T7UPHEMIA gradually recovered from her ordeal, -J As the phrase goes "mother and child did well"; but Alexander found the time of convalescence pass slowly for, with her sister incapacitated from ordinary household duties, Maggie still remained beneath the roof -- Maggie, the enemy of quiet, the excitable, the freckled, the abhorred. In less equivocal circumstances he might have throbbed with paternal joy at sight of Euphemia pale, proud, with bairn at breast, but alas! the feeling that James was an intolerable nuisance still dominated the quarryman. It certainly was a child enormous. None born within gossip's memory had ever even approached it in size and weight. Chicken-brained Euphemia, far from sharing her lord's resentment against the phenomenon, nearly burst with, pride and received a regular procession of matrons at her bedside. She imparted strange tidings to her astonished audience. "There never was a bairn to eat sae hearty, I'm assurin' ye," and here would plunge into the mysteries of young Jim's diet, whither it is unseemly to follow. All this "clamjamfry" served but to prejudice Alexander still further against James, for he was a lover of quiet besides being a trifle selfish. Often he would exclaim with sense of deepest ill-usage: "Why couldna Phonic hae a bairn o' rational dimensions? Ony mon would be fashed to hae a conteenual pack o' weemen in the hoose -- and sic endless talk aboot naething mair important than a bairn." Or again, "I'm no partial to the extraordinair! There was'na sic a pother wi' the ithers....« less