Quixstar Author:Elizabeth Taylor Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. A Han without women-folk in some shape is, in Great Britain, at this moment, nearly an impossibility. Here and there in the southern hemisphere, ... more »no doubt, there are huts in which, if you were to enter, you would find a man —a man, too, who may have " moved in the best society''—paring potatoes for his dinner, or washing his clothes, or baking damper, with a face so overgrown with hair that his mother would not know him. In writing home he will tell he is seeing life, and how jolly it is, how free from conventionalism, and all that. Well, we will respect his privacy when the big salt drops fall on the long rough beard, and the word " banishment " rises to his lips as he yearns for the music of a woman's voice, and the deft ministrations of her hand. How often has he twisted up the end of that worsted thread and tried to get it through the eye of his darning- needle ! He remembers his mother had no difficulty in threading a darning-needle—and he flings it down with a smile and a tear; but be sure he enjoys this life—no conventionality and no humbug! Mr. Sinclair, living in the heart of Scotland, could not keep house in this style. His household goods arrived in charge of two women-servants and several upholsterer's men, and it was soon known that he himself would shortly appear. Like Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Sinclair was a man of fifty, possibly a year or two more. It is nouse saying whether that is old or young; hale gentlemen of seventy will think he was barely in his prime, while the youth of twenty-one will consider that he was in extreme old age. He had been a wholesale tobacconist, and he, or at least his ancestors, had owned also a retail shop. There were people in Quixstar who had seen it, and the Highlander that stood over its door,—the finger and thumb of on...« less