The English Fireside Author:John Mills 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 IV. " Though now this grained face of mine be hid In sap-consuming winter's drizzled snow, Yet hath my night of life some memory." In a lofty, oak... more »-panelled room, upon the walls of which were hung deep and wide arras, the scenes now faded and obscure from age, sat a lady whose bleached locks and deeply-lined features told the winter of her life had long since began. And yet there was a laughter-loving humour in her eyes which seldom accompanies the full-ripened sheaf of life. Time, alas! and the ills and heartaches attendant on the chequered, mingled course, blots, for the most part, all such traces of the heart's sunshine. Age, " with nothing of gladness to be," looks with jaundiced eye on the past, and, forgetful of its pleasures, views sadly, and even bitterly, the joys of youth and the merry, careless days of childhood. But it was not so with Miss Deborah Sinclair. No, although three score years and ten had rolled onwards from her introduction to the first spoonful of farinaceous food to this introduction to our readers; and although she had, like a nun mewed in a shady cloister, permitted her days to wend away in single blessedness; and although she kept a favourite cat—and a fat, sleek, tabby Tom he was, ever basking in the sun, or immediately before the blazing fire on the very centre of the hearth-rug—and, in short, although Miss Deborah Sinclair was, in its most comprehensive sense, an old, very old maid, there was not a happier —I could almost say—jovial old soul that ever drank tea or joined in a rubber; both of which she was especially fond of. And yet she had had her afflictions, and verygrave ones they were. She had witnessed a young wife, loving and well-beloved, die the same hour that she gave birth to her beautiful niece Blanch. Within two years f...« less