Lost Endeavor Author:John Masefield General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1917 Original Publisher: Macmillan Subjects: English fiction Buccaneers Fiction / Classics Fiction / Literary History / General Literary Collections / General Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Poetry / General Poetry / English... more », Irish, Scottish, Welsh 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 Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: LOST ENDEAVOUR PAET FIRST CHARLES HARDING'S STORY 1GOT my learning, such as it is, from Dr. Carter, who kept an Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen, in a great old haunted house which stood at that time (1690) near the coach road to Shooter's Hill, on the southern border of Black Heath. Dr. Carter was one of the old school, " birch and bottle men " I think they called them, because they flogged without mercy, and drank port wine without stint; but he knew a great deal of Greek, they say, and he was always very good to me, so his faults may rest. His house, at one time, long before he came there, was one of the old, bad coaching inns. The cellar was said to be full of secret rooms, where the conspirators used to meet in the time of the Powder Plot. And we boys always heard that from somewhere in the cellar one could get into those secret passages, cut under the ground, which run all across Greenwich, and away south to Chislehurst, like the workings of great moles. I went down into the cellars one night, I remember, with a boy called Thomas Davies, but we could find no secret passages. They were ghostly, damp, vaulty places those cellars, full of empty barrels, and a melancholy noise of dripping; I think the rats must have gone melancholy mad there. Old Carter came down for a bottle of port while we were there; so that we...« less