A Wise Son Author:Charles Sherman General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1914 Original Publisher: The Bobbs-Merrill Company Subjects: Fiction / Literary Fiction / Romance / 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... more » this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER IV A Man's A Man TIMOTHY after he had awakened lay a while with his eyes closed. His head ached and he was tired, thoroughly tired. Every morning of his life he woke up a bit more tired than he had been the morning before, a bit more unequal to the struggle of keeping body and soul and worn-out clothes together. Days had become simply a test of endurance. The future held nothing, and the past held only ghosts that were best forgotten. He lay and wondered listlessly where he was, too indifferent to open his eyes for a moment and find out. He remembered yesterday having had a glass of beer with an acquaintance for whom he had done a trifling service and that on his empty stomach, the one glass had made him fairly drunk. He remembered that he had sought the seclusion of Central Park to avoid as much as possible any encounter with the police and that he had met a stranger there. After that things became blank, blurred at first, and finally obliterated, except the fact, vouched for by his aching head, that he had become hopelesslydrunk. He turned his head restlessly and the pillow under it sank softly as though it were of a goodly thickness of downy feathers, such a pillow as one did not find in the police station, nor even on Patrick's scant rickety cot. The mattress, he realized now that he thought about it, was correspondingly soft, and the blankets covered him with a snug and sufficient warmth and felt smooth and silky against the face. He could not be at Mills Hotel for he had not had th...« less