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The Autobiography of a Quack and Other Stories
The Autobiography of a Quack and Other Stories Author:Silas Weir Mitchell 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: HEPHZIBAH GUINNESS. CHAPTER I. On the fifteenth day of October, in the year 1807, a young man about the age of twenty walked slowly down Front Street in th... more »e quiet city of Philadelphia. The place was strange to him, and with the careless curiosity of youth he glanced about and enjoyed alike the freshness of the evening hour and the novelty of the scene. To the lad—for he was hardly more—the air was delicious, because only the day before he had first set foot on shore after a wearisome ocean-voyage. All the afternoon a torrent of rain had fallen, but as he paused and looked westward at the corner of Cedar Street, the lessening rain, of which he had taken little heed, ceased of a sudden, and below the dun masses of swiftly-changing clouds the western sky became all aglow with yellow light, which set a rainbow over the broad Delaware and touched with gold the large drops of the ceasing shower. The young man stood a moment gazing at the changeful sky, and then with a pleasant sense ofsober contrast let his eyes wander over the broken roof-lines and broad gables of Front Street, noting how sombre the wetted brick houses became, and how black the shingled roofs with their patches of tufted green moss and smoother lichen. Then as he looked he saw, a few paces down the street, two superb buttonwoods from which the leaves were flitting fast, and his quick eye caught the mottled loveliness of their white and gray and green boles. Drawn by the unusual tints of these stately trunks, he turned southward, and walking towards them, stopped abruptly before the quaint house above which they spread their broad and gnarled branches. The dwelling, of red and black glazed bricks, was what we still call a double house, having two windows on each side of a door, over which projected a peak...« less