The Ferryman Author:Helen Mathers General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1905 Original Publisher: Methuen 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 this book you get... more » free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER V THE HEAVENLY HILLS I LEFT behind me the merry-go-round of the terminus, where a hundred swift cars converge furiously upon you at the same moment, a very pandemonium of traffic and danger, and found myself at last on Huldah's wonderful Brooklyn Bridge. For awhile I pushed forward, then looked back -- looked back to a scene that no poet or painter alive could re-create, that caught the very breath between my lips for pure rapture, for " 'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view," and far away, fairy-like, ran a living, coruscating wall of splendour, as of a million fireflies caught in ebony, reaching to heaven, and between me and it, water and the great hollow of the town, whose lights did not count -- nothing counted but that irregular facade, with illuminated tower and minaret, battlements and keep, seemingly falling sheer away to the flowing darkness, and silence, and mystery of the river. From below shot out gondolier-like lights, that added to the illusion of a fairy palace set on a hill; from somewhere in the hollow, rose a smoke-wreath that might have been the breath of earth-gnomes that sought zealously to dim that celestial radiance; and yet this exquisite fantasy was furnished by those very skyscrapers whose ugliness the world derided, Wall Street and the financial district were responsible for this rare splendour, that the very earthly hands of clerks and typists had kindled; and strange it was, that right behind that glamour should be all the greed and devouring competition of the great ci...« less