Out of the World And Other Tales Author:Anne Thackeray Ritchie General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1876 Original Publisher: B. Tauchnitz 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 se... more »lect from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: " Come along, mamma," said Jack, who had seen nothing but the folds of his mother's dress, and who was not haunted by associations as yet. "Come along, mamma; don't stop and think." Esther took Jack's little outstretched paw into her long slim fingers, but as she walked along the shady side of the street -- past the Moorish shop-fronts arched with black marble, with old women gossiping in the interiors, and while Jack stared at the passers-by, at a monk plodding by with sandalled feet, at a bath-woman balancing an enormous machine on her head, or longed as he gazed at the beautiful peaches and knitted wool-work piled on the shop-ledges, Esther went dreaming back to ten years before, wishing, as grown-up people wish, not for the good things spread before them, but for those of years long gone by -- for the fruit long since eaten, or rotten, or planted in the ground. "Mammy, there's the Spaniard. Oh! look at his legs," said Jack, "they are all over ribbons." And Esther, to please him, smiled and glanced at a bandy-legged mountebank disposing of bargains to two credulous Britons. "Why, there's uncle Penton come back," Jack cried in great excitement; "he is buying muffetees. Mammy, come and see what he has got," cried Jack, trying to tug away his hand. "Not now, dear," said Esther. The slim fingers closed upon Jack's little hand with too firm a grasp for him to escape, and he trudges on perforce. They had almost reached the hotel where they lived by this time. The great clock-tower round which it is built serves as a landmark and beacon. The place was all alive -- jang...« less