The Works of Miss Thackerary Author:Anne Thackeray Ritchie 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: A YOUNG PRINCE. This little introduction is to open the door of a home that was once, in a house in a pleasant green square in London —a comfortable family ho... more »use, with airy and light and snug corners, and writing-tables, and with pictures hanging from the walls of the drawing-room, where the tall windows looked out upon the trees, and of the study upstairs where the father sat at his work. Here were books and china pots and silver inkstands, and a hundred familiar things all about the house, which the young people had been used to for so long that they had by degrees come to live for them with that individual life with which inanimate things live for the young. Sometimes in the comfortable nicker of the twilight fire the place would seem all astir in the dance of the bright fires which burned in that hearth—fires which then seemed to be, perhaps, only charred coal and wood and ashes, but whose rays still warm and cheer those who were gathered round the home hearth so many years ago. On one side of the fireplace hung a picture which had been painted by Miss Edgar, and which represented a pretty pale lady, with her head on one side. The artist had christened her Laura. On the chimney-piece, behind the old red pots, the little Dresden china figures, the gilt and loudly ticking clock, stood the picture of a kind old family friend, with a friendly, yet troubled expression in his countenance: and then, against a panel, hung a little water-colour painted by Hunt, and representing the sweet little heroine of this short history. Opposite to her for a while, was a vacant space, until one summer, in Italy, the father happened to buy the portrait of a little Dauphin or Neapolitan Prince, with a broad ribbon and order, and soft fair hair; and when the little Prince had come back from ...« less