Description
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1891 edition. Excerpt: ... ODD MISS TODD. He$ father was odd before her. Barzillai Todd was one of those men who crop out from the general level of other people like a bowlder from the soft green surface of a meadow. He had a good farm, but he lived on it as Selkirk lived on his island. It was but half tilled; he never cut the huckleberry bushes or ploughed them up, for he ate little besides the hard yet juicy fruit while they lasted. Then no persuasion would induce him to sell the woodland which rose all about his lonely brown house. The trees were his congeners; he knew them individually. It was his delight to lie at length under their aerial canopy, and see the golden flecks of sunshine dance athwart their perfect grace and verdure, or to watch for bits of blue sky, sapphire blue, "like the body of heaven in its clearness," revealed by the parting of a wind-swept bough. The light susurrus of stealing breezes made the purest music to his ear, and he loved to watch the thousand quaint insects that inhabited moss and bark, to trace the busy life of anthills, to track beetles on their laborious journeys, or to see how deftly the wren wove her mystic nest, and the partridge made of her pale eggs an open secret. He was no farmer, as all Dorset knew. Hay just enough for his two lonely Ayrshire cows was all he cut, and root crops were unknown to his fields; he raised acres of strawberries, and, being a vegetarian, used them all their season, selling the vast surplus for money to buy books; corn he grew in abundance, for meal was a necessity, and waving crops of rye; a long range of beehives gave him honey, and he had a wild theory that honey was the cure-all, and that a man who had honey at hand and ate fruit in" its season would live to an indefinite period. Flowers...
