Cinderella eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 152 pages of information about Cinderella.

Cinderella eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 152 pages of information about Cinderella.

Stuart’s servant had heard the men trooping down the stairs, laughing and calling to one another as they went, and judging from this that they had departed for the night, he put out all the lights in the library and closed the piano, and lifted the windows to clear the room of the tobacco-smoke.  He did not notice the beautiful photograph sitting upright in the armchair before the fireplace, and so left it alone in the deserted library.

The cold night-air swept in through the open window and chilled the silent room, and the dead coals in the grate dropped one by one into the fender with a dismal echoing clatter; but the Picture still sat in the armchair with the same graceful pose and the same lovely expression, and smiled sweetly at the encircling darkness.

THE EDITOR’S STORY

It was a warm afternoon in the early spring, and the air in the office was close and heavy.  The letters of the morning had been answered and the proofs corrected, and the gentlemen who had come with ideas worth one column at space rates, and which they thought worth three, had compromised with the editor on a basis of two, and departed.  The editor’s desk was covered with manuscripts in a heap, a heap that never seemed to grow less, and each manuscript bore a character of its own, as marked or as unobtrusive as the character of the man or of the woman who had written it, which disclosed itself in the care with which some were presented for consideration, in the vain little ribbons of others, or the selfish manner in which still others were tightly rolled or vilely scribbled.

The editor held the first page of a poem in his hand, and was reading it mechanically, for its length had already declared against it, unless it might chance to be the precious gem out of a thousand, which must be chosen in spite of its twenty stanzas.  But as the editor read, his interest awakened, and he scanned the verses again, as one would turn to look a second time at a face which seemed familiar.  At the fourth stanza his memory was still in doubt, at the sixth it was warming to the chase, and at the end of the page was in full cry.  He caught up the second page and looked for the final verse, and then at the name below, and then back again quickly to the title of the poem, and pushed aside the papers on his desk in search of any note which might have accompanied it.

The name signed at the bottom of the second page was Edwin Aram, the title of the poem was “Bohemia,” and there was no accompanying note, only the name Berkeley written at the top of the first page.  The envelope in which it had come gave no further clew.  It was addressed in the same handwriting as that in which the poem had been written, and it bore the post-mark of New York city.  There was no request for the return of the poem, no direction to which either the poem itself or the check for its payment in the event of its acceptance might be sent.  Berkeley might be the name of an apartment-house or of a country place or of a suburban town.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Cinderella from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.