Produced by Wendy Crockett, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
"THE OLD HOMESTEAD" is a superb story of quaint New England farm lifein the vein now so popular both in fiction and on the stage. Withan absorbing plot, effective incidents and characters entirely trueto nature, it holds attention as very few stories do. It possessesall that powerful attraction which clings to a romance of home, thefamily fireside and the people who gather about it. Simplicity andstrength are happily combined in its pages, and no one can begin itwithout desiring to read it through. All the works of Mrs. Ann S.Stephens are books that everybody should read, for in point of realmerit, wonderful ingenuity and absorbing interest they loom far abovethe majority of the books of the day. She has a thorough knowledgeof human nature, and so vividly drawn and natural are her charactersthat they seem instinct with life. Her plots are models ofconstruction, and she excels in depicting young lovers, their trials,troubles, sorrows and joys, while her love scenes fascinate the youngas well as the old. In short, Mrs. Stephens' novels richly merit boththeir vast renown and immense popularity, and they should find a placein every house and in every library.
She kneels beside the pauper bed,
As seraphs bow while they adore!
Advance with still and reverent tread,
For angels have gone in before!
"I wonder, oh, I wonder if he will come?"
The voice which uttered these words was so anxious, so pathetic withdeep feeling, that you would have loved the poor child, whose heartgave them forth, plain and miserable as she was. Yet a more helplesscreature, or a more desolate home could not well be imagined. Shewas very small, even for her age. Her little sharp features had nofreshness in them; her lips were thin; her eyes not only heavy, butfull of dull anguish, which gave you an idea of settled pain, bothof soul and body, for no mere physical suffering ever gave that depthof expression to the eyes of a child.
But all was of a piece, the garret, and the child that inhabited it.The attic, which was more especially her home, was crowded under thelow roof of a tenant house, which sloped down so far in front, thateven the child could not stand upright under it, except where it wasperforated with a small attic window, which overlooked the chimneysand gables of other tenement buildings, hived full of poverty, andswarming with the dregs of city life.
This was the prospect on one side. On the other a door with one hingebroken, led into a low open garret, where smoke-dried rafters slantedgrimly over head, like the ribs of some mammoth skeleton, and looseboards, whose nails had rusted out, creaked and groaned under foot.They made audible sounds even beneath the shadowy tread of the littlegirl, as she glided toward the top of a stair-case unrailed and outi