THE VOICE OF THE CITY: BEST SHORT STORIES OF O. HENRY 欧·亨利经典短篇小说英文原版
WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG: BEST SHORT STORIES OF JACK LONDON 杰克·伦敦经典短篇小说英文原版
內容簡介：
Nathaniel
Hawthorne, born on July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts was an American short
story writer and romance novelist. He is best known for his short stories and
two widely read novels：The Scarlet
Letter and The House of Seven Gables. Along with Herman Melville and Edgar
Allan Poe much of Hawthorne''s work belongs to the subgenre of Dark Romanticism.
Young
Hawthorne was a contemporary of fellow transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott. Hawthorne was part of this
prominent circle of Massachusetts writers and philosophers. The
transcendentalists believed in the “inherent goodness of both people and
nature.”
Hawthorne''s
style “is like purity itself.” Hawthorne''s highest regarded short stories
include My Kinsman, Major Molineaux , Young Goodman Brown, Feathertop, and The
Minister''s Black Veil . For the record, Hawthorne died in his sleep in 1864
during a tour of the White Mountains in Plymouth, New Hampshire.
One September
night a family had gathered round their hearth and piled it high with the
driftwood of mountainstreams, the dry cones of the pine, and the splintered
ruins of great trees that had come crashing down the precipice. Up the chimney
roared the fire, and brightened the room with its broad blaze. The faces of the
father and mother had a sober gladness; the children laughed. The eldest
daughter was the image of Happiness at seventeen, and the aged grandmother, who
sat knitting in the warmest place, was the image of Happiness grown old. They
had found the “herb heart’s-ease” in the bleakest spot of all New England. This
family were situated in the Notch of the White Hills, where the wind was sharp
throughout the year and pitilessly cold in the winter, giving their cottage all
its fresh inclemency before it descended on the valley of the Saco. They dwelt in
a cold spot and a dangerous one, for a mountain towered above their heads so
steep that the stones would often rumble down its sides and startle them at
midnight.
The daughter
had just uttered some simple jest that filled them all with mirth, when the
wind came through the Notch and seemed to pause before their cottage, rattling
the door with a sound of wailing and lamentation before it passed into the
valley. For a moment it saddened them, though there was nothing unusual in the
tones. But the family were glad again when they perceived that the latch was
lifted by some traveller whose footsteps had been unheard amid the dreary blast
which heralded his approach and wailed as he was entering and went moaning away
from the door.
Though they
dwelt in such a solitude, these people held daily converse with the world. The
romantic pass of
the Notch is a great artery through which the lifeblood of internal commerce is
continually throbbing between
Maine on one side and the Green Mountains and the shores of the St. Lawrence on
the other. The stagecoach always
drew up before the door of the cottage. The wayfarer with no companion but
his staff paused here to exchange
a word, that the sense of loneliness might not utterly overcome him ere he could
pass through the cleft of
the mountain or reach the first house in the valley. And here the teamster on his way
to Portland market would
put up for the night, and, if a bachelor, might sit an hour beyond the usual
bedtime and steal a kiss from
the mountain-maid at parting. It was one of those primitive taverns where the
traveller pays only for food and
lodging, but meets with a homely kindness beyond all price. When the footsteps were
heard, therefore, between the
outer door and the inner one, the whole family rose up, grandmother, children and
all, as if about to welcome some
one who belonged to them, and whose fate was linked with theirs.
The
door was opened by a young man. His face at first wore the melancholy
expression, almost despondency, of one who travels a wild and bleak road at
nightfall and alone, but soon brightened up when he saw the kindly warmth of
his reception. He felt his heart spring forward to meet them all, from the old
woman who wiped a chair with her apron to the little child that held out its
arms to him. One glance and smile placed the stranger on a footing of innocent
familiarity with the eldest daughter.
“Ah!
this fire is the right thing,” cried he, “especially when there is such a
pleasant circle round it. I am quite benumbed, for the Notch is just like the
pipe of a great pair of bellows; it has blown a terrible blast in my face all the
way from Bartlett.”
“Then
you are going toward Vermont?” said the master of the house as he helped to
take a light knapsack off the young man’s shoulders.
“Yes,
to Burlington, and far enough beyond,” replied he. “I meant to have been at
Ethan Crawford’s to-night, but a pedestrian lingers along such a road as this.
It is no matter; for when I saw this good fire and all your cheerful faces, I
felt as if you had kindled it on purpose for me and were waiting my arrival. So
I shall sit down among you and make myself at home.”
The
frank-hearted stranger had just drawn his chair to the fire when something like
a heavy footstep was heard without, rushing down the steep side of the mountain
as with long and rapid strides, and taking such a leap in passing the cottage
as to strike the opposite precipice. The family held their breath, because they
knew the sound, and their guest held his by instinct.
“The
old mountain has thrown a stone at us for fear we should forget him,” said the
landlord, recovering himself. “He sometimes nods his head and threatens to come
down, but we are old neighbors, and agree together pretty well, upon the whole.
Besides, we have a sure place of refuge hard by if he should be coming in good
earnest.”
Let
us now suppose the stranger to have finished his supper of bear’s meat, and by
his natural felicity of manner to have placed himself on a footing of kindness
with the whole family; so that they talked as freely together as if he belonged
to their mountain-brood. He was of a proud yet gentle spirit, haughty and
reserved among the rich and great, but ever ready to stoop his head to the lowly
cottage door and be like a brother or a son at the poor man’s fireside. In the
household of the Notch he found warmth and simplicity of feeling, the pervading
intelligence of New England, and a poetry of native growth which they had
gathered when they little thought of it from the mountain-peaks and chasms, and
at the very threshold of their romantic and dangerous abode. He had travelled
far and alone; his whole life, indeed, had been a solitary path, for, with the
lofty caution of his nature, he had kept himself apart from those who might otherwise
have been his companions. The family, too, though so kind and hospitable, had
that consciousness of unity among themselves and separation from the world at
large which in every domestic circle should still keep a holy place where no
stranger may intrude. But this evening a prophetic sympathy impelled the
refined and educated youth to pour out his heart before the simple
mountaineers, and constrained them to answer him with the same free confidence.
And thus it should have been. Is not the kindred of a common fate a closer tie
than that of birth?
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