Little Stories about Women by George Fleming details from bookadda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1897 Excerpt: ... THE PRINCE OF MOROCCO Some forty minutes before reaching Venice the express from Trieste and Udine passes the village of Maroco, as any doubting traveller may verify by consulting his old, well-thumbed copy of the official Indicatore delle Ferrovie per 1'Alta Italia. But few trains stop at that insignificant platform. The station-master spends long, leisurely days between his beans, his tasselled maize, and the flaunting hollyhocks of his garden, undisturbed for hours at a time by any summons from a busier world. Now and then an old peasant woman rattles past with her milk-cans, or her load of fresh-cut grass, goading her donkey up the poplar-bordered road. There is scarce any other traffic. Indeed, there is nothing to distinguish Maroco, at first sight, from a hundred other such leafy hamlets scattered about that green and level country. If the place leave any impression at all upon the traveller's mind (already alert and a-tune for Venice) it can only be an impression of greenness and long continuance; a passing glimpse of humble, ancient houses; brown roofs, unimportant and enduring as the village fortunes which they shelter. And yet, for all this show of peace, here, too, there have been changes. Maroco hath had losses. The old fields lie out under the sky much in the old way; but the train puffing past clanks and jolts heavily across the very turn in the brook where the Prince's white oxen trooped to drink in the cool of the evening. The strip of turf on which the station-house is built was long the Prince's favourite bowlinggreen; yet there is not a fragment of boundarywall, not a vestige of carved stone left to show where stood the finest mansion of the place and time: for I hesitate to attribute undue importance to the local tradition which gives th...