The Rise of Roscoe Paine

Name: The Rise of Roscoe Paine
Author: Joseph Crosby Lincoln

by Joseph Crosby Lincoln

Pages: about 485
Category: Literature & Fiction
Language: English
Reading time: 8.9 h at 250 wpm

Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 4.9 h at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

“I'm going up to the village,” I told Dorinda, taking my cap from the hook behind the dining-room door.
“What for?” asked Dorinda, pushing me to one side and reaching for the dust-cloth, which also was behind the door.
“Um-hm” is, I believe, good Scotch for “Yes.” I have read that it is, somewhere--in one of Barrie's yarns, I think. I had never been in Scotland, or much of anywhere else, except the city I was born in, and my college town, and Boston--and Cape Cod. “Um-hm” meant yes on the Cape, too, except when Dorinda said it; then it might mean almost anything. When Mother asked her to lower the window shade in the bed-room she said “Um-hm” and lowered it. And, five minutes later, when Lute came in, loaded to the guards with explanations as to why he had forgotten to clean the fish for dinner, she said it again. And the Equator and the North Pole are no nearer alike, so far as temperature is concerned, than those two “Um-hms.” And between them she had others, expressing all degrees from frigid to semi-torrid.
Her “Um-hm” this time was somewhere along the northern edge of Labrador.
I opened the outside door. The warm spring sunshine, pouring in, was a pleasant contrast and made me forget, for the moment, the glacier at my back. Come to think of it, “glacier” isn't a good word; glaciers move slowly and that wasn't Dorinda's way.
“Work,” snapped Dorinda, unfurling the dust cloth. “It's a good mornin' for that, too.”
I went out, turned the corner of the house and found Lute sound asleep on the wash bench behind the kitchen. His full name was Luther Millard Filmore Rogers, and he was Dorinda's husband by law, and the burden which Providence, or hard luck, had ordered her to carry through this vale of tears. She was a good Methodist and there was no doubt in her mind that Providence was responsible.

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The Rise of Roscoe Paine

From the opening

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