Vera, the Medium

Name: Vera, the Medium
Author: Richard Harding Davis

by Richard Harding Davis

Pages: about 112
Category: Literature & Fiction
Language: English
Reading time: 2 h at 250 wpm

Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 68 min at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

Happy in the hope that the news was “exclusive”, the Despatch had thrown the name of Stephen Hallowell, his portrait, a picture of his house, and the words, “At Point of Death!” across three columns. The announcement was heavy, lachrymose, bristling with the melancholy self-importance of the man who “saw the deceased, just two minutes before the train hit him.”
But the effect of the news fell short of the effort. Save that city editors were irritated that the presidents of certain railroads figured hastily on slips of paper, the fact that an old man and his millions would soon be parted, left New York undisturbed.
In the early 80’s this would not have been so. Then, in the uplifting of the far West, Stephen Hallowell was a national figure, in the manoeuvres of the Eastern stock market an active, alert power. In those days, when a man with a few millions was still listed as rich, his fortune was considered colossal.
A patent coupling-pin, the invention of his brother-in-law, had given him his start, and, in introducing it, and in his efforts to force it upon the new railroads of the West, he had obtained a knowledge of their affairs. From that knowledge came his wealth. That was twenty years ago. Since then giants had arisen in the land; men whose wealth made the fortune of Stephen Hallowell appear a comfortable competence, his schemes and stratagems, which, in their day, had bewildered Wall Street, as simple as the trading across the counter of a cross-roads store. For years he had been out of it. He had lost count. Disuse and ill health had rendered his mind feeble, made him at times suspicious, at times childishly credulous. Without friends, along with his physician and the butler, who was also his nurse, he lived in the house that in 76, in a burst of vanity, he had built on Fifth Avenue. Then the house was a “mansion,” and its front of brown sandstone the outward sign of wealth and fashion.

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Vera, the Medium

From the opening

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