The Crossing

by Winston Churchill

Transcriber Notes

Welcome to the Project Gutenberg edition of The Crossing by Winston Churchill. We have used the original publication of this book, the 1904 MacMillan edition, as the source for our transcription. On a few occasions changes were made to correct obvious errors.
Differences between the text and e-book are explained here. A few items that may be errors are listed below, but we did not correct an error unless it was an obvious one. Sometimes, a word had been hyphenated in the book to split across two lines for even spacing, thus forcing the transcriber to make a choice. Some of those decisions are listed below.

[Page 54]: Changed a double quote nested inside of a double quote to use single quotes. “Behold, I ... affliction.” became ‘Behold, I ... affliction.’
[Page 82]: Journeycakes is spelled without a hyphen here, but the journey-cakes of [Page 94] and [Page 95] had a hyphen. There were four occurrences of “journey-cake” and “journey-cakes” and no other occurrences of the word spelled without a hyphen. The inconsistency was retained.
[Page 147]: The repeating “at all at all” looks like a typo, but Churchill also used “at all, at all” on [Page 222]. No changes were made.
[Page 150]: grog-shop was hyphenated between two lines, so could be transcribed as “grog-shop” or “grogshop”. With no other examples in the novel, we went with the latter usage— no hyphen.
[Page 152]: The word “three-score,” split across two lines with a hyphen, could be transcribed as “threescore” or “three-score.” Two lines after that word, a sentence began “Threescore years!” The word was hyphenated for spacing and not transcribed with a hyphen.
[Page 310]: Add quotation-mark after Mr. Temple: "Good-by, Mr. Temple," she said…
[Page 317]: Hell-fire was split between two lines for spacing purposes. The decision to retain the hyphen in the transcription is traced to a prior use of the word in this novel. On [Page 40], hell-fire was spelled with a hyphen, and the word was in the middle of a line.
On [Page 321] and Page 322, changed double quotes nested inside of double quotes to single quotes. For example, “Ay, ay!” became ‘Ay, ay!’
[Page 338]: Place period after all the tribes.
[Page 375]: Remove comma after tinkle of a guitar.
[Page 385]: Was Mounsier de Saint-Gré at home? This question should end in a question mark but the author put a period there—and so did we.
[Page 426]: Ignored hyphen in black forest-swamp. In print, the hyphen occurred at the end of a line. However, the novel writes “forest swamp” on [Page 51] and “forest swamps” on [Page 216]—and never uses “forest-swamp.” This inconsistency was assumed to be a publisher's mistake in typesetting.
[Page 448]: “fianancier” may be dialect, but in other quotes of characters it is spelled “financier.” See [Page 192], [Page 250], and [Page 283]. No change was made.
[Page 494]: The verse following Caroline is printed to sheet music in the book.
[Page 588]: The preposition “to” is missing from the following phrase: “she drew the ivory from her gown and gave it me.” “Gave it to me” sounds better. Nevertheless, the sentence was written without the to, and it remains as the author wrote it in the e-book.
Some inconsistencies were highlighted above, but there also were instances where New Orléans was given an acute accent, but more often so, it was not. The same occurred with Miró. Another inconsistency was the author italicizing banquette and piastre as part of his rule of italicizing foreign words, but failing to do so all the time. We retained these inconsistencies in transcribing the book.
There were some cases where it was difficult to distinguish whether there was or was not a space before 'll. The contraction 'll was not spaced for common contractions, such as I'll, he'll, they'll. However, there was a space for “Breed 'll”, “what 'll”, “M'lisse 'll”, and other uncommon contractions formed with 'll. Sometimes, with line compression to justify the text, it is difficult to tell whether there should, or should not, be a space between the two parts of the uncommon contraction. In those cases where it was difficult to tell, we applied the convention as stated above.
Two confusing passages to transcribe are Davy's narration on [Page 284] and Page 285 and Hélène's narration on [Page 583]. Other paragraphs contain quotes embedded within quotes. We changed double quotes nested inside of double quotes to single quotes because our error-checking utilities flag the second double quote as an error.