When I reached the cottage and lifted Mamie up, she was raving mad. She got better afterwards, but she was never right in her head again.
Oh, you want to know if they found Jack's body? I don't know whether it was his, but I read in a paper at a Southern port where I was with my new ship that two dead bodies had come ashore in a gale down East, in pretty bad shape. They were locked together, and one was a skeleton in oilskins.
FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD the youngest of the four children of the well-known sculptor Thomas Crawford, was born in Rome, educated by a French governess; then at St Paul's School, Concord, N.H.; in the quiet country village of Hatfield Regis, under an English tutor; at Trinity College, Cambridge, where they thought him a mathematician in those days; at Heidelberg and Karlsruhe, and at the University of Rome, where a special interest in Oriental languages sent him to India with the idea of preparing for a professorship.
At one time in India hard times nearly forced him into enlistment in the British army, but a chance opening sent him as editor of the Indian Herald to Allahabad. It was during the next eighteen months that he met at Simla the hero of his first novel, "Mr. Isaacs." "If it had not been for him," Mr. Crawford has been known to say, "I might at this moment be a professor of Sanskrit in some American college;" for that idea persisted after his return to the United States, where he entered Harvard for special study of the subject.
But from the May evening when the story of the interesting man at Simla was first told in a club smoking-room overlooking Madison Square, Mr. Crawford's life has been one of hard literary work. He returned to Italy in 1883, spent most of the next year in Constantinople, where he was married to a daughter of General Berdan. From 1885 he has made his home in Sorrento, Italy, visiting America at intervals.
"Mr. Isaacs," published in 1882, was followed almost at once by "Dr. Claudius." Then The Atlantic Monthly claimed a serial, "A Roman Singer," in 1883. Since that time the list of his novels has been increased to thirty-two, besides the historical and descriptive works entitled "Ave Roma Immortalis" and "The Rulers of the South."
To Mr. Crawford, the development of a story and of the character which suggested it, is the preëminent thing. As the critics say:—
"He is an artist, a born story-teller and colourist, imaginative and dramatic, virile and vivid."
His wide range as a traveller has contributed doubtless to another characteristic quality:—