The Project Gutenberg eBook, In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim,
by Frances Hodgson Burnett

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Title: In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim

Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett

Release Date: June 16, 2008 [eBook #25810]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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WILLOUGHBY CLAIM***

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A Special Limited Edition

IN CONNECTION WITH THE De WILLOUGHBY CLAIM

by

FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT

Author of
"A Lady of Quality," "Little Lord Fauntleroy," Etc.

The People's Library
Issued Monthly
By _The American News Company_

New York
The American News Company
Publishers' Agents
39-41 Chambers Street

Copyright, 1899
by Charles Scribner's Sons
All rights reserved

The owners of the copyright of this volume sanction the issue of
this edition as a paper-covered book, to be sold at fifty cents;
but, while not wishing to interfere with any purchaser binding his
own copy, they do not sanction placing on the market any volumes of
this edition bound in any other form.

In Connection with
The De Willoughby Claim

CHAPTER I

High noon at Talbot's Cross-roads, with the mercury standing at
ninety-eight in the shade--though there was not much shade worth
mentioning in the immediate vicinity of the Cross-roads post-office,
about which, upon the occasion referred to, the few human beings within
sight and sound were congregated. There were trees enough a few hundred
yards away, but the post-office stood boldly and unflinchingly in the
blazing sun. The roads crossing each other stretched themselves as far as
the eye could follow them, the red clay transformed into red dust which
even an ordinarily lively imagination might have fancied was red hot. The
shrill, rattling cry of the grasshoppers, hidden in the long yellow
sedge-grass and drouth-smitten corn, pierced the stillness now and then
with a suddenness startling each time it broke forth, because the
interval between each of the pipings was given by the hearers