The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Golden Scarecrow, by Hugh Walpole

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Title: The Golden Scarecrow

Author: Hugh Walpole

Release Date: November 29, 2004 [EBook #14201]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE GOLDEN SCARECROW

BY

HUGH WALPOLE

AUTHOR OF

"THE DUCHESS OF WREXE," "FORTITUDE," "THE PRELUDE TO
ADVENTURE," "THE WOODEN HORSE." ETC.

NEW YORK

1915

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
PROLOGUE--HUGH SEYMOUR 11
I. HENRY FITZGEORGE STRETHER 43
II. ERNEST HENRY 65
III. ANGELINA 94
IV. BIM ROCHESTER 121
V. NANCY ROSS 146
VI. 'ENERY 172
VII. BARBARA FLINT 198
VIII. SARAH TREFUSIS 226
IX. YOUNG JOHN SCARLET 256
EPILOGUE 274

PROLOGUE

HUGH SEYMOUR

I

When Hugh Seymour was nine years of age he was sent from Ceylon, where
his parents lived, to be educated in England. His relations having, for
the most part, settled in foreign countries, he spent his holidays as a
very minute and pale-faced "paying guest" in various houses where other
children were of more importance than he, or where children as a race
were of no importance at all. It was in this way that he became during
certain months of 1889 and 1890 and '91 a resident in the family of the
Rev. William Lasher, Vicar of Clinton St. Mary, that large rambling
village on the edge of Roche St. Mary Moor in South Glebeshire.

He spent there the two Christmases of 1890 and 1891 (when he was ten
and eleven years of age), and it is with the second of these that the
following incident, and indeed the whole of this book, has to do. Hugh
Seymour could not, at the period of which I write, be called an
attractive child; he was not even "interesting" or "unusual." He was
very minutely made, with bones