The Project Gutenberg eBook, Children of the Market Place, by Edgar Lee
Masters

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Title: Children of the Market Place

Author: Edgar Lee Masters

Release Date: April 4, 2005 [eBook #15534]

Language: English

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

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHILDREN OF THE MARKET PLACE***

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CHILDREN OF THE MARKET PLACE

by

EDGAR LEE MASTERS

1922

TO GEORGE P. BRETT

CHAPTER I

I was born in London on the eighteenth of June, 1815. The battle of
Waterloo was being fought as I entered this world. Thousands were giving
up their lives at the moment that life was being bestowed upon me. My
father was in that great battle. Would he ever return? My mother was but
eighteen years of age. Anxiety for his safety, the exhaustion of giving
me life prostrated her delicate constitution. She died as I was being
born.

I have always kept her picture beside me. I have always been bound to
her by a tender and mystical love. During all the years of my life my
feeling for her could not have been more intense and personal if I had
had the experience of daily association with her through boyhood and
youth.

What girlish wistfulness and sadness there are in her eyes! What a
gentle smile is upon her lips, as if she would deny the deep foreboding
of a spirit that peered into a perilous future! Her dark hair falls in
rich strands over her forehead in an elfin and elegant disorder. Her
slender throat rises gracefully from an unloosened collar. This picture
was made from a drawing done by a friend of my father's four months
before I was born. My old nurse told me that he was invalided from the
war; that my father had asked him to make the drawing upon his return to
London. Perhaps my father had ominous dreams of her ordeal soon to be.

They pronounced me a fine boy. I was round faced, round bodied, well
nourished. The nurse read my horoscope in coffee grounds. I was to
become a notable figure in the world. My mother's people took me in
charge, glad to give me a place in their household. Her