Project Gutenberg's A British Islander, by Mary Hartwell Catherwood

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Title: A British Islander
From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899

Author: Mary Hartwell Catherwood

Release Date: October 30, 2007 [EBook #23255]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A BRITISH ISLANDER ***

Produced by David Widger

A BRITISH ISLANDER

From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899

By Mary Hartwell Catherwood

* This story is set down exactly as it was told by the
Island Chronicler.

Well, I wish you could have been here in Mrs. Gunning's day. She was
the oddest woman on Mackinac. Not that she exerted herself to attract
attention. But she was such a character, and her manners were so
astonishing, that she furnished perennial entertainment to the few
families of us constituting island society.

She was an English woman, born in South Africa, and married to an
American army surgeon, and had lived over a large part of the world
before coming to this fort. She had no children. But her sister had
married Dr. Gunning's brother. And the good-for-nothing pair set out to
follow the English drum-beat around the world, and left a child for the
two more responsible ones to rear. Juliana Gunning was so deaf she
could not hear thunder. But she was quits with nature, for all that; a
wonderfully alluring kind of girl, with big brown eyes that were better
than ears, and that could catch the meaning of moving lips. It seemed
to strangers that she merely evaded conversation; for she had a sweet
voice, a little drawling, and was witty when she wanted to speak.
Juliana couldn't step out of the surgeon's quarters to walk across the
parade-ground without making every soldier in the fort conscious of
her. She was well-shaped and tall, and a slight pitting of the skin
only enhanced the charm of her large features. She used to dress unlike
anybody else, in foreign things that her aunt gave her, and was always
carrying different kinds of thin scarfs to throw over her face and
tantalize the men.

Everybody knew that Captain Markley would marry her if he could. But
along comes Dr. Mc-Curdy, a wealthy widower from t