Availability: Usually ships within 48 hours. Ships from and sold by Babblebooks.com.Running time: 18 hr 58 min
The unabridged classic on MP3 audio, narrated by Anais 9000. Three playback speeds on one disk; etext edition included. Running time: 19.0 hours (slow), 17.3 hours (medium), 15.8 hours (fast).
CHAPTER I - A Minor Incident Showing an Hereditary Aptitude in the Use of the Knife
There was an ominously anxious watch of eyes visible and invisible over
the infancy of Willoughby, fifth in descent from Simon Patterne, of
Patterne Hall, premier of this family, a lawyer, a man of solid
acquirements and stout ambition, who well understood the
foundation-work of a House, and was endowed with the power of saying No
to those first agents of destruction, besieging relatives. He said it
with the resonant emphasis of death to younger sons. For if the oak is
to become a stately tree, we must provide against the crowding of
timber. Also the tree beset with parasites prospers not. A great House
in its beginning lives, we may truly say, by the knife. Soil is easily
got, and so are bricks, and a wife, and children come of wishing for
them, but the vigorous use of the knife is a natural gift and points to
growth. Pauper Patternes were numerous when the fifth head of the race
was the hope of his county. A Patterne was in the Marines.
The country and the chief of this family were simultaneously informed
of the existence of one Lieutenant Crossjay Patterne, of the corps of
the famous hard fighters, through an act of heroism of the unpretending
cool sort which kindles British blood, on the part of the modest young
officer, in the storming of some eastern riverain stronghold, somewhere
about the coast of China. The officer's youth was assumed on the
strength of his rank, perhaps likewise from the tale of his modesty:
"he had only done his duty". Our Willoughby was then at College,
emulous of the generous enthusiasm of his years, and strangely
impressed by the report, and the printing of his name in the
newspapers. He thought over it for several months, when, coming to his
title and heritage, he sent Lieutenant Crossjay Patterne a cheque for a
sum of money amounting to the gallant fellow's pay per annum, at the
same time showing his acquaintance with the first, or chemical,
principles of generosity, in the remark to friends at home, that "blood
is thicker than water". The man is a Marine, but he is a Patterne. How
any Patterne should have drifted into the Marines, is of the order of
questions which are senselessly asked of the great dispensary. In the
complimentary letter accompanying his cheque, the lieutenant was
invited to present himself at the ancestral Hall, when convenient to
him, and he was assured that he had given his relative and friend a
taste for a soldier's life. Young Sir Willoughby was fond of talking of
his "military namesake and distant cousin, young Patterne--the Marine".
It was funny; and not less laughable was the description of his
namesake's deed of valour: with the rescued British sailor inebriate,
and the hauling off to captivity of the three braves of the black
dragon on a yellow ground, and the tying of them together back to back
by their pigtails, and driving of them into our lines upon a newly
devised dying-top style of march that inclined to the oblique, like the
astonished six eyes of the celestial prisoners, for straight they could
not go. The humour of gentlemen at home is always highly excited by
such cool feats. We are a small island, but you see what we do. The
ladies at the Hall, Sir Willoughby's mother, and his aunts Eleanor and
Isabel, were more affected than he by the circumstance of their having
a Patterne in the Marines. But how then! We English have ducal blood
in business: we have, genealogists tell us, royal blood in common
trades. For all our pride we are a queer people; and you may be [...]
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