Tales of the Chesapeake

Tales of the Chesapeake

George Alfred Townsend

5.0
Comment(s)
1
View
11
Chapters

Tales of the Chesapeake by George Alfred Townsend

Tales of the Chesapeake Chapter 1 No.1

Nick Hammer sat in Funkstown

Before his tavern door-

The same old blue-stone tavern

The wagoners knew of yore,

When the Conestoga schooners

Came staggering under their load,

And the lines of slow pack-horses

Stamped over the National Road.

Nick Hammer and son together,

Both blowing pipe-smoke there,

Like a pair of stolid limekilns,

In the blue South Mountain air;

And the mills of the Antietam,

Grinding the Dunker's wheat

So oldly and so slowly,

Groaned up the deserted street.

"What think'st thou, Nick, my father?"

Said Nick, the old man's twin.

"This whole year thou art silent.

Let a little speech begin.

Thou think'st the bar draws little;

That the stables are empty yet,

And the growing pride of Hagerstown,

Thou can'st not that forget."

"Thou liest, Nick, my little boy;

For Hager's bells I hear

Like the bells of olden travel,

Forgot upon mine ear.

In a wonderful thing once asked him

Thy dear old daddy is sunk-

I have sot here a year and wondered

Who the devil was Mr. Funk!"

Continue Reading

Other books by George Alfred Townsend

More

You'll also like

Jilted Bride's Revenge: The Valkyrie Awakens

Jilted Bride's Revenge: The Valkyrie Awakens

Gujian Qitan
5.0

I had been a wife for exactly six hours when I woke up to the sound of my husband’s heavy breathing. In the dim moonlight of our bridal suite, I watched Hardin, the man I had adored for years, intertwined with my sister Carissa on the chaise lounge. The betrayal didn't come with an apology. Hardin stood up, unashamed, and sneered at me. "You're awake? Get out, you frumpy mute." Carissa huddled under a throw, her fake tears already welling up as she played the victim. They didn't just want me gone; they wanted me erased to protect their reputations. When I refused to move, my world collapsed. My father didn't offer a shoulder to cry on; he threatened to have me committed to a mental asylum to save his business merger. "You're a disgrace," he bellowed, while the guards stood ready to drag me away. They had spent my life treating me like a stuttering, submissive pawn, and now they were done with me. I felt a blinding pain in my skull, a fracture that should have broken me. But instead of tears, something dormant and lethal flickered to life. The terrified girl who walked down the aisle earlier that day simply ceased to exist. In her place, a clinical system—the Valkyrie Protocol—booted up. My racing heart plummeted to a steady sixty beats per minute. I didn't scream. I stood up, my spine straightening for the first time in twenty years, and looked at Hardin with the detachment of a surgeon looking at a tumor. "Correction," I said, my voice stripped of its stutter. "You're in my light." By dawn, I had drained my father's accounts, vanished into a storm, and found a bleeding Crown Prince in a hidden safehouse. They thought they had broken a mute girl. They didn't realize they had just activated their own destruction.

Chapters
Read Now
Download Book