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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Miscellanea, by Juliana Horatia Ewing
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: Miscellanea
Author: Juliana Horatia Ewing
Release Date: July 22, 2005 [EBook #16347]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MISCELLANEA ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Paul Ereaut and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
MISCELLANEA.
BY
JULIANA HORATIA EWING.
SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE,
London: Northumberland Avenue, W.C.
43, Queen Victoria Street, E.C.
Brighton: 129, North Street.
New York: E. & J.B. YOUNG & CO.
[Published under the direction of the General Literature
Committee.]
PREFACE.
The contents of this volume are republished in order to make the Edition
a complete collection of Mrs. Ewing's works, rather than because of
their intrinsic worth. The fact that she did not republish the papers
during her life shows that she did not estimate them very highly
herself; but as each one has a special interest connected with it, I
feel I am not violating her wishes in bringing the collection before the
public.
One of Mrs. Ewing's strongest gifts was her power of mimicry; this made
her an actor above the average of amateurs, and also enabled her to
imitate any special style of writing that she wished. The first four
stories in this volume are instances of this power. _The Mystery of the
Bloody Hand_ was an attempt to vie with some of the early sensational
novels, such as _Lady Audley's Secret_ and _The Moonstone_;--tales in
which a glimpse of the supernatural is introduced amongst scenes of
every-day life.
During my sister's girlhood we had a family MS. Magazine (as our Mother
had done in her young days), and two of the stories in Mrs. Gatty's
"Aunt Judy's Letters," _The Flatlands Fun Gazette_ and _The Black Bag_,
were founded on this custom, Mrs. Ewing being the typical "Aunt Judy" of
the book. Mrs. Gatty described how the children were called upon each to
contribute a tale for _The Black Bag_, and how No. 5 remonstrated by
saying--"I've been sitting over the fire this evening trying to think,
but what _could_ come, with only the coals and the fire-place before one
to look at? I dare say neither Hans Andersen nor Grimm nor any of those
fellows would have written anything, if they had not gone about into
caves and forests and those sort of places, or boated in the North
Seas!" Aunt Judy replied that she also had been looking into the fire,
and the longer she did so, the more she decided "that Hans Andersen was
not beholden to caves or forests or any curious things or people for his
story-telling inspirations"; but as it was difficult for the "little
ones" to write she enclosed three tales as "jokes, imitations, in fact,
of the Andersenian power of spinning gold threads out of old tow-ropes."
So far this was Mrs. Gatty's own writing, but the three tales were the
work of the real Aunt Judy, Mrs. Ewing herself. These three are (1)
_The Smut_, (2) _The Crick_, (3) _The Brothers_. The last sentence in
_The Brothers_ recalls the last entry in Mrs. Ewing's commonplace book,
which is quoted in her Life--"If we still love those we lose, can we
altogether lose those we love?"
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