Page:Female Prose Writers of America.djvu/395

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E. W. BARNES.


Miss Barnes is a native, and has been all her life a resident, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Her father is by birth a Swede, the only son of an officer in the Swedish army. On his arrival in this country in early youth, he was persuaded by a clergyman of Salem to change his name from Ludwig Baärnhielm to Lewis Barnes, for greater convenience of pronunciation. Miss Barnes has published, in Annuals and Magazines, a considerable amount of prose and verse, all of a very creditable character. From a prose tale published in 1850, the following sketch has been selected as a fair specimen of her style.


THE YOUNG RECTOR.

The crash startled from his revery a pale student, who, in the same apartment by his solitary lamp, sat poring over the pages of a ponderous volume, while beside it, on his writing-desk, lay the half- written page on which, with a vigorous and rapid pen, he wrote from time to time, with an energy which told how every faculty of his mind was absorbed in the work before him. He rose from his task as the shattered glass flew even over the table at which he sat, and, still engrossed in the thoughts which had occupied him for some hours, went mechanically to the window, thrust into the aperture some old and worn-out garment, and returned again abstractedly to his work.

The hours moved on, and no sound recalled him from the intellectual world in which his spirit was far away, except the continued

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