As I remember him : the biography of R.S / by Hans Zinsser.

  • Hans Zinsser
Date:
1940
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: As I remember him : the biography of R.S / by Hans Zinsser. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    I 2 And then something happened that seemed like a miracle. A letter came, like the answer to a wish in a fairy tale. Tire young chemist had written home. Home was a school¬ master's house on the Rhine, in a village conveniently located for harboring refugees at night, when they tapped on the kitchen shutters after the children were asleep — or were sup¬ posed to be. Often they were not, as my father told me, and they would lie in their beds in the attic, wide-eyed and alert, listening in silent excitement to the sounds of hurried meals and furtive departures below. The broad-shouldered old schoolmaster was alone now — his wife dead and all the seven birds flown from the roost into the wide world. Four sons —a doctor, two merchants, and a chemist — in New York; three daughters married, one of them in America. He spent long evenings in his garden — a lonely old man — thinking of the past, and hoping for letters. “I am now in a position to marry her, the young chemist wrote. “But it is two years since we have seen each other and we were then very young. Does she love me enough to journey almost a quarter of the circumference of the world, to settle in a new, strange, and curiously unfriendly country, with no one but myself to be home to her? On a happy day the letter came to her from the old school¬ master, whom she had never seen. “The boy loves you and wants you to marry him, it said. “You may think you are still in love with him and, being a brave girl, you may have courage enough to go to him and fulfill your promise. But you are very young and very lonely, and neither of us can tell how these two years among the clever Yankees may have changed him. But if you think you are sure of your feelings, I will take you to him myself. And if we find him the same
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