Sommaire pour Autumn 2023 de Siegfried

The tenth month of the year, and I am standing in the garden. Dampness is seeping into my old boots, but I linger amidst the cabbages and kale. They will make a fine autumn salad to accompany tonight’s culinary treat: my neighbour has made sweet onion jam. For dinner, we’ll spread it over sourdough and toasted cheese. I have a dry white wine in the dark recess of my pantry, too. It will accompany our little feast until we turn to hot tea and apple cake. There is a mist rising on the hills. Were I to stay outside I might see the parcel of deer that roam these lands. I know my cat will watch them search the orchard’s windfall from the shelter of the barn. It is so…

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 1919 IF YOU ARE EVER IN BROOKLYN, that borough of superb sunsets and magnificent vistas of husband-propelled baby-carriages, it is to be hoped you may chance upon a quiet by-street where there is a very remarkable bookshop. This bookshop, which does business under the unusual name “Parnassus at Home,” is housed in one of the comfortable old brown-stone dwellings which have been the joy of several generations of plumbers and cockroaches. The owner of the business has been at pains to remodel the house to make it a more suitable shrine for his trade, which deals entirely in second-hand volumes. There is no second-hand bookshop in the world more worthy of respect. It was about six o’clock of a cold November evening, with gusts of rain splattering upon…

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 1860 SOME YEARS AGO, a temporary inability to sleep, referable to a distressing impression, caused me to walk about the streets all night, for a series of several nights. The disorder might have taken a long time to conquer, if it had been faintly experimented on in bed; but, it was soon defeated by the brisk treatment of getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise. In the course of those nights, I finished my education in a fair amateur experience of houselessness. My principal object being to get through the night, the pursuit of it brought me into sympathetic relations with people who have no other object every night in the year. The month was March, and the weather damp,…

Autumn came. Late September with cool nights. They had to forsake the verandah; but they kindled a fire in the big fireplace and sat before it with jest and laughter. They left the doors open, and Banjo and Good Luck came and went at pleasure. Sometimes they sat gravely on the bearskin rug between Barney and Valancy; sometimes they slunk off into the mystery of the chill night outside. The stars smouldered in the horizon mists through the old oriel. The haunting, persistent croon of the pine-trees filled the air. The little waves began to make soft, sobbing splashes on the rocks below them in the rising winds. They needed no light but the firelight that sometimes leaped up and revealed them — sometimes shrouded them in shadow. When the…

Front Cover Morland, Henry Robert. The Ballad Singer. c. 1784. Oil on Canvas. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut. Visscher, Claes Jansz., publisher. Oval Blackwork Print with Birds, Insects and Fruits. c. 1620. Blackwork. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York. Wiles, Irving R. Russian Tea. c. 1896. Oil on Canvas. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Mauve, Anton. The Marsh. c. 1885-1888. Oil on Canvas. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Whistler, James Abbott McNeill. London Bridge. c. early 1880s. Pencil and Watercolour on Paper. Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, D.C. Ciągliński, Jan. Northern Studies (The White Night). 1908. Oil on Canvas. National Museum of Kraków, Kraków, Poland. Lavery, John. Miss Auras, The Red Book. c. 1892. Private Collection. Keene, Charles Samuel. Evening Entertainments. Watercolour and…