Excerpt from The Red Scaur: A Novel of Manners It is not all fancy either. Mr. Selwyn, the relative already mentioned, when a bachelor of fourscore, used to talk to me by the hour of the inhabitants of the Glen, and of the scenes and incidents of his prime; and though much was forgotten at the time, the memory of it was revived when I came to look over the bundles of papers left in his library. It was like reviewing the actual life of a man, for Mr. Selwyn, who was absurdly shy and diffident in company, had solaced himself by copious writing. And he evidently had a vanity all his own; for his ms. Book of poems and his history of local antiquities were carefully prepared for the press, though he never had summoned up courage enough to submit them to a publisher. His diaries and letters, too, were arranged as by one who knew them to be of consequence. More than by anything else, however, his character was revealed by a long series of love poems. They belonged to a species of literature to which I was not addicted, and which I did not read carefully, but their salient features could be caught at a glance. In a great boyish hand there was an acrostic showing that the girl's name was Elizabeth, and then there were in tensely passionate sonnets to Eliza, and long madrigal like effusions full of references to the blue Cheviots. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.