Weighed and Wanting   By: George MacDonald (1824-1905)

WEIGHED AND WANTING

BY GEORGE MACDONALD

CONTENTS.

I. Bad Weather

II. Father, Mother and Son

III. The Magic Lantern

IV. Hester alone

V. Truly the Light is sweet

VI. The Aquarium

VII. Amy Amber

VIII. Cornelius and Vavasor

IX. Songs and Singers

X. Hester and Amy

XI. At Home

XII. A Beginning

XIII. A private Exhibition

XIV. Vavasor and Hester

XV. A small Failure

XVI. The Concert Room

XVII. An uninvited Guest

XVIII. Catastrophe

XIX. Light and Shade

XX. The Journey

XXI. Mother and Daughter

XXII. Gladness

XXIII. Down the Hill

XXIV. Out of the Frying pan

XXV. Was it into the Fire?

XXVI. Waiting a Purpose

XXVII. Major H. G. Marvel

XXVIII. The Major and Vavasor

XXIX. A brave Act

XXX. In another Light

XXXI. The Major and Cousin Helen's Boys

XXXII. A distinguished Guest

XXXIII. Courtship in earnest

XXXIV. Calamity

XXXV. In London

XXXVI. A Talk with the Major

XXXVII. Rencontres

XXXVIII. In the House

XXXIX. The Major and the Small pox

XL. Down and down

XLI. Difference

XLII. Deep calleth unto Deep

XLIII. Deliverance

XLIV. On the Way up

XLV. More yet

XLVI. Amy and Corney

XLVII. Miss Vavasor

XLVIII. Mr. Christopher

XLIX. An Arrangement

L. Things at Home

LI. The Return

LII. A heavenly Vision

LIII. A sad Beginning

LIV. Mother and Son

LV. Miss Dasomma and Amy

LVI. The sick Room

LVII. Vengeance is Mine

LVIII. Father and Daughter in law

LIX. The Message

LX. A birthday Gift

CHAPTER I.

BAD WEATHER.

It was a gray, windy noon in the beginning of autumn. The sky and the sea were almost of the same color, and that not a beautiful one. The edge of the horizon where they met was an edge no more, but a bar thick and blurred, across which from the unseen came troops of waves that broke into white crests, the flying manes of speed, as they rushed at, rather than ran towards the shore: in their eagerness came out once more the old enmity between moist and dry. The trees and the smoke were greatly troubled, the former because they would fain stand still, the latter because it would fain ascend, while the wind kept tossing the former and beating down the latter. Not one of the hundreds of fishing boats belonging to the coast was to be seen; not a sail even was visible; not the smoke of a solitary steamer ploughing its own miserable path through the rain fog to London or Aberdeen. It was sad weather and depressing to not a few of the thousands come to Burcliff to enjoy a holiday which, whether of days or of weeks, had looked short to the labor weary when first they came, and was growing shorter and shorter, while the days that composed it grew longer and longer by the frightful vitality of dreariness. Especially to those of them who hated work, a day like this, wrapping them in a blanket of fog, whence the water was every now and then squeezed down upon them in the wettest of all rains, seemed a huge bite snatched by that vague enemy against whom the grumbling of the world is continually directed out of the cake that by every right and reason belonged to them. For were they not born to be happy, and how was human being to fulfill his destiny in such circumstances?