Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 edition. Excerpt: ... widowers' houses act I In the garden restaurant of a hotel at Remagen on the Rhine, on a fine afternoon in August. Tables and chairs under the trees. The gate leading from the garden to the riverside is on the left. The hotel is on the right. It has a wooden annexe with an entrance marked Table d'Hote. A waiter is in attendance. A couple of English tourists come out of the hotel. The younger, Dr. Harry Trench, is about 24, stoutly built, thick in the neck, with close-cropped and black hair, with undignified medical student manners, frank, hasty, rather boyish. The other, Mr. William de Burgh Cokane, is older--probably over 40, possibly 50--an illnourished, scanty-haired gentleman, with affected manners, fidgety, touchy, and constitutionally ridiculous in uncompassionate eyes. Cokane (on the threshold of the hotel, calling peremptorily to the waiter). Two beers for us out here. (The waiter goes for the beer. Cokane comes down into the garden.) We have got the room with the best view in the hotel, Harry, thanks to my tact. We'll leave in the morning and do Mainz and Frankfurt. There is a very graceful female statue in the private house of a nobleman in Frankfurt--also a zoo. Next day, Nuremberg! finest collection of instruments of torture in the world. Trench. All right. You look out the trains, will you? (He takes out a Continental Bradshaw, and tosses it on one of the tables.) Cokane (baulking himself in the act of sitting down). Pah! the seat is all dusty. These foreigners are deplorably unclean in their habits. Trench (buoyantly). Never mind: it don't matter, old chappie. Buck up, Billy, buck up. Enjoy yourself. (He throws Cokane into the chair, and sits down opposite him, taking out his pipe, and singing noisily) Pass about the Rhine...