title: Silent and True Or, a Little Queen
author: Fleming, May Agnes
description: An excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter:
   PER STEAMER HESPERIA.
   IT is a May day. If we did not take our weather on trust and tradition, as we take so many things, we would certainly never find it out for ourselves.
   Dropping down on the dock, amid the shivering throng of passengers, from some other planet, let us say, we might easily conclude we had alighted in the middle of March, so gusty, so bleak, so chill is this May morning.
   The Cunard steamer will float away down the Mersey in something less than an hour, the little fussy, puffing tender is already waiting for her passengers and luggage, and snorting fiercely, as though in fiery impatience to be off. There is the customary crowd, cabmen haggling over fares, porters shouldering trunks and boxes, passengers hurrying wildly hither and thither, or mounting guard over their belongings, shrill voices of women, deeper tones of men, . and now and then, in base growls, some of the strong words in which the nobler sex are wont to relieve their manly minds.
   Overhead there is a dark, fast-drifting sky, that bodes anything but a pleasant first night on the ocean, and outside there is an ominous short-chop, and little, wicked white caps breaking the turbid flow of the river. And all around, from every quarter of the compass at once, there come sudden bleak blasts that chill to the marrow of your bones, and set you shivering and make you wrap your great coat or waterproof about your shrinking form never so closely.
   Standing a little apart, if there be any apart in this madding crowd, leaning easily against the back of a cab, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, an amused look in his face, is a young man. A solitary large trunk beside him, bearing on its canvas back the big black initials "F. D.," is evidently his only property; a very large and lumbering Newfoundland is evidently his only companion.
   He is a tall, strongly-built, square-shouldered young fellow, of perhaps three-and-twenty, his beardless face not in the slightest degree handsome except with the good looks that three-and-twenty years' perfect health, boundless good-humor, and a certain boyish brightness gives. He is sun-burned and ruddy, he is buttoned up in a shaggy overcoat, and is taking life at present with a perfect coolness that is refreshing contrasted with the wild excitement depicted on most of the faces around him.
   Fragments of flurried conversation reach him on all sides as he stands, but he pays nv particular heed to any, until a girl's voice, fresh and clear, but in accents of misery, reaches his ear. "Mon Dieu  Marie " cries this, despairing voice, in a composite mixture of French and English, "if that imbecile has not carried off my box again. Here, you " a frantic little stamp;" drop that directly. It is mine, I tell you. I told you before, "stupide  Que devons - nous faire, Marie"--"
   A soft laugh is the answer. The young man turns round, and see two young ladies and a porter. One of the young ladies is seated quietly on a black box, the other is standing excitedly, trying to prevent the porter from carrying off a similar article of luggage, and trying in vain.
   The owner of the dog, with the impetuosity of three-and twenty, instantly comes to the rescue of beauty in distress.
   "Hi  I say you   drop that, will you," he cries, authoritatively, and the porter yields at once to the imperious masculine voice what he has scorned to yield to the frantic feminine. "Don't you want your luggage taken on board the tender?" inquires the young American gentleman, for such his accent proclaims him to be, lifting his hat to the young person who stands, and appears so greatly exercised over the fate of the black box.