07/02/2026 11:59

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It is not a warm spring rain-not a seasonal rain, as my grandmother liked to say. Good reading-and good writing about reading-moves the same way. If Owen won't marry me, I'll never marry anyone, Hester told me between flashes and blasts. When they'd been growing up in the big house on Front Street, it was my Aunt Martha who brought the boys from Gravesend Academy

she admired reading, which she believed was an unselfish activity that provided information and inspiration. Then I remembered it was Christmas Eve. If someone ever presumed to teach Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy or Robertson Davies to my Bishop Strachan students with die sam Thank Heavens for Hurd's Church; that was the unfortunate name of the nondenominational church at Gravesend Academy-it was named after the academy's founder, that childless Puritan, the Rev.