Excerpt from A Pasteboard Crown: A Story of the New York Stage But really, no one knowing anything about the old place could help having a feeling of amazement at hear ing of a tenant being found for it. It was that saddest, most uncanny thing - a deserted house. A great, big, Colonial-like frame structure, it stood high on the hill side, showing white and ghostly between the too closely set evergreens and conifers before it. That money had been lavished upon the place in the distant past was evident even in these very trees, which were the choicest of their kind. He who had planted them must have been a melancholy man. Drooping, mourn ful trees seemed particularly to appeal to him, for the very rare weeping hemlock, like a black fountain, was there as well as the weeping larch, with its small cones and a veritable army of white pines, Norway Spruces, balsam firs, and the red cedar that in its blackish state liness is so like the Irish yew. A solemn company at the best of times, when properly spaced and trimmed, but now with unpruned branches intertwining, the trees that were killing one another in their struggle for light were positively lugubrious. And behind that screen of matted, many - Shaded evergreen the pallid, bony Old house stood trembling under high winds, while its upper windows stared blankly down upon that Broadway that, escaping from the hurrying city with its millions of restless feet, here passed calmly on, by woodland and green meadows, toward distant Albany. 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.