Explore "The Adventure of Norah Sullivan and the Student of Heredity" by Wardon Allan Curtis on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was the time of full moon. As the orb of day dropped its red, huge / disk below the western horizon, over the opposite side of the world, / the moon, even more huge and scarcely less red, rose to irradiate with / its mild beams the scenes which the shadows of darkness had not yet / touched. Miss Nora Sullivan, a teacher in the public schools of the / metropolis, sat upon the front porch of the paternal residence / enjoying the loveliness of the vernal prospect and the balm of the / air, for it was in the flowery month of June. Although the residence / of Timothy Sullivan was well within the limits of the municipality of / Chicago, one visiting at that hospitable abode might imagine himself / in the country. From no part of the enclosure could you, during the / leafy season, see another human habitation. A quarter of a mile down / the road to the east, the electric cars for Calumet could be seen / flitting by, but except at the intervals of their passing, there was / seldom anything to suggest that the location was part of a great city. / A quarter of a mile to the west, on the edge of a marsh -- a situation / well suited to such culture -- lived a person engaged in the raising of / African geese. As it is probable that you may never have heard of / African geese, I will tell you that they are the largest of their / tribe and that specimens of them often weigh as high as seventy / pounds.
The person engaged in the culture of African geese was Wilhelm / Klingenspiel, a man of German ancestry, but born in this country. Miss / Sullivan had often heard of him, she had even partaken of the left leg / of an African goose, which leg he had given Mr. Sullivan for the / Sunday dinner, but she had never seen him. As Wilhelm Klingenspiel was / young and single and as no other man of any description lived in the / vicinity, it is not strange that Nora, who was also young and single, / should sometimes fall to thinking of Mr. Klingenspiel and wonder what / manner of man he was.