In Honey's House

By Wolcott LeCléar Beard

In Honey's House by Wolcott LeClear Beard is about a young doctor from France who reconnects with a mysterious old friend. Excerpt: "Because I had been a captain-doctor in France, where inconsiderate Teutons injected some mustard gas and a few bits of H.E. shells into my system, my uncle and only relative purchased for me the practice of Old Doctor Jenkins…"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 4064066435189

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Wolcott LeCléar Beard

In Honey's House

Published by Good Press, 2020

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EAN 4064066435189

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BECAUSE I had been a captain-doctor in France, where inconsiderate Teutons injected some mustard-gas and a few bits of H.E. shell into my system, my uncle and only relative purchased for me the practice of old Doctor Jenkins, who was anxious to retire. These facts are here given because they serve to explain me and my domiciliary advent in Greenwich Village. My advent is of importance, so far as this story is concerned, only because it placed me in a position to narrate said story.

Having thus attended to the above matters, I can begin fairly at the moment when I alighted at the Christopher Street Station from a Ninth Avenue train, dressed in brand-new civilian clothes. Setting my suitcase down on the platform, and assuming the attitude best calculated to ease the leg with a limp in it, I drew two keys from my pocket and proceeded to examine the tags that were fastened to them. They bore the inscriptions Front Door and Back Door, respectively, with an address under each. The latter address was on Christopher Street.

‘Back Door' has the jump on 'Front Door' by nearly five blocks, said I to myself. It mayn't be a very dignified manner in which to enter my new domain, but this gimpy leg of mine isn't strong on dignity, just now. 'Back Door' wins!

So I stumped eastward, and soon found the door I sought. It was set in a brick wall and led, as nearly as I could make out, into the back room of a corner saloon. Upon entering, however, I discovered my mistake.

I found myself in a narrow, flagged alley which evidently, when New York still lay south of Canal Street, and Greenwich Village really was a village, had led from a back lane through a garden. To one side grew an ailanthus-tree, with the sunshine of late spring filtering greenly through its leaves. A stone arch, within which the original garden-gate must have swung, still was standing, just inside the doorway that had admitted me. On the flat top of this arch stood a large flower pot with a dead geranium in it.

I am not likely soon to forget that flower-pot. It, the arch, the flagged alley, and the tree together formed, as it seemed to me, a quaintly picturesque fragment of