Title:  Tracy Park

Author:  Mary Jane Holmes

Release Date:  March 10, 2005 [eBook #15321]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ISO-646-us (us-ASCII)

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TRACY PARK

A Novel

by

Mrs. Mary J. Holmes,

Author of Bessie’s Fortune, Queenie Hetherton, Edith Lysle’s Secret,
Homestead on the Hillside, etc., etc., etc.

Toronto: 
Rose Publishing Company
Hunter Rose & Co. 
Printers & Book Binders
Toronto
25 Wellington St

1886

“Don’t stand and cry; press forward and remove the difficulty.”—­Dickens.

CHAPTER I.

The telegram.

’Brevoort house, new York, Oct. 6th, 18—.

’To Mr. Frank Tracy, Tracy Park, Shannondale.

’I arrived in the Scotia this morning, and shall take the train for Shannondale at 3 p.m.  Send someone to the station to meet us.

‘Arthur Tracey.’

This was the telegram which the clerk in the Shannonville office wrote out one October morning, and despatched to the Hon. Frank Tracy, of Tracy Park, in the quiet town of Shannondale, where our story opens.

Mr. Frank Tracy, who, since his election to the State Legislature for two successive terms, had done nothing except to attend political meetings and make speeches on all public occasions, had an office in town, where he usually spent his mornings, smoking, reading the papers and talking to Mr. Colvin, his business agent and lawyer, for, though born in one of the humblest of New England houses, where the slanting roof almost touched the ground in the rear, and he could scarcely stand upright in the chamber where he slept, Mr. Frank Tracy was a great man now, and as he dashed along the turnpike behind his blooded bays, with his driver beside him, people looked admiringly after him, and pointed him out to strangers as the Hon. Mr. Tracy, of Tracy Park, one of the finest places in the county.  It is true it did not belong to him, but he had lived there so long that he had come to look upon it as his, while his neighbors, too, seemed to have forgotten that there was across the ocean a Mr. Arthur Tracy, who might at any time come home to claim his own, and demand an account of his brother’s stewardship.  And it was this very Arthur Tracy, whose telegram announcing his return from Europe was read by his brother with mingled feelings of surprise and consternation.