Strangers Banquet
Donn Byrne
Hardcover
(GROSSET & DUNLAP, March 15, 1919)
Excerpt: With his long white beard and with his white hair, with his hook nose and his black eyes, with his little gold ear-rings, he was, as he sat back in his chair, his stick leaning against the arm of it, the coal fire playing on his face, a picture an Italian painter might have made. It was hard to believe he was eighty-seven years old. "I've sailed many seas in my time." His head wagged reminiscently. "North and south seas, east and west ones. From Java Island to Sandy Hook and from Boston town to San Francisco. There's no sea I haven't sailed." His daughter, sitting near him, twenty-two years old, dark as he himself had once been, with the same Hispano-Celtic features, softened, feminine, but from the same die, could hardly believe he was her father. He seemed like some epic figure from out of a dim past.