Speeches At the Lotos Club

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: WILKIE COLLINS AT THE DINNER IN HIS HONOR, SEPTEMBER 27, 1873 MANY years ago?more years than I now quite like to reckon?I was visiting Sorrento, in the Bay of Naples, with my father, mother, and brothers, as a boy of thirteen. At that time of my life I was an insatiable reader of that order of books for which heavy people have invented the name of light literature. In due course of time I exhausted the modest resources of the library which we had brought to Naples, and found myself faced with the necessity of borrowing from the resources of our fellow-travelers, summer residents of Sorrento like ourselves. Among them was a certain countryman of yours, very tall, very lean, very silent, and very melancholy. In what circumstances the melancholy of this gentleman took its rise I am not able to tell you. The l