The Entire Short Works of George Meredith

玘
The Entire Short Works of George Meredith?by George Meredith

The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Entire Short Works of George Meredith
by George Meredith #105 in our series by George Meredith
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg file.
We encourage you to keep this file, exactly as it is, on your own disk, thereby keeping an electronic path open for future readers.
Please do not remove this.
This header should be the first thing seen when anyone starts to view the etext. Do not change or edit it without written permission. The words are carefully chosen to provide users with the information they need to understand what they may and may not do with the etext. To encourage this, we have moved most of the information to the end, rather than having it all here at the beginning.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
*****These Etexts Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get etexts, and further information, is included below. We need your donations.
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541 Find out about how to make a donation at the bottom of this file.

Title: The Entire Short Works of George Meredith
Author: George Meredith
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4499] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on March 5, 2002]
The Project Gutenberg Etext The Entire Short Works of George Meredith *********This file should be named gn05v10.txt or gn05v10.zip********
Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, gn05v11.txt VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, gn05v10a.txt
Project Gutenberg Etexts are often created from several printed editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we usually do not keep etexts in compliance with any particular paper edition.
The "legal small print" and other information about this book may now be found at the end of this file. Please read this important information, as it gives you specific rights and tells you about restrictions in how the file may be used.

This etext was produced by David Widger

[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an entire meal of them. D.W.]

THE ENTIRE SHORT WORKS OF GEORGE MEREDITH
CONTENTS: Farina Case of General Opel The Tale of Chloe The House on the Beach The Gentleman of Fifty The Sentimentalists Miscellaneous Prose

FARINA
By George Meredith
THE WHITE ROSE CLUB
In those lusty ages when the Kaisers lifted high the golden goblet of Aachen, and drank, elbow upward, the green-eyed wine of old romance, there lived, a bow-shot from the bones of the Eleven Thousand Virgins and the Three Holy Kings, a prosperous Rhinelander, by name Gottlieb Groschen, or, as it was sometimes ennobled, Gottlieb von Groschen; than whom no wealthier merchant bartered for the glory of his ancient mother- city, nor more honoured burgess swallowed impartially red juice and white under the shadow of his own fig-tree.
Vine-hills, among the hottest sun-bibbers of the Rheingau, glistened in the roll of Gottlieb's possessions; corn-acres below Cologne; basalt- quarries about Linz; mineral-springs in Nassau, a legacy of the Romans to the genius and enterprise of the first of German traders. He could have bought up every hawking crag, owner and all, from Hatto's Tower to Rheineck. Lore-ley, combing her yellow locks against the night-cloud, beheld old Gottlieb's rafts endlessly stealing on the moonlight through the iron pass she peoples above St. Goar. A wailful host were the wives of his raftsmen widowed there by her watery music!
This worthy citizen of Cologne held vasty manuscript letters of the Kaiser addressed to him:
'Dear Well-born son and Subject of mine, Gottlieb!' and he was easy with the proudest princes of the Holy German Realm. For Gottlieb was a money- lender and an honest man in one body. He laid out for the plenteous harvests of usury, not pressing the seasons with too much rigour. 'I sow my seed in winter,' said he, 'and hope to reap good profit in autumn; but if the crop be scanty, better let it lie and fatten the soil.'
'Old earth's the wisest creditor,' he would add; 'she never squeezes the sun, but just takes what he can give her year by year, and so makes sure of good annual interest.'
Therefore when people asked Gottlieb how he had risen to such a pinnacle of fortune, the old merchant screwed his eye into its wisest corner, and answered slyly, 'Because I 've always been a student of the heavenly