The Project Gutenberg EBook of The New Forest Spy, by George Manville Fenn
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Title: The New Forest Spy
Author: George Manville Fenn
Illustrator: W.D.E. Evans
Release Date: November 15, 2007 [EBook #23502]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW FOREST SPY ***
Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England
The New Forest Spy, by George Manville Fenn.
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The hero, living in a big house in the New Forest, is a teenager, Waller
Froy. His father is away, and he is out fishing in the Forest, when he
encounters a strange boy of his own age. Initially they each assume the
other to be an adversary, but Waller then realises that the other boy is
harmless, and has become lost from a party of Jacobite gentlemen from
France. Of course this is ridiculous, because we are now in the days of
King George the Third, and no Jacobite revival is likely or possible,
but the soldiers are out looking for this lad and his former companions.
So Waller decides to take him home and look after him till he is a bit
less starved. The boy's name is Godfrey Boyne. But from a tiny
incident news gets out that there are strange noises in the house, as
though there was another person in the attics. And so the military,
accompanied by the village constable, arrive, to search the house. This
is a very comic event, and the soldiers retreat empty-handed. Help
comes from an unexpected quarter, and Waller manages to organise his
friend Godfrey with a trip back to France in a local fishing boat.
It's a short book, or a long short story, and was published under the
same binding as "Through Forest and Stream". But neither of these books
appears in any of the lists of Fenn's works, though it certainly appears
from internal evidence that they are genuine. The way they were bound
there was no title page for this book, nor lists of the contents and of
the illustrations, so for our pdf version we have had to recreate these.
It actually is an enjoyable book, and makes a good read or a good
listen.
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