Get Disney Plus in Hulu in a brand new bundle.

Better together for only $9.99 a month.

Offer valid for eligible subscribers only, terms apply.

See DisneyBundle.com for details.

The Trail of the Serpent by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

Book the first, a respectable young man.

Chapter 1.

The Good School Master.

I don't suppose it rained harder in the good town of Slapperton on the slashe than it rained

anywhere else.

But it did rain.

There was scarcely an umbrella in Slapperton that could hold its own against the rain that

came pouring down that November afternoon between the hours of four and five.

Every gutter in High Street, Slapperton, every gutter in Broad Street, which was of course

the narrowest street, in New Street, which by the same rule was the oldest street, in

East Street, West Street, Blue Dragon Street, and Windmill Street.

Every gutter in every one of these thoroughfares was a little Niagara with a maelstrom at the

corner, down which such small craft is bits of orange peel, old boots and shoes, scraps

of paper, and fragments of rag were absorbed.

These better ships have been in the great Northern Whirlpool.

That dingy stream, the slashe, was swollen into a kind of dirty Mississippi, and the graceful

coal-barges which adorned its bosom were stripped of the clotheslines and fluttering linen,

...