by Willa Cather
9 pension: Inexpensive hotel.
10 fêtes: Celebratory parties.
THE ENCHANTED BLUFF
1 freshets: New and usually temporary streams formed from a swollen, overflowing river.
2 seine-fishing: Fishing with nets.
3 Golden Days for Boys and Girls was a magazine published from 1880 to 1907 in Philadelphia.
4 big red rock: The Enchanted Mesa of Cather’s novel The Professor’s House (1925) is prefigured in this specific reference.
THE JOY OF NELLY DEANE
1 Queen Esther (1689) is a tragic play by Jean Racine, written originally for a production by French schoolgirls. The plot is drawn from the Old Testament story of Esther and Ahasuerus in the Book of Esther. Richard Giannone offers direct points of comparison between the biblical Esther and Nelly (p. 47) and suggests an even more likely adaptation of the material than Racine’s: the American composer William B. Bradbury’s 1856 oratorio Esther, the Beautiful Queen.
2 three patient dressers: Susan Rosowski (p. 147) and Mary Ruth Ryder (pp. 85-88) see Mrs. Dow, Mrs. Freeze, and Mrs. Spinny as clear incarnations of the Greek Fates, the Moirai.
3 “The Ninety and Nine”: The first words in Elizabeth Cecelia Douglass Clephane’s hymn “The Lost Sheep” (1868).
4 chromo of Hagar and Ishmael: A chromolithograph is a print made by using inked stones in the lithographic process. The subjects of the print are the bondswoman and the son of Abraham, both cast out into the desert after the birth of Isaac, Abraham’s son by Sarah (Genesis 21 : 14).
5 isinglass: Semitransparent whitish gel hardened into sheets and used like panes of glass.
BEHIND THE SINGER TOWER
1 arrack: An alcoholic beverage, from the Far East, that includes coconut and palm juices.
2 “racial characteristics”—a euphemistic reference to Jewishness.
3 a gang of twenty dagos: Hallet prefers to get his training as an architect from the bottom up, beginning with the crew of Italian day labourers who are putting in the foundations of the new hotel.
4 Ischia: An island in the Tyrrhenian Sea; near Naples, Italy.
5 Buono soldato: Good soldier (Italian).
6 ‘È necessario, signore . . . ma, perchè?’ Protesting at first that he must return home, as he has promised his mother, Caesarino is calmed by Hallet’s presence, and finally simply questions his own needless death as he asks, “but why?”
7 guineas: An insulting term for “Italians.”
8 Moloch: Title of “king” in the ancient Canaanite kingdom.
OLD MRS. HARRIS
1 velocipedes: Early forms of self-propelled cycles, bicycles, and railroad handcars.
2 the bound girl: A family servant virtually adopted, rather than hired, for lifelong service. See John March’s discussion of the Cather family’s “bound girl” Marjorie Anderson, upon whom the character Mandy is clearly based (pp. 456-58).
3 Tom Sawyer: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a novel (1876) by Mark Twain (1835-1910).
4 Waverley Novels: Begun in 1814, this was a series of romantic novels, written in English, by the Scottish novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832).
5 Wilhelm Meister: A novel (1796) of character development by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).
6 Faust: A play by Goethe (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1832) of the figure Georg Faust, who risked his soul for the reward of great knowledge.
7 a new cloak of the sleeveless dolman type: A Turkish-style cape, with holes for the arms and open in front.
8 Rigoletto: An opera (1851) by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), set in Renaissance Italy.
9 Le but ... the road is all: In several works, Cather attributes this phrase to Michelet, but the exact source is uncertain. See the discussion of the quotation in John March (pp. 487-88).
10 Jules Michelet, a French historian (1798-1874).
11 The Chimes of Normandy: A very popular light opera by Jean-Robert Planquette (1848-1903), first performed in Paris as Les Cloches de Corneville in 1877.
12 Joe’s Luck: A novel by Horatio Alger, Jr., which was written in 1877, serialized in 1878, and published as part of the Boys’ Home Libraries series in 1888.
13 Pilgrim’s Progress: A Christian allegory (Part I, 1678; Part II, 1684) by John Bunyan. The passage quoted echoes the words of the Book of Revelation (14 : 13).