Life at High Tide

Nathaniel May comes home nearly blind, with twenty-four cents, a bag of odd wheels and lenses, and a machine he believes will let the living see the dead.

In a sun-baked New England village, the town has decided that its penniless former schoolteacher belongs at the Poor Farm. Lizzie Graham, a widowed neighbor with little to spare, hears of his plea for time to finish his invention—and sees more than Jonesville’s gossiping crowd does: a man in need of kindness. But taking him in could cost her a good name, and there is no guarantee his strange machine will ever work. In this story from William Dean Howells’s collection of lives shaped by everyday hardship, can Lizzie make room for Nathaniel—and his hope?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.