The Going of the White Swan

Classic short story. According to Wikipedia:" Sir Horatio Gilbert George Parker, 1st Baronet PC ( 23 November 1862 6 September 1932),[known as Gilbert Parker, Canadian novelist and British politician, was born at Camden East, Addington, Ontario… The best of his novels are those in which he first took for his subject the history and life of the French Canadians; and his permanent literary reputation rests on the fine quality, descriptive and dramatic, of his Canadian stories. Pierre and his People (1892) was followed by Mrs. Falchion (1893), The Trail of the Sword (1894), When Valmond came to Pontiac (1895), An Adventurer of Icy North (1895), and The Seats of the Mighty (1896, dramatized in 1897). The Seats of the Mighty was a historical novel depicting the English conquest of Quebec with James Wolfe and the Marquis de Montcalm as two of the characters. The Lane that had no Turning (1900) contains some of his best work. In The Battle of the Strong (1898) he broke new ground, laying his scene in the Channel Islands. His chief later books were The Right of Way (1901), Donovan Pasha (1902), The Ladder of Swords (1904), The Weavers (1907), Northern Lights (1909) and The Judgment House (1913). Parker had three that made it into the top 10 on the annual list of bestselling novels in the United States, two of which were on it for two years in a row. The 1905 New International Encyclopaedia claimed that it was the “dramatic quality of his . . . books [which] won for them [their] considerable popularity, despite their disregard of truth in local color."