Millisecond Publishing Company, Inc.

12/22/2025

A bide at 14… then

At 14, she was a bride. By 17, she was a fugitive sentenced to death by fire.

Her story doesn't begin like a fairy tale. It begins in 17th-century France, a world of rigid rules and expectations, especially for women.

Born the daughter of a master fencer who trained the King's pages, she learned to handle a sword before she learned courtly manners. She mastered the art of the duel, a skill forbidden to her gender and by the law.

She was married off to a man named Sieur de Maupin, given a respectable name and a gilded cage.

But this cage was never going to hold her.

She left her husband and set off for a life of her own making, often dressing in men's clothing for the freedom and safety it provided. She earned money by giving fencing demonstrations in taverns, proving her skill against any man who dared to challenge her.

Her voice was as powerful as her sword arm. She joined a traveling opera company, where her talent was undeniable. It was there she fell in love with a young woman, a romance that society condemned.

Her lover's parents discovered the affair and forced their daughter into a convent, hoping to lock her away from the world and from the duelist who had captured her heart.

For most, the story would end there. With stone walls and a broken heart.

But she was not most people.

She hatched an impossible plan. Joining the convent as a novice, she waited for the right moment. When an elderly nun passed away, she saw her chance.

In the dead of night, she crept into the morgue, carried the deceased nun's body to her lover's cell, and placed it in the bed.

Then, she set the room on fire.

In the ensuing chaos, the two lovers slipped away into the darkness, leaving the world to believe one of them had tragically perished in the flames.

The courts pieced together the truth and condemned the unknown "abductor" to be burned at the stake. They issued the warrant for a man, never imagining a woman was behind the daring act.

She fought with her sword when challenged. She loved with her whole heart. She lived without apology.

Her life only grew more audacious. She engaged in at least ten fatal duels, fought her landlord, and scandalized the court. Yet her talent was so immense that she was personally pardoned not once, but twice, by King Louis XIV himself.

She became a prima donna at the Paris Opéra, one of the most famous singers of her time. Composers wrote roles specifically for her powerful voice.

Today, her story is a reminder that history isn't just shaped by kings and generals, but by individuals who refuse to fit the mold. She refused to be a footnote in a man's world.

She was a storm in human form, an artist and a warrior who demanded to be seen.

Sources: Los Angeles Public Library Blog / Wikipedia

12/16/2025

😌🫶👌

11/15/2025

Mary had a lamb.....

Nine-year-old Mary Sawyer follows her father inside—and spots a lamb left behind.
Its twin is nursing strongly. This one is motionless, rejected, barely breathing. Her father shrugs: nature’s way, nothing to be done. But Mary feels the tiny ribs fluttering under her fingers and can’t accept it. She begs, keeps asking until he finally sighs and lets her try.
Inside the farmhouse, Mary wraps the lamb in an old garment and settles by the hearth. Hour after hour she warms it against her dress, dribbles milk between its lips, and listens to the faint, stubborn heartbeat. By dawn, the impossible has happened: the lamb can stand.
Nursed on kitchen milk and child-sized determination, the animal recovers—and imprints on its rescuer. It knows Mary’s voice. It trots after her in the yard, at chores, on the walk to the one-room Redstone School. One day, on a dare from her brother, Mary sneaks the lamb into class in a basket.
When she’s called to recite, the lamb bursts out, bleating as it scrambles after her. Children howl with laughter, the teacher half-scolds, half-smiles—and a visiting student named John Roulstone quietly turns the scene into a little poem about “Mary” and her rule-breaking lamb.
Years later, writer Sarah Josepha Hale publishes an expanded version in Poems for Our Children, and the rhyme spreads through classrooms across America. In 1877, when Thomas Edison needs test words for his new phonograph, he reaches for that familiar verse. Mary’s lamb becomes the first human words ever played back by machine.
Mary grows old, then quietly steps forward to say, “I am the Mary,” selling bits of yarn from stockings knitted from her lamb’s wool to save a historic church. Today a statue of the lamb stands in Sterling—a reminder that the world’s most famous nursery rhyme began with a child who wouldn’t walk away from a dying animal.
One small act of mercy became a story every child can sing.

11/13/2025

😟🧐🤫

Arizona Territory, March 15, 1860.
Larcena Ann Pennington, age twenty-three, was convalescing at her husband John Page’s lumber camp in Madera Canyon, south of Fort Buchanan.
Page stepped away with a partner; a small raiding party appeared.
Sources agree they were Apache; band identifications vary between Pinal and Tonto.
Larcena and her pupil, Mercedes Sais Quiroz, were forced from camp and driven east along the mountain base.
On the march the captors beat and stabbed Larcena.
Thinking she would die, they shoved her over a rocky ledge and kept Mercedes.
She landed among brush and boulders and could not stand.
After nightfall cooled the rocks, she began to move.
Not walking—crawling, west toward the camp and Fort Buchanan she knew.
Accounts place the crawl at roughly fourteen to sixteen days.
Distances reported cluster around fifteen miles over broken foothill terrain.
She survived on melted patches of snow and bits of wild greens, sometimes called pine buds in retellings.
Fever followed; coyotes trailed her blood scent.
By late March she reached the landmark the crews called the “Big Rock.”
Workers recognized her and rushed word to Tucson.
Physician L. C. (often printed C. B.) Hughes treated her extensive wounds.
The Army later recovered Mercedes in a prisoner exchange near Fort Buchanan.
Larcena healed slowly but resumed life in the territory.
In 1861, amid violence after the Bascom Affair, John Page was killed.
She later married Judge William F. Scott and remained in Tucson civic life.
The city memorialized the family in Pennington Street; Scott Avenue honors her second husband.
Historians debate details—the raiders’ exact band and the crawl’s precise length—but the core record is consistent: date, place, injuries, survival, and recovery.
Her ordeal endures in Southwest memory as a documented case of extreme endurance on a contested borderland.

11/10/2025

On this date in history, November 10, 1871, one of the most famous greetings in history took place in the heart of Africa.

Journalist Henry Morton Stanley had spent months on a grueling expedition, funded by the New York Herald, to find a man the world thought was lost forever.

That man was Dr. David Livingstone, a celebrated Scottish missionary and explorer who had been out of contact for years while on a personal quest to find the source of the Nile River.

Stanley's caravan finally arrived in the small village of Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in what is now Tanzania.

There, he saw a weary, older European man. Trying to maintain his composure, Stanley approached, tipped his hat, and uttered the now-immortal words: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" 🗺️

Livingstone, who had not spoken with another European in years, simply replied, "Yes, and I feel thankful that I am here to welcome you."

The journey had been perilous for Stanley, but he had accomplished his mission, creating a media sensation back home and cementing his own fame. 🤝

Interestingly, the famous greeting is only recorded in Stanley's own account of the events. Livingstone’s personal letters and journals don't mention the specific phrase, leaving a small mystery in this legendary encounter.

The meeting became one of the great moments of 19th-century exploration and captured the public's imagination for generations.

11/09/2025

The Woman Who Rides the Wind

She does not guide the horse—
the earth does.
Hooves follow the heartbeat
of the land that raised her.

Her eyes are closed,
yet she sees farther
than those who stare too hard
at the world.

In the braids of the mane,
in the woven patterns of her dress,
live the stories of her people—
carried, not spoken.

She rides not to arrive,
but to remember:
that freedom is not a place,
it is a spirit moving forward
with the wind at its back.

🎨 Minda Moris
👉 You Just check the comments or send me a message with the image you like and I'll send you a direct link to the piece!

11/04/2025

love song

10/21/2025

George Washington

10/11/2025

did you know?

In the summer of 1816, farmers in New England looked on in disbelief as frost and even snow fell in July, devastating their crops. ❄️

This bizarre weather wasn't a local event. It was the direct result of something that had happened a year earlier and thousands of miles away on a remote Indonesian island.

On April 10, 1815, Mount Tambora erupted in what is still the largest and most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human history. It was ten times more powerful than the more famous Krakatoa eruption.

The explosion was so immense it launched over 100 cubic kilometers of rock, ash, and sulfur into the stratosphere. This material formed a vast aerosol veil that circled the globe and blocked sunlight from reaching the Earth's surface. 🌋

What followed was the year 1816, which became known as the "Year Without a Summer." Global temperatures dropped, causing chaos for agriculture worldwide.

While New Englanders dealt with summer frosts, the situation was even worse in other parts of the world. Europe experienced widespread famine, and in China, the delayed monsoon season led to massive crop failures.

The immediate blast from Tambora killed around 11,000 people. But the global cooling and resulting starvation and disease that followed claimed the lives of over 100,000 more in the following years.

The eruption’s effects were felt for years, altering weather patterns and causing widespread hardship long after the dust from the volcano had settled.

Sources: Royal Society historical records, Farmer's Almanac 1817, British Colonial Archives