CHAPTER I. THE MISCHIEF-MAKERS. "Here, Noddy Newman! you haven't washed out the boat-house yet," said Ben, the boatman, as the young gentleman thus addressed was ambling down towards the river. "Hang the boat-house!" exclaimed Noddy, impatiently, as he stopped short in his walk, and seemed to be in doubt whether he should return or continue on his way. "You know what Miss Bertha says—don't you?" "Yes, I know what she says," added... more...

I. Flora Lee’s birthday came in July. Her mother wished very much to celebrate the occasion in a proper manner. Flora was a good girl, and her parents were always glad to do any thing they could to please her, and to increase her happiness. They were very indulgent parents, and as they had plenty of money, they could afford to pay well for a “good time.” Yet they were not weak and silly in their indulgence. As much as they... more...

CHAPTER I. A NOVEL BATTLE. "Pull him along, Carlos! Pull him along!" shouted a young gentleman about sixteen years of age, as he danced about on the back porch of his uncle's house, in a state of great excitement; "why don't you pull him along?" "He'll come, after awhile," replied the person addressed; "but he is very wild and obstinate." The boy on the porch was almost beside himself—so much so, in fact, that he found it utterly... more...

I HOW DON QUIXOTE WAS KNIGHTED Some three or four hundred years ago, there lived in sunny Spain an old gentleman named Quixada, who owned a house and a small property near a village in La Mancha. With him lived his niece, a housekeeper, and a man who looked after Quixada's farm and his one old white horse, which, though its master imagined it to be an animal of great strength and beauty, was really as lean as Quixada himself and as broken down... more...

WHAT SHALL WE BUILD? our children were playing on the sea-shore. They had gathered bright pebbles and beautiful shells, and written their names in the pure, white sand; but at last, tired of their sport, they were about going home, when one of them, as they came to a pile of stones, cried out: "Oh! let us build a fort; and we will call that ship away out there, an enemy's vessel, and make believe we are firing great cannon balls into her!"... more...

Among the great wars of history there are few, if any, instances of so long and successfully sustained a struggle, against enormous odds, as that of the Seven Years' War, maintained by Prussia--then a small and comparatively insignificant kingdom--against Russia, Austria, and France simultaneously, who were aided also by the forces of most of the minor principalities of Germany. The population of Prussia was not more than five millions, while... more...

Birds called. Breezes played among branches just bursting into green. Daffodils, proud and erect, stood in clumps about the dazzling lawn. Young, pulsing, eager things elbowed their way through last year's leaves to taste the morning sun; the wide-eyed celandine, yellower than butter; the little violet, hugging the earth for fear of being seen; the sturdy bourgeois daisy; the pale-faced anemone, earliest to wake and earliest to sleep; the blue... more...

THE FARM ON THE PENNESSEEWASSEE Away down East in the Pine Tree State, there is a lake dearer to my heart than all the other waters of this fair earth, for its shores were the scenes of my boyhood, when Life was young and the world a romance still unread. Dearer to the heart;—for then glowed that roseate young joy and faith in life and its grand possibilities; that hope and confidence that great things can be done and that the doing of... more...

CHAPTER I. Harry Loudon Makes Up His Mind. On a wooden bench under a great catalpa-tree, in the front yard of a comfortable country-house in Virginia, sat Harry and Kate Loudon worrying their minds. It was all about old Aunt Matilda. Aunt Matilda was no relation of these children. She was an old colored woman, who lived in a cabin about a quarter of a mile from their house, but they considered her one of their best friends. Her old log cabin... more...

CHAPTER I HIS HIGHNESS   His Highness came by the nickname honestly enough and yet those who heard it for the first time had difficulty in repressing a smile at the incongruity of the title. In fact perhaps no term could have been found that would have been less appropriate. For Walter King possessed neither dignity of rank nor of stature. On the contrary he was a short, snub-nosed boy of fifteen, the epitome of good humor and democracy.... more...