CHAPTER I. It was a warm June evening, and the family was taking the air on the back porch—father and mother, two stalwart young men, the elder sons, two slender girls, and a romping boy of nine—the little Benjamin of the tribe. It was a placid homelike group; father deep in the daily paper and his easy-chair, mother absorbed in chat with the girls even while keeping watchful eye on "the... more...

I. SESSION OF OCTOBER 1, 1884. The Delegates to the International Meridian Conference, who assembled in Washington upon invitation addressed by the Government of the United States to all nations holding diplomatic relations with it, "for the purpose of fixing upon a meridian proper to be employed as a common zero of longitude and standard of time-reckoning throughout the globe," held their... more...

V.—IN PURSUIT OF A PASSPORT.THE SIGN OF THE "STORK"."The Strasburgers have a legend—" We were rolling along very comfortably in the engineer's coach. From pavement to bridge, and from bridge to pavement, we effected the long step which bestrides the Rhine. "I knew you would prick your ears up at the word. Well, I have found a legend among the people here about the original... more...

FITZ-GREENE HALLECK. The author of Fanny, Burns, Marco Bozzaris, etc., was born at Guilford in Connecticut, in August, 1795, and in his eighteenth year removed to the city of New-York. He evinced a taste for poetry and wrote verses at a very early period; but the oldest of his effusions I have seen are those under the signatures of "Croaker," and "Croaker & Co.," published in the... more...

ithin a thick-walled sphere of steel eight feet in diameter, with crystal-clear fused-quartz windows, there crouched an alert young scientist, George Abbot. The sphere rested on the primeval muck and slime at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, one mile beneath the surface.Marooned on the sea-floor, his hoisting cable cut, young Abbot is left at the mercy of the man-sharks.The beam from his 200-watt... more...

The Latest Viewpoints of Men Worth While Stuyvesant Fish Says That Americans Are Wasteful, While Pastor Wagner Praises Our National Character—John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Professor Fagnani Discuss Joseph's Corner in Corn—Thomas F. Ryan Holds That Opportunity to Win Wealth is Necessary to Industrial Progress—Andrew Carnegie as the Financier of Spelling Reform—With Other Opinions of... more...

For several weeks the attention of the curious has been more and more attracted to a remarkable ethnological exhibition at the Society Library. Two persons, scarcely larger than the fabled gentlemen of Lilliput, (though one is twelve or thirteen and the other eighteen years of age), of just and even elegant proportions, and physiognomies striking and peculiar, but not deficient in intellect or... more...

ON THIS SIDE. VII. It has not been concealed that, with all his fine qualities, Mr. Ketchum was an obstinate man, and so, in spite of his wife's remonstrances, he came down-stairs next morning—Sunday morning—in a dress that she had assured him was "only fit for one's bedroom,"—namely, a very gorgeous Oriental dressing-gown (Mabel's gift the preceding Christmas), with a fez... more...

We all held our breath as the coach rushed through the semi-darkness of Galloper’s Ridge. The vehicle itself was only a huge lumbering shadow; its side-lights were carefully extinguished, and Yuba Bill had just politely removed from the lips of an outside passenger even the cigar with which he had been ostentatiously exhibiting his coolness. For it had been rumoured that the Ramon Martinez gang of... more...

Part the Last. There was a crowd and a clamour in the principal coffee-house of Pampeluna at nine o'clock on a July evening, that of the first day after Don Baltasar's escape from the town. The numerous tables were surrounded by officers of Cordova's army, still flushed with their recent victory, and eager to enjoy to the utmost a period of relaxation, which, for aught they knew, the... more...