CHAPTER I In the first part of ROBINSON CRUSOE, at page one hundred and twenty-nine, you will find it thus written: "Now I saw, though too late, the Folly of beginning a Work before we count the Cost, and before we judge rightly of our own Strength to go through with it." Only yesterday, I opened my ROBINSON CRUSOE at that place. Only this morning (May twenty-first, Eighteen hundred and fifty),... more...

FIRST SCENE.—The Cottage on the Frontier.PREAMBLE.THE place is France. The time is autumn, in the year eighteen hundred and seventy—the year of the war between France and Germany. The persons are, Captain Arnault, of the French army; Surgeon Surville, of the French ambulance; Surgeon Wetzel, of the German army; Mercy Merrick, attached as nurse to the French ambulance; and Grace Roseberry, a... more...

CHAPTER I. OURSELVES. WE were three quiet, lonely old men, and SHE was a lively, handsome young woman, and we were at our wits' end what to do with her. A word about ourselves, first of all—a necessary word, to explain the singular situation of our fair young guest. We are three brothers; and we live in a barbarous, dismal old house called The Glen Tower. Our place of abode stands in a hilly,... more...

CHAPTER I. GREENWATER BROAD LOOK back, my memory, through the dim labyrinth of the past, through the mingling joys and sorrows of twenty years. Rise again, my boyhood's days, by the winding green shores of the little lake. Come to me once more, my child-love, in the innocent beauty of your first ten years of life. Let us live again, my angel, as we lived in our first paradise, before sin and... more...

THE STORY BEGUN BY WALTER HARTRIGHT (of Clement's Inn, Teacher of Drawing) This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a Man's resolution can achieve. If the machinery of the Law could be depended on to fathom every case of suspicion, and to conduct every process of inquiry, with moderate assistance only from the lubricating influences of oil of gold, the events... more...