Fiction Books

THE EMPTY HOUSE Certain houses, like certain persons, manage somehow to proclaim at once their character for evil. In the case of the latter, no particular feature need betray them; they may boast an open countenance and an ingenuous smile; and yet a little of their company leaves the unalterable conviction that there is something radically amiss with their being: that they are evil. Willy nilly, they... more...

SOME FICTION. "One More Unfortunate." It was midnight-a black, wet, midnight-in a great city by the sea. The church clocks were booming the hour, in tones half-smothered by the marching rain, when an officer of the watch saw a female figure glide past him like a ghost in the gloom, and make directly toward a wharf. The officer felt that some dreadful tragedy was about to be enacted, and started... more...

It was hard to get back into the easy current of everyday talk. Cora Albright's question had too rudely pulled them out of it, disturbing the quiet flow of inconsequential things. Even when they had recovered and were safely flowing along on the fact that the new hotel was to cost two hundred thousand dollars, after they had moved with apparent serenity to lamentation over a neighbor who was sick... more...

BOOK ONE THE BEATING HEART Jan of Ruffluck Croft never tired of telling about the day when his little girl came into the world. In the early morning he had been to fetch the midwife, and other helpers; all the forenoon and a good part of the afternoon he had sat on the chopping-block, in the woodshed, with nothing to do but to wait. Outside it rained in torrents and he came in for his share of the... more...

THE FIRE-EATERS long time ago there lived a man who had the biggest head in the world. Into it he had crammed all the knowledge that might be gathered from the four corners of the earth. Every one said he was the wisest man living. "If I could only find a wife," said the sage, "as wise for a woman as I am for a man, what a race of head-pieces we could bring into the world!" He waited... more...

I THOSE RUSSIAN VIOLETS There had been a brilliant reception at the house of Mrs. Adrian Colburn in honor of her guest—a most attractive young woman—from the East. The hours were brief, from five to seven. I had gone late and left early, but while there had made an engagement with Miss Caddington for the large ball to be given that night by the Boltons. Miss Caddington was a debutante. She had been... more...

PART ONE   When Miss Fox-Seton descended from the twopenny bus as it drew up, she gathered her trim tailor-made skirt about her with neatness and decorum, being well used to getting in and out of twopenny buses and to making her way across muddy London streets. A woman whose tailor-made suit must last two or three years soon learns how to protect it from splashes, and how to aid it to retain the... more...

CHAPTER FIRST. INTRODUCTION. One bright afternoon, or rather evening, in May, two girls, with basket in hand, were seen leaving the little seaport town in which they resided, for the professed purpose of primrose gathering, but in reality to enjoy the pure air of the first summer-like evening of a season, which had been unusually cold and backward. Their way lay through bowery lanes scented with sweet... more...

EMMA GOLDMAN ANARCHIST REBEL The hanging of several anarchists in 1887 as a consequence of the Haymarket bombing in Chicago caused many Americans to sympathize with the gibbeted radicals. Youths swathed in bright idealism, men and women rooted in equalitarian democracy, workers trusting in the rectitude of their government—all doubted the guilt of the condemned prisoners and were deeply perturbed by... more...

Chapter I Wherein the lady describes who she was, and by what signs her misfortunes were foreshadowed, and at what time, and where, and in what manner, and of whom she became enamored, with the description of the ensuing delight. In the time when the newly-vestured earth appears more lovely than during all the rest of the year came I into the world, begotten of noble parents and born amid the unstinted... more...