Fiction Books

CHAPTER I. THE BLUE WALL I was born under the Blue Ridge, and under that side which is blue in the evening light, in a wild land of game and forest and rushing waters. There, on the borders of a creek that runs into the Yadkin River, in a cabin that was chinked with red mud, I came into the world a subject of King George the Third, in that part of his realm known as the province of North Carolina. The... more...

CHAPTER IHOW THE BOSS WON HIS TITLELate last Thursday evening one Jonas Rodney Potts, better known to this community as "Upright" Potts, stumbled into the mill-race, where it had providentially been left open just north of Cady's mill. Everything was going along finely until two hopeless busybodies were attracted to the spot by his screams, and fished him out. It is feared that he will... more...

THE OLD HOUSE. "Somewhat back from the village street Stands the old-fashioned country seat." Once upon a time in an old town, in an old street, there stood a very old house. Such a house as you could hardly find nowadays, however you searched, for it belonged to a gone-by time—a time now quite passed away. It stood in a street, but yet it was not like a town house, for though the front... more...

THE GROUND-HOG The day had dawned on the summit of Apache Leap and a golden eagle, wheeling high above the crags, flashed back the fire of the sun from his wings; but in the valley below where old Pinal lay sleeping the heat had not begun. A cool wind drew down from the black mouth of Queen Creek Canyon, stirring the listless leaves of the willows, and the shadow of the great cliff fell like a soothing... more...

Bert Leston Taylor (known the country over as “B. L. T.”) was the first of our day’s “colyumists”—first in point of time, and first in point of merit. For nearly twenty years, with some interruptions, he conducted “A Line-o’-Type or Two” on the editorial page of the Chicago . His broad column—broad by measurement, broad in scope, and a bit broad, now and again, in its... more...

MEMOIR OF GRACE AGUILAR. Grace Aguilar was born at Hackney, June 2nd, 1816. She was the eldest child, and only daughter of Emanuel Aguilar, one of those merchants descended from the Jews of Spain, who, almost within the memory of man, fled from persecution in that country, and sought and found an asylum in England. The delicate frame and feeble health observable in Grace Aguilar throughout her life,... more...

CHAPTER I On the borders of the Forest of Munza-mulgar lived once an old grey fruit-monkey of the name of Mutt-matutta. She had three sons, the eldest Thumma, the next Thimbulla, and the youngest, who was a Nizza-neela, Ummanodda. And they called each other for short, Thumb, Thimble, and Nod. The rickety, tumble-down old wooden hut in which they lived had been built 319 Munza years before by a... more...

Introduction. i. Introduction There are two great rivers of Europe which, in their course, offer a not uninstructive analogy to the Church of God. The Rhine and the Rhone both take their rise from mountain glaciers, and for the first hundred or hundred and fifty miles from their sources they run turbid as glacier streams always are, and for the most part turbulent as mountain torrents. Then they enter... more...

CHAPTER I. THE OUTLAWS. It was a bright morning in the month of August, when a lad of some fifteen years of age, sitting on a low wall, watched party after party of armed men riding up to the castle of the Earl of Evesham. A casual observer glancing at his curling hair and bright open face, as also at the fashion of his dress, would at once have assigned to him a purely Saxon origin; but a keener eye... more...

CHAPTER I "You chump," I thought contemptuously. I was seven years old at the time, and the gentleman to whom I referred was Henry Ward Beecher. What it was that aroused my contempt for the man will be more fully understood if I tell first of the grudge that I bore him. I was sitting in my mother's pew in the old church in Brooklyn. I was altogether too small for the pew, it was much too... more...