Fiction Books

Subject. Population. Gist. “For some generations the colored element may continue to make decennial gains, but it is very probable that the next thirty years will be the last to show total gains, and then the decrease will be slow but sure until final disappearance.” I have taken this quotation from another work by the same author as it represents more clearly than any other condensed statement the... more...

Since the Koenig Wilhelm, of the Dutch East India Service, left Batavia, the sky had been torpidly blue, that suffocating indigo which seems so neighborly that the traveller fancies were he a trifle taller he could touch it with the ferule of his stick. When night came, the stars would issue from their ambush and stab it through and through, but the glittering cicatrices which they made left it bluer... more...

There was, many years ago, a gentleman who had a charming lady for his wife. They had one daughter only, who was very dutiful to her parents. But while she was still very young, her mamma died, to the grief of her husband and daughter. After a time, the little girl’s papa married another lady. Now this lady was proud and haughty, and had two grown-up daughters as disagreeable as herself; so the poor... more...

CHAPTER I TOMMY CONTRIVES TO KEEP ONE OUT The celebrated Tommy first comes into view on a dirty London stair, and he was in sexless garments, which were all he had, and he was five, and so though we are looking at him, we must do it sideways, lest he sit down hurriedly to hide them. That inscrutable face, which made the clubmen of his later days uneasy and even puzzled the ladies while he was making... more...

On its surface the choice was an easy one—Doak Parker's career in Washington against a highly suspect country girl he had just met. Doak Parker was thinking of June, when the light flashed. He was thinking of the two months' campaign and the very probable probability of his knocking her off this week-end. It was going to be a conquest to rank among his best. It was going to be.... The... more...

LECTURE. Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:— We have met together to consider the best methods of Educating, that is, drawing out, or developing the Human Nature common to all of us. Truly a subject not easy to be exhausted. For we all of us feel that the Human Nature,—out of whose bosom has flowed all history, all science, all poetry, all art, all life in short,—contains within itself far more... more...

CASE I: SECRET WORSHIP Harris, the silk merchant, was in South Germany on his way home from a business trip when the idea came to him suddenly that he would take the mountain railway from Strassbourg and run down to revisit his old school after an interval of something more than thirty years. And it was to this chance impulse of the junior partner in Harris Brothers of St. Paul's Churchyard that... more...

We have before us a volume of autograph letters, chiefly of soldiers and statesmen of the Revolution, and addressed to a good and brave man, General Palmer, who himself drew his sword in the cause. They are profitable reading in a quiet afternoon, and in a mood withdrawn from too intimate relation with the present time; so that we can glide backward some three quarters of a century, and surround... more...

In September, 1958, the author and two colleagues collected a large series of Pseudemys in small ponds and in a river in the basin of Cuatro Ciénegas, Coahuila. The specimens prove to represent a previously unrecognized subspecies of Pseudemys scripta. The subspecies is named in honor of Edward Harrison Taylor who has contributed more than any other person to our present knowledge of the herpetofauna... more...

A WORD OF APOLOGY FOR MY TITLE. Before I begin my story, let me crave my reader's indulgence for a brief word of explanation, for which I know no better form than a parable. There is an Eastern tale—I forget exactly where or by whom told—of a certain poor man, who, being in extreme distress, and sorely puzzled as to how to eke out a livelihood, bethought him to give out that he was a great... more...