Fiction Books

CHAPTER I I To take Mark Sabre at the age of thirty-four, and in the year 1912, and at the place Penny Green is to necessitate looking back a little towards the time of his marriage in 1904, but happens to find him in good light for observation. Encountering him hereabouts, one who had shared school days with him at his preparatory school so much as twenty-four years back would have found matter for... more...

FISHERMAN'S LUCK Has it ever fallen in your way to notice the quality of the greetings that belong to certain occupations? There is something about these salutations in kind which is singularly taking and grateful to the ear. They are as much better than an ordinary "good day" or a flat "how are you?" as a folk-song of Scotland or the Tyrol is better than the futile love-ditty of... more...

INTRODUCTION. The Phaedrus is closely connected with the Symposium, and may be regarded either as introducing or following it. The two Dialogues together contain the whole philosophy of Plato on the nature of love, which in the Republic and in the later writings of Plato is only introduced playfully or as a figure of speech. But in the Phaedrus and Symposium love and philosophy join hands, and one is... more...

Those adventurous gentlemen who derive exhilaration from peril, and extract febrifuge for the high pressure of a too exuberant constitution from the difficulties of the Alps, cannot find such peaks as the Aiguille Verte and the Matterhorn, with their friable and precipitous cliffs, among the Rocky Mountains. The geological processes have been gentler in evolving the latter than the former, and in the... more...

WHICH DESCRIBES, AMONG OTHER THINGS, A PAIR OF WHISKERS In the writing of books, as all the world knows, two things are above all other things essential—the one is to know exactly when and where to leave off, and the other to be equally certain when and where to begin. Now this book, naturally enough, begins with Mr. Brimberly's whiskers; begins at that moment when he coughed and pulled down his... more...

INTRODUCTION. The Protagoras, like several of the Dialogues of Plato, is put into the mouth of Socrates, who describes a conversation which had taken place between himself and the great Sophist at the house of Callias—'the man who had spent more upon the Sophists than all the rest of the world'—and in which the learned Hippias and the grammarian Prodicus had also shared, as well as... more...

COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLES The principles established by the Rochdale Pioneers in England in 1844 and observed consistently by successful societies since that time are as follows: 1. Earnings of capital stock limited to legal or current rate of interest. 2. Surplus earnings to be returned to members in proportion to patronage. 3. One vote for each member regardless of amount of stock owned. No proxy voting... more...

Letter from Professor Albrecht Aigen, University of Brunn, to the Herr General Johann von Steppberg, retired. My dear General von Steppberg: It is with reluctance that I intrude upon your retirement, but at the request of the Government I have undertaken a scientific examination of the causes which brought about The Leader's rise to power, the extraordinary popularity of his regime, the... more...

THE BOY THE ELF Sunday, March twentieth. Once there was a boy. He was—let us say—something like fourteen years old; long and loose-jointed and towheaded. He wasn't good for much, that boy. His chief delight was to eat and sleep; and after that—he liked best to make mischief. It was a Sunday morning and the boy's parents were getting ready to go to church. The boy sat on the edge of the... more...

CHAPTER 1. TWO MEN AND A WOMAN "Mr. Ridgway, ma'am." The young woman who was giving the last touches to the very effective picture framed in her long looking-glass nodded almost imperceptibly. She had come to the parting of the ways, and she knew it, with a shrewd suspicion as to which she would choose. She had asked for a week to decide, and her heart-searching had told her nothing new.... more...