Fiction Books

Big Reuben’s Raid “ Wake up, boys! Wake up! Tumble out, there! Quick! Big Reuben’s into the pig-pen again!” Our bedroom door was banged wide open, and my father stood before us—a startling apparition—dressed only in his night-shirt and a pair of boots, carrying a stable-lantern in one hand and a rifle in the other. “What is it?” cried Joe, as he bounced out of bed; and, “Where is... more...

In vain do the inhabitants of London go to their conduits for supply unless the man who has the master-key turns the water on; and in vain do we think to quench our thirst at ordinances, unless God communicates the living water of His Spirit.—Anon. It was the custom of the Roman emperors, at their triumphal entrance, to cast new coins among the multitudes; so doth Christ, in His triumphal ascension... more...

"Pardon! Madame does not know that this is a smoking-carriage?" "But yes. Monsieur is very good. It is that my husband would smoke. He is an old soldier. He smokes all the time. Ciel! They are like chimneys, these old soldiers. This man of mine regrets that he cannot smoke when he is asleep!" While Madame delivered this address she continued also to mount the steps, and as she finished... more...

CHAPTER I ACTION OF STEAM ENGINES A steam engine is a device by means of which heat is transformed into work. Work may be defined as the result produced by a force acting through space, and is commonly measured in foot-pounds; a foot-pound represents the work done in raising 1 pound 1 foot in height. The rate of doing work is called power. It has been found by experiment that there is a definite... more...

CHAPTER I. HOW DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND, AND HOW THE SPARKS FLEW. The windows are all wide open, and through them the warm, lazy summer wind is stealing languidly. The perfume of the seringas from the shrubbery beyond, mingled with all the lesser but more delicate delights of the garden beneath, comes with the wind, and fills the drawing-room of The Place with a vague, almost drowsy sense of sweetness. Mrs.... more...

INTRODUCTION In all branches of medicine the master word is prophylaxis, or prevention, and its benefits are nowhere more strikingly illustrated than in the practice of obstetrics. In former times every woman who gave birth to a child or passed through a miscarriage was exposed to grave danger of infection or child-bed fever; but at present—thanks to the recognition of the bacterial origin of the... more...

CHAPTER I In a secluded and mountainous part of Stiria there was in old time a valley of the most surprising and luxuriant fertility. It was surrounded on all sides by steep and rocky mountains rising into peaks which were always covered with snow and from which a number of torrents descended in constant cataracts. One of these fell westward over the face of a crag so high that when the sun had set to... more...

TOINE He was known for thirty miles round was father Toine—fat Toine, Toine-my-extra, Antoine Macheble, nicknamed Burnt-Brandy—the innkeeper of Tournevent. It was he who had made famous this hamlet buried in a niche in the valley that led down to the sea, a poor little peasants' hamlet consisting of ten Norman cottages surrounded by ditches and trees. The houses were hidden behind a curve... more...

Indefatigable topers, and you, thrice precious martyrs of the smock, give me leave to put a serious question to your worships while you are idly striking your codpieces, and I myself not much better employed. Pray, why is it that people say that men are not such sots nowadays as they were in the days of yore? Sot is an old word that signifies a dunce, dullard, jolthead, gull, wittol, or noddy, one... more...

We are accustomed to speak with a certain light irony of the tendency which women have to gossip, as if the sin itself, if it is a sin, were of the gentler sex, and could by no chance be a masculine peccadillo. So far as my observation goes, men are as much given to small talk as women, and it is undeniable that we have produced the highest type of gossiper extant. Where will you find, in or out of... more...