Fiction Books

"We're almost there, my boy." The big, gray-haired man who would be Lieutenant Dale Hunter's superior—Strategic Service's Special Agent, George Rockford—opened another can of beer, his fifth. "There will be intrigue already under way when this helicopter sets down with us. Attempted homicide will soon follow. The former will be meat for me. You will be meat for the... more...

CHAPTER I THE VOICE OF THE WILDERNESS "It's always the way, Wallace! When a fellow starts on the long trail, he's never willing to quit. It'll be the same with you if you go with me to Labrador. When you come home, you'll hear the voice of the wilderness calling you to return, and it will lure you back again." It seems but yesterday that Hubbard uttered those prophetic words... more...

batalões turned from the open waters of the lower Tapajos River into the igarapé, the lily-smothered shallows that often mark an Indian settlement in the jungles of Brazil. One of the two half-breed rubber-gatherers suddenly stopped his batalõe by thrusting a paddle against a giant clump of lilies. In a corruption of the Tupi dialect, he called over to the white man occupying the other frail craft.... more...

CHAPTER I TELLING HOW, UNDER STRESS OF CIRCUMSTANCE, A HUMANIST TURNED HERMIT A peculiar magic resides in running water, as every student of earth-lore knows. There is high magic, too, in the marriage of rivers, so that the spot where two mingle their streams is sacred, endowed with strange properties of evocation and of purification. Such spots go to the making of history and ruling of individual... more...

CHAPTER I A MIDNIGHT SUMMONS W hen did you last hear from Nayland Smith?" asked my visitor. I paused, my hand on the siphon, reflecting for a moment. "Two months ago," I said: "he's a poor correspondent and rather soured, I fancy." "What—a woman or something?" "Some affair of that sort. He's such a reticent beggar, I really know very little about it." I... more...

A High Family. “Con-found those organs!” said the Earl of Barmouth. “And frustrate their grinders,” cried Viscount Diphoos. “They are such a nuisance, my boy.” “True, oh sire,” replied the viscount, who had the heels of his patent leather shoes on the library chimney-piece of the town mansion in Portland Place. He had reached that spot with difficulty, and was smoking a cigar, to calm... more...

I. ATHENA CHALINITIS.*(Athena in the Heavens.) * "Athena the Restrainer." The name is given to her as having helpedBellerophon to bridle Pegasus, the flying cloud. LECTURE ON THE GREEK MYTHS OF STORM, GIVEN (PARTLY) IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON, MARCH 9, 1869. 1. I will not ask your pardon for endeavoring to interest you in the subject of Greek Mythology; but I must ask your permission to... more...

CHAPTER I "A pity Kiddie ain't here along of us, to help. He'd sure tell us if thar's Injuns prowlin' around. My old eyes ain't just what they used ter be for spottin' a crawlin' Redskin from afar. Now, Kiddie had eyes like spy-glasses, hadn't he, Isa? As for his sense of hearin'—well, I allow he c'd 'most hear the grass a-growin'."... more...

“Can you use a Sword?” “Yes! What is it?” “Hist, boy! Jump up and dress.” “Oh, it’s you, father!” said the newly aroused sleeper, slipping out of bed—or, rather, off his bed, for the heat of an Eastern China night had made him dispense with bedclothes. He made a frantic dash at his trousers, feeling confused and strange in the darkness, and hardly... more...

In those dim recesses of the consciousness where things have their beginning, if ever things have a beginning, I suppose the origin of this novel may be traced to a fact of a fortnight's sojourn on the western shore of lake Champlain in the summer of 1891. Across the water in the State of Vermont I had constantly before my eyes a majestic mountain form which the earlier French pioneers had named... more...