Fiction Books

"Well, Dave, it was a close game, but we managed to save ourselves after all their talk," said Tom Martin, referring to a baseball match of the previous day. "Yes, but thanks to our lucky stars that Fred Worthington was with us. If John Rexford had kept him at the store, as I was afraid, we should have been badly beaten." "He didn't play the whole game, did he?" asked Tom... more...

INTRODUCTION I am sitting in the doorway of a house of the Stone Age—neolithic, paleolithic, troglodytic man—with a roofless city of the dead lying in the valley below and the eagles circling with lonely cries along the yawning caverns of the cliff face above. My feet rest on the topmost step of a stone stairway worn hip-deep in the rocks of eternity by the moccasined tread of foot-prints that run... more...

The transport swung past Centaurus on the last leg of her long journey to Sol. There was no flash, no roar as she swept across the darkness of space. As silent as a ghost, as quiet as a puff of moonlight she moved, riding the gravitational fields that spread like tangled, invisible spider webs between the stars. Within the ship there was also silence, but the air was stirred by a faint, persistent... more...

§ 1. THE TERM The names ‘rationalist’ and ‘rationalism’ have been used in so many senses within the past three hundred years that they cannot be said to stand quite definitely for any type or school of philosophic thought. For Bacon, a ‘rationalist’ or rationalis was a physician with a priori views of disease and bodily function; and the Aristotelian humanists of the Helmstadt school were... more...

THE HYLA BISTINCTA GROUP The five species comprising the Hyla bistincta group are moderate-sized hylids having rather blunt heads and robust bodies. The fingers are long and have little webbing (Fig. 1). The skin of the dorsum is thick and glandular, but not tuberculate. An anal sheath is present. The skull is rather broad, flat, and solidly roofed. The ethmoid is broad, curved downward laterally, and... more...

CHAPTER I THE STORM All day long, from an hour before the pale dawn until now after the thick dark, the storm had raged through the mountains. Before midday it had grown dark in the cañons. In the driving blast of the wind many a tall pine had snapped, broken at last after long valiant years of victorious buffeting with the seasons, while countless tossing branches had been riven away from the parent... more...

CHAPTER I Bettina Mowbray, walking the deck of the ocean steamer bound for England, was aware that she was observed with interest by a great many pairs of eyes. Certainly the possessors of these eyes were not more interested in her than she was in the interpretation of their glances. It was, indeed, of the first importance to her to know that she was being especially noticed by the men and women of the... more...

HUMORESQUE On either side of the Bowery, which cuts through like a drain to catch its sewage, Every Man's Land, a reeking march of humanity and humidity, steams with the excrement of seventeen languages, flung in patois from tenement windows, fire escapes, curbs, stoops, and cellars whose walls are terrible and spongy with fungi. By that impregnable chemistry of race whereby the red blood of the... more...

In tragic life, God wot,No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:We are betray'd by what is false within.—GEORGE MEREDITH."I can't get out," said Sterne's starling, looking through the bars of his cage. "I will get out," said Hugh Scarlett to himself, seeing no bars, but half conscious of a cage. "I will get out," he repeated, as his hansom took him swiftly... more...

CHAPTER I PAUL, ARRIVED IN A STRANGE LAND, LEARNS MANY THINGS, AND GOES TO MEET THE MAN IN GREY. Fate intended me for a singularly fortunate man. Properly, I ought to have been born in June, which being, as is well known, the luckiest month in all the year for such events, should, by thoughtful parents, be more generally selected. How it was I came to be born in May, which is, on the other hand, of all... more...