Fiction Books

Warden Halloran smiled slightly. "You expect to have criminals on Mars, then?" he asked. "Is that why you want me?" "Of course we don't, sir!" snapped the lieutenant general. His name was Knox. "We need men of your administrative ability—" "Pardon me, general," Lansing interposed smoothly, "I rather think we'd better give the warden a ... a more... more...

PROLOGUE. A week ago, my friend the Journalist wrote to remind me that once upon a time I had offered him a bed in my cottage at Troy and promised to show him the beauties of the place. He was about (he said) to give himself a fortnight's holiday, and had some notion of using that time to learn what Cornwall was like. He could spare but one day for Troy, and hardly looked to exhaust its... more...

CHAPTER I. The Nez Percé Indians are a powerful and populous tribe, who, for centuries, have made their home in the Snake, Salmon, and Clear Water Valleys in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. When the great tide of civilization, which for years flowed toward the Pacific Coast, finally spread out into these valleys, questions arose between the emigrants and Indians as to the ownership of certain lands... more...

It may be regarded as one of the commendable peculiarities of the English language that, despite provincialisms, vulgarisms, neglected education, foreign accent, and the various corrupting influences to which it is subjected, it may be understood wherever it is heard, whatever differences of distance or associations may have existed between the speaker and the listener, both claiming familiarity with... more...

INTRODUCTION There are always Americas to be discovered: the most interesting inEurope. I can lay no claim to having discovered an America, but I do claim to have discovered a Columbus. His name is Benedetto Croce, and he dwells on the shores of the Mediterranean, at Naples, city of the antique Parthenope. Croce's America cannot be expressed in geographical terms. It is more important than any... more...

It was hard to judge Jeff Rand's age from his appearance; he was certainly over thirty and considerably under fifty. He looked hard and fit, like a man who could be a serviceable friend or a particularly unpleasant enemy. Women instinctively suspected that he would make a most satisfying lover. One might have taken him for a successful lawyer (he had studied law, years ago), or a military officer... more...

THE LADY OF THE CIVET FURS Henry Leroux wrote busily on. The light of the table-lamp, softened and enriched by its mosaic shade, gave an appearance of added opulence to the already handsome appointments of the room. The little table-clock ticked merrily from half-past eleven to a quarter to twelve. Into the cozy, bookish atmosphere of the novelist's study penetrated the muffled chime of Big Ben;... more...

I do not intend to carry my story one month beyond the hour when I saw that my boyhood was gone and my youth arrived; a period determined to some by the first tail-coat, to me by a different sign. My reason for wishing to tell this first portion of my history is, that when I look back upon it, it seems to me not only so pleasant, but so full of meaning, that, if I can only tell it right, it must prove... more...

MEMOIRS OF A CAVALIER. PART I. It may suffice the reader, without being very inquisitive after my name, that I was born in the county of Salop, in the year 1608, under the government of what star I was never astrologer enough to examine; but the consequences of my life may allow me to suppose some extraordinary influence affected my birth. My father was a gentleman of a very plentiful fortune, having... more...

CHAPTER ONE I returned from the City about three o'clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life. I had been three months in the Old Country, and was fed up with it. If anyone had told me a year ago that I would have been feeling like that I should have laughed at him; but there was the fact. The weather made me liverish, the talk of the ordinary Englishman made me sick, I... more...