Fiction Books

CHAPTER I MRS. CARTER RECEIVES A LETTER "Is that the latest style?" inquired James Leech, with a sneer, pointing to a patch on the knee of Herbert Carter's pants. Herbert's face flushed. He was not ashamed of the patch, for he knew that his mother's poverty made it a necessity. But he felt that it was mean and dishonorable in James Leech, whose father was one of the rich men of... more...

THE GENIUS OF JOSEPH CONRAD I In these piping days when fiction plays the handmaid or prophet to various propaganda; when the majority of writers are trying to prove something, or acting as venders of some new-fangled social nostrums; when the insistent drums of the Great God Réclame are bruising human tympani, the figure of Joseph Conrad stands solitary among English novelists as the very ideal of a... more...

CHAPTER I. The beauty of a farm yard on a Sabbath day, and what a difference a single letter will sometimes make in the legal signification of a sentence. It was during the Long Vacation—that period which is Paradise to the Rich and Purgatory to the Poor Lawyer—to say nothing of the client, who simply exists as a necessary evil in the economy of our enlightened system of Legal Procedure: it was... more...

In the Old Armoury. “See these here spots o’ red rust, Master Roy?” “I should be blind as poor old Jenkin if I couldn’t, Ben.” “Ay, that you would, sir. Poor old Jenk, close upon ninety he be; and that’s another thing.” “What do you mean?” said the boy addressed. “What do I mean, sir? Why, I mean as that’s another thing as shows as old England’s wore out, and rustin’ and... more...

THE TWO BROTHERS Once upon a time there were two brothers whose father had left them but a small fortune. The eldest grew very rich, but at the same time cruel and wicked, whereas there was nowhere a more honest or kinder man than the younger. But he remained poor, and had many children, so that at times they could scarcely get bread to eat. At last, one day there was not even this in the house, so he... more...

ALPHONSE DAUDET Tartarin of TarasconAlphonse Daudet, the celebrated French novelist, was born at Nimes on May 13, 1840, and as a youth of seventeen went to Paris, where he began as a poet at eighteen, and at twenty-two made his first efforts in the drama. He soon found his feet as a contributor to the leading journals of the day and a successful writer for the stage. He was thirty-two when he wrote... more...

INTRODUCTION. The Euthydemus, though apt to be regarded by us only as an elaborate jest, has also a very serious purpose. It may fairly claim to be the oldest treatise on logic; for that science originates in the misunderstandings which necessarily accompany the first efforts of speculation. Several of the fallacies which are satirized in it reappear in the Sophistici Elenchi of Aristotle and are... more...

CHAPTER I It was the custom of the geographers of a period not remote to grapple somewhat jejune facts to the infant mind by means of fanciful comparison: thus, Italy was likened to a boot, France to a coffee-pot, and the European domain of the Sultan to a ruffling turkey. In this pleasant scheme the state of New York was made to figure as a couchant lion, his massy head thrust high in the North... more...

AN EXCURSION I am going ahead two years. Two years during which a nation struggled in agony with sickness, and even the great strength with which she was endowed at birth was not equal to the task of throwing it off. In 1620 a Dutch ship had brought from Guinea to his Majesty's Colony of Virginia the germs of that disease for which the Nation's blood was to be let so freely. During these... more...

ITHE DISCOVERY My Dear Jane, You remember that you were puzzled when I told you I had heard something from the owls—or if not puzzled (for I know you have some experience of these things), you were at any rate anxious to know exactly how it happened. Perhaps the time has now come for you to be told. It was really luck, and not any skill of mine, that put me in the way of it; luck, and also being... more...