Fiction Books

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...

MAXWELL GRAY The Silence of Dean MaitlandMary Gleed Tuttiett, the gifted lady who writes under the pseudonym of "Maxwell Gray," was born at Newport, Isle of Wight. The daughter of Mr. F.B. Tuttiett, M.R.C.S., she began her literary career by contributing essays, poems, articles, and short stones to various periodicals. With the appearance of "The Silence of Dean Maitland," in 1886,... more...

CHAPTER I THE MARCH It was the close of the day. Over the baked veldt of Equatorial Africa a safari marched. The men, in single file, were reduced to the unimportance of moving black dots by the tremendous sweep of the dry country stretching away to a horizon infinitely remote, beyond which lay single mountains, like ships becalmed hull-down at sea. The immensities filled the world— the simple... more...

Dear Children: You will remember that, in the front part of Glinda of Oz, the Publishers told you that when Mr. Baum went away from this world he left behind some unfinished notes about the Princess Ozma and Dorothy and the jolly people of the Wonderful Land of Oz. The Publishers promised that they would try to put these notes together into a new Oz book for you. Well, here it is—The Royal Book of... more...

CONQUEST OF PEACE. Before the war Vermont and the nation were approaching a serious economic crises. The war has accentuated the gravity of the situation, but has also demonstrated certain human characteristics that can be enlisted to correct our course. We found during the war that we were ready to take heroic action whenever an occasion demanded it—that there was a solidarity of purpose of our... more...

CHAPTER I "THE PROUD PARENT" If you happen to be riding a bicycle you arrive somewhat unexpectedly in the little Ardenshire village of Hampton Bagot, and are through it in a flash, before you quite realise its existence. But in the unlikely event of your having business or pleasure there, you approach the place more leisurely in the carrier's cart from the little station which absurdly... more...

AMOS KILBRIGHT: HIS ADSCITITIOUS EXPERIENCES. [This story is told by Mr. Richard Colesworthy, an attorney-at-law, in a large town in one of our Eastern States. The fact that Mr. Colesworthy is a practical man, and but little given, outside of his profession, to speculative theorizing, adds a weight to his statements which they might not otherwise possess.] In the practice of my profession I am in the... more...

PROLOGUE. "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" At Surat, by a window of his private office in the East India Company's factory, a middle-aged man stared out upon the broad river and the wharves below. Business in the factory had ceased for the day: clerks and porters had gone about their own... more...