Fiction Books

REGINALD BLAKE, FINANCIER AND CAD The advantage of literature over life is that its characters are clearly defined, and act consistently.  Nature, always inartistic, takes pleasure in creating the impossible.  Reginald Blake was as typical a specimen of the well-bred cad as one could hope to find between Piccadilly Circus and Hyde Park Corner.  Vicious without passion, and possessing brain without... more...

MRS. ZANT AND THE GHOST. I. THE course of this narrative describes the return of a disembodied spirit to earth, and leads the reader on new and strange ground. Not in the obscurity of midnight, but in the searching light of day, did the supernatural influence assert itself. Neither revealed by a vision, nor announced by a voice, it reached mortal knowledge through the sense which is least easily... more...

THE RIFT As he dropped the last grisly fragment of the dismembered and mutilated body into the small vat of nitric acid that was to devour every trace of the horrid evidence which might easily send him to the gallows, the man sank weakly into a chair and throwing his body forward upon his great, teak desk buried his face in his arms, breaking into dry, moaning sobs. Beads of perspiration followed the... more...

CHAPTER I. BALLYCLORAN HOUSE AS FIRST SEEN BY THE AUTHOR.  In the autumn, 184—, business took me into the West of Ireland, and, amongst other places, to the quiet little village of Drumsna, which is in the province of Connaught, County Leitrim, about 72 miles w.n.w. of Dublin, on the mail-coach road to Sligo. I reached the little inn there in the morning by the said mail, my purpose being to leave... more...

ACT I On the 15th June 1903, in the early forenoon, a medical student, surname Redpenny, Christian name unknown and of no importance, sits at work in a doctor's consulting-room. He devils for the doctor by answering his letters, acting as his domestic laboratory assistant, and making himself indispensable generally, in return for unspecified advantages involved by intimate intercourse with a... more...

STORY ABOUT THE WORD NO. BY T. S. ARTHUR. "There is a word, my son, a very little word, in the English language, the right use of which it is all important that you should learn," Mr. Howland said to his son Thomas, who was about leaving the paternal roof for a residence in a neighboring city, never again, perchance, to make one of the little circle that had so long gathered in the family... more...

Chapter I Brandons Adam Brandon was born at Little Empton in Kent in 1839. He was educated at the King's School, Canterbury, and at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Ordained in 1863, he was first curate at St. Martin's, Portsmouth, then Chaplain to the Bishop of Worcester; in the year 1875 he accepted the living of Pomfret in Wiltshire and was there for twelve years. It was in 1887 that he came... more...

CHAPTER XV. The entrance of a servant, announcing a name which Harley, in the absorption of his gloomy revery, did not hear, was followed by that of a person on whom he lifted his eyes in the cold and haughty surprise with which a man much occupied greets and rebukes the intrusion of an unwelcome stranger. "It is so long since your Lordship has seen me," said the visitor, with mild dignity,... more...

I There are always two ways of looking at a thing, frequently there are six or seven; but two ways of looking at a London fog are quite enough. When it is thick and yellow in the streets and stings a man's throat and lungs as he breathes it, an awakening in the early morning is either an unearthly and grewsome, or a mysteriously enclosing, secluding, and comfortable thing. If one awakens in a... more...

GENERAL PREFACE TO THE WAVERLEY NOVELS And must I ravel outMy weaved-up follies?                       Richard II, Act IV. Having undertaken to give an Introductory Account of the compositions which are here offered to the public, with Notes and Illustrations, the Author, under whose name they are now for the first time collected, feels that he has the delicate task of speaking... more...