Fiction Books

THE SISTERS THERE was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a... more...

The greatest master of the short story our country has known found his inspiration and produced his best work in California. It is now nearly forty years since "The Luck of Roaring Camp" appeared, and a line of successors, more or less worthy, have been following along the trail blazed by Bret Harte. They have given us matter of many kinds, realistic, romantic, tragic, humorous, weird. In this... more...

My Dear Boy:—I am glad you want to go to college. Possibly I might send you even if you did not want to go, yet I doubt it. One may send a boy through college and the boy is sent through. None of the college is sent through him. But if you go, I am sure a good deal of the college will somehow get lodged in you. You will find a thousand and one things in college which are worth while. I wish you could... more...

THE RED ROSES OF TONIA A trestle burned down on the International Railroad. The south-bound from San Antonio was cut off for the next forty-eight hours. On that train was Tonia Weaver's Easter hat. Espirition, the Mexican, who had been sent forty miles in a buckboard from the Espinosa Ranch to fetch it, returned with a shrugging shoulder and hands empty except for a cigarette. At the small... more...

CHAPTER I "Take care not to tumble into the water, David," said my mother. She was standing by the gate, and from my perch on the back of the off-wheeler, I smiled down on her with boyish self-assurance. The idea of my tumbling into the water! The idea of my drowning even did I meet with so ludicrous a mishap! But I was accustomed to my mother's anxious care, for as an only child there had... more...

INTRODUCTION The first volume of the present edition of Hauptmann's Dramatic Works is identical in content with the corresponding volume of the German edition. In the second volume The Rats has been substituted for two early prose tales which lie outside of the scope of our undertaking. Hence these two volumes include that entire group of dramas which Hauptmann himself specifically calls social.... more...

CHAPTER I THE BURSTING OF THE STORM A group of excited men were gathered in front of the Stock Exchange at Johannesburg. It was evident that something altogether unusual had happened. All wore anxious and angry expressions, but a few shook hands with each other, as if the news that so much agitated them, although painful, was yet welcome; and indeed this was so. For months a war-cloud had hung over the... more...

TOM dodged hither and thither through lanes until he was well out of the track of returning scholars, and then fell into a moody jog. He crossed a small "branch" two or three times, because of a prevailing juvenile superstition that to cross water baffled pursuit. Half an hour later he was disappearing behind the Douglas mansion on the summit of Cardiff Hill, and the school-house was hardly... more...

Chapter One A Horse in Need He came into the town as a solid, swiftly moving dust cloud. The wind from behind had kept the dust moving forward at a pace just equal to the gallop of his horse. Not until he had brought his mount to a halt in front of the hotel and swung down to the ground did either he or his horse become distinctly visible. Then it was seen that the animal was in the last stages of... more...

Think of it! "One Dollar a Pound." The Editor of this book was brought face to face with the true possibilities in Frog raising by his love for this delicate meat and his inability to get it. As I had visited all the principal markets in New York City, a market where it is known the world over that if there is anything in the eatable line to be found it can be found there. This was not so of... more...