Fiction Books

The life of a female prisoner! It is so uniformly dull that I fear to weary you, friends, in repeating its history; while for me, even now, outside of some few days only too memorable, the twenty-seven months spent in the fortress are like a great hole, empty and badly lighted, at the bottom of which sometimes passed human shadows and some few phantasmagorical scenes. In these scattered remembrances,... more...

On the veranda of the Bella Union Hotel, San Francisco, a man sat enjoying his morning pipe. The Bella Union overlooked the Plaza of that day, a dusty, unkempt, open space, later to be swept and graded and dignified into Portsmouth Square. The man was at the younger fringe of middle life. He was dressed neatly and carefully in the fashionable costume of the time, which was the year of grace 1852. As to... more...

PREFACE. The stories contained in the following pages are taken from the collections published by Afanasief, Khudyakof, Erlenvein, and Chudinsky. The South-Russian collections of Kulish and Rudchenko I have been able to use but little, there being no complete dictionary available of the dialect, or rather the language, in which they are written. Of these works that of Afanasief is by far the most... more...

THE CASTLE OF VAUTSBERG ON THE RHINE. A chamber in a tower. PRINCE HENRY, sitting alone, ill and restless.  Prince Henry. I cannot sleep! my fervid brainCalls up the vanished Past again,And throws its misty splendors deepInto the pallid realms of sleep!A breath from that far-distant shoreComes freshening ever more and more,And wafts o'er intervening seasSweet odors from the Hesperides!A wind,... more...

Pale moonlight spilled through the window and over the wedding gifts that crowded the little room. "And this mirror, darling?" Mark Carter asked. "Who sent it?" A sudden flicker of worry flashed across Elaine Duchard's lovely face. She bit her lower lip nervously. Pretended to inspect a great silver punchbowl that stood on a nearby table. "Who did you say sent the mirror?"... more...

THE SOWER Questions to arouse interest. What is this man doing? Why do you think so? What does he carry over his shoulder? in his bag? How does he sow the grain? What will be the result of his work? How do you think the grain will be covered? What can you see in the background? Do you think the oxen are plowing the field or covering the grain? why? What time of the day is it? What can you see in this... more...

CHAPTER I For the audacity of the title of this book I offer no apology. I have had it pointed out, not altogether facetiously, that it is impossible to determine with accuracy what one woman, much less what any number of women, wants. I sympathize with the first half of the tradition. The desires, that is to say, the ideals, of an individual, man or woman, are not always easy to determine. The... more...

CHAPTER I In Which Silken Ladies Ascend One Stairway, and a Lonely Wayfarer Ascends Another and Comes Face to Face With Old Friends. The big house, standing on a high hill which overlooked the city, showed in the moonlight the grotesque outlines of a composite architecture. Originally it had been a square substantial edifice of Colonial simplicity. A later and less restrained taste had aimed at a... more...

CHAPTER I French women of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, when studied according to the distinctive phases of their influence, are best divided into three classes: those queens who, as wives, represented virtue, education, and family life; the mistresses, who were instigators of political intrigue, immorality, and vice; and the authoresses and other educated women, who constituted... more...

LETTERS OF VOLUME III LETTER I. Miss Howe to Clarissa.—Is astonished, confounded, aghast. Repeats her advice to marry Lovelace. LETTER II. Clarissa to Miss Howe.—Gives a particular account of her meeting Lovelace; of her vehement contention with him; and, at last, of her being terrified out of her predetermined resolution, and tricked away. Her grief and compunction of heart upon it. Lays all to... more...