Fiction Books

The Dangerous Age My Dear Lillie, Obviously it would have been the right thing to give you my news in person—apart from the fact that I should then have enjoyed the amusing spectacle of your horror! But I could not make up my mind to this course. All the same, upon my word of honour, you, dear innocent soul, are the only person to whom I have made any direct communication on the subject. It is at... more...

All day Sunday they had raised the devil from attic to cellar; Mrs. Farren was in tears, Howker desperate. Not one out of the fifteen servants considered necessary to embellish the Seagrave establishment could do anything with them after Kathleen Severn's sudden departure the week before. When the telegram announcing her mother's sudden illness summoned young Mrs. Severn to Staten Island,... more...

The Little Ship. "I have made a nice little ship, of cork, and am going to let it sail in this great basin of water. Now let us fancy this water to be the North-Pacific Ocean, and those small pieces of cork on the side of the basin, to be the Friendly Islands, and this little man standing on the deck of the ship, to be the famous navigator, Captain Cook, going to find them." "Do you know... more...

NEVILLE'S BIRTHDAY 1 Neville, at five o'clock (Nature's time, not man's) on the morning of her birthday, woke from the dream-broken sleep of summer dawns, hot with the burden of two sheets and a blanket, roused by the multitudinous silver calling of a world full of birds. They chattered and bickered about the creepered house, shrill and sweet, like a hundred brooks running together... more...

CHAPTER I. A MORNING OF MISADVENTURES. "Well, my Lord, are we to pass the day here," said Count Trouville, the second of the opposite party, as Norwood returned from a fruitless search of George Onslow, "or are we to understand that this is the English mode of settling such matters?" "I am perfectly ready, Monsieur le Comte, to prove the contrary, so far as my own poor abilities... more...

PREFACE This book is the direct result of what, at the time of its occurrence, seemed to be an unimportant incident in the course of my scientific work— the presentation of a pair of dancing mice to the Harvard Psychological Laboratory. My interest in the peculiarities of behavior which the creatures exhibited, as I watched them casually from day to day, soon became experiment-impelling, and almost... more...

Daisy Hanbury poked her parasol between the bars of the cage, with the amiable intention of scratching the tiger's back. The tiger could not be expected to know this all by himself, and so he savagely bit the end of it off, with diabolical snarlings. Daisy turned to her cousin with a glow of sympathetic pleasure. "What a darling!" she said. "He didn't understand, you see, and was... more...

THE DALBY BEAR There goes a bear on Dalby moors,Oxen and horses he devours. The peasants are in deep distressThe laidly bear should them oppress. Their heads together at length they lay,How they the bear might seize and slay. They drove their porkers through the wood,The bear turn’d round as he lay at food. Outspoke as best he could the bear:“What kind of guests approach my lair?” Uprose the bear... more...

CHAPTER I. Just when Meyerhofer's estate was to be sold by auction, his third son Paul was born. That was a hard time indeed. Frau Elsbeth, with her haggard face and melancholy smile, lay in her big four-post bed, with the cradle of the new-born child near her, and listened to every noise that reached her in her sad sickroom from the yard and the house. At each suspicious sound she started up, and... more...

CHAPTER I. BADEN OUT OF SEASON. A THEATRE by daylight, a great historical picture in the process of cleaning, a ballet-dancer of a wet day hastening to rehearsal, the favorite for the Oaks dead-lame in a straw-yard, are scarcely more stripped of their legitimate illusions than is a fashionable watering-place on the approach of winter. The gay shops and stalls of flaunting wares are closed; the... more...