Fiction Books

FATTY COON AT HOME Fatty Coon was so fat and round that he looked like a ball of fur, with a plumelike tail for a handle. But if you looked at him closely you would have seen a pair of very bright eyes watching you. Fatty loved to eat. Yes—he loved eating better than anything else in the world. That was what made him so fat. And that, too, was what led him into many adventures. Close by a swamp,... more...

CHAPTER ONE. Casanova was in his fifty-third year. Though no longer driven by the lust of adventure that had spurred him in his youth, he was still hunted athwart the world, hunted now by a restlessness due to the approach of old age. His yearning for Venice, the city of his birth, grew so intense that, like a wounded bird slowly circling downwards in its death flight, he began to move in... more...

Jarvis stretched himself as luxuriously as he could in the cramped general quarters of the Ares. "Air you can breathe!" he exulted. "It feels as thick as soup after the thin stuff out there!" He nodded at the Martian landscape stretching flat and desolate in the light of the nearer moon, beyond the glass of the port. The other three stared at him sympathetically—Putz, the engineer,... more...

CHAPTER I THE UNCONQUERED LAND Bones. Bones of dead buffalo, bones of dead horses, bones of dead men. The tribute exacted by the Kansas prairie: bones. A waste of bones, a sepulcher that did not hide its bones, but spread them, exulting in its treasures, to bleach and crumble under the stern sun upon its sterile wastes. Bones of deserted houses, skeletons of men's hopes sketched in the dimming... more...

THE BOOK, AND THE DREAM It was a long time ago—far back in another century—that my father brought home from the village, one evening, a brand-new book. There were not so many books in those days, and this was a fine big one, with black and gilt covers, and such a lot of pictures! I was at an age to claim things. I said the book was my book, and, later, petitioned my father to establish that claim.... more...

Take a board with 64 squares on it. Put a grain of wheat on the first square—two on the second—four on the third. Keep doubling in this manner and you will find there isn't enough wheat in the world to fill the sixty-fourth square. It can be the same with compound interest. On the 201st day of the year 3221 A.D., the professor of history at the University of Terra seated himself in front of... more...

Did she come to threaten or to plead? The question, darting swiftly through his mind as his eyes took in the unfamiliar outline of her figure, produced a storm of agitation which left him gazing stupidly at her, with fixed eyes in which surprise and terror mingled. He had never seen her before—his first moment of survey impressed that clearly on him. Yet her presence in his home at this compromising... more...

CHAPTER I THE LESSON "Then he's such a prig!" said Olga. "You should never use a word you can't define," observed Nick, from the depths of the hammock in which his meagre person reposed at length. She made a face at him, and gave the hammock a vicious twitch which caused him to rock with some violence for several seconds. As he was wont pathetically to remark, everyone bullied... more...

CHAPTER I. THE LABOURER; AND HIS DAWNING DISCONTENT. Roger Acton woke at five. It was a raw March morning, still dark, and bitterly cold, while at gusty intervals the rain beat in against the crazy cottage-window. Nevertheless, from his poor pallet he must up and rouse himself, for it will be open weather by sunrise, and his work lies two miles off; Master Jennings is not the man to show him favour if... more...

THE THREE SISTERS Thirty years ago on a wet autumn evening the household of Mallett's Lodge was gathered round the death-bed of Ursula Mallow, the eldest of the three sisters who inhabited it. The dingy moth-eaten curtains of the old wooden bedstead were drawn apart, the light of a smoking oil-lamp falling upon the hopeless countenance of the dying woman as she turned her dull eyes upon her... more...