Fiction Books

I I was happily at work this morning among my butterbeans—a vegetable of solid merit and of a far greater suitableness to my palate than such bovine watery growths as the squash and the beet. Georgiana came to her garden window and stood watching me. "You work those butterbeans as though you loved them," she said, scornfully. "I do love them. I love all vines." "Are you... more...

ARTICLE ONE.THE OLD ITALIAN SCHOOL OF SINGING.The Shibboleth, or trade cry, of the average modern vocal teacher is "The Old Italian School of Singing." How much of value there is in this may be surmised when we stop to consider that of the many who claim to teach the true Old Italian method no two of them teach at all alike, unless they happen to be pupils of the same master. A system, a... more...

CHAPTER ONE. OATMEAL AND THE SHORTER CATECHISM. The first and most-serious-but-one ordeal in the life of Robert Chalmers Fordyce—so Robert Chalmers himself informed me years afterwards—was the examination for the Bursary which he gained at Edinburgh University. A bursary is what an English undergraduate would call a "Schol." (Imagine a Scottish student talking about a "Burse"!)... more...

PROLOGUE THE CHILD "The fangs of the she-wolf are whetted keen for Galilean flesh and else the wrath of Jehovah palsy the arm of Rome, Galilean soil will run red with blood from scourged backs ere the noon of a new day." The speaker, a slender woman wearing the garb of a peasant, lowered a water-jar from her shoulder and stood beside the bench of a workman, who paused at his task to get news... more...

"I can break him, split his Criterion Committee wide open now while there's still a chance, and open rejuvenation up to everybody....." Four and one half hours after Martian sunset, the last light in the Headquarters Building finally blinked out. Carl Golden stamped his feet nervously against the cold, cupping his cigarette in his hand to suck up the tiny spark of warmth. The night air bit... more...

CHAPTER I. THE RELATION OF MARRIAGE. The young man who marries finds himself in an entirely new relation in life. Grand as life may have been in the past, the present and the future are full of new meaning, of grander possibilities and of larger blessing. God has meant that love should come to man to glorify life and to lift the lower nature of husband and wife into higher realms of thought and being;... more...

Wanted: A Match-Maker "You understand, Josie, that I wouldn't for a moment wish Constance to marry without being in love, but—" Mrs. Durant hesitated long enough to convey the inference that she was unfeminine enough to place a value on her own words, and then, the pause having led to a change, or, at least, modification of what had almost found utterance, she continued, with a touch of... more...

CHAPTER I. THE CHASE. At noon, on the first Saturday of March, 1796, there was an unusual stir at the old Barton farm-house, just across the creek to the eastward, as you leave Kennett Square by the Philadelphia stage-road. Any gathering of the people at Barton's was a most rare occurrence; yet, on that day and at that hour, whoever stood upon the porch of the corner house, in the village, could... more...

Nahum 1:1 An oracle about Nineveh. The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite. 1:2 Yahweh is a jealous God and avenges. Yahweh avenges and is full of wrath. Yahweh takes vengeance on his adversaries, and he maintains wrath against his enemies. 1:3 Yahweh is slow to anger, and great in power, and will by no means leave the guilty unpunished. Yahweh has his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and... more...

CHAPTER I   LISA'S KNIGHT AND LISA'S SISTER It had come at last, the moment I had been thinking about for days. I was going to have him all to myself, the only person in the world I ever loved. He had asked me to sit out two dances, and that made me think he really must want to be with me, not just because I'm the "pretty girl's sister," but because I'm myself, Lisa... more...