Fiction Books

CHAPTER 1. I AM BORN Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously. In... more...

I wish Max would treat me like a woman. An hour ago, at dinner, John Armitage proposed a toast, especially for my benefit. He loves to play the gallant. Big man, silver mane, very blue eyes, a porcelain smile. The head of WSC, the perfect example of the politician-scientist. "To the colony," he announced, raising his glass. "May Epsilon love them and keep them. May it only be transmittal... more...

Evan Winford leaned wearily against the controls of the little space sphere, and stared out of the window at the planet, Mercury, which lay a million miles sunward. Fail now? He gritted his teeth. No! He would wrench victory from Fate after all, even though at this moment mine guards must be searching the nearby mountains, for him and his companions, and a warning was being broadcast to all the planets... 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...

The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed. Abraham Cowley is now less remembered for his poetry than for his pleasant volume of essays, published after the Restoration; but he was thought in his own time a better poet than Milton. His collection of love songs—the Mistress—is a mass of cold conceits, in the metaphysical manner; but his elegies on Crashaw and Harvey have much dignity and natural... more...

PREFACE Two great collections of Byron's letters have been already printed. In Moore's 'Life', which appeared in 1830, 561 were given. These, in FitzGreene Halleck's American edition of Byron's 'Works', published in 1847, were increased to 635. The first volume of a third collection, edited by Mr. W. E. Henley, appeared early in 1897. A comparison of the number... more...

CHAPTER I. Departure from Havre—Regrets—A Barrier of Rocks—Rio Janeiro—Departure from Rio—Six Weeks at Sea—Cape Horn—Storms—Death of a Sailor—Catching a Shark—Land! Land!—The Gold Country. In the year 1852, on a fine spring morning, I arrived in Havre with my eldest sister, who was going, on commercial matters, to California. We spent several days in Havre; and on the 30th of May,... more...

"When we two partedIn silence and tears,Half broken-heartedTo sever for years." MUST I really go?" "I'm afraid it has come to that, Philippa! I believe I have kept you here too long already. You're ten years old now, growing a tall girl, and not learning half the things you ought to. I feel there's something wrong about you, but I don't know quite how to set it... 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...

CHAPTER ONE Through the Blue Haze Six months and three days after the Peace of Shanghai was signed and the great War of 1965-1970 declared at an end by an exhausted world, a young man huddled on a park bench in New York, staring miserably at the gravel beneath his badly worn shoes. He had been trained to fill the pilot's seat in the control cabin of a fighting plane and for nothing else. The... more...