Fiction Books

THE COMING OF THE STORKIT was always a puzzle to the little girl how the stork that brought her ever reached the lonely Dakota farm-house on a December afternoon without her being frozen; and it was another mystery, just as deep, how the strange bird, which her mother said was no larger than a blue crane, was able, on leaving, to carry her father away with him to some family, a long, long distance off,... more...

CHAPTER I GREEN FIELDS AND PASTURES NEW The Imperial Limited lurched with a swing around the last hairpin curve of the Yale canyon. Ahead opened out a timbered valley,—narrow on its floor, flanked with bold mountains, but nevertheless a valley,—down which the rails lay straight and shining on an easy grade. The river that for a hundred miles had boiled and snarled parallel to the tracks, roaring... more...

The first to describe a case of division of the parietal bone in apes was Johannes Ranke, in 1899. The skull in question is that of an adolescent female orang, one of 245 orang crania in the Selenka collection in the Munich Anthropological Institute. The abnormal suture divides the right parietal into an upper larger and a lower smaller portion. "The suture runs nearly parallel with the sagittal... more...

ON THE STREETS OF ANTWERP. “Good-bye, Elmer, and you, too, Rooster!” “It’s too bad we have to hurry home, and break up the Big Five Motorcycle Boys’ combination, just when we’ve been having such royal good times over in the country of the Great War!” “But there was nothing else to do, Elmer, when you got that cable message telling you to take the first steamer home, as your mother was... more...

Bruckner was a man deeply imbued with a sense of his own worth. Now as he rested his broad beam on the joined arms of Sweets and Majesky, he winked to include them in a "this is necessary, but you and I see the humor of the thing" understanding. Like most thoroughly disliked men, he considered himself quite popular with "the boys." The conceited ham's enjoying this, Sweets thought,... more...

CHAPTER I THE DOCTOR'S DAUGHTER t was a beautiful summer morning when slowly I wheeled my way along the principal street of the village of Walford. A little valise was strapped in front of my bicycle; my coat, rolled into a small compass, was securely tied under the seat, and I was starting out to spend my vacation. I was the teacher of the village school, which useful institution had been closed... more...

BILL THE MINDER Old Crispin, the mushroom gatherer, and his good wife Chloe had ten children, and nine of them were bad-tempered. There was Chad, the youngest and most bad-tempered of the lot, Hannibal and Quentin the twins, Randall with the red head, Noah, Ratchett the short-sighted, Nero the worrit, weeping Biddulph and Knut. The only good-tempered child was a little girl named Boadicea. It is well... more...

CHAPTER I. It was a Saturday morning in December at the Indian Mission School. Two young Sioux girls were going up the stairs—Hannah Straight Tree and Cordelia Running Bird. It was their Saturday for cleaning. The two girls drew a heavy breath in prospect of the difficult task that confronted them. The great unplastered mission building was a chilly place throughout the winter, and the halls and... more...

nder the glow of Saturn and his Rings, five of the airdomes of the new colony on Titan were still inflated. They were enormous bubbles of clear, flexible plastic. But the sixth airdome had flattened. And beneath its collapsed roof, propped now by metal rods, a dozen men in spacesuits had just lost all hope of rescuing the victims of the accident. Bert Kraskow, once of Oklahoma City, more recently a... more...

A LIVING BOOK   here is only one Book that never grows old. For thousands of years men have been writing books. Most books are forgotten soon after they are written; a few of the best and wisest are remembered for a time. But all at last grow old; new discoveries are made; new ideas arise; the old books are out of date; their usefulness is at an end. Students are the only people who still care to read... more...