Fiction Books

CHAPTER I     Man is his own star; and the soul that can    Render an honest and a perfect man    Commands all light, all influence, all fate,    Nothing to him falls early, or too late.    Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,     Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.                           BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. Minks—Herbert... more...

In submitting Captain Carter's strange manuscript to you in book form, I believe that a few words relative to this remarkable personality will be of interest. My first recollection of Captain Carter is of the few months he spent at my father's home in Virginia, just prior to the opening of the civil war. I was then a child of but five years, yet I well remember the tall, dark, smooth-faced,... more...

The King Intervenes Late evening had fallen on the grey walls of Stirling Castle, and dark night on the town itself, where narrow streets and high gables gave early welcome to the mirk, while the westward-facing turrets of the castle still reflected the departing glory of the sky. With some suggestion of stealth in his movements, a young man picked his way through the thickening gloom of the streets.... more...

CHAPTER I. HOW OWEN OF CORNWALL WANDERED TO SUSSEX, AND WHY HE BIDED THERE. The title which stands at the head of this story is not my own. It belongs to one whose name must come very often into that which I have to tell, for it is through him that I am what I may be, and it is because of him that there is anything worth telling of my doings at all. Hereafter it will be seen, as I think, that I could... more...

CHAPTER ONE THE POWER OF CONSOLATION At the first glance there appeared to be nothing unusual in the scene confronting Miss Jane Combs as she stood, broad and heavy, in her doorway that May morning, looking up and down the single street of the little Colorado mining-town. Jane's house was broad and heavy also—a rough, paintless "shack," which she had built after her own ideals on a... more...

Chapter I. Introduction. 1. The Study of Physiology. We are now to take up a new study, and in a field quite different from any we have thus far entered. Of all our other studies,--mathematics, physics, history, language,--not one comes home to us with such peculiar interest as does physiology, because this is the study of ourselves. Every thoughtful young person must have asked himself a hundred... more...

My friend Hammond is a bachelor, and lives in chambers in New York. Whenever we meet on my occasional visits to the city, he insists on my spending the night with him. On one of these occasions we had been at the opera during the evening, and had witnessed an ovation to a beautiful and famous singer. We had been stirred by the enthusiasm of the audience, and on our walk home fell to discussing a theme... more...

Chapter 1 Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo... His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt. O, the wild... more...

CHAPTER I The city turned its dreariest aspect toward the railway on blackened walls, irregular and ill-paved streets, gloomy warehouses, and over all a gray, smoke-laden atmosphere which gave it mystery and often beauty. Sometimes the softened towers of the great steel bridges rose above the river mist like fairy towers suspended between Heaven and earth. And again the sun tipped the surrounding hills... more...

SIR, In my last, for want of something better to write about, I told you what a World of Fending and Proving we have had of late, in this little Village of ours, about an old-cast-Pair-of-black-Plush-Breeches, which John, our Parish-Clerk, about ten Years ago, it seems, had made a Promise of to one Trim, who is our Sexton and Dog-Whipper.—To this you write me Word, that you have had more than either... more...