Fiction Books

CHAPTER I. JOHN HENRY'S LUCKY DAYS. Seven, come eleven! After promising Clara J. that I would never again light a pipe at the race track, there I stood, one of the busiest puff-puff laddies on the circuit. Well, the truth of the matter is just this: I fell asleep at the switch and somebody put the white lights all over me. Just how I happened to join the Dream Builders' Association I... more...

CHAPTER I. THE STRANGER. IT was corn-planting time, when the stranger followed the Old Trail into the Mutton Hollow neighborhood. All day a fine rain had fallen steadily, and the mists hung heavy over the valley. The lower hills were wrapped as in a winding sheet; dank and cold. The trees were dripping with moisture. The stranger looked tired and wet. By his dress, the man was from the world beyond the... more...

CHAPTER I The Puce Dressing-gown The peculiar angle of the earth's axis to the plane of the ecliptic--that angle which is chiefly responsible for our geography and therefore for our history--had caused the phenomenon known in London as summer. The whizzing globe happened to have turned its most civilized face away from the sun, thus producing night in Selwood Terrace, South Kensington. In No. 91... more...

Night came early. It might well seem that day had fled affrighted. The heavy masses of clouds, glooming low, which had gathered thicker and thicker, as if crowding to witness the catastrophe, had finally shaken asunder in the concussions of the air at the discharges of artillery, and now the direful rain, always sequence of the shock of battle, was steadily falling, falling, on the stricken field. Many... more...

The 1,000-foot tower that formed the focal point and central feature of the Universal Exposition of 1889 at Paris has become one of the best known of man’s works. It was among the most outstanding technological achievements of an age which was itself remarkable for such achievements. Second to the interest shown in the tower’s structural aspects was the interest in its mechanical organs. Of these,... more...

Sorex cinereus ohionensis Bole and Moulthrop.—In their description of this subspecies from Ohio, Bole and Moulthrop (1942:89-95) made no mention of specimens in the United States Biological Surveys Collection from Ellsworth and Milford Center, Ohio, which stand in the literature (see Jackson, 1928:49) as Sorex cinereus cinereus. These two localities lie south of the geographic range ascribed to S. c.... more...

EPISTLES. EPISTLE I. TO MY HONOURED FRIEND SIR ROBERT HOWARD,[1] ON HIS EXCELLENT POEMS.   As there is music uninform'd by art  In those wild notes, which, with a merry heart,  The birds in unfrequented shades express,  Who, better taught at home, yet please us less:  So in your verse a native sweetness dwells,  Which shames composure, and its art excels.  Singing no more can your... more...

Crossing the Durban Bar. The steamship Amatikulu was drawing near the end of her voyage. A fresh breeze was ploughing up the blue waves of the Indian Ocean, hurling off their crests in white, foamy masses, casting showers of salt spray upon the wet decks of the vessel as she plunged her nose into each heaving, tossing billow, and leaped up again with a sudden jerk which was more than lively, and... more...

CHAPTER I. THE SERFS OF PLOUERNEL. The day touched its close. The autumn sun cast its last rays upon one of the villages of the seigniory of Plouernel. A large number of partly demolished houses bore testimony to having been recently set on fire during one of the wars, frequent during the eleventh century, between the feudal lords of France. The walls of the huts of the village, built in pise, or of... more...

I Miss Robinson had first seen Wyndham and fallen in love with him on the day that he appeared in the road as a neighbour and set up his studio there. But that was years before, and she had never made his acquaintance. He was the Prince Charming of the romances, handsome, of knightly bearing, with a winning smile on his frank face. From her magic window in the big corner house where the road branched... more...