Fiction Books

I A SOUTHERN ASSIGNMENT   Sunday, the sixth of June, 1903, broke the monotony of the life that we were leading at the Post of Hassi-Inifel by two events of unequal importance, the arrival of a letter from Mlle. de C——, and the latest numbers of the Official Journal of the French Republic. "I have the Lieutenant's permission?" said Sergeant Chatelain, beginning to glance through the... more...

Lady Channice was waiting for her son to come in from the garden. The afternoon was growing late, but she had not sat down to the table, though tea was ready and the kettle sent out a narrow banner of steam. Walking up and down the long room she paused now and then to look at the bowls and vases of roses placed about it, now and then to look out of the windows, and finally at the last window she... more...

CHAPTER FIRST. Wiser Raymondus, in his closet pent,Laughs at such danger and adventurementWhen half his lands are spent in golden smoke,And now his second hopeful glasse is broke,But yet, if haply his third furnace hold,Devoteth all his pots and pans to gold.* * The author cannot remember where these lines are to be found: perhaps in Bishop Hall's Satires. [They occur in Book iv. Satire iii.]... more...

CHAPTER I The tiny, trivial touch of Destiny that caused the turn in Amarilly's fate-tide came one morning when, in her capacity as assistant to the scrub ladies at the Barlow Stock Theatre, she viewed for the first time the dress rehearsal of A Terrible Trial. Heretofore the patient little plodder had found in her occupation only the sordid satisfaction of drawing her wages, but now the... more...

INTRODUCTION The present work completes a series of fictitious narratives, intended to illustrate the manners of Scotland at three different periods. Waverley embraced the age of our fathers, Guy Mannering that of our own youth, and the Antiquary refers to the last ten years of the eighteenth century. I have, in the two last narratives especially, sought my principal personages in the class of society... more...

CHAPTER FIRST. Go call a coach, and let a coach be called,And let the man who calleth be the caller;And in his calling let him nothing call,But Coach! Coach! Coach! O for a coach, ye gods!Chrononhotonthologos. It was early on a fine summer's day, near the end of the eighteenth century, when a young man, of genteel appearance, journeying towards the north-east of Scotland, provided himself with a... more...

CHAPTER I It was a cold night in early spring, and the West End streets were nearly deserted. The great shutters of the shops were being drawn down with a dull rumble, and every moment the pavements grew more dreary looking as the glories of the plate-glass windows were hidden. Tired workers with haggard faces were making their way homeward; to them the day was at an end. But to the occupants of the... more...

A sectional party, inimical to our institutions, and odious to our people, is about taking possession of the Federal Government. The seed sown by the early Abolitionists has yielded a luxurious harvest. When Lincoln is in place, Garrison will be in power. The Constitution, either openly violated or emasculated of its true meaning and spirit by the subtleties of New England logic, is powerless for... more...

The tract appended to this preface has been chosen to accompany this reprint of Alton Locke in order to illustrate, from another side, a distinct period in the life of Charles Kingsley, which stands out very much by itself. It may be taken roughly to have extended from 1848 to 1856. It has been thought that they require a preface, and I have undertaken to write it, as one of the few survivors of those... more...

CHAPTER I.   I have now come to the farmer's life, with which I am exceedingly delighted, and which seems to me to belong especially to the life of a wise man. CICERO. Weary of boarding at seashore and mountain, tired of traveling in search of comfort, hating hotel life, I visited a country friend at Gooseville, Conn. (an assumed name for Foxboro, Mass.), and passed three happy weeks in her... more...