Fiction Books

Sandeman, 2624 CE It was midafternoon before Dana's hunger overcame her excitement at being on Sandeman, hiking with her chosen lord—her thakur, in the Sandeman term she preferred—and trying to track a balik. She hadn't gotten within two hundred meters of the wolflike predator, and had finally realized she wasn't going to, so the two found a small clearing with bare rocks which made... more...

Why Not? At three o’clock this afternoon Evelyn Wastneys died. I am Evelyn Wastneys, and I died, standing at the door of an old country home in Ireland, with my hands full of ridiculous little silver shoes and horseshoes, and a Paris hat on my head, and a trembling treble voice whispering in my ear:— “Good-bye, Evelyn darling—darling! Thank you—thank you for all you have been to me! Oh,... more...

The six tales now translated for the English reader were written by Turgenev at various dates between 1847 and 1881. Their chronological order is:— Pyetushkov, 1847 The Brigadier, 1867 A Strange Story, 1869 Punin and Baburin, 1874 Old Portraits, 1881 A Desperate Character, 1881 Pyetushkov is the work of a young man of twenty-nine, and its lively, unstrained realism is so bold, intimate, and delicate... more...

Now this is the beginning of the Hollow Tree stories which the Story Teller told the Little Lady in the queer old house which stands in the very borders of the Big Deep Woods itself. They were told in the Room of the Lowest Ceiling and the Widest Fire—a ceiling so low that when the Story Teller stands upright it brushes his hair as he walks, and a fire so deep that pieces of large trees do not need... more...

ADDRESS I GOD, THE GREAT REALITY PORTION OF SCRIPTURE—Hebrews xi. 1-6. God is the one great Reality. Will you close your eyes for a moment and say those words over again very slowly so as to let them burn into your inmost heart and soul. The Word of God tells us that "The Son of God is come and hath given us an understanding that we may know Him that is true": this means that we may... more...

CHAPTER I A BOLT FOR FREEDOM Most of the really important things in life—such as love and death—happen unexpectedly. I know that my escape from Dartmoor did. We had just left the quarries—eighteen of us, all dressed in that depressing costume which King George provides for his less elusive subjects—and we were shambling sullenly back along the gloomy road which leads through the plantation to... more...

The Protectorate had come to an end ten years before the period when our story commences; and Charles the Second, restored to the throne of England, had since been employed in outraging all the right feelings of the people over whom he was called to reign, and in lowering the English name, which had been so gloriously raised by the wisdom of Cromwell. The body of that sagacious ruler of a mighty nation... more...

PROEM. Timber Town lay like a toy city at the bottom of a basin. Its wooden houses, each placed neatly in the middle of a little garden-plot, had been painted brightly for the delight of the children. There were whole streets of wooden shops, with verandahs in front of them to shade the real imported goods in their windows; and three wooden churches, freshly painted to suit the tastes of their... more...

Wendel Bollman’s name survives today solely in association with the Bollman truss, and even in this respect is known only to a few older civil and railroad engineers. The Bollman system of trussing, along with those of Whipple and Fink, may be said to have introduced the great age of the metal bridge, and thus, directly, the modern period of civil engineering. Bollman’s bridge truss, of which the... more...

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. A successful scout, or spy, is like a great poet in one respect: he is born, not made—subject to the requisition of the military genius of the time. That I was not born to be hanged is a self-evident proposition. Whether I was a successful scout or not, the reader of these pages must determine. It was my good fortune to have first seen the light under the shadow of one of... more...