Fiction Books

"MORAL STATISTICIAN."—I don't want any of your statistics; I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it. I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the... more...

OUR FIRST SORROW. "O, it is trouble very bad,Which causes us to weep;All last night long we were so sad,Not one of us could sleep." Sometimes they called us all three just "the boys." But I don't think that was fair. I may have been rather a tomboy, but I wasn't quite so bad as to be called a "boy." I was nine then— I mean I was nine at the beginning of the time I am... more...

PREFACE. The following addresses, though spoken at different times, are intentionally connected in subject; their aim being to set one or two main principles of art in simple light before the general student, and to indicate their practical bearing on modern design. The law which it has been my effort chiefly to illustrate is the dependence of all noble design, in any kind, on the sculpture or painting... more...

CHAPTER I The light cruisers and destroyers—Harwich in war time—The Harwich Force goes out—The first shots of the naval war—Sinking of the Königin Luise—Loss of the Amphion. He who undertakes to write the history of the Naval Forces which had Harwich as their base during the Great War will have a wonderful story indeed to tell—from the sinking, within a few days of the declaration of war,... more...

HOW IT WAS LOST Among green New England hills stood an ancient house, many-gabled, mossy-roofed, and quaintly built, but picturesque and pleasant to the eye; for a brook ran babbling through the orchard that encompassed it about, a garden-plat stretched upward to the whispering birches on the slope, and patriarchal elms stood sentinel upon the lawn, as they had stood almost a century ago, when the... more...

LETTER FROM CHEVALIER BUNSEN. Charlottenberg, near Heidelberg, 10th October, 1857. Dear Sir,—It is now about five months since you expressed to me a wish that I might be induced to imbody, in a few pages, my views on the peculiar interest I attached—as you had been informed by a common friend—to the most popular German novel of the age, Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben. I confess I was at... more...

THE HOLY OILS. Horace Endicott once believed that life began for him the day he married Sonia Westfield. The ten months spent with the young wife were of a hue so roseate as to render discussion of the point foolish. His youth had been a happy one, of the roystering, innocent kind: noisy with yachting, baseball, and a moderate quantity of college beer, but clean, as if his mother had supervised it; yet... more...

CHAPTER I THE THEORY OF COPERNICUS DROOP The two sisters were together in their garden. Rebecca Wise, turned forty and growing slightly gray at the temples, was moving slowly from one of her precious plants to the next, leaning over each to pinch off a dead leaf or count the buds. It was the historic month of May, 1898, and May is the paradise of flower lovers. Phœbe was eighteen years younger than... more...

THIS IS THE END BY STELLA BENSON 1917 This is the end, for the moment, of all my thinking, this is my unfinal conclusion. There is no reason in tangible things, and no system in the ordinary ways of the world. Hands were made to grope, and feet to stumble, and the only things you may count on are the unaccountable things. System is a fairy and a dream, you never find system where or when you expect it.... more...

Chapter I Mushrooms"La célébrité est comme le feu, qui brûle de près et illumine de loin."Under a glorious sky, in the year 1869, Paris gathered to rejoice in the centenary of the birth of the First Napoleon. A gathering this of mushroom nobility, soldiery and diplomacy, to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the greatest mushroom that ever sprang to life in the hotbed of internecine... more...