Fiction Books

D'RI AND I I A poet may be a good companion, but, so far as I know, he is ever the worst of fathers. Even as grandfather he is too near, for one poet can lay a streak of poverty over three generations. Doubt not I know whereof I speak, dear reader, for my mother's father was a poet—a French poet, too, whose lines had crossed the Atlantic long before that summer of 1770 when he came to... more...

THE KASÎDAH I The hour is nigh; the waning Queen   walks forth to rule the later night;Crownd with the sparkle of a Star,   and throned on orb of ashen light: The Wolf-tail* sweeps the paling East   to leave a deeper gloom behind,And Dawn uprears her shining head,   sighing with semblance of a wind: * The false dawn. The highlands catch yon Orient gleam,   while purpling still the... more...

The following Glossary includes the whole of Somerset, East of the River Parret, as well as adjoining parts of Wiltshire and Gloucestershire. West of the Parret many of the words are pronounced very differently indeed, so as to mark strongly the people who use them. [This may be seen more fully developed in two papers, by T. Spencer Baynes, read before the Somersetshire Archaeological Society, entitled... more...

The Wrecker Sometimes the notion comes to me while I'm talkin' to people that maybe I don't make myself clear, and it's been so for some time now—the things I see in my mind fadin' away from me at times, like ships in a fog. And that's strange enough, too, if what people tell me so often is true—that it used to be so one time that the office clerks would correct their... more...

CHAPTER I FAMILY ANTECEDENTS The Mallocks of Cockington—Some Old Devonshire Houses—A Child's Outlook on Life "Memoirs" is a word which, as commonly used, includes books of very various kinds, ranging from St. Augustine's Confessions to the gossip of Lady Dorothy Nevill. Such books, however, have all one family likeness. They all of them represent life as seen by the writers from a... more...

No windows broke any of the four plain walls of the office; there was no focus of outer-world sunlight on the desk there. Yet the five disks set out on its surface appeared to glow—perhaps the heat of the mischief they could cause ... had caused ... blazed in them. But fanciful imaginings did not cushion or veil cold, hard fact. Dr. Gordon Ashe, one of the four men peering unhappily at the display,... more...

CHAPTER I 'Ayah,' the doctor-sahib said in the vernacular, standing beside the bed, 'the fever of the mistress is like fire. Without doubt it cannot go on thus, but all that is in your hand to do you have done. It is necessary now only to be very watchful. And it will be to dress the mistress, and to make everything ready for a journey. Two hours later all the sahib-folk go from this... more...

"I'm getting old," Sam Chipfellow said, "and old men die." His words were an indirect answer to a question from Carter Hagen, his attorney. The two men were standing in an open glade, some distance from Sam Chipfellow's mansion at Chipfellow's Folly, this being the name Sam himself had attached to his huge estate. Sam lived there quite alone except for visits from... more...

Dulaq rode the slide to the upper pedestrian level, stepped off and walked over to the railing. The city stretched out all around him—broad avenues thronged with busy people, pedestrian walks, vehicle thoroughfares, aircars gliding between the gleaming, towering buildings. And somewhere in this vast city was the man he must kill. The man who would kill him, perhaps. It all seemed so real! The noise... more...

CHAPTER I. AS THE SPIRIT MOVED The village lay in a valley which had been the bed of a great river in the far-off days when Ireland, Wales and Brittany were joined together and the Thames flowed into the Seine. The place had never known turmoil or stir. For generations it had lived serenely. Three buildings in the village stood out insistently, more by the authority of their appearance and position... more...