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...

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...

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...

HAPPINESS IN PURGATORY. T may be said of Purgatory that if it did not exist it would have to be created, so eminently is it in accord with the dictates of reason and common sense. The natural instinct of travellers at their journey's end is to seek for rest and change of attire. Some are begrimed with mud, others have caught the dust of a scorching summer day; the heat or cold or damp of the... 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...

THE MAHATMA* [*] Mahatma, "great-souled." "One of a class of persons withpreter-natural powers, imagined to exist in India andThibet."—New English Dictionary. Everyone has seen a hare, either crouched or running in the fields, or hanging dead in a poulterer's shop, or lastly pathetic, even dreadful-looking and in this form almost indistinguishable from a skinned cat, on the... 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...

Why were they apologetic? It wasn't their fault that they came to Earth much too late. The beings stood around my bed in air suits like ski suits, with globes over their heads like upside-down fishbowls. It was all like a masquerade, with odd costumes and funny masks. I know that the masks are their faces, but I argue with them and find I think as if I am arguing with humans behind the masks. They... 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...