Fiction Books

CHAPTER ITHERE was not a person in Old Chester less tainted by the vulgarity of secretiveness than Miss Lydia Sampson. She had no more reticence than sunshine or wind, or any other elemental thing. How much of this was due to conditions it would be hard to say; certainly there was no "reticence" in her silence as to her neighbors' affairs; she simply didn't know them! Nobody ever... more...

She was one of those girls who have become much more common of late years among the upper-middle classes, the comfortably fixed classes, than they have ever been since the aristocracy left off marrying Italian prime-donne. You know the type of English beauty, so often insisted on, say, twenty years ago—placid, fair, gentle, blue-eyed, fining into distinction in Lady Clara Vere de Vere? Always she was... more...

One The red sun rose slowly, achingly across the high Scottish moor, touching with melancholy gold the patching hoar frost and purple heath. For this was a land of pain, and stark beauty, and restless dream. Here the spirits of the dead walked by night through grim castles of shadow and dust, their glory long past. Here the spirits of the living grieved by day for a proud and chivalrous time forever... more...

CHAPTER I THE HERMIT THRUSH SINGS Then twilight falls with the touchOf a hand that soothes and stills,And a swamp-robin sings into lightThe lone white star of the hills. Alone in the dusk he sings,And the joy of another dayIs folded in peace and borneOn the drift of years away.—BLISS CARMAN. Other years, by the time the mid-June days were come, the little brook that sang through John McIntyre's... more...

"Isn't the eternal-womanly everywhere? What has happened to you?"I asked. "I wish you would come to my house and see. Every rug has been up for a month, and we have been living on bare floors. Everything that could be tied up has been tied up, everything that could be sewed up has been sewed up. Everything that could be moth-balled and put away in chests has been moth-balled and put... more...

PREFACE. Here is the reprint of one of the most formidable books against Nunneries ever published. It has produced powerful impressions abroad, as well as in the United States, and appears destined to have still greater results. It is the simple narrative of an uneducated and unprotected female, who escaped from the old Black Nunnery of Montreal, or Hotel Dieu, and told her tale of sufferings and... more...

No new edition of Bulfinch's classic work can be considered complete without some notice of the American scholar to whose wide erudition and painstaking care it stands as a perpetual monument. "The Age of Fable" has come to be ranked with older books like "Pilgrim's Progress," "Gulliver's Travels," "The Arabian Nights," "Robinson Crusoe," and five... more...

I. O'er royal London, in luxuriant May,While lamps yet twinkled, dawning crept the day.Home from the hell the pale-eyed gamester steals;Home from the ball flash jaded Beauty's wheels;The lean grimalkin, who, since night began,Hath hymn'd to love amidst the wrath of man,Scared from his raptures by the morning star,Flits finely by, and threads the area bar;From fields suburban rolls the... more...

I When Hugh Seymour was nine years of age he was sent from Ceylon, where his parents lived, to be educated in England. His relations having, for the most part, settled in foreign countries, he spent his holidays as a very minute and pale-faced "paying guest" in various houses where other children were of more importance than he, or where children as a race were of no importance at all. It was... more...

CHAPTER I.  Three Editors Let the reader be introduced to Lady Carbury, upon whose character and doings much will depend of whatever interest these pages may have, as she sits at her writing-table in her own room in her own house in Welbeck Street.  Lady Carbury spent many hours at her desk, and wrote many letters,—wrote also very much beside letters.  She spoke of herself in these days as a woman... more...