Fiction Books

THE GOOSE-GIRL An old queen, whose husband had been dead some years, had a beautiful daughter. When she grew up, she was betrothed to a prince who lived a great way off; and as the time drew near for her to be married, she got ready to set off on her journey to his country. Then the queen, her mother, packed up a great many costly things—jewels, and gold, and silver, trinkets, fine dresses, and in... more...

INTRODUCTION Upton Sinclair is one of the not too many writers who have consecrated their lives to the agitation for social justice, and who have also enrolled their art in the service of a set purpose. A great and non-temporizing enthusiast, he never flinched from making sacrifices. Now and then he attained great material successes as a writer, but invariably he invested and lost his earnings in... more...

CHAPTER I—START IN LIFE I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull.  He got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom... more...

Thirty minutes to Litchfield. Conn Maxwell, at the armor-glass front of the observation deck, watched the landscape rush out of the horizon and vanish beneath the ship, ten thousand feet down. He thought he knew how an hourglass must feel with the sand slowly draining out. It had been six months to Litchfield when the Mizar lifted out of La Plata Spaceport and he watched Terra dwindle away. It had been... more...

The Discovery of the Tablets at Nineveh by Layard, Rassam and Smith. In 1845-47 and again in 1849-51 Mr. (later Sir) A. H. Layard carried out a series of excavations among the ruins of the ancient city of Nineveh, "that great city, wherein are more than sixteen thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left; and also much cattle" (Jonah iv, II). Its ruins lie on... more...

CHAPTER I Kedzie Thropp had never seen Fifth Avenue or a yacht or a butler or a glass of champagne or an ocean or a person of social prominence. She wanted to see them. For each five minutes of the day and night, one girl comes to NewYork to make her life; or so the compilers of statistics claim. This was Kedzie Thropp's five minutes. She did not know it, and the two highly important, because... more...

ADVERTISEMENT. The present edition is an exact reproduction of that edited by my father, with my great-uncle's final corrections, and published by Mr. John Murray in 1859. Several reprints of that edition have testified to the continued popularity of the work, and the necessity for the present issue shows that an acquaintance of nearly half a century has not yet wearied the public of the standard... more...

I An Irate Neighbor A tall, slim girl, "half-past sixteen," with serious gray eyes and hair which her friends called auburn, had sat down on the broad red sandstone doorstep of a Prince Edward Island farmhouse one ripe afternoon in August, firmly resolved to construe so many lines of Virgil. But an August afternoon, with blue hazes scarfing the harvest slopes, little winds whispering elfishly... more...

CHRYSOSTOM. A.D. 347-407. SACRED ELOQUENCE. The first great moral force, after martyrdom, which aroused the degenerate people of the old Roman world from the torpor and egotism and sensuality which were preparing the way for violence and ruin, was the Christian pulpit. Sacred eloquence, then, as impersonated in Chrysostom, "the golden-mouthed," will be the subject of this Lecture, for it was by... more...

I. "Love, that old song, of which the world is never weary." It was one of those beautiful, lengthening days, when May was pressing back with both hands the shades of the morning and the evening; May in New York one hundred and twenty-one years ago, and yet the May of A.D. 1886,—the same clear air and wind, the same rarefied freshness, full of faint, passing aromas from the wet earth and the... more...