Fiction Books

CHAPTER I JIMMY MAKES A BET The main smoking-room of the Strollers' Club had been filling for the last half-hour, and was now nearly full. In many ways, the Strollers', though not the most magnificent, is the pleasantest club in New York. Its ideals are comfort without pomp; and it is given over after eleven o'clock at night mainly to the Stage. Everybody is young, clean-shaven, and full... more...

PREFACE oes anybody remember the opera of The Inca, and that heartbreaking episode where the Court Undertaker, in a morbid desire to increase his professional skill, deliberately accomplishes the destruction of his middle-aged relatives in order to inter them for the sake of practise? If I recollect, his dismal confession runs something like this: “It was in a bleak November When I slew them, I... more...

INTRODUCTION My Dear Boys: This is a complete story in itself, but forms the sixteenth volume issued under the general title of "Rover Boys Series for Young Americans." This line was started thirteen years ago by the publication of the first three volumes, "The Rover Boys at School," "On the Ocean," and "In the Jungle." I hoped that the young people would like the... more...

I Mrs Brindeley looked across the lunch-table at her husband with glinting, eager eyes, which showed that there was something unusual in the brain behind them. "Bob," she said, factitiously calm. "You don't know what I've just remembered!" "Well?" said he. "It's only grandma's birthday to-day!" My friend Robert Brindley, the architect, struck the... more...

ILKA ON THE HILL-TOP Mr. Julius Hahn and his son Fritz were on a summer journey in the Tyrol. They had started from Mayrhofen early in the afternoon, on two meek-eyed, spiritless farm horses, and they intended to reach Ginzling before night-fall. There was a great blaze of splendor hidden somewhere behind the western mountain-tops; broad bars of fiery light were climbing the sky, and the châlets and... more...

Chapter I. Life in Martinique. A.D. 1760-A.D. 1775Martinique.Its varied beauties.The island of Martinique emerges in tropical luxuriance from the bosom of the Caribbean Sea. A meridian sun causes the whole land to smile in perennial verdure, and all the gorgeous flowers and luscious fruits of the torrid zone adorn upland and prairie in boundless profusion. Mountains, densely wooded, rear their summits... more...

CHAPTER ONE THE POWER OF CONSOLATION At the first glance there appeared to be nothing unusual in the scene confronting Miss Jane Combs as she stood, broad and heavy, in her doorway that May morning, looking up and down the single street of the little Colorado mining-town. Jane's house was broad and heavy also—a rough, paintless "shack," which she had built after her own ideals on a... more...

CHAPTER I. "Really, Frank, if I were in your place I shouldn't know whether to laugh or cry. It has always been the height of my ambition to have a fortune left me, but as with everything in this earthly existence, I should have my preferences. "Upon my word, Frank, I am sorry for you. Here you are with an inheritance fallen into your lap that you never even dreamed of, a sort of an... more...

Preface. The historical portion of this tale has been partially narrated in one of my previous volumes, “In All Time of our Tribulation,” in which the Despenser story is begun, and its end told from another point of view. That volume left Isabelle of France at the height of her ambition, in the place to reach which she had been plotting so long and so unscrupulously. Here we see the Nemesis come... more...

PREFACE There is a chain of little lakes—a necklace of lost jewels—lying in the forest that clothes the blue Laurentian Mountains in the Province of Quebec. Each of these hidden lakes has its own character and therefore its own charm. One is bright and friendly, with wooded hills around it, and silver beaches, and red berries of the rowan-tree fringing the shores. Another is sombre and lonely, set... more...