Fiction Books

POTTER’S CLAY Scipio moved about the room uncertainly. It was characteristic of him. Nature had given him an expression that suggested bewilderment, and, somehow, this expression had got into his movements. He was swabbing the floor with a rag mop; a voluntary task, undertaken to relieve his wife, who was lounging over the glowing cookstove, reading a cheap story book. Once or twice he paused in his... more...

Amongst the Plungers. “Hullo! Markworth. How lucky! Why you are just the man I want; you’re ubiquitous, who’d have thought of seeing you in town?” said Tom Hartshorne, of the —th Dragoons, cheerily, as he sauntered late one summer afternoon into a private billiard-room in Oxford-street, where a tall, dark-complexioned, and strikingly-handsome man, was knocking the balls about in his... more...

THE AUTHOR TO THE READER A la sueur de ton visaige,Tu gagnerais ta pauvre vie.Après long travail et usaige,Voicy la mort qui te convie.* THIS quaint old French verse, written under one of Holbein's pictures, is profoundly melancholy. The engraving represents a laborer driving his plow through the middle of a field. Beyond him stretches a vast horizon, dotted with wretched huts; the sun is sinking... more...

Herbert Hyrel settled himself more comfortably in his easy chair, extended his short legs further toward the fireplace, and let his eyes travel cautiously in the general direction of his wife. She was in her chair as usual, her long legs curled up beneath her, the upper half of her face hidden in the bulk of her personalized, three-dimensional telovis. The telovis, of a stereoscopic nature, seemingly... more...

THE LAST CARD Mr. Brinsmade and the Doctor were the first to leave the little room where Silas Whipple had lived and worked and died, Mr. Brinsmade bent upon one of those errands which claimed him at all times. He took Shadrach with him. Virginia sat on, a vague fear haunting her,—a fear for her father's safety. Where was Clarence? What had he seen? Was the place watched? These questions, at... more...

CHAPTER I FATHERLESS Lad stood looking out of the dormer window in a scantily furnished attic in the high-pitched roof of a house in Holborn, in September 1664. Numbers of persons were traversing the street below, many of them going out through the bars, fifty yards away, into the fields beyond, where some sports were being held that morning, while country people were coming in with their baskets from... more...

SOMETHING AMISS. Everybody knows Canterbury, with its Old-World charms and its ostentatious air of being content to be rather behind the times, of looking down upon the hurrying Americans who dash through its cathedral and take snap-shots at its slums, and at all those busy moderns who cannot afford to take life at its own jog-trot pace. But everybody does not know the charming old halls and... more...

CHAPTER I A BOMBING AIR RAID The scene in the valley was striking in one respect. Low ranges of gently sloping hills had widened out, enclosing broad levels with what in America would be termed a creek but was here poetically named a river. By here I mean eastern France, not so many miles from No-Man's-Land. The "striking" feature was the "Flying Camp" spread out over a dead level... more...

CHAPTER I. THE TWO COMRADES. "War has been declared, mother!" shouted Hal, as closely followed by his friend, Chester Crawford, he dashed into the great hotel in Berlin, where the three were stopping, and made his way through the crowd that thronged the lobby to his mother's side. "Yes, mother, it's true," continued Hal, seeing the look of consternation on Mrs. Paine's... more...

THE SISTINE MADONNA John turned a little to the left, going nearer to the window, where he could gain a better view of the Madonna, which he had heard so often was the most famous picture in the world. He was no technical judge of painting—he was far too young for such knowledge—but he always considered the effect of the whole upon himself, and he was satisfied with that method, feeling perhaps... more...