Fiction Books

Through the open window came the clear trill of a canary singing blithely in its cage. Within the tidy, homely little room a pale-faced girl and a youth of slender frame listened intently while the bird sang its song. The girl was the first to break the silence. "Ephraim, my brother!" she said. "What is it, dear Viola?" "I wonder does the birdie know that it is the Sabbath... more...

His head hurt like blazes, but he was alive, and to be alive meant fighting like hell to stay that way. That was the first thing returning consciousness told him. The next was that his helmet should have been cracked wide open when the bum landing had wrenched the acceleration hammocks out of their suspension sockets and heaved his suited body across the buckled conning deck. It should've been,... more...

CHAPTER I. Jeremiah Brander was one of the most prominent personages in the Cathedral town of Abchester. He inhabited an old-fashioned, red brick house near the end of the High Street. On either side was a high wall facing the street, and from this a garden, enclosing the house, stretched away to a little stream some two hundred yards in the rear; so that the house combined the advantage of a business... more...

CHAPTER I A NIGHT IN TOWN Night had fallen over Alaska—black, uncompromising night; a veil of impenetrable darkness had dropped upon the snow wastes and the ice-fields and the fettered Yukon, sleeping under its ice-chains, and upon the cruel passes where the trails had been made by tracks of blood. Day by day, as long as the light of day—God's glorious gift to man—had lasted, these trails... more...

CHAPTER I. "You have kept us waiting an age! Come along, Bet, do." "She ain't going to funk it, surely!" "No, no, not she,—she's a good 'un, Bet is,—come along, Bet. Joe Wilkins is waiting for us round the corner, and he says Sam is to be there, and Jimmy, and Hester Wright: do come along, now." "Will Hester Wright sing?" suddenly demanded the girl who... more...

A GOLDEN VENTURE The elders of the Tidger family sat at breakfast—Mrs. Tidger with knees wide apart and the youngest Tidger nestling in the valley of print-dress which lay between, and Mr. Tidger bearing on one moleskin knee a small copy of himself in a red flannel frock and a slipper. The larger Tidger children took the solids of their breakfast up and down the stone-flagged court outside, coming in... more...

A GOOD SAMARITAN The little District Telegraph boy, with a dirty face, stood at the edge of the desk, and, rubbing his sleeve across his cheek, made it unnecessarily dirtier. "Answer, sir?" "No—yes—wait a minute." Reed tore the yellow envelope and spread the telegram. It read: "Do I meet you at your office or at Martin's and what time?" "The devil!" Reed... more...

Ralph Grimm was born a gentleman, He had the misfortune of coming into the world some ten years later than might reasonably have been expected. Colonel Grim and his lady had celebrated twelve anniversaries of their wedding-day, and had given up all hopes of ever having a son and heir, when this late comer startled them by his unexpected appearance. The only previous addition to the family had been a... more...

CHAPTER I. The best bed-chamber, with its hangings of crimson moreen, was opened and aired—a performance which always caused my eight little brothers and sisters to place themselves in convenient positions for being stumbled over, to the great annoyance of industrious damsels, who, armed with broom and duster, endeavored to render their reign as arbitrary as it was short. For some time past, the... more...

HIS BIRTH On an evening in 1866 (exactly eight hundred years after the Battle of Hastings) Mr. Henry Knight, a draper's manager, aged forty, dark, clean-shaven, short, but not stout, sat in his sitting-room on the second-floor over the shop which he managed in Oxford Street, London. He was proud of that sitting-room, which represented the achievement of an ideal, and he had a right to be proud of... more...