Fiction Books

CHAPTER I. The turf shall be my fragrant shrine;My temple, Lord! that arch of thine;My censer's breath the mountain airs,And silent thoughts my only prayers.MOORE The sublimity connected with vastness is familiar to every eye. The most abstruse, the most far-reaching, perhaps the most chastened of the poet's thoughts, crowd on the imagination as he gazes into the depths of the illimitable... more...

PROEM "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her" I can hear it always—the Call of the Prairie. The passing of sixty Winters has left me a vigorous man, although my hair is as white as the January snowdrift in the draws, and the strenuous events of some of the years have put a tax on my strength. I shall always limp a little in my right foot—that was left out on the plains one... more...

CHAPTER I. Who art thou, fair one, who usurp'st the placeOf Blanch, the lady of the matchless grace?—LAMB. IT was towards the evening of a day in early April that two ladies were seated by the open windows of a cottage in Devonshire. The lawn before them was gay with evergreens, relieved by the first few flowers and fresh turf of the reviving spring; and at a distance, through an opening amongst... more...

Rimsky-Korsakov had long been engrossed in his treatise on orchestration. We have in our possession a thick note book of some 200 pages in fine hand writing, dating from the years 1873-1874, containing a monograph on the question of acoustics, a classification of wind instruments and a detailed description of the construction and fingering of the different kinds of flute, the oboe, clarinet and... more...

CHAPTER I WHAT'S IN HEREDITY Honora Leffingwell is the original name of our heroine. She was born in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, at Nice, in France, and she spent the early years of her life in St. Louis, a somewhat conservative old city on the banks of the Mississippi River. Her father was Randolph Leffingwell, and he died in the early flower of his manhood, while filling with a... more...

Guard-mounting was over. The commanding officer in the Adjutant's office was occupied with the daily routine business of a frontier post. At tables near him sat the Post-Adjutant, the acting Sergeant-Major, and a soldier clerk, writing and making up the semi-weekly mail for the post-office beyond the neighboring river. Upon a bench outside the door, serving his tour as office orderly, lounged a... more...

CHATEAUBRIAND. 1768-1848. THE RESTORATION AND FALL OF THE BOURBONS. In this lecture I wish to treat of the restoration of the Bourbons, and of the counter-revolution in France. On the fall of Napoleon, the Prussian king and the Austrian emperor, under the predominating influence of Metternich, in restoring the Bourbons were averse to constitutional checks. They wanted nothing less than absolute... more...

I Miss Robinson had first seen Wyndham and fallen in love with him on the day that he appeared in the road as a neighbour and set up his studio there. But that was years before, and she had never made his acquaintance. He was the Prince Charming of the romances, handsome, of knightly bearing, with a winning smile on his frank face. From her magic window in the big corner house where the road branched... more...

CHAPTER I. THE SERFS OF PLOUERNEL. The day touched its close. The autumn sun cast its last rays upon one of the villages of the seigniory of Plouernel. A large number of partly demolished houses bore testimony to having been recently set on fire during one of the wars, frequent during the eleventh century, between the feudal lords of France. The walls of the huts of the village, built in pise, or of... more...

Crossing the Durban Bar. The steamship Amatikulu was drawing near the end of her voyage. A fresh breeze was ploughing up the blue waves of the Indian Ocean, hurling off their crests in white, foamy masses, casting showers of salt spray upon the wet decks of the vessel as she plunged her nose into each heaving, tossing billow, and leaped up again with a sudden jerk which was more than lively, and... more...