Fiction Books

CHAPTER IONCE upon a time there were a King and a Queen who were very unhappy because they had no children. Everything else that the heart could wish for was theirs. They were rich; they lived in a wonderful palace full of the costliest treasures; theirkingdom was at peace, and their people were prosperous. Yet none of these things contented them, because they wanted a little child of their own to love... more...

rd Neff dropped a thin bundle of currency into the $100 bill drawer of the flat-top desk and kicked the drawer shut with a dusty boot. He flicked the drip from his hooked nose, which was chronically irritated by the wheat dust of the warehouse, then he wiped his fingers down the leg of his soiled denims. Across the 12 X 12, windowless room John stirred awake from the noise and began nosing in the... more...

CHAPTER I Hayden was back in New York again after several years spent in the uttermost parts of the earth. He had been building railroads in South America, Africa, and China, and had maintained so many lodges in this or that wilderness that he really feared he might be curiously awkward in adapting himself to the conventional requirements of civilization. In his long roundabout journey home he had... more...

THE BROWN HAND Every one knows that Sir Dominick Holden, the famous Indian surgeon, made me his heir, and that his death changed me in an hour from a hard-working and impecunious medical man to a well-to-do landed proprietor. Many know also that there were at least five people between the inheritance and me, and that Sir Dominick's selection appeared to be altogether arbitrary and whimsical. I can... more...

INTRODUCTION Arthur B. Reeve What is the fascination we feel for the mystery of the ghost story? Is it of the same nature as the fascination which we feel for the mystery of the detective story? Of the latter fascination, the late Paul Armstrong used to say that it was because we are all as full of crime as Sing Sing—only we don't dare. Thus, may I ask, are we not fascinated by the ghost story... more...

PART 1 For seven weeks the Constellation had been plunging through hyperspace with her eight thousand colonists; fleeing like a hunted thing with her communicators silenced and her drives moaning and thundering. Up in the control room, Irene had been told, the needles of the dials danced against the red danger lines day and night. She lay in bed and listened to the muffled, ceaseless roar of the drives... more...

Philip had whispered to Reinhold that he would look him up presently; Reinhold trembled for the result of a meeting between father and son, which could not have occurred at a more unfortunate moment; but it could not be helped, and he determined to employ the interval in saying a few words of comfort, after the scene that had just taken place, to the old clerk whom he had spoken to several times during... more...

CHAPTER I. THE MARQUIS OF KINGSBURY.  When Mr. Lionel Trafford went into Parliament for the Borough of Wednesbury as an advanced Radical, it nearly broke the heart of his uncle, the old Marquis of Kingsbury. Among Tories of his day the Marquis had been hyper-Tory,—as were his friends, the Duke of Newcastle, who thought that a man should be allowed to do what he liked with his own, and the Marquis of... more...

Chapter I.Superiority of Man in the Universe--Present Degradation of Reason--The mere Philosopher and the Christian Contrasted--God seen in all his Works--Creation of Man--His Corporeal and Mental Constitution--Value of the Soul--Adam in Paradise--Alone--Supplied with a Help Meet--Revelation points out the True Dignity of the Female Character--One Woman given to the Man--The Fall--Aggravated and... more...

It was on a cold morning late in November last, just after the national election, and I was walking briskly toward my office. A stiff wind was blowing and a drizzling rain was falling. The threads in one of the ribs of my umbrella snapped asunder and the cover flew upward, as it has a way of doing, and I was about to lower my disabled shower-stick when I ran slapdash into an old itinerant umbrella... more...