Fiction Books

PREFACE "A Lieutenant at Eighteen" is the third of the series of "The Blue and the Gray—on Land." The stirring events of thirty-four years ago, when the first gun of the Great Rebellion awoke the nation from its slumber of thirteen years of peace, transformed the older boys of the day into men. Thousands of them who lacked three or four years of their majority, and some of them even... more...

PROLOGUE When William, Duke of Normandy, invaded England in 1066, and achieved for himself the title of "Conqueror," one of those who accompanied him was Robert D'Evreux, younger son of Walter, Earl of Rosmar, feudal owner and ruler of the town of his name in Normandy. After the battle of Hastings, in which William won so great a victory, he, wishing to honor the memory of the noblemen and... more...

CHAPTER I NEGLECTED RESPONSIBILITIES "Like a prince in his cradle," you say, "with invisible fairies and the innocent peace of childhood over him!" What fairy stood by the cradle of Barbara's Nikolai it would be difficult to say. Out at the tinsmith's, in the little house with the cracked and broken window-panes in the outskirts of the town, there was often a run of visitors,... more...

NICHOLAS TOP My uncle, Nicholas Top, of Twist Tickle, was of a cut so grotesque that folk forgot their manners when he stumped abroad. Bowling through the streets of St. John’s, which twice a year he tapped with staff and wooden leg, myself in leading––bowling cheerily, with his last rag spread, as he said, and be damned to the chart––he left a swirling wake of amazement: craning necks, open... more...

MOTHER When handsome young Richard Field—he was very handsome and very young—announced to our assembled company that if his turn should really come to tell us a story, the story should be no invention of his fancy, but a page of truth, a chapter from his own life, in which himself was the hero and a lovely, innocent girl was the heroine, his wife at once looked extremely uncomfortable. She changed... more...

O but a little consider, and you will soon find, Pride and Luxury, Corruption and Bribery, are the greatest Causes of our present Calamities; and if you do not discourage the Two first, and punish the Two last Evils, we shall speedily come to Destruction, and God will blast all our Endeavours. The lively Instance of late, proves to us the Ruin those Evils carry with them: And is there not one good Man,... more...

PREFACE. Here is the reprint of one of the most formidable books against Nunneries ever published. It has produced powerful impressions abroad, as well as in the United States, and appears destined to have still greater results. It is the simple narrative of an uneducated and unprotected female, who escaped from the old Black Nunnery of Montreal, or Hotel Dieu, and told her tale of sufferings and... more...

Introduction The tree frogs of the Hyla rubra group are abundant and form a conspicuous element of the Neotropical frog fauna. Representatives of the group occur from lowland México to Argentina; the greatest diversity is reached in the lowlands of southeastern Brazil (Cochran, 1955). The group apparently originated in South America; the endemic Central American species evolved from stocks that... more...

I Like a man who reenters a closed and darkened house and lies down; lying there, remains conscious of sunlight outside, of bird-calls, and the breeze in the trees, so had Drene entered into the obscurity of himself. Through the chambers of his brain the twilit corridors where cringed his bruised and disfigured soul, there nothing stirring except the automatic pulses which never cease. Sometimes, when... more...

No new edition of Bulfinch's classic work can be considered complete without some notice of the American scholar to whose wide erudition and painstaking care it stands as a perpetual monument. "The Age of Fable" has come to be ranked with older books like "Pilgrim's Progress," "Gulliver's Travels," "The Arabian Nights," "Robinson Crusoe," and five... more...