Fiction Books

COUSIN RUPERT GAINS A RECRUIT It has not happened to many men, as I think, to have fallen into the hands of as cruel and bloodthirsty a monster as ever defiled God’s earth, and to have escaped to tell the tale. Yet it is of this that I have come to write; and of all the hardships and perils which I went through from the time I fled from my father’s house to seek for treasure in the East Indies; and... more...

I Vengeance! that is the first, the only thought, when a man finds himself victimized, when his honor and fortune, his present and future, are wrecked by a vile conspiracy! The torment he endures under such circumstances can only be alleviated by the prospect of inflicting them a hundredfold upon his persecutors. And nothing seems impossible at the first moment, when hatred surges in the brain, and the... more...

It is characteristic of the atmosphere of legend in which Gabriele d'Annunzio has lived that even the authenticity of his name has been disputed. It was said that his real name was Gaetano Rapagnetta, and the curious will find amongst the Letters of James Huneker the boast that he was the first person to reveal to America the fact that d'Annunzio's name was "Rapagnetto"—a... more...

Fielding's third great novel has been the subject of much more discordant judgments than either of its forerunners. If we take the period since its appearance as covering four generations, we find the greatest authority in the earliest, Johnson, speaking of it with something more nearly approaching to enthusiasm than he allowed himself in reference to any other work of an author, to whom he was on... more...

AT last the sleepy atmosphere was stirred—and vigorously: the murder trial came on in the court. It became the absorbing topic of village talk immediately. Tom could not get away from it. Every reference to the murder sent a shudder to his heart, for his troubled conscience and fears almost persuaded him that these remarks were put forth in his hearing as "feelers"; he did not see how he... more...

I ~ THE "STARLIGHT" As the rising sun had just begun to pierce the misty tropic haze of early dawn, a small, white-painted schooner of ninety or a hundred tons burden was bearing down upon the low, densely-wooded island of Mayou, which lies between the coast of south-east New Guinea and the murderous Solomon Group—the grave of the white man in Melanesia. The white population of Mayou was not... more...

The Pets "Of all the worlds I ever broke into, this one's the most curious," said Red. "And one of the curiousest things in it is that I think it's queer. Why should I, now? What put it into our heads that affairs ought to go so and so and so, when they never do anything of the sort? Take any book you read, or any story a man tells you: it runs along about how Mr. Smith made up... more...

The Seizure of the “Zenobia”. The Zenobia—A1 at Lloyd’s—was a beautiful little clipper barque of 376 tons register, and so exquisitely fine were her lines that her cargo-carrying capacity amounted to but a few tons more than her register tonnage; in fact, the naval architect who designed her had been instructed to ignore altogether the question of cargo capacity, and to give his whole... more...

As the day was now waning apace, and I was still unprovided with any one who could act as my second, I set out upon a search through the various large hotels in the neighbourhood, trusting that amid my numerous acquaintance I should be fortunate enough to find some of them at Paris. With a most anxious eye I scanned the lists of arrivals at the usual haunts of my countrymen, in the Rue Rivoli, and the... more...

THE GREAT STONE BOOK "The crust of our earth is a great cemetery where the rocks are tombstones on which the buried dead have written their own epitaphs. They tell us who they were, and when and where they lived."—Louis Agassiz. Deep in the ground, and high and dry on the sides of mountains, belts of limestone and sandstone and slate lie on the ancient granite ribs of the earth. They are the... more...