Fiction Books

CHAPTER I AT THE SIGN OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN "That it may please Thee to preserve all that travel by land or by water . . . all sick persons, and young children."—THE LITANY. "I love my love with a H'aitch, because he's 'andsome—" Tilda turned over on her right side—she could do so now without pain— and lifting herself a little, eyed the occupant of the next bed.... more...

CHAPTER I. A BRILLIANT MATCH. "I remember Regulas Rothsay—or Rule, as we used to call him—when he was a little bit of a fellow hardly up to my knee, running about bare-footed and doing odd jobs round the foundry. Ah! and now he is elected governor of this State by the biggest majority ever heard of, and engaged to be married to the finest young lady in the country, with the full consent of all... more...

THE CHILDREN OF THE UPPER GLEN. There was, of course, the Lower Glen, which consisted of boggy places and endless mists in winter, and a small uninteresting village, where the barest necessaries of life could be bought, and where the folks were all of the humbler class, well-meaning, hard-working, but, alas! poor of the poor. When all was said and done, the Lower Glen was a poor place, meant for poor... more...

CHAPTER ISTRANGE BARGAININGS When a man came down out of the mountains looking dusty and gaunt as the stranger did, there was no marvel in the matter of his eating five cans of cove oysters. The one unaccountable thing about it was that Saul Chadron, president of the Drovers’ Association, should sit there at the table and urge the lank, lean starveling to go his limit. Usually Saul Chadron was a man... more...

Compared with a spaceship in distress, going to hell in a handbasket is roomy and slow! The space freighter Queen Dierdre was a great, squat, pockmarked vessel of the Earth-Mars run and she never gave anyone a bit of trouble. That should have been sufficient warning to Mr. Watkins, her engineer. Watkins was fond of saying that there are two kinds of equipment—the kind that fails bit by bit, and the... more...

INTRODUCTION. The best parallel to the conduct of the silly ostrich, that thrusts her head into a thicket, or the sand, and fancies she is thereby hidden from view, occurred some years since in the village of Catskill. A printer, who was neither an observer of the Sabbath, nor a member of the Temperance Society, went to a grocery one Sunday morning for a bottle of gin. On coming out of the dram-shop,... more...

CHAPTER I.Our Expanding Trade. In a little book recently published, an attempt is made to show that British trade is being knocked to pieces by German competition, that already the sun has set on England’s commercial supremacy, and that if we are not careful the few crumbs of trade still left to us will be snapped up by Germany. This depressing publication, aptly entitled “Made in Germany,” has... more...

PREFACE. I am unwilling to suffer this tale to leave my hands without a word of explanation to my reader. If I have never disguised from myself the grounds of any humble success I have attained to as a writer of fiction; if I have always had before me the fact that to movement and action, the stir of incident, and a certain light-heartedness and gayety of temperament, more easy to impart to others than... more...

He was afraid—not of the present or the future, but of the past. He was afraid of the thing tagged Reed Kieran, that stiff blind voiceless thing wheeling its slow orbit around the Moon, companion to dead worlds and silent space. 1. Something tiny went wrong, but no one ever knew whether it was in an electric relay or in the brain of the pilot. The pilot was Lieutenant Charles Wandek, UNRC, home... more...

ancy Laughton sat on the blanket she had spread on the lawn in her front yard, knitting a pair of booties for the PTA bazaar. Occasionally she glanced at her son in the play pen, who was getting his daily dose of sunshine. He was gurgling happily, examining a ball, a cheese grater and a linen baby book, all with perfunctory interest. When she looked up again she noticed a man walking by—except he... more...