Fiction Books

CHAPTER IWHICH TELLS OF A VERY COMMONPLACE INCIDENT No! No! she was not going to gush!—Not even though there was nothing in the room at this moment to stand up afterward before her as dumb witness to a moment's possible weakness. Less than nothing in fact: space might have spoken and recalled that moment . . . infinite nothingness might at some future time have brought back the memory of it . .... more...

CHAPTER I. A MAN OF HIS DAY As the Milvains sat down to breakfast the clock of Wattleborough parish church struck eight; it was two miles away, but the strokes were borne very distinctly on the west wind this autumn morning. Jasper, listening before he cracked an egg, remarked with cheerfulness: 'There's a man being hanged in London at this moment.' 'Surely it isn't necessary... more...

CHAPTER I. "There is a courtesy of the heart. Is it akin to love?"—Goethe.. It is the perfection of summer, early June, before the roses have shaken off their sweetness, and Grandon Park is lovely enough to compare with places whose beauty is an accretion of centuries rather than the work of decades. Yet these grand old trees and this bluff, with a strata of rock manifest here and there, are... more...

LETTER I MR. LOVELACE, TO JOHN BELFORD, ESQ. SAT. MIDNIGHT. No rest, says a text that I once heard preached upon, to the wicked—and I cannot close my eyes (yet only wanted to compound for half an hour in an elbow-chair)—so must scribble on. I parted with the Captain after another strong debate with him in relation to what is to be the fate of this lady. As the fellow has an excellent head, and... more...

In 1682, when I was thirty years of age and Mistress Mary Cavendish just turned of eighteen, she and I together one Sabbath morning in the month of April were riding to meeting in Jamestown. We were all alone except for the troop of black slaves straggling in the rear, blurring the road curiously with their black faces. It seldom happened that we rode in such wise, for Mistress Catherine Cavendish, the... more...

PREFACE. The following pages have afforded occupation for many hours, which might else have been wasted in idle amusements, or embittered by still idler regrets at the destiny which carried the writer to a region so little seductive as Africa, and kept him there so long. He now offers them to the public, after some labor bestowed in correction and amendment, but retaining their original form, that of a... more...

CHAPTER I. It was raining when the ship was ready to sail; yet on the pier a large crowd of people stood under dripping umbrellas, waving and shouting farewells to their friends on board. The departing passengers, most of them protected by an upper deck, pressed four deep against the rail, and waved and shouted in return. The belated passenger, struggling with heavy hand baggage, scrambled up the... more...

I do not thinkSo fair an outward, and such stuff within,Endows a man but he. Cymbeline. The Victoria Bank, Toronto, is on the corner of Bay and Front Streets, where it overlooks a part of the harbor large enough to gladden the eyes of the bank-clerks who are aquatic in their habits and have time to look out of the windows. Young gentlemen in tattered and ink-stained coats, but irreproachable in the... more...

CHAPTER I A PRIVATE LESSON FROM A BULLDOG. "Want to be a school-master, do you? You? Well, what would you do in Flat Crick deestrick, I'd like to know? Why, the boys have driv off the last two, and licked the one afore them like blazes. You might teach a summer school, when nothin' but children come. But I 'low it takes a right smart man to be school-master in Flat Crick in the... more...

Here I am at the end of the railroad, waiting to begin my two-days' wagon-trip across the mountains. But the school wagon has not arrived,—my landlady says it is delayed by a "tide" in the creeks. By way of cheering me, she has just given a graphic account of the twenty-year-old feud for which this small town is notorious, and has even offered to take me around and show me, on walls,... more...