Fiction Books

ALONG THE ROCKY RANGE OVER THE DIVIDE The hope of finding El Dorado, that animated the adventurous Spaniards who made the earlier recorded voyages to America, lived in the souls of Western mountaineers as late as the first half of this century. Ample discoveries of gold in California and Colorado gave color to the belief in this land of riches, and hunger, illness, privation, the persecutions of... more...

I All this New-year's Day of 1850 the sun shone cloudless but wrought no thaw. Even the landscapes of frost on the window-panes did not melt a flower, and the little trees still keep their silvery boughs arched high above the jeweled avenues. During the afternoon a lean hare limped twice across the lawn, and there was not a creature stirring to chase it. Now the night is bitter cold, with no... more...

CHAPTER I Bellamy, King's Spy, and Dorward, journalist, known to fame in every English-speaking country, stood before the double window of their spacious sitting-room, looking down upon the thoroughfare beneath. Both men were laboring under a bitter sense of failure. Bellamy's face was dark with forebodings; Dorward was irritated and nervous. Failure was a new thing to him—a thing which... more...

The following articles are now, after forty-five years, for the first time collected and printed in book form. They are an invaluable pendant to Marx's work on the coup d'état of Napoleon III. ("Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte.") Both works belong to the same period, and both are what Engels calls "excellent specimens of that marvellous gift ... of Marx ... of... more...

CHAPTER I. The sad curlews, annunciators of the autumn, had just appeared in a mass in a gray squall, fleeing from the high sea under the threat of approaching tempests. At the mouth of the southern rivers, of the Adour, of the Nivelle, of the Bidassoa which runs by Spain, they wandered above the waters already cold, flying low, skimming, with their wings over the mirror-like surfaces. And their cries,... more...

At one o’clock the busy seen begin,Quick to the hall they all are posting in;The cautious merchant takes his stand,The farmer shows the product of his land:If wheat the merchant says it’s damp or cold,If Dawling Market, that’s the case I’m told.If it is barley he’ll your mind unhinge,And say good Sir it has a gloomy dinge;Reduce three shillings of the currant price,And with the farmer he’ll... more...

CHAPTER I HOW BELTANE LIVED WITHIN THE GREENWOOD In a glade of the forest, yet not so far but that one might hear the chime of bells stealing across the valley from the great minster of Mortain on a still evening, dwelt Beltane the Smith. Alone he lived in the shadow of the great trees, happy when the piping of the birds was in his ears, and joying to listen to the plash and murmur of the brook that... more...

Part the First.THE VILLA AT HAMPSTEAD.I.ON a summer's morning, between thirty and forty years ago, two girls were crying bitterly in the cabin of an East Indian passenger ship, bound outward, from Gravesend to Bombay. They were both of the same age—eighteen. They had both, from childhood upward, been close and dear friends at the same school. They were now parting for the first time—and... more...

CHAPTER I THE CASTAWAYS The second night north of the Zambezi, as well as the first, the little tramp rescue steamer had run out many miles into the offing and laid-to during the hours of darkness. The vicinity of the coral reefs that fringe the southeast coast of Africa is decidedly undesirable on moonless nights. When the Right Honorable the Earl of Avondale came out of his close, hot stateroom into... more...

The University of Kansas Museum of Natural History received from J. R. Alcorn and Albert A. Alcorn a sizable collection of mammals taken in the summer of 1951 in Alaska. In addition to visiting localities at which they had collected in 1947 and 1948 (see Baker, Univ. Kansas Publ., Mus. Nat. Hist., 5:87-117, 1951) the Alcorns obtained specimens from localities not previously visited in the vicinity of... more...