Fiction Books

The fine charter with which France had presumably closed the revolutionary epoch, in order to live for the first time under a constitutional government, was about to display its fatal weakness in the production of a deadlock. This possibility had been clearly foreseen by acute observers, since there was no provision for the control of one arm of the government by the other, and in any working system... more...

I There are men who are capable of loving a machine more deeply than they can love a woman. They are among the happiest men on earth. This is not a sneer meanly shot from cover at women. It is simply a statement of notorious fact. Men who worry themselves to distraction over the perfecting of a machine are indubitably blessed beyond their kind. Most of us have known such men. Yesterday they were... more...

We did not oversleep at St. Nicholas. The church-bell began to ring at four-thirty in the morning, and from the length of time it continued to ring I judged that it takes the Swiss sinner a good while to get the invitation through his head. Most church-bells in the world are of poor quality, and have a harsh and rasping sound which upsets the temper and produces much sin, but the St. Nicholas bell is a... more...

CHAPTER I. "Go down, grandfather: I will watch." But the old man to whom the entreaty was addressed shook his shaven head. "Yet you can get no rest here.... "And the stars? And the tumult below? Who can think of rest in hours like these? Throw my cloak around me! Rest—on such a night of horror!" "You are shivering. And how your hand and the instrument are shaking."... more...

A STUDY IN TINGUIAN FOLK-LORE This paper is based on a collection of Philippine folk-tales recently published by the Field Museum of Natural History. [1] The material appearing in that publication was gathered by the writer during a stay of sixteen months with the Tinguian, a powerful pagan tribe inhabiting the mountain districts of Abra, Ilocos Sur, and Norte, of Northern Luzon. In social... more...

"Suzy, Suzy, Suzy!" Whit Clayborne looked at the luminous face of the bulkhead clock for the hundredth time that day. Sweat started out on his forehead, and he gripped his face with a convulsed hand, moaning in helpless anguish. "Suzy, Suzy, Suzy!" The clock clicked impersonally in the darkness, and Whit moaned again. The cold. The darkness. The quiet. And the solitude. But there was... more...

CHAPTER I Along the buffalo paths, from one salt-lick to another, a group of pioneers took a vagrant way through the dense cane-brakes. Never a wheel had then entered the deep forests of this western wilderness; the frontiersman and the packhorse were comrades. Dark, gloomy, with long, level summit-lines, a grim outlier of the mountain range, since known as the Cumberland, stretched from northeast to... more...

ROAST BEEF, MEDIUM There is a journey compared to which the travels of Bunyan's hero were a summer-evening's stroll. The Pilgrims by whom this forced march is taken belong to a maligned fraternity, and are known as traveling men. Sample-case in hand, trunk key in pocket, cigar in mouth, brown derby atilt at an angle of ninety, each young and untried traveler starts on his journey down that... more...

The first of May, eighteen hundred and fifty-one, will be remembered in the Calendar for centuries after those who witnessed its glories shall have passed away. Its memory will endure with our language; and the Macaulays and Hallams of the time to come will add brilliancy to their pages by recounting the gorgeous yet touching ceremonial of this great Apotheosis of Peace. Peace has occasionally received... more...

CHAPTER I By easy stages Blue Jeans had arrived at the water tanks. That had not pleased him much, though the water which fell in a musical drip from the stack nearest the rails into what impressed one as a sensible, frugal tub, until it, too, filled and overflowed and betrayed its trivial nature, was sweet on his tongue and grateful to his mare. Arriving anywhere by easy stages had never appealed to... more...