Fiction Books

GREAT many years ago there dwelt in a city of the East, of which you have never heard the name, a wise and holy man. He was highly esteemed by his fellow citizens, for he was kind and benevolent, never refusing good counsel to those in earnest to profit by it, so that by degrees the fame of his sagacity spread far and wide, and many came from great distances to consult him. One day he was sitting in... more...

THE BRACELETS. In a beautiful and retired part of England lived Mrs. Villars, a lady whose accurate understanding, benevolent heart, and steady temper, peculiarly fitted her for the most difficult, as well as most important of all occupations—the education of youth. This task she had undertaken; and twenty young persons were put under her care, with the perfect confidence of their parents. No young... more...

THE BETROTHAL.   Frances Seymour had been left an orphan and an heiress very early in life. Her mother had died in giving birth to a second child, which did not survive its parent, so that Frances had neither brother nor sister; and her father, an officer of rank and merit, was killed at Waterloo. When this sad news reached England, the child was spending her vacation with Mrs Wentworth, a sister of... more...

PREFACE. 'The last fruit off an old tree!' This, in the words of Walter Savage Landor, is what I have now the honour to set before the public in these hitherto 'Uncollected Writings of Thomas De Quincey.' It was my privilege to be associated intimately with the Author some thirty to forty years ago—from the beginning of 1850 until his death in 1859. Throughout the whole period... more...

CHAPTER ITHERE was not a person in Old Chester less tainted by the vulgarity of secretiveness than Miss Lydia Sampson. She had no more reticence than sunshine or wind, or any other elemental thing. How much of this was due to conditions it would be hard to say; certainly there was no "reticence" in her silence as to her neighbors' affairs; she simply didn't know them! Nobody ever... more...

She was one of those girls who have become much more common of late years among the upper-middle classes, the comfortably fixed classes, than they have ever been since the aristocracy left off marrying Italian prime-donne. You know the type of English beauty, so often insisted on, say, twenty years ago—placid, fair, gentle, blue-eyed, fining into distinction in Lady Clara Vere de Vere? Always she was... more...

One The red sun rose slowly, achingly across the high Scottish moor, touching with melancholy gold the patching hoar frost and purple heath. For this was a land of pain, and stark beauty, and restless dream. Here the spirits of the dead walked by night through grim castles of shadow and dust, their glory long past. Here the spirits of the living grieved by day for a proud and chivalrous time forever... more...

CHAPTER I THE HERMIT THRUSH SINGS Then twilight falls with the touchOf a hand that soothes and stills,And a swamp-robin sings into lightThe lone white star of the hills. Alone in the dusk he sings,And the joy of another dayIs folded in peace and borneOn the drift of years away.—BLISS CARMAN. Other years, by the time the mid-June days were come, the little brook that sang through John McIntyre's... more...

PREFACE "A Lieutenant at Eighteen" is the third of the series of "The Blue and the Gray—on Land." The stirring events of thirty-four years ago, when the first gun of the Great Rebellion awoke the nation from its slumber of thirteen years of peace, transformed the older boys of the day into men. Thousands of them who lacked three or four years of their majority, and some of them even... more...

PROLOGUE When William, Duke of Normandy, invaded England in 1066, and achieved for himself the title of "Conqueror," one of those who accompanied him was Robert D'Evreux, younger son of Walter, Earl of Rosmar, feudal owner and ruler of the town of his name in Normandy. After the battle of Hastings, in which William won so great a victory, he, wishing to honor the memory of the noblemen and... more...