Fiction Books

I. BOYHOOD I It was dawn on the first of May, 1877. From the sea the mist came sweeping in, in a gray trail that lay heavily on the water. Here and there there was a movement in it; it seemed about to lift, but closed in again, leaving only a strip of shore with two old boats lying keel uppermost upon it. The prow of a third boat and a bit of breakwater showed dimly in the mist a few paces off. At... more...

CRITICAL INTRODUCTION Domi mansit, lanam fecit: "He remained at home and wrote," is the first thing that should be said of Gustave Flaubert. This trait, which he shares with many of the writers of his generation,—Renan, Taine, Leconte de Lisle and Dumas fils,—distinguishes them and distinguishes him from those of the preceding generation, who voluntarily sought inspiration in disorder and... more...

I Late one fall afternoon, in the year 1898, a train paused for a moment before crossing a bridge over a river. From it descended a heavy-set, elderly man. The train immediately proceeded on its way. The heavy-set man looked about him. The river and the bottom-land growths of willow and hardwood were hemmed in, as far as he could see, by low-wooded hills. Only the railroad bridge, the steep embankment... more...

he wind howled out of the northwest, blind with snow and barbed with ice crystals. All the way up the half-mile precipice it fingered and wrenched away at groaning ice-slabs. It screamed over the top, whirled snow in a dervish dance around the hollow there, piled snow into the long furrow plowed ruler-straight through streamlined hummocks of snow. The sun glinted on black rock glazed by ice, chasms and... more...

CHAPTER IHER MISSION IN LIFE Obadiah Dale was the richest man in South Ridgefield. He owned the great textile mill down by the river where hundreds of people were employed and which hummed and clattered from morning until night to add to his wealth. He lived in a fine house. About it, broad lawns, shaded by ancient elms and dotted with groups of shrubbery, formed a verdant setting for the walls and... more...

By July 1, 1916, the war had involved every civilized nation upon the globe except the United States of North and of South America, which had up to that time succeeded in maintaining their neutrality. Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, Poland, Austria Hungary, Lombardy, and Servia, had been devastated. Five million adult male human beings had been exterminated by the machines of war, by disease,... more...

Miles Gilbert watched the landscape slide away below him, its quilt of rounded treetops mottled red and orange in the double sunlight and, in shaded places, with the natural yellow of the vegetation of Kwannon. The aircar began a slow swing to the left, and Gettler Alpha came into view, a monstrous smear of red incandescence with an optical diameter of two feet at arm's length, slightly flattened... more...

THE only way to be happy with a husband is to learn to be happy without him most of the time.LOVE is just the shine on the jewel of matrimony; but, after all, the shine on a jewel is the whole thing.A MAN firmly believes that, if he can only keep his wife in the straight and narrow path, he can go out and zig-zag all over the downward one without falling from grace.A GIRL is never so surprised when a... more...

A friend of mine, a soldier, who died in Greece of fever some years since, described to me one day his first engagement. His story so impressed me that I wrote it down from memory. It was as follows: I joined my regiment on September 4th. It was evening. I found the colonel in the camp. He received me rather bruskly, but having read the general's introductory letter he changed his manner and... more...

Chapter I"If to her share some female errors fall,Look on her face—and you'll forget them all." [Footnote 1: Ao-Tea-Roa, the Maori name of New Zealand.] Though one of the parts of the earth best fitted for man, New Zealand was probably about the last of such lands occupied by the human race. The first European to find it was a Dutch sea-captain who was looking for something else, and who... more...