Fiction Books

CHAPTER I OUR FRIENDLY NERVES "Hop up, Dick, love! See how glorious the sun is on the new snow. Now isn't that more beautiful than your dreams? And see the birdies! They can't find any breakfast. Let's hurry and have our morning wrestle and dress and give them some breakie before Anne calls." The mother is Ethel Baxter Lord. She is thirty-eight, and Dick-boy is just five. The... more...

CHAPTER I MR. WRENN IS LONELY The ticket-taker of the Nickelorion Moving-Picture Show is a public personage, who stands out on Fourteenth Street, New York, wearing a gorgeous light-blue coat of numerous brass buttons. He nods to all the patrons, and his nod is the most cordial in town. Mr. Wrenn used to trot down to Fourteenth Street, passing ever so many other shows, just to get that cordial nod,... more...

Just as one of the great proofs, if not the great proof, of the truth of Christianity is the vast fact of the world's need for it, so one grand proof of the Resurrection lies in the fact that no interpretation of Christ's teaching or Christ's life would be worth a brass farthing--so far as the actual life of suffering man is concerned--without His Death and Resurrection. That teaching... more...

TO A FRIEND. I have not asked your consent, my dear General, to the foregoing inscription, because it would have been no inconsiderable disappointment to me had you withheld it; for I have long desired to connect your name with some book of mine, in commemoration of an early friendship that has grown old between two individuals of widely dissimilar pursuits and fortunes. I only wish that the offering... more...

THE HIGHLAND FEUD. Why should I, Murdoch M'Crimman of Coila, be condemned for a period of indefinite length to the drudgery of the desk's dull wood? That is the question I have just been asking myself. Am I emulous of the honour and glory that, they say, float halo-like round the brow of the author? Have I the desire to awake and find myself famous? The fame, alas! that authors chase is but... more...

CHAPTER I OF LOYALTYO God, who causes us to rejoice in recalling the joys of the conception, the nativity, the annunciation, the visitation, the purification, and the assumption of the blessed and glorious virgin Mary; grant to us so worthily to devote ourselves to her praise and service, that we may be conscious of her presence and assistance in all our necessities and straits, and especially in the... more...

CHAPTER I. THE WORK OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT. The Preservation of Order.—The first and most important work of any government is the preservation of order. We think of this function most frequently as exercised in the arrest of offenders who violate the law. In fact, most young persons receive their earliest ideas of government by seeing the policeman, or constable, who stands for the authority of the... more...

CHAPTER I. SOME QUEER THINGSYung Pak was the very queer name of a queer little boy who lived in a queer house in a queer city. This boy was peculiar in his looks, his talk was in a strange tongue, his clothes were odd in colour and fit, his shoes were unlike ours, and everything about him would seem to you very unusual in appearance. But the most wonderful thing of all was that he did not think he was... more...

After an interval of more than fifty years, I propose taking a second look at some parts of Europe. It is a Rip Van Winkle experiment which I am promising myself. The changes wrought by half a century in the countries I visited amount almost to a transformation. I left the England of William the Fourth, of the Duke of Wellington, of Sir Robert Peel; the France of Louis Philippe, of Marshal Soult, of... more...

CHAPTER I. WHERE SHALL WE LIVE? "Where shall we live?" That was a question asked by the sister of the writer, when it became necessary to leave London, and break up a once happy home, rendered desolate sudden bereavement. "Ah! Where, indeed?" was the answer. "Where can we hope to find a house which will be suitable for ourselves, six children, and a small income?" "Oh,"... more...