Fiction Books

IN the Knockerbeck Hotel there are various parlors; Pompeian rooms lined in marble and pillared in chaste fluted columns; Louis Quinze corners, gold-leafed and pink-brocaded, principally furnished with a spindly-legged Vernis-Martin cabinet and a large French clock in the form of a celestial sphere surmounted by a gold cupid. There are high-ceilinged rendezvous rooms, with six arm and two straight... more...

Chapter I. THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF POMPEII. 'HO, Diomed, well met! Do you sup with Glaucus to-night?' said a young man of small stature, who wore his tunic in those loose and effeminate folds which proved him to be a gentleman and a coxcomb. 'Alas, no! dear Clodius; he has not invited me,' replied Diomed, a man of portly frame and of middle age. 'By Pollux, a scurvy trick! for... more...

Near the Levée, and not far from the old French Cathedral in the Place d'Armes, at New Orleans, stands a fine date-palm, thirty feet in height, spreading its broad leaves in the alien air as hardily as if its sinuous roots were sucking strength from their native earth. Sir Charles Lyell, in his Second Visit to the United States, mentions this exotic: "The tree is seventy or eighty years old;... more...

Chapter One. Darkness had set in. The wind was blowing strong from the southwest, with a fine, wetting, penetrating rain, which even tarpaulins, or the thickest of Flushing coats, would scarcely resist. A heavy sea also was running, such as is often to be met with in the chops of the British Channel during the month of November, at which time of the year, in the latter part of the last century, a fine... more...

CHAPTER I. THE SETTING FORTH. A voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in the year 1799 was not the every-day affair that it has come to be at the present time. There were no "ocean greyhounds" then. The passage was a long and trying one in the clumsy craft of those days, and people looked upon it as a more serious affair than they now do on a tour round the world. In the year 1799 few people thought... more...

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. Our neighbours on the other side of the English Channel have been accused of calling us a “nation of shopkeepers.” No doubt the definition is not bad; and, so long as the goods supplied bear the hall-mark of British integrity, there is nothing to be ashamed of in the appellation; still, with all due deference, I think we might more appropriately be called a nation of... more...

CHAPTER I. I was resident in this city during the year 1793. Many motives contributed to detain me, though departure was easy and commodious, and my friends were generally solicitous for me to go. It is not my purpose to enumerate these motives, or to dwell on my present concerns and transactions, but merely to compose a narrative of some incidents with which my situation made me acquainted. Returning... more...

Friend, for the sake of loves we hold in common,The love of books, of paintings, rhyme and fiction;And for the sake of that divine affliction,The love of art, passing the love of woman;—By which all life's made nobler, superhuman,Lifting the soul above, and, without frictionOf Time, that puts failure in his prediction,—Works to some end through hearts that dreams illumine:To you I pour this Cup... more...

PART FIRST. THE BONFIRE OF ST. JOHN. Early in the century, on a summer evening, Jean Lozier stood on the bluff looking at Kaskaskia. He loved it with the homesick longing of one who is born for towns and condemned to the fields. Moses looking into the promised land had such visions and ideals as this old lad cherished. Jean was old in feeling, though not yet out of his teens. The training-masters of... more...

CHAPTER I THE EARLY LITERATURE One Sunday morning, about the year 1661, a group of Indians was gathered around a noble-looking man, listening to a story he was reading. It was summer and the day was beautiful, and the little Indian children who sat listening were so interested that not even the thought of their favorite haunts by brookside or meadow could tempt them from the spot. The story was about... more...