Fiction Books

CHAPTER I - A Difficult Case They did not look like women, or at least a stranger new to the district might easily have been misled by their appearance, as they stood together in a group, by the pit's mouth. There were about a dozen of them there—all "pit-girls," as they were called; women who wore a dress more than half masculine, and who talked loudly and laughed discordantly, and some... more...

PROLOGUE. “That girl the murderer of a man—of Lee Holly! That pretty little girl? Bosh! I don’t believe it.” “I did not say she killed him; I said she was suspected. And even though she was cleared, the death of that renegade adds one more to the mysteries of our new West. But I think the mere suspicion that she did it entitles her to a medal, or an ovation of some sort.” The speakers were... more...

CHAPTER I. THE TRIAL Some years ago there was a trial in Dublin, which, partly because the parties in the cause were in a well-to-do condition of life, and partly because the case in some measure involved the interests of the two conflicting Churches, excited considerable sensation and much comment. The contention was the right to the guardianship of a boy whose father and mother had ceased to live... more...

A DISCOVERY. I am not an inquisitive woman, but when, in the middle of a certain warm night in September, I heard a carriage draw up at the adjoining house and stop, I could not resist the temptation of leaving my bed and taking a peep through the curtains of my window. First: because the house was empty, or supposed to be so, the family still being, as I had every reason to believe, in Europe; and... more...

CHAPTER I THE GUN MAN’S HERITAGE Lost Valley lay like a sparkling jewel, fashioned in perfection, cast in the breast of the illimitable mountain country––and forever after forgotten of God. A tiny world, arrogantly unconscious of any other, it lived its own life, went its own ways, had its own conceptions of law––and they were based upon primeval instincts. Cattle by the thousand head ran on... more...

CHAPTER I The road from Wellmouth Centre to East Wellmouth is not a good one; even in dry weather and daylight it is not that. For the first two miles it winds and twists its sandy way over bare hills, with cranberry swamps and marshy ponds in the hollows between. Then it enters upon a three-mile stretch bordered with scrubby pines and bayberry thickets, climbing at last a final hill to emerge upon the... more...

I The time was the year of grace 1779; the locality, Morristown, New Jersey. It was bitterly cold. A northeasterly wind had been stiffening the mud of the morning's thaw into a rigid record of that day's wayfaring on the Baskingridge road. The hoof-prints of cavalry, the deep ruts left by baggage-wagons, and the deeper channels worn by artillery, lay stark and cold in the waning light of an... more...

Sandeman, 2624 CE It was midafternoon before Dana's hunger overcame her excitement at being on Sandeman, hiking with her chosen lord—her thakur, in the Sandeman term she preferred—and trying to track a balik. She hadn't gotten within two hundred meters of the wolflike predator, and had finally realized she wasn't going to, so the two found a small clearing with bare rocks which made... more...

PART THE FIRST — THE LOTUS In those days there were many hermits living in the desert. On both banks of the Nile numerous huts, built by these solitary dwellers, of branches held together by clay, were scattered at a little distance from each other, so that the inhabitants could live alone, and yet help one another in case of need. Churches, each surmounted by a cross, stood here and there amongst... more...

THE AUTHOR, TO HER FRIENDLY READERS. Written for the new edition of "Thaddeus of Warsaw," forming one of the series called "The Standard Novels." To such readers alone who, by the sympathy of a social taste, fall in with any blameless fashion of the day, and, from an amiable interest, also, in whatever may chance to afford them innocent pleasure, would fain know something more about an... more...