Fiction Books

POST-PRANDIAL WIT There is a sense, of course, in which everything from the pages of Mr. Punch might be regarded as coming into a collection entitled "After Dinner Stories." All good stories are really for telling after dinner. Somehow or other one seldom associates wit and humour with the breakfast table, although the celebrated breakfast parties of Rogers, the banker, were doubtless in no way... more...

BACK TO BACK Mrs. Scutts, concealed behind the curtain, gazed at the cab in uneasy amazement. The cabman clambered down from the box and, opening the door, stood by with his hands extended ready for any help that might be needed. A stranger was the first to alight, and, with his back towards Mrs. Scutts, seemed to be struggling with something in the cab. He placed a dangling hand about his neck and,... more...

DANTE Critical Notice OF DANTE'S LIFE AND GENIUS.[1] Dante was a very great poet, a man of the strongest passions, a claimant of unbounded powers to lead and enlighten the world; and he lived in a semi-barbarous age, as favourable to the intensity of his imagination, as it was otherwise to the rest of his pretensions. Party zeal, and the fluctuations of moral and critical opinion, have at... more...

THE MINERAL KINGDOM. The splendor of the world is due to mining and to the perfectness of man's ability to work the minerals which the mines supply. The fields of the world give men food; with food furnished, a few souls turn to the contemplation of higher things; but no grand civilization ever came to an agricultural people until their intellects were quickened by something beyond their usual... more...

THE LOVE-PHILTRE OF IKEY SCHOENSTEIN The Blue Light Drug Store is downtown, between the Bowery and First Avenue, where the distance between the two streets is the shortest. The Blue Light does not consider that pharmacy is a thing of bric-a-brac, scent and ice-cream soda. If you ask it for pain-killer it will not give you a bonbon. The Blue Light scorns the labour-saving arts of modern pharmacy. It... more...

TO THE PUBLIC. The papers which are herewith submitted to you for your perusal and consideration, were delivered into my hands by Mr. Berl Trout. The papers will speak for themselves, but Mr. Trout now being dead I feel called upon to say a word concerning him. Mr. Berl Trout was Secretary of State in the Imperium In Imperio, from the day of its organization until the hour of his sad death. He was,... more...

GUY DE MAUPASSANTA STUDY BY POL. NEVEUX"I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt." These words of Maupassant to Jose Maria de Heredia on the occasion of a memorable meeting are, in spite of their morbid solemnity, not an inexact summing up of the brief career during which, for ten years, the writer, by turns undaunted and sorrowful, with the fertility of a... more...

CHAPTER I A LOST LANDMARK "The sins of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me." These are the words that have followed me always. This is the curse which has fallen on my life. If I had not known my father, if I had not loved him, if I had not closed his eyes in desert silence deeper than the silence of the grave, even if I could have buried and... more...

The lips of a strange woman drop as an honey-comb, and her mouth is smoother then oyl: But her end is bitter as wormwood, and sharp as a two-edged sword. The Text here presents you with a strange woman; with whom though I desire not to procure you a familiar acquaintance, yet I'le give you such cognizance of her, and excite that abhorrency of her baseness in all your minds, that if any have... more...

CHAPTER I The Road THOUGH it was six days since Daniel Ordway had come out of prison, he was aware, when he reached the brow of the hill, and stopped to look back over the sunny Virginia road, that he drank in the wind as if it were his first breath of freedom. At his feet the road dropped between two low hills beyond which swept a high, rolling sea of broomsedge; and farther still—where the... more...