Fiction Books

CHAPTER ONE—THE TRYING-OUT OF ONE RODNEY PARKER, ASSISTANT ENGINEER All at once the stump-dotted, rocky hillside became clamorous and animated. From the little shacks sheathed with tarred paper, from the sodded huts, from burrows sunk into the hillside men suddenly came popping out with shrill cries. Three men, shouldering surveying instruments, stopped in their tracks on the freshly-heaped soil of a... more...

CHAPTER I. Hawkins is part inventor and part idiot. Hawkins has money, which generally mitigates idiocy; but in his case it also allows free rein to his inventive genius, and that is a bad thing. When I decided to build a nice, quiet summer home in the Berkshires, I paid for the ground before discovering that the next villa belonged to Hawkins. Had I known then what I know now, my country-seat would be... more...

CHAPTER I Between the smoke-darkened walls of the mountain cabin still murmured the last echoes of the pistol's bellowing, and it seemed a voice of everlasting duration to the shock-sickened nerves of those within. First it had thundered with the deafening exaggeration of confined space, then its echo had beaten against the clay-chink wall timbers and rolled upward to the rafters. Now, dwindled to... more...

INTRODUCTION. HOW I, LUCIA DACRE, CAME TO WRITE THIS HISTORY, AT THE TIME THAT I WITH MY SISTER WAS LODGED IN A DESERTED HOUSE IN LONDON, WHEN THE GREAT PLAGUE WAS AT ITS HEIGHT; WHICH WAS IN THE MONTHS OF JULY AND AUGUST, ANNO SIXTEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE. Now that my sister and myself are in such a strange melancholy case, and I enforced to spend many hours daily in idleness, I find the time hang... more...

On that summer day the sky over New York was unflecked by clouds, and the air hung motionless, the waves of heat undisturbed. The city was a vast oven where even the sounds of the coiling traffic in its streets seemed heavy and weary under the press of heat that poured down from above. In Washington Square, the urchins of the neighborhood splashed in the fountain, and the usual midday assortment of... more...

The Consequences of this mistake, appear'd presently in the Most Zealous, in their offering all possible Insults to the Crolian Dissenters, Preaching them down, Printing them down, and Talking them down, as a People not fit to be suffer'd in the Nation, and now they thought they had the Game sure. Down with the Crolians began to be all the Cry, and truly the Crolians themselves began to be... more...

INTRODUCTION The fairy tale has a place in the training of children which common sense and a sympathetic attitude toward childhood will not deny. Some rigid philosophers, who see no more of life than is to be found in logical science, condemn the imaginative tale. They regard the teaching of myths and stories as the telling of pleasant lies, which, if harmless, are wasteful. What the child acquires... more...

SIR HARRY HOTSPUR.  Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite was a mighty person in Cumberland, and one who well understood of what nature were the duties, and of what sort the magnificence, which his position as a great English commoner required of him. He had twenty thousand a year derived from land. His forefathers had owned the same property in Cumberland for nearly four centuries, and an estate nearly... more...

LAURA SILVER BELL In the five Northumbrian counties you will scarcely find so bleak, ugly, and yet, in a savage way, so picturesque a moor as Dardale Moss. The moor itself spreads north, south, east, and west, a great undulating sea of black peat and heath. What we may term its shores are wooded wildly with birch, hazel, and dwarf-oak. No towering mountains surround it, but here and there you have a... more...

I Two Houses, with a great Gulf between; of V. Vivian, M.D., and what he thought of John the Baptist. V. Vivian, M.D. by the paint upon his window, dwelt in the Dabney House; Mr. Heth--pronounced Heath if you value his wife's good opinion--dwelt in the House of his cognomen. Between the two lay a scant mile of city streets. But then this happened to be the particular mile which traversed, while of... more...