Fiction Books

CHAPTER I.Say, who art thou—thou lean and haggard wretch!Thou living satire on the name of man!Thou that hast made a god of sordid gold,And to thine idol offered up thy soul?Oh, how I pity thee thy wasted years:Age without comfort—youth that had no prime.To thy dull gaze the earth was never green;The face of nature wore no cheering smile,For ever groping, groping in the dark;Making the soulless... more...

KARAIN, A MEMORYIWe knew him in those unprotected days when we were content to hold in our hands our lives and our property. None of us, I believe, has any property now, and I hear that many, negligently, have lost their lives; but I am sure that the few who survive are not yet so dim-eyed as to miss in the befogged respectability of their newspapers the intelligence of various native risings in the... more...

WORRIES OF A WINTER WALK The other winter, as I was taking a morning walk down to the East River, I came upon a bit of our motley life, a fact of our piebald civilization, which has perplexed me from time to time, ever since, and which I wish now to leave with the reader, for his or her more thoughtful consideration. The morning was extremely cold. It professed to be sunny, and there was really some... more...

CHAPTER I. THE ROMAN IDEA AND THE ENGLISH IDEA. It used to be the fashion of historians, looking superficially at the facts presented in chronicles and tables of dates, without analyzing and comparing vast groups of facts distributed through centuries, or even suspecting the need for such analysis and comparison, to assign the date 476 A.D. as the moment at which the Roman Empire came to an end. It was... more...

Chapter 1   Sunday, April 5 6:49 a.m.   Alexa Hampton was awakened by a sensation in her chest. The alarm wasn't set to go off for another eleven minutes, but she knew her sleep was finished. Not again! She rolled over and slapped the blue pillowcase. That little sound from her heart and the twinges of angina, that catchall for heart discomfort, was happening more and more now, just as Dr.... more...

CHAPTER I. HIS PARENTAGE AND EARLY LIFE. Franklin Pierce was born at Hillsborough, in the State of New Hampshire, on the 23d of November, 1804. His native county, at the period of his birth, covered a much more extensive territory than at present, and might reckon among its children many memorable men, and some illustrious ones. General Stark, the hero of Bennington, Daniel Webster, Levi Woodbury,... more...

Through the kindness of William N. Loew, Esq., of the New York Bar, who has generously placed the manuscript at our disposal, we are able to offer a translation of one of the shorter stories by a living Hungarian writer. The Magyar literature offers a mine of gold to the translator, but on account of the difficulties of the language very few have explored it. With the exception of the great novelist,... more...

THE HAPPY GIRL The stage line which ran from Williams to Bear Tooth (one of the most authentic then to be found in all the West) possessed at least one genuine Concord coach, so faded, so saddened, so cracked, and so splintered that its passengers entered it under protest, and alighted from it with thanksgiving, and yet it must have been built by honorable men, for in 190- it still made the run of one... more...

I suppose there is no one of us who can honestly deny that he is interested in one way or another in the American short story. Indeed, it is hard to find a man anywhere who does not enjoy telling a good story. But there are some people born with the gift of telling a good story better than others, and of telling it in such a way that a great many people can enjoy its flavor. Most of you are acquainted... more...

Frank Aretas Haskell was born at Tunbridge, Vermont, the son of Aretas and Ann (Folson) Haskell, on the 13th of July, 1828. Graduating from Dartmouth College with distinguished honors, in the class of 1854, the young man came to Madison in the autumn of that year, and entered the law firm of Orton, Atwood & Orton. His career in this profession was increasingly successful, until in 1861 it was... more...