Fiction Books

CHAPTER I It was very early in the morning, it was scarcely dawn, when the young man started upon a walk of twenty-five miles to reach Alton, where he was to be assistant to the one physician in the place, Doctor Thomas Gordon, or as he was familiarly called, "Doc." Gordon. The young man's name was James Elliot. He had just graduated, and this was to be his first experience in the practice... more...

THE cave had been their hiding-place as children; it was a secret refuge now against hunger or darkness when they were hunting in the woods. The primitive meal was finished; ashes were raked over the red coals; the slice of bacon and the little bag of meal were hung high against the rock wall; and the two stepped from the cavern into a thicket of rhododendrons. Parting the bushes toward the dim light,... more...

The first specimens of Myotis velifer from California were taken in 1909 by C. L. Camp at Needles, San Bernardino County (Grinnell, Univ. California Publ. Zool., 12:266, March 20, 1914), and subsequently this bat was recorded from farther south in the lower Colorado River Valley at the Riverside Mountains, Riverside County (Stager, Jour. Mamm., 20:226, May 14, 1939). West of the Rocky Mountains the... more...

GEORGE BORROW. It is a singular coincidence, perhaps, that during one and the same summer we should be celebrating centenaries of Samuel Pepys and George Borrow.  Pepys died in the early summer of 1703; Borrow was born in July, 1803.  Unlike each other in almost every respect, they are dui palor, as Borrow would say, in one very material point.  The reputation of each of them has risen to such a... more...

THE GOD FROM THE MACHINE Hit a man an' help a woman, an' ye can't be far wrong anyways.— Maxims of Private Mulvaney. The Inexpressibles gave a ball. They borrowed a seven-pounder from the Gunners, and wreathed it with laurels, and made the dancing-floor plate-glass, and provided a supper, the like of which had never been eaten before, and set two sentries at the door of the room to... more...

IN WHICH IT IS ALL DONE OVER AGAIN All morning she had gazed on the shining reaches of the Hudson, their colour deepening to blue as she neared the sea. A gold-bound volume of Shelley, with his name on the fly-leaf, lay in her lap. And two lines she repeated softly to herself—two lines that held a vision:        "He was as the sun in his fierce youth,        As terrible and lovely... more...

Chapter I. The scene was not exactly new to me. Moved by the spirit of adventure, or by an access of ennui which overtakes me at times, I had several times visited the gaudy establishment of Mercer, on the fashionable side of Fifth Avenue in the Fifties. In either case I had found disappointment; where the stake is a matter of indifference there can be no excitement; and besides, I had been always in... more...

I. THE CRIME IN WEST SEDGWICK Though a young detective, I am not entirely an inexperienced one, and I have several fairly successful investigations to my credit on the records of the Central Office. The Chief said to me one day: "Burroughs, if there's a mystery to be unravelled; I'd rather put it in your hands than to trust it to any other man on the force. "Because," he went on,... more...

CHAPTER I. THE SERMON. Four girls were together in a pleasant cottage room with a large window, over which fluttered some dry sticks, which would in due time bear clematis and Virginia creeper leaves. Three of them were Miss Lee's apprentices, and this room had been built out at the back of the baker's shop for them. The place was the property of the Lee family themselves, and nobody in... more...

CHAPTER I Along the buffalo paths, from one salt-lick to another, a group of pioneers took a vagrant way through the dense cane-brakes. Never a wheel had then entered the deep forests of this western wilderness; the frontiersman and the packhorse were comrades. Dark, gloomy, with long, level summit-lines, a grim outlier of the mountain range, since known as the Cumberland, stretched from northeast to... more...