Fiction Books

Here I am at the end of the railroad, waiting to begin my two-days' wagon-trip across the mountains. But the school wagon has not arrived,—my landlady says it is delayed by a "tide" in the creeks. By way of cheering me, she has just given a graphic account of the twenty-year-old feud for which this small town is notorious, and has even offered to take me around and show me, on walls,... more...

CHAPTER I A PRIVATE LESSON FROM A BULLDOG. "Want to be a school-master, do you? You? Well, what would you do in Flat Crick deestrick, I'd like to know? Why, the boys have driv off the last two, and licked the one afore them like blazes. You might teach a summer school, when nothin' but children come. But I 'low it takes a right smart man to be school-master in Flat Crick in the... more...

I do not thinkSo fair an outward, and such stuff within,Endows a man but he. Cymbeline. The Victoria Bank, Toronto, is on the corner of Bay and Front Streets, where it overlooks a part of the harbor large enough to gladden the eyes of the bank-clerks who are aquatic in their habits and have time to look out of the windows. Young gentlemen in tattered and ink-stained coats, but irreproachable in the... more...

PREFACE. The following pages have afforded occupation for many hours, which might else have been wasted in idle amusements, or embittered by still idler regrets at the destiny which carried the writer to a region so little seductive as Africa, and kept him there so long. He now offers them to the public, after some labor bestowed in correction and amendment, but retaining their original form, that of a... more...

In 1682, when I was thirty years of age and Mistress Mary Cavendish just turned of eighteen, she and I together one Sabbath morning in the month of April were riding to meeting in Jamestown. We were all alone except for the troop of black slaves straggling in the rear, blurring the road curiously with their black faces. It seldom happened that we rode in such wise, for Mistress Catherine Cavendish, the... more...

LETTER I MR. LOVELACE, TO JOHN BELFORD, ESQ. SAT. MIDNIGHT. No rest, says a text that I once heard preached upon, to the wicked—and I cannot close my eyes (yet only wanted to compound for half an hour in an elbow-chair)—so must scribble on. I parted with the Captain after another strong debate with him in relation to what is to be the fate of this lady. As the fellow has an excellent head, and... more...

In the past several years the United States National Museum has received a large number of mammals from central and southern Korea through the auspices of the Commission on Hemorrhagic Fever of the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board. Among these Korean collections are more than a hundred specimens of a murine rodent originally described as "Micromys speciosus peninsulae" by Oldfield Thomas but... more...

The Blind Spot opens with the words: "Perhaps it were just as well to start at the beginning. A mere matter of news." Suppose I use them in the same sense: A mere matter of news: The first instalment of this fabulous novel was featured in Argosy-All-Story-Weekly for May 14, 1921. Described as a "different" serial, it was introduced by a cover by Modest Stein. In the foreground was the... more...

Chapter 1 Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo... His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt. O, the wild... more...

PREFACE. I propose, in the following pages, to consider the possibilities of a satisfactory intellectual life under various conditions of ordinary human existence. It will form a part of my plan to take into account favorable and unfavorable influences of many kinds; and my chief purpose, so far as any effect upon others may be hoped for, will be to guard some who may read the book alike against the... more...