Fiction Books

CHAPTER I.Roll on thou deep and dark blue ocean roll;. . . . . . Upon the watery plain.The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remainA shadow of man's ravage, save his own,When for a moment like a drop of rain,He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown. September 27, 1607. Dead bodies everywhere. The ocean, lashed to fury by the gale of... more...

CHAPTER I CHOOSING THE TENS Near the eastern boundary of that level region of northern Egypt, known as the Delta, once thridded by seven branches of the sea-hunting Nile, Rameses II, in the fourteenth century B. C., erected the city of Pithom and stored his treasure therein. His riches overtaxed its coffers and he builded Pa-Ramesu, in part, to hold the overflow. But he died before the work was... more...

CHAPTER FIRST. FRANCES MEETS THE SPECTACLE MAN."The bridge is broke, and I have to mend it,  Fol de rol de ri do, fol de rol de ri do—"sang the Spectacle Man, leaning his elbows on the show-case, with his hands outspread, and the glasses between a thumb and finger, as he nodded merrily at Frances. Such an odd-looking person as he was! Instead of an ordinary coat he wore a velvet... more...

PROLOGUE. It was November in London. The great city was buried under a dank, yellow fog. Traffic was temporarily checked; foot passengers groped their way by the light of the street lamps, and the hoarse shouts of the link boys running before cabs and carriages with blazing torches rang at intervals above the muffled rumble of countless wheels. In the coffee-room of a quiet hotel on the Strand a young... more...

BRIEF MEMOIR OF ELIZA SOUTHALL. Eliza Southall, wife of William Southall, Jr., of Birmingham, England, and daughter of John and Eliza Allen, was born at Liskeard, on the 9th of 6th month, 1823. As she felt a strong attachment to the scenes of her childhood, and an interest in the people among whom she spent the greater part of her short life,—an attachment which is evinced many times in the course of... more...

CHAPTER I The poor young man hesitated and procrastinated: it cost him such an effort to broach the subject of terms, to speak of money to a person who spoke only of feelings and, as it were, of the aristocracy.  Yet he was unwilling to take leave, treating his engagement as settled, without some more conventional glance in that direction than he could find an opening for in the manner of the large... more...

PROLOGUE The sun was westering over Ike Brandon’s ranch at Twin Forks. It was the first year of a new century when the old order was giving place to the new. Yet there was little to show the change that had already begun to take place in the old West. The desert still stretched away drearily to the south where it ended against the faint, dim line of the Esmeralda Mountains. To the north it stretched... more...

CHAPTER I Enter Eleanor A child in a faded tam-o’-shanter that had once been baby blue, and a shoddy coat of a glaring, unpropitious newness, was sitting uncomfortably on the edge of a hansom seat, and gazing soberly out at the traffic of Fifth Avenue. The young man beside her, a blond, sleek, narrow-headed youth in eye-glasses, was literally making conversation with her. That is, he was engaged in a... more...

1. The Sinking My marriage aborted, my private practice stillborn, I packed stale possessions in two flabby suitcases and bade my sterile apartment a tearless goodbye. On the spur of the moment, I had applied a fortnight before to a government post and, to my consternation, had won it handily. I was probably the only applicant. It was an odd sort of job. The state authorities had just finished... more...

The Protestant Lovers—A Rival—Diedrich finds his Footsteps dogged—Finds a friend in the Ferryman—Threatened with the Inquisition—Flies to sea. Not far from the broad and slow-flowing river Meuse stands the town of Brill. Flanders, in which it is found, formed at the period to which we refer a province of the dominions belonging to Philip of Spain. It was ruled with no very paternal hand by... more...