Fiction Books

SPANISH GUIANA. ANGOSTURA. PALM-INHABITING TRIBES. MISSIONS OF THE CAPUCHINS. THE LAGUNA PARIME. EL DORADO. LEGENDARY TALES OF THE EARLY VOYAGERS. I shall commence this chapter by a description of Spanish Guiana (Provincia de la Guyana), which is a part of the ancient Capitania general of Caracas. Since the end of the sixteenth century three towns have successively borne the name of St. Thomas of... more...

MEMOIR. I was born in the year 1802, in Cumberland County, Downs Township, in the State of New Jersey, on the shores of Nantuxet Creek, not far from Delaware Bay, into which that creek flows. My father was a farmer,—not a very profitable occupation in that barren part of the country. My mother was a widow at the time of her marriage with my father, having three children by a former... more...

TERESA FRANCES THOMPSON, who also bore my name by marriage, died on January 26, 1919. This verse is published to her memory, because I wish to keep together the poetry she occasioned and enable those who loved her—and they were a great many-to know definitely what she was to me. I think that is the truth. This is the only means I have at present of acknowledging publicly the vast debt I owe to her.... more...

itting at his desk, Colonel Halter brought the images on the telescreen into focus. Four booster tugs were fastening, like sky-barnacles, onto the hull of the ancient derelict, Alpha. He watched as they swung her around, stern down, and sank with her through the blackness, toward the bluish-white, moon-lighted arc of Earth a thousand miles below. He pressed a button. The image of tugs and hull faded... more...

CHAPTER I INTRODUCING MYSELF "Nineteen to-day, is he!" said my uncle Jervas, viewing me languidly through his quizzing-glass. "How confoundedly the years flit! Nineteen—and on me soul, our poor youth looks as if he hadn't a single gentlemanly vice to bless himself with!" "Not one, Jervas, my boy," quoth my uncle George, shaking his comely head at me. "Not one, begad,... more...

Near the Levée, and not far from the old French Cathedral in the Place d'Armes, at New Orleans, stands a fine date-palm, thirty feet in height, spreading its broad leaves in the alien air as hardily as if its sinuous roots were sucking strength from their native earth. Sir Charles Lyell, in his Second Visit to the United States, mentions this exotic: "The tree is seventy or eighty years old;... more...

Chapter One. A few miles from the town of Southampton there is an old mansion-house, which has been for centuries known as Madeline Hall, in the possession of the de Versely family. It is a handsome building, surrounded by a finely timbered park of some extent, and, what is more important, by about 12,000 acres of land, which also appertain to it. At the period in which I commence this history, there... more...

All along the line of machines, the men's hands and arms worked like the legs of spiders spinning a web. They wound wire and hammered bolts, tied knots and welded pieces of steel and fitted gears. They did not look at each other or sing or whistle or talk or laugh. And then—he made a mistake. Instantly he stepped back and a trouble shooter moved into his place. The trouble shooter's hands... more...

ANIMA HOMINIS I When I come home after meeting men who are strange to me, and sometimes even after talking to women, I go over all I have said in gloom and disappointment. Perhaps I have overstated everything from a desire to vex or startle, from hostility that is but fear; or all my natural thoughts have been drowned by an undisciplined sympathy. My fellow-diners have hardly seemed of mixed humanity,... more...

Once upon a time there was a lad named Jacob Boehm, who was a practical huntsman. One day Jacob said to his mother, "Mother, I would like to marry Gretchen—the nice, pretty little daughter of the Herr Mayor." Jacob's mother thought that he was crazy. "Marry the daughter of the Herr Mayor, indeed! You want to marry the daughter of the Herr Mayor? Listen; many a man wants and wants,... more...