Fiction Books

1. A STREET IN ANGLEBURY—A HEATH NEAR IT—INSIDE THE ‘RED LION’ INN Young Mrs. Petherwin stepped from the door of an old and well-appointed inn in a Wessex town to take a country walk.  By her look and carriage she appeared to belong to that gentle order of society which has no worldly sorrow except when its jewellery gets stolen; but, as a fact not generally known, her claim to distinction was... more...

CHAPTER I The Brunford Town Hall clock was just chiming half-past three as Tom Pollard left his home in Dixon Street and made his way towards the Thorn and Thistle public-house. It was not Tom's intention to stay long at the Thorn and Thistle, as he had other plans in view, nevertheless something drew him there. He crossed the tram lines in St. George's Street, and, having stopped to exchange... more...

There are some men born with a vagrant strain in the blood, an unsatiable inquisitiveness about the world beyond their doors.  Natural revolutionaries they, with an ingrained distaste for the routine of ordinary life and the conventions of civilization.  The average common-sense Englishman distrusts the Vagabond for his want of sympathy with established law and order.  Eccentricity and... more...

The plateau pocket gopher, Cratogeomys castanops, inhabits open lands from southeastern Colorado southward onto the Mexican Plateau as far south as southern San Luis Potosí and southeastern Zacatecas and southeastward to the Coastal Plain of northern Tamaulipas. This species occurs at elevations from as low as 26 feet at Matamoras in Tamaulipas to as high as 8700 feet in valleys of south-eastern... more...

CHAPTER I—HOW MRS. LIRRIPER CARRIED ON THE BUSINESS Whoever would begin to be worried with letting Lodgings that wasn’t a lone woman with a living to get is a thing inconceivable to me, my dear; excuse the familiarity, but it comes natural to me in my own little room, when wishing to open my mind to those that I can trust, and I should be truly thankful if they were all mankind, but such is not so,... more...

CHAPTER I. It was a bright May morning some twelve years ago, when a youth of still tender age, for he had certainly not entered his teens by more than two years, was ushered into the waiting-room of a house in the vicinity of St. James's Square, which, though with the general appearance of a private residence, and that too of no very ambitious character, exhibited at this period symptoms of being... more...

he watchman's flashlight printed a white circle on the frosted-glass, black-lettered door: GREGG CHEMICAL CO., MFRS.ASA GREGG, PRES.PRIVATE The watchman's hand closed on the knob, rattled the door in its frame. Queer, but tonight the sound had seemed to come from in there.... But that couldn't be. He knew that Mr. Gregg and Miss Carruthers carried the only keys to the office, so any... more...

I COMPANY AT THE FARM One lovely spring morning long years ago in Hellas, Lydia, wife of Melas the Spartan, sat upon a stool in the court of her house, with her wool-basket beside her, spinning. She was a tall, strong-looking young woman with golden hair and blue eyes, and as she twirled her distaff and twisted the white wool between her fingers she sang a little song to herself that sounded like the... more...

PREFACE "Life is the mirror of the king and slave,'Tis just what you are and do.Then give to the world the best you have,And the best will come back to you." I never thought that I should be guilty of writing a book. I did not, however, do this with malice aforethought. My son is responsible for whatever sin I may have committed in presenting this to the public. He and I have been good... more...

INTRODUCTION. The sixty-fourth volume of this Library contains those papers from the Tatler which were especially associated with the imagined character of Isaac Bickerstaff, who was the central figure in that series; and in the twenty-ninth volume there is a similar collection of papers relating to the Spectator Club and Sir Roger de Coverley, who was the central figure in Steele and Addison’s... more...