Fiction Books

PREFACE. I am unwilling to suffer this tale to leave my hands without a word of explanation to my reader. If I have never disguised from myself the grounds of any humble success I have attained to as a writer of fiction; if I have always had before me the fact that to movement and action, the stir of incident, and a certain light-heartedness and gayety of temperament, more easy to impart to others than... more...

CHAPTER I “And is there care in Heaven?”Spenser’s Faerie Queene. “Allah remembers us not. It is the divine decree. We can but die with His praises on our lips; perchance He may greet us at the gates of Paradise!” Overwhelmed with misery, the man drooped his head. The stout staff he held fell to his feet. He lifted his hands to hide the anguish of eye and lip, and the grief that mastered him... more...

CHAPTER I.Our Expanding Trade. In a little book recently published, an attempt is made to show that British trade is being knocked to pieces by German competition, that already the sun has set on England’s commercial supremacy, and that if we are not careful the few crumbs of trade still left to us will be snapped up by Germany. This depressing publication, aptly entitled “Made in Germany,” has... more...

CHAPTER ITHE SHERIFF RIDES TO WAR MANY men swore that The Orphan was bad, and many swore profanely and with wonderful command of epithets because he was bad, but for obvious reasons that was as far as the majority went to show their displeasure. Those of the minority who had gone farther and who had shown their hatred by rash actions only proved their foolishness; for they had indeed gone far and would... more...

INTRODUCTION. The best parallel to the conduct of the silly ostrich, that thrusts her head into a thicket, or the sand, and fancies she is thereby hidden from view, occurred some years since in the village of Catskill. A printer, who was neither an observer of the Sabbath, nor a member of the Temperance Society, went to a grocery one Sunday morning for a bottle of gin. On coming out of the dram-shop,... more...

CHAPTER I THE MISSING HEART There came a sudden blare of music from the great ballroom below, and the woman who stood alone at an open window on the first floor shrugged her shoulders and shivered a little. The night air blew in brisk and cold upon her uncovered neck, but except for that slight, involuntary shiver she scarcely seemed aware of it. The room behind her was brilliantly lighted but empty.... more...

The Dome of Eyes made it almost impossible for Terrans to reach the world of Tepokt. For those who did land there, there was no returning—only the bitterness of respect—and justice! The Tepoktan student, whose blue robe in George Kinton's opinion clashed with the dull purple of his scales, twiddled a three-clawed hand for attention. Kinton nodded to him from his place on the dais before the... more...

EASTERN SHAME GIRL When there is a great peace Under the gold cup of the sun Joy reaches its flowering. In the twentieth year of the period Wan-li, there came, among the thousands of students who gathered at Peking for the examinations, a certain Li, whose first name was Chia and his surname Ch'ien-hsi, or "Purified-a-thousand times." His family were from Shao-hsing fu in Chekiang; his... more...

CHAPTER I. ORIGIN OF FAIRY STORIES. We are going into Fairy Land for a little while, to see what we can find there to amuse and instruct us this Christmas time. Does anybody know the way? There are no maps or guidebooks, and the places we meet with in our workaday world do not seem like the homes of the Fairies. Yet we have only to put on our Wishing Caps, and we can get into Fairy Land in a moment.... more...

The Trader in Zululand. Zululand is a wild region of mountain ranges, deep valleys and gorges, roaring torrents, rapidly flowing rivers, plains covered with mimosa bushes, meadows where cattle pasture and grow fat, and level plateaux extending for many miles across it, several hundred feet above the level of the ocean; while scattered here and there, in some parts pretty thickly, are to be seen the... more...