Fiction Books

The Three Tigers As to Tiger Number One, what he likes best is prowling and hunting. He snuffs at all the interesting and exciting smells there are on the breeze; that dark breeze that tells him the secrets the jungle has hid: every nerve in his body is alert, every hair in his whiskers; his eyes gleam; he's ready for anything. He and Life are at grips. Number Two is a higher-browed tiger, in a... more...

INTRODUCTION Introducing a reader to Christy Mathewson seems like a superfluous piece of writing and a waste of white paper. Schoolboys of the last ten years have been acquainted with the exact figures which have made up Matty’s pitching record before they had ever heard of George Washington, because George didn’t play in the same League. Perfectly good rational and normal citizens once deserted a... more...

Antoine Louis Barye At the Metropolitan Museum of Art are two pictures by the Florentine painter of the fifteenth century called Piero di Cosimo. They represent hunting scenes, and the figures are those of men, women, fauns, satyrs, centaurs, and beasts of the forests, fiercely struggling together. As we observe the lion fastening his teeth in the flesh of the boar, the bear grappling with his human... more...

INTRODUCTION. On ushering into the world a literary production, custom has established that its parent should give some account of his offspring. Indeed, this becomes the more necessary at the present moment, as the short-lived peace, which gave birth to the following sheets, had already ceased before they were entirely printed; and the war in which England and France are now engaged, is of a nature... more...

CHAPTER I On a certain forenoon in the month of April, 1758, there was unusual activity in the harbor of New York. In spite of the disagreeable weather--which had now already lasted two days, with dense fogs and drizzling rain, and even then, from low, gray clouds, was drenching the multitude--there stood upon the quay dense groups of people looking at a large Dutch three-master, which had already lain... more...

Chapter ONE Though the sun was hot on this July morning Mrs Lucas preferred to cover the half-mile that lay between the station and her house on her own brisk feet, and sent on her maid and her luggage in the fly that her husband had ordered to meet her. After those four hours in the train a short walk would be pleasant, but, though she veiled it from her conscious mind, another motive, sub-consciously... more...

CHAPTER I In undertaking to write the history of General Morgan's services, and of the command which he created, it is but fair that I shall acknowledge myself influenced, in a great measure, by the feelings of the friend and the follower; that I desire, if I can do so by relating facts, of most of which I am personally cognizant, to perpetuate his fame, and, at the same time, establish the true... more...

TUESDAY afternoon came, and waned to the twilight. The village of St. Petersburg still mourned. The lost children had not been found. Public prayers had been offered up for them, and many and many a private prayer that had the petitioner's whole heart in it; but still no good news came from the cave. The majority of the searchers had given up the quest and gone back to their daily avocations,... more...

CHAPTER IA FLASH OF FIRE Filled was the room with boys and girls–yes, literally filled; for they moved about so from chair to chair, from divan to sofa, from one side of the apartment to the other, now and then changing corners after the manner of the old-fashioned game of “puss,” that what they lacked in numbers they more than made up in activity. It was a veritable moving picture of healthful,... more...

CHAPTER I. MONSIEUR THE SECRETARY It was spring at Bellecour—the spring of 1789, a short three months before the fall of the Bastille came to give the nobles pause, and make them realise that these new philosophies, which so long they have derided, were by no means the idle vapours they had deemed them. By the brook, plashing its glittering course through the park of Bellecour, wandered La Boulaye,... more...