Fiction Books

UP THE INDUS.   Three years ago, I received orders to proceed from Kurâchee to Roree by the river route, for the purpose of joining the siege-train then assembling for the reduction of Mooltan. Subsequent events caused my final destination to be changed to Sukkur. Although my journey was thus not so long as I had both expected and wished, yet I had an opportunity of seeing some three or four hundred... more...

The Evanescent Beautiful.Day after Day, young with eternal beauty,Pays flowery duty to the month and clime;Night after night erects a vasty portalOf stars immortal for the march of Time.But where are now the Glory and the Rapture,That once did capture me in cloud and stream?Where now the Joy that was both speech and silence?Where the beguilance that was fact and dream?I know that Earth and Heaven are... more...

The Celestia, gliding through space toward Titan, major satellite of Saturn, faltered in her course. Her passengers, mostly mining engineers and their wives, stockholders, and a sprinkling of visitors, were aware of a cessation of the heavens' apparent gyrations, due to the halting of the ship's rotation on its axis. At the same time the ship's fictitious gravity, engendered by the... more...

Such a day made glad the heart. All the flags of July were waving; the sun and the poppies flaming; white butterflies spiring up and twining, and the bees busy on the snapdragons. The lime-trees were coming into flower. Tall white lilies in the garden beds already rivaled the delphiniums; the York and Lancaster roses were full-blown round their golden hearts. There was a gentle breeze, and a swish and... more...

MONSIEUR PARENT George's father was sitting in an iron chair, watching his little son with concentrated affection and attention, as little George piled up the sand into heaps during one of their walks. He would take up the sand with both hands, make a mound of it, and put a chestnut leaf on top. His father saw no one but him in that public park full of people. The sun was just disappearing behind... more...

A GREAT STREAK OF LUCK “Anybody home?” “Sure, walk right in, Toby. My latch-string is always out to my chums. I see you managed to pick up Steve on the way across; but I wager you had really to pry him loose from that dandy new volume on travel he was telling me about, because he’s such a bookworm.” The two boys who hastened to accept this warm invitation, and enter Jack Winters’ snug... more...

When the discovery was announced, it was Dr. Chauncey Patrick Coffin who announced it. He had, of course, arranged with uncanny skill to take most of the credit for himself. If it turned out to be greater than he had hoped, so much the better. His presentation was scheduled for the last night of the American College of Clinical Practitioners' annual meeting, and Coffin had fully intended it to be... more...

Savagely cursing, Luke Fenton reeled backward from the porthole, his great hairy paws clapped over his eyes. No one had warned him, and he did not know that total blindness might result from gazing too earnestly into the sun's unscreened flaming orb, especially with that body not more than twenty million miles distant in space. He did not know, in fact, that the ethership was that close: Luke had... more...

obody at Hoskins, Haskell & Chapman, Incorporated, knew jut why Lucilla Brown, G.G. Hoskins' secretary, came to work half an hour early every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Even G.G. himself, had he been asked, would have had trouble explaining how his occasional exasperated wish that just once somebody would reach the office ahead of him could have caused his attractive young secretary to... more...

long long time ago, there lived in a quiet spot, a young man and his wife. They had one child, a little daughter, whom they both loved with all their hearts. I cannot tell you their names, for they have been long since forgotten, but the name of the place where they lived was Matsuyama, in the province of Echigo. It happened once, while the little girl was still a baby, that the father was obliged to... more...