Fiction Books

CHAPTER I It was nearly eleven o'clock at night when some one knocked at the door of Fred Osborne's room. He was not in the least expecting any caller at that hour, and had paid no attention when he had heard the doorbell of the boarding-house ring downstairs, and the sound of feet ascending the steps. He hastened to open the door, however, and in the dim hallway he recognized the dark,... more...

With savage pity Marjorie regarded a sobbing girl whose face was distorted, and whose palsied hands were trying to straighten her veil and push back stray wisps of hair. Marjorie thought: "What a fool she is to cry like that! Her nose is red; she's a sight. I can control myself. I can control myself." An elderly man with an austere face, standing beside Marjorie, started to light a... more...

CHAPTER I For some moments profound silence and darkness had accompanied a Sierran stage-coach towards the summit. The huge, dim bulk of the vehicle, swaying noiselessly on its straps, glided onward and upward as if obeying some mysterious impulse from behind, so faint and indefinite appeared its relation to the viewless and silent horses ahead. The shadowy trunks of tall trees that seemed to approach... more...

CHAPTER I HAZARDOUS PLANS The lightning flashes, the mutterings of thunder, like the low growls of some angry animal, and the shrieking of the wind through swaying branches, gave a weird, uncanny effect to a scene which was being enacted, on a certain April night of the year 1862, in a secluded piece of woodland a mile or more east of the village of Shelbyville, Tennessee. In the centre of a small... more...

Chapter I. How I Became a Secret Agent "O Jerum, jerum, jerum, quâ motatio rerum." Half past three was heard booming from some clock tower on the twelfth day of June, 1913, when Mr. King, the Liberal representative from Somerset, was given the floor in the House of Commons. Mr. King proceeded to make a sensation. He demanded that McKinnon Wood, the House Secretary for Scotland, reveal to the... more...

Chapter I Mushrooms"La célébrité est comme le feu, qui brûle de près et illumine de loin."Under a glorious sky, in the year 1869, Paris gathered to rejoice in the centenary of the birth of the First Napoleon. A gathering this of mushroom nobility, soldiery and diplomacy, to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the greatest mushroom that ever sprang to life in the hotbed of internecine... more...

Why were they apologetic? It wasn't their fault that they came to Earth much too late. The beings stood around my bed in air suits like ski suits, with globes over their heads like upside-down fishbowls. It was all like a masquerade, with odd costumes and funny masks. I know that the masks are their faces, but I argue with them and find I think as if I am arguing with humans behind the masks. They... more...

CHAPTER I THE THEORY OF COPERNICUS DROOP The two sisters were together in their garden. Rebecca Wise, turned forty and growing slightly gray at the temples, was moving slowly from one of her precious plants to the next, leaning over each to pinch off a dead leaf or count the buds. It was the historic month of May, 1898, and May is the paradise of flower lovers. Phœbe was eighteen years younger than... more...

The grey mist of an autumn morning lay upon forest and field. Through its shadowy vapors a swarm of birds were sweeping by, on their Southward way, now dipping low over the tops of the tall fir forest, as if giving a last greeting to their summer homes, and then rising high in the air; turning their flight due South, they disappeared slowly through the fog. At the window of a large manor-house, which... more...

HOW IT WAS LOST Among green New England hills stood an ancient house, many-gabled, mossy-roofed, and quaintly built, but picturesque and pleasant to the eye; for a brook ran babbling through the orchard that encompassed it about, a garden-plat stretched upward to the whispering birches on the slope, and patriarchal elms stood sentinel upon the lawn, as they had stood almost a century ago, when the... more...