Fiction Books

CHAPTER I It was a hot July day, set in a sky of unruffled blue, with sharp shadows across road and field, and a wind that had little coolness in it playing languidly over the downland. The long white dusty road kept its undeviating course eastward over hill and dale, through hamlet and town, till it was swallowed up in the mesh-work of ways round London, sixty-three miles away according to the... more...

Chapter I On the west side of Ellen's father's house was a file of Norway spruce-trees, standing with a sharp pointing of dark boughs towards the north, which gave them an air of expectancy of progress. Every morning Ellen, whose bedroom faced that way, looked out with a firm belief that she would see them on the other side of the stone wall, advanced several paces towards their native land.... more...

CHAPTER I. MY THIRTY YEARS' INTIMATE ASSOCIATION WITH THE BREWERS For about thirty years I have been closely allied with the brewing industry and was daily brought in contact with the brewers. I have been interested in a number of breweries as a stockholder. I have been intimately associated with many brewers throughout the country. I am therefore thoroughly familiar with the inner history of the... more...

HENRY GOWER was dead at sixty-one—the end of a lifelong fraud which never had been suspected, and never would be. With the world, with his acquaintances and neighbors, with his wife and son and daughter, he passed as a generous, warm-hearted, good-natured man, ready at all times to do anything to help anybody, incapable of envy or hatred or meanness. In fact, not once in all his days had he ever... more...

MAY 4. How happy I am that I am gone! My dear friend, what a thing is the heart of man! To leave you, from whom I have been inseparable, whom I love so dearly, and yet to feel happy! I know you will forgive me. Have not other attachments been specially appointed by fate to torment a head like mine? Poor Leonora! and yet I was not to blame. Was it my fault, that, whilst the peculiar charms of her sister... more...

CHAPTER I THE FORBIDDEN ROCK A young man and an old one sat in the shade of the willows beside the wide, still river. The glare of a hot August sun failed to penetrate the shelter in which they idled; out upon the slow-gliding river it beat relentlessly, creating a pale, thin vapour that clung close to the shimmering surface and dazzled the eye with an ever-shifting glaze. The air was lifeless, sultry,... more...

CHAPTER IA LETTER FROM GRANDPA "Ted! Teddy! Look, it's snowing!" "Oh, is it? Let me see, Mother!" Theodore Martin, who was seldom called anything but Teddy or Ted, hurried away from the side of his mother, who was straightening his tie in readiness for school. He ran to the window through which his sister Janet, or Jan as she liked to be called, was looking. "Oh, it really is... more...

THE LITTLE REGIMENT I The fog made the clothes of the men of the column in the roadway seem of a luminous quality. It imparted to the heavy infantry overcoats a new colour, a kind of blue which was so pale that a regiment might have been merely a long, low shadow in the mist. However, a muttering, one part grumble, three parts joke, hovered in the air above the thick ranks, and blended in an undertoned... more...

CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. It is refreshing to turn from the depressing materialism of the present time to the inspiring faith of the Middle Ages. The change of outlook is invigorating; it has on the soul the effect which a bracing atmosphere has on the body. The temper of modern times tends to enfeeble our sense of the supernatural. If we would maintain undiminished our spiritual vigour we must... more...

CHAPTER I Mrs. Assheton's house in Sussex Square, Brighton, was appointed with that finish of smooth stateliness which robs stateliness of its formality, and conceals the amount of trouble and personal attention which has, originally in any case, been spent on the production of the smoothness. Everything moved with the regularity of the solar system, and, superior to that wild rush of heavy bodies... more...