Fiction Books

SIELANKA. An Idyll. In the woods, in the deep woods, was an open glade in which stood the house of the forester Stephan. The house was built of logs packed with moss, and the roof was thatched with straw; hard by the house stood two outbuildings; in front of it was a piece of fenced-in ground, and an old well with a long, crooked sweep; the water in the well was covered with a green vegetation at the... more...

CHAPTER I. SINGING SAL. On a certain golden afternoon in August, when the sea was as still and radiant as the vaulted blue overhead, and when the earth was lying so hushed and silent that you would have thought it was listening for the chirp of the small birds among the gorse, a young girl of about seventeen or so was walking over the downs that undulate, wave on wave, from Newhaven all along the coast... more...

enry Kuran answered a nod here and there, a called out greeting from a desk an aisle removed from the one along which he was progressing, finally made the far end of the room. He knocked at the door and pushed his way through before waiting a response. There were three desks here. He didn't recognize two of the girls who looked up at his entry. One of them began to say something, but then Betty,... more...

McAllister's Christmas I McAllister was out of sorts. All the afternoon he had sat in the club window and watched the Christmas shoppers hurrying by with their bundles. He thanked God he had no brats to buy moo-cows and bow-wows for. The very nonchalance of these victims of a fate that had given them families irritated him. McAllister was a clubman, pure and simple; that is to say though neither... more...

A LADY OF QUALITY The steamship Trave of the North German Lloyd docked at its Hoboken pier at eight o'clock one morning in December. Among the passengers who presently departed from the vessel was a woman who attracted unusual attention for the reason that she was accompanied by a considerable suite of retainers and servants who were for a time as busy as flies around a honey pot, caring for their... more...

OPERATION R.S.V.P By H. Beam Piper   Vladmir N. Dzhoubinsky, Foreign Minister, Union of East European Soviet Republics, to Wu Fung Tung, Foreign Minister, United Peoples' Republics of East Asia: 15 Jan. 1984 Honored Sir: Pursuant to our well known policy of exchanging military and scientific information with the Government, of friendly Powers, my Government takes great pleasure in announcing the... more...

Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy, more than four hundred and fifty years ago. Genoa was a rich town on the Mediterranean Sea. She had trading routes to India, China and Japan. Columbus was fond of stories of the sea and liked the study of geography. He was anxious to go to sea and while a boy made his first voyage. When he grew up to be a man, he went to Lisbon the capital of Portugal. The... more...

Dewforth had almost most lost the habit of looking from windows. The train which took him to the city every morning passed through a country in the terminal stages of a long war of self-destruction. Whatever had been burned, botched, poisoned or exhausted in that struggle had been filled along the right-of-way, among drifts of soot and ground-mists of sulphurous smoke and chemical flatulence, to form a... more...

Every Rivermouth boy looks upon the sea as being in some way mixed up with his destiny. While he is yet a baby lying in his cradle, he hears the dull, far-off boom of the breakers; when he is older, he wanders by the sandy shore, watching the waves that come plunging up the beach like white-maned sea-horses, as Thoreau calls them; his eye follows the lessening sail as it fades into the blue horizon,... more...

INTRODUCTION As a part of a study of the herpetofauna of the Mexican state of Michoacán an attempt was made to ascertain the interspecific and intraspecific relationships of the various populations of Pituophis there. Field work in Michoacán revealed that two supposed subspecies of Pituophis deppei were sympatric. This discovery led to the examination of all available (124) museum specimens of these... more...