Fiction Books

THE PRINCESS OF QULZUM (BALLADE BY NUR UDDIN) I have seen a small proud face brimming with sunlight;I have seen the daughter of the King of Qulzum passing from grace to grace.Yesterday she threw her bed on the floor of her double houseAnd laughed with a thousand graces.She has a little pearl and coral capAnd rides in a palanquin with servants about herAnd claps her hands, being too proud to call.I have... more...

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. A successful scout, or spy, is like a great poet in one respect: he is born, not made—subject to the requisition of the military genius of the time. That I was not born to be hanged is a self-evident proposition. Whether I was a successful scout or not, the reader of these pages must determine. It was my good fortune to have first seen the light under the shadow of one of... more...

THE only way to be happy with a husband is to learn to be happy without him most of the time.LOVE is just the shine on the jewel of matrimony; but, after all, the shine on a jewel is the whole thing.A MAN firmly believes that, if he can only keep his wife in the straight and narrow path, he can go out and zig-zag all over the downward one without falling from grace.A GIRL is never so surprised when a... more...

PRELUDE   Long, long ago when castles grim did frown,  When massy wall and gate did 'fend each town;  When mighty lords in armour bright were seen,  And stealthy outlaws lurked amid the green  And oft were hanged for poaching of the deer,  Or, gasping, died upon a hunting spear;  When barons bold did on their rights insist  And hanged or burned all rogues who dared resist;  When... more...

TRUE STORIES ABOUT DOGS AND CATS. In a pretty, quiet village in New England lived Mary Chilton. She was a widow. She had two sons; and it was the occupation and the happiness of her life to do all she could to make her boys good and happy. I should say to help and teach them to be good and happy; for boys and girls must make themselves good; and then, of course, they will be happy; and no one can be... more...

The Indians were formerly lords of the soil we now occupy, and obtained a subsistence principally by hunting and fishing. They generally lived in villages, containing from fifty to five hundred families. Their houses, called wigwams, were usually constructed of poles, one end being driven into the ground, and the other bent over so as to meet another fastened in like manner; both being joined together... more...

A Hoosier Fairy Tale. You think that folks in fine clothes are the only folks that ever see fairies, and that poor folks can't afford them. But in the days of the real old-fashioned "Green Jacket and White Owl's Feather" fairies, it was the poor boy carrying fagots to the cabin of his widowed mother who saw wonders of all sorts wrought by the little people; and it was the poor girl... more...

THE LIFE OF AKENSIDE. Mark Akenside was born at Newcastle-upon-Tyne on the 9th of November 1721. His family were Presbyterian Dissenters, and on the 30th of that month he was baptized in the meeting, then held in Hanover Square, by a Mr. Benjamin Bennet. His father, Mark, was a butcher in respectable circumstances—his mother's name was Mary Lumsden. There may seem something grotesque in finding... more...

OLD JUDAS This entire stretch of country was amazing; it was characterized by a grandeur that was almost religious, and yet it had an air of sinister desolation. A great, wild lake, filled with stagnant, black water, in which thousands of reeds were waving to and fro, lay in the midst of a vast circle of naked hills, where nothing grew but broom, or here and there an oak curiously twisted by the wind.... more...

Miles Gilbert watched the landscape slide away below him, its quilt of rounded treetops mottled red and orange in the double sunlight and, in shaded places, with the natural yellow of the vegetation of Kwannon. The aircar began a slow swing to the left, and Gettler Alpha came into view, a monstrous smear of red incandescence with an optical diameter of two feet at arm's length, slightly flattened... more...