Fiction Books

CHAPTER I The landlady, Madame Lemercier, left me alone in my room, after a short speech impressing upon me all the material and moral advantages of the Lemercier boarding-house. I stopped in front of the glass, in the middle of the room in which I was going to live for a while. I looked round the room and then at myself. The room was grey and had a dusty smell. I saw two chairs, one of which held my... more...

CHAPTER I I scarcely know where to begin, though I sometimes facetiously place the cause of it all to Charley Furuseth’s credit.  He kept a summer cottage in Mill Valley, under the shadow of Mount Tamalpais, and never occupied it except when he loafed through the winter months and read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to rest his brain.  When summer came on, he elected to sweat out a hot and... more...

CHAPTER I. “As ye sweep through the deepWhile the stormy winds do blow,While the battle rages loud and long,And the stormy winds do blow.”Campbell. UST two years this very day since poor Jack Mackenzie sailed away from England in the Ocean Pride.” Mr. Richards, of the tough old firm of Griffin, Keane, and Co., Solicitors, London, talked more to himself than to any one within hearing. As he spoke... more...

othing more exciting ever happened to Oliver Watts than being rejected by his draft board for a punctured eardrum until, deferring as usual to the superior judgment of his Aunt Katisha and of Glenna—his elder and militantly spinster sister—he put away his lifelong dream and took up, at the age of twenty-five, the practice of veterinary medicine. The relinquished dream was Oliver's ambition,... more...

CHAPTER I—THE MAN AT STEPHANO's The thing happened so suddenly that I really had very little time to make up my mind what course to adopt under somewhat singular circumstances. I was seated at my favorite table against the wall on the right-hand side in Stephano's restaurant, with a newspaper propped up before me, a glass of hock by my side, and a portion of the plat du jour, which happened... more...

A LODGE IN THE WILDERNESS “Hai-yai, so bright a day, so clear!” said Mitiahwe as she entered the big lodge and laid upon a wide, low couch, covered with soft skins, the fur of a grizzly which had fallen to her man’s rifle. “Hai-yai, I wish it would last forever—so sweet!” she added, smoothing the fur lingeringly and showing her teeth in a smile. “There will come a great storm, Mitiahwe.... more...

The Ghost-Ship Fairfield is a little village lying near the Portsmouth Road about half-way between London and the sea. Strangers who find it by accident now and then, call it a pretty, old-fashioned place; we who live in it and call it home don't find anything very pretty about it, but we should be sorry to live anywhere else. Our minds have taken the shape of the inn and the church and the green,... more...

THE SLAVE'S SOCIAL CIRCLE. With the growing population in the Southern States, the increase of mulattoes has been very great. Society does not frown upon the man who sits with his half-white child upon his knee whilst the mother stands, a slave, behind his chair. In nearly all the cities and towns of the Slave States, the real negro, or clear black, does not amount to more than one in four of the... more...

IN WHICH I APPEAR WITH FEW PRETENSIONS As the storm broke and a shower of hail rattled like a handful of pebbles against our little window, I choked back a sob and edged my small green-painted stool a trifle nearer the hearth. On the opposite side of the wire fender, my father kicked off his wet boots, stretched his feet, in grey yarn stockings, out on the rag carpet in front of the fire, and reached... more...

The Mackenzie Family  I fear I must trouble my reader with some few details as to the early life of Miss Mackenzie,—details which will be dull in the telling, but which shall be as short as I can make them. Her father, who had in early life come from Scotland to London, had spent all his days in the service of his country. He became a clerk in Somerset House at the age of sixteen, and was a clerk in... more...