Fiction Books

PART I "A stifling hot day!" General Hobson lifted his hat and mopped his forehead indignantly. "What on earth this place can be like in June I can't conceive! The tenth of April, and I'll be bound the thermometer's somewhere near eighty in the shade. You never find the English climate playing you these tricks." Roger Barnes looked at his uncle with amusement.... more...

It was a little late to search for the philosophers’ stone in 1669, yet it was in such a search that phosphorus was discovered. Wilhelm Homberg (1652-1715) described it in the following manner: Brand, “a man little known, of low birth, with a bizarre and mysterious nature in all he did, found this luminous matter while searching for something else. He was a glassmaker by profession, but he had... more...

Chapter I. "Friday, the 13th; I thought as much. If Bob has started, there will be hell, but I will see what I can do." The sound of my voice, as I dropped the receiver, seemed to part the mists of five years and usher me into the world of Then as though it had never passed on. I had been sitting in my office, letting the tape slide through my fingers while its every yard spelled... more...

CHAPTER I THE SHADOW OF A COWL Keppel Stuart, M.D., F. R. S., awoke with a start and discovered himself to be bathed in cold perspiration. The moonlight shone in at his window, but did not touch the bed, therefore his awakening could not be due to this cause. He lay for some time listening for any unfamiliar noise which might account for the sudden disturbance of his usually sound slumbers. In the... more...

MEMORY GEMS. Every man stamps his value on himself.—Schiller No capital earns such interest as personal culture.—President Eliot The end and aim of all education is the development of character.                                        —Francis W. Parker One of the best effects of thorough intellectual training is a     knowledge of our own... more...

THE career of Olive Fremstad has entailed continuous struggle: a struggle in the beginning with poverty, a struggle with a refractory voice, and a struggle with her own overpowering and dominating temperament. Ambition has steered her course. After she had made a notable name for herself through her interpretations of contralto rôles, she determined to sing soprano parts, and did so, largely by an... more...

Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when he reached the village. He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing, parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius' second planet with... more...

CHAPTER I. THE BENT TWIG. Caius Simpson was the only son of a farmer who lived on the north-west coast of Prince Edward's Island. The farmer was very well-to-do, for he was a hard-working man, and his land produced richly. The father was a man of good understanding, and the son had been born with brains; there were traditions of education in the family, hence the name Caius; it was no plan of the... more...

Chapter I At the far end of Thorhaven towards the north was a little square house surrounded by a privet hedge. It had a green door under a sort of wooden canopy with two flat windows on either side, and seemed to stand there defying the rows and rows of terraces, avenues and meanish semi-detached villas which were creeping up to it. Behind lay the flat fields under a wide sky just as they had lain for... more...

PART I THE POLITICAL OBJECTIVE The proper understanding of a battle and of its historical significance is only possible in connection with the campaign of which it forms a part; and the campaign can only be understood when we know the political object which it was designed to serve. A battle is no more than an incident in a campaign. However decisive in its immediate result upon the field, its value to... more...