Fiction Books

INTRODUCTION "For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." SHAKESPEARE "To the impure all things are impure." NIETZSCHE In "The Little Demon" Sologub has shown us how the evil within us peering out through our imagination makes all the world seem evil to us. In "The Created Legend," feeling perhaps the need of reacting from his morose creation... more...

CHAPTER I. "Any news to-night?" asked Admiral Buzza, leading a trump. "Hush, my love," interposed his wife timidly, with a glance at the Vicar. She liked to sit at her husband's left, and laid her small cards before him as so many tributes to his greatness. "I will not hush, Emily. I repeat, is there any news to-night?" Miss Limpenny, his hostess and vis-a-vis, finding the... more...

CHAPTER I An old man sat in the shadows of the summer night. From a veranda chair he looked at the stars. He wore a white beard, and his eyes, grown small with age, watered continually as if he were weeping. Half-hidden under his beard his emaciated lips kept the monotonous grimace of a smile on his face. He sat in the dark, a patient, trembling figure waiting for bedtime. His feet, though he rested... more...

CHAPTER I. HOMILETIC. Dear Friends,—I am beginning a new book like an old sermon; but, as you know, I have been so accustomed to preach all my life, that whatever I say or write will more or less take the shape of a sermon; and if you had not by this time learned at least to bear with my oddities, you would not have wanted any more of my teaching. And, indeed, I did not think you would want any more.... more...

HEINRICH HEINE. (BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.) Harry Heine, as he was originally named, was born in Düsseldorf on the Rhine, December 13th, 1799. His father was a well-to-do Jewish merchant; and his mother, the daughter of the famous physician and Aulic Counlor Von Geldern, was, according to her son, a "femme distinguée." His early childhood fell in the days of the occupation of Düsseldorf by the... more...

I had been out of Germany for thirty-five years, drawn hither and thither by various glittering of will-of-the-wisps. When I returned to my native country, I was as poor in pocket as when I left, and much poorer in illusions. The Berlin insurance company which I had represented with such mediocre success in Switzerland, Austria and Belgium agreed to let me sell for them at home, and by a curious... more...

THE SNAKE-TREE THEY managed to make a good meal of the food supplies they had brought along, and as a dessert Washington made some peach short-cake from the slices of the giant fruit they had found, the day before. Just as they finished supper it got very dark, but, in about an hour, the moon-beams, as the travelers called them, came up, and illuminated the lake with a weird light. As the machinery of... more...

CHAPTER 1. THE EGG It began with the day when it was almost the Fifth of November, and a doubt arose in some breast—Robert's, I fancy—as to the quality of the fireworks laid in for the Guy Fawkes celebration. 'They were jolly cheap,' said whoever it was, and I think it was Robert, 'and suppose they didn't go off on the night? Those Prosser kids would have something to... more...

THE TREASURE-TRAIN "I am not by nature a spy, Professor Kennedy, but—well, sometimes one is forced into something like that." Maude Euston, who had sought out Craig in his laboratory, was a striking girl, not merely because she was pretty or because her gown was modish. Perhaps it was her sincerity and artlessness that made her attractive. She was the daughter of Barry Euston, president of... more...

CHAPTER I I It had rained all night, one of the summer rains that, beginning in a thunder-storm in Washington, had continued in a steaming drizzle until morning. There were only four passengers in the sleeper, men all of them—two in adjoining sections in the middle of the car, a third in the drawing-room, a fourth an intermittent occupant of a berth at the end. They had gone to bed unaware of the... more...