Fiction Books

CUCHULAIN AND HIS CYCLE The Church when it was most powerful taught learned and unlearned to climb, as it were, to the great moral realities through hierarchies of Cherubim and Seraphim, through clouds of Saints and Angels who had all their precise duties and privileges. The story-tellers of Ireland, perhaps of every primitive country, imagined as fine a fellowship, only it was to the æsthetic... more...

TAKING COMFORT. "REALLY, this is comfortable!" said I, glancing around the handsomely furnished parlour of my young friend Brainard, who had, a few weeks before, ventured upon matrimony, and was now making his first experiments in housekeeping. "Yes, it is comfortable," replied my friend. "The fact is, I go in for comforts." "I'm afraid George is a little... more...

INTRODUCTION When the historian has described the rise and fall of empires and dynasties, and has recounted with care and exactness the details of the great political movements that have changed the map of continents, there remains the question: What was the cause of these revolutions in human society--what were the real motives that were operative in the hearts and minds of the persons in the great... more...

CHAPTER I. On the very day when Charles I. was crowned with due rejoicings—Candlemasday, in the year of our Lord 1626—a loyalty, quite as deep and perhaps even more lasting, was having its beer at Ley Manor in the north of Devon. A loyalty not to the king, for the old West-country folk knew little and cared less about the house that came over the Border; but to a lord who had won their hearts by... more...

"Space life expectancy has been increased to twenty-five months and six days," said Marlowe, the training director. "That's a gain of a full month." Millions of miles from Earth, Ethan also looked discontentedly proud. "A mighty healthy-looking boy," he declared. Demarest bent a paperweight ship until it snapped. "It's something. You're gaining on the heredity... more...

Chapter 1 In the year 1775, there stood upon the borders of Epping Forest, at a distance of about twelve miles from London—measuring from the Standard in Cornhill,' or rather from the spot on or near to which the Standard used to be in days of yore—a house of public entertainment called the Maypole; which fact was demonstrated to all such travellers as could neither read nor write (and at that... more...

Preface We were talking last evening—as the blue moon-mist poured in through the old-fashioned grated window, and mingled with our yellow lamplight at table—we were talking of a certain castle whose heir is initiated (as folk tell) on his twenty-first birthday to the knowledge of a secret so terrible as to overshadow his subsequent life. It struck us, discussing idly the various mysteries and... more...

Last night, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the Old Year was leaving her final foot prints on the borders of Time's empire, she found herself in possession of a few spare moments, and sat down—of all places in the world—on the steps of our new City Hall. The wintry moonlight showed that she looked weary of body, and sad of heart, like many another wayfarer of earth. Her... more...

Chapter 1.I. The Brothers. The celebrated name which forms the title to this work will sufficiently apprise the reader that it is in the earlier half of the fourteenth century that my story opens. It was on a summer evening that two youths might be seen walking beside the banks of the Tiber, not far from that part of its winding course which sweeps by the base of Mount Aventine. The path they had... more...

The Story of the Choir Boy who Became a Great Composer Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, a little Austrian village not far from Hainburg. It is quite worth while for you to look for this town and for the River Leytha in any large geography. You may not find Rohrau itself, for it is a very small town, but you will surely find the River Leytha which flows by it. The parents lived in a very modest little... more...