Fiction Books

A GENEROUS LETTER. At last the answer came, and it was Maddy who brought it to Guy. She had been home that day, and on her return had ridden by the office as Guy had requested her to do. She saw the letter bore a foreign postmark, also that it was in the delicate handwriting of some female, but the sight did not affect her in the least. Maddy's heart was far too heavy that day to care for a... more...

CHAPTER I A fast train drew into Albany, on the New York Central, from the West. It was three-thirty of a chill March morning in the first year of peace. A pall of fog lay over the world so heavy that it beaded the face and hands and deposited a fairy diamond dust upon wool. The station lights had the visibility of stars, and like the stars were without refulgence—a pale golden aureola, perhaps three... more...

CHAPTER I. Christopher was a fiddler and a man of genius. Educated people do not deny the possibility of such a combination; but it was Christopher's misfortune to live amongst a dull and bovine-seeming race, who had little sympathy with art and no knowledge of an artist's longings. They contented themselves, for the most part, with the belief that Christopher was queer. Perhaps he was. My... more...

IT was an occasion, I felt—the prospect of a large party—to look out at the station for others, possible friends and even possible enemies, who might be going. Such premonitions, it was true, bred fears when they failed to breed hopes, though it was to be added that there were sometimes, in the case, rather happy ambiguities. One was glowered at, in the compartment, by people who on the morrow,... more...

The following story, the simple and domestic incidents of which may be deemed scarcely worth relating, after such a lapse of time, awakened some degree of interest, a hundred years ago, in a principal seaport of the Bay Province. The rainy twilight of an autumn day,—a parlor on the second floor of a small house, plainly furnished, as beseemed the middling circumstances of its inhabitants, yet... more...

CHAPTER I THE HEROINE GOES TO MARKET "Let's see—bacon, eggs, bread, sugar, two cans of corn, and jam. Have I gotten everything, Alma?" Nancy, checking off the items in her marketing list, looked over toward her sister, who had wandered to the door and stood gazing out into the street where a gentle September rain was falling. Alma did not answer, seeming to have gone into a dream, and... more...

About six miles north of the original Paris stands the great Basilica of St. Denis--the only church in Paris, and I think in France, called by that ancient name, which carries us back at once to the days of the Roman Empire, and in itself bears evidence to the antiquity of the spot as a place of worship. Around it, a squalid modern industrial town has slowly grown up; but the nucleus of the whole... more...

THE ROAD TO RICHMOND The tobacco-roller and his son pitched their camp beneath a gum tree upon the edge of the wood. It was October, and the gum was the colour of blood. Behind it rolled the autumn forest; before it stretched a level of broom-sedge, bright ochre in the light of the setting sun. The road ran across this golden plain, and disappeared in a league-deep wood of pine. From an invisible... more...

CHAPTER I. HOW DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND, AND HOW THE SPARKS FLEW. The windows are all wide open, and through them the warm, lazy summer wind is stealing languidly. The perfume of the seringas from the shrubbery beyond, mingled with all the lesser but more delicate delights of the garden beneath, comes with the wind, and fills the drawing-room of The Place with a vague, almost drowsy sense of sweetness. Mrs.... more...

HOW THE COLLECTION WAS FORMED This question may be answered shortly; it was formed—at least the beginning of it—under compulsion. After fifteen years of very hard work, Mr. Measures broke down. The doctor prescribed a long rest, and insisted on it; but the patient was equally determined not to risk the career just opening, with an assurance of success, by taking a twelve-months’ holiday.... more...