Fiction Books

C. Suetonius Tranquillus was the son of a Roman knight who commanded a legion, on the side of Otho, at the battle which decided the fate of the empire in favour of Vitellius. From incidental notices in the following History, we learn that he was born towards the close of the reign of Vespasian, who died in the year 79 of the Christian era. He lived till the time of Hadrian, under whose administration... more...

THE RED ROSES OF TONIA A trestle burned down on the International Railroad. The south-bound from San Antonio was cut off for the next forty-eight hours. On that train was Tonia Weaver's Easter hat. Espirition, the Mexican, who had been sent forty miles in a buckboard from the Espinosa Ranch to fetch it, returned with a shrugging shoulder and hands empty except for a cigarette. At the small... more...

CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN1Since I came to this place I have been very restless, wasting my energies in the futile beginning of ill-conceived books. One does not settle down very readily at two and forty to a new way of living, and I have found myself with the teeming interests of the life I have abandoned still buzzing like a swarm of homeless bees in my head. My... more...

THE AIM OF THE DETROIT NEWS Formation of a newspaper's ideals comes through a process of years. The best traditions of the past, blending with hopes of the future, should be the writer's guide for the day. Nov. 1, 1916, the editor-in-chief of The Detroit News, in a letter to the managing editor, wrote his interpretation of the principles under which the staff should work, in striving toward... more...

THE 184-INCH SYNCHROCYCLOTRON His success with the 60-inch cyclotron in 1939 led Dr. E. O. Lawrence to propose a much more powerful accelerator, one which could produce new types of nuclear rearrangements and even create particles. Grants totaling $1,225,000 permitted work to start on the 184-inch cyclotron in August 1940. It was designed to accelerate atomic particles to an energy of 100 million... more...

It was not a sinister silence. No silence is sinister until it acquires a background of understandable menace. Here there was only the night quiet of Maternity, the silence of noiseless rubber heels on the hospital corridor floor, the faint brush of starched white skirts brushing through doorways into darkened and semi-darkened rooms. But there was something wrong with the silence in the "basket... more...

I PROLOGUE BY WAY OF DEDICATION Those to whom God has given the gift of comely speech, should not hide their light beneath a bushel, but should willingly show it abroad. If a great truth is proclaimed in the ears of men, it brings forth fruit a hundred-fold; but when the sweetness of the telling is praised of many, flowers mingle with the fruit upon the branch. According to the witness of Priscian, it... more...

CHAPTER I "Are you coming in to watch the dancing, Lady Conway?" "I most decidedly am not. I thoroughly disapprove of the expedition of which this dance is the inauguration. I consider that even by contemplating such a tour alone into the desert with no chaperon or attendant of her own sex, with only native camel drivers and servants, Diana Mayo is behaving with a recklessness and... more...

I After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes. On the big maps this deserted area is painted in a fluffy blue, growing fainter in color as it leaves the... more...

INTRODUCTION It is a melancholy but instructive fact to remember that, in the opinion of him whom nature had adorned with the greatest intellect that the world has yet seen, selfishness and self-interest lie at the root of all human action. "For," as Napoleon said, "in ambition is to be found the chief motive force of humanity, and a man puts forth his best powers in proportion to his hopes... more...