Fiction Books

CHAPTER I THE WOLF AND THE BADGER The time was in or about the year 1544, when the Emperor Charles V. ruled the Netherlands, and our scene the city of Leyden. Any one who has visited this pleasant town knows that it lies in the midst of wide, flat meadows, and is intersected by many canals filled with Rhine water. But now, as it was winter, near to Christmas indeed, the meadows and the quaint gabled... more...

CHAPTER I "SMALL AND EARLY" A wild wet night in the Channel, the white waves leaping, lashing, and tumbling together in that confusion of troubled waters, which nautical men call a "cross-sea." A dreary, dismal night on Calais sands: faint moonshine struggling through a low driving scud, the harbour-lights quenched and blurred in mist. Such a night as bids the trim French sentry hug... more...

THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN Before the railroad's thin lines of steel bit their way up through the wilderness, Athabasca Landing was the picturesque threshold over which one must step who would enter into the mystery and adventure of the great white North. It is still Iskwatam—the "door" which opens to the lower reaches of the Athabasca, the Slave, and the Mackenzie. It is somewhat... more...

ABOUT RAINDROPS The river of Tavy is a great mountain-carver. From its mud-holes of Cranmere to the walls of Tavistock it is a hewer of rocks. Thenceforth it becomes a gardener, raising flowers and herbs; it becomes idyllic. It goes into Arcadia. And at last it floats ships of war. There is a story in Hebrew literature of a king called Solomon, a man reputed wise, although a fool with women, who... more...

A Matrimonial Hurdle. Cassandra Raynor stood on the terrace of her great house, looking over the sweep of country stretching to right and left, and in her heart was the deadliest of all weariness,—the weariness of repletion. It seemed at that moment the bitterest cross that she had nothing left for which to wish, that everything good which the world could give was hers already, and had left her cold.... more...

AFFGHANISTAN. There are those persons now living who would give their own weight in sovereigns, though drawing against thirteen to sixteen stone, that all of this dreadful subject might be swallowed up by Lethe; that darkness might settle for ever upon the insanities of Cabool; and the grave close finally over the carnage of Tezeen. But it will not be. Blood will have blood, they say. The madness which... more...

Of the seven Icelandic short stories which appear here, the first was probably written early in the thirteenth century, while the rest all date from the early twentieth century. It might therefore be supposed that the earliest of these stories was written in a language more or less unintelligible to modern Icelanders, and that there was a gap of many centuries in the literary production of the nation.... more...

AN ACCIDENT. "It will be a fine opportunity for Edna," said Mrs. Conway. Edna did not like that word opportunity; it always seemed to her that it meant something unpleasant. She had noticed that when pleasant things came along they were rarely spoken of as "opportunities," but were just happenings. So she sat with her little sturdy legs dangling down from the sofa, and a very sober look... more...

CHAPTER 1. At the age of fifteen I found myself in St. Louis, Mo., probably five hundred miles from my childhood home, with one dollar and a half in money in my pocket. I did not know one person in that whole city, and no one knew me. After I had wandered about the city a few days, trying to find something to do to get a living, I chanced to meet what proved to be the very best that could have happened... more...

OLD PLYMOUTH TRAILS "The breaking waves dashed highOn a stern and rock-bound coastAnd the woods against a stormy skyTheir giant branches tossed." So sang Felicia D. Hemans in the early years of the last century and she has been much derided by the thoughtless and irreverent who have said that the landing of the Pilgrims was not on a stern and rock-bound coast. Such scoffers evidently never... more...