Fiction Books

GRETCHEN'S VIOLIN. An elderly woman and a German girl were walking along the old Indian trail that led from the northern mountains to the Columbia River. The river was at this time commonly called the Oregon, as in Bryant's poem:"Where rolls the Oregon,And no sound is heard save its own dashings." The girl had a light figure, a fair, open face, and a high forehead with width in the... more...

PREFACE The story of The Log-Cabin Lady is one of the annals of America. It is a moving record of the conquest of self-consciousness and fear through mastery of manners and customs. It has been written by one who has not sacrificed the strength and honesty of her pioneer girlhood, but who added to these qualities that graciousness and charm which have given her distinction on two continents. I have... more...

theRELIGIOUS DENOMINATIONSof london. ‘Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,’ said Terence, and the sentence has been a motto for man these many years.  To the human what deep interest attaches!  A splendid landscape soon palls unless it has its hero.  We tire of the monotonous prairie till we learn that man, with his hopes and fears, has been there; and the barrenest country becomes dear to... more...

Being in a state of utter mystification, (a very disagreeable state, by-the-bye,) I hold it advisable to lay my unhappy case, in strict confidence, in the lowest possible whisper, and quite in a corner, before my kind friend, patron, and protector, the public, through whose means—for now-a-days every body knows everything, and there is no riddle so dark but shall find an OEdipus to solve it—I may... more...

CHAPTER I So it was in him, then—an inherited fighting instinct, a driving intensity to kill. He was the last of the Duanes, that old fighting stock of Texas. But not the memory of his dead father, nor the pleading of his soft-voiced mother, nor the warning of this uncle who stood before him now, had brought to Buck Duane so much realization of the dark passionate strain in his blood. It... more...

TROYON'S It must have been Bourke who first said that even if you knew your way about Paris you had to lose it in order to find it to Troyon's. But then Bourke was proud to be Irish. Troyon's occupied a corner in a jungle of side-streets, well withdrawn from the bustle of the adjacent boulevards of St. Germain and St. Michel, and in its day was a restaurant famous with a fame jealously... more...

THE LONELY DANCER I had no heart to join the dance,  I danced it all so long ago—Ah! light-winged music out of France,  Let other feet glide to and fro,Weaving new patterns of romance  For bosoms of new-fallen snow. But leave me thus where I may hear  The leafy rustle of the waltz,The shell-like murmur in my ear,  The silken whisper fairy-falseOf unseen rainbows circling... more...

THE LONESOME TRAIL PART ONE A man is very much like a horse. Once thoroughly frightened by something he meets on the road, he will invariably shy at the same place afterwards, until a wisely firm master leads him perforce to the spot and proves beyond all doubt that the danger is of his own imagining; after which he will throw up his head and deny that he ever was afraid—and be quite amusingly... more...

The day is done, and yet we linger here at the window of the private office, alone, in the early evening. Street sounds come surging up to us—the hoarse Voice of the City—a confused blur of noise—clanging trolley-cars, rumbling wagons, and familiar cries—all the varied commotion of the home-going hour when the city's buildings are pouring forth their human tide of laborers into the clogged... 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...