Fiction Books

NO SINECURE I am still uncertain which surprised me more, the telegram calling my attention to the advertisement, or the advertisement itself. The telegram is before me as I write. It would appear to have been handed in at Vere Street at eight o'clock in the morning of May 11, 1897, and received before half-past at Holloway B.O. And in that drab region it duly found me, unwashen but at work before... more...

CHAPTER I French women of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, when studied according to the distinctive phases of their influence, are best divided into three classes: those queens who, as wives, represented virtue, education, and family life; the mistresses, who were instigators of political intrigue, immorality, and vice; and the authoresses and other educated women, who constituted... more...

CHAPTER I In Which Silken Ladies Ascend One Stairway, and a Lonely Wayfarer Ascends Another and Comes Face to Face With Old Friends. The big house, standing on a high hill which overlooked the city, showed in the moonlight the grotesque outlines of a composite architecture. Originally it had been a square substantial edifice of Colonial simplicity. A later and less restrained taste had aimed at a... more...

I. THE WOMAN WITH THE DIAMOND I was, perhaps, the plainest girl in the room that night. I was also the happiest—up to one o'clock. Then my whole world crumbled, or, at least, suffered an eclipse. Why and how, I am about to relate. I was not made for love. This I had often said to myself; very often of late. In figure I am too diminutive, in face far too unbeautiful, for me to cherish... more...

CHAPTER I IN A HOSTILE COUNTRY Eastward out of the Torquilla Range the Burntwood River emerged from a gorge, flowing swift and turbulent during the spring months, shallow and murmurous the rest of the year, to pass through a basin formed by low mountains and break forth at last from a canyon and wind away over the mesa. In the canyon was being erected the huge reservoir dam which was in the future to... more...

THE CASTLE OF VAUTSBERG ON THE RHINE. A chamber in a tower. PRINCE HENRY, sitting alone, ill and restless.  Prince Henry. I cannot sleep! my fervid brainCalls up the vanished Past again,And throws its misty splendors deepInto the pallid realms of sleep!A breath from that far-distant shoreComes freshening ever more and more,And wafts o'er intervening seasSweet odors from the Hesperides!A wind,... more...

THE Hermit lived in a cave in the hollow of a hill. Below him was a glen, with a stream in a coppice of oaks and alders, and on the farther side of the valley, half a day's journey distant, another hill, steep and bristling, which raised aloft a little walled town with Ghibelline swallow-tails notched against the sky. When the Hermit was a lad, and lived in the town, the crenellations of the walls... more...

Between two and three years ago, the following pithy advertisement appeared in several of the London papers:— "Country Lodgings.—Apartments to let in a large farm-house,situate in a cheap and pleasant village, about forty milesfrom London. Apply (if by letter post-paid) to A. B., No. 7,Salisbury-street, Strand." Little did I think, whilst admiring in the broad page of the Morning Chronicle... more...

The Crew pulsed with contentment, and its communal singing brought a pleasant kind of glow that throbbed gently in the control room. "'Has anybody here seen Kelly ... K-E-double-L-Y?'" "Shut up and dig my thought!" Kelly's stubborn will insisted. "I'm going on out for a while!" The delicate loom of the Crew's light pattern increased its frequency a... more...

Think of it! "One Dollar a Pound." The Editor of this book was brought face to face with the true possibilities in Frog raising by his love for this delicate meat and his inability to get it. As I had visited all the principal markets in New York City, a market where it is known the world over that if there is anything in the eatable line to be found it can be found there. This was not so of... more...