Fiction Books

The starship waited. Cylindrical walls enclosed it, and a transparent plastic dome held it back from the sky and the stars. It waited, while night changed to day and back again, while the seasons merged one into another, and the years, and the centuries. It towered as gleaming and as uncorroded as it had when it was first built, long ago, when men had bustled about it and in it, their shouting and... more...

CHAPTER I WANT OF VARIETY A BLEMISH There is a sad want of variety amongst evergreen and deciduous shrubs in the average English garden. Faith is placed in a few shrubs with a reputation for robbing the soil of its goodness and making a monotonous ugly green bank, neither pleasant to look at nor of any protective value. As one who knows shrubs well and the way to group them says, "Even the... more...

PREFACE Romances of the future, however fantastic they may be, have for most of us a perennial if mild interest, since they are born of a very common feeling—a sense of dissatisfaction with the existing order of things, combined with a vague faith in or hope of a better one to come. The picture put before us is false; we knew it would be false before looking at it, since we cannot imagine what is... more...

CHAPTER IA Roadside Meeting The white dust, which lay thick upon the wide road between rolling fields of ripened grain, rose in little spirals from beneath the heavy feet of the plodding farm-horses drawing the empty hay-wagon, and had scarcely settled again upon the browning goldenrod and fuzzy milkweed which bordered the rail fences on either side when Ebb Fischel’s itinerant butcher-jitney rattled... more...

CHAPTER I. THE FATHER'S RETURN.   She kneels beside the pauper bed,    As seraphs bow while they adore!  Advance with still and reverent tread,    For angels have gone in before! "I wonder, oh, I wonder if he will come?" The voice which uttered these words was so anxious, so pathetic with deep feeling, that you would have loved the poor child, whose heart gave them forth, plain... more...

I Dream.         True, I talk of dreams;Which are the children of an idle brain,Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,Which is as thin of substance as the air;And more inconstant than the wind, who woosEven now the frozen bosom of the north,And, being anger’d, puffs away from thence,Turning his face to the dew-dropping south. Il est naturel que nos idées les plus vives et les plus familières se... more...

CHAPTER I For a man to keep himself consistently amused for ten years after his graduation from college, even with an inheritance to furnish ample financial assistance, suggests a certain quality of genius. This much Monte Covington had accomplished—accomplished, furthermore, without placing himself under obligations of any sort to the opposite sex. He left no trail of broken hearts in his wake. If... more...

I. RED LAKE Shefford halted his tired horse and gazed with slowly realizing eyes. A league-long slope of sage rolled and billowed down to Red Lake, a dry red basin, denuded and glistening, a hollow in the desert, a lonely and desolate door to the vast, wild, and broken upland beyond. All day Shefford had plodded onward with the clear horizon-line a thing unattainable; and for days before that he had... more...

ADVERTISEMENT. The American publishers of M. De Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," have been frequently solicited to furnish the work in a form adapted to seminaries of learning, and at a price which would secure its more general circulation, and enable trustees of School District Libraries, and other libraries, to place it among their collections. Desirous to attain these objects, they... more...

CHAPTER I. THE BALL. Belonging to one of the first families in France, still young, and with a face that would have been agreeable had it not been for the almost ridiculous and disproportionate length of his nose, M. de Lucenay joined to a restless love of constant motion the habit of talking and laughing fearfully loud upon subjects quite at variance with good taste or polished manners, and throwing... more...