Fiction Books

"Unexpected obstacle. Please don't come till thirtieth. Anna." All the way from Charing Cross to Dover the train had hammered the words of the telegram into George Darrow's ears, ringing every change of irony on its commonplace syllables: rattling them out like a discharge of musketry, letting them, one by one, drip slowly and coldly into his brain, or shaking, tossing, transposing... more...

I I have wondered sometimes if there are not perhaps some disadvantages in having really blue blood in one's veins, like grandmamma and me. For instance, if we were ordinary, common people our teeth would chatter naturally with cold when we have to go to bed without fires in our rooms in December; but we pretend we like sleeping in "well-aired rooms"—at least I have to. Grandmamma simply... more...

CHAPTER I. THE MAN FROM AMERICA. It was the sort of window which was common in Paris about the end of the seventeenth century. It was high, mullioned, with a broad transom across the centre, and above the middle of the transom a tiny coat of arms—three caltrops gules upon a field argent—let into the diamond-paned glass. Outside there projected a stout iron rod, from which hung a gilded miniature of... more...

CHAPTER I DOG-BITE I "And yet," Edward Henry Machin reflected as at six minutes to six he approached his own dwelling at the top of Bleakridge, "and yet—I don't feel so jolly after all!" The first two words of this disturbing meditation had reference to the fact that, by telephoning twice to his stockbrokers at Manchester, he had just made the sum of three hundred and forty-one... more...

When General Rosecrans took command of the Army of the Ohio there were in that army five battalions of regular infantry in two different divisions; when he reorganized this army he determined to bring these battalions together, to give them a regular battery, and form of them a Regular Brigade. The 15th, 16th and 19th were already at Nashville; the orders organizing the brigade found the two battalions... more...

On the Upper DeckSic itur ad astra.One morning in December the steamer Tabo was laboriously ascending the tortuous course of the Pasig, carrying a large crowd of passengers toward the province of La Laguna. She was a heavily built steamer, almost round, like the tabú from which she derived her name, quite dirty in spite of her pretensions to whiteness, majestic and grave from her leisurely motion.... more...

HEMP The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foothold, stronghold, freehold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers of hemp—with remembrance of Virginia, with remembrance of dear ancestral Britain. Away back in the days when they lived with wife, child, flock in frontier wooden fortresses and hardly ventured forth for water, salt, game, tillage—in the very summer of that wild... more...

SERMON. 1 Corinthians, x. 31. WHETHER YE EAT OR DRINK, OR WHATSOEVER YE DO, DO ALL TO THE GLORY OF GOD. The solemnities of this occasion belong to a Christian people. By them religion is solicited to throw her protection and authority around the institutions of the State. The citizen and the magistrate recognise their common relation to a higher Power than the functionary or the State, and in such... more...

CHAPTER I.on heresy and orthodoxy. The original meaning of the word heresy is choice.  “It was long used,” writes Dr. Waddington, “by the philosophers to designate the preference and selection of some speculative opinion, and in process of time was applied without any sense of reproach to every sect.”  The most fruitful source of speculative opinion is, and has ever been, religion; from the... more...

resqu the Wisest, Ruler of Hova, Lord of the Universe, was being entertained by a troupe of Goefd dancers when his Lord of War, Wert, bounded into the Audience Hall. In his hurry to reach Tresqu's throne, Wert slipped on the nearly frictionless floor and skidded through the formation of dancers, sending the slender Goefden sprawling in all directions. He slid to a halt by the Pleading Mat, onto... more...