Fiction Books

CHAPTER I I Arthur Charles Prohack came downstairs at eight thirty, as usual, and found breakfast ready in the empty dining-room. This pleased him, because there was nothing in life he hated more than to be hurried. For him, hell was a place of which the inhabitants always had an eye on the clock and the clock was always further advanced than they had hoped. The dining-room, simply furnished with... more...

THEY TOLD ME They told me Pan was dead, but I  Oft marvelled who it was that sangDown the green valleys languidly  Where the grey elder-thickets hang. Sometimes I thought it was a bird  My soul had charged with sorcery;Sometimes it seemed my own heart heard  Inland the sorrow of the sea. But even where the primrose sets  The seal of her pale loveliness,I found amid the violets  Tears of an... more...

IT happened nigh on seven years ago, when I was living in one of the districts of the J. province, on the estate of Bielokurov, a landowner, a young man who used to get up early, dress himself in a long overcoat, drink beer in the evenings, and all the while complain to me that he could nowhere find any one in sympathy with his ideas. He lived in a little house in the orchard, and I lived in the old... more...

INTRODUCTION This Supplement is designed to supply a double need: it furnishes an analytical index to the entire series of twenty volumes; and it affords a great deal of additional information, bearing on the subject-matter of these volumes, but which from its very nature it was impossible to incorporate in the text. This additional information includes biographical sketches of the characters mentioned... more...

INTRODUCTION The publication of Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded on 6 November 1740 occasioned the kind of immediate and hyperbolic praise which would have turned the head of an author less vain than Richardson. Proclaimed by Aaron Hill as being "the Soul of Religion," and by Knightley Chetwood as the book next to the Bible which ought to be saved "if all the Books in England were to be... more...

Influence of the Pipe. "I see, by a recent paper," said the Observer, as he lit another cigar and resettled himself in his chair, "that a Chicago physician and a lot of fool women, who are evidently jealous of Carrie Nation, are about to start an active crusade against the 'Smoke Nuisance.' This is ambiguous enough to warrant the supposition that their object is the compulsory... more...

CHAPTER I According to an entry in my book of engagements, I left London for Ravensdene Court on March 8th, 1912. Until about a fortnight earlier I had never heard of the place, but there was nothing remarkable in my ignorance of it, seeing that it stands on a remote part of the Northumbrian coast, and at least three hundred miles from my usual haunts. But then, towards the end of February, I received... more...

Tommy hated Earth, knowing his mother might go home to Mars without him. Worse, would a robot secretly take her place?... Tommy Benton, on his first visit to Earth, found the long-anticipated wonders of twenty-first-century New York thrilling the first week, boring and unhappy the second week, and at the end of the third he was definitely ready to go home. The never-ending racket of traffic was torture... more...

HUMIN NATUR' ON THE HAN'BUL 'ND ST. JO Durin' war times the gorillas hed torn up most uv the cypress ties an' used 'em for kindlin' an' stove wood, an' the result wuz that when the war wuz over there wuz n't anythink left uv the Han'bul 'nd St. Jo but the rollin' stock 'nd the two streaks uv rails from one end uv the road to the... more...

I The guests at Mrs. Smithers's high-class boarding-house for gentlemen had assembled as usual for breakfast, and in a few moments Mary, the dainty waitress, entered with the steaming coffee, the mush, and the rolls. The School-master, who, by-the-way, was suspected by Mrs. Smithers of having intentions, and who for that reason occupied the chair nearest the lady's heart, folded up the... more...