Fiction Books

SHE Winchester, May 28, 1891The Royal Garden Inn. We are doing the English cathedral towns, aunt Celia and I.  Aunt Celia has an intense desire to improve my mind.  Papa told her, when we were leaving Cedarhurst, that he wouldn’t for the world have it too much improved, and aunt Celia remarked that, so far as she could judge, there was no immediate danger; with which exchange of hostilities they... more...

This tale is founded upon two sagas, which have been translated literally and without attempt to accord their discrepancies by York Powell and Vigfussen in their invaluable Origines Icelandicae. As well as those versions I have had another authority to help me, in Laing's Sea-Kings of Norway. I have blent the two accounts into one, and put forward the result with this word of explanation, which I... more...

r. Jeremy Garnet stood with his back to the empty grate—for the time was summer—watching with a jaundiced eye the removal of his breakfast things. "Mrs. Medley," he said. "Sir?" "Would it bore you if I became auto-biographical?" "Sir?" "Never mind. I merely wish to sketch for your benefit a portion of my life's history. At eleven o'clock last night I... more...

CHAPTER I I was born in the town in Lynn, Massachusetts, upon the twenty- second day of February, in the year 1855. Unlike most writers of similar memoirs, I shall cast no aspersions upon the indigent by stating that my parents were poor but honest. They were poor and honest, as indeed, so far as I have been able to ascertain, have been all the Quibbles since the founder of the family came over on the... more...

MUSLIN I The convent was situated on a hilltop, and through the green garden the white dresses of the schoolgirls fluttered like the snowy plumage of a hundred doves. Obeying a sudden impulse, a flock of little ones would race through a deluge of leaf-entangled rays towards a pet companion standing at the end of a gravel-walk examining the flower she has just picked, the sunlight glancing along her... more...

CHAPTER I SALEM AND THE HATHORNES: 1630-1800 The three earliest settlements on the New England coast were Plymouth, Boston, and Salem; but Boston soon proved its superior advantages to the two others, not only from its more capacious harbor, but also from the convenient waterway which the Charles River afforded to the interior of the Colony. We find that a number of English families, and among them the... more...

CHAPTER I. LENOBLE OF BEAUBOCAGE. In the days when the Bourbon reigned over Gaul, before the "simple, sensuous, passionate" verse of Alfred de Musset had succeeded the débonnaire Muse of Béranger in the affections of young France,—in days when the site of the Trocadero was a remote and undiscovered country, and the word "exposition" unknown in the Academic dictionary, and the Gallic... more...

GENERAL PREFACE TO THE WAVERLEY NOVELS And must I ravel outMy weaved-up follies?                       Richard II, Act IV. Having undertaken to give an Introductory Account of the compositions which are here offered to the public, with Notes and Illustrations, the Author, under whose name they are now for the first time collected, feels that he has the delicate task of speaking... more...

CHAPTER I. “There is something in this climate, after all. I suppose there are not many places where one could lie on the shore in December, and enjoy the air as much as I have done for the last two hours.” Harry Molyneux turned his face seaward again as he spoke, and drank in the soft breeze eagerly; he could scarcely help thanking it aloud, as it stole freshly over his frame, and played gently... more...

PICTURE.   Winter's wild birthnight! In the fretful East  The uneasy wind moans with its sense of cold,  And sends its sighs through gloomy mountain gorge,  Along the valley, up the whitening hill,  To tease the sighing spirits of the pines,  And waste in dismal woods their chilly life.  The sky is dark, and on the huddled leaves—  The restless, rustling leaves—sifts down its... more...