Fiction Books

INTRODUCTION Lafcadio Hearn, known to Nippon as Yakumo Koizumi, was born in Leucadia in the Ionian Islands, June 27, 1850. His father was an Irish surgeon in the British Army; his mother was a Greek. Both parents died while Hearn was still a child, and he was adopted by a great-aunt, and educated for the priesthood. To this training he owed his Latin scholarship and, doubtless, something of the... more...

PREFACE This is the story of our most useful business. It is a medley of mechanics, millionaires, kings, inventors and farmers; and it is intended for the average man and woman, boy and girl. Although I have taken great pains to make this book accurate, I have written it in the fashion of romance, because it tells a story that every American ought to know. The fact is that the United States owes much... more...

CHAPTER I THE COMING OF THE RED TRIANGLEHis Majesty congratulates the Association on the successful results of its war work, which has done everything conducive to the comfort and well-being of the armies, supplying the special and peculiar needs of men drawn from countries so different and distant. It has worked in a practical, economical and unostentatious manner, with consummate knowledge of those... more...

CHAPTER IHOW PEACEFUL ARTS HELP IN WAR In the olden times warfare was supported by a single trade, that of the armourer. Nowadays the whole resources of the greatest manufacturing nations scarcely suffice to supply the needs of their armies. So much is this the case that no nation can possibly hope to become powerful in a military or naval sense unless they are either a great manufacturing community or... more...

CHAPTER I OF A CURIOUS MEETING OF EXTREMES On the dreary suburban edge of a very old, very ignorant, very sooty, hardhearted, stony-streeted, meanly grim, little provincial town there stands a gasometer. On one side of this gasometer begins a region of disappointed fields, which, however, has hardly begun before a railway embankment cuts across, at an angle convenient for its entirely obscuring the few... more...

I They turned again at the end of the platform. The tail of her long, averted stare was conscious of him, of his big, tweed-suited body and its behaviour, squaring and swelling and tightening in its dignity, of its heavy swing to her shoulder as they turned. She could stave off the worst by not looking at him, by looking at other things, impersonal, innocent things; the bright, yellow, sharp gabled... more...

athematicians are just like people: old, young, fat, thin, male, female. This one was male, thirty-five, with steady brown eyes and a nice smile when he remembered to use it. His name was Norman Venner, and besides being a mathematical whiz generally, he had designed and built an electronic brain, or calculator, which was in some ways smarter than himself—and a lot less diffident. Electronic... more...

ADVERTISEMENT. It having been frequently stated in print that the book called “Lavengro” was got up expressly against the popish agitation, in the years 1850-51, the author takes this opportunity of saying that the principal part of that book was written in the year ’43, that the whole of it was completed before the termination of the year ’46, and that it was in the hands of the publisher in... more...

The Dingle at Night—The Two Sides of the Question—Roman Females—Filling the Kettle—The Dream—The Tall Figure. I descended to the bottom of the dingle.  It was nearly involved in obscurity.  To dissipate the feeling of melancholy which came over my mind, I resolved to kindle a fire; and having heaped dry sticks upon my hearth, and added a billet or two, I struck a light, and soon produced a... more...

CHAPTER I The Rome Express, the direttissimo, or most direct, was approaching Paris one morning in March, when it became known to the occupants of the sleeping-car that there was something amiss, very much amiss, in the car. The train was travelling the last stage, between Laroche and Paris, a run of a hundred miles without a stop. It had halted at Laroche for early breakfast, and many, if not all the... more...