Action & Adventure Books

THAT night Tom and Huck were ready for their adventure. They hung about the neighborhood of the tavern until after nine, one watching the alley at a distance and the other the tavern door. Nobody entered the alley or left it; nobody resembling the Spaniard entered or left the tavern door. The night promised to be a fair one; so Tom went home with the understanding that if a considerable degree of... more...

I. How Brigadier Gerard Lost His Ear It was the old Brigadier who was talking in the cafe. I have seen a great many cities, my friends. I would not dare to tell you how many I have entered as a conqueror with eight hundred of my little fighting devils clanking and jingling behind me. The cavalry were in front of the Grande Armee, and the Hussars of Conflans were in front of the cavalry, and I was in... more...

CHAPTER I. THE AUTHOR GIVES SOME ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF AND FAMILY: HIS FIRST INDUCEMENTS TO TRAVEL. HE IS SHIPWRECKED, AND SWIMS FOR HIS LIFE; GETS SAFE ASHORE IN THE COUNTRY OF LILLIPUT; IS MADE A PRISONER, AND CARRIED UP THE COUNTRY. My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the third of five sons. He sent me to Emmanuel College in Cambridge at fourteen years old, where I resided three... more...

"TOM!" No answer. "TOM!" No answer. "What's gone with that boy,  I wonder? You TOM!" No answer. The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked THROUGH them for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for... more...

"BULLY" HAYES! Oh, halcyon days of the sixties and seventies, when the Pacific was not, as now, patrolled by men-of-war from lonely Pylstaart, in the Friendlies, to the low-lying far-away Marshalls and the coral lagoons of the north-west; when the Queensland schooners ran full "nigger" cargoes to Bundaberg, Maryborough, and Port Mackay; when the Government agents, drunk nine days out of... more...

CHAPTER I.Description of Fostina's Home—Introduction of Herself and Parents to the Reader—Aunt Aubrey—Sudden Calamity—The Two Brothers and Lewis Mortimer—Introduction of her Uncle, and the Great Change in Fostina's Life.Reader, are you a lover of Nature? And do you behold with pleasure the wonderful works of creation, where the hand of Art has made no claims? Then follow me to the... more...

CHAPTER XXXVI. AS soon as we reckoned everybody was asleep that night we went down the lightning-rod, and shut ourselves up in the lean-to, and got out our pile of fox-fire, and went to work.  We cleared everything out of the way, about four or five foot along the middle of the bottom log.  Tom said we was right behind Jim's bed now, and we'd dig in under it, and when we got through there... more...

CHAPTER ONE Perhaps it was Jack Barry's own fault that he had spent three weeks loafing about Batavia without a job. Fat jobs were to be had, if a fellow persevered and could grin at rebuffs; but when he discovered that shore jobs for sailors were usually secured through the Consulate, and that his own country's Consulate Service was limited, as service, to cocktails and financial reports to... more...

CHAPTER I—START IN LIFE I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull.  He got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom... more...

Chapter One. Darkness had set in. The wind was blowing strong from the southwest, with a fine, wetting, penetrating rain, which even tarpaulins, or the thickest of Flushing coats, would scarcely resist. A heavy sea also was running, such as is often to be met with in the chops of the British Channel during the month of November, at which time of the year, in the latter part of the last century, a fine... more...