Action & Adventure Books

CHAPTER I. OLD FRIENDS IN MELBOURNE. A stout gentleman of middle age and two boys were sitting in the public room of a modest inn in Melbourne. The gentleman was known to the public as Professor Hemmenway, who announced himself on the programme of his entertainment as "The Magician of Madagascar," though he freely confessed to his confidential friends that he had never seen the island of that... 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...

CHAPTER I. THE CAMPFIRE IN THE GULCH—AN ALARM—THE SOLITARY FIGURE—UNDER COVER—A WHITE MAN—"HAIL, FRIEND!"—A CORDIAL MEETING—A SECOND STRANGE CHARACTER.   "Well, Desmond, we've taken a desperate chance, and so far appear to be losers." The circumstances under which the words above quoted were spoken were weird and strange. A man and a mere youth were sitting by a... more...

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCING MR. PETER RUFF There was nothing about the supper party on that particular Sunday evening in November at Daisy Villa, Green Street, Streatham, which seemed to indicate in any way that one of the most interesting careers connected with the world history of crime was to owe its very existence to the disaster which befell that little gathering. The villa was the residence and... more...

Pirate Life. I served as assistant pilot on board the merchant vessel Dolphin, bound from Jamaica for London, which had already doubled the southern point of the Island of Cuba, favored by the wind, when one afternoon, I suddenly observed a very suspicious-looking schooner bearing down upon us from the coast. I climbed the mast, with my spy glass, and became convinced that it was a pirate. I directed... more...

INTRODUCTION A Voyage to Cacklogallinia appeared in London, in 1727, from the pen of a pseudonymous "Captain Samuel Brunt." Posterity has continued to preserve the anonymity of the author, perhaps more jealously than he would have wished. Whatever his real parentage, he must for the present be referred only to the literary family of which his progenitor "Captain Lemuel Gulliver" is the... more...

Chapter 1 O ye who tread the Narrow WayBy Tophet-flare to Judgment Day,Be gentle when 'the heathen' prayTo Buddha at Kamakura! Buddha at Kamakura. He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that 'fire-breathing dragon', hold... more...