Classics Books

CHAPTER I A COLD NIGHT "Oh, how red your nose is!" cried little Mabel Blake, one day, as her brother Hal came running out of the school yard, where he had been playing with some other boys. Mabel was waiting for him to walk home with her as he had promised. "So's your's red, too, Mab!" Harry said. "It's as red—as red as some of the crabs we boiled at our... more...

INTRODUCTION The story that follows this introduction is literally true. There died lately, in a Western State prison, a man of the class known as habitual criminals. He was, at the time of his death, serving out a sentence for burglary. For thirty years he had been under the weight of prison discipline, save for short periods of freedom between the end of one term and the beginning of another. Because... more...

To Amos Jordan, Secretary for Cislunar Navigation, no situation was unsolvable. There were rules for everything, weren't there.... Except maybe this thing ... "What's the matter, anyway?" Amos Jordan snapped at his assistant. "Is everyone in the Senate losing their mind?" "No more than usual," said Clements, the undersecretary. "It's just a matter of... more...

CHAPTER I. "My meaning in't, I protest, was very honest in the behalf of themaid * * * * yet, who would have suspected an ambush where I wastaken?" All's Well that Ends Well, Act iv. Sc. 3. SOME four miles distant from one of our northern manufacturing towns, in the year 18—, was a wide and desolate common; a more dreary spot it is impossible to conceive—the herbage grew up in... more...

INTRODUCTION. The atmospheric conditions and phenomena which constitute “The Weather” are of surpassing interest. Now, we rejoice in the genial air and warm rains of spring, which clothe the earth with verdure; in the alternating heat and showers of summer, which insure the bountiful harvest; in the milder, ripening sunshine of autumn; or the mantle of snow and the invigorating air of a moderate... more...

THE RAY FAMILY.  There are women who cannot grow alone as standard trees;—for whom the support and warmth of some wall, some paling, some post, is absolutely necessary;—who, in their growth, will bend and incline themselves towards some such prop for their life, creeping with their tendrils along the ground till they reach it when the circumstances of life have brought no such prop within their... more...

CHAPTER I Ite, missa est The door opened, and the men of the congregation began to come out of the church at Peribonka. A moment earlier it had seemed quite deserted, this church set by the roadside on the high bank of the Peribonka, whose icy snow-covered surface was like a winding strip of plain. The snow lay deep upon road and fields, for the April sun was powerless to send warmth through the gray... more...

"... Continued fair weather and the unusual circumstances of the execution promise a turn-away crowd of more than 100,000 spectators by Court time. All unreserved tent space has been sold out for several days. Next news at...." Sir Jacques de Carougne, Lord High Executioner for the Seventh Judicial District, spun the dial on the instrument panel of his single-seater rocket, but the vidcasts... more...

HINTS ON THE USEFUL-KNOWLEDGE MOVEMENT.   The advocates of the diffusion of useful knowledge among the great body of the people, found one of their greatest difficulties to lie in an inability on the part of the people themselves to see what benefit they were to derive from the knowledge proposed to be imparted. This knowledge consisted of such a huge mass of facts of all kinds, that few could... more...

NEW YORK, Saturday, October 12, 1878. Bang! click! the desk closes, the key turns, and good-bye for a year to my wards—that goodly cluster over which I have watched with parental solicitude for many a day; their several cribs full of records and labelled Union Iron Mills, Lucy Furnaces, Keystone Bridge Works, Union Forge, Cokevale Works, and last, but not least, that infant Hercules, the Edgar... more...