Classics Books

Daisy Hanbury poked her parasol between the bars of the cage, with the amiable intention of scratching the tiger's back. The tiger could not be expected to know this all by himself, and so he savagely bit the end of it off, with diabolical snarlings. Daisy turned to her cousin with a glow of sympathetic pleasure. "What a darling!" she said. "He didn't understand, you see, and was... more...

CHAPTER I. Just when Meyerhofer's estate was to be sold by auction, his third son Paul was born. That was a hard time indeed. Frau Elsbeth, with her haggard face and melancholy smile, lay in her big four-post bed, with the cradle of the new-born child near her, and listened to every noise that reached her in her sad sickroom from the yard and the house. At each suspicious sound she started up, and... more...

CHAPTER I. SNOW had been falling for more than three hours, the large flakes dropping silently through the still air until the earth was covered with an even carpet many inches in depth. It was past midnight. The air, which had been so still, was growing restless and beginning to whirl the snow into eddies and drive it about in an angry kind of way, whistling around sharp corners and rattling every... more...

CHAPTER1 AN ASSIGNMENT FOR PENNY Penny Parker, leaning indolently against the edge of the kitchen table, watched Mrs. Weems stem strawberries into a bright green bowl. “Tempting bait for Dad’s jaded appetite,” she remarked, helping herself to the largest berry in the dish. “If he can’t eat them, I can.” “I do wish you’d leave those berries alone,” the housekeeper protested in an... more...

DANTE. [Jan. 1850.] The Divina Commedia is one of the landmarks of history. More than a magnificent poem, more than the beginning of a language and the opening of a national literature, more than the inspirer of art, and the glory of a great people, it is one of those rare and solemn monuments of the mind's power, which measure and test what it can reach to, which rise up ineffaceably and for ever... more...

CHAPTER I "Her Excellency,—will she have the politeness," said Daphne slowly, reading from a tiny Italian-English phrase-book, "the politeness to"—She stopped helpless. Old Giacomo gazed at her with questioning eyes. The girl turned the pages swiftly and chose another phrase. "I go," she announced, "I go to make a walk." Light flashed into Giacomo's face.... more...

CHAPTER ITHE AWAKENING Dimly, like the daybreak glimmer of a sky long wrapped in fogs, a sign of consciousness began to dawn in the face of the tranced girl. Once more the breath of life began to stir in that full bosom, to which again a vital warmth had on this day of days crept slowly back. And as she lay there, prone upon the dusty floor, her beautiful face buried and shielded in the hollow of her... more...

I The Story of the Little Red Sleigh It was in 1835, about mid-winter, when Brier Dale was a narrow clearing, and the horizon well up in the sky and to anywhere a day's journey. Down by the shore of the pond, there, Allen built his house. To-day, under thickets of tansy, one may see the rotting logs, and there are hollyhocks and catnip in the old garden. He was from Middlebury, they say, and came... more...

Like a flash of light the gleaming sword swept down. A fraction of a second later a portion of it no longer gleamed: it was crimson! And Queen Dionaea's head bounced down the stairway into her garden of live oaks. A few seconds of thought remained to it before it would be very dead; but her thought was confused by shock—her eyes rolled uncontrollably while she tried to remember some cantrap or... more...

HARRIET NEWELL, THE PROTO-MARTYR. Several centuries ago, the idea of driving out of Jerusalem its infidel inhabitants was suggested to a mad ecclesiastic. A shorn and dehumanized monk of Picardy, who had performed many a journey to that fallen city, who had been mocked and derided there as a follower of the Nazarene, whose heart burned beneath the wrongs and indignities which had been so freely heaped... more...