Classics Books

CHAPTER I. The huge London church was crowded in every part, and men had been standing in the aisles from the first moment that the service began. The preacher who had attracted so huge a crowd at two-thirty on a weekday afternoon, was one of the very youngest of the "coming men" of the English church. Tall, thin, with a magnificent head crowned by a mane of hair that was fast becoming... more...

ENCOUNTER Soames Forsyte emerged from the Knightsbridge Hotel, where he was staying, in the afternoon of the 12th of May, 1920, with the intention of visiting a collection of pictures in a Gallery off Cork Street, and looking into the Future. He walked. Since the War he never took a cab if he could help it. Their drivers were, in his view, an uncivil lot, though, now that the War was over and supply... more...

CHAPTER I. "SECURITY" On December 1, 1851, Charras[1] shrugged his shoulder and unloaded his pistols. In truth, the belief in the possibility of a coup d'etat had become humiliating. The supposition of such illegal violence on the part of M. Louis Bonaparte vanished upon serious consideration. The great question of the day was manifestly the Devincq election; it was clear that the... more...

THE ENGLISH FLAPPERFrom Nature's anvil hot she hails,The forge still glowing on her cheek.Untamed as yet, Life still prevailsWithin her breast and fain would speak.But all the elfs upon the plain,And in the arbour where she lolls,Repeat the impudent refrain;Too young for babes, too old for dolls.Her fingers deft have guessed the knackOf making each advantage tell:Her hat, her hair still down her... more...

Marina, at seventeen, was the most admired beauty in Granada. She was an orphan, and heiress to an immense fortune, under the guardianship of an old and avaricious uncle, whose name was Alonzo, and who passed his days in counting ducats, and his nights in silencing serenades, nocturnally addressed to Marina. His design was to marry her, for the sake of her great fortune, to his own son, Henriquez, who... more...

CHAPTER ONE A MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR It was half-past eleven on the night of Wednesday, April 14th, when the well-known red limousine of Mr. Maverick Narkom, superintendent of Scotland Yard, came abruptly to the head of Mulberry Lane, which, as you may possibly know, is a narrow road skirting one of the loneliest and wildest portions of Wimbledon Common. Lennard, the chauffeur, put on the brake with such... more...

Preface Irish Fairy Lore has well been called by Mr. Alfred Nutt, one of the leading authorities on the subject, “As fair and bounteous a harvest of myth and romance as ever flourished among any race,” and Dr. Joyce, the well-known Irish scholar and historian, states: “that it is very probable that the belief in the existence of fairies came in with the earliest colonists that entered Ireland,... more...

Ronar was reformed, if that was the right word, but he could see that they didn't trust him. Uneasiness spoke in their awkward hurried motions when they came near him; fear looked out of their eyes. He had to reassure himself that all this would pass. In time they'd learn to regard him as one of themselves and cease to recall what he had once been. For the time being, however, they still... more...

A TOUCH OF SUN I The five-o'clock whistle droned through the heat. Its deep, consequential chest-note belonged by right to the oldest and best paying member of the Asgard group, a famous mining property of northern California. The Asgard Company owned a square league of prehistoric titles on the western slope of the foot-hills,—land enough for the preservation of a natural park within its own... more...

In the spring of 1950, a field party from the University of Kansas Museum of Natural History including J. R. Alcorn, W. J. Schaldach, Jr., George Newton, and the author collected mammals in the Mexican state of Coahuila. A few days were spent in the Sierra del Carmen. One morning when examining sets for pocket gophers in these mountains, Alcorn found a mole caught in one of the traps. Subsequent... more...