Classics Books

To Mr. Ray Gilbert Late Student, Aged Twenty-three Were you an older man, my dear Ray, your letter would be consigned to the flames unanswered, and our friendship would become constrained and formal, if it did not end utterly. But knowing you to be so many years my junior, and so slightly acquainted with yourself or womankind, I am going to be the friend you need, instead of the misfortune you invite.... more...

CHAPTER I ALL ABOUT GADABOUT   It was dark and still and four o'clock on a summer morning. The few cottages clustering about a landing upon a Virginia river were, for the most part, sleeping soundly, though here and there a flickering light told of some awakening home. Down close by the landing was one little house wide awake. Its windows were aglow; lights moved about; and busy figures passed... more...

PREFACE There is no campaign in the history of the world which has left such a deep impression upon the heart of the people than that of Napoleon in Russia, Anno 1812. Of the soldiers of other wars who had not come home it was reported where they had ended on the field of honor. Of the great majority of the 600 thousand who had crossed the Niemen in the month of June Anno 1812, there was recorded in... more...

  "A shout as of waters—a long-uttered cry:   Hark! hark! how it leaps from the earth to the sky!   From the sky to the earth, from the earth to the sea   It is grandly reechoed, We are free, we are free!" Every thing, the next morning, seemed as quiet and peaceful in the village, as if nothing unusual had occurred there. The commotion of the preceding night appeared to have wholly... more...

THE LADIES’ KNITTING AND NETTING BOOK. SECOND SERIES. Gentlemen’s Knitted Gloves. Four needles No. 15, and fine German lambs’-wool. Cast on 88 stitches, 28 on each of 2 needles, and 32 on the 3rd, knit round, knitting and ribbing 4 stitches alternately; when you have done about one inch, continue with plain knitting until your glove is long enough to begin increasing for the thumb, which is done... more...

PREFACE MOST of these stories were written on the veldt; at odd times, in out- of-the-way prospecting camps, in the wilds of the Kalahari Desert, or of that equally little-known borderland between Klein Namaqualand, and Gordonia, Cape Colony, and what was at that time known as German South- West Africa. Four of them appeared a few years back in The State an illustrated magazine now unhappily defunct;... more...

CHAPTER I. NOBLESSE. They were seated in the drawing-room of an ancient château in Brittany,—the Countess Dowager de Gramont and Count Tristan, her only son,—a mansion lacking none of the ponderous quaintness that usually characterizes ancestral dwellings in that locality. The edifice could still boast of imposing grandeur, especially if classed among "fine ruins." Within and without were... more...

There is an hour or so before the train comes puffing round the curve of the Gulf from Cordelio, and you are gone down into the garden for a while because the mosquitoes become tiresome later, and the great shadows of the cypresses are vanishing as the sun sinks behind the purple islands beyond the headlands. You will stay there for a while among the roses and jasmine, and then you will come in and... more...

CHAPTER I THE ANTECEDENTS OF THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR Two men were largely responsible, each in his own way, for the third French Republic, Napoleon III and Bismarck. The one, endeavoring partly at his wife's instigation to renew the prestige of a weakening Empire, and the other, furthering the ambitions of the Prussian Kingdom, set in motion the forces which culminated in the Fourth of September.... more...

PROLOGUE     Thursday 8:40 a.m.   G-load is now eight point five. Pilot must acknowledge for power-up sequence to continue. The cockpit computer was speaking in a simulated female voice, Russian with the Moscow accent heard on the evening TV newscast Vremya. The Soviet technicians all called her Petra, after that program's famous co-anchor. Yuri Andreevich Androv didn't need to be told the... more...