Classics Books

PREFACE.SUNDAY ought to be the most cheerful, sunniest, happiest and best day of the week in every home. In most homes it is the dullest and most dreary day of the week to the children, and the most taxing and the most wearying to the parents, especially to the mother. It not only ought to be, but it can be made, not only the brightest and happiest but also the most influential in the... more...

CHAPTER I TWO LETTERS The Leveretts were at their breakfast in the large sunny room in Derby Street. It had an outlook on the garden, and beyond the garden was a lane, well used and to be a street itself in the future. Then, at quite a distance, a strip of woods on a rise of ground, that still further enhanced the prospect. The sun slanted in at the windows on one side, there was nothing to shut it... more...

I   Ravenel Plantation occupies a singular rise of wooded land in North Carolina, between Way-Home River, Loon Mountain, and the Silver Fork. The road which leads from Charlotte toward the south branches by the Haunted Hollow, the right fork going to Carlisle and the left following the rushing waters of the Way-Home River to the very gate-posts of Ravenel Plantation, through which the noisy water... more...

MEMOIR OF SIR HENRY YULE. Henry Yule was the youngest son of Major William Yule, by his first wife, Elizabeth Paterson, and was born at Inveresk, in Midlothian, on 1st May, 1820. He was named after an aunt who, like Miss Ferrier's immortal heroine, owned a man's name. On his father's side he came of a hardy agricultural stock,[1] improved by a graft from that highly-cultured tree, Rose... more...

WARWICK AND COVENTRY. OBLIQUE GABLES IN WARWICK.The history of England is written in living characters in the provincial towns of the kingdom; and it is this which gives such interest to places which have been surpassed commercially by great manufacturing centres and overshadowed socially by the attractions of London. The local nobility once held state little less than royal in houses whose beautiful... more...

I. VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. Here is an image by which you may call up and remember the natural form and appearance of Ireland: Think of the sea gradually rising around her coasts, until the waters, deepened everywhere by a hundred fathoms, close in upon the land. Of all Ireland there will now remain visible above the waves only two great armies of islands, facing each other obliquely across a channel of... more...

I DRIFTING NORTH It was a wet, bad year on the Old Western Trail. From Red River north and all along was herd after herd waterbound by high water in the rivers. Our outfit lay over nearly a week on the South Canadian, but we were not alone, for there were five other herds waiting for the river to go down. This river had tumbled over her banks for several days, and the driftwood that was coming down... more...

T is most certain that all Nations, even the most barbarous, have in all Ages made use of Medicines, to ease their Pains, to regain or preserve Health, the greatest among earthly Felicities; in the Absence whereof, we cannot relish any of those numerous Enjoyments, which the bountiful Creator hath plentifully bestow’d on us; so that the most sublime ancient Philosophers who excluded all other... more...

I MAKING GOOD WITH MOTHER When men began to build cities vertically instead of horizontally there passed from our highways a picturesque figure, and from our language an expressive figure of speech. That oily-tongued, persuasive, soft-stepping stranger in the rusty Prince Albert and the black string tie who had been wont to haunt our back steps and front offices with his carefully wrapped bundle,... more...

RACINE When Ingres painted his vast 'Apotheosis of Homer,' he represented, grouped round the central throne, all the great poets of the ancient and modern worlds, with a single exception—Shakespeare. After some persuasion, he relented so far as to introduce into his picture a part of that offensive personage; and English visitors at the Louvre can now see, to their disgust or their... more...