Classics Books

I It was a country of wide pastures, of moors covered with heath, of rock-born streams and rivulets, of forest and hill and dale, sparsely inhabited, with the sea to the eastward of it, unseen, and the mountains everywhere visible always, and endlessly changing in aspect. Herdsmen and shepherds wandered over it, and along its almost disused roads pedlars and pack mules passed at times but rarely.... more...

CHAPTER I. Methinks I feel this youth's perfections,With an invisible and subtle stealth,To creep in at mine eyes.—Shakespeare. It had come at last, the day of days, for the two great American universities; Harvard and Yale were going to play their annual game of football and the railroad station of Springfield, Mass., momentarily became more and more thronged with eager partisans of both sides... more...

CHAPTER I. Since childhood days he had been haunted by a Wave. It appeared with the very dawn of thought, and was his earliest recollection of any vividness. It was also his first experience of nightmare: a wave of an odd, dun colour, almost tawny, that rose behind him, advanced, curled over in the act of toppling, and then stood still. It threatened, but it did not fall. It paused, hovering in a... more...

CHAPTER I. “He has come to ope the purple testament of war.” —Richard II It was the 7th of August, 1812, when Winnebeg, the confidential Indian messenger of Captain Headley, commanding Fort Dearborn, suddenly made his appearance within the stockade. With a countenance on which was depicted more of the seriousness and concern than usually attach to his race, he requested the officer of the guard,... more...

Sir Walter Scott transmitted from Naples, in February, 1832, an Introduction for CASTLE DANGEROUS; but if he ever wrote one for a second Edition of ROBERT OF PARIS, it has not been discovered among his papers. Some notes, chiefly extracts from the books which he had been observed to consult while dictating this novel, are now appended to its pages; and in addition to what the author had given in the... more...

CHAPTER I. DEPARTURE FROM DETROIT. It was on a dark, rainy evening in the month of September, 1830, that we went on board the steamer "Henry Clay," to take passage for Green Bay. All our friends in Detroit had congratulated us upon our good fortune in being spared the voyage in one of the little schooners which at this time afforded the ordinary means of communication with the few and distant... more...

CHAPTER I THE TRUST The long clatter of an irregular volley of musketry rattled warningly from the naked mountain ridges; over a great grey shoulder of rock the sun sank in a splendid opal glow; from very near at hand came the clatter of tin cups and the sound of a subdued British laugh. And in the room of the Brigadier-General a man lifted his head from his hands and stared upwards with unseeing,... more...

Lieutenant Laskell surfaced his one-man submarine fifty miles off the Florida coast where he had been patrolling in search of enemy subs. Darkness had fallen. He tuned his short wave set to the Miami station just in time to hear the eight o'clock news. The grim announcement that he had expected was quick to come: "In accordance with the provisions of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, Congress today... more...

CHAPTER 1 Beside the rear window of the blacksmith shop Jasper Lanning held his withered arms folded against his chest. With the dispassionate eye and the aching heart of an artist he said to himself that his life work was a failure. That life work was the young fellow who swung the sledge at the forge, and truly it was a strange product for this seventy-year-old veteran with his slant Oriental eyes... more...

TADAIMA I thought I saw the bronze god Asamra (he who may speak but once in a thousand years, and whose friendship I keep by making time stand still for him in the stopping of the clock and its turning back) shake his head in doubt as I put the manuscript into its wrappings and addressed it to the publisher. "Well?" I inquired, testily. "Suppose They do not like it?" sighed the god.... more...