Classics Books

CHAPTER ONE When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effect. It was going to be a short episode—a sentence in brackets, so to speak—in the flowing tale of his life:... 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...

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...

CHAPTER FIRST. Isab.—Alas! what poor ability's in meTo do him good?Lucio.—Assay the power you have.Measure for Measure. When Mrs. Saddletree entered the apartment in which her guests had shrouded their misery, she found the window darkened. The feebleness which followed his long swoon had rendered it necessary to lay the old man in bed. The curtains were drawn around him, and Jeanie sate... more...

CHAPTER I. THE YOUNG MAN WHO CAME TO STAY There is a fertile stretch of flat lands in Indiana where unagrarian Eastern travellers, glancing from car-windows, shudder and return their eyes to interior upholstery, preferring even the swaying caparisons of a Pullman to the monotony without. The landscape lies interminably level: bleak in winter, a desolate plain of mud and snow; hot and dusty in summer,... more...

A LONDON LIFE I It was raining, apparently, but she didn't mind—she would put on stout shoes and walk over to Plash. She was restless and so fidgety that it was a pain; there were strange voices that frightened her—they threw out the ugliest intimations—in the empty rooms at home. She would see old Mrs. Berrington, whom she liked because she was so simple, and old Lady Davenant, who was... more...

Jackson kept his promise to write to Westover, but he was better than his word to his mother, and wrote to her every week that winter. "I seem just to live from letter to letter. It's ridic'lous," she said to Cynthia once when the girl brought the mail in from the barn, where the men folks kept it till they had put away their horses after driving over from Lovewell with it. The trains... more...

THE STRENGTHOF GIDEON THE STRENGTH OF GIDEON Old Mam' Henry, and her word may be taken, said that it was "De powerfulles' sehmont she ever had hyeahd in all huh bo'n days." That was saying a good deal, for the old woman had lived many years on the Stone place and had heard many sermons from preachers, white and black. She was a judge, too. It really must have been a powerful... more...

The character of this female suggests a train of thought which will form as natural an Introduction to her story, as most of the Prefaces to Gay's Fables, or the tales of Prior; besides that, the general soundness of the moral may excuse any want of present applicability. We will not look for a living resemblance of Mrs. Hutchinson, though the search might not be altogether fruitless. But there... more...

THE POWER OF MEDITATION Spiritual meditation is the pathway to Divinity. It is the mystic ladder which reaches from earth to heaven, from error to Truth, from pain to peace. Every saint has climbed it; every sinner must sooner or later come to it, and every weary pilgrim that turns his back upon self and the world, and sets his face resolutely toward the Father's Home, must plant his feet upon its... more...