Classics Books

IF ENGLAND KNEW No sane person can deny that England is in grave danger of invasion by Germany at a date not far distant. This very serious fact I endeavoured to place vividly before the public in my recent forecast, The Invasion of 1910, the publication of which, in Germany and in England, aroused a storm of indignation against me. The Government, it will be remembered, endeavoured to suppress its... more...

CHAPTER I Peter was still poring over his ledger one dark afternoon in December, his bald head glistening like a huge ostrich egg under the flare of the overhead gas jets, when Patrick, the night watchman, catching sight of my face peering through the outer grating, opened the door of the Bank. The sight so late in the day was an unusual one, for in all the years that I have called at the Bank—ten,... more...

Chapter I Cross-RoadsIT was late November and a little snow had fallen. Three boys were on their way down Park Avenue to school—the Regal High. One of the boys, Frank Mulvy, carried his lunch in his pocket. He did not live far away, but his mother was to be out for the day and had put up a lunch for him. As the boys came down the avenue, an old man whom they had never seen before, met them. He asked... more...

IRON BRIDGES, AND THEIR CONSTRUCTION. "ASSEMBLING" BRIDGE UNDER SHED. In a graveyard in Watertown, a village near Boston, Massachusetts, there is a tombstone commemorating the claims of the departed worthy who lies below to the eternal gratitude of posterity. The inscription is dated in the early part of this century (about 1810), but the name of him who was thus immortalized has faded like the... more...

C. Suetonius Tranquillus was the son of a Roman knight who commanded a legion, on the side of Otho, at the battle which decided the fate of the empire in favour of Vitellius. From incidental notices in the following History, we learn that he was born towards the close of the reign of Vespasian, who died in the year 79 of the Christian era. He lived till the time of Hadrian, under whose administration... more...

CHAPTER ONE YESTERDAY AND TO-DAY "Once upon a Time." "Once upon a time,"[1] men and women dwelt in caves and cliffs and fashioned curious implements from the stones of the earth and painted crude pictures upon the walls of their rock dwellings. Archaeologists find such traces in England and along the river valleys of France, among the sands of Egyptian deserts and in India, where armor... more...

OUTSIDE, the bluish sun slanted low across the green dust of the Martian desert, its last rays sparkling on the far mountain tops. One by one, lights flickered on in the city."Mary must be expecting that Earthman," Anne said. She held her glastic blouse tight together over her breasts and leaned a little out of the window. Milly nodded. "The Azmuth landed this morning." The noises of... more...

A slab of shale obtained in 1955 by Mr. Russell R. Camp from a Pennsylvanian lagoon-deposit in Anderson County, Kansas, has yielded in the laboratory a skeleton of the small amphibian Hesperoherpeton garnettense Peabody (1958). This skeleton provides new and surprising information not available from the holotype, No. 9976 K. U., which consisted only of a scapulocoracoid, neural arch, and rib fragment.... more...

How could a man tell the difference if all the reality of Earth turned out to be a cosmic hoax? Suppose it turned out that this was just a stage set for students of history? When the sharp snap of a pistol shot came from the half-finished building, Karnes wasn't anywhere near the sandpile that received the slug. He was fifteen feet away, behind the much more reliable protection of a neat stack of... more...

CHAPTER I.off for greenock. The late—I had almost written the last—Imperial ruler of France was wont to say—indeed, it was his favourite maxim—“Everything comes to him who waits.”  It was not exactly true in his case.  Just as he was to have placed himself at the head of his followers, and make his reappearance in France, and to have effaced the recollections of Sedan, Death, who waits... more...