Classics Books

CHAPTER I. THE APPARITION. "Be patient a few: minutes longer! There's a man beckoning to go with us," said the boatman to his passengers, two women and one man. The man was gray-haired, of slender form, rubicund face, and blue eyes of a kindly, but absent-minded and weary expression; a heavy moustache, wholly covering the upper lip, seemed out of keeping with this inoffensive face. He wore... more...

It was one of those exquisite days that come in every winter, in which it seems no longer the dead body, but the lovely ghost of summer. Such a day bears to its sister of the happier time something of the relation the marble statue bears to the living form; the sense it awakes of beauty is more abstract, more ethereal; it lifts the soul into a higher region than will summer day of lordliest splendour.... more...

THE FROST SPIRIT He comes,—he comes,—the Frost Spirit comesYou may trace his footsteps nowOn the naked woods and the blasted fields and thebrown hill's withered brow.He has smitten the leaves of the gray old treeswhere their pleasant green came forth,And the winds, which follow wherever he goes,have shaken them down to earth. He comes,—he comes,—the Frost Spirit comes!from the frozen... more...

EVACUATION OF RICHMOND, 1865. On Saturday, the 1st day of April, 1865, orders reached us at camp headquarters of the Seventh South Carolina Cavalry, Gary's Brigade, to send forward all the dismounted men of the regiment to report to Lt. Col. Barham, Twenty-fourth Regiment Virginia Cavalry, in command of dismounted men of the brigade, for duty on the lines. Began to think that a move was intended... more...

Madam, You have graciously conveyed to me the intelligence that during the weary weeks spent far from his home—in alternate hope and fear, in suffering and mortal trial—a Prince whose memory all men must reverence, the Emperor Frederick, found pleasure in the reading of my stories: that "they interested and fascinated him." While the world was watching daily at the bedside of your... more...

CHAPTER I."A child of our grandmother Eve, a female; or, for thy more sweet understanding, a woman."—Love's Labors Lost.The gates are thrown wide open, and the carriage rolls smoothly down the long dark avenue, beneath the waving branches of the tall elms and the copper beeches, through which the dying sun is flinging its parting rays. The horses, sniffing the air of home, fling up their... more...

CHAPTER I I The long street rising and falling and rising again until its farthest crest high in the east seemed to brush the fading stars, was deserted even by the private watchmen that guarded the homes of the apprehensive in the Western Addition. Alexina darted across and into the shadows of the avenue that led up to her old-fashioned home, a relic of San Francisco's "early days,"... more...

CHAPTER I. The Activities of Nuremberg.—The Dürer Family.—Early Years of Albert.—His Studies with Wohlgemuth.—The Wander-Jahre. The free imperial city of Nuremberg, in the heart of Franconia, was one of the chief centres of the active life of the Middle Ages, and shared with Augsburg the great trans-continental traffic between Venice and the Levant and Northern Europe. Its municipal liberties... more...

CHAPTER I. THE UNFINISHED WILL Toward the middle of October, about the time of the beechnut harvest, M. Eustache Destourbet, justice of the Peace of Auberive, accompanied by his clerk, Etienne Seurrot, left his home at Abbatiale, in order to repair to the Chateau of Vivey, where he was to take part in removing the seals on some property whose owner had deceased. At that period, 1857, the canton of... more...

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY The twentieth century is the age of Woman; some day, it may be that it will be looked back upon as the golden age, the dawn, some say, of feminine civilisation. We cannot estimate as yet; and no man can tell what forces these new conditions may not release in the soul of woman. The modern change is that the will of woman is asserting itself. Women are looking for a satisfactory... more...