Classics Books

To make it clear how normal everything was when the evening started out, I'll let you in at the time Willy phoned me. I was in my apartment with a lady from down the hall.... I had asked her what she liked and she'd purred, "You." I had asked her with soda or gingerale and she'd said, "Straight," so I'd obliged and poured myself a triple too and sank into the sofa... more...

The third night of the Marco Four's landfall on the moonless Altarian planet was a repetition of the two before it, a nine-hour intermission of drowsy, pastoral peace. Navigator Arthur Farrell—it was his turn to stand watch—was sitting at an open-side port with a magnoscanner ready; but in spite of his vigilance he had not exposed a film when the inevitable pre-dawn rainbow began to shimmer... more...

THE ADVENT OF THE ANGEL. The ladies of the Tenement felt that it was a matter concerning the reputation of the house. Therefore on this particular hot July morning they were gathered in the apartment of Miss Mary Carew and Miss Norma Bonkowski, if one small and dingy room may be so designated, and were putting the matter under discussion. Miss Carew, tall, bony, and more commonly known to the Tenement... more...

CHAPTER I. AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR."Victory! It flies! I am master of the Powers of the Air at last!" They were strange words to be uttered, as they were, by a pale, haggard, half-starved looking young fellow in a dingy, comfortless room on the top floor of a South London tenement-house; and yet there was a triumphant ring in his voice, and a clear, bright flush on his thin cheeks that spoke at... more...

It was a handful of people in the country—a simple-hearted handful. There was no railroad—only a stage which creaked through the gullies and was late. Once it had a hot-box, and the place drifted through space, a vagrant atom. Time swung on a lazy hinge. Children came; young folks married; old ones died; Indian Creek overflowed the bottom-land; crops failed; one by one the stage bore boys and girls... more...

CHAPTER I The Road THOUGH it was six days since Daniel Ordway had come out of prison, he was aware, when he reached the brow of the hill, and stopped to look back over the sunny Virginia road, that he drank in the wind as if it were his first breath of freedom. At his feet the road dropped between two low hills beyond which swept a high, rolling sea of broomsedge; and farther still—where the... more...

CHAPTER I. AN OLD FRIEND Now I, Allan Quatermain, come to the weirdest (with one or two exceptions perhaps) of all the experiences which it has amused me to employ my idle hours in recording here in a strange land, for after all England is strange to me. I grow elderly. I have, as I suppose, passed the period of enterprise and adventure and I should be well satisfied with the lot that Fate has given to... more...

INTRODUCTORY NOTE. "Septimius Felton" was the outgrowth of a project, formed by Hawthorne during his residence in England, of writing a romance, the scene of which should be laid in that country; but this project was afterwards abandoned, giving place to a new conception in which the visionary search for means to secure an earthly immortality was to form the principal interest. The new... more...

INTRODUCTION For almost 30 years North American herpetologists have been making extensive collections of reptiles and amphibians in México. Some parts of the country, because of their accessibility, soon became relatively well known; other regions lying off the beaten path were bypassed or inadequately sampled. Principally in the last decade herpetologists have been entering regions from which no... more...

Hard is the task of the man who at this late day attempts to say anything new about Washington. But perhaps it may be possible to unsay some of the things which have been said, and which, though they were at one time new, have never at any time been strictly true. The character of Washington, emerging splendid from the dust and tumult of those great conflicts in which he played the leading part, has... more...