Classics Books

CHAPTER I OF A GREAT WHITE BIRD UPON A LAKE Spring was stealing lightly over the Connecticut hills, a shy, tender thing of delicate green winging its way with witch-rod over the wooded ridges and the sylvan paths of Diane Westfall's farm. And with the spring had come a great hammering by the sheepfold and the stables where a smiling horde of metropolitan workmen, sheltered by night in the rambling... more...

On a clear spring evening in 2189, Charles Edward Button came home half an hour late for his supper, tossed his hat to the robot butler who came out from behind the DoItAll, and announced that he had just bought a planet. His wife, Betty, was looking small and long-suffering on a plastic reproduction of a Victorian love-seat, and her cousin Aurelia, a large, handsome woman, was standing behind her... more...

THE PERFECT GUEST There are certain qualities that we all claim. We are probably wrong, of course, but we deceive ourselves into believing that, short as we may fall in other ways, we really can do this or that superlatively well. "I'll say this for myself," we remark, with an approving glance in the mirror, "at any rate I'm a good listener"; or, "Whatever I may not be,... more...

CHAPTER I. PLAYING TRUANT A breezy morning after a night of rain. Fleecy clouds, some in massive folds and fantastic shape, some in small half-transparent wisps like sunlit ghosts, were driven rapidly across the blue. Hurrying shadows flecked the swelling bosom of the downs, and where the grass was long it rippled like a green sea, making rustling music. Overhead the larks fluttering upward,... more...

A SELECTION FROM THE DISCOURSES OF EPICTETUS. OF THE THINGS WHICH ARE IN OUR POWER AND NOT IN OUR POWER.—Of all the faculties (except that which I shall soon mention), you will find not one which is capable of contemplating itself, and, consequently, not capable either of approving or disapproving. How far does the grammatic art possess the contemplating power? As far as forming a judgment about what... more...

AN HISTORICAL ROCKY-MOUNTAIN OUTPOST. GOING TO THE JUDGE'S. The day might have graced the month of June, so balmy was the air, so warmly shone the sun from a cloudless sky. But the snow-covered mountain-range whose base we were skirting, the leafless cottonwoods fringing the Fontaine qui Bouille and the sombre plains that stretched away to the eastern horizon told a different story. It was on one... more...

SEND ROUND THE HAT Now this is the creed from the Book of the Bush—Should be simple and plain to a dunce:"If a man's in a hole you must pass round the hatWere he jail-bird or gentleman once." "Is it any harm to wake yer?" It was about nine o'clock in the morning, and, though it was Sunday morning, it was no harm to wake me; but the shearer had mistaken me for a deaf... more...

Gaige (1926) described Allophryne ruthveni as a new genus and species of diminutive bufonid from British Guiana. Noble (1931) considered A. ruthveni to be a toothless relative of Centrolenella and placed the genus in the Hylidae. Gallardo (1965) suggested that Allophryne is a leptodactylid of uncertain affinities. Other references to the monotypic genus have consisted only of a listing of the name or... more...

CHAPTER I It was a season of unequalled prosperity in Devil's Ford. The half a dozen cabins scattered along the banks of the North Fork, as if by some overflow of that capricious river, had become augmented during a week of fierce excitement by twenty or thirty others, that were huddled together on the narrow gorge of Devil's Spur, or cast up on its steep sides. So sudden and violent had been... more...

I The revival in Paradise Valley, conducted by the Reverend Silas Crafts, of South Tredegar, was in the middle of its second week, and the field—to use Brother Crafts' own word—was white to the harvest. Little Zoar, the square, weather-tinged wooden church at the head of the valley, built upon land donated to the denomination in times long past by an impenitent but generous Major Dabney, stood... more...