Classics Books

CHAPTER I.—Of the Beginnings of Cities in general, and in particular of that of Rome. No one who reads how the city of Rome had its beginning, who were its founders, and what its ordinances and laws, will marvel that so much excellence was maintained in it through many ages, or that it grew afterwards to be so great an Empire. And, first, as touching its origin, I say, that all cities have been... more...

He lit a cigarette, the last one they had, and asked his wife "Want to share it?" "No. That's all right." Diane sat at the viewport of the battered old Gormann '87, a small figure of a woman hunched over and watching the parade of asteroids like tiny slow-moving incandescent flashes. Ralph looked at her and said nothing. He remembered what it was like when she had worked by... more...

CHAPTER I. OF THE OBJECT-MATTER AND PARTITION OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY. 1. Moral Philosophy is the science of human acts in their bearing on human happiness and human duty. 2. Those acts alone are properly called human, which a man is master of to do or not to do. A human act, then, is an act voluntary and free. A man is what his human acts make him. 3. A voluntary act is an act that proceeds from the will... more...

CHAPTER I A DANGEROUS ERRAND A city of hills with a fringe of houses crowning the lower heights; half-mountains rising bare in the background and becoming real mountains as they stretched away in the distance to right and left; a confused mass of buildings coming to the water's edge on the flat; a forest of masts, ships swinging in the stream, and the streaked, yellow, gray-green water of the bay... more...

CHAPTER I OUR HERO t was a murky October day that the hero of our tale, Mr. Sponge, or Soapey Sponge, as his good-natured friends call him, was seen mizzling along Oxford Street, wending his way to the West. Not that there was anything unusual in Sponge being seen in Oxford Street, for when in town his daily perambulations consist of a circuit, commencing from the Bantam Hotel in Bond Street into... more...

CHAPTER I THREE GIRLS It was a very cold blustering day in early January, and even brilliant thronged Broadway felt the influence of winter's harshest frown. There had been a heavy fall of snow which, though in the main cleared from the sidewalks, lay in the streets comparatively unsullied and unpacked. Fitful gusts of the passing gale caught it up and whirled it in every direction. From roof,... more...

CHAPTER I UP THE TRAIL Just why my father moved, at the close of the civil war, from Georgia to Texas, is to this good hour a mystery to me. While we did not exactly belong to the poor whites, we classed with them in poverty, being renters; but I am inclined to think my parents were intellectually superior to that common type of the South. Both were foreign born, my mother being Scotch and my father a... more...

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I If it hadn't been for a purple moon that came peering up above the dark jungle just at nightfall, it would have been impossible to tell that Little Shikara was at his watch. He was really just the colour of the shadows—a rather pleasant brown—he was very little indeed, and besides, he was standing very, very still. If he was trembling at all, from anticipation and excitement, it was no more... more...

RETURN OF THE ARMY—MARRIAGE—ORDERED TO THE PACIFIC COAST—CROSSING THE ISTHMUS—ARRIVAL AT SAN FRANCISCO. My experience in the Mexican war was of great advantage to me afterwards. Besides the many practical lessons it taught, the war brought nearly all the officers of the regular army together so as to make them personally acquainted. It also brought them in contact with volunteers, many of whom... more...