Classics Books

CHAPTER I. THE BIRTH OF AN IDEA. Sunk far back in the huge leather cushions of his morris chair, old Isaac Flint was thinking, thinking hard. Between narrowed lids, his hard, gray eyes were blinking at the morning sunlight that poured into his private office, high up in the great building he had reared on Wall Street. From his thin lips now and then issued a coil of smoke from the costly cigar he was... more...

CHAPTER I. Departure—The Atlantic—Demoralization of the “Boarders”—Betting—The Auctioneer—An Inquisitive Yankee. On board the “Celtic,” Christmas Week, 1889. In the order of things the Teutonic was to have sailed to-day, but the date is the 25th of December, and few people elect to eat their Christmas dinner on the ocean if they can avoid it; so there are only twenty-five saloon... more...

Chapter I DIP INTO THIS NOVEL ANYWHERE.... It deals with a god in whom nobody believed, and of his adventures the day after eternity. For instance, try Chapter XVI. One Sunday afternoon I was driving through a sparsely settled region on the southwest slope of the Catskills. It was growing late and I was anxious to get back to New York, but I had lost my way. In an attempt to cut across to the Hudson... more...

CHAPTER I THE TRAVELLER The war had stopped. The King of England was in Paris, and the President of the United States was hourly expected. Humbler guests poured each night from the termini into the overflowing city, and sought anxiously for some bed, lounge-chair, or pillowed corner, in which to rest until the morning. Stretched upon the table in a branch of the Y.W.C.A. lay a young woman from England... more...

A BOY OF THE WILDERNESS The forest was still. A calm lay upon its vast extent, from the green-capped hills in the east to the noble river which, fed by the streams so quietly meandering through the pleasantly wooded country, found its way to the sea where the greatest city of the New World was destined to stand. The clear, bell-like note of a waking bird startled the morning hush. A doe and her fawn... 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. 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."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...

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. DEMONOLOGY—THE DEVIL, A MOST UNACCOUNTABLE PERSONAGE—WHO IS HE?—HISPREDILECTION FOR OLD WOMEN—TRADITIONS CONCERNING EVIL SPIRITS, &C. Children and old women have been accustomed to hear so many frightful things of the cloven-footed potentate, and have formed such diabolical ideas of his satanic majesty, exhibiting him in so many... more...