Classics Books

CHAPTER I. A BOZRAH BORNIN'. A tallow candle shed its sickly and flickering light in the front room of an ancient farm house, as Jack Sheppard announced his arrival on earth at four o'clock on a Friday morning. He arrived in a snowstorm, and it was a very select gathering of some of old Bozrah's prominent citizens who greeted his entry into the world. There was old Doctor Pettingill,... more...

"I am getting very tired," said a hard brain-worker to me once. "Life is beginning to drag and lose its zest." This is an experience that can scarcely happen to one who has fallen in love with Nature, or become deeply interested in any of her almost infinite manifestations. Mr. and Mrs. Clifford of my story are not wholly the creations of fancy. The aged man sketched in the following... more...

CHAPTER I. When John Marsh, the steel man, died, there was considerable stir in the inner circles of New York society. And no wonder. The wealthy ironmaster's unexpected demise certainly created a most awkward situation. It meant nothing less than the social rehabilitation of a certain individual who, up to this time, had been openly snubbed, not to say deliberately "cut" by everybody in... more...

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CHAPTER I. In those days, Santa Fé, New Mexico, was an undergrown, decrepit, out-at-elbows ancient hidalgo of a town, with not a scintillation of prosperity or grandeur about it, except the name of capital. It was two hundred and seventy years old; and it had less than five thousand inhabitants. It was the metropolis of a vast extent of country, not destitute of natural wealth; and it consisted of a... more...

Dear Kate: Two years! Only two years, what do you think of it! Why, when I heard the judge say two years, I nearly fell off the bench. You were caught with the goods, and he had your record with its two stretches right before him, yet he only gave you two years. You told me yourself you thought you would get at least five. We tried to dope it out up to the room, and kind of figured that he had it in... more...

CHAPTER I. The public may possibly wonder why it is that they have never heard in the papers of the fate of the passengers of the Korosko. In these days of universal press agencies, responsive to the slightest stimulus, it may well seem incredible that an international incident of such importance should remain so long unchronicled. Suffice it that there were very valid reasons, both of a personal and... more...

THE SNAKE-TREE THEY managed to make a good meal of the food supplies they had brought along, and as a dessert Washington made some peach short-cake from the slices of the giant fruit they had found, the day before. Just as they finished supper it got very dark, but, in about an hour, the moon-beams, as the travelers called them, came up, and illuminated the lake with a weird light. As the machinery of... more...

CHAPTER I At Cairo, Illinois, the Pullman-car conductor asked Peter Siner to take his suitcase and traveling-bag and pass forward into the Jim Crow car. The request came as a sort of surprise to the negro. During Peter Siner's four years in Harvard the segregation of black folk on Southern railroads had become blurred and reminiscent in his mind; now it was fetched back into the sharp distinction... more...

THE TREASURE-TRAIN "I am not by nature a spy, Professor Kennedy, but—well, sometimes one is forced into something like that." Maude Euston, who had sought out Craig in his laboratory, was a striking girl, not merely because she was pretty or because her gown was modish. Perhaps it was her sincerity and artlessness that made her attractive. She was the daughter of Barry Euston, president of... more...