Classics Books

CHAPTER I TROUBLE'S TUMBLE "Say, Jan, this isn't any fun!" "What do you want to play then, Ted?" Janet Martin looked at her brother, who was dressed in one of his father's coats and hats while across his nose was a pair of spectacles much too large for him. Janet, wearing one of her mother's skirts, was sitting in a chair holding a doll. "Well, I'm tired of... more...

RUSSIAN FICTION SINCE CHEKHOV The English reading public knows next to nothing of contemporary Russian Literature. In the great age of the Russian Realistic Novel, which begins with Turgeniev and finishes with Chekhov, the English reader is tolerably at home. But what came after the death of Chekhov is still unknown or, what is worse, misrepresented. Second and third- rate writers, like Merezhkovsky,... more...

CHAPTER I BEFORE USING Astride the ridgepole of his father's stable Sube Cane sat with the easy grace of a range-rider, gently rising in his stirrups in unison with the pounding of imaginary unshod hoofs on the soft turf of a dreamland prairie, as he conversed in low tones with a dark-haired maiden who rode in fancy beside him. And, as he rode, he gently rubbed his upper lip with an index finger.... more...

Chapter I. Preliminary Ideas--criterion of the Oratorical Art. Let us note an incontestable fact. The science of the Art of Oratory has not yet been taught. Hitherto genius alone, and not science, has made great orators. Horace, Quintilian and Cicero among the ancients, and numerous modern writers have treated of oratory as an art. We admire their writings, but this is not science; here we seek in vain... more...

CHAPTER I THE CHIEF CONSPIRATOR SECURES A PAL In a rear room of a quaint little house uptown, a great bronzed-faced man sat at a piano, a dead pipe between his teeth, and absently played the most difficult of Beethoven's sonatas. Though he played it divinely, the three men who sat smoking and talking in a near-by corner paid not the least attention to him. The player, it seemed, did not expect... more...

THE VILLAGE IN THE MOUNTAINS. M. ----, a merchant, at the head of one of the first commercial houses in Paris,[1] had occasion to visit the manufactories established in the mountainous tracts of the Departments of the Loire and the Puy de Dôme. The road that conducted him back to Lyons traversed a country rich in natural productions, and glowing with all the charms of an advanced and promising spring.... more...

CHAPTER I MY LEARNED BROTHER   "Conflagratam An° 1677. Fabricatam An° 1698. Richardo Powell Armiger Thesaurar." The words, set in four panels, which formed a frieze beneath the pediment of a fine brick portico, summarised the history of one of the tall houses at the upper end of King's Bench Walk and as I, somewhat absently, read over the inscription, my attention was divided between... more...

CHAPTER I At seven o'clock on a fine evening in April the gas had just been lighted in a room on the first floor of a house in York Road, Lambeth. A man, recently washed and brushed, stood on the hearthrug before a pier glass, arranging a white necktie, part of his evening dress. He was about thirty, well grown, and fully developed muscularly. There was no cloud of vice or trouble upon him: he was... more...

THE EXTINCT. If it is a scene of painful interest, as surely it is to a well-constituted mind, to stand by and watch the death-struggles of one of the nobler brutes,—a dog or an elephant, for example,—to mark the failing strength, the convulsive throes, the appealing looks, the sobs and sighs, the rattling breath, the glazing eye, the stiffening limbs—how much more exciting is the interest with... more...

THE SHEPHERD AND THE BIBLEDan'l Burdon, the treasure-seeker—The shepherd's feeling for the Bible—Effect of the pastoral life—The shepherd's story of Isaac's boyhood—The village on the WylyeOne of the shepherd's early memories was of Dan'l Burdon, a labourer on the farm where Isaac Bawcombe was head-shepherd. He retained a vivid recollection of this person, who had... more...