Classics Books

CHAPTER I 'We go.' The lascar meditatively pressed his face, brown and begrimed with coal dust, streaked here and there with sweat, against the rope which formed the rough bulwark. His dark eyes were fixed on the shore near by, between which and the ship's side the water quivered quicker and quicker in little ripples, each ripple carrying an iridescent film of grey ooze. Without joy or... more...

Chapter I A bright spring day was fading into evening. High overhead in the clear heavens small rosy clouds seemed hardly to move across the sky but to be sinking into its depths of blue. In a handsome house in one of the outlying streets of the government town of O—— (it was in the year 1842) two women were sitting at an open window; one was about fifty, the other an old lady of seventy. The name... more...

I MR. BEETLE MAN The man sat in a niche of the mountain, busily hating the Caribbean Sea. It was quite a contract that he had undertaken, for there was a large expanse of Caribbean Sea in sight to hate; very blue, and still, and indifferent to human emotions. However, the young man was a good steadfast hater, and he came there every day to sit in the shade of the overhanging boulder, where there was a... more...

CHAPTER I.on heresy and orthodoxy. The original meaning of the word heresy is choice.  “It was long used,” writes Dr. Waddington, “by the philosophers to designate the preference and selection of some speculative opinion, and in process of time was applied without any sense of reproach to every sect.”  The most fruitful source of speculative opinion is, and has ever been, religion; from the... more...

VIGI Wisest of dogs was Vigi, a tawny-coated hound That King Olaf, warring over green hills of Ireland, found; His merry Norse were driving away a mighty herd For feasts upon the dragonships, when an isleman dared a word: "From all those stolen hundreds, well might ye spare my score." "Ay, take them," quoth the gamesome king, "but not a heifer more. Choose out thine own, nor hinder... more...

CHAPTER I. FAIR ACRES. It was a fair morning of early summer, when the low beams of the eastern sun, threw flickering shadows across the lawn, which lay before Fair Acres Manor, nestling under the shelter of the Mendip Hills, somewhere between Wells and Cheddar. Truth compels me to say, that the lawn was covered with daisies, and that their bright eyes looked fearlessly up into the blue sky; for mowing... more...

By their fruits ye shall know them. Last Sunday I said something of the moral condition of Boston; to-day I ask your attention to a Sermon of the Spiritual Condition of Boston. I use the word spiritual in its narrower sense, and speak of the condition of this town in respect to piety. A little while since, in a sermon of piety, I tried to show that love of God lay at the foundation of all manly... more...

My childhood passed so quietly and smoothly that it would be superfluous to mention it at all, except for the fact that such omission would leave a gap in these reminiscences. For this reason, and, also, in order that the American reader may get some idea of a good country home in Sweden, I shall relate very briefly some incidents from that time. My parents belonged to one of those old families of... more...

"WE ARE ALL LOW PEOPLE THERE." A TALE OF THE ASSIZES. IN TWO CHAPTERS. CHAPTER THE FIRST. Some time ago, business of an important character carried me to the beautiful and populous city of ——. I remember to have visited it when I was a child, in the company of a doating mother, who breathed her last there; and the place, associated with that circumstance, had ever afterwards been the... more...

THE INDICTMENT. ‘Mynyddshire to Wit.—The jurors for our lady the Queen upon their oath present that Eleanor Margaret Owen, upon the first day of June in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and eighty-nine, feloniously, wilfully, and of her malice aforethought did kill and murder one Ann Elizabeth Lewis against the peace of our lady the Queen, her crown and dignity.’ CHAPTER II. ‘A brief for... more...