Classics Books

CHAPTER I It was sunrise on the Colorado desert. As the advance guard of dawn emerged from behind the serrated peaks to the east and paused on their snow-encrusted summits before charging down the slopes into the open desert to rout the lingering shadows of the night, a coyote came out of his den in the tumbled malpais at the foot of the range, pointed his nose skyward and voiced his matutinal salute... more...

CHAPTER I PRELIMINARIES Argumentation is the art of presenting truth so that others will accept it and act in accordance with it. Debate is a special form of argumentation: it is oral argumentation carried on by opposing sides. A consideration of the service which argumentation performs shows that it is one of the noblest and most useful of arts. By argumentation men overthrow error and discover truth.... more...

CHAPTER XVIII. 1841-1842. Mr. Hope's Pamphlet on the Jerusalem Bishopric—His Value for the CanonLaw—Continued Correspondence of Mr. Hope and Mr. Newman on the JerusalemBishopric—Mr. Newman's Idea of a Monastery—Mr. Newman writes fromLittlemore, April 22, 1842—Dr. Pusey consults Mr. Hope on his Letter tothe Archbishop of Canterbury—Dr. Pusey and the Jerusalem Bishopric—Letters of... more...

There was a crooked man, and he went a crooked mile,He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile:He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse,And they all lived together in a little crooked house. Curly locks, curly locks, wilt thou be mine?Thou shalt not wash dishes, nor yet feed the swine;But sit on a cushion, and sew a fine seam,And feed upon strawberries, sugar, and cream. My little... more...

At the end of the ’eighties my father and mother, my brother and sisters and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in a red-brick house with several mantelpieces of wood, copied from marble mantelpieces designed by the brothers Adam, a balcony and a little garden shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there, when the crooked ostentatiously... more...

INTRODUCTION On the banks of a shallow winding stream, traversing the region known as Middle Tennessee, on the last day of December, 1862, and on the first and second days of January, 1863, a great battle was fought,—a battle that marked the turning point of the Civil War. Stone’s River, as the North designated it, or Murfreesboro,—to give it the Southern name,—has hitherto not been estimated... more...

CHAPTER I THE MARCH It was the close of the day. Over the baked veldt of Equatorial Africa a safari marched. The men, in single file, were reduced to the unimportance of moving black dots by the tremendous sweep of the dry country stretching away to a horizon infinitely remote, beyond which lay single mountains, like ships becalmed hull-down at sea. The immensities filled the world— the simple... more...

Chapter One. Madúla’s Cattle. Madúla’s kraal, in the Sikumbutana, was in a state of quite unusual excitement. The kraal, a large one, surrounded by an oval ring-fence of thorn, contained some seventy or eighty huts. Three or four smaller kraals were dotted around within a mile of it, and the whole lay in a wide, open basin sparsely grown with mimosa and low scrub, shut in by round-topped... more...

INTRODUCTION TO DON JUAN Byron was a rapid as well as a voluminous writer. His Tales were thrown off at lightning speed, and even his dramas were thought out and worked through with unhesitating energy and rapid achievement. Nevertheless, the composition of his two great poems was all but coextensive with his poetical life. He began the first canto of Childe Harold in the autumn of 1809, and he did not... more...

AMOS KILBRIGHT: HIS ADSCITITIOUS EXPERIENCES. [This story is told by Mr. Richard Colesworthy, an attorney-at-law, in a large town in one of our Eastern States. The fact that Mr. Colesworthy is a practical man, and but little given, outside of his profession, to speculative theorizing, adds a weight to his statements which they might not otherwise possess.] In the practice of my profession I am in the... more...