Classics Books

The morning paper lay unread before Philon Miller on the breakfast table and even the prospects of steaming coffee, ham, eggs and orange juice could not make him forget his last night's visitors. On the closed-circuit Industrial TV screen glowed the words, Food Preparation Center breakfast menu for July 24, 2052. No. 1, orange juice, coffee, ham and eggs. No. 2, waffle, coffee.... Automatically he... more...

CHAPTER I THE WILL OF JOHN MARSHALL GLENARM Pickering’s letter bringing news of my grandfather’s death found me at Naples early in October. John Marshall Glenarm had died in June. He had left a will which gave me his property conditionally, Pickering wrote, and it was necessary for me to return immediately to qualify as legatee. It was the merest luck that the letter came to my hands at all, for it... more...

_INTRODUCTORY NOTE Of the life of Aeschylus, the first of the three great masters of Greek tragedy, only a very meager outline has come down to us. He was born at Eleusis, near Athens, B. C. 525, the son of Euphorion. Before he was twenty-five he began to compete for the tragic prize, but did not win a victory for twelve years. He spent two periods of years in Sicily, where he died in 456, killed, it... more...

THE WORK OF GEORGE GISSING AN INTRODUCTORY SURVEY 'Les gens tout Гѓ  fait heureux, forts et bien portants, sont-ils préparés comme il faut pour comprendre, pénétrer, exprimer la vie, notre vie si tourmentée et si courte?' MAUPASSANT. In England during the sixties and seventies of last century the world of books was dominated by one Gargantuan type of fiction. The terms book and... more...

CHAPTER ONE Harriet Blair was seventeen when she went with her father and mother and her brother Austen to New Orleans, to the marriage of an older brother, Alexander, the father’s business representative at that place. It was characteristic of the Blairs that they declined the hospitality of the bride’s family, and from the hotel attended, punctiliously and formally, the occasions for which they... more...

THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY I THE UNKNOWN GIRL In a Boston and Albany parlor-car, east bound through the Berkshires, sat a young man respectfully, but intently studying a young woman. Now and then, from the newspapers heaped in mannish confusion about his chair, he selected another sheet. Always, he took advantage of this opportunity to face the chair across the aisle and to sweep a glance over a piquant... more...

I ENTER JANE GRAY   It must have been the name that made me take that little house on the hilltop. It was mostly view, but the title—supplemented by the very low rent—suggested the first line of a beautiful poem.   Nobody knows who began the custom or when, but for unknown years a night-light had been kept burning in a battered old bronze lantern swung just over my front door. Through the early... more...

CHAPTER I THE LAIRD OF GLENCARDINE "Why, what's the matter, child? Tell me." "Nothing, dad—really nothing." "But you are breathing hard; your hand trembles; your pulse beats quickly. There's something amiss—I'm sure there is. Now, what is it? Come, no secrets." The girl, quickly snatching away her hand, answered with a forced laugh, "How absurd you really... more...

CHAPTER I IN WHICH JASPER BEGG MAKES KNOWN THE PURPOSE OF HIS VOYAGE TO THE PACIFIC OCEAN, AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT THAT HE COMMISSIONED THE STEAM-SHIP SOUTHERN CROSS THROUGH PHILIPS, WESTBURY, AND CO. Many gentlemen have asked me to write the story of Ken's Island, and in so far as my ability goes, that I will now do. A plain seaman by profession, one who has had no more education than a Kentish... more...

That's what we always called them, where I come from, huddlers. Damnedest thing to see from any distance, the way they huddle. They had one place, encrusting the shore line for miles on one of the land bodies they called the Eastern Seaboard. A coagulation in this crust contained eight million of the creatures, eight million. They called it New York, and it was bigger than most of the others, but... more...