Classics Books

At sunset they were in sight of the Ryzga mountain. Strangely it towered among the cliffs and snow-slopes of the surrounding ranges: an immense and repellently geometric cone, black, its sides blood-tinted by the dying sun. Neena shivered, even though the surrounding cold could not reach her. The ice-wind blew from the glacier, but Var's love was round her as a warming cloak, a cloak that glowed... more...

PARIS AT THE BEGINNING OF 1792. Paris in 1792 is no longer what it was in 1789. In 1789, the old French society was still brilliant. The past endured beside the present. Neither names nor escutcheons, neither liveries nor places at court, had been suppressed. The aristocracy and the Revolution lived face to face. In 1792, the scene has changed. The Paris of the nobility is no longer in Paris, but at... more...

CHAPTER I JACK IN THE SADDLE "Your father is a little late to-night, isn't he Jack?" "Yes, Mrs. Watson, he should have been here a half-hour ago, and he would, too, if he had ridden Sunger instead of his own horse." "You think a lot of that pony of yours, don't you, Jack?" and a motherly-looking woman came to the doorway of a small cottage and peered up the mountain... more...

SALLY CREIGHTON. The frost outside was bitter, and the prairie, which rolled back from Lander's in long undulations to the far horizon, gleamed white beneath the moon, but there was warmth and brightness in Stukely's wooden barn. It stood at one end of the little, desolate settlement, where the trail that came up from the railroad thirty miles away forked off into two wavy ribands that melted... more...

CHAPTER I. THE TRAMP. "Will you give me a glass of water, please?" A ragged, bearded tramp stood before the door of a cottage near the outskirts of a country village, and propounded this question to a pretty girl who stood in the door. "In a moment." The girl disappeared, soon returning with a pitcher. She went to the pump near, and soon had the pitcher running over with sparkling... more...

FAIR MAID AND FOUL FOOL The girl stood on the summit of the hill looking down the white highway that stretched to Syracuse. The morning sun shone hotly; sky and sea and earth seemed to kindle and quicken in the ecstasy of heat, setting free spirits of air and earth and water, towards whom the girl’s spirit stirred in sympathy. All about her beauty flamed luxuriant. At her feet the secrets of the... more...

TO HIS LOVING FRIEND THE AUTHOR, UPON HIS TRAGEDY "THE REBELLION."To praise thee, friend, and show the reason why,Issues from honest love, not flattery.My will is not to flatter, nor for spiteTo praise or dispraise, but to do thee rightProud daring rebels in their impious wayOf Machiavellian darkness this thy playExactly shows; speaks thee truth's satirist,Rebellion's foe, time's... more...

The Tales of the Crusaders was determined upon as the title of the following series of the Novels, rather by the advice of the few friends whom, death has now rendered still fewer, than by the author's own taste. Not but that he saw plainly enough the interest which might be excited by the very name of the Crusaders, but he was conscious at the same time that that interest was of a character which... more...

CHAPTER I. THE OLD HOUSE BY THE MILL. 'Mid the New England hills, and beneath the shadow of their dim old woods, is a running brook whose deep waters were not always as merry and frolicsome as now; for years before our story opens, pent up and impeded in their course, they dashed angrily against their prison walls, and turned the creaking wheel of an old sawmill with a sullen, rebellious roar. The... more...

CHAPTER I. AN ENCOUNTER. Juarez was sleepy, very sleepy. He had been traveling on a railroad train for several days, and while ordinarily he could adapt himself to circumstances, traveling by car instead of having a soothing influence as it does with some, seemed to keep him awake. He was thoroughly tired out, and was standing, just now, when our story opens, on dark and lonesome dock in San Francisco.... more...