Classics Books

Chapter I THE MAN WHO FEARED SLEEP Peter Brooks felt himself for a man given up. He had felt his physical unfitness for some time in the silent, condemning judgment masked under the too sympathetic gaze of his fellow-men; he had felt it in the over-solicitous inquiries after his health made by the staff; and there was his chief, who had fallen into the comfortable week-end habit of telling him he... more...

CHAPTER I THE ARRIVAL Toward the close of a pleasant September afternoon, in one of the years when the big stick of President Roosevelt was cudgeling the shoulders of malefactors of great wealth, the feverish home-bound masses which poured into upper Fifth Avenue with the awakening of the electric night were greeted by the strangest of all spectacles which can astound a metropolitan crowd harassed by... more...

CHAPTER XIX THE ROSE PLAY-HOUSE The play-house was an eight-sided, three-storied, tower-like building of oak and plastered lath, upon a low foundation of yellow brick. Two outside stairways ran around the wall, and the roof was of bright-red English tiles with a blue lead gutter at the eaves. There was a little turret, from the top of which a tall ash stave went up; and on the stave, whenever there was... more...

PREFACE Brave Serbia has not been forgotten in her hour of need by the women of England. For the Women's Imperial Service League, with Mrs. St. Clair Stobart as directress, went out to Serbia under the ægis of the Serbian Relief Fund, after arduous work out in Antwerp and after at Cherbourg. Mrs. Stobart decided that ours should be a Field Hospital owing to typhus and other fever raging in the... more...

THE WIDOW OF DUNSKAITH."Oh, mony a shriek, that waefu' night,Rose frae the stormy main;An' mony a bootless vow was made,An' mony a prayer vain;An' mithers wept, an' widows mournedFor mony a weary day;An' maidens, ance o' blithest mood,Grew sad, and pined away." The northern Sutor of Cromarty is of a bolder character than even the southern one—abrupt, and... more...

CHAPTER I. "THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH" Near eleven o'clock, one evening in the month of May, a man about fifty years of age, well formed, and of noble carriage, stepped from a coupe in the courtyard of a small hotel in the Rue Barbet-de-Jouy. He ascended, with the walk of a master, the steps leading to the entrance, to the hall where several servants awaited him. One of them followed him... more...

I SEA-POWER[1] [Footnote 1: Written in 1899. (_Encyclopoedia_Britannica_.)] Sea-power is a term used to indicate two distinct, though cognate things. The affinity of these two and the indiscriminate manner in which the term has been applied to each have tended to obscure its real significance. The obscurity has been deepened by the frequency with which the term has been confounded with the old phrase,... more...

I SAW a gray-haired man, a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and writing. He seemed to be in a room in a tower, very high, so that through the tall window on his left one perceived only distances, a remote horizon of sea, a headland and that vague haze and glitter in the sunset that many miles away marks a city. All the appointments of this room were orderly and beautiful, and in some subtle... more...

Take my life, and let it be Consecrated, Lord, to Thee. Take my moments and my days; Let them flow in ceaseless praise. Take my hands, and let them move At the impulse of Thy love. Take my feet, and let them be Swift and ‘beautiful’ for Thee. Take my voice, and let me sing Always, only, for my King. Take my lips and let them be Filled with messages from Thee. Take my silver and my gold; Not a mite... more...

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY The United Empire Loyalists have suffered a strange fate at the hands of historians. It is not too much to say that for nearly a century their history was written by their enemies. English writers, for obvious reasons, took little pleasure in dwelling on the American Revolution, and most of the early accounts were therefore American in their origin. Any one who takes the trouble... more...