Classics Books

The six tales now translated for the English reader were written by Turgenev at various dates between 1847 and 1881. Their chronological order is:— Pyetushkov, 1847 The Brigadier, 1867 A Strange Story, 1869 Punin and Baburin, 1874 Old Portraits, 1881 A Desperate Character, 1881 Pyetushkov is the work of a young man of twenty-nine, and its lively, unstrained realism is so bold, intimate, and delicate... more...

PROLOGUE The Affair of the Man Who Vanished Mr. Maverick Narkom, Superintendent at Scotland Yard, flung aside the paper he was reading and wheeled round in his revolving desk-chair, all alert on the instant, like a terrier that scents a rat. He knew well what the coming of the footsteps toward his private office portended; his messenger was returning at last. Good! Now he would get at the facts of the... more...

CHAPTER I Jill looked at the East! At her feet sat huddled groups of women, just bundles of black robes, some with discs about their necks, some with chains or golden crescents upon the forehead, all wearing the burko [yashmak or face veil] covering the entire face with the exception of the eyes, and held in position between the eyebrows by the quaint tube-shaped selva, fastening it to the tarhah, the... more...

CHAPTER I Inside the bank that June morning the clerks and accountants on their high stools were bent over their ponderous ledgers, although it was several minutes before the opening hour. The gray-stone building was in Atlanta's most central part on a narrow street paved with asphalt which sloped down from one of the main thoroughfares to the section occupied by the old passenger depot, the... more...

HOW THE HORSES OF THE SUN RAN AWAY Greek Phaeton was the child of the Sun-god, Apollo. "Mother Clymene," said the boy one day, "I am going to visit my father's palace." "It is well," she answered. "The land where the Sun rises is not far from this. Go and ask a gift from him." That night Phaeton bound his sandals more tightly, and, wrapping a thicker silken robe... more...

CHAPTER I Late in June the vast northwestern desert of wheat began to take on a tinge of gold, lending an austere beauty to that endless, rolling, smooth world of treeless hills, where miles of fallow ground and miles of waving grain sloped up to the far-separated homes of the heroic men who had conquered over sage and sand. These simple homes of farmers seemed lost on an immensity of soft gray and... more...

Chapter I     "Little Next Door—her years are few—    Loves me, more than her elders do;    Says, my wrinkles become me so;    Marvels much at the tales I know.    Says, we shall marry when she is grown——" The little happy song stopped short. John Wesley Pringle, at the mesa's last headland, drew rein to adjust his geography. This was new country to him. Close... more...

Gentlemen:— There is no need, I apprehend, that I should undertake to impress you with a sense either of the need or of the importance of our assemblage here to-day. The fact of your coming here is, of itself, the clearest evidence of your warm acquiescence in the summons to this meeting, and of your cordial interest in the objects which it purposes to consider. Nothing has surprised and gratified me... more...

CHAPTER I JIM LESLIE WRITES A LETTER In a fifth-story sitting room of a New York boarding house four youths were holding a discussion. The sitting room was large and square, and in the wildest disorder, which was, however, sublimated into a certain system by an illuminated device to the effect that one should "Have a Place for Everything, and then there'll be one Place you won't have to... more...

Anti-Jacobin, May, 1804. PYE'S DICTIONARY OF ANCIENT GEOGRAPHY. The author's avowed object, is to arrange the ancient and modern names, in a clear and methodical manner, so as to give a ready reference to each; and in addition to this arrangement of ancient appellations both of people and places, with the modern names, he has given a concise chronological history of the principal places; by... more...