Classics Books

CHAPTER I."A SWEET GIRL GRADUATE.""Her eyesWould match the southern skiesWhen southern skies are bluest;Her heartWill always, take its partWhere southern hearts are truest."Such youth,With all its charms, forsooth.Alas! too well I know it!—Will claimA song of love and fameSung by some southern poet." "It's a perfect godsend, this invitation!" cried Olive Peyton, with... more...

CHAPTER I. “I can hear the sullen, savage roar of the breakers, if I do not see them, and my pretty painted bark—expectation—is bearing down helplessly upon them. Perhaps the unwelcome will not come to-day. What then? I presume I should not care; and yet, I am curious to see him,—anxious to know what sort of person will henceforth rule the house, and go in and out here as master. Of course the... more...

AUTHOR'S PREFACE The economic and social order of the modern world exhibits a strange enigma, which only a prosperous thoughtlessness can regard with indifference or, indeed, without a shudder. We have made such splendid advances in art and science that the unlimited forces of nature have been brought into subjection, and only await our command to perform for us all our disagreeable and onerous... more...

TO A FRIEND. I have not asked your consent, my dear General, to the foregoing inscription, because it would have been no inconsiderable disappointment to me had you withheld it; for I have long desired to connect your name with some book of mine, in commemoration of an early friendship that has grown old between two individuals of widely dissimilar pursuits and fortunes. I only wish that the offering... more...

PREFACE. In my first novel, "The Shadow of a Crime," I tried to penetrate into the soul of a brave, unselfish, long-suffering man, and to lay bare the processes by which he raised himself to a great height of self-sacrifice. In this novel the aim has been to penetrate into the soul of a bad man, and to lay bare the processes by which he is tempted to his fall. To find a character that shall be... more...

Chapter I In the month of June, 1919, I received a long letter from Brigadier-General Andrew Lackaday together with a bulky manuscript. The letter, addressed from an obscure hotel in Marseilles, ran as follows:-- MY DEAR FRIEND, On the occasion of our last meeting when I kept you up to an ungodly hour of the morning with the story of my wretched affairs to which you patiently listened without seeming... more...

THE BULL-RUN ROUT A little paper written years ago by a lately deceased brother of mine describing the rout of the battle of Bull Run as he saw it with the eyes of a boy and a boy's love of the marvellous seems to me to possess some value historically for the intimate, unconscious picturing, along with it, of the state of the public mind on the eve of the so-called "great uprising." It... more...

I. IN THE UNSEEN. She had been talking of dying only the evening before, with a friend, and had described her own sensations after a long illness when she had been at the point of death. "I suppose," she said, "that I was as nearly gone as any one ever was to come back again. There was no pain in it, only a sense of sinking down, down—through the bed as if nothing could hold me... more...

INTRODUCTION EDGAR ALLAN POE: HIS LIFE, CHARACTER, AND ART Edgar Allan Poe is in many respects the most fascinating figure in American literature. His life, touched by the extremes of fortune, was on the whole more unhappy than that of any other of our prominent men of letters. His character was strangely complex, and was the subject of misunderstanding during his life and of heated dispute after his... more...

CHAPTER I. Archibald Dundass was a rich Jamaica planter, whose estates were situated in one of the most delightful regions in that garden of the West India isles. His wife, an English lady, of great personal attractions and highly connected, died when Helen, their only child, had just entered her thirteenth year, an age when, perhaps, a mother's counsel and tender guidance is most required. When... more...