Classics Books

Chap. I. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. The Cucumber, Cucumis sativa, is supposed to be a native of the East Indies; but like many other of our culinary plants, the real stations which it naturally has occupied, are involved in obscurity: in habit it is a trailing herb, with thick fleshy stems, broadly palmate leaves, and yellow axillary monæcious flowers. In the natural arrangement of the vegetable kingdom,... more...

CHAPTER I. "THE BLIND-EYED CHILDREN." "You is goin' off, Dotty Dimpwil." "Yes, dear, and you must kiss me." "No, not now; you isn't gone yet. You's goin' nex' day after this day." Miss Dimple and Horace exchanged glances, for they had an important secret between them. "Dotty, does you want to hear me crow like Bantie? 'Cause," added... 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...

INTRODUCTION This little volume really needs no introduction; the two sketches of which it is made explain and, I hope, justify themselves. But there is one phase of the President's many-sided character upon which I should like to lay especial emphasis, namely, his natural history bent and knowledge. Amid all his absorbing interests and masterful activities in other fields, his interest and his... more...

FLYING MACHINES   Early Attempts at Flight—The Dirigible—Professor Langley's  Experiment—The Wright Brothers—Count Zeppelin—Recent Aeroplane  Records. It is hard to determine when men first essayed the attempt to fly. In myth, legend and tradition we find allusions to aerial flight and from the very dawn of authentic history, philosophers, poets, and writers have made allusion to... more...

Chapter I. In a large and handsomely-furnished room of a somewhat old-fashioned house, situated in a rural district in the south of Scotland, was assembled, one day in the early summer of 185-, a small group in deep mourning. Mr. Hogarth, of Cross Hall, had been taken suddenly ill a few days previously, and had never recovered consciousness so far as to be able to speak, though he had apparently known... more...

CHAPTER I. Just when Meyerhofer's estate was to be sold by auction, his third son Paul was born. That was a hard time indeed. Frau Elsbeth, with her haggard face and melancholy smile, lay in her big four-post bed, with the cradle of the new-born child near her, and listened to every noise that reached her in her sad sickroom from the yard and the house. At each suspicious sound she started up, and... more...

THE CREATION OF EVE. "And the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helpmeet for him. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept, and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my... more...

INTRODUCTION "The Prairie" was the third in order of Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. Its first appearance was in the year 1827. The idea of the story had suggested itself to him, we are told, before he had finished its immediate forerunner, "The Last of the Mohicans." He chose entirely new scenes for it, "resolved to cross the Mississippi and wander over the desolate... more...

Foreword       Anyone who examinesthe Zen arts is immediately struck by how modern they seem. Many of the most famous stone gardens are abstract expressionism pure and simple, created out of found objects. The ceramics of the sixteenth-century Zen artists could be interchanged with the rugged pots of our own contemporary crafts movement and few people would notice a difference. Ancient Zen... more...