Classics Books

THE PEDLER OF DUST STICKS. One day I went to visit a friend, a lady, who came from Hamburg, in Germany. I was much pleased with a portrait which was hanging up in her room, and I was particularly struck by the ornamental drawings with which the picture was surrounded. They consisted of whip handles, canes, piano keys, mouth-pieces for wind instruments, all sorts of umbrellas, and many more things, of... more...

CHAPTER I THE OPEN RIVER The winter had broken early and the Scotch River was running ice-free and full from bank to bank. There was still snow in the woods, and with good sleighing and open rivers every day was golden to the lumbermen who had stuff to get down to the big water. A day gained now might save weeks at a chute farther down, where the rafts would crowd one another and strive for right of... more...

THE STORY OF CALIFORNIA 1542—On September 28, 1542, Captain Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese navigator in the service of Spain, on a voyage of exploration along the coast northward from Mexico casts anchor of his two small ships, the San Salvador and the Victoria, in San Diego Bay. He christens it the Puerta de San Miguel (Port of Saint Michael). Thence his ships explore north clear to the line... more...

NAN "Hello, Nan!" "Heyo, Ruthie!" "Where are you going?" "Over to Reid's lot." "Take me?" "No, Ruthie, can't." The little child's lip began to tremble. "I think you're real mean, Nan Cutler," she complained. Nan shook her head. "Can't help it if you do," she returned, stoutly, and took a step on. "Nannie,"... more...

CHAPTER I. SINGING SAL. On a certain golden afternoon in August, when the sea was as still and radiant as the vaulted blue overhead, and when the earth was lying so hushed and silent that you would have thought it was listening for the chirp of the small birds among the gorse, a young girl of about seventeen or so was walking over the downs that undulate, wave on wave, from Newhaven all along the coast... more...

CHAPTER I PAUL KEGWORTHY lived with his mother, Mrs. Button, his stepfather, Mr. Button, and six little Buttons, his half brothers and sisters. His was not an ideal home; it consisted in a bedroom, a kitchen and a scullery in a grimy little house in a grimy street made up of rows of exactly similar grimy little houses, and forming one of a hundred similar streets in a northern manufacturing town. Mr.... more...

CHAPTER ONE. OATMEAL AND THE SHORTER CATECHISM. The first and most-serious-but-one ordeal in the life of Robert Chalmers Fordyce—so Robert Chalmers himself informed me years afterwards—was the examination for the Bursary which he gained at Edinburgh University. A bursary is what an English undergraduate would call a "Schol." (Imagine a Scottish student talking about a "Burse"!)... more...

CHAPTER I Light, entering the vast room—a room so high that its carved ceiling refused itself to exact scrutiny—travelled, with the wistful, cold curiosity of the dawn, over a fantastic storehouse of Time. Light, unaccompanied by the prejudice of human eyes, made strange revelation of incongruities, as though illuminating the dispassionate march of history. For in this dining hall—one of the... more...

CHAPTER I. he autumn wind blew in great gusts over the rocky island of Guernsey, and in the country parishes rushed up hill and down dale, leaving not a lane undisturbed by its vagaries. It rattled the leafless trees which grew at the back of Colomberie Farm, whose deep brown-thatched roof rested against the lichened red tiles of the barn adjoining. Surrounded on all sides by green fields outside its... more...

CHAPTER I "As well give up the Bible at once, as our belief in apparitions."—Wesley. The house cried out to me for help. In the after-knowledge I now possess of what was to happen there, that impression is not more clearly definite than it was at my first sight of the place. Let me at once set down that this is not the story of a haunted house. It is, or was, a beleaguered house; strangely... more...