Classics Books

INTRODUCTION Among the decisive events of the Revolutionary struggle, Burgoyne's campaign deservedly holds the foremost place, as well for what it led to, as for what it was in inception and execution—at once the most daring, most quixotic, and most disastrous effort of the whole war. Burgoyne was himself, in some respects, so remarkable a man that any picture of his exploits must needs be more... more...

CHAPTER I The Puce Dressing-gown The peculiar angle of the earth's axis to the plane of the ecliptic--that angle which is chiefly responsible for our geography and therefore for our history--had caused the phenomenon known in London as summer. The whizzing globe happened to have turned its most civilized face away from the sun, thus producing night in Selwood Terrace, South Kensington. In No. 91... more...

THE GREEK SLAVE AND THE LITTLE ROMAN BOY Ariston, the Greek slave, was busily painting. He stood in a little room with three smooth walls. The fourth side was open upon a court. A little fountain splashed there. Above stretched the brilliant sky of Italy. The August sun shone hotly down. It cut sharp shadows of the columns on the cement floor. This was the master's room. The artist was painting... more...

THE GREEK SLAVE AND THE LITTLE ROMAN BOY Ariston, the Greek slave, was busily painting. He stood in a little room with three smooth walls. The fourth side was open upon a court. A little fountain splashed there. Above stretched the brilliant sky of Italy. The August sun shone hotly down. It cut sharp shadows of the columns on the cement floor. This was the master's room. The artist was painting... more...

TWO WINNERS OF CROWNS The July sun was blazing over the country of Greece. Dust from the dry plain hung in the air. But what cared the happy travelers for dust or heat? They were on their way to Olympia to see the games. Every road teemed with a chattering crowd of men and boys afoot and on horses. They wound down from the high mountains to the north. They came along the valley from the east and out... more...

MYCENAE HOW A LOST CITY WAS FOUND Thirty years ago a little group of people stood on a hill in Greece. The hilltop was covered with soft soil. The summer sun had dried the grass and flowers, but little bushes grew thick over the ground. In this way the hill was like an ordinary hill, but all around the edge of it ran the broken ring of a great wall. In some places it stood thirty feet above the earth.... more...

CHAPTER I EARLY LIFE, AND FIRST WRITINGS It will soon be a hundred and twenty years since Burke first took his seat, in the House of Commons, and it is eighty-five years since his voice ceased to be heard there. Since his death, as during his life, opinion as to the place to which he is entitled among the eminent men of his country has touched every extreme. Tories have extolled him as the saviour of... more...

CHAPTER I THE FIRST PROBLEM Lone Moose snaked its way through levels of woodland and open stretches of meadow, looping sinuously as a sluggish python—a python that rested its mouth upon the shore of Lake Athabasca while its tail was lost in a great area of spruce forest and poplar groves, of reedy sloughs and hushed lakes far northward. The waterways of the North are its highways. There are no... more...

CHAPTER I. A SURPRISE IN THE SCREEN-ROOM. The city of Scranton lies in the centre of the Lackawanna coal-field, in the State of Pennsylvania. Year by year the suburbs of the city creep up the sides of the surrounding hills, like the waters of a rising lake. Standing at any point on this shore line of human habitations, you can look out across the wide landscape and count a score of coal-breakers within... more...

CHAPTER I It was a quiet night in the Shovel. At the bar, which ranged along one side of the large chinked-log room, leaned half a dozen men, two of whom were discussing the relative merits of spruce-tea and lime-juice as remedies for scurvy. They argued with an air of depression and with intervals of morose silence. The other men scarcely heeded them. In a row, against the opposite wall, were the... more...