General Books

INTRODUCTION A long list of works Gertrude Atherton has to her credit as a writer. She is indisputably a woman of genius. Not that her genius is distinctively feminine, though she is in matters historical a passionate partisan. Most of the critics who approve her work agree that in the main she views life with somewhat of the masculine spirit of liberality. She is as much the realist as one can be who... more...

Dear Public, When first I set about recording the scenes which occupy these pages, I had no intention of continuing them, except in such stray and scattered fragments as the columns of a Magazine (FOOTNOTE: The Dublin University Magazine.) permit of; and when at length I discovered that some interest had attached not only to the adventures, but to their narrator, I would gladly have retired with my... more...

CHAPTER I Everybody knew that Miss Audrey Craven was the original of "Laura," the heroine of Langley Wyndham's masterpiece. She first attracted the attention of that student of human nature at Oxford, at a dinner given by her guardian, the Dean of St. Benedict's, ostensibly in honour of the new Master of Lazarus, in reality for his ward's entertainment and instruction in the... more...

CHAPTER I.  EILEAN AROS. It was a beautiful morning in the late July when I set forth on foot for the last time for Aros.  A boat had put me ashore the night before at Grisapol; I had such breakfast as the little inn afforded, and, leaving all my baggage till I had an occasion to come round for it by sea, struck right across the promontory with a cheerful heart. I was far from being a native of these... more...

The performance in itself was crude and commonplace, but the demonstration in regard to it was unusual. Although this scene had been enacted both afternoon and evening for the past six weeks, the audience at the Vaudeville was showing its appreciation by an intent silence. The curtain had risen upon a street scene in the metropolis at night. Snow was falling, dimming the gas jets at the corner and... more...

CHAPTER I. PLACE: TIME: CIRCUMSTANCE. Burleigh-Singleton is a pleasant little watering-place on the southern coast of England, entirely suitable for those who have small incomes and good consciences. The latter, to residents especially, are at least as indispensable as the former: seeing that, however just the reputation of their growing little town for superior cheapness in matters of meat and drink,... more...

During fourteen years Hepworth Closs had been a wanderer over the earth. When he was carried out from the court-room after Mrs. Yates' confession of a crime which he had shrinkingly believed committed by another, he had fainted from the suddenness with which a terrible load had been lifted from his soul. In that old woman's guilt he had no share. It swept the blackness from the marriage he... more...

PREFACE Though to explain incurs a risk, the author accepts the hazard of a word in advance. While the novelist's license has been so used that there is need neither to resent an innuendo nor to prove an "alibi," yet, substantially, the incidents narrated occurred within the time stated, and nearly all the actors are still upon life's "boards." The conscientious tourist in... more...

THE CAPTAIN OF THE "POLE-STAR." [Being an extract from the singular journal of JOHNM'ALISTER RAY, student of medicine.] September 11th.—Lat. 81 degrees 40' N.; long. 2 degrees E. Still lying-to amid enormous ice fields. The one which stretches away to the north of us, and to which our ice-anchor is attached, cannot be smaller than an English county. To the right and left unbroken... more...

CHAPTER I SPRING BANK A large, old-fashioned, weird-looking wooden building, with strangely shaped bay windows and stranger gables projecting here and there from the slanting roof, where the green moss clung in patches to the moldy shingles, or formed a groundwork for the nests the swallows built year after year beneath the decaying eaves. Long, winding piazzas, turning sharp, sudden angles, and low,... more...