General Books

A RELIC FROM AFRICA The Maid of the North was ready for sea. Only the touch of the engineer was wanting to send her, once again, on a homeward voyage to the St. Lawrence. Meanwhile, in solemn undertones, she was breathing forth her superabundant steam. Behind the wharf lay the city of Boston. A score of passengers, together with friends who had come aboard to see them off, were scattered about the... 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Chapter I Maria Edgham, who was a very young girl, sat in the church vestry beside a window during the weekly prayer-meeting. As was the custom, a young man had charge of the meeting, and he stood, with a sort of embarrassed dignity, on the little platform behind the desk. He was reading a selection from the Bible. Maria heard him drone out in a scarcely audible voice: “Whom the Lord loveth, He... more...

THE RIGHT OF WAY. MR. EDWARD BOLTON had purchased himself a farm, and taken possession thereof. Once, while examining the premises, before deciding to buy, he had observed a light wagon moving along on the extreme south edge of the tract of land included in the farm, but it had occasioned no remark. It was late in the afternoon when he arrived with his family at their new home. On the morning that... more...

One afternoon in July, 1869, I was seated at my desk in Locock's law-office in the town of Kiota, Kansas. I had landed in New York from Liverpool nearly a year before, and had drifted westwards seeking in vain for some steady employment. Lawyer Locock, however, had promised to let me study law with him, and to give me a few dollars a month besides, for my services as a clerk. I was fairly... 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...