General Books

CHAPTER I LATE FOR DINNER Concerning Bridget there was from the outset considerable difference of opinion. Mark Driver, for instance, always showed a tendency to something more than tolerance, and even Carrissima Faversham, in spite of a manifestly unfavourable bias, strove to hold the balance even. It was her brother Lawrence who took the most adverse view; insisting that Miss Rosser was neither more... more...

CHAPTER I. The professor crossed one long, lean leg over the other, and punched down the ashes in his pipe-bowl with the square tip of his middle finger. The thermometer on the shady veranda marked eighty-seven degrees of heat, and nature wooed the soul to languor and revery; but nothing could abate the energy of this bony sage. "They talk about their Atlantises,—their submerged continents!"... more...

ONSLOW SQUARE This is a romantic tale. So romantic is it that I shall be forced to pry into the coy recesses of the mind in order to exhibit a connected, reasonable affair, not only of a man and his wife prosperously seated in the mean of things, nel mezzo del cammin in space as well as time—for the Macartneys belonged to the middle class, and were well on to the middle of life themselves—, but of... more...

CHAPTER I. A NEW DISCOVERY DEEPENS A MYSTERY. When Mrs. Montague entered her room, an hour after Mona went up stairs, there was a deep frown upon her brow. She found Mona arrayed in a pretty white wrapper, and sitting before the glowing grate reading a new book, while she waited for her. "What are you sitting up for, and arrayed in that style?" she ungraciously demanded. "I thought you... more...

Three o'clock on a warm June afternoon. The great heat has caused something like a purple haze to cloud over the deep blue of the sapphire sky. There is not one breath of wind to stir the leaves or cool the flushed faces of those whose duties call them out on this sultry June day. Away in the deep green heart of the broad land broad streams are flowing; in the very heart of the green woods there... more...

CHAPTER I THE PAST INTERVENES James Challoner, known to his friends and intimates as Jimmy, brushed an imaginary speck of dust from the shoulder of his dinner jacket, and momentarily stopped his cheery whistling to stare at himself in the glass with critical eyes. Jimmy was feeling very pleased with himself in particular and the world in general. He was young, and quite passably good-looking, he had... more...

HIS BIRTH On an evening in 1866 (exactly eight hundred years after the Battle of Hastings) Mr. Henry Knight, a draper's manager, aged forty, dark, clean-shaven, short, but not stout, sat in his sitting-room on the second-floor over the shop which he managed in Oxford Street, London. He was proud of that sitting-room, which represented the achievement of an ideal, and he had a right to be proud of... more...

CHAPTER I Judging from my own experience it is my opinion that many strange and wonderful events have happened during the past in which man took part, that have never been recorded. Many reasons could be given for this, but the main causes perhaps, are that the participants have lacked the intelligence, education or literary ability to properly describe them. In these respects I must admit my own... more...

If the mission of the little school-house in Holly Cove was to impress upon the youthful mind a comprehension and appreciation of the eternal verities of nature, its site could hardly have been better chosen. All along the eastern horizon deployed the endless files of the Great Smoky Mountains—blue and sunlit, with now and again the apparition of an unfamiliar peak, hovering like a straggler in the... more...

OUT OF THE MIST It appears to me, looking back over a past experience, that certain days in one's life stand out prominently as landmarks, when we arrive at some finger-post pointing out the road that we should follow. We come out of some deep, rutty lane, where the hedgerows obscure the prospect, and where the footsteps of some unknown passenger have left tracks in the moist red clay. The... more...