General Books

I. The Light in the Window A rickety carriage was slowly ascending the hill, and from the place of honour on the back seat, the single passenger surveyed the country with interest and admiration. The driver of that ancient chariot was an awkward young fellow, possibly twenty-five years of age, with sharp knees, large, red hands, high cheek-bones, and abundant hair of a shade verging upon orange. He was... more...

CHAPTER I. HOW DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND, AND HOW THE SPARKS FLEW. The windows are all wide open, and through them the warm, lazy summer wind is stealing languidly. The perfume of the seringas from the shrubbery beyond, mingled with all the lesser but more delicate delights of the garden beneath, comes with the wind, and fills the drawing-room of The Place with a vague, almost drowsy sense of sweetness. Mrs.... more...

1. FILMER In truth the mastery of flying was the work of thousands of men—this man a suggestion and that an experiment, until at last only one vigorous intellectual effort was needed to finish the work. But the inexorable injustice of the popular mind has decided that of all these thousands, one man, and that a man who never flew, should be chosen as the discoverer, just as it has chosen to honour... more...

CHAPTER I Natalie Spencer was giving a dinner. She was not an easy hostess. Like most women of futile lives she lacked a sense of proportion, and the small and unimportant details of the service absorbed her. Such conversation as she threw at random, to right and left, was trivial and distracted. Yet the dinner was an unimportant one. It had been given with an eye more to the menu than to the guest... more...

THE GOD OF HIS FATHERS I On every hand stretched the forest primeval,—the home of noisy comedy and silent tragedy.  Here the struggle for survival continued to wage with all its ancient brutality.  Briton and Russian were still to overlap in the Land of the Rainbow’s End—and this was the very heart of it—nor had Yankee gold yet purchased its vast domain.  The wolf-pack still clung to the... more...

THE GEN D'ARME. I had fortunately sufficient influence upon my fair friends to persuade them to leave Calais early on the morning following; and two hours before Kilkee had opened his eyes upon this mortal life, we were far upon the road to Paris. Having thus far perfectly succeeded in my plot, my spirit rose rapidly, and I made every exertion to make the road appear short to my fellow-travellers.... more...

CHAPTER I IN WHICH THE PRINCE DEPARTS ON AN ADVENTURE You shall seek in vain upon the map of Europe for the bygone state of Grünewald. An independent principality, an infinitesimal member of the German Empire, she played, for several centuries, her part in the discord of Europe; and, at last, in the ripeness of time and at the spiriting of several bald diplomatists, vanished like a morning ghost. Less... more...

CHAPTER I Somewhere out in the night a woman was crying, crying desolately. The sad, rather monotonous sound broke the silence of the street and floated through the open window of a room where Micky Mellowes was wondering how the deuce he should get through the long evening lying before him. Micky was in a bad temper. It was not often that he was in a bad temper, but he had begun the day by waking with... more...

THE FORBIDDEN PASTURE She sat hunched up in the middle of the silent pasture, where the tall, thin grass ran ripening before the breeze in waves the hue of burnished bronze. Her cow pony grazed greedily a few yards away, lifting his head now and then to gaze inquiringly at her, and then returning to his gluttony with a satisfied snort, commendatory of this long rest. The girl had removed her small... more...

CHAPTER I BLINDS DOWN "What do you think, Mitty? All the blinds are down at 'Littlecote,'" announced Miss Jane Tebbs, bursting open the drawing-room door and disturbing her sister in a surreptitious game of patience. In well-ordered households the mistress is understood to have various domestic tasks claiming her attention in the morning. Cards should never appear until after sunset.... more...