General Books

CHAPTER 1 Of all the remote streams of influence that pour both before and after birth into the channel of our being, what an insignificant few—and these only the more obvious—are traceable at all. We swim in a sea of environment and heredity, are tossed hither and thither by we know not what cross currents of Fate, are tugged at by a thousand eddies of which we never dream. The sum of it all makes... more...

THE STEWARD. Earl de Montford sat in a plainly furnished room in his stately mansion. Gorgeously decorated as were the other apartments of his princely residence, this apartment, with its plain business-look—its hard benches for such of the tenantry as came to him or his agent on business—its walls garnished with abstracts of the Game and Poor Law Enactments—its worn old chairs and heavy oak... more...

THE first thing which attracted my attention to the man was the shock of white hair above the lean young face. But for this, I should not have looked twice at him: long, spare, and stooping, a shabby figure, he crouched over a cup of coffee in a corner of the dingy restaurant, at fretful enmity with the world; typical, I should have said, of the furtive London nondescript. But that white hair startled... more...

CHAPTER I It had occurred to her early that in her position—that of a young person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or a magpie—she should know a great many persons without their recognising the acquaintance.  That made it an emotion the more lively—though singularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity still very much smothered—to see any one come in... more...

My going to Valencia was entirely an accident. But the more often I stated that fact, the more satisfied was everyone at the capital that I had come on some secret mission. Even the venerable politician who acted as our minister, the night of my arrival, after dinner, said confidentially, "Now, Mr. Crosby, between ourselves, what's the game?" "What's what game?" I asked.... more...

CHAPTER I I scarcely know where to begin, though I sometimes facetiously place the cause of it all to Charley Furuseth’s credit.  He kept a summer cottage in Mill Valley, under the shadow of Mount Tamalpais, and never occupied it except when he loafed through the winter months and read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to rest his brain.  When summer came on, he elected to sweat out a hot and... more...

THE OCTOBER LAND I sat on the ground with my youthful legs tucked under me, and the bridle rein of El Mahdi over my arm, while I hammered a copper rivet into my broken stirrup strap. A little farther down the ridge Jud was idly swinging his great driving whip in long, snaky coils, flicking now a dry branch, and now a red autumn leaf from the clay road. The slim buckskin lash would dart out hissing,... more...

CHAPTER I. THE CITY OF WYTHBURN. Tar-ry woo', tar-ry woo',Tar-ry woo' is ill to spin:Card it weel, card it weel,Card it weel ere you begin.Old Ballad. The city of Wythburn stood in a narrow valley at the foot of Lauvellen, and at the head of Bracken Water. It was a little but populous village, inhabited chiefly by sheep farmers, whose flocks grazed on the neighboring hills. It contained... more...

CHAPTER I Many patterns of carpet lay rolled out before them on the floor—two of Brussels showed the beginning of their quest, and its ending in that direction; while a score of ingrains lured their eyes and prolonged the debate between desire pocket-book.  The head of the department did them the honor of waiting upon them himself—or did Joe the honor, as she well knew, for she had noted the... more...

Part 1 One Wednesday afternoon in late September, Ann Veronica Stanley came down from London in a state of solemn excitement and quite resolved to have things out with her father that very evening. She had trembled on the verge of such a resolution before, but this time quite definitely she made it. A crisis had been reached, and she was almost glad it had been reached. She made up her mind in the... more...