Historical Books

CHAPTER I. THE FANATIC Mr. Caryll, lately from Rome, stood by the window, looking out over the rainswept, steaming quays to Notre Dame on the island yonder. Overhead rolled and crackled the artillery of an April thunderstorm, and Mr. Caryll, looking out upon Paris in her shroud of rain, under her pall of thundercloud, felt himself at harmony with Nature. Over his heart, too, the gloom of storm was... more...

CHAPTER I. The green screen slowly rose, covering the lower portion of the broad studio window where Heron, the gem-cutter, was at work. It was Melissa, the artist's daughter, who had pulled it up, with bended knees and outstretched arms, panting for breath. "That is enough!" cried her father's impatient voice. He glanced up at the flood of light which the blinding sun of Alexandria... more...

CHAPTER I. 'For be it knownThat their saint's honour is their own.'—SCOTT. The town of Micklethwayte was rising and thriving. There were salubrious springs which an enterprising doctor had lately brought into notice. The firm of Greenleaf and Dutton manufactured umbrellas in large quantities, from the stout weather-proof family roof down to the daintiest fringed toy of a parasol. There... more...

CHAPTER I. DEATH AND BURIAL OF A SLAVE'S INFANT. "The small and great are there, and the servant is free from his master." A Southern gentleman, who was visiting in New York, sent me, with his reply to my inquiries for the welfare of his family at home, the following letter which he had just received from one of his married daughters in the South. The reader will be so kind as to take the... more...

This is the story, among others, of Henry the waiter—or, as he now prefers to call himself, Henri—told to me in the long dining-room of the Riffel Alp Hotel, where I once stayed for a melancholy week “between seasons,” sharing the echoing emptiness of the place with two maiden ladies, who talked all day to one another in frightened whispers.  Henry’s construction I have discarded for its... more...

Chapter I. THE BEACH. A coach-and-six, as a rule, may be called an impressive Object.But something depends on where you see it. Viewed from the tall cliffs—along the base of which, on a strip of beach two hundred feet below, it crawled between the American continent and the Atlantic Ocean—Captain Oliver Vyell's coach-and-six resembled nothing so nearly as a black-beetle. For that matter the... more...

CHAPTER I. HOW OWEN OF CORNWALL WANDERED TO SUSSEX, AND WHY HE BIDED THERE. The title which stands at the head of this story is not my own. It belongs to one whose name must come very often into that which I have to tell, for it is through him that I am what I may be, and it is because of him that there is anything worth telling of my doings at all. Hereafter it will be seen, as I think, that I could... more...

CHAPTER I. Arthur sat in the library of the theological seminary at Pisa, looking through a pile of manuscript sermons. It was a hot evening in June, and the windows stood wide open, with the shutters half closed for coolness. The Father Director, Canon Montanelli, paused a moment in his writing to glance lovingly at the black head bent over the papers. "Can't you find it, carino? Never mind;... more...

CHAPTER I. Gorgias, the architect, had learned to bear the scorching sunbeams of the Egyptian noonday. Though not yet thirty, he had directed—first as his late father's assistant and afterwards as his successor—the construction of the huge buildings erected by Cleopatra in Alexandria. Now he was overwhelmed with commissions; yet he had come hither ere the hours of work were over, merely to... more...

THE TRAIL OF THE SWORD This book, like Mrs. Falchion, was published in two volumes in January. That was in 1894. It appeared first serially in the Illustrated London News, for which paper, in effect, it was written, and it also appeared in a series of newspapers in the United States during the year 1893. This was a time when the historical novel was having its vogue. Mr. Stanley Weyman, Sir Arthur... more...