Political Books

CHAPTER XXVIII. Whatever may have been the language of Harry's letter to the Colonel, the information it conveyed was condensed or expanded, one or the other, from the following episode of his visit to New York: He called, with official importance in his mien, at No.— Wall street, where a great gilt sign betokened the presence of the head-quarters of the "Columbus River Slack-Water... more...

CHAPTER I A LIGHT FROM THE FAR EAST In the mists of the infinite, events poise invisible, awaiting their opportunity to incarnate themselves. They fasten, each after his kind, on these human lives of ours, as germs find the culture soil they love; so it follows that to the commonplace comes a life of dull routine, foolish happenings seek out the sentimentalist, sordid events seek the sordid and on the... more...

Mrs. Reginald Norman walked into Sherry's and sank down at a small table with the calm assurance of one conscious of being both beautiful and perfectly gowned. There were no defects for the critical world to take up and magnify. Her gown fitted flawlessly, was built by the highest court of appeal on Parisian fashions, and suited her to perfection. There is nothing like such a latent consciousness... more...

CHAPTER I. BY SAMUEL MERWIN Genevieve Remington had been called beautiful. She was tall, with brown eyes and a fine spun mass of golden-brown hair. She had a gentle smile, that disclosed white, even teeth. Her voice was not unmusical. She was twenty-three years old and possessed a husband who, though only twenty-six, had already shown such strength of character and such aptitude at the criminal branch... more...

I BECAUSE PATRICIA SAID "NO" Some one was giving a dinner dance at the country club, and Blount, who was a week-end guest of the Beverleys, was ill-natured enough to be resentful. What right had a gay and frivolous world to come and thrust its light-hearted happiness upon him when Patricia had said "No"? It was like bullying a cripple, he told himself morosely, and when he had read the... more...

CHAPTER I THE LOAD All love is a gas, and it takes either loneliness, strength of character, or religion to liquefy it into a condition to be ladled out of us, one to another. There is a certain dangerously volatile state of it; and occasionally people, especially of opposite sexes, try to administer it to each other in that form, with asphyxiation resulting to both hearts. And I'm willing to... more...

CHAPTER I THE BAITING OF THE ANCIENT LION War and Peace had swapped corners that morning in the village of Fort Canibas. War was muttering at the end where two meeting-houses placidly faced each other across the street. Peace brooded over the ancient blockhouse, relic of the "Bloodless War," and upon the structure that Thelismer Thornton had converted from officers' barracks to his own... more...

CHAPTER I. June 18—. Squire Hawkins sat upon the pyramid of large blocks, called the "stile," in front of his house, contemplating the morning. The locality was Obedstown, East Tennessee. You would not know that Obedstown stood on the top of a mountain, for there was nothing about the landscape to indicate it—but it did: a mountain that stretched abroad over whole counties, and rose very... more...

THE ENCOUNTER Glenister gazed out over the harbor, agleam with the lights of anchored ships, then up at the crenelated mountains, black against the sky. He drank the cool air burdened with its taints of the sea, while the blood of his boyhood leaped within him. "Oh, it's fine—fine," he murmured, "and this is my country—my country, after all, Dex. It's in my veins, this hunger... more...

It is certainly not the function of a romance to relate, with the exactness of a House journal, the proceedings of a Legislature. Somebody has likened the state-house to pioneer Kentucky, a dark and bloody ground over which the battles of selfish interests ebbed and flowed,—no place for an innocent and unselfish bystander like Mr. Crewe, who desired only to make of his State an Utopia; whose measures... more...