Short Stories (single author) Books

BOOK FIRST ADVENTURES   Lo, in the dance the wine-drenched coronal  From shoulder white and golden hair doth fall!  A-nigh his breast each youth doth hold an head,  Twin flushing cheeks and locks unfilleted;  Swifter and swifter doth the revel move  Athwart the dim recesses of the grove …  Where Aphrodite reigneth in her prime,  And laughter ringeth all the summer time.   There... more...

"You ought to buy it," said my host; "it's just the place for a solitary-minded devil like you. And it would be rather worth while to own the most romantic house in Brittany. The present people are dead broke, and it's going for a song—you ought to buy it." It was not with the least idea of living up to the character my friend Lanrivain ascribed to me (as a matter of fact,... more...

It is characteristic of this buoyant people that they pursue no man beyond the grave. "Let God be his judge!"—Even with the hundred thousand unfound, though greatly coveted, the hue and cry went no further than that. To the stranger or the guest the people of Coralio will relate the story of the tragic end of their former president; how he strove to escape from the country with the public... more...

AN OLD MATE OF YOUR FATHER'S You remember when we hurried home from the old bush school how we were sometimes startled by a bearded apparition, who smiled kindly down on us, and whom our mother introduced, as we raked off our hats, as "An old mate of your father's on the diggings, Johnny." And he would pat our heads and say we were fine boys, or girls—as the case may have been—and... more...

Iceland is a little country far north in the cold sea. Men found it and went there to live more than a thousand years ago. During the warm season they used to fish and make fish-oil and hunt sea-birds and gather feathers and tend their sheep and make hay. But the winters were long and dark and cold. Men and women and children stayed in the house and carded and spun and wove and knit. A whole family sat... more...

I had left Sandy MacWhirter crooning over his smouldering wood fire the day Boggs blew in with news of the sale of Mac's two pictures at the Academy, and his reply to my inquiry regarding his future plans (vaguely connected with a certain girl in a steamer chair), "By the next steamer, my boy," still rang in my ears, but my surprise was none the less genuine when I looked up from my easel,... more...

NORMAN DUNCAN An Appreciation byWilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. As our thoughts fly back to the days when the writer of these stories was a guest aboard our little hospital vessel, we remember realizing how vast was the gulf which seemed to lie between him and the circumstances of our sea life in the Northland. Nowhere else in the world, perhaps, do the cold facts of life call for a more unrelieved material... more...

"Am I to have no privacy at all?" demanded the Governor irritably as the orderly again tapped at the open door and announced another visitor. "Who is he and what does he want?" "Mr. John Corwell, your Excellency, master of the cutter Ceres, from the South Seas." The Governor's brows relaxed somewhat. "Let him come in in ten minutes, Cleary, but tell him at the same time... more...

TOINE He was known for thirty miles round was father Toine—fat Toine, Toine-my-extra, Antoine Macheble, nicknamed Burnt-Brandy—the innkeeper of Tournevent. It was he who had made famous this hamlet buried in a niche in the valley that led down to the sea, a poor little peasants' hamlet consisting of ten Norman cottages surrounded by ditches and trees. The houses were hidden behind a curve... more...

My name is Jimmy and I am five years old, and my friend Bobby is five years old too but he says he thinks he's really more than five years old because he's already grown up and I'm just a little boy. We live out in the country because that's where mommy and daddy live, and every morning daddy takes the car out of the barn and rides into the city to work, and every night he comes... more...