Non-Classifiable Books

INTRODUCTION With so many excellent textbooks now in circulation, it seems almost audacious to add another treatise to current card literature. It happens, however, that the game of Auction, or Auction Bridge, as it is generally called ("Auction Whist" is perhaps a more appropriate title), has been so completely and so suddenly revolutionized that books written upon the subject a few months ago... more...

SOCRATES I do not think it possible for a better man to be injured by a worse.... To a good man nothing is evil, neither while living nor when dead, nor are his concerns neglected by the gods. —The Republic SOCRATES It was four hundred seventy years before Christ that Socrates was born. He never wrote a book, never made a formal address, held no public office, wrote no letters, yet his words have... more...

AN UNPREMEDITATED FOLLY Steve Tolman had done a wrong thing and he knew it. While his father, mother, and sister Doris had been absent in New York for a week-end visit and Havens, the chauffeur, was ill at the hospital, the boy had taken the big six-cylinder car from the garage without anybody's permission and carried a crowd of his friends to Torrington to a football game. And that was not the... more...

CHAPTER I Siegfried was born a Prince and grew to be a hero, a hero with a heart of gold. Though he could fight, and was as strong as any lion, yet he could love too and be as gentle as a child. The father and mother of the hero-boy lived in a strong castle near the banks of the great Rhine river. Siegmund, his father, was a rich king, Sieglinde, his mother, a beautiful queen, and dearly did they love... more...

The few pages of which the present edition is composed, were principally written under the circumstances there stated, which had forcibly called my attention to the fatal effects of those ever-recurring tempests, which scatter devastation and misery round our coasts, where the veteran commander and his hardy crew, with their helpless passengers of every age and station in life, are left wretchedly to... more...

CHAPTER I. To produce a good balance staff requires more skill than to produce any other turned portion of a watch, and your success will depend not alone on your knowledge of its proper shape and measurements, nor the tools at your command, but rather upon your skill with the graver and your success in hardening and tempering. There are many points worthy of consideration in the making of a balance... more...

INTRODUCTION. It is less than twenty-five years since the first cold Grapery was erected on the Hudson. Since the success of the culture of the delicious varieties of the exotic Grape has been demonstrated, the number of graperies has annually increased, and during the last ten years in a very rapid ratio, until they have become recognized as possible and desirable, among those even whose circumstances... more...

PREFACE Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find a universal formula for it. The value of these attempts has most often been in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way. Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is... more...

The object of this little work is to assist those who may occasionally be called upon to form an opinion as to the genuineness of signatures, alterations in cheques, and the varied doubtful documents that demand the serious consideration of business men by way of a preliminary to "taking further steps." It is the first attempt published in England to explain the principles upon which the... more...

CHAPTER I. EARLY LIFE. The life of Francis Bacon is one which it is a pain to write or to read. It is the life of a man endowed with as rare a combination of noble gifts as ever was bestowed on a human intellect; the life of one with whom the whole purpose of living and of every day's work was to do great things to enlighten and elevate his race, to enrich it with new powers, to lay up in store... more...