BOOK I CHAPTER I At the beginning of the long twilight of a summer evening, Sam McPherson, a tall big-boned boy of thirteen, with brown hair, black eyes, and an amusing little habit of tilting his chin in the air as he walked, came upon the station platform of the little corn-shipping town of Caxton in Iowa. It was a board platform, and the boy walked cautiously, lifting his bare feet and putting them... more...

GERMAN SOUP.—Good, fresh beef and some cracked bone are all important for soup making. The stock when nutritious, and properly prepared, forms the basis of meat soups. To make the stock great care must be taken in boiling the meat. Put your meat on in cold water, enough to cover the meat, set on the stove to boil, for four hours, slowly but steadily; never boil very fast. When meat becomes tender,... more...

VALLEY of the CROEN They say cross-eyed men are bad luck. He stood there, in my doorway, eyeing me up and down with those in-focused black eyes. His face was hideous even if the eyes had been normal. He was slashed with a wide cicatrice of livid scar tissue from one cheekbone across his nose and down to the button of his jaw on the other side. He was big, and he looked like bad news to me. I... more...

THE FAIRIES' CHAPEL. Farewell, rewards and fairies!Good housewives now may say;For now foule sluts in dairies,Doe fare as well as they:And though they sweepe their hearths no lessThan mayds were wont to doe,Yet who of late, for cleaneliness,Finds sixe-pence in her shoe?" —Percy's Reliques. The ancient mansion of Healey Hall was a cumbrous inconvenient dwelling of timber; but the spirit... more...

On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach. To the left a group of barren... more...

PREFACE. The only works which, so far as I know, profess to deal with English caricaturists and comic artists of the nineteenth century are two in number. The first is a work by the late Robert William Buss, embodying the substance of certain lectures delivered by the accomplished author many years ago. Mr. Buss’s book, which was published for private circulation only, deals more especially with the... more...

THE HURRICANE "Will we ever weather this terrible storm?" It was a half-grown lad who flung this despairing question out; the wind carried the sound of his voice off over the billows; but there came no answer. A brigantine, battered by the tropical hurricane sweeping up from the Caribbean Sea, was staggering along like a wounded beast. Her masts had long since gone by the board, and upon the... more...

I spoke of the possibility of moral education by means of magnetism, which has been carried out.” * * * “Dr. Bernheim, a Professor of the Medical Faculty in Nancy who is a champion of hypnotism has written a book on ‘Suggestion and its Application in Therapeutics,’ in which a great many hypnotic cures are recorded.” “Dr. —— quotes Franklin against magnetism but Sprengel in his... more...

CHAPTER I OF PROFIT AND HONESTY No man is free from speaking foolish things; but the worst on't is, when a man labours to play the fool: "Nae iste magno conatu magnas nugas dixerit."      ["Truly he, with a great effort will shortly say a mighty trifle."     —-Terence, Heaut., act iii., s. 4.] This does not concern me; mine slip from me with as little care as they are... more...

FRAGMENTS OF GREEK DETAIL. The Art of Greece during the fifth century, B.C., was developed in an amazingly short time from a condition of almost archaic rudeness to that of the greatest perfection which the world has ever seen. At the close of the Persian wars the Athenians, under Pericles, began rebuilding their city and perfecting themselves in all the arts of civilization, and their progress in the... more...