he man in the pastel blue topcoat walked with steady purpose, but without haste, through the chill, wind-swirled drizzle that filled the air above the streets of Arlington, Virginia. His matching blue cap-hood was pulled low over his forehead, and the clear, infrared radiating face mask had been flipped down to protect his chubby cheeks and round nose from the icy wind. No one noticed him particularly.... more...

THE CHILD Lemonnier had remained a widower with one child. He had loved his wife devotedly, with a tender and exalted love, without a slip, during their entire married life. He was a good, honest man, perfectly simple, sincere, without suspicion or malice. He fell in love with a poor neighbor, proposed and was accepted. He was making a very comfortable living out of the wholesale cloth business, and he... more...

CHAPTER I. THE MOUNTAIN-CABIN. "What's the news, Ben? You didn't happen to bring an evenin' paper, did you?" The speaker was a tall, loose-jointed man, dressed as a miner in a garb that appeared to have seen considerable service. His beard was long and untrimmed, and on his head he wore a Mexican sombrero. This was Jake Bradley, a rough but good-hearted miner, who was stretched... more...

INTRODUCTION The verses in this volume cover very many and various occasions; and are therefore the very contrary of what is commonly called occasional verse. The term is used with a meaning that is very mutable; or with a meaning that has been greatly distorted and degraded. Occasion should mean opportunity; and in the case of poetry it should rather mean provocation. And the trick of writing upon... more...

CHAPTER I THE ODDEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED "Well, if that isn't the oddest thing that ever happened!" murmured Laura Belding, sitting straight up on the stool before the high desk in her father's glass-enclosed office, from which elevation she could look down the long aisles of his jewelry store and out into Market Street, Centerport's main business thoroughfare. But Laura was... more...

CHAPTER I "Lady Fenimore's compliments, sir, and will you be so kind as to step round to Sir Anthony at once?" Heaven knows that never another step shall I take in this world again; but Sergeant Marigold has always ignored the fact. That is one of the many things I admire about Marigold. He does not throw my poor paralysed legs, so to speak, in my face. He accepts them as the normal... more...

HOLBEIN AND THE DANCE OF DEATH. At the northwest corner of Switzerland, just on the turn of the Rhine from its westward course between Germany and Switzerland, to run northward between Germany and France, stands the old town of Bâle. It is nominally Swiss; but its situation on the borders of three countries, and almost in them all, has given to the place itself and to its inhabitants a somewhat... more...

Several years ago, among the dusty piles of old pamphlets stored away upon the upper shelves of the Union Theological Seminary library, I met with several works of Luther, in the original editions, as they were issued during his lifetime from his press at Wittemberg. Among them were his Commentaries, or rather Lectures, on the Epistles of Peter and Jude. The forbidding aspect of the page, with the... more...

Among small mammals accumulated, from Wyoming, in the Museum of Natural History of the University of Kansas, specimens of the wide-spread species Thomomys talpoides are abundantly represented. Subspecific names are available for most of these, but specimens from the Sierra Madre Mountain Range of Wyoming and Colorado prove upon comparison to pertain to an heretofore unnamed subspecies which may be... more...

Introduces Deep-Sea Fishermen And their Families. On a certain breezy morning in October—not many years ago—a wilderness of foam rioted wildly over those dangerous sands which lie off the port of Yarmouth, where the Evening Star, fishing-smack, was getting ready for sea. In one of the narrow lanes or “Rows” peculiar to that town, the skipper of the smack stood at his own door, grumbling. He was... more...