CHAPTER I It was over. The rambling house, with its rickety, old-fashioned furniture—and its memories—was now deserted, except for Robert Fairchild, and he was deserted within it, wandering from room to room, staring at familiar objects with the unfamiliar gaze of one whose vision suddenly has been warned by the visitation of death and the sense of loneliness that it brings. Loneliness, rather than... more...

§ 1 On the high land overlooking the distant channel and the hills beyond it, the spring day, set in azure, was laced with gold and green. Gorse bushes flaunted their colour, larch trees hung out their tassels and celandines starred the bright green grass in an air which seemed palpably blue. It made a mist among the trees and poured itself into the ground as though to dye the earth from which... more...

FOREWORD PIRATES, Buccaneers, Marooners, those cruel but picturesque sea wolves who once infested the Spanish Main, all live in present-day conceptions in great degree as drawn by the pen and pencil of Howard Pyle. Pyle, artist-author, living in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, had the fine faculty of transposing himself into any chosen period of history... more...

CHAPTER I Mrs. Ogilvie, red-haired according to the exact shade then in fashion, and dressed by Paquin, sat in her drawing-room reading the Court Journal. She was a woman who thought on the lines of Aristotle, despised most other women except Charlotte Corday, Judith, Joan of Arc, and a few more, and she dyed her hair and read the Court Journal. People who did not know her sometimes alluded to her as... more...

INTRODUCTION"Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice,Be not dishearten'd, affection shall solve the problem of freedom yet.. . . . . . . . .(Were you looking to be held together by lawyers?Or by an agreement on a paper? or by arms?Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.)"These lines of Walt Whitman will be recalled by many who read the following pages: for not only does... more...

Chap. I Of Ketill Flatnose and his Descendants, 9th Century A.D. Ketill Flatnose was the name of a man. He was the son of Bjorn the Ungartered. Ketill was a mighty and high-born chieftain (hersir) in Norway. He abode in Raumsdale, within the folkland of the Raumsdale people, which lies between Southmere and Northmere. Ketill Flatnose had for wife Yngvild, daughter of Ketill Wether, who was a man of... more...

The Maid of Tamalpais. This she told me in the firelightAs I sat beside her campfire,In a grove of giant redwoods,On the slope of Tamalpais. Old she was, and bent and wrinkled,Lone survivor of the Tamals,Ancient tribe of Indian people,Who have left their name and legendOn the mountain they held sacred.On the ground she sat and brooded,With a blanket wrapped around her—Sat and gazed into the... more...

The Welsh style themselves Cymry or Cumry, a word which, in their language, means a number of people associated together.   They were the second mass of population which moved from Asia into Europe.  They followed and pushed forward the Gael or Gauls; were themselves impelled onward by the Slowaks or Sclavonians, who were themselves hunted, goaded, and pestered by a wild, waspish race of people,... more...

THE RUSH IN 1900 he remarkable discoveries of gold at Cape Nome, Alaska, situated almost in the Bering Strait, only one hundred and fifty miles from Siberia, and distant not less than three thousand miles from San Francisco and fifteen hundred from the famed Klondike, naturally created more excitement in the Western and mining sections of this country than in the Middle States and the "effete... more...

The World’s Neglected or Forgotten Leaders and Pioneers. Leif Ericson, the long-forgotten Scandinavian discoverer of North America, nearly five hundred years before Columbus, has at last received American justice, and a statue in his honor has been erected, which was unveiled in Boston, on Commonwealth Avenue, before a distinguished assemblage, on the 29th of October. The history of the Scandinavian... more...