CHAPTER I.PLANTS AS A SOURCE OF REVENUE. With the single exception of ginseng, the hundred of plants whose roots are used for medical purposes, America is the main market and user. Ginseng is used mainly by the Chinese. The thickly inhabited Chinese Empire is where the American ginseng is principally used. To what uses it is put may be briefly stated, as a superstitious beverage. The roots with certain... more...

When Anna Estcourt was twenty-five, and had begun to wonder whether the pleasure extractable from life at all counterbalanced the bother of it, a wonderful thing happened. She was an exceedingly pretty girl, who ought to have been enjoying herself. She had a soft, irregular face, charming eyes, dimples, a pleasant laugh, and limbs that were long and slender. Certainly she ought to have been enjoying... more...

CHAPTER I The hour was close on midday, but the lamps in Cavendish Square shone with a blurred light through the unnatural gloom. The fog, pouring down from Regent's Park above, was wedged tight in Harley Street like a wad of dirty wool, but in the open space fronting Harcourt House it found room to expand and took on spectral shape; dim forms with floating locks that clung to the stunted trees... more...

OUR NATIONAL FINANCES. Our national finances are involved in extreme peril. Our public debt exceeds $720,000,000, and is estimated by the Secretary of the Treasury, on the 1st of July next, at $1,122,297,403, and on the 1st of July, 1864, at $1,744,685,586. When we reflect that this is nearly one half the debt of England, and bearing almost double the rate of interest, it is clear that we are... more...

The life of the American Cavalry is almost coeval with that of the American people. Laws were passed for the formation of a mounted force in 1648, when the colony of Massachusetts Bay had not yet attained its majority. Twenty-seven years later, in 1675, when the war with Metacomet (King Philip) broke out there were five troops of cavalry, which in point of equipment, discipline and appearance, had... more...

THE "MODEL HUSBAND" CONTEST. SCENE THE FIRST—At the GALAHAD-GREENS'. Mrs. G.-G. GALAHAD! Mr. G.-G. (meekly). My love? Mrs. G.-G. I see that the proprietors of All Sorts are going to follow the American example, and offer a prize of £20 to the wife who makes out the best case for her husband as a Model. It's just as well, perhaps, that you should know that I've made up my mind... more...

CHAPTER I IN WHICH WE BEGIN OUR SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY By rights Henry, being the hero of this story, should be introduced in the first line. But really there isn't so much to say about Henry—Henry J. Allen for short, as we say in Kansas—Henry J. Allen, editor and owner of the Wichita Beacon. And to make the dramatis personae complete, we may consider me as the editor of the Emporia Gazette, and... more...

PREFACE. This volume of memoirs has a double character—historical and intimate. The life of a period, the XIX Century, is bound up in the life of a man, VICTOR HUGO. As we follow the events set forth we get the impression they made upon the mind of the extraordinary man who recounts them; and of all the personages he brings before us he himself is assuredly not the least interesting. In portraits... more...

In the course of the preparation of a synopsis of the North American terrestrial microtines by one of us (Cockrum), and the completion of a Master's thesis on the geographical variation of the red-backed mice of Wyoming by the other (Fitch) we had occasion to study the red-backed mice of the southern Rocky Mountain region (see figure 1). Results of these studies are the recognition of two... more...

[234] IT was on the afternoon of the Feast of Pentecost that news of the death of Charles the Ninth went abroad promptly. To his successor the day became a sweet one, to be noted unmistakably by various pious and other observances; and it was on a Whit-Sunday afternoon that curious Parisians had the opportunity of listening to one who, as if with some intentional new version of the sacred event then... more...