CHAPTER I ANCIENT INDIA The Vedas. Buddhist Literature. Great Epic Poems, then veryDiverse, much Shorter Poems. Dramatic Literature. Moral Literature. THE VEDAS.—The ancient Indians, who spoke Sanscrit, possess a literature which goes back, perhaps, to the fifteenth century before Christ. At first, like all other races, they possessed a sacred literature intimately bound up with their religion. The... more...

CHAPTER I THE MARQUIS ARRIVES AT THE INN By the end of the second decade of the last century Monday Port had passed the height of prosperity as one of the principal depots for the West Indian trade. The shipping was rapidly being transferred to New York and Boston, and the old families of the Port, having made their fortunes, in rum and tobacco as often as not, were either moving away to follow the... more...

CHAPTER I. "I won't give you any farther trouble, I can find what I want myself." The sexton's wife looked at the gentleman in some little surprise, and then glanced at the bunch of huge keys which hung in the door she had just opened for the stranger. "That's right; you need not be uneasy, I shall not stay long, and here is something for your trouble." He pressed a piece... more...

THE CULT OF ALTRUISM In this age of sacred egoisms and oppressed nationalities the drama—or melodrama—of international politics has been enriched by a variety of distressed heroines, in the shape of small nations, whose salvation has inspired professions of altruism slightly incompatible with the previous records of the rescuers as revealed to the impartial observer. The shortage of paper and... more...

“Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell.”—St. James iii. 5-6. In the development of Christian Truth a peculiar office was assigned to... more...

CHAPTER I. Clairvoyance means literally nothing more than "clear-seeing," and it is a word which has been sorely misused, and even degraded so far as to be employed to describe the trickery of a mountebank in a variety show. Even in its more restricted sense it covers a wide range of phenomena, differing so greatly in character that it is not easy to give a definition of the word which shall be... more...

CHAPTER I TWO weeks of instructive contact with the Bar-7 school of gallantry had prepared Mrs. Laithe to be amazed at her first encounter with Ewing's kid. Riding out from the ranch one afternoon and turning, for coolness, up the wooded mesa that rises from the creek flat, she overwhelmed him at a bend in the trail. Stricken motionless, he glared at the lady with eyes in which she was compelled... more...

CHAPTER I SOME COMPARISONS "…and so at noon with Sir Thomas Allen, and Sir Edward Scott and Lord Carlingford, to the Spanish Ambassador's, where I dined the first time…. And here was an Oxford scholar, in a Doctor of Laws' gowne…. And by and by he and I to talk; and the company very merry at my defending Cambridge against Oxford."—PEPYS' Diary (May 5, 1669). In writing of... more...

A Preface With Some Revised Ideas IT HAS BEEN ten years since I wrote the prefatory "Declaration" to this now enlarged and altered book. Not to my generation alone have many things receded during that decade. To the intelligent young as well as to the intelligent elderly, efforts in the present atmosphere to opiate the public with mere pictures of frontier enterprise have a ghastly unreality.... more...

CHAPTER I I MAKE NO EFFORT TO DEFEND MYSELF I am quite sure it was my Uncle Rilas who said that I was a fool. If memory serves me well he relieved himself of that conviction in the presence of my mother—whose brother he was—at a time when I was least competent to acknowledge his wisdom and most arrogant in asserting my own. I was a freshman in college: a fact—or condition, perhaps,—which should... more...