INTRODUCTIONIThe story of the Edgeworth Family, if it were properly told, should be as long as the ARABIAN NIGHTS themselves; the thousand and one cheerful intelligent members of the circle, the amusing friends and relations, the charming surroundings, the cheerful hospitable home, all go to make up an almost unique history of a county family of great parts and no little character. The Edgeworths were... more...

Justly has a vast excitement taken hold of all classes of the people, an excitement that has caused all other contemporary events to fall back. The search for an actual remedy for that exceedingly ravaging disease, tuberculosis, has at last been crowned with success, and even the most uneducated will be able to estimate the significance of this event. We need but consider, that pulmonary consumption,... more...

CHAPTER I Tristan da Cunha, a British possession, is an island-mountain of volcanic origin in the South Atlantic ocean. Latitude 37° 5' 50" S.; longitude 12° 16' 40" W. Circular in form. Circumference about 21 miles. Diameter about 7 miles. Height 7,640 feet. Volcano extinct during historic times. Discovered by the Portuguese navigator Tristan da Cunha, 1506. Occupied by the... more...

FOREWORD The struggle for the North Pole began nearly one hundred years before the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth Rock, being inaugurated (1527) by that king of many distinctions, Henry VIII of England. In 1588 John Davis rounded Cape Farewell, the southern end of Greenland, and followed the coast for eight hundred miles to Sanderson Hope. He discovered the strait which bears his name, and... more...

Joel 1:1 The Word of Yahweh that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel.1:2Hear this, you elders,And listen, all you inhabitants of the land.Has this ever happened in your days,or in the days of your fathers?1:3Tell your children about it,and have your children tell their children,and their children, another generation.1:4What the swarming locust has left, the great locust has eaten.What the great locust has... more...

PREFACE. The Abraham Lincoln Statue at Chicago is accepted as the typical Westerner of the forum, the rostrum, and the tribune, as he stood to be inaugurated under the war-cloud in 1861. But there is another Lincoln as dear to the common people--the Lincoln of happy quotations, the speaker of household words. Instead of the erect, impressive, penetrative platform orator we see a long, gaunt figure,... more...

THE TRIMMED LAMP  Of course there are two sides to the question. Let us look at the other. We often hear "shop-girls" spoken of. No such persons exist. There are girls who work in shops. They make their living that way. But why turn their occupation into an adjective? Let us be fair. We do not refer to the girls who live on Fifth Avenue as "marriage-girls." Lou and Nancy were chums.... more...

CHAPTER I.AN UNWELCOME LEGACY."Children! They are a nuisance to everyone—my abomination, as you know, Jack. Why on earth they can not be kept out of sight altogether till they reach a sensible age is what puzzles me! And I suppose if anything could make the matter worse, it is that this is a girl." The tone of disgust with which the last word was uttered brought a laugh from Sir Edward... more...

CHAPTER I. Down the Danube from Buda-Pest—Amusements on board the steamer—Basiash—Drive to Oravicza by Weisskirchen—Ladies of Oravicza—Gipsy music—Finding an old schoolfellow—The czardas. One glorious morning in June 1875, I, with the true holiday feeling at heart, for the world was all before me, stepped on board the Rustchuk steamer at Buda-Pest, intending to go down the Danube as far... more...

OSCAR WILDE ears ago, in a Paris club, one man said to another: "Well, what's up?" The other shook a paper: "There is only one genius in England and they have put him in jail." One may wonder though whether it were their doing, or even Wilde's, that put him there. One may wonder whether it were not the high fates who so gratified him in order that, from his purgatory, he might... more...