Chapter 1 In my opinion, it is impossible to create characters until one has spent a long time in studying men, as it is impossible to speak a language until it has been seriously acquired. Not being old enough to invent, I content myself with narrating, and I beg the reader to assure himself of the truth of a story in which all the characters, with the exception of the heroine, are still alive.... more...

CHAPTER I I hope and believe there are comparatively few people who will deny that athletics have done much for the health and mind of the modern girl. Exercise in some form or other is essential, and although I am quite ready to admit that games of the strenuous type, such as hockey and lawn tennis, can be and sometimes are overdone, yet the girl of to-day, who enters into and enjoys her game with... more...

CHAPTER I EARLY LIFE 'A great man,' says Hegel, 'condemns the world to the task of explaining him.' Emphatically does the remark apply to Thomas Carlyle. When he began to leave his impress in literature, he was treated as a confusing and inexplicable element. Opinion oscillated between the view of James Mill, that Carlyle was an insane rhapsodist, and that of Jeffrey, that he was... more...

She loved him so, that when he went away to a little war in which his country was interested she could not understand, nor quite forgive. As the correspondent of a newspaper, Chesterton had looked on at other wars; when the yellow races met, when the infidel Turk spanked the Christian Greek; and one he had watched from inside a British square, where he was greatly alarmed lest he should be trampled... more...

AN OLD HOUSE. A few steps from the St. Charles Hotel, in New Orleans, brings you to and across Canal street, the central avenue of the city, and to that corner where the flower-women sit at the inner and outer edges of the arcaded sidewalk, and make the air sweet with their fragrant merchandise. The crowd—and if it is near the time of the carnival it will be great—will follow Canal street. But you... more...

Field and museum studies of the wood rats of Colorado have revealed the existence of an unnamed subspecies of Neotoma mexicana in eastern Colorado south of the Arkansas River. The characters of the new subspecies are most distinctive in the northeastern part of its range near Two Buttes and Higbee. It differs in cranial characters from N. m. fallax and N. m. inopinata and averages slightly larger, but... more...

WATTY WILLIAMS was a studious youth, with a long nose and a short pair of trowsers; his delight was in the green fields, for he was one of those philosophers who can find sermons in stones, and good in everything. One day, while wandering in a meadow, lost in the perusal of Zimmerman on Solitude, he was suddenly aroused from his reverie by a loud "Moo!" and, turning about, he descried, to his... more...

"ONE OF THOSE IMPOSSIBLE AMERICANS" "N'avez-vous pas—" she was bravely demanding of the clerk when she saw that the bulky American who was standing there helplessly dangling two flaming red silk stockings which a copiously coiffured young woman assured him were bien chic was edging nearer her. She was never so conscious of the truly American quality of her French as when a... more...

WILLIAM GASTON. By ARTHUR P. DODGE. Victor Hugo has written: "The historian of morals and ideas has a mission no less austere than that of the historian of events. The latter has the surface of civilization, the struggles of the crowns, the births of princes, the marriages of Kings, the battles, the assemblies, the great public men, the revolutions in the sunlight, all exterior; the other historian... more...

WHY A BOAT FLOATSBEFORE taking up the construction of any of the model power boats described in this book, it will be well for the young boat-builder to become acquainted with such terms as buoyancy, displacement, center of gravity, etc. Knowledge of these subjects is more or less necessary if successful boats are to be made. Aside from this, they are terms that every boy who claims an interest in... more...