DEATH OF REV. G. D. PIKE, D. D. In the death of Dr. Pike, which occurred in Hartford, Conn., Jan. 29, the American Missionary Association has lost a most earnest and successful worker. Repeated and protracted attacks of throat and lung troubles during the last two or three years, terminating in an illness that confined him to his room for three months, gave warning to his friends of the approach of... more...

CHAPTER I The crowd gave way and the car glided smoothly up to the curb at the canopied entrance to the church. The blackness of the wet November night was upon the street. It had rained at intervals all day. The pavements shone wetly like new paint in the glimmer of the street lights, and rude shadows gloomed in every cranny of the great stone building. Betty, alone in the midst of her bridal finery,... more...

Bonnie Bell was her real name—Bonnie Bell Wright. It sounds like a race horse or a yacht, but she was a girl. Like enough that name don't suit you exactly for a girl, but it suited her pa, Old Man Wright. I don't know as she ever was baptized by that name, or maybe baptized at all, for water was scarce in Wyoming; but it never would of been healthy to complain about that name before Old Man... more...

CHAPTER I. EARLY LIFE — RESIDENCE IN CANADA. MANKIND take an interest in the history of those who, like themselves, have encountered the trials and discharged the duties of life. Too often, however, publicity is given to the lives of men splendid in acts of mighty mischief, in whom the secret exercises of the heart would not bear a scrutiny. The memoirs are comparatively few of those engaged in the... more...

GEORGE BORROWSELECTED PASSAGES It is very possible that the reader during his country walks or rides has observed, on coming to four cross-roads, two or three handfuls of grass lying at a small distance from each other down one of these roads; perhaps he may have supposed that this grass was recently plucked from the roadside by frolicsome children, and flung upon the ground in sport, and this may... more...

BABY TORTOISE You know what it is to be born alone,Baby tortoise!The first day to heave your feet little by littlefrom the shell,Not yet awake,And remain lapsed on earth,Not quite alive. A tiny, fragile, half-animate bean. To open your tiny beak-mouth, that looks as ifit would never open,Like some iron door;To lift the upper hawk-beak from the lower baseAnd reach your skinny little neckAnd take your... more...

ADDRESSED TO THE CRITIC.      Critics of art, connoisseurs of fair Fame,Who on her bulwarks stand, to guard the wayUnto the courts wherein her favored dwell,Where they have gained admittance by the pass“True merit,” which alone can bring them there;Thine is the power the unworthy to debar,To tell them that they are unfit to comeTo seek a standing near her honored throne.Away in sorrow the... more...

THE WISTFUL HEART IT was long after noon in the far, big, white Northwest. Day was on the wing. Christmas Eve splendidly impended—thank God for unspoiled childish faith and joys of children everywhere! Christmas Eve was fairly within view and welcoming hail, at last, in the thickening eastern shadows. Long Day at its close. Day in a perturbation of blessed unselfishness. Day with its tasks of love... more...

INTRODUCTION THE greatest of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose, satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was Ben Jonson, and as such his strong personality assumes an interest to us almost unparalleled, at least in his age. Ben Jonson came of the... more...

My First Football Match. It was a proud moment in my existence when Wright, captain of our football club, came up to me in school one Friday and said, “Adams, your name is down to play in the match against Craven to-morrow.” I could have knighted him on the spot. To be one of the picked “fifteen,” whose glory it was to fight the battles of their school in the Great Close, had been the leading... more...