Chapter 1 A FORESHADOWING THE Patriarch of Alexandria, Egypt was expecting company. He stood at the window of his palace looking down the long road, that at the first sign of his guests' arrival he might go forth and welcome them. Before him, like a white pearl in the blue waters of the Mediterranean, lay the city of Alexandria—"the beautiful," as men loved to call it. Across the harbor... more...

CHAPTER I PRINCE OR BANDIT Now Nevada, though robed in gray and white—the gray of sagebrush and the white of snowy summits—had never yet been accounted a nun when once again the early summer aroused the passions of her being and the wild peach burst into bloom. It was out in Nauwish valley, at the desert-edge, where gold has been stored in the hungry-looking rock to lure man away from fairer... more...

FATHER GORIOT Mme. Vauquer (nee de Conflans) is an elderly person, who for the past forty years has kept a lodging-house in the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, in the district that lies between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel. Her house (known in the neighborhood as the Maison Vauquer) receives men and women, old and young, and no word has ever been breathed against her respectable... more...

CHAPTER I The trouble from which great events were to come began when Everard Dominey, who had been fighting his way through the scrub for the last three quarters of an hour towards those thin, spiral wisps of smoke, urged his pony to a last despairing effort and came crashing through the great oleander shrub to pitch forward on his head in the little clearing. It developed the next morning, when he... more...

Chapter One. How Drew Lennox and Bob Dickenson went a-Fishing. They did not look like fishermen, those two young men in khaki, for people do not generally go fishing with magazine-rifles instead of fishing-rods—certainly not in England. But this was in South Africa, and that makes all the difference. In addition, they were fishing in a South African river, where both of them were in profound... more...

CHAPTER I. I am an innkeeper, and know my grounds,And study them; Brain o' man, I study them.I must have jovial guests to drive my ploughs,And whistling boys to bring my harvests home,Or I shall hear no flails thwack. THE NEW INN. It is the privilege of tale-tellers to open their story in an inn, the free rendezvous of all travellers, and where the humour of each displays itself without ceremony... more...

Chapter I I confess that when first I made acquaintance with Charles Strickland I never for a moment discerned that there was in him anything out of the ordinary. Yet now few will be found to deny his greatness. I do not speak of that greatness which is achieved by the fortunate politician or the successful soldier; that is a quality which belongs to the place he occupies rather than to the man; and a... more...

INTRODUCTION* Koerlighedens Komedie was published at Christiania in 1862. The polite world—so far as such a thing existed at the time in the Northern capital—received it with an outburst of indignation now entirely easy to understand. It has indeed faults enough. The character-drawing is often crude, the action, though full of effective by-play, extremely slight, and the sensational climax has... more...

EXCELSIOR. "Goblin, lead them up and down." The ruddy glow of sunset was already fading into the sombre shadows of night, when two travellers might have been observed swiftly—at a pace of six miles in the hour—descending the rugged side of a mountain; the younger bounding from crag to crag with the agility of a fawn, while his companion, whose aged limbs seemed ill at ease in the heavy... more...

Here, if nowhere else, we leave political parties and preferences alone. But here, as everywhere else, we are patriotic men; and we North Carolinians have as our background a community that from the first showed a singularly independent temper. A freedom of opinion is our heritage. We once drove a Colonial Governor who disputed our freedom of political action to the safer shelter of the Colony of New... more...