SPRING NIGHT   THE park is filled with night and fog,     The veils are drawn about the world,  The drowsy lights along the paths     Are dim and pearled.   Gold and gleaming the empty streets,     Gold and gleaming the misty lake,  The mirrored lights like sunken swords,     Glimmer and shake.   Oh, is it not enough to be  Here with this beauty over me?  My throat... more...

CHAPTER I. A MAN OF HIS DAY As the Milvains sat down to breakfast the clock of Wattleborough parish church struck eight; it was two miles away, but the strokes were borne very distinctly on the west wind this autumn morning. Jasper, listening before he cracked an egg, remarked with cheerfulness: 'There's a man being hanged in London at this moment.' 'Surely it isn't necessary... more...

PART I.—INCIDENCE OF ABORTION IN NEW ZEALAND. All the evidence brought before the Committee indicates that abortion is exceedingly frequent in New Zealand. It is quite impossible to assess the incidence with complete accuracy, for the reason that a very considerable number of these cases do not come under medical or hospital observation, but some definite indication of the frequency is given by the... more...

MISAPPREHENSIONS CORRECTED I should not like to ask an indulgent and idle public to saunter about with me under a misapprehension. It would be more agreeable to invite it to go nowhere than somewhere; for almost every one has been somewhere, and has written about it. The only compromise I can suggest is, that we shall go somewhere, and not learn anything about it. The instinct of the public against any... more...

INTRODUCTION For modern readers, one of the most intriguing scenes in Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) occurs during the courtship of Moll by the man who is to become her third husband. Aware that the eligible men of her day have little interest in prospective wives with small or nonexistent fortunes, Moll slyly devises a plan to keep her relative poverty a secret from the charming and (as she... more...

LIFE--the first glance would hardly find it on this African hillside in the summertime. The hot wind of the desert has passed over it, and the spring beauty of iris and orchid, asphodel and marigold, has vanished. Nothing is to be seen but the mellow golden-brown of the grass, broken by blue-green aloe leaves, and here and there a deep madder head of dried-up fennel. Yet life is reigning, not death,... more...

CHAPTER V. MR. MCLAUGHLIN AND FRIEND. JOHN BUMSTEAD, on his way home along the unsteady turnpike—upon which he is sure there will be a dreadful accident some day, for want of railings—is suddenly brought to an unsettled pause in his career by the spectacle of Old Mortarity leaning against the low fence of the pauper burial-ground, with a shapeless boy throwing stones at him in the moonlight. The... more...

In the past several years the United States National Museum has received a large number of mammals from central and southern Korea through the auspices of the Commission on Hemorrhagic Fever of the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board. Among these Korean collections are more than a hundred specimens of a murine rodent originally described as "Micromys speciosus peninsulae" by Oldfield Thomas but... more...

The Blind Spot opens with the words: "Perhaps it were just as well to start at the beginning. A mere matter of news." Suppose I use them in the same sense: A mere matter of news: The first instalment of this fabulous novel was featured in Argosy-All-Story-Weekly for May 14, 1921. Described as a "different" serial, it was introduced by a cover by Modest Stein. In the foreground was the... more...

PREFACE. I propose, in the following pages, to consider the possibilities of a satisfactory intellectual life under various conditions of ordinary human existence. It will form a part of my plan to take into account favorable and unfavorable influences of many kinds; and my chief purpose, so far as any effect upon others may be hoped for, will be to guard some who may read the book alike against the... more...