At half-past two of a sunny, sultry afternoon late in the month of August, Mr. Benjamin Staff sat at table in the dining-room of the Authors’ Club, moodily munching a morsel of cheese and a segment of cast-iron biscuit and wondering what he must do to be saved from the death-in-life of sheer ennui. A long, lank gentleman, surprisingly thin, of a slightly saturnine cast: he was not only unhappy, he... more...

CHAPTER I. THE SCHOOL-HOUSE. Early this morning I opened a window in my school-house in the glen of Quharity, awakened by the shivering of a starving sparrow against the frosted glass. As the snowy sash creaked in my hand, he made off to the waterspout that suspends its "tangles" of ice over a gaping tank, and, rebounding from that, with a quiver of his little black breast, bobbed through the... more...

WILMINGTON AND ITS INDUSTRIES.SHIP IN DRY-DOCK: HARLAN & HOLLINGSWORTH COMPANY.Sleepy travelers on the great route to Washington, having passed Philadelphia and expecting Baltimore, are attracted, if it is a way-train, by a phenomenon. The engine is observed to slacken, and a little elderly man with a lantern, looking in the twilight like an Arabian Night's phantom with one red eye in the... more...

Simeon Ponsonby—the professor of botany at Harmouth—had married when over forty the eldest daughter of a distinguished though impecunious family in his own college town. His mother, on her deathbed, foresaw that he would need a housekeeper and suggested the match. "Simeon," she said, "it isn't for us to question the Lord's ways, but I am mortally sorry to leave you, my son; it... more...

I FAREWELL TO THE TOWN The town is one large house of which all the little houses are rooms. The streets are the stairs. Those who live always in the town are never out of doors even if they do take the air in the streets. When I came into the town I found that in my soul were reflected its blank walls, its interminable stairways, and the shadows of hurrying traffic. A thousand sights and impressions,... more...

My Darling Children: I wrote these stories, as I have already told you, some years ago, and took a great deal of pains with them. I called them "Life Among the Children;" when, lo and behold! somebody else had written a book with the very same name, but very different stories, and I never knew one word about it. You may believe how sorry I was to take this pretty title when it belonged to... more...

CHAPTER I. A DUCAL MONOMANIAC. The traveller who wishes to go from Poitiers to London by the shortest route will find that the simplest way is to take a seat in the stage-coach which runs to Saumur; and when you book your place, the polite clerk tells you that you must take your seat punctually at six o'clock. The next morning, therefore, the traveller has to rise from his bed at a very early... more...

SAHARA LIMITED Sir Robert Aylward, Bart., M.P., sat in his office in the City of London. It was a very magnificent office, quite one of the finest that could be found within half a mile of the Mansion House. Its exterior was built of Aberdeen granite, a material calculated to impress the prospective investor with a comfortable sense of security. Other stucco, or even brick-built, offices might crumble... more...

THE WIFE-CATCHERS. A LEGEND OF MY UNCLE’S BOOTS. In Four Chapters. The conversation now subsided into “private and confidential” whispers, from which I could learn that Miss O’Brannigan had consented to quit her father’s halls with Terence that very night, and, before the priest, to become his true and lawful wife. It had been previously understood that those of the guests who lived at a... more...

THE PARTY ON SPECIAL NO. 218 Any one who hopes to find in what is here written a work of literature had better lay it aside unread. At Yale I should have got the sack in rhetoric and English composition, let alone other studies, had it not been for the fact that I played half-back on the team, and so the professors marked me away up above where I ought to have ranked. That was twelve years ago, but my... more...