Reader, if thou hast never visited the Fern Isles, but intendest to visit them, thou hast a pleasure in reserve—a positive, downright, profitable pleasure—profitable as regards the health of the body, for a trip upon the sea makes the blood feel ten years younger, and dance in the veins as merrily as the waves around us; and profitable also to the mind, by filling it with fresh objects for wonder... more...

IA month without sight of the sunRising or reigning or settingThrough days without use of the day,Who calls it the month of May?The sense of the name is undoneAnd the sound of it fit for forgetting.We shall not feel if the sun rise,We shall not care when it sets:If a nightingale make night's airAs noontide, why should we care?Till a light of delight that is done rise,Extinguishing grey... more...

CHAPTER I—SOMETHING TO BE DONE He was a very sick white man.  He rode pick-a-back on a woolly-headed, black-skinned savage, the lobes of whose ears had been pierced and stretched until one had torn out, while the other carried a circular block of carved wood three inches in diameter.  The torn ear had been pierced again, but this time not so ambitiously, for the hole accommodated no more than a... more...

CHAPTER FIRST. Wiser Raymondus, in his closet pent,Laughs at such danger and adventurementWhen half his lands are spent in golden smoke,And now his second hopeful glasse is broke,But yet, if haply his third furnace hold,Devoteth all his pots and pans to gold.* * The author cannot remember where these lines are to be found: perhaps in Bishop Hall's Satires. [They occur in Book iv. Satire iii.]... more...

CHAPTER I SPEECH Importance of Speech. There never has been in the history of the world a time when the spoken word has been equaled in value and importance by any other means of communication. If one traces the development of mankind from what he considers its earliest stage he will find that the wandering family of savages depended entirely upon what its members said to one another. A little later... more...

SAKUNTALA or THE LOST RING. In ancient days, there was a mighty king of the Lunar dynasty by name Dushyanta. He was the king of Hastinapur. He once goes out a-hunting and in the pursuit of a deer comes near the hermitage of the sage Kanwa, the chief of the hermits, where some anchorites request him not to kill the deer. The king feels thirsty and was seeking water when he saw certain maidens of the... more...

wenty years had left no trace inside Sam Kee's little shop on Mott Street. There were the same dusty jars of ginseng root and tigers' whiskers, the same little bronze Buddahs, the same gim-cracks mixed with fine jade. Edith Williams gave a little murmur of pleasure as the door shut behind them. "Mark," she said, "it hasn't changed! It doesn't look as if a thing had been... more...

THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. IN September of the year during the February of which Hawthorne had completed "The Scarlet Letter," he began "The House of the Seven Gables." Meanwhile, he had removed from Salem to Lenox, in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where he occupied with his family a small red wooden house, still standing at the date of this edition, near the Stockbridge Bowl.... more...

CHAPTER I THE MAN IN SECTION THIRTEENBARBARA THURSTON awakened with a violent start."Wha—a-at is it?" she muttered, then opened her eyes wide. In the darkness of the Pullman berth she could see nothing at all save a faint perpendicular line of light at the edges of the curtains that enclosed the section. "I—I wonder what made me wake up so suddenly?" Barbara put out a groping hand.... more...

They ran through the streets of the seaport town;They peered from the decks of the ships that lay:The cold sea-fog that came whitening downWas never as cold or white as they. "Ho, Starbuck and Pinckney and Tenterden!  Run for your shallops, gather your men,  Scatter your boats on the lower bay." Good cause for fear! In the thick middayThe hulk that lay by the rotting pier,Filled with the... more...