CHAPTER I Henrietta was the third daughter and fifth child of Mr. and Mrs. Symons, so that enthusiasm for babies had declined in both parents by the time she arrived. Still, in her first few months she was bound to be important and take up a great deal of time. When she was two, another boy was born, and she lost the honourable position of youngest. At five her life attained its zenith. She became a... more...

1. Burzee Have you heard of the great Forest of Burzee? Nurse used to sing of it when I was a child. She sang of the big tree-trunks, standing close together, with their roots intertwining below the earth and their branches intertwining above it; of their rough coating of bark and queer, gnarled limbs; of the bushy foliage that roofed the entire forest, save where the sunbeams found a path through... more...

IN WHICH HE BUYS A CHRISTMAS TREE There was never in the world a better fellow than Jimmy Bulstrode. If he had been poorer his generosities would have ruined him over and over again. He was always being taken in, was the recipient of hundreds of begging letters, which he hired another soft-hearted person to read. He offended charitable organizations by never passing a beggar's outstretched hand... more...

Science needed two thousand years to disentangle the earth's orbital movement from the revolutions of the other planets, and the incomparably more arduous problem of distinguishing the solar share in the confused multitude of stellar displacements first presented itself as possibly tractable a little more than a century ago. In the lack for it as yet of a definite solution there is, then, no... more...

CHAPTER I AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR “Oh, what a glorious day!” cried Bessie King, the first of the members of the Manasquan Camp Fire Girls of America to emerge from the sleeping house of Camp Sunset, on Lake Dean, and to see the sun sparkling on the water of the lake. She was not long alone in her enjoyment of the scene, however. “Oh, it’s lovely!” said Dolly Ransom, as, rubbing her eyes... more...

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. (1872) It is not without hesitation that I have taken upon myself the editorship of a work left avowedly imperfect by the author, and, from its miscellaneous and discursive character, difficult of completion with due regard to editorial limitations by a less able hand. Had the author lived to carry out his purpose he would have looked through his Budget again, amplifying... more...

PART I Shepherd's Hey §1 Three marshes spread across the triangle made by the Royal Military Canal and the coasts of Sussex and Kent. The Military Canal runs from Hythe to Rye, beside the Military Road; between it and the flat, white beaches of the Channel lie Romney Marsh, Dunge Marsh and Walland Marsh, from east to west. Walland Marsh is sectored by the Kent Ditch, which draws huge, straggling... more...

"Common Sense About the War" By George Bernard Shaw. "Let a European war break out—the war, perhaps, between the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, which so many journalists and politicians in England and Germany contemplate with criminal levity. If the combatants prove to be equally balanced, it may, after the first battles, smoulder on for thirty years. What will be the population... more...

THE STORY OF JOSIAH HENSON No one ever uttered a more forceful truth than Frederika Bremer when she said in speaking to Americans: "The fate of the Negro is the romance of your history." The sketches of heroes showing the life of those once exploited by Christian men must ever be interesting to those who would know the origin and the development of a civilization distinctly American. In no case... more...

NOTES. OLD SONGS. I heard, "in other days," a father singing a comic old song to one of his children, who was sitting on his knee. This was in Yorkshire: and yet it could hardly be a Yorkshire song, as the scene was laid in another county. It commenced with— "Randle O'Shay has sold his mare For nineteen groats at Warrin'ton fair," and goes on to show how the simpleton was... more...