INTRODUCTION In preparing this, his latest volume, the author found himself embarrassed from the beginning, because of the large amount of material which came into his hands, and the consequent difficulty of selection and condensation. There is not a chapter which might not have been extended to twice its present length, nor a fact stated, or argument used, which might not have been supplemented by... more...

THE WISE GRASSHOPPER "Come, Billy!" Billy dropped his tin-soldier on the ground and ran in to help his mother wipe the dishes. She gave him a nice, fresh towel and he began to rub the tin plates as fast as he could. He never put one down until he could see himself in it. As for the tin cups, his mother sometimes thought he would rub them entirely away! But he never did quite that. You see,... more...

TEDDY AND THE CALF. "Oh yes, I'll repeat it if you like; but I'd rather you didn't tell Teddy that you heard it, for he is already much too proud. This is the way it goes:   Young Ted was a rider bold,  Who never did things by half,  And so he hitched to his cart one day  A strong and frolicsome calf.   Away he went, and on behind  Came a troop of merry boys,  Who... more...

He lit a cigarette, the last one they had, and asked his wife "Want to share it?" "No. That's all right." Diane sat at the viewport of the battered old Gormann '87, a small figure of a woman hunched over and watching the parade of asteroids like tiny slow-moving incandescent flashes. Ralph looked at her and said nothing. He remembered what it was like when she had worked by... more...

On the veranda of the Bella Union Hotel, San Francisco, a man sat enjoying his morning pipe. The Bella Union overlooked the Plaza of that day, a dusty, unkempt, open space, later to be swept and graded and dignified into Portsmouth Square. The man was at the younger fringe of middle life. He was dressed neatly and carefully in the fashionable costume of the time, which was the year of grace 1852. As to... more...

CHAPTER I. The best bed-chamber, with its hangings of crimson moreen, was opened and aired—a performance which always caused my eight little brothers and sisters to place themselves in convenient positions for being stumbled over, to the great annoyance of industrious damsels, who, armed with broom and duster, endeavored to render their reign as arbitrary as it was short. For some time past, the... more...

CHAPTER I ANCESTRY AND BIRTH All history, says Emerson, "resolves itself into the biographies of a few stout and earnest persons." These remarks find exemplification in the life of William Ewart Gladstone, of whom they are pre-eminently true. His recorded life, from the early period of his graduation to his fourth premiership, would embrace in every important respect not only the history of the... more...

I. "O, Auntee, what is it?" The awed young voice paused at the threshold. It was a sight the little girl had never witnessed before—she had seen Auntee sad at occasional intervals, and a few times had looked upon tears in the usually merry eyes of her beloved chum, but never before had she beheld Auntee sobbing in such an abandonment of grief. There was a very tender tie of love between these... more...

"Every state,Allotted to the race of man below,Is in proportion, doom'd to taste some sorrow."—Rowe. The Ion family were at home again after their summer on the New Jersey coast. It was a delightful morning early in October: the dew-drops on the still green grass of the neatly kept lawn sparkled in the rays of the newly risen sun; the bright waters of the lakelet also, as, ruffled by the... more...

"Quite impossible, as you see, to start without an introduction," laughed Ivan. "Well, then, I mean to place the event described in the poem in the sixteenth century, an age—as you must have been told at school—when it was the great fashion among poets to make the denizens and powers of higher worlds descend on earth and mix freely with mortals... In France all the notaries'... more...