CHAPTER I Private Harry Hawke, of the 2/12th Battalion Royal Reedshire Regiment (T.F.), sat on the step of the fire trench, his back against the parapet, busy with the bolt of his rifle. There were two things he loved more than anything else in life, and that rifle was one of them. The other was his platoon commander, Captain Bob Dashwood, who chanced to be coming along the communication at the moment,... more...

As I sit by my Christmas fire I now and then give it a poke with a bayonet. It is an old-fashioned British bayonet which has seen worse days. I picked it up in a little shop in Birmingham for two shillings. I was attracted to it as I am to all reformed characters. The hardened old sinner, having had enough of war, was a candidate for a peaceful position. I was glad to have a hand in his reformation. To... more...

I 1 Barbara wished she would come back. For the last hour Fanny Waddington had kept on passing in and out of the room through the open door into the garden, bringing in tulips, white, pink, and red tulips, for the flowered Lowestoft bowls, hovering over them, caressing them with her delicate butterfly fingers, humming some sort of song to herself. The song mixes itself up with the Stores list Barbara... more...

THERE ARE CRIMES AND CRIMES INTRODUCTION Strindberg was fifty years old when he wrote "There Are Crimes and Crimes." In the same year, 1899, he produced three of his finest historical dramas: "The Saga of the Folkungs," "Gustavus Vasa," and "Eric XIV." Just before, he had finished "Advent," which he described as "A Mystery," and which was published... more...

THE BIG DRUM   THE FIRST ACT The scene is a room, elegantly decorated, in a flat in South Audley Street. On the right, two windows give a view, through muslin curtains, of the opposite houses. In the wall facing the spectator are two doors, one on the right, the other on the left. The left-hand door opens into the room from a dimly-lighted corridor, the door on the right from the dining-room. Between... more...

PREFACE School and Home Cooking is a text which can be placed in the hands of the pupils and used by them as a guide both in the school and home. Its use eliminates note-taking (which in reality is dictation) and thus saves much time. The psychological method of education, which treats first of material within the experience of the beginner and with that as a basis develops new material to meet the... more...

I. ITS NATURE. When one thinks of the marvellously nourishing and stimulating virtue of cocoa, and of the exquisite and irresistible dainties prepared from it, one cannot wonder that the great Linnæus should have named it theo broma, "the food of the gods." No other natural product, with the exception of milk, can be said to serve equally well as food or drink, or to possess nourishing and... more...

BRANCH I. Hear ye the history of the most holy vessel that is called Graal, wherein the precious blood of the Saviour was received on the day that He was put on rood and crucified in order that He might redeem His people from the pains of hell. Josephus set it in remembrance by annunciation of the voice of an angel, for that the truth might be known by his writing of good knights, and good worshipful... more...

SONS OF THE NORTH Three men stood ankle deep in mud on the shore of a jungle river, silently watching a ribbon of smoke drift and dissolve above the somber mass of trees to the northwest. Three men of widely different types they were, yet all cradled in the same far-off northern land. The tallest, lean bodied but broad shouldered, black of hair and gray of eye, held himself in soldierly fashion and... more...

PREFACE. The unexpectedly favorable reception of the poetical compilation entitled "Child Life" has induced its publishers to call for the preparation of a companion volume of prose stories and sketches, gathered, like the former, from the literature of widely separated nationalities and periods. Illness, preoccupation, and the inertia of unelastic years would have deterred me from the... more...