WHY AND WHEREFORE When over eighty years of age, the poet Bryant said that he had added more than ten years to his life by taking a simple exercise while dressing in the morning. Those who knew Bryant and the facts of his life never doubted the truth of this statement. I have made inquiries lately among men who are eighty years of age, as to their method of waking up. Almost without exception, I find... more...

It was Madame who first entered the box, and Madame was bright with youthful bloom, bright with jewels, and, moreover, a beauty. She was a little creature, with childishly large eyes, a low, white forehead, reddish-brown hair, and Greek nose and mouth. "Clearly," remarked the old lady in the box opposite, "not a Frenchwoman. Her youth is too girlish, and she has too petulant an air of... more...

THE WIFE I I RECEIVED the following letter: "DEAR SIR, PAVEL ANDREITCH! "Not far from you—that is to say, in the village of Pestrovo—very distressing incidents are taking place, concerning which I feel it my duty to write to you. All the peasants of that village sold their cottages and all their belongings, and set off for the province of Tomsk, but did not succeed in getting there, and... more...

INTRODUCTION This essay on Wisdom and Destiny was to have been a thing of some twenty pages, the work of a fortnight; but the idea took root, others flocked to it, and the volume has occupied M. Maeterlinck continuously for more than two years. It has much essential kinship with the "Treasure of the Humble," though it differs therefrom in treatment; for whereas the earlier work might perhaps be... more...

Sometimes, I know, I must seem a crotchety old man. "Old John Hanson," they call me, and roll their eyes as though to say, "Of course, you have to forgive him on account of his age." But the joke isn't always on me. Not infrequently I gain much amusement observing these cocky youngsters who strut in the blue-and-silver uniforms of the Service in which, until more or less recently,... more...

CHAPTER I 'Are you to be at Lady Clonbrony's gala next week?' said Lady Langdale to Mrs. Dareville, whilst they were waiting for their carriages in the crush-room of the opera house. 'Oh yes! everybody's to be there, I hear,' replied Mrs. Dareville. 'Your ladyship, of course?' 'Why, I don't know—if I possibly can. Lady Clonbrony makes it such a point... more...

HENRY GOWER was dead at sixty-one—the end of a lifelong fraud which never had been suspected, and never would be. With the world, with his acquaintances and neighbors, with his wife and son and daughter, he passed as a generous, warm-hearted, good-natured man, ready at all times to do anything to help anybody, incapable of envy or hatred or meanness. In fact, not once in all his days had he ever... more...

JOURNAL.   In offering this journal to the public, the writer makes no pretensions to authorship, but believes that, although it be written in plain, off-hand style, nevertheless, some portions of it may be interesting to the public, and that if any who may chance to read it are about to start for "Eldorado," they may derive some benefit from it, whether they go over the Plains, or by water.... more...

I. THE THREE HYPOTHESES RESPECTING THE HISTORY OF NATURE We live in and form part of a system of things of immense diversity and perplexity, which we call Nature; and it is a matter of the deepest interest to all of us that we should form just conceptions of the constitution of that system and of its past history. With relation to this universe, man is, in extent, little more than a mathematical point;... more...

Introductory. That room or toleration for another "cook-book" can exist in the public mind, will be denied at once, with all the vigor to be expected from a people overrun with cook-books, and only anxious to relegate the majority of them to their proper place as trunk-linings and kindling-material. The minority, admirable in plan and execution, and elaborate enough to serve all republican... more...