CHAPTER I. A NEW BOY. "What's your name?" "Diggory Trevanock." The whole class exploded. "Now, then," said Mr. Blake, looking up from his mark-book with a broad grin on his own face—"now, then, there's nothing to laugh at.—Look here," he added, turning to the new boy, "how d'you spell it?" Instead of being at all annoyed... more...

endell Hart had drifted, rather than plunged, into the underground movement. Later, discussing it with other members of the Savers' Conspiracy, he found they had experienced the same slow, almost casual awakening. His own, though, had come at a more appropriate time, just a few weeks before the Great Ritual Sacrifice. The Sacrifice took place only once a decade, on High Holy Day at dawn of the... more...

BYRON. It is one of the singular facts in the history of literature, that the most rootedly conservative country in Europe should have produced the poet of the Revolution. Nowhere is the antipathy to principles and ideas so profound, nor the addiction to moderate compromise so inveterate, nor the reluctance to advance away from the past so unconquerable, as in England; and nowhere in England is there... more...

OVERTON CLAIMS HER OWN "Oh, there goes Grace Harlowe! Grace! Grace! Wait a minute!" A curly-haired little girl hastily deposited her suit case, golf bag, two magazines and a box of candy on the nearest bench and ran toward a quartette of girls who had just left the train that stood puffing noisily in front of the station at Overton. The tall, gray-eyed young woman in blue turned at the call,... more...

The Hudson Valley, above all other places in this country, combines historic and romantic interest with the beauties of nature. It is one hundred and fifty miles crowded with the splendors of mountain and forest and river, and replete with incident and legend. To quote George William Curtis: "Its morning and evening reaches are like the lakes of a dream." Everyone who visits New York comes or... more...

Six Hundred Years ago—What things were like. The afternoon service was over in Lincoln Cathedral, and the congregation were slowly filing out of the great west door. But that afternoon service was six hundred years ago, and both the Cathedral and the congregation would look very strange to us if we saw them now. Those days were well called the Dark Ages, and how dark they were we can scarcely realise... more...

I. A SLOW JOURNEY Again two carriages stood at the front door of the house at Petrovskoe. In one of them sat Mimi, the two girls, and their maid, with the bailiff, Jakoff, on the box, while in the other—a britchka—sat Woloda, myself, and our servant Vassili. Papa, who was to follow us to Moscow in a few days, was standing bareheaded on the entrance-steps. He made the sign of the cross at the... more...

CHAPTER I. MY BIRTH AND HOME—MY PRETTY COUSIN—ACCIDENT TO THE "KITTYWICH"—JOURNEY TO GUERNSEY—PLEADING TO BECOME A CRUSOE—MY WISH GRANTED—OUTFIT SECURED—SAIL TO JETHOU. That Crusoe of Crusoes, Alexander Selkirk, as I am aware, commences his entertaining history with his birth and parentage, and as I am also a Crusoe, although a very minor adventurer, I may as well follow the... more...

CHAPTER I Skinner had inhabited the ironbound enclosure labeled "CASHIER" at McLaughlin & Perkins, Inc., so long, that the messenger boys had dubbed him the "cage man." To them he had become something of a bluff. Skinner's pet abomination was cigarettes, and whenever one of these miniatures in uniform chanced to offend that way, he would turn and frown down upon the culprit.... more...

CHAPTER I. LIVING IN THE COUNTRY—LIFE AT SCHOOL—THE HUT CLUB IS FORMED—THECOMING OF THE CIRCUS. "YES," said Mrs. Dunn to her neighbour, Mrs. Sullivan, "we are expecting great things of Archie, and yet we sometimes hardly know what to think of the boy. He has the most remarkable ideas of things, and there seems to be absolutely no limit to his ambition. He has long since determined... more...