The Christmas ChildBYMrs. G. de Horne VaizeyA happy thought, a cross-country journey, a strange discovery, another happy thought, and many still happier thoughts hereafter!Jack said: "Nonsense! We are all grown up now. Let Christmas alone. Take no notice of it; treat it as if it were an ordinary day." Margaret said: "The servants have all begged for leave. Most of their mothers are dying,... more...

BOOK ONE THE BEATING HEART Jan of Ruffluck Croft never tired of telling about the day when his little girl came into the world. In the early morning he had been to fetch the midwife, and other helpers; all the forenoon and a good part of the afternoon he had sat on the chopping-block, in the woodshed, with nothing to do but to wait. Outside it rained in torrents and he came in for his share of the... more...

THE FIRE-EATERS long time ago there lived a man who had the biggest head in the world. Into it he had crammed all the knowledge that might be gathered from the four corners of the earth. Every one said he was the wisest man living. "If I could only find a wife," said the sage, "as wise for a woman as I am for a man, what a race of head-pieces we could bring into the world!" He waited... more...

THE GENIUS TO BE LOVED In the history of the last two thousand years there is but one Person who has been, and is supremely loved. Many have been loved by individuals, by groups of persons, or by communities; some have received the pliant idolatries of nations, such as heroes and national deliverers; but in every instance the sense of love thus excited has been intimately associated with some triumph... more...

I THOSE RUSSIAN VIOLETS There had been a brilliant reception at the house of Mrs. Adrian Colburn in honor of her guest—a most attractive young woman—from the East. The hours were brief, from five to seven. I had gone late and left early, but while there had made an engagement with Miss Caddington for the large ball to be given that night by the Boltons. Miss Caddington was a debutante. She had been... more...

PART ONE   When Miss Fox-Seton descended from the twopenny bus as it drew up, she gathered her trim tailor-made skirt about her with neatness and decorum, being well used to getting in and out of twopenny buses and to making her way across muddy London streets. A woman whose tailor-made suit must last two or three years soon learns how to protect it from splashes, and how to aid it to retain the... more...

CHAPTER FIRST. INTRODUCTION. One bright afternoon, or rather evening, in May, two girls, with basket in hand, were seen leaving the little seaport town in which they resided, for the professed purpose of primrose gathering, but in reality to enjoy the pure air of the first summer-like evening of a season, which had been unusually cold and backward. Their way lay through bowery lanes scented with sweet... more...

EMMA GOLDMAN ANARCHIST REBEL The hanging of several anarchists in 1887 as a consequence of the Haymarket bombing in Chicago caused many Americans to sympathize with the gibbeted radicals. Youths swathed in bright idealism, men and women rooted in equalitarian democracy, workers trusting in the rectitude of their government—all doubted the guilt of the condemned prisoners and were deeply perturbed by... more...

Chapter I Wherein the lady describes who she was, and by what signs her misfortunes were foreshadowed, and at what time, and where, and in what manner, and of whom she became enamored, with the description of the ensuing delight. In the time when the newly-vestured earth appears more lovely than during all the rest of the year came I into the world, begotten of noble parents and born amid the unstinted... more...

INTRODUCTION. The following treatise is to some extent a re-statement and partly an amplification of a theory I have elsewhere advanced. But as that theory, although it has been advocated by several writers, especially during the past half-century, is not familiar to everybody, some remarks of an explanatory nature are necessary. And if this explanation assumes a narrative form, not without a tinge of... more...