CHAPTER I. STEPHEN GIRARD. One May morning, in the year 1776, the mouth of the Delaware Bay was shrouded in a dense fog, which cleared away toward noon, and revealed several vessels just off the capes. From one of these, a sloop, floated the flag of France and a signal of distress. An American ship ran alongside the stranger, in answer to her signal, and found that the French captain had lost his... more...

THE THREE SISTERS Thirty years ago on a wet autumn evening the household of Mallett's Lodge was gathered round the death-bed of Ursula Mallow, the eldest of the three sisters who inhabited it. The dingy moth-eaten curtains of the old wooden bedstead were drawn apart, the light of a smoking oil-lamp falling upon the hopeless countenance of the dying woman as she turned her dull eyes upon her... more...

Our Pretty Dragon Flies Come, children; come with me. Come to a pond I know of. See how the water shines in the sun. Over there is an old log lying on the edge of the pond. It is covered with green moss, and a green frog is sitting on one end of it. Let us go and sit on the other end. Goop! he says, and—plump! he has jumped into the water. That is too bad, frog; we did not mean to disturb you. How... more...

CHAPTER I. STAR BRIGHT The Captain had sold all his lobsters. They had been particularly fine ones, and had gone off "like hot cakes," everyone who passed by the wharf stopping to buy one or two. Now the red dory was empty, and the Captain had washed her out with his usual scrupulous care, and was making preparations for his homeward voyage, when he was hailed by a cheery voice from the street.... more...

All day Sunday they had raised the devil from attic to cellar; Mrs. Farren was in tears, Howker desperate. Not one out of the fifteen servants considered necessary to embellish the Seagrave establishment could do anything with them after Kathleen Severn's sudden departure the week before. When the telegram announcing her mother's sudden illness summoned young Mrs. Severn to Staten Island,... more...

INTRODUCTION. "I have the feeling that every man's biography is at his own expense. He furnishes not only the facts, but the report. I mean that all biography is autobiography. It is only what he tells of himself that comes to be known and believed." So writes the man whose life we are to pass in review, and it is certainly as true of him as of any author we could name. He delineates... more...

CHAPTER I. He had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean anniversaries, and loved them still less when they made a pretence of a figure.  Celebrations and suppressions were equally painful to him, and but one of the former found a place in his life.  He had kept each year in his own fashion the date of Mary Antrim’s death.  It would be more to the point perhaps to say that this occasion kept... more...

PIERRE GRASSOU Whenever you have gone to take a serious look at the exhibition of works of sculpture and painting, such as it has been since the revolution of 1830, have you not been seized by a sense of uneasiness, weariness, sadness, at the sight of those long and over-crowded galleries? Since 1830, the true Salon no longer exists. The Louvre has again been taken by assault,—this time by a populace... more...

MEMOIRSOF AN English Officer, &c. In the year one Thousand six Hundred seventy two, War being proclaimed with Holland, it was looked upon among Nobility and Gentry, as a Blemish, not to attend the Duke of York aboard the Fleet, who was then declared Admiral. With many others, I, at that Time about twenty Years of Age, enter'd my self a Voluntier on board the London, commanded by Sir Edward... more...

THE SEVEN DEVILS It was very warm in the inn room, but it was so much warmer outside, in the waning flames of the late September evening, that the dark room seemed veritably cool to those who escaped into its shelter from the fading sunlight outside. A window was open to let in what little air was stirring, and from that window a spectator with a good head might look down a sheer drop of more than... more...