BRIEF FOREWORD With sincere pleasure the author would acknowledge the uniform courtesy of editors and publishers in permitting him to reprint many of the articles comprised in this volume, from the various periodicals in which they first appeared. He also desires to express his special indebtedness to Mr. Charles E. Aiken, of Colorado Springs, Colorado, whose contributions to the ornithology of the... more...

STORY OF THE DOOR Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but which... more...

On approaching the task of writing this Note for Victory, the first thing I am conscious of is the actual nearness of the book, its nearness to me personally, to the vanished mood in which it was written, and to the mixed feelings aroused by the critical notices the book obtained when first published almost exactly a year after the beginning of the war. The writing of it was finished in 1914 long... more...

IINTRODUCTION The best things in an artist's work are so much a matter of intuition, that there is much to be said for the point of view that would altogether discourage intellectual inquiry into artistic phenomena on the part of the artist. Intuitions are shy things and apt to disappear if looked into too closely. And there is undoubtedly a danger that too much knowledge and training may supplant... more...

LIVETTE AND ZINZARA A shadow suddenly darkened the narrow window. Livette, who was running hither and thither, setting the table for supper, in the lower room of the farm-house of the Château d’Avignon, gave a little shriek of terror, and looked up. The girl had an instinctive feeling that it was neither father nor grandmother, nor any of her dear ones, but some stranger, who sought amusement by... more...

CHAPTER I THE NORTH RAID An hour before, Deal Sanderson had opened his eyes. He had been comfortably wrapped in his blanket; his head had been resting on a saddle seat. His sleep over, he had discovered that the saddle seat felt hard to his cheek. In changing his position he had awakened. His face toward the east, he had seen a gray streak widening on the horizon—a herald of the dawn. Sanderson found... more...

FOR THE BEST. Miss CAROWTHERS'S educational hotbed of female innocence was about to undergo desolation by the temporary dispersal of its intellectual buds and blossoms to their native soils, therefrom to fill home-atmospheres with the mental fragrance of "all the branches." Holiday Week drew near, when, as Miss CAROWTHERS Ritually expressed it, "all who were true believers of the... more...

CHAPTER ONE I spent one-third of my journey looking out of the window of a first-class carriage, the next in a local motor-car following the course of a trout stream in a shallow valley, and the last tramping over a ridge of downland through great beech-woods to my quarters for the night. In the first part I was in an infamous temper; in the second I was worried and mystified; but the cool twilight of... more...

INTRODUCTION. Brantwood, 14th March, 1874. Yesterday evening I was looking over the first book in which I studied Botany,—Curtis's Magazine, published in 1795 at No. 3, St. George's Crescent, Blackfriars Road, and sold by the principal booksellers in Great Britain and Ireland. Its plates are excellent, so that I am always glad to find in it the picture of a flower I know. And I came... more...

CHAPTER I PAUL, ARRIVED IN A STRANGE LAND, LEARNS MANY THINGS, AND GOES TO MEET THE MAN IN GREY. Fate intended me for a singularly fortunate man. Properly, I ought to have been born in June, which being, as is well known, the luckiest month in all the year for such events, should, by thoughtful parents, be more generally selected. How it was I came to be born in May, which is, on the other hand, of all... more...