It is our design to present a pleasing and interesting miscellany, which will serve to beguile the leisure hour, and will at the same time couple instruction with amusement. We have used but little method in the arrangement: Choosing rather to furnish the reader with a rich profusion of and anecdotes, all tending to illustrate the FEMALE CHARACTER, to display its delicacy, its sweetness, its gentle... more...

CHAPTER I STARTLING INTRODUCTION OF TOM TREFETHEN "Look out, there!" "My God, he is under the wheels!" The narrow-gauge train for Red Jacket had just started from the Hancock station, and was gathering quick headway for its first steep grade, when a youth ran from the waiting-room and attempted to leap aboard the "smoker." Missing the step, he fell between two cars, though still... more...

Introduction. “A wet sheet and a flowing sea,    A breeze that follows fast,That fills the white and rustling sail,    And bends the gallant mast.And bends the gallant mast, my boys,    Our good ship sound and free,The hollow oak our palace is,    Our heritage the sea.” It is now some twenty years ago, that the goodly ship Washington, commanded by Mr Erskine, left the port of New... more...

Chapter 1 ON THE LOOK OUT In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in. The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled hair and... more...

A PROLOGUE TO BE SPOKEN BY BETSY Our scene is the wind-swept coast of Devon. By day there is a wide stretch of ocean far below, and the abutments of our stage arise from a dizzy cliff. The time is remote, and ships of forgotten build stand out from Bristol in full sail for the mines of India. But we must be loose and free of precise date lest our plot be shamed by broken fact. A thousand years are but... more...

PREFACE This book is principally intended for those persons of Cornish nationality who wish to acquire some knowledge of their ancient tongue, and to read, write, and perhaps even to speak it.  Its aim is to represent in an intelligible form the Cornish of the later period, and since it is addressed to the general Cornish public rather than to the skilled philologist, much has been left unsaid that... more...

INTRODUCTORY: OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY To Mr. Arthur Wincott, Topeka, Kansas. Dear Wincott,—You write to me, from your “bright home in the setting sun,” with the flattering information that you have read my poor “Letters to Dead Authors.”  You are kind enough to say that you wish I would write some “Letters to Living Authors;” but that, I fear, is out of the question,—for me. A... more...

ARTIST AND PUBLIC In the history of art, as in the history of politics and in the history of economics, our modern epoch is marked off from all preceding epochs by one great event, the French Revolution. Fragonard, who survived that Revolution to lose himself in a new and strange world, is the last at the old masters; David, some sixteen years his junior, is the first of the moderns. Now if we look for... more...

THE COLORS It isn't just colors and bunting—The red and the blue and the white.It's something heaps better and finer,—It's the soul of my country in sight! There's a lot of ceremony 'bout the Flag,Though many half-baked patriots believeSalutin' it and hangin' it correct"Is only loyalty upon the sleeve."But we who work beneath the Flag to-day,Who'll... more...

FOREWORDS When Harrison Ainsworth, in his preface to Rookwood, claimed tobe "the first to write a purely flash song" he was very wide of themark. As a matter of fact, "Nix my doll, pals, fake away!" had beenanticipated, in its treatment of canting phraseology, by nearly three centuries, and subsequently, by authors whose names stand high, in other respects, in English literature. The... more...