The Prelude —A Note Explanatory— With James Whitcomb Riley, some years ago. This Man From Down On The Farm, made a Reading Tour, of—in Population—more than one-half of this Imperial Republic, including the Cream of the Canadian Provinces. Of that Tour, at some other time, in some more leisurely hour, he desires, if able, to make a full and faithful Record. This, is but a humble Spray of... more...

CHAPTER I. "Who amongst this merry party will become sufficiently sober to assist me in a work of charity?" was Mrs. Hamilton's address, one afternoon, as she entered her daughter's room, where Emmeline, her young friends Lady Florence and Lady Emily Lyle, and even the usually quiet Ellen, were employing themselves in drawing, embroidery, and such light amusements as diligently as the... more...

CHAPTER I—HOW MY MOTHER GOT HER SOFT FACE On the day I was born we bought six hair-bottomed chairs, and in our little house it was an event, the first great victory in a woman’s long campaign; how they had been laboured for, the pound-note and the thirty threepenny-bits they cost, what anxiety there was about the purchase, the show they made in possession of the west room, my father’s unnatural... more...

CHAPTER I THE ANTECEDENTS OF THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR Two men were largely responsible, each in his own way, for the third French Republic, Napoleon III and Bismarck. The one, endeavoring partly at his wife's instigation to renew the prestige of a weakening Empire, and the other, furthering the ambitions of the Prussian Kingdom, set in motion the forces which culminated in the Fourth of September.... more...

There is an hour or so before the train comes puffing round the curve of the Gulf from Cordelio, and you are gone down into the garden for a while because the mosquitoes become tiresome later, and the great shadows of the cypresses are vanishing as the sun sinks behind the purple islands beyond the headlands. You will stay there for a while among the roses and jasmine, and then you will come in and... more...

CHARLES LAMB THE STORY OF HIS LIFE Charles Lamb's biography should be read at length in his essays and his letters—from them we get to know not only the facts of his life but almost insensibly we get a knowledge of the man himself such as cannot be conveyed in any brief summary. He is as a friend, a loved friend, whom it seems almost sacrilegious to summarize in the compact sentences of a... more...

I must have been no more than fifteen or sixteen years old when I first chanced upon Winesburg, Ohio. Gripped by these stories and sketches of Sherwood Anderson's small-town "grotesques," I felt that he was opening for me new depths of experience, touching upon half-buried truths which nothing in my young life had prepared me for. A New York City boy who never saw the crops grow or spent... more...

Chapter One. The New Boy. “Hi! Blacky! Here—hold hard. D’you hear, Snowball?” The last peremptorily. He thus addressed, paused, turned, and eyed somewhat doubtfully, not without a tinge of apprehension, the group of boys who thus hailed him. “What’s your name?” pursued the latter, “Caesar, Pompey, Snowball—what?” “Or Uncle Tom?” came another suggestion. “I—new boy,” was... more...

The Northampton Bank Robbery bout midnight on Tuesday, January 25, 1876, five masked men entered the house of John Whittelsey in Northampton, Massachusetts. Mr. Whittelsey was the cashier of the Northampton National Bank, and was known to have in his possession the keys of the bank building and the combination to the bank vault. The five men entered the house noiselessly, with the aid of false keys,... more...

WALT WHITMAN IN EUROPE. With the death and burial of Walt Whitman passes away the most picturesque figure of contemporary literature. It is true that in England the name of the poet is more familiar than his poetry, and that students of literature are more conversant with the nature of his writings than are the mass of general readers; yet the character of the man and the spirit of his compositions... more...