PRELIMINARY CHAPTER. URSUS.   Ursus and Homo were fast friends. Ursus was a man, Homo a wolf. Their dispositions tallied. It was the man who had christened the wolf: probably he had also chosen his own name. Having found Ursus fit for himself, he had found Homo fit for the beast. Man and wolf turned their partnership to account at fairs, at village fêtes, at the corners of streets where passers-by... more...

THERE were no two horses to be seen winding along the base of a precipitous hill; and there were no dark-looking riders on those horses which were not to be seen; and it wasn't at the close of a dusky autumn evening; and the setting sun didn't gild, with his departing rays, the steep summit of the mountain tops; and the gloomy cry of the owl was not to be heard from the depths of a... more...

CHAPTER XVI. WE slept most all day, and started out at night, a little ways behind a monstrous long raft that was as long going by as a procession.  She had four long sweeps at each end, so we judged she carried as many as thirty men, likely.  She had five big wigwams aboard, wide apart, and an open camp fire in the middle, and a tall flag-pole at each end.  There was a power of style about her.... more...

CHAPTER I. THE THOUGHTS OF YOUTH The sunshine of a day in early spring, honey pale and honey sweet, was showering over the red brick buildings of Queenslea College and the grounds about them, throwing through the bare, budding maples and elms, delicate, evasive etchings of gold and brown on the paths, and coaxing into life the daffodils that were peering greenly and perkily up under the windows of the... more...

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KWAIDAN THE STORY OF MIMI-NASHI-HOICHI More than seven hundred years ago, at Dan-no-ura, in the Straits of Shimonoseki, was fought the last battle of the long contest between the Heike, or Taira clan, and the Genji, or Minamoto clan. There the Heike perished utterly, with their women and children, and their infant emperor likewise—now remembered as Antoku Tenno. And that sea and shore have been... more...

PREFACE At the close of the civil war the need for a market for the surplus cattle of Texas was as urgent as it was general. There had been numerous experiments in seeking an outlet, and there is authority for the statement that in 1857 Texas cattle were driven to Illinois. Eleven years later forty thousand head were sent to the mouth of Red River in Louisiana, shipped by boat to Cairo, Illinois, and... more...

Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men The lack of interest in so-called psychical matters is somewhat surprising. There is, however, more hope of the clearing up of the scientific aspects of these phenomena than ever before. Sir William Crookes, late President of the British Association, has no doubt that thoughts and images may be transferred from one mind to another without the agency of the... more...

CHAPTER I A GLANCE AT THE BACKGROUND It is a gray day in autumn. I am sitting at my desk, wondering how to begin the first chapter of this book about poetry. Outside the window a woman is contentedly kneeling on the upturned brown earth of her tulip-bed, patting lovingly with her trowel as she covers the bulbs for next spring's blossoming. Does she know Katharine Tynan's verses about... more...

What it is that has kept urging me to write down these recollections of Edward Gamaliel Janeway, the physician, would indeed be rather hard to define, but the desire to record a little something of what I had personally come to know of this unusual man made itself felt very shortly after his death, now over five years ago. Since that time this feeling—steadily growing—seems irresistibly to have... more...