CHAPTER I "How serene the joy,when things that are made for each other meetand are joined;but ah,—how rarely they meet and are joined, the thingsthat are made for each other!"—SAO-NAN. When Peter Moore entered the static-room, picked his way swiftly and unnoticingly across the littered floor, and jerked open the frosted glass door of the chief operator's office, the assembled operators... more...

In an old world garden dreaming,Where the flowers had human names,Methought, in fantastic seeming,They disported as squires and dames. Of old in Rosamond's Bower,With it's peacock hedges of yew,One could never find the flowerUnless one was given the clue;So take the key of the wicket,Who would follow my fancy free,By formal knot and clipt thicket,And smooth greensward so fair to see And while... more...

Germany is furnishing us with some interesting news this week. She has successfully accomplished something which, to simple folks who are not diplomatists, seems like a plain, every-day case of robbery. Here is the story of it, and you can judge for yourselves. Some German missionaries have been killed in China, and Germany has seized a Chinese port in revenge. Missionaries are, as you know, holy and... more...

CANTO V FROM the first circle I descended thusDown to the second, which, a lesser spaceEmbracing, so much more of grief containsProvoking bitter moans.  There, Minos standsGrinning with ghastly feature: he, of allWho enter, strict examining the crimes, Gives sentence, and dismisses them beneath,According as he foldeth him around:For when before him comes th' ill fated soul,It all confesses; and... more...

INTRODUCTION The articles here presented are modern and unhackneyed. Selected primarily as models for teaching the methods of exposition employed in the explanation of mechanisms, processes, and ideas, they are nevertheless sufficiently representative of certain tendencies in science to be of intrinsic value. Indeed, each author is a recognized authority. Another feature is worthy of mention. Although... more...

April 5, 1916. A severe blizzard hit London last week, and Mr. Pemberton-Billing has since been heard to admit, however reluctantly, that there are other powers of the air. After more than five weeks the bubble blown by Sir James Dewar at the Royal Institution on February 17th has burst. A still larger bubble, blown by some eminent German scientists as long ago as August, 1914, is said to be on the... more...

CANTO I His glory, by whose might all things are mov'd,Pierces the universe, and in one partSheds more resplendence, elsewhere less.  In heav'n,That largeliest of his light partakes, was I,Witness of things, which to relate againSurpasseth power of him who comes from thence;For that, so near approaching its desireOur intellect is to such depth absorb'd,That memory cannot follow.... more...

Since the publication of Edward Fitzgerald's classic translation of the Rubaiyat in 1851 - or rather since its general popularity several years later - poets minor and major have been rendering the sincerest form of flattery to the genius of the Irishman who brought Persia into the best regulated families. Unfortunately there was only one Omar and there were scores of imitators who, in order to... more...

SOMETHING AMISS. Everybody knows Canterbury, with its Old-World charms and its ostentatious air of being content to be rather behind the times, of looking down upon the hurrying Americans who dash through its cathedral and take snap-shots at its slums, and at all those busy moderns who cannot afford to take life at its own jog-trot pace. But everybody does not know the charming old halls and... more...

The dark clouds which hung yet over the future of Napoleon Bonaparte, the lieutenant of artillery, were gathering in heavier and heavier masses over all France, and already were overshadowing the throne of the lilies. Marie Antoinette had already abandoned the paradise of innocency in Trianon, and when she came there now it was to weep in silence, to cast away the mask from her face, and under the garb... more...