THEday before Christmas, in the year of our Lord 722. Broad snow-meadows glistening white along the banks of the river Moselle; pallid hill-sides blooming with mystic roses where the glow of the setting sun still lingered upon them; an arch of clearest, faintest azure bending overhead; in the center of the aerial landscape of the massive walls of the cloister of Pfalzel, gray to the east, purple to the... more...

MASSIMILLA DONI As all who are learned in such matters know, the Venetian aristocracy is the first in Europe. Its Libro d'Oro dates from before the Crusades, from a time when Venice, a survivor of Imperial and Christian Rome which had flung itself into the waters to escape the Barbarians, was already powerful and illustrious, and the head of the political and commercial world. With a few rare... more...

Relief from Railroad Delays and Embargoes. Through the cooperation of State Councils of Defense, Chambers of Commerce, local War Boards, and Motor Clubs, the Council of National Defense, through its Highways Transport Committee and its State Councils Section is building up a system for more efficient utilization of the highways of the country as a means of affording merchants and manufacturers relief... more...

It is certainly a curious fact that so many of the voices of what is called our modern religion have come from countries which are not only simple, but may even be called barbaric. A nation like Norway has a great realistic drama without having ever had either a great classical drama or a great romantic drama. A nation like Russia makes us feel its modern fiction when we have never felt its ancient... more...

BAR BARRED! SCENE—A Parliamentary Committee Room. Committee sitting at horse-shoe table. Bar crowded at table covered with plans, custards, buns, agreements, and ginger-beer. Huge plans hanging to walls. View in distance of St. Thomas's Hospital. East-West Diddlesex Railway Extension Bill under consideration. Expert Witness standing at reading-desk under examination. Junior Counsel (for... more...

STEPHEN ARCHER Stephen Archer was a stationer, bookseller, and newsmonger in one of the suburbs of London. The newspapers hung in a sort of rack at his door, as if for the convenience of the public to help themselves in passing. On his counter lay penny weeklies and books coming out in parts, amongst which the Family Herald was in force, and the London Journal not to be found. I had occasion once to... more...

KENNINGTON COMMON. Before all traces be lost of Kennington Common, so soon to be distinguished by the euphonious epithet of Park, let me put a Query to some of your antiquarian readers in relation thereunto; and suffer me to make the Query a peg, whereon to hang sundry and divers little notes. And pray let no one ridicule the idea that Kennington has its antiquities; albeit that wherever you look, new... more...

CHAPTER I OUR NATIONAL MILITARY HERO Since the end of the civil war in the United States, whoever has occasion to name the three most distinguished representatives of our national greatness is apt to name Washington, Lincoln, and Grant. General Grant is now our national military hero. Of Washington it has often been said that he was "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his... more...

Out of the Ashes Old Troy reaped rue in the womb of yearsFor stolen Helen's sake;Till tenfold retribution rearsIts wreck on embers slaked with tearsThat mended no heart-ache.The wail of the women sold as slavesLest Troy breed sons againDreed o'er a desert of nameless graves,The heaps and the hills that are Trojan gravesDeep-runneled by the rain. But Troy lives on. Though Helen's rapeAnd... more...

Chapter I. One pleasant summer morning Alphonzo was amusing himself by swinging on a gate in front of his mother’s house. His cousin Malleville, who was then about eight years old, was sitting upon a stone outside of the gate, by the roadside, in a sort of corner that was formed between the wall and a great tree which was growing there. Malleville was employed in telling her kitten a story. The... more...