CHAPTER I WHAT'S IN HEREDITY Honora Leffingwell is the original name of our heroine. She was born in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, at Nice, in France, and she spent the early years of her life in St. Louis, a somewhat conservative old city on the banks of the Mississippi River. Her father was Randolph Leffingwell, and he died in the early flower of his manhood, while filling with a... more...

PREFACE. Among the multitudes of causes which concur to impair health and produce disease, the most general is the improper quality of our food: this most frequently arises from the injudicious manner in which it is prepared: yet strange, “passing strange,” this is the only one for which a remedy has not been sought; few persons bestow half so much attention on the preservation of their own health,... more...

Guard-mounting was over. The commanding officer in the Adjutant's office was occupied with the daily routine business of a frontier post. At tables near him sat the Post-Adjutant, the acting Sergeant-Major, and a soldier clerk, writing and making up the semi-weekly mail for the post-office beyond the neighboring river. Upon a bench outside the door, serving his tour as office orderly, lounged a... more...

AN UPBRAIDING Now I am dead you sing to me   The songs we used to know,But while I lived you had no wish   Or care for doing so. Now I am dead you come to me   In the moonlight, comfortless;Ah, what would I have given alive   To win such tenderness! When you are dead, and stand to me   Not differenced, as now,But like again, will you be cold   As when we lived, or how? "These... more...

The biography of CHARLES LAMB lies within a narrow compass. It comprehends only few events. His birth and parentage, and domestic sorrows; his acquaintance with remarkable men; his thoughts and habits; and his migrations from one home to another,—constitute the sum and substance of his almost uneventful history. It is a history with one event, predominant. For this reason, and because I, in common... more...

CHATEAUBRIAND. 1768-1848. THE RESTORATION AND FALL OF THE BOURBONS. In this lecture I wish to treat of the restoration of the Bourbons, and of the counter-revolution in France. On the fall of Napoleon, the Prussian king and the Austrian emperor, under the predominating influence of Metternich, in restoring the Bourbons were averse to constitutional checks. They wanted nothing less than absolute... more...

The writing of historical biography is properly a work of partnership, to which public credit is awarded too often in an inverse proportion to the labours expended. One group of historians, labouring in the obscurest depths, dig and prepare the ground, searching and sifting the documentary soil with infinite labour and over an area immensely wide. They are followed by those scholars and specialists in... more...

I Miss Robinson had first seen Wyndham and fallen in love with him on the day that he appeared in the road as a neighbour and set up his studio there. But that was years before, and she had never made his acquaintance. He was the Prince Charming of the romances, handsome, of knightly bearing, with a winning smile on his frank face. From her magic window in the big corner house where the road branched... more...

CHAPTER I. THE SERFS OF PLOUERNEL. The day touched its close. The autumn sun cast its last rays upon one of the villages of the seigniory of Plouernel. A large number of partly demolished houses bore testimony to having been recently set on fire during one of the wars, frequent during the eleventh century, between the feudal lords of France. The walls of the huts of the village, built in pise, or of... more...

Crossing the Durban Bar. The steamship Amatikulu was drawing near the end of her voyage. A fresh breeze was ploughing up the blue waves of the Indian Ocean, hurling off their crests in white, foamy masses, casting showers of salt spray upon the wet decks of the vessel as she plunged her nose into each heaving, tossing billow, and leaped up again with a sudden jerk which was more than lively, and... more...