SIELANKA. An Idyll. In the woods, in the deep woods, was an open glade in which stood the house of the forester Stephan. The house was built of logs packed with moss, and the roof was thatched with straw; hard by the house stood two outbuildings; in front of it was a piece of fenced-in ground, and an old well with a long, crooked sweep; the water in the well was covered with a green vegetation at the... more...

Chapter I The hush of the court, which had been broken when the foreman of the jury returned their verdict, was intensified as the Judge, with a quick glance over his pince-nez at the tall prisoner, marshalled his papers with the precision and method which old men display in tense moments such as these. He gathered them together, white paper and blue and buff and stacked them in a neat heap on a tiny... more...

THE MOUNTAIN SPRING And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.—Revelation 22:17.I wandered down a mountain road,Past flower and rock and lichen gray,Alone with nature and her GodUpon a flitting summer day.The forest skirted to the edgeOf Capon river, Hampshire's gem,Which, bathing many a primrose ledge,Oft sparkled like a diadem.At length a... more...

CHAPTER I GOOD TIMES COMING Hugh looked at the big thermometer alongside the Juggins' front door as he came out, and the mercury was still falling steadily. "It's certainly a whole lot sharper than it was early this morning,Thad. Feels to me as if the first cold wave of the winter had struckScranton." "The ice on our flooded baseball field, and that out at Hobson's mill-pond... more...

INTRODUCTION "Dear foster-mother, on whose ample breast The hungry still find food, the weary rest; The child of want that treads thy happy shore, Shall feel the grasp of poverty no more; His honest toil meet recompense can claim, And Freedom bless him with a freeman's name!" S.M. In our work of "Roughing it in the Bush," I endeavoured to draw a picture of Canadian life, as I found... more...

CHAPTER I. SINGING SAL. On a certain golden afternoon in August, when the sea was as still and radiant as the vaulted blue overhead, and when the earth was lying so hushed and silent that you would have thought it was listening for the chirp of the small birds among the gorse, a young girl of about seventeen or so was walking over the downs that undulate, wave on wave, from Newhaven all along the coast... more...

CHAPTER I THE HIGH SCHOOL SNEAK "I say you did!" cried Fred Ripley, hotly. Dick Prescott's cheeks turned a dull red as he replied, quietly, after swallowing a choky feeling in his throat: "I have already told you that I did not do it." "Then who did do the contemptible thing?" insisted Ripley, sneeringly. Fully forty boys, representing all the different classes at the... more...

CHAPTER ONE “THE WHISPERING VOICE” In the greatest city of the modern world, in the Metropolis of Guilt and Guile—where Alias and Alibi ride in gum-shod limousines while Mary Smith of the pure heart walks the pavements with broken shoes—there is a mansion so rich and so rare that it stands alone. Turret and tower, green-bronze roof, Cararra-marbled portico and iron-grilled gates brought from... more...

The Ideal Book. There is a wide felt need for a worthy book of sound hygienic and medical facts for the non-medical people. The Ideal Book for this mission should be compact in form, but large enough to give the salient facts, and give these in understandable language; it must not be "loaded" with obsolete and useless junk of odds and ends which have long ceased to be even interesting; it must... more...

I was sitting in a birch grove in autumn, near the middle of September. It had been drizzling ever since morning; occasionally the sun shone warmly;—the weather was changeable. Now the sky was overcast with watery white clouds, now it suddenly cleared up for an instant, and then the bright, soft azure, like a beautiful eye, appeared from beyond the dispersed clouds. I was sitting looking about me and... more...