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CHAPTER I The first Penhallow crossed the Alleghanies long before the War for Independence and on the frontier of civilisation took up land where the axe was needed for the forest and the rifle for the Indian. He made a clearing and lived a hard life of peril, wearily waiting for the charred stumps to rot away. The younger men of the name in Colonial days and later left the place early, and for the... more...

PREFACE It was on Friday, August 1, 1919, that "the damned reporters" and the Times correspondent's hatbox went on board the light cruiser Dauntless at Devonport. The Dauntless had just arrived from the Baltic to load up cigarettes—at least, that was the first impression. In the Baltic the rate of exchange had risen from roubles to packets of Players, and a handful of cigarettes would... more...

CHAPTER IHOW MR. OXENHAM SAW THE WHITE BIRD"The hollow oak our palace is,Our heritage the sea." All who have travelled through the delicious scenery of North Devon must needs know the little white town of Bideford, which slopes upwards from its broad tide-river paved with yellow sands, and many-arched old bridge where salmon wait for autumn floods, toward the pleasant upland on the west. Above... more...

SERMON I.  THE MYSTERY OF THE CROSS.  A GOOD FRIDAY SERMON. Philippians ii. 5-8. Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a slave, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient... more...

INTRODUCTION "Kings are thy nursing fathers and their queens thy nursing mothers." From the reign of Edward the Confessor, the last sovereign of the royal Saxon race, till the death of Elizabeth, the last Tudor queen, these words of the old Hebrew prophet were literally applicable to the great West Minster. When Edward knelt within the Benedictine chapel on Thorneye, which had so miraculously... more...

THE DUKE OF ARGYLL. For its size and population Scotland has been remarkably prolific in the rearing of eminent statesmen, soldiers, and litterateurs. Viewed with respect to its relative importance as an item in the map of Europe, it has likewise a most chequered and eventful history—a history to which, in various essentials, no counterpart can be found elsewhere. Chiefly, however, has "the land... more...

INTRODUCTORY.—“Our Mississippi, rolling proudly on,Would sweep them from its path, or swallow up,Like Aaron's rod, those streams of fame and song.”Mrs. Hale. The valley of a river like the channel of a man's career, does not always bear proportion to the magnitude or volume of the current, which flows through it. Mountains, forests, deserts, physical barriers to the former—and the... more...

On a bright, still morning in October, the Doraine sailed from a South American port and turned her glistening nose to the northeast. All told, there were some seven hundred and fifty souls on board; and there were stores that filled her holds from end to end,—grain, foodstuffs, metals, chemicals, rubber and certain sinister things of war. Her passenger list contained the names of men who had... more...

[5] Last year had well advanced towards its middle—in fact it was already April, 1888—before Mr. Froude's book of travels in the West Indies became known and generally accessible to readers in those Colonies. My perusal of it in Grenada about the period above mentioned disclosed, thinly draped with rhetorical flowers, the dark outlines of a scheme to thwart political aspiration in the... more...