Canaples, brother of the Marechal de Crequi, wished to marry Mademoiselle de Vivonne who was no longer young, but was distinguished by talent, virtue and high birth; she had not a penny. The Cardinal de Coislin, thinking Canaples too old to marry, told him so. Canaples said he wanted to have children. "Children!" exclaimed the Cardinal. "But she is so virtuous!" Everybody burst out... more...

PREFACE On a mild February afternoon I was waiting for the train at a wayside station in north-western Banat. So unimportant was that station that it was connected neither by telegraph nor telephone with any other station, and thus there was no means of knowing how long I would have to wait. The movements of the train in those parts could never, so I gathered, be foretold, and on that afternoon it was... more...

INTRODUCTORY. "If humour only meant laughter," said Thackeray, in his essay on the English humorists, "you would scarcely feel more interest about humorous writers than the life of poor Harlequin, who possesses with these the power of making you laugh. But the men regarding whose lives and stories you have curiosity and sympathy appeal to a great number of our other faculties, besides our... more...

INTRODUCTION "When I first dabbled in this art, the old distemper call'd Melancholy was exchang'd for Vapours, and afterwards for the Hypp, and at last took up the now current appellation of the Spleen, which it still retains, tho' a learned doctor of the west, in a little tract he hath written, divides the Spleen and Vapours, not only into the Hypp, the Hyppos, and the Hyppocons;... more...

MAN PROPOSES. "H'm! And you scarcely remember your mother, I suppose?" "No, Lucian; I was such a mere babe when she died, I have often wondered what it would be like to have a mother. Auntie Hagar was always very kind to me, however; so kind, in fact, that my step-father, fearing, he said, that I would grow up self-willed and disobedient, sent her away, and procured the services of the... more...

CHAPTER I AN ESKIMO IGLOO "How could William get the croup that way?" Violet asked with much emphasis. Of course, Vi was always asking questions—so many questions, indeed, that it was often impossible for her elders to answer them all; and certainly Rose and Russ Bunker, who were putting together a "cut-up" puzzle on the table, could not be bothered by Vi's insistence. "I... more...

CHAPTER I. The Jubilee Monarch, King George III., and his last name-sake, had succeeded so much that was unsettled in the previous hundred years, that the last half of the 18th Century was a period almost of comparative quiet in home affairs. Abroad were stirring events in abundance in which England played its part, for the century gives, at a rough calculation, 56 years of war to 44 years of peace,... more...

PART ONE IN WHICH PETER MEETS A DRAGON, AND THE LOVELY LADY MAKES HER APPEARANCE The walls of the Wonderful House rose up straight and shining, pale greenish gold as the slant sunlight on the orchard grass under the apple trees; the windows that sprang arching to the summer blueness let in the scent of the cluster rose at the turn of the fence, beginning to rise above the dusty smell of the country... more...

STRONG SOULS.   John x. 10 p. (Revised Version): "I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly." Life is a gift of very unequal distribution. I am not speaking merely of length of life, though that is an important element in the case: there may be sad and quiet years which do not count: we have known existences which crept on in one dull round, from petty pleasure to petty... more...

INTRODUCTION Victor Hugo was thinking much of Æschylus and his Prometheus at the time he conceived the figure of Gilliatt, heroic warrer with the elements. But it is to a creature of the Gothic mind like Byron's Manfred, and not to any earlier, or classic, type of the eternal rebellion against fate or time or circumstance, that Hugo's readers will be tempted to turn for the fellow to his... more...