PREFACE It is my purpose in these volumes to write a History of Cuba. The title may imply either the land and its natural conditions, or the people and the nation which inhabit it. It in fact implies both, and to both I shall address myself, though it will appropriately be with the latter rather than with the former that the narrative will be most concerned. For it is with Cuba as with other countries:... more...

The History of Company C is properly connected with the history of Oberlin College, the Alma Mater of its organization. The majority of its members were proud to be known as the exponents of the generous, Christian principles, there so fearlessly uttered and so zealously inculcated. The founders of Oberlin were pledged to the general law of benevolence. All known forms of virtue were cheerfully... more...

INTRODUCTION William Beckford, born in 1759, the year before the accession of King George the Third, was the son of an Alderman who became twice Lord Mayor of London.  His family, originally of Gloucestershire, had thriven by the plantations in Jamaica; and his father, sent to school in England, and forming a school friendship at Westminster with Lord Mansfield, began the world in this country as a... more...

Part I Rumours of the existence of a Southern Continent in the Sixteenth Century—JAVE and JAVE LA GRANDE—Authentic Discoveries and visits of the early Navigators—Torres sails between New Guinea and Terra Australis—Voyage of the DUYFHEN in 1606—Dirk Hartog on the West Coast, his inscribed plate—Restored by Vlaming—Afterwards by Hamelin—Nuyts on the South Coast—Wreck of the BATAVIA on... more...

The volume of which the following pages are a translation, has been adopted by the University Commission at Paris among their prize books, and has reached an eighth edition. Perhaps these facts speak sufficiently in its favor; but as translator, and to some extent editor, I wish to add my testimony to the great charm as well as merit of the little work. I sat down to it, I must own, with no special... more...

FOREWORD This is the history of a Lie—of a cruel and terrible Lie invented for the purpose of defaming the entire Jewish people. Given out as fiction, by a German anti-Semitic writer, involved in the Waldeck forgery case, who concealed his identity under the pen-name of an Englishman, it was gradually changed and elaborated, and finally groomed as fact. Agents of the Russian secret police department... more...

CHAPTER I. "SECURITY" On December 1, 1851, Charras[1] shrugged his shoulder and unloaded his pistols. In truth, the belief in the possibility of a coup d'etat had become humiliating. The supposition of such illegal violence on the part of M. Louis Bonaparte vanished upon serious consideration. The great question of the day was manifestly the Devincq election; it was clear that the... 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...

THERE were no two horses to be seen winding along the base of a precipitous hill; and there were no dark-looking riders on those horses which were not to be seen; and it wasn't at the close of a dusky autumn evening; and the setting sun didn't gild, with his departing rays, the steep summit of the mountain tops; and the gloomy cry of the owl was not to be heard from the depths of a... more...

The ancient town and borough of Horsham, which has generally been past over in topographical accounts, as a place unworthy of notice; or lost in the dazzling descriptions, of the “modern maritime Babylon of Sussex,” must always remain a spot, dear to the lover of antiquities, and romantic scenery.  The derivation of its name, has ever continued a matter of great perplexity; which perhaps may be... more...