CHAPTER I. MORNING DISPUTE AND EVENING CONTENTION. "My sweet friend," said Judge Frank, in a tone of vexation, "it is not worth while reading aloud to you if you keep yawning incessantly, and looking about, first to the right and then to the left;" and with these words he laid down a treatise of Jeremy Bentham, which he had been reading, and rose from his seat. "Ah, forgive me, dear... more...

A COVNTER-BLASTE TO TOBACCO. That the manifolde abuses of this vile custome of Tobacco taking, may the better be espied, it is fit, that first you enter into consideration both of the first originall thereof, and likewise of the reasons of the first entry thereof into this Countrey. For certainely as such customes, that haue their first institution either from a godly, necessary, or honorable ground,... more...

THE HILL CHAPTER I THE MANOR   "Five hundred faces, and all so strange!    Life in front of me—home behind,    I felt like a waif before the wind  Tossed on an ocean of shock and change.   "Chorus. Yet the time may come, as the years go by,    When your heart will thrill    At the thought of the Hill,  And the day that you came so strange and shy." The train slid... more...

THE township of Haverhill, even as late as the close of the seventeenth century, was a frontier settlement, occupying an advanced position in the great wilderness, which, unbroken by the clearing of a white man, extended from the Merrimac River to the French villages on the St. Francois. A tract of twelve miles on the river and three or four northwardly was occupied by scattered settlers, while in the... more...

CHAPTER ITHE ADVENTURE IN THE COULIE The report of a bird gun made the single rider in sight upon the short-grassed plain pull in her pinto and gaze westerly toward the setting sun, now going down in a field of golden glory. The pinto stood like a statue, and its rider seemed a part of the steed, so well did she sit in her saddle. She gazed steadily under her hand–gazed and listened. Finally, she... more...

CHAPTER I. THE FLAME DIVINE Melissa came home from Sunday-school with a feeling she had never had before. To be sure she was frequently discovering, these days, feelings she had never had before. That was the marvellous reward of having grown to be so old; she was ten, now, an advanced age—almost grown up! She could look back, across the eons which separated her from seven-years-old, and dimly... more...

PREFACE During the last decade of Peter Cooper's life, the writer of this biographical sketch enjoyed some degree of intimacy with him, as professional adviser and traveling companion, and also, incidentally, as consulting engineer of the firm of Cooper and Hewitt, and manager of a department in the Cooper Union. This circumstance, together with the preference kindly expressed by Mr. Cooper's... more...

OLD SPOOKSES' PASS. I. We'd camp'd that night on Yaller Bull Flat—  Thar was Possum Billy, an' Tom, an' me.Right smart at throwin' a lariat  Was them two fellers, as ever I see;An' for ridin' a broncho, or argyin' squar  With the devil roll'd up in the hide of a mule,Them two fellers that camp'd with me thar  Would hev made an'... more...

BOOK I CHAPTER I At the beginning of the long twilight of a summer evening, Sam McPherson, a tall big-boned boy of thirteen, with brown hair, black eyes, and an amusing little habit of tilting his chin in the air as he walked, came upon the station platform of the little corn-shipping town of Caxton in Iowa. It was a board platform, and the boy walked cautiously, lifting his bare feet and putting them... more...

VALLEY of the CROEN They say cross-eyed men are bad luck. He stood there, in my doorway, eyeing me up and down with those in-focused black eyes. His face was hideous even if the eyes had been normal. He was slashed with a wide cicatrice of livid scar tissue from one cheekbone across his nose and down to the button of his jaw on the other side. He was big, and he looked like bad news to me. I... more...