POET LAUREATE. This book in its progress has recalled often to my memory a man with whose friendship we were once honoured, to whom no region of English literature was unfamiliar, and who, whilst rich in all the noble gifts of nature, was most eminently distinguished by the noblest and the rarest,—just judgment and high-hearted patriotism. It would have been hence a peculiar pleasure and pride to... more...

INTRODUCTION It is at my persuasion that these poems are now published. The earliest of them were read to me in London in 1896, when the writer was seventeen; the later ones were sent to me from India in 1904, when she was twenty-five; and they belong, I think, almost wholly to those two periods. As they seemed to me to have an individual beauty of their own, I thought they ought to be published. The... more...

PREFACE It comes to me as a very welcome piece of news, and yet a piece of news which I have been long expecting, that a special American edition of Edmund Leamy's Irish fairy tales is about to be published. This, then, will be the third issue of the little book. I venture to predict that it will not be the last; and I fancy the American publisher who has had the judgment to take the matter up... more...

CHAPTER I Bram Johnson was an unusual man, even for the northland. He was, above all other things, a creature of environment—and necessity, and of that something else which made of him at times a man with a soul, and at others a brute with the heart of a devil. In this story of Bram, and the girl, and the other man, Bram himself should not be blamed too much. He was pathetic, and yet he was terrible.... more...

PROBLEM I THE GOLDEN SLIPPER "She's here! I thought she would be. She's one of the three young ladies you see in the right-hand box near the proscenium." The gentleman thus addressed—a man of middle age and a member of the most exclusive clubs—turned his opera glass toward the spot designated, and in some astonishment retorted: "She? Why those are the Misses Pratt and—"... more...

The Head-hunter It was hot in the cabin of the freighter Asiatic Dream. The heaviness of the tropical heat outside the ship penetrated through the steel and flaking paint of the deck to turn the cabin into an oven. Rick Brant and Don Scott, stripped to their shorts, were oblivious of the heat. They sat hunched over a three-dimensional chessboard, studying the complex moves of their newest hobby. Now... more...

Stephen Knight was very angry, though he meant to be kind and patient with Margot. Perhaps, after all, she had not given the interview to the newspaper reporter. It might be what she herself would call a "fake." But as for her coming to stop at a big, fashionable hotel like the Carlton, in the circumstances she could hardly have done anything in worse taste. He hated to think that she was... more...

CHAPTER I. In a small house, in a back street, in the large manufacturing town of Cottonborough, the young wife of “Cobbler” Horn lay dying. It was the dusk of a wild evening in early winter; and the cruel cough, which could be heard every now and then, in the lulls of the wind, from the room upstairs, gave deepening emphasis to the sad fact that the youthful wife and mother—for such also she... more...

CHAPTER I THE SHADOW OF A COWL Keppel Stuart, M.D., F. R. S., awoke with a start and discovered himself to be bathed in cold perspiration. The moonlight shone in at his window, but did not touch the bed, therefore his awakening could not be due to this cause. He lay for some time listening for any unfamiliar noise which might account for the sudden disturbance of his usually sound slumbers. In the... more...

I When Hugh Seymour was nine years of age he was sent from Ceylon, where his parents lived, to be educated in England. His relations having, for the most part, settled in foreign countries, he spent his holidays as a very minute and pale-faced "paying guest" in various houses where other children were of more importance than he, or where children as a race were of no importance at all. It was... more...