Chapter 6 A Cub-pilot's Experience WHAT with lying on the rocks four days at Louisville, and some other delays, the poor old 'Paul Jones' fooled away about two weeks in making the voyage from Cincinnati to New Orleans. This gave me a chance to get acquainted with one of the pilots, and he taught me how to steer the boat, and thus made the fascination of river life more potent than ever... more...

Identification is Important Identifying waterfowl gives many hours of enjoyment to millions of people. This guide will help you recognize birds on the wing—it emphasizes their fall and winter plumage patterns as well as size, shape, and flight characteristics. It does not include local names. Recognizing the species of ducks and geese can be rewarding to birdwatchers and hunters—and the ducks.... more...

THE LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT. The illustrious woman who is the subject of these volumes makes a remark to her publisher which is at least as relevant now as it was then. Can nothing be done, she asks, by dispassionate criticism towards the reform of our national habits in the matter of literary biography? 'Is it anything short of odious that as soon as a man is dead his desk should be raked, and every... more...

CHURCH WORK AMONG THE NEGROES IN THE SOUTH I take as the South the eleven old slave states, which stood at one time in armed array against the rest of the United States, which are to-day as loyal and true to the General Government as any other states in this great and favored land of ours. They are Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana,... more...

CHAPTER I. There have been many attempts to discover a northwest passage to the East Indies or China. Some of these attempts have been disastrous, but none fruitless. They have all led to other discoveries of scarcely inferior importance, and so recently as within the past twelve months the discovery of a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans has been made. It was in the attempt to find a new... more...

CHAPTER I HISTORY OF THE BUILDING Of the churches connected with the religious houses which once existed in the county of Dorset, three only remain to the present day. Of some of the rest we have ruins, others have entirely disappeared. But the town of Sherborne, once the bishop-stool of the sainted Aldhelm, who overlooked a vast diocese comprising a great portion of the West Saxon kingdom, has its... more...

CAPTAIN SHARKEY: HOW THE GOVERNOR OF SAINT KITT'S CAME HOME When the great wars of the Spanish Succession had been brought to an end by the Treaty of Utrecht, the vast number of privateers which had been fitted out by the contending parties found their occupation gone. Some took to the more peaceful but less lucrative ways of ordinary commerce, others were absorbed into the fishing-fleets, and a... more...

INTRODUCTION English verse allegory, humorous or serious, political or moral, has deep roots; a reprint such as the present is clearly no place for a discussion of the subject at large: it need only be recalled here that to the age that produced The Pilgrim's Progress the art form was not new. Throughout his life Dryden had his enemies, Prior and Montague in their satire of The Hind and the... more...

INTRODUCTION The extreme rarity of The Death-Wake is a reason for its republication, which may or may not be approved of by collectors. Of the original edition the Author says that more than seventy copies were sold in the first week of publication, but thereafter the publisher failed in business. Mr. Stoddart recovered the sheets of his poem, and his cook gradually, and perhaps not injudiciously,... more...

A note about this story This story is from my collection, "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," published by Four Walls Eight Windows Press in September, 2003, ISBN 1568582862. I've released this story, along with five others, under the terms of a Creative Commons license that gives you, the reader, a bunch of rights that copyright normally reserves for me, the creator. I recently did the... more...