AMERICAN ANTIQUITIES. [Sidenote: Geology and Archaeology.] The sciences of geology and archaeology, working side by side, have made a wonderful progress in the past half a century. The one, seeking for the history and transformations of the physical earth, and the other, aiming to discover the antiquity, differences of race, and social and ethnical development of man, have obtained results which we... more...

CHAPTER I. Continuation from June 1788 to July 1789—Author travels to collect further evidence—great difficulties in obtaining it—forms committees on his tour—Privy council resume the examinations—inspect cabinet of African productions—obliged to leave many of the witnesses in behalf of the abolition unexamined—prepare their report—Labours of the committee in the interim—Proceedings... more...

THE PARTY ON SPECIAL NO. 218 Any one who hopes to find in what is here written a work of literature had better lay it aside unread. At Yale I should have got the sack in rhetoric and English composition, let alone other studies, had it not been for the fact that I played half-back on the team, and so the professors marked me away up above where I ought to have ranked. That was twelve years ago, but my... more...

PREFACE In the execution of the present task (which I took over about two years ago from hands worthier than mine, but then more occupied) some difficulties of necessity occurred which did not present themselves to myself when I undertook the volume of Elizabethan Literature, or to my immediate predecessor in grappling with the period between 1660 and 1780. The most obvious and serious of these was the... more...

THE WIFE-CATCHERS. A LEGEND OF MY UNCLE’S BOOTS. In Four Chapters. The conversation now subsided into “private and confidential” whispers, from which I could learn that Miss O’Brannigan had consented to quit her father’s halls with Terence that very night, and, before the priest, to become his true and lawful wife. It had been previously understood that those of the guests who lived at a... more...

SAHARA LIMITED Sir Robert Aylward, Bart., M.P., sat in his office in the City of London. It was a very magnificent office, quite one of the finest that could be found within half a mile of the Mansion House. Its exterior was built of Aberdeen granite, a material calculated to impress the prospective investor with a comfortable sense of security. Other stucco, or even brick-built, offices might crumble... more...

CHAPTER I BOY SCOUTS IN A STRANGE LAND "Fine country, this—to get out of!" "What's the difficulty, kid?" Jimmie McGraw, the first speaker, turned back to the interior of the apartment in which he stood with a look of intense disgust on freckled face. "Oh, nothin' much," he replied, wrinkling his nose comically, "only Broadway an' the Bowery are too far away... more...

My Darling Children: I wrote these stories, as I have already told you, some years ago, and took a great deal of pains with them. I called them "Life Among the Children;" when, lo and behold! somebody else had written a book with the very same name, but very different stories, and I never knew one word about it. You may believe how sorry I was to take this pretty title when it belonged to... more...

I FAREWELL TO THE TOWN The town is one large house of which all the little houses are rooms. The streets are the stairs. Those who live always in the town are never out of doors even if they do take the air in the streets. When I came into the town I found that in my soul were reflected its blank walls, its interminable stairways, and the shadows of hurrying traffic. A thousand sights and impressions,... more...

Simeon Ponsonby—the professor of botany at Harmouth—had married when over forty the eldest daughter of a distinguished though impecunious family in his own college town. His mother, on her deathbed, foresaw that he would need a housekeeper and suggested the match. "Simeon," she said, "it isn't for us to question the Lord's ways, but I am mortally sorry to leave you, my son; it... more...