CHAPTER I. MY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES The odds and ends of humanity, so plentiful in London's great city, have for many years largely constituted my circle of friends and acquaintances. They are strange people, for each of them is, or was, possessed of some dominating vice, passion, whim or weakness which made him incapable of fulfilling the ordinary duties of respectable citizenship. They had... more...

CHAPTER I THE COWARD Spring had come. Despite the many wet and gusty days which April had thrust in rude challenge upon reluctant May, in the glory of the triumphant sun which flooded the concave blue of heaven and the myriad shaded green of earth, the whole world knew to-day, the whole world proclaimed that spring had come. The yearly miracle had been performed. The leaves of the maple trees lining... more...

CHARIVARIA. The Cambridge University Boat Club has decided to spend £8,000 in improving the Cam. There is talk of making it into a river. Says a writer in a contemporary, "Don't live in a houseboat during a flood." And yet Noah always declared that he owed his life to having done so. The gentlemen who formed M. Ribot's Cabinet are objecting to being described as "The One-Day... more...

CHAPTER I CATS In opening this volume on Animals and their associations with the unknown, I will commence with a case of hauntings in the Old Manor House, at Oxenby. My informant was a Mrs. Hartnoll, whom I can see in my mind's eye, as distinctly as if I were looking at her now. Hers was a personality that no lapse of time, nothing could efface; a personality that made itself felt on boys of all... more...

CHAPTER I. THE WILD WEST. At the beginning of the twentieth century there is, strictly speaking, no frontier to the United States. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the larger part of the country was frontier. In any portion of the country to-day, in the remotest villages and hamlets, on the enormous farms of the Dakotas or the vast ranches of California, one is certain to find some, if not... more...

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...