CHAPTER I MRS. CARTER RECEIVES A LETTER "Is that the latest style?" inquired James Leech, with a sneer, pointing to a patch on the knee of Herbert Carter's pants. Herbert's face flushed. He was not ashamed of the patch, for he knew that his mother's poverty made it a necessity. But he felt that it was mean and dishonorable in James Leech, whose father was one of the rich men of... more...

I Be honest with the world and the world will be honest with you. This is the fundamental truth of all real prosperity and happiness. For the purposes of every man's daily affairs, all other maxims are to this central verity as the branches of a tree to its rooted trunk. The world will be honest with you whether you are honest with it or not. You cannot trick it—remember that. If you try it, the... more...

THE GENIUS OF JOSEPH CONRAD I In these piping days when fiction plays the handmaid or prophet to various propaganda; when the majority of writers are trying to prove something, or acting as venders of some new-fangled social nostrums; when the insistent drums of the Great God Réclame are bruising human tympani, the figure of Joseph Conrad stands solitary among English novelists as the very ideal of a... more...

CHAPTER I "DO YOU SPEAK GERMAN?" "Hey, there, Mister!" called out Jabez Holt, from one of the two office windows in the little hotel at Dunhaven. As there was only one other man in the office, that other man guessed that he might be the one addressed. With a slight German accent the stranger, who was well-dressed, and looked like a prosperous as well as an educated man, turned and... more...

WHAT IS EUGENICS? The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. It is no answer to say, with a... more...

CHAPTER I.   "The changing guests, each in a different mood,     Sit at the road-side table and arise:     And every life among them in likewise  Is a soul's board set daily with new food.   "May not this ancient room thou sitt'st in dwell     In separate living souls for joy or pain?     Nay, all its corners may be painted plain  Where Heaven shows... more...

“I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep.”—1 Thess. iv. 13. There are moments in the lives of every one of us, when the mind is irresistibly drawn on to wonder what our own personal future shall be, as soon as life is over and death has overtaken us.  We cannot help the speculation.  However bound by present duties and absorbed in present interests,... more...

ADVERTISEMENT.   This publication of the Works of John Knox, it is supposed, will extend to Five Volumes. It was thought advisable to commence the series with his History of the Reformation in Scotland, as the work of greatest importance. The next volume will thus contain the Third and Fourth Books, which continue the History to the year 1564; at which period his historical labours may be considered... more...

SIR ISAAC NEWTON n honest farmer, neither rich nor poor, was Isaac Newton. He was married to Harriet Ayscough in February, Sixteen Hundred Forty-two. Both were strong, intelligent and full of hope. Neither had any education to speak of; they belonged to England's middle class—that oft-despised and much ridiculed middle class which is the hope of the world. Accounts still in existence show that... more...

Muirtown Seminary was an imposing building of the classical order, facing the north meadow and commanding from its upper windows a fine view of the river Tay running rapidly and cleanly upon its gravel bed. Behind the front building was the paved court where the boys played casual games in the breaks of five minutes between the hours of study, and this court had an entrance from a narrow back street... more...