Library Of Alexandria imprint: 887 books

An eminent apothecary of my acquaintance once told me that at each increase to his family, he added ten per cent to the price of his drugs, and as his quiver was full of daughters, Blackdraught, when I knew him, was a more costly cordial than Curaçoa. To apply this to my own case, I may mention that...

THE BISHOP'S FOLLY Towards the close of the last century there was a very remarkable man, Bishop of Down, in Ireland: a Liberal in politics, in an age when Liberalism lay close on the confines of disloyalty; splendidly hospitable, at a period when hospitality verged on utter recklessness; he carried...

HYDROPATHIC ACQUAINTANCES. We are at Como, on the lake—that spot so beloved of opera dancers—the day-dream of prima donnas—the Elysium of retired barytones! And with what reason should this be the Paradise of all who have lived and sighed, and warbled and pirouetted, within the charmed circle of...

I first thought of this story—I should say I planned it, if the expression were not misleading—when living at the Lake of Como. There, in a lovely little villa—the "Cima"—on the border of the lake, with that glorious blending of Alpine scenery and garden-like luxuriance around me, and little...

I am unwilling to suffer this tale to leave my hands without a word of explanation to my reader. If I have never disguised from myself the grounds of any humble success I have attained to as a writer of fiction; if I have always had before me the fact that to movement and action, the stir of incident,...

A FIGHT WITH A BLOODHOUND Now, look here, Nathaniel—" "Drop that, Curtis, you know very well that I won't have it. I can't help having such a beast of a name, and why it was given me I have never been able to make out, and if I had been consulted in the matter all the godfathers and godmothers...

A Lost Father. "There is no saying, lad, no saying at all. All I know is that your father, the captain, was washed ashore at the same time as I was. As you have heard me say, I owed my life to him. I was pretty nigh gone when I caught sight of him, holding on to a spar. Spent as I was, I managed to give...

Two great forces have contributed to the making of the Anglo-American character. The types, broadly classed in England as Puritan and Cavalier, repeated themselves in the New World. On the bleak Massachusetts coast, the Puritan emigrants founded a race as rugged as their environment. Driven by the force...

A When the first Miscellany of American Poetry appeared in 1920, innumerable were the questions asked by both readers and reviewers of publishers and contributors alike. The modest note on the jacket appeared to satisfy no one. The volume purported to have no editor, yet a collection without an editor...

A detailed narrative of events so interesting as those which preceded and attended the conquest of England by William, duke of Normandy, needs little apology for its introduction, for the first time, to the english reader. If his feelings are at all in unison with those of the translator, he will welcome...

When a poem is read aloud it is easy to realize that poetry is closely related to music. Like music it awakens vague, mysterious feelings which cannot be expressed in ordinary speech; and the person who fails to catch the subtle melody of a poem gets but little from it even though he understands perfectly...

Compilers' Preface. The inestimable value of literature in supplying healthful recreation, in opening the mind to larger views of life, and in creating ideals that shall mold the spiritual nature, is conceded now by every one who has intelligently considered the problems of education. But the basis upon...

Between those last precise accounts of military engagements which antiquity has left us in small number, and what may be called the modern history of war, there lies a period of many centuries—quite 1400 years—during which the details of an action and even the main features of a campaign are never...

THE MAGICAL RING 'Tis an ash circled bower, Of berries and musk, And the fairies' first hour, Neither daylight nor dusk; And fancy is thridding In vistas of green, Where the moth is out bidding The cock for his sheen; And the bee with his treasure, Is at rest on a stone— The measure of pleasure, The...