Everett Hilgarde was conscious that the man in the seat across the aisle was looking at him intently. He was a large, florid man, wore a conspicuous diamond solitaire upon his third finger, and Everett judged him to be a traveling salesman of some sort. He had the air of an adaptable fellow who had [...]

MY friend Peyton was what is called a “fine, generous fellow.” He valued money only as a means of obtaining what he desired, and was always ready to spend it with an acquaintance for mutual gratification. Of course, he was a general favourite. Every one spoke well of him, and few hesitated to give his [...]

“A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.” {12}
Footnote: {12} Fraser’s Magazine, No. CCCXXXVII. 1858.
The cholera, as was to be expected, has reappeared in England again; and England, as was to be expected, has taken no sufficient steps towards meeting it; so that if, as seems but too probable, the plague should spread next summer, we may count [...]

Mrs. Jennings (or Jinnins, as the neighbours would have it) ruled absolutely at home, when she took so much trouble as to do anything at all there–which was less often than might have been. As for Robert her husband, he was a poor stick, said the neighbours. And yet he was a man with enough [...]

A hot, breathless, blinding sunrise–the sun having appeared suddenly above the ragged edge of the barren scrub like a great disc of molten steel. No hint of a morning breeze before it, no sign on earth or sky to show that it is morning–save the position of the sun.
A clearing in the scrub–bare as though [...]

The scene is a drawing-room (in which the men are allowed to smoke–or a smoking-room in which the women are allowed to draw–it doesn’t much matter) in the house of somebody or other in the country. George Turnbull and his old College friend, Henry Peterson, are confiding in each other, as old friends will, over [...]

1891
It was his greatest pride in life that he had been a soldier–a soldier of the empire. (He was known simply as “The Soldier,” and it is probable that there was not a man or woman, and certain that there was not a child in the Quarter who did not know him: the tall, erect [...]

A grand affair of a ball–the Pioneers’–came off at the Occidental some time ago. The following notes of the costumes worn by the belles of the occasion may not be uninteresting to the general reader, and Jerkins may get an idea therefrom:
Mrs. W. M. was attired in an elegant ‘pate de foie gras,’ made expressly [...]

“Here comes Captain Bogart–we’ll ask him,” said the talkative man.
His listeners were grouped about one of the small tables in the smoking-room of the Moldavia, five days out. The question was when the master of a vessel should leave his ship. In the incident discussed every man had gone ashore–even the life-saving crew had given [...]

I
There are certain people who will never understand this story, people who live their lives by rule of thumb. Little lives they are, too, measured by the letter and not the spirit. Quite simple too. Right is right and wrong is wrong.
That shadowy No Man’s Land between the trenches of virtue and sin, where most [...]

The stage is in semi-darkness as Dick Trayle throws open the window from outside, puts his knee on the sill, and falls carefully into the drawing-room of Beeste Hall. He is dressed in a knickerbocker suit with arrows on it (such as can always be borrowed from a friend), and, to judge from the noises [...]

This is a sketch of one of the many ways in which a young married woman, who is naturally thick-skinned and selfish–as most women are–and who thinks she loves her husband, can spoil his life because he happens to be good-natured, generous, sensitive, weak or soft, whichever you like to call it.
Johnson went out to [...]

Opposite the entrance to the Sevres Museum in the old town of Sevres, in France, stands a handsome bronze statue of Bernard Palissy, the potter. Within the museum are some exquisite pieces of pottery known as “Palissy ware.” They are specimens of the art of Palissy, who spent the best years of his life toiling [...]

“BETHINK YOURSELVES!”
“This is your hour, and the power of darkness.”–Luke xxii. 53.
I
Again war. Again sufferings, necessary to nobody, utterly uncalled for; again fraud; again the universal stupefaction and brutalization of men.
Men who are separated from each other by thousands of miles, hundreds of thousands of such men (on the one hand–Buddhists, whose law forbids [...]

I
It was nearly midnight of Christmas Eve on Oakland Plantation. In the library of the great house a dim lamp burned, and here, in a big arm-chair before a waning fire, Evelyn Bruce, a fair young girl, sat earnestly talking to a withered old black woman, who sat on the rug at her feet.
“An’ yer [...]

PROLOGUE
Old Abel Albury had a genius for getting the bull by the tail with a tight grip, and holding on with both hands and an obstinacy born of ignorance–and not necessarily for the sake of self-preservation or selfishness–while all the time the bull might be, so to speak, rooting up life-long friendships and neighbourly relations, [...]

The day was fine, and the breeze so light that the old patched sails were taking the schooner along at a gentle three knots per hour. A sail or two shone like snow in the offing, and a gull hovered in the air astern. From the cabin to the galley, and from the galley to [...]

Mrs. Ambrose Dale–forty, slender, still young–sits in her drawing-room at the tea-table. The winter twilight is falling, a lamp has been lit, there is a fire on the hearth, and the room is pleasantly dim and flower-scented. Books are scattered everywhere–mostly with autograph inscriptions “From the Author”–and a large portrait of Mrs. Dale, at her [...]

So long as the oceans are the ligaments which bind together the great broad-cast British Empire, so long will there be a dash of romance in our minds. For the soul is swayed by the waters, as the waters are by the moon, and when the great highways of an empire are along such roads [...]

They were certainly the very oddest pair that ever the moon shone on,–Stony Durdles and the boy “Deputy.”
Durdles was a stone-mason, from which occupation, undoubtedly, came his nickname “Stony,” and Deputy was a hideous small boy hired by Durdles to pelt him home if he found him out too late at night, which duty the [...]