Booklassic: 1874 books

A classic English Puritan exposition of Matthew 5:1-12.

The Oregon Trail--what suggestion the name carries of the heroic toil of pioneers! Yet a few years' ago the route of the trail was only vaguely known. Then public interest was awakened by the report that one of the very men who had made the trip to Oregon in the old days was traversing the trail once...

Excerpt: "The silver airship cut swiftly through the hot thin air. The noonday sun blazed down upon it and the desert world below. All about was the solemn silence of death. No living thing appeared either in the air or on the drab, gray earth. Only the aircraft itself displayed any signs of...

A Dream of John Ball (1888) is a novel by English author William Morris about the English peasants' revolt of 1381 and the rebel John Ball. Like the novels close contemporary - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) by Mark Twain - it describes a dream and time travel encounter between...

The mental characteristics of Allan Pinkerton were judgment as to facts, knowledge of men, the ability to concentrate his faculties on one subject, and the persistent power of will. A mysterious problem of crime, against which his life was devoted, presented to his thought, was solved almost in an...

(This has been called one of the two most famous riddle stories of all time, along with "The Lady, or the Tiger?" by Frank Stockton.) Burwell, a New Yorker in Paris, during intermission at the Folies Bergere, is inconspicuously given a card by a charming, elegant lady passing by his...

Sequel to "The Mysterious Card", in which the mystery of the card is resolved. According to Uncertain Endings: The World's Greatest Unsolved Mystery Stories by Otto Penzler (Penguin Books, 2006), this 2-part story is one of the two most famous riddle stories of all time, the other...

A young man in modern America is terrorized by visions of an earlier, primitive life. Across the enormous chasm of thousands of centuries, his consciousness has become entwined with that of Big-Tooth, an ancestor living at the dawn of humanity. Big-Tooth makes his home in Pleistocene Africa, a ferocious,...

The Head of the House of Coombe follows the relationships between a group of pre–World War One English nobles and commoners. It also offers both some interesting editorial commentary on the political system in prewar Europe that Burnett feels bears some responsibility for the war and some surprisingly pointed social commentary.

Excerpt: "Every Monday morning, when the clock of the old parish church in Scarnham Market-Place struck eight, Wallington Neale asked himself why on earth he had chosen to be a bank clerk. On all the other mornings of the week this question never occurred to him: on Sunday he never allowed a...

Excerpt: "Never heard a sound," the younger of the afternoon callers admitted, getting rid of his empty cup and leaning forward in his low chair. "No more tea, thank you, Miss Fairclough. Done splendidly, thanks. No, I went to bed last night soon after eleven—the Colonel had been...

Excerpt: "That's just what I was going to suggest, he said. "There's no good to be done hanging about here. Let's get on to the scene of operations. If Miss Lennard's maid has stolen her jewels, she's probably had some hand in the theft from my cousin. We must find her. Now, then, let me...

The wandering Englishman, the atom of empire, at sundry ends of the earth is not always good company in the flesh, but in Mr. Cutcliffe Hyne's stories he is good company. For the reader is not in the position of the "native"; he is, on the contrary, elected of the company of proper Britons and talked to as an equal. Those who try this book will have no sharp regrets.

This story deals with the participants in an expedition that successfully captures the presidency of a Central American republic. It is very exciting, the incidents being fresh and daring with not too much reliance placed on coincidence.