Wds Publishing: 369 books

THE student of criminal annals will find upon classifying his cases that the two causes which are the most likely to incite a human being to the crime of murder are the lust of money and the black resentment of a disappointed love. Of these the latter are both rarer and more interesting, for they...

Towards midnight there was a little commotion on the Havre to Southampton packet boat Columbia, which was drawn up against the quay of the French port, and already preparing for its journey across the channel. A passenger--one of three, two men and a boy, who had lately come aboard--had been taken...

"Well," sighed the nurse. "He's gone!" She had seen so many deaths that the experience had become a commonplace in that big London hospital. She peered down at him with a professional scrutiny. Yes, another of them. Everybody died at last; they all came to it. In this...

MY name is Mervington Smythers. I was born in London, but have not had the inestimable advantage of in any way profiting by my short residence in that centre of civilisation, being only some four years old when my parents landed in Sydney. My father was a gentleman, living upon his income,...

Of the many illustrious thinkers whom the schools of France have contributed to the intellectual philosophy of our age, Victor Cousin, the most accomplished, assigns to Maine de Biran the rank of the most original. In the successive developments of his own mind, Maine de Biran may, indeed,...

The king slapped his hand to the back of his neck and jumped to his feet. Shaking the rain from his hair; he slammed and bolted the big wooden shutters just behind him. The princess, in the supple devilment of her nineteen years, leaned meekly against the shutters, but there was a suspicious spark...

In the intellectual history of all countries we find the same phenomenon incessantly recurring. New writers, new artists, new composers arise in revolt against what has delighted their grandfathers and satisfied their fathers. These young men, pressed together at first, by external opposition, into...

It may be deemed presumptuous that one of my age and sex should venture to give to the public an account of personal adventures in a land which has so often been descanted upon by other and abler pens; but when I reflect on the many mothers, wives, and sisters in England, whose...

His Christian name was Nicholas but his familiars called him Nickie the Kid. The title did not imply that Nicholas possessed the artless gaiety, the nimbleness, or any of the simple virtues of the young of the common goat. Kid was short for "kidder," a term that as...

In those days Balthasar, whom the Greeks called Saracin, reigned in Ethiopia. He was black, but comely of countenance. He had a simple soul and a generous heart. The third year of his reign, which was the twenty-second of his age, he left his dominions on a visit to Balkis, Queen of Sheba....

The time at which we open our story is midwinter and toward the close of the seventeenth century. Russia had passed through the long and bitter ordeal of national night. The Tartar yoke had been worn till the very bones of the nation were galled, and when this was thrown off...

ON all hands the arms of the sons of Islam had been victorious, and the close of the eighth century, and the opening of the ninth, saw the Arabian dominion at its zenith of power and splendor. The followers of Mahomet had not only established one of the most mighty governments of earth, but they had...

I don't suppose there is any use in trying to find out when the game of “Jack Stones” was first played. No one can tell. It certainly is a good many hundred years old. All boys and girls know how to play it. There is the little rubber ball, which you toss in the air, catch up one of the...

The quaint, old-fashioned little town faces eastward to the blue Pacific, whose billows, when the wind blows from any point between north and east, come tumbling in across the shallow bar in ceaseless lines of foaming white, to meet, when the tide is on the ebb, the swift current of a tidal river...