Wds Publishing: 369 books

There are many pleasanter spots than the deck of a sailing ship, as on some winter's morning she hangs to the buoy at Gravesend ready for a start; and Merchant Jack, both fore and aft, as he eyes the cold, grey sky and low-lying dingy shores on either hand, curses the climate, the service, and his...

When, in 1850, Mr. Richard Green determined to build an English clipper that should compete with the American flyers then snatching the China trade from the grasp of English merchants, Aberdeen, and Greenock, and Glasgow were unthought of as candidates for a share in ship-building fame. "Dicky"...

Prominent among the naval patrols that England sends to police the southern seas and guard the island fringes of the Empire, making the while their headquarters in Port Jackson, is the Pylades, now on another cruise among the British possessions and protectorates in Oceania. Peculiar interest attaches...

It is a curious fact, but a true one nevertheless, that German shipowners have realised before their British contemporaries that to prepare men to make good officers in steam they must first have some training under canvas. "No one," remarked Captain Zander, of the Herzogin Sophie Charlotte,...

"It is consolatory to reflect that while other nations are fighting for social existence and preventing an excess of population by fratricidal war, we are bridging over the immensity of the ocean to encourage clamorous and discontented multitudes to fly to a land of exuberant plenty; and that...

A fine, sunny, clear day, Watson's Bay, and the pilot steamer Captain Cook, in which we are bound for a short cruise, lying quietly at her buoy. In answer to a signal a boat puts off, and in a few more minutes we are on the steamer's deck; in two more, after a cordial welcome from Captain Chudleigh,...

Alan Thorne, master of otter hounds, had run up to town, and was waiting for dinner in the smoking-room of his club when a man he knew came in. Jervis Liddel did not see Thorne, for he picked up an evening newspaper and studied the stock exchange quotations. He was dressed with fastidious taste,...

I have been intimate with some who risked and with some who lost life for causes to which they were devoted, and came to understand that with many the political images in imagination were but the psychic body of spiritual ideas.  Behind the open argument lurked a spiritual mood which was the...

Reduced to its proper factors it stands as follows: Either Forrester has gone mad and dreamed it all, or he is sane and has suffered as few others have done in this world. In either case he is deserving of our deepest pity. In one way only are we fortunate. Knowing the man as we do, we are in a position...

Every day, weather permitting, I walk with my husband amongst the linden trees surrounding the town square. We are both rheumatic, so he leans on his cane while I, by force of habit, clasp his arm, though my hand trembles as I touch him. Today, though autumn sun shines on the church and offices,...

An hour ago, under the marvelous canopy of the blue northern sky, David Carrigan, Sergeant in His Most Excellent Majesty's Royal Northwest Mounted Police, had hummed softly to himself, and had thanked God that he was alive. He had blessed McVane, superintendent of "N" Division at Athabasca...

A small, squat and dirty-looking trading steamer, with the name _Motutapu_ painted in yellow letters on her bows and stern, lay at anchor off the native village of Utiroa on Drummond's Island in the Equatorial Pacific. She was about 800 tons burden, and her stained and rusty sides made her appear...

A wild, blustering day in Sydney, the Queen City of the Southern Seas. Since early morn a keen, cutting, sleet-laden westerly gale had been blowing, rattling and shaking the windows of the houses in the higher and more exposed portions of the town, and churning the blue waters of the harbour into...

I have more than once told the story of the only remarkable thing which ever happened to me in the course of a longish life, but as no one ever believed me, I left off telling it. I wish, therefore, to leave behind me a truthful record, in which everything shall be set down, as near as I can remember...