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Modern Essays and Stories

In all schools pupils are expected to write “essays” but, curiously enough, essay-reading and essay-writing are taught but little. In spite of that neglect, the essay is so altogether natural and spontaneous in spirit, so intensely personal in expression, and so demanding of excellence of prose style, that it is the form, par excellence, for consid..

Tied Up for Tombstone

by W. C. Tuttle

Piperock ain’t what a stranger would call a paradise on earth, and she don’t qualify for the milk and honey, but she’s a man’s town—all up and down the street. Me and Lodestone pilgrims through the dust up to “Buck” Masterson’s saloon, and I goes inside. Buck and “Tellurium” are there, and they welcomes me like a lost brother. Buck salutes me with ..

Portrait of a Man with Red Hair

by Hugh Walpole

The soul of Charles Percy Harkness slipped, like a neat white pocket-handkerchief, out through the carriage window into the silver-blue air, hung there changing into a tiny white fleck against the immensity, struggling for escape above the purple-pointed trees of the dark wood, then, realising that escape was not yet, fluttered back into the carria..

Stepping Westward

by M. E. Francis

The wayside hedgerow, gay with its autumn tints, stretched its undulating length beside the rather stony lane that wound upwards from the high road, and lost itself amid a multiplicity of sheep-tracks on the down. It was one of those mild days that here in the south country cheat the fancy with their likeness, not merely to spring, but to summer.&n..

1914

by John Oxenham

HE early morning of July 25th, 1914, was not at all such as the date might reasonably have led one to expect. It was gray and overcast, with heavy dew lying white on the grass and a quite unseasonable rawness in the air.The clock on the mantelpiece of the morning-room in The Red House, Willstead, was striking six, in the sonorous Westminster chimes..

Battle for the Stars

by Alexander Blade

There was a narrow cleft between cliffs of stars, with the flame-shot glow of an immense nebula roofing it. The only possible way into the heart of the cluster, this Dragon's Throat of starman legend. But others had gone in this way. At least, so said the rumors, rumors that had reached the squadron as far away as the Pleiades. Rumors too factual, ..

The Prize

by Sydney C. Grier

The scene was a picture in itself. Sea and sky vied with one another in the depth of their unruffled blue, and in the glorious sunshine and clear air the cliffs were vividly, even startlingly, white. All round the island they presented an inhospitable front to the voyager save at one point, where advantage had been taken of a steep ravine running d..

A Prevaricated Parade