Axidava

The Night Express

Fred M. White

A pelting rain volleyed against the great glass dome of the terminus, a roaring wind boomed in the roof. Passengers, hurrying along the platform, glistened in big coats and tweed caps pulled close over their ears. By the platform the night express was drawn up—a glittering mass of green and gold, shimmering with electric lights, warm, inviting, and cozy.

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Physicians Two

Ambrose Bierce

A Wicked Old Man finding himself ill sent for a Physician, who prescribed for him and went away. 

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The Mountain Charm

Fiona Macleod

A famous writer of the eighteenth century declared that to a civilised mind the mountain solitude was naturally abhorrent. To be impressed was unavoidable, he allowed; to love barrenness and the wilderness, to take delight in shadow and silence, to find peace in loneliness, was unnatural. It is humanity that redeems nature, he added in effect.

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In No Strange Land

Katharine Butler

He was in the heart of the crowd, in it, and of it—the crowd of late afternoon whose simultaneous movement is the expression of a common wish to cease to be a crowd. His was one of the thousand faces that are almost tragical with weariness, tragical without thought. At five o’clock the sparkle of the morning is forgotten. There is no seeking of hidden treasure in the face opposite, for the face opposite, whosesoever it may be, has become too hatefully intrusive with its own burden to yield any light of recognition.

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My Battle With Drink

P. G. Wodehouse

I could tell my story in two words—the two words “I drank.” But I was not always a drinker. This is the story of my downfall—and of my rise—for through the influence of a good woman, I have, thank Heaven, risen from the depths.

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A Resurrected Pirate

Frank Richard Stockton

When L’Olonnois arrived at Tortuga he caused great astonishment among his old associates; that he had come back a comparative pauper surprised no one, for this was a common thing to happen to a pirate, but the wonder was that he got back at all.

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The Pyramids And The Sphinx

Anonymous

Hugh was so very anxious to see the pyramids, that every one agreed to visit them from Cairo, instead of from the boat on the voyage up the Nile, which was to be as far as the second cataract; but neither the children nor their mother were to go. The latter was not strong, and she thought it best to keep the children with her. Lucy would very much have liked to see the pyramids as well as Hugh, but the ride from Cairo was too long for her.

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The Death Cell

F. K. Moss

“Man is by nature an experimenter,” argued my friend, Dr. Armand, a psychologist of some repute, “and he is steadily delving into the Unknown and bringing to light knowledge that is often appalling in its intricacy of concept.

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Our Invisible Government

Max Heindel

It is well known to students of the Rosicrucian Philosophy that each species of animals is dominated by a group spirit, which is their guardian and looks after these, its wards, with a view to bringing them along the path of evolution that is best suited to their development; it does not matter what the geographical position of these animals is; the lion in the jungles of Africa is dominated by the same group spirit as is the lion in the cage of a menagerie in our northern countries.

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The Bronco Cow

Bill Nye

When I was young and used to roam around over the country, gathering water-melons in the dark of the moon, I used to think I could milk anybody’s cow, but I do not think so now. I do not milk a cow now unless the sign is right, and it hasn’t been right for a good many years.

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The Rider Of The Black Horse

George Lippard

It was the 7th of October, 1777. Horatio Gates stood before his tent, gazing steadfastly upon the two armies now arrayed in order of battle.

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Chewing Gum

Charles Dudley Warner

In language that is unfortunately understood by the greater portion of the people who speak English, thousands are saying on the first of January, a far-off date that it is wonderful any one has lived to see—“Let us have a new deal!”

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Presumption Of Innocence

Lyman Bryson

Into the judge’s empty office came the attorney for the defense, followed by his client. The attorney for the defense wore belligerent hair and spectacles. His manner was more upright and simple than his speech, which was full of guile.

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The Assassination Of Gessler (1307)

Francis Johnson

The assassination of Julius Cæsar and of the first Roman Emperors led to greater demoralization of the people, and thereafter to anarchy, bloodshed, civil war, and ultimately to an atrocious despotism; but at an interval of twelve hundred and forty years after the death of Nero there occurred a political assassination, growing out of personal revenge, which freed a whole people from oppression and placed the murderer among the heroes of mankind and the liberators of nations.

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My School Days

Bill Nye

Looking over my own school days, there are so many things that I would rather not tell, that it will take very little time and space for me to use in telling what I am willing that the carping public should know about my early history.

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The Charlie Ross Enigma

Edward H. Smith

Late on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of June, 1874, two men in a shabby-covered buggy stopped their horse under the venerable elms of Washington Lane in Germantown, that sleepy suburb of Philadelphia, with its grave-faced revolutionary houses and its air of lavendered maturity.

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The She-Wolf

Saki

Leonard Bilsiter was one of those people who have failed to find this world attractive or interesting, and who have sought compensation in an “unseen world” of their own experience or imagination—or invention.  Children do that sort of thing successfully, but children are content to convince themselves, and do not vulgarise their beliefs by trying to convince other people.  Leonard Bilsiter’s beliefs were for “the few,” that is to say, anyone who would listen to him.

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Young Men, To The Front!

Richard Theodore Greener

The adage which was once so common, if not so thoroughly axiomatic as to gain universal credence—”Old men for council and young men for war”—assumes additional notoriety to-day, when the old men are quarreling in the council chamber and the young men are kept outside the door.

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Red Blood Or Blue

E. Montgomery

Dear Lou:

“This is the last letter I shall write to you, for to-morrow I begin the final stage of my transition. At four o’clock I shall become a lady. To be sure, you and I will know that I am only an imitation, but with an eighteen-carat setting every one else will take me for the real thing.

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Love And Bread

August Strindberg

When young Gustaf Falk, the assistant councilor, made his ceremonial proposal for Louise’s hand to her father, the old gentleman’s first question was: “How much are you earning?”

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What Was It?

Fitz-James O’Brien

It is, I confess, with considerable diffidence, that I approach the strange narrative which I am about to relate. The events which I purpose detailing are of so extraordinary a character that I am quite prepared to meet with an unusual amount of incredulity and scorn.

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The Untraveled Stranger

Irvin S. Cobb

Back in those sinful days which ended in January, 1919—that is, officially they ended then—a group of congenial spirits were gathered one Saturday night in a local life-saving station on the principal corner of a small Kentucky town, engaged in the quaint old pastime of pickling themselves.

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Stove Pipe Pete

Anonymous

The prisoner in this case, whose name was Dickey Swivel, alias “Stove Pipe Pete,” was placed at the bar, and questioned by the Judge to the following effect:

Judge: Bring the prisoner into court.

Pete: Here I am, bound to blaze, as the spirits of turpentine said, when he was all a fire.

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The Boarded Window

Ambrose Bierce

In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost unbroken forest. The whole region was sparsely settled by people of the frontier—restless souls who no sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and attained to that degree of prosperity which to-day we should call indigence than impelled by some mysterious impulse of their nature they abandoned all and pushed farther westward, to encounter new perils and privations in the effort to regain the meagre comforts which they had voluntarily renounced.

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The Jew’s Reasoning

Anonymous

An officer fell from his horse in a public square. A Jew standing near said: “This would never have happened to me!”

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The Tower

G. K. Chesterton

I have been standing where everybody has stood, opposite the great Belfry Tower of Bruges, and thinking, as every one has thought (though not, perhaps, said), that it is built in defiance of all decencies of architecture.

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