文摘

The little girl came into her papa's study, as she always did Saturday morning before breakfast, and asked for a story.

WHEN dear old Mrs. Hay went back to town after staying with the Burnells she sent the children a doll's house.

IT WAS a dark autumn night. The old banker was walking up and down his study and remembering how, fifteen years before, he had given a party one autumn evening.

The girl was one of those pretty and charming young creatures who sometimes are born, as if by a slip of fate, into a family of clerks.

Two men in a smoking-room were talking of their private-school days. ‘At our school,’ said A., ‘we had a ghost’s footmark on the staircase.

Of course the Widow Stimson never tried to win Deacon Hawkins, nor any other man, for that matter.

IT was Christmas Eve. Marya had long been snoring on the stove; all the paraffin in the little lamp had burnt out, but Fyodor Nilov still sat at work.

Never are there such departures as from the dock at Honolulu. The great transport lay with steam up, ready to pull out.

One sunny afternoon in the autumn of the year 1861 a soldier lay in a clump of laurel by the side of a road in western Virginia. He lay at full length upon his stomach, his feet resting upon the toes, his head upon the left forearm.