Floating Fancies among the Weird and the Occult

Time went on. Thella was fourteen; her life was a horrible routine—up before dawn in the winter, and before the sun in summer, to milk and churn, cook and scrub; no thoughts exp...

“Oh, confound that combination! I’ve heard it until I’m sick of it! Your niece knew it as well as I—why not suspect her? She was in the house, I was not!”

Toward the close of a cloudless July day he came up a long, grassy, country lane, to a squat looking farmhouse; he had come across country many miles, and had found a strange ch...

I had extinguished my light, the flame annoyed me; and now—from being nervous—I became hysterical. Several times, as a vivid glow illumined the room, followed by an awful crash,...

James hurried back to Henry’s rooms, and left Marjy breathlessly watching Aunt Hattie, who was carefully gathering up the scattered papers, and putting them back in their severa...

Christopher fought like a fury, but in spite of it he was loaded into the wagon between two burly promoters of the peace and carried to the station, where he raved like a madman...

Gradually the picture faded, and so great was his sense of loss that for a time his mind seemed a perfect blank. Then, a fever possessed him to sketch the cottage, the valley, t...

At last, worn out with play, they climbed the long, icy hills; they wound around the towering rocks, they clung to dizzy precipices; they crept by the lairs of horrible animals...

Ah! A change came over him. The spirit of the explorer stirred once more within him. He felt that he was once again describing an immense circle, as had been his experience upon...

All human love is more or less riotous and selfish; the passion is like an ocean, whose billows roll high, or rock in a gentle lullaby, but never, never an unbroken calm. Also,...

It is hard to tell what were Arthur’s sensations; everything seemed so strange. He was told that these were his rooms; he had no recollection of ever having seen them until the...

Very many years ago, in an age when departures from the regular line of thought were accounted but vagaries of a diseased brain, when science was a thing of dread, and great kno...

As Phil left the stagecoach on his return home, three months later, he at once sought Mollie; he had received no letter from her during his absence, although he had repeatedly w...

He seemed moody and distrait all the evening, and several times Gus caught him glaring at Wilbur with the unmistakable light of hatred in his eyes. Wilbur spent nearly all of hi...

“Because I wanted to see you, to be sure!” The same laughing insouciance as of old, so impossible to understand; it might be pleasant raillery, it was quite as likely to be sarc...