Little Dinners With the Sphinx, and Other Prose Fancies

Whenever I ought to be working especially hard at my desk in the middle of the woodland, where I have built myself a little log house for my books, and my pictures and my pen--b...

Yea! Why of all men should this sorrow dire Unto thy servant bitterly befall? For, Lady, thou dost know I ne’er did tire Of thy sweet sacraments and ritual; In morning meadows I...

“Laugh,” said I, “but it’s all too true. Take another illustration: Some noble cause, some ghastly wrong, some agonising disaster. Never has my imagination been more alive to su...

“I declare, the idea grows on me!” she said. “I wonder it never occurred to me before. Now that it has, I must insist on your carrying it out--for my sake. When I think of your...

“You seem very sure, Margaret, that I am going to heaven,” the old mother will sometimes say, with one of her arch old smiles; “but do you know that I stole two peppermints yest...

In this old house of Noctorum, which had been built by his ancestors and inhabited by Fantons ever since, lived studious old Sir Gilbert Fanton, Baronet, alone most of the year...

I said that there would be no librarian in my library, similarly there would be no gardener in my garden, no priest in my chapel. The places of the soul need no custodians. The...

Looking long at the picture of the Beautiful Face, he turned--to the Beautiful Face itself; for it had now been silver dust for four years. Drawing the urn to him, he read once...

The Sphinx and I had not met for quite a long time. We hadn’t dined together for--O I should think--four years; and it was strange to both of us to be sitting opposite to each o...

Another problem: I am wondering, as I turn over page after page of our brilliantly written past, whether Miranda will expect me to return also the many flowers that every now an...