The Choir Invisible

THE closing day of school had come; and although he had waited in impatience for the end, it was with a lump in his throat that he sat behind the desk and ruler for the last tim...

"Listen!" he cried; and when he spoke in, that tone he reduced everything turbulent to peace. "I have brought you here to tell you of the battle of the Blue Licks not because it...

The following afternoon O'Bannon was ambling back to town--slowly and awkwardly, he being a poor rider and dreading a horse's back as he would have avoided its kick. He was retu...

Mrs. Falconer did not take Amy's word: she searched her face and eyes with one swift scrutiny that was like a merciless white flame of truth, scorching away all sham, all play,...

"My cry to-day then is the war-cry of the spirit. Subdue the wilderness within you! Step by step, little by little, as you have fought your way across this land from the Eastern...

While fondling these, he failed not to notice how the great book, as though it were a living mouth, spat its deathless scorn upon the things that he also--in the imperfect measu...

He sat at the upper end of the room, gazing blankly through the doorway at the gray light and clouds of white mist trailing. Once an object came into the field of his vision. At...

"But you do the work so well--better than I could! Besides, you are obeying a Divine law. I have no right to keep you from doing the will of God. I observe you as one of the dau...

She had taken such delight in furnishing her room: in the great bedstead with its mighty posts, its high tester, its dainty, hiding curtains; such delight in choosing, in bleach...

But so few of our faculties are of a truly military turn, and these wax indolent and unwary from disuse like troops during long times of peace. We all come to recognize sooner o...

It was getting late. The sun at this moment passed behind the western tree-tops. It was the old customary signal for him to go. They suddenly looked at each other in that shadow...

Then white and heavenly Peace again, and the liberty of the Anglo-Saxon race in the New World. But with wounds harder to heal than those of the flesh; with memories that were as...

"O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence. . . . . . feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,...

He stood bolt upright in the middle of the room, looking down at her in silence. Then he walked slowly over and took the seat. She folded her hands over the back of her own chai...

"Martin Luther--he was a cathedral organ. And so it goes. And so the whole past sounds to me: it is the music of the world: it is the vast choir of the ever-living dead." He gaz...

It was this religious purity of his nature and his life, resting upon him as a mantle visible to all eyes but invisible to him, that had, as she believed, attracted her to him s...

"All this prosperity, as the mere fruit of my toil, has been less easy than for many. I may not boast the Apostle that I have fought a good fight, but I can say that I fought a...