The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales With Condensed Novels, Spanish and American Legends, and Earlier Papers

Moral Tendency. Chapter V “Open Sesame”. Chapter VI The Trials Of Mrs. Morpher. Chapter VII The People vs John Doe Waters. Chapter VIII The Author To The Reader—Explanatory. Cha...

Three months after the survey of the Espiritu Santo rancho I was again in the valley of the Sacramento. But a general and terrible visitation had erased the memory of that event...

In the strong light that fell upon her face, Mr. Gray had an opportunity to examine her features more closely. Her eyes, which were dark and singularly brilliant, were half clos...

It was near the close of an October day that I began to be disagreeably conscious of the Sacramento Valley. I had been riding since sunrise, and my course through the depressing...

The hurried statement of the messenger was corroborated in the streets that night. It was certain that McSnagley was killed. Smith’s Pocket, excited but skeptical, had seen the...

Just where the Sierra Nevada begins to subside in gentle undulations, and the rivers grow less rapid and yellow, on the side of a great red mountain stands Smith’s Pocket. Seen...

As the master, wan-eyed and unrefreshed by slumber, strayed the next morning among the blackened ruins of the fire, he was conscious of having undergone some strange revulsion o...

Somewhat less spiteful in her intercourse with the other scholars, M’liss still retained an offensive attitude toward Clytemnestra. Perhaps the jealous element was not entirely...

The long wet season had drawn near its close. Signs of spring were visible in the swelling buds and rushing torrents. The pine forests exhaled a fresher spicery. The azaleas wer...

“What! more bread?” said John Jenkins gruffly. “You’re always asking for money for bread. D—nation! Do you want to ruin me by your extravagance?” and as he uttered these words h...

The opinion which McSnagley expressed in reference to a “change of heart,” as experienced by M’liss, was more forcibly described in the gulches and tunnels. It was thought there...

“Now, where on earth can that child be?” said Mrs. Morpher, shading her eyes with her hand, as she stood at the door of the “Mountain Ranch,” looking down the Wingdam road at su...

It was an amiable weakness of Mrs. Morpher to imagine that, of all her classical progeny, Clytemnestra was particularly the model for M’liss. Following this fallacy she threw “C...

And yet the Boy Chief was not entirely happy. Indeed, at times he seriously thought of accepting the invitation extended by the Great Chief at Washington immediately after the m...

When I was nineteen years old my father sold the Chateau d’ Enville, and purchased my commission in the “Fifty-sixth” with the proceeds. “I say, Denville,” said young McSpadden,...

After the events related in the last chapter, the reader will perceive that nothing was easier than to reconcile Sir Edward to his son Lionel, nor to resuscitate the beautiful I...

One! The stroke of the far-off bell had hardly died before the front door closed with a reverberating clang. Steps were heard along the passage; the library door swung open of i...

It was a quiet New England village. Nowhere in the valley of the Connecticut the autumn sun shone upon a more peaceful, pastoral, manufacturing community. The wooden nutmegs wer...

Let my young readers now sail with me to warmer and more hospitable climes. Off the coast of Patagonia a long, low, black schooner proudly rides the seas, that break softly upon...

Again I must ask my young readers to mount my hippogriff and hie with me to the almost inaccessible heights of the Rocky Mountains. There, for years, a band of wild and untamabl...

Don’t tell me that it wasn’t a knocker. I had seen it often enough, and I ought to know. So ought the three-o’clock beer, in dirty high-lows, swinging himself over the railing,...

My pupil was a bright little girl, who spoke French with a perfect accent. Her mother had been a “French ballet-dancer, which probably accounted for it. Although she was only si...

The little village of Pilwiddle is one of the smallest and obscurest hamlets on the western coast of Ireland. On a lofty crag, overlooking the hoarse Atlantic, stands “Denville’...

If I remember rightly, in one of the admirable tragedies of Tsien Tsiang at a certain culminating point of interest an innocent person is about to be sacrificed. The knife is ra...

He had never once looked at me. He stood with his back to the fire, which set off the herculean breadth of his shoulders. His face was dark and expressive; his under jaw squarel...

Guy was in the north of Ireland, cock-shooting. So Ralph Mortmain told me, and also that the match between Mary Brandagee and Guy had been broken off by Flora Billingsgate. “I d...

Truly the traveler, clad in the uniform of a musketeer, as he drew up to the door of the hostelry, did not seem to have spared his horse. Throwing his reins to the landlord, he...

I followed the housekeeper as she led the way timidly to my room. As we passed into a dark hall in the wing, I noticed that it was closed by an iron gate with a grating. Three o...

The sun was setting over Sloperton Grange, and reddened the window of the lonely chamber in the western tower, supposed to be haunted by Sir Edward Sedilia, the founder of the G...

It was noon. Sir Edward had stepped from his brougham, and was proceeding on foot down the Strand. He was dressed with his usual faultless taste, but in alighting from his vehic...

I am by profession a reporter, and writer for the press. I live at Pultneyville. I have always had a passion for the marvelous, and have been distinguished for my facility in tr...

This simple yet first-class conversation existed in the morning-room of Plusham, where the mistress of the palatial mansion sat involved in the sacred privacy of a circle of her...

I am upper housemaid to the family that live at No. 27 Limehouse Road, Pultneyville. I have been requested by Mr. Wilkey Collings, which I takes the liberty of here stating is a...

The King descended into the garden. Proceeding cautiously along the terraced walk, he came to the wall immediately below the windows of Madame. To the left were two windows, con...

“I do,” replied the fair young girl, in a low voice that resembled rock candy in its saccharine firmness,—“I do. He has promised to reform. Since he lost all his property by fire”—

But the capture of several wagon-loads of commissary whiskey, and the destruction of two tons of stationery intended for the general commanding, which interfered with his regula...

It needed but a glance at the new-comer to detect at once the form and features of the haughty aborigine,—the untaught and untrammeled son of the forest. Over one shoulder a bla...

I am a foreigner. Observe! To be a foreigner in England is to be mysterious, suspicious, intriguing. M. Collins has requested the history of my complicity with certain occurrenc...

“One cigar a day is three cents a day,” remarked Judge Boompointer gravely; “and do you know, sir, what one cigar a day, or three cents a day, amounts to in the course of four y...

Norwood Park was the adjacent estate,—a lordly domain dotted with red deer and black trunks, but scrupulously kept with graveled roads as hard and blue as steel. There Little wa...

It was the winter of 186– when I next met Guy Heavystone. He had left the university and had entered the 79th “Heavies.” “I have exchanged the gown for the sword, you see,” he s...

The reader will guess what followed. I fell deeply in love with Clara Maitland, to whom I confided the secret of my birth. The generous girl asserted that she had detected the s...

I pushed the door of the schoolroom open. There are some spectacles which a man never forgets. The burning of Troy probably seemed a large-sized conflagration to the pious Aenea...

It was toward the close of a bright October day. The last rays of the setting sun were reflected from one of those sylvan lakes peculiar to the Sierras of California. On the rig...

We were ordered to the West Indies. Although Captain Boltrope’s manner toward me was still severe, and even harsh, I understood that my name had been favorably mentioned in the...

I looked up and beheld Guy Heavystone bending haughtily over the saddle, as he addressed a beautiful brunette. She was indeed a splendidly groomed and high-spirited woman. We we...

My father was a north-country surgeon. He had retired, a widower, from her Majesty’s navy many years before, and had a small practice in his native village. When I was seven yea...

On leaving Provins the first musketeer proceeded to Nangis, where he was reinforced by thirty-three followers. The second musketeer, arriving at Nangis at the same moment, place...

Lothaw was maturing. He had attended two womens’ rights conventions, three Fenian meetings, had dined at White’s, and had danced _vis-a-vis_ to a prince of the blood, and eaten...

At the masthead I made the acquaintance of two youngsters of about my own age, one of whom informed me that he had been there three hundred and thirty-two days out of the year.

Genevra had not proceeded many miles before a weariness seized upon her fragile limbs, and she would fain seat herself upon the trunk of a prostrate pine, which she previously d...

“Thy forte was less to act than speak, Maryland! Thy politics were changed each week, Maryland! With Northern Vandals thou wast meek, With sympathizers thou wouldst shriek, I kn...

Encouraged by love, Little worked hard upon his new flying-machine. His labors were lightened by talking of the beloved one with her French maid Therese, whom he had discreetly...

A year has passed away. Natty Bumpo was returning from Gold Hill, where he had been to purchase provisions. On his way to Donner Lake, rumors of an Indian uprising met his ears....

“Now, Pills, you’ll have a chance to smell powder,” said Briggs as he entered the cockpit and buckled around his waist an enormous cutlass. “We have just sighted a French ship.”

Blunderbore Hall, the seat of James Rawjester, Esq., was encompassed by dark pines and funereal hemlocks on all sides. The wind sang weirdly in the turrets and moaned through th...

“Each of these pearls, my lord, is worth fifty thousand guineas,” said Mr. Amethyst, the fashionable jeweler, as he lightly lifted a large shovelful from a convenient bin behind...

“It wants but a few minutes of the hour,” he said, consulting his watch by the light of the moon. “He dare not break his word. He will come.” He paused, and peered anxiously int...

Every reader of Belle Boyd’s narrative will remember an allusion to a “lovely, fragile-looking girl of nineteen,” who rivaled Belle Boyd in devotion to the Southern cause, and w...

He took the amber necklace and rubbed it briskly. Then he asked her to present her knuckle to the gem. A bright spark was the result. This was repeated for some hours. The light...

The roasting of an Abolitionist, by a greatly infuriated community, was my first taste of the horrors of civil war. Heavens! Why will the North persist in this fratricidal warfa...

My earliest impressions are of a huge, misshapen rock, against which the hoarse waves beat unceasingly. On this rock three pelicans are standing in a defiant attitude. A dark sk...

He soared as high as the clouds, he dipped as low as the cellars of the London poor. He analyzed the London fog, and found it two parts smoke, one disease, one unmentionable abo...

Released at last from durance vile, and placed on board of an Erie canal-boat, on my way to Canada, I for a moment breathed the sweets of liberty. Perhaps the interval gave me o...

As Lothaw drove toward his country-seat, The Mural Inclosure, he observed a crowd, apparently of the working-class, gathered around a singular-looking man in the picturesque gar...

“Eleven years ago,” said Sir Edward to himself, as his brougham slowly rolled him toward the Committee Room, “just eleven years ago my natural son disappeared mysteriously. I ha...

As we sat together in the cockpit, picking the weevils out of our biscuit, Briggs consoled me for my late mishap, adding that the “naval salute,” as a custom, seemed just then t...

About half a mile from Sloperton Station the South Clapham and Medway line crossed a bridge over Sloperton-on-Trent. As the shades of evening were closing, a man in a slouched h...

Mr. Putney Giles’s was Lothaw’s first grand dinner-party. Yet, by carefully watching the others, he managed to acquit himself creditably, and avoided drinking out of the finger-...

My name is David Diggs. I am a surgeon, living at No. 9 Tottenham Court. On the 15th of June, 1854, I was called to see an elderly gentleman lodging on the Kent Road. Found him...

Both were silent. The same thought possessed each, and perhaps there was sweet companionship even in the unbroken quiet. Genevra bit the handle of her parasol, and blushed. Natt...

It was a hot midsummer evening. Limehouse Road was deserted save by dust and a few rattling butchers’ carts, and the bell of the muffin and crumpet man. A commodious mansion, wh...

“Alas, too true!” replied the General. “The engagements of a long lecturing season, exposure in traveling by railway during the winter, and the imperfect nourishment afforded by...

“I do. Understand me,—I do not object to the eccentricities of your youth. I know the fearful destiny which, pursuing you, led you to poison your sister and drown your lady’s ma...

“You have sent for me,” hissed the Presence. “Behold me, Apokatharticon,—the Unpronounceable. In me all things exist that are not already coexistent. I am the Unattainable, the...

I was born in Missouri. My dislike for the Northern scum was inherent. This was shown, at an early age, in the extreme distaste I exhibited for Webster’s spelling-book,—the work...

Lady Caroline fainted. The cold, watery nose of her dog on her cheek brought her to herself. She dared not look over the edge of the car; she dared not look up to the bellowing...

But the chaotic vortex of civil war approached, and fell destruction, often procrastinated, brooded in storm. [Footnote: I make no pretension to fine writing, but perhaps Mrs. H...

Genevra Tompkins stood at the door of the log-cabin, looking after the retreating Overland Mail stage which conveyed her father to Virginia City. “He may never return again,” si...

But that night, on consulting a well-known spiritual medium, Lothaw received a message from the late Mrs. General Camperdown, advising him to return to England. Two days later h...

Everybody at Plusham played croquet, and none badly. Next to their purity of blood and great wealth, the family were famous for this accomplishment. Yet Lothaw soon tired of the...

Scarcely had the wedding-train left the Grange, than Alice Sedilia, youngest daughter of Lady Selina, made her escape from the western tower, owing to a lack of watchfulness on...

The morning of the seventeenth dawned brightly over Sloperton. “A fine day for the wedding,” said the sexton to Swipes, the butler of Sloperton Grange. The aged retainer shook h...

At exactly two o’clock on the seventeenth, Rupert Sedilia, who had just returned from India, was thoughtfully descending the hill toward Sloperton manor. “If I can prove that my...

Little sprang again into the balloon and sped away to America. He came down in California, oddly enough in front of Hardin’s door, at Dutch Flat. Hardin was just examining a spe...

“Handsome is as handsome does, sweetheart,” pleaded Jael, interceding for the orphan with arms that were still beautiful. “Dear knows, it is not his fault if he does not look li...

An official letter, with the Admiralty seal, informed me that I was expected to join H. M. ship Belcher, Captain Boltrope, at Portsmouth, without delay. In a few days I presente...

The Dodds were dead. For twenty years they had slept under the green graves of Kittery churchyard. The townfolk still spoke of them kindly. The keeper of the alehouse, where Dav...

As Lothaw turned to leave the Cardinal, he was struck by a beautiful face. It was that of a matron, slim but shapely as an Ionic column. Her face was Grecian, with Corinthian te...

The breach between young Little and Mr. Raby was slowly widening. Little found objectionable features in the Hall. “This black oak ceiling and wainscoting is not as healthful as...

To THE HONORABLE AUGUSTUS RABY—I cannot marry you. If I marry any one [sly puss] it will be the man who has twice saved my life, Professor Little. CAROLINE COVENTRY.

When the bells again rang on the new parish church of Sloperton it was for the marriage of Sir Rupert Sedilia and his cousin, the only remaining members of the family.