OLD KOSKOOSH listened greedily. Though his sight had long since faded, his hearing was still acute, and the slightest sound penetrated to the glimmering intelligence which yet abode behind the withered forehead, but which no longer gazed forth upon the things…

"Ready?" "Ready." "Now?" "Soon." "Do the scientists really know? Will it happen today, will it?" "Look, look; see for yourself!" The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun. It…

It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell…

LEOPARDS? – Oom Schalk Lourens said – Oh, yes, there are two varieties on this side of the Limpopo. The chief difference between them is that the one kind of leopard has got a few more spots on it than the other kind. But when you meet a leopard in the veld…

IT was a bright winter midday… There was a sharp snapping frost and the curls on Nadenka’s temples and the down on her upper lip were covered with silvery frost. She was holding my arm and we were standing on a high hill. From where we stood to the ground…

Sub conservatione formae specificae salva anima (Under the protection of a specific form, my soul is safe)… Raymond Lully. I AM come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether…

AFTER A STROLL, Mashenka Pavletskaya, a girl who had just finished her courses at boarding school, came back to the Kushkins’ house, where she lived as a governess, to find an extraordinary commotion. The porter Mikhailo, who opened the door for her, was…

The canoe was now approaching the land. The bay opened out, and a gap in the white surf of the reef marked where the little river ran out to the sea; the thicker and deeper green of the virgin forest showed its course down the distant hill slope. The forest…

At the lake shore there was another rowboat drawn up. The two Indians stood waiting. Nick and his father got in the stern of the boat and the Indians shoved it off and one of them got in to row. Uncle George sat in the stern of the camp rowboat. The young…

I An unpretentious building of rough-hewn stone standing in the middle of a small, stockaded enclosure. A doorway in the wall of the building facing the entrance-gate to the yard. To the left of the doorway, a glazed window of the ordinary size. To its right…

I was prepared to dislike Max Kelada even before I knew him. The war had just finished and the passenger traffic in the ocean going liners was heavy. Accommodation was very hard to get and you had to put up with whatever the agents chose to offer you. You…

POSEIDON SAT at his desk and went through his accounts. Being in charge of all the seas and oceans was an endless amount of work. He could have had assistants, as many as he wanted, and indeed he did have very many of them, but because he took his position…

The deacon’s son, a seminarist who had come to the village to stay with his parents for the holidays, was woken up one dark hot night by cruel bodily arousal and, lying there for a while, he inflamed himself still more with his imagination: in the afternoon…

The widow of Paolo Saverini lived alone with her son in a poor little house on the outskirts of Bonifacio. The town, built on an outjutting part of the mountain, in places even overhanging the sea, looks across the straits, full of sandbanks, towards the…

Theodoric Voler had been brought up, from infancy to the confines of middle age, by a fond mother whose chief solicitude had been to keep him screened from what she called the coarser realities of life. When she died she left Theodoric alone in a world that…

Upon the half-decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked nervously up and down. Across a long field that had been seeded for clover but that had produced only a…

Doctors had given him just one month to live. A month to wonder, what comes afterward? There was one way to find out–ask a dead man! The amber brown of the liquor disguised the poison it held, and I watched with a smile on my lips as he drank it. There was…

People came running from all directions wanting to know what all the fuss was about. “Oho! It’s crazy old Taranga perching like a crow in her tree because the Pakeha boss wants his men to cut it down,” Panapa explained, enjoying the joke hugely. “What you…

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN came forth at sunset into the street at Salem village; but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as the wife was aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the street…

Govinda came to Calcutta after graduation from high school in Mymensingh. His widowed mother’s savings were meager, but his own unwavering determination was his greatest resource. “I will make money,” he vowed, “even if I have to give my whole life to it.”…