Books published by publisher A.L. Burt company

Example in this ebookCHAPTER I.COMMENCEMENT WEEK.Every door and every window of Miss Allen’s Boarding School stood wide open in hospitality to welcome the guests of the graduating class. For it was Commencement Week, and visitors were coming from far and wide to see the exercises.Upstairs in the dormitories, confusion reigned everywhere. Trunks, half-packed, their lids wide open and their trays on the floor, lined the hallways; dresses were lying about in profusion on chairs and beds; great bunches of flowers filled the vases and pitchers; and rooms were bereft of their hangings and furnishings. Girls, girls everywhere! In party dresses or kimonos they rushed about their rooms or bent over their trunks in the hall. Everybody seemed in mad haste to accomplish the impossible.Marjorie Wilkinson and Lily Andrews were no less excited than the other seniors. They not only shared in the mad whirl of social events and class activities, but as officers they were responsible for their success. When dances and picnics were to be arranged, studying and packing were out of the question for them.But that afternoon there had been a slight lull in their program, and both girls were in their room, trying to make up for lost time. Marjorie, who had been struggling for half an hour with a buckle and a satin pump, finally put it aside in disgust.“Lil, I can’t sew that thing on, so as to have it look right! Every needle breaks, and the stitches show besides!”“Couldn’t you wear them without the buckles?” suggested her room-mate, looking up from the floor, where she was kneeling over a bureau drawer.“No, the marks would show where the buckles were before,” replied Marjorie, in the most mournful tone.“Then don’t bother!” returned Lily, cheerfully. “Wear your silver slippers and stockings.”“With pink georgette? Do you think it would look all right?”“Yes—it would be stunning!”“Just as you say,” agreed Marjorie, much relieved to have the matter disposed of. “I wish I had thought of that before—and not wasted a precious half hour with those old slippers!”Lily stood up, holding a pile of clothing over her arm. She started for the trunk in the hall, but paused at the door.“Marj, you better ‘waste’ another half hour in a nap, or you’ll be dead. You know as well as I do that tonight’s the biggest thing of the year for us.”Marjorie smiled contentedly at this reference to the senior dance, which, as Lily had said, was the crowning event of their social career at Miss Allen’s. Later in life, Commencement itself would stand out most clearly in their memory; but now, at the age of eighteen, nothing could exceed the dance in importance. And yet Marjorie was conscious of an indefinable regret about the whole affair, as if already she knew that the realization could not equal the anticipation. The cause of this feeling could be traced to her partner. A month ago, on the spur of the moment, she had invited Griffith Hunter, a Harvard man whom she had met several years before at Silvertown, and whose acquaintance she had kept. But she was sorry not to have asked John Hadley, an older and truer friend.“Tonight will be wonderful!” she said; “only, do you know, Lil, I do wish I had asked John instead of Griffith.”“I knew you’d be sorry, Marj!” said Lily. “I never could understand why you asked Griffith.”“I guess it’s because he’s so stunning looking, and I knew he would make a hit with the girls.”“But John Hadley is good looking, too!”“But not in the same way Griffith is. And you have so few dances with your partner!”Smilingly, she threw herself down upon the bed and closed her eyes. Lily was right; she must be fresh for the dance. The class president could not afford to look weary and tired out. In a few minutes she was fast asleep.To be continue in this ebook...

Horatio Alger Jr. (1832–1899), began his writing career by publishing in local newspapers. He turned professional in 1849, when a Boston magazine, the Pictorial National Library purchased a poem and two essays. Alger wrote four adult novels, and one adult novella, but he gained notoriety when his friendship with ‘William Taylor Adams’, a boys’ author, changed Horatio’s interest to writing for the juvenile market. ‘A Debt of Honor, The Story of Gerald Lane's Success in the Far West’ is one of Horatio Alger’s earlier rags-to-riches, ‘formula’ written books for boys. When the hero, 16 year old Gerald Lane, is orphaned, he must make his own way in the world, penniless and alone. Through his honesty, intelligence, hard work, and the timely assistance of new friends, Gerald is able to vindicate his deceased father’s memory by exposing the true perpetrator of a forgery, thus receiving the financial benefits from a long overdue debt of honor. During all of this, Gerald is able to make his own fortune by maintaining his own sense of honor.Further information on this prolific author will be found in the foreword provided by AlwaysWrite Ent. Although many of the books offered by AlwaysWrite Ent. are provided exactly as the author presented them in their original format, all works have been entered, and edited by hand, and not merely scanned. They have been spell-checked, and punctuation corrected where necessary.

Example in this ebookITHE VAN NORMANSThe old Van Norman mansion was the finest house in Mapleton. Well back from the road, it sat proudly among its finely kept lawns and gardens, as if with a dignified sense of its own importance, and its white, Colonial columns gleamed through the trees, like sentinels guarding the entrance to the stately hall.All Mapleton was proud of the picturesque old place, and it was shown to visiting strangers with the same pride that the native villagers pointed out the Memorial Library and the new church.More than a half-century old, the patrician white house seemed to glance coldly on the upstart cottages, whose inadequate pillars supported beetling second stories, and whose spacious, filigreed verandas left wofully small area for rooms inside the house.The Van Norman mansion was not like that. It was a long rectangle, and each of its four stories was a series of commodious, well-shaped apartments.And its owner, the beautiful Madeleine Van Norman, was the most envied as well as the most admired young woman in the town.Magnificent Madeleine, as she was sometimes called, was of the haughty, imperious type which inspires admiration and respect rather than love. An orphan and an heiress, she had lived all of her twenty-two years of life in the old house, and since the death of her uncle, two years before, had continued as mistress of the place, ably assisted by a pleasant, motherly chaperon, a clever social secretary, and a corps of capable servants.The mansion itself and an income amply sufficient to maintain it were already legally her own, but by the terms of her uncle’s will she was soon to come into possession of the bulk of the great fortune he had left.Madeleine was the only living descendant of old Richard Van Norman, save for one distant cousin, a young man of a scapegrace and ne’er-do-weel sort, who of late years had lived abroad.This young man’s early life had been spent in Mapleton, but, his fiery temper having brought about a serious quarrel with his uncle, he had wisely concluded to take himself out of the way.And yet Tom Willard was not of a quarrelsome disposition. His bad temper was of the impulsive sort, roused suddenly, and as quickly suppressed. Nor was it often in evidence. Good-natured, easy-going Tom would put up with his uncle’s criticism and fault-finding for weeks at a time, and then, perhaps goaded beyond endurance, he would fly into a rage and express himself in fluent if rather vigorous English.For Richard Van Norman had been by no means an easy man to live with. And it was Tom’s general amiability that had made him the usual scapegoat for his uncle’s ill temper. Miss Madeleine would have none of it. Quite as dictatorial as the old man himself she allowed no interference with her own plans and no criticism of her own actions.This had proved the right way to manage Mr. Van Norman, and he had always acceded to Madeleine’s requests or submitted to her decrees without objection, though there had never been any demonstration of affection between the two.But demonstration was quite foreign to the nature of both uncle and niece, and in truth they were really fond of each other in their quiet, reserved way. Tom Willard was different. His affection was of the honest and outspoken sort, and he made friends easily, though he often lost them with equal rapidity.On account, then, of his devotion to Madeleine, and his enmity toward young Tom Willard, Richard Van Norman had willed the old place to his niece, and had further directed that the whole of his large fortune should be unrestrictedly bestowed upon her on her wedding-day, or on her twenty-third birthday, should she reach that age unmarried. In event of her death before her marriage, and also before her twenty-third birthday, the whole estate would go to Tom Willard.To be continue in this ebook...

That Printer of Udell's is a 1903 work of fiction by Harold Bell Wright. Wright, who served as a minister before becoming a writer, created a story with Christian themes. In the story, Dick Falkner, who comes from a broken home, sees his father under the influence of alcohol and his mother starving. After his parents die, Dick goes to Boyd City in the Midwestern United States to become employed. Dick believes that "Christians won't let me starve." A printer named George Udell hires Dick; both of them decide to become Christians and Dick becomes a revered member of the religious community due to his public speaking abilities and optimism. At the end of the book, Dick gets a political job in Washington, D.C. Ronald Reagan read the book at age 11 after his mother, a member of the Protestant Disciples of Christ Church, gave him the book. Reagan says that the book inspired him to become an evangelical Christian; he became baptized by his mother's congregation. At age 66 Reagan said that the book "left an abiding belief in the triumph of good over evil."

IT is only within comparatively recent years that the homely stories in the mouths of the country-people have been constituted a branch of learning, and have had applied to them, as such, the methods and the terminology of science. No doubt a very noteworthy gain to knowledge has resulted from this treatment,--a curious department of research has been opened up, and light has been cast upon various outside things of greater importance than the subject of study itself. But, side by side with this gain to knowledge, is there not, involved in the method of treatment indicated, a loss to the stories themselves? Classified, tabulated, scientifically named, they are no longer the wild free product of Nature that we knew and loved:--they are become, so to speak, a collection of butterflies in a case, an album of pressed wild flowers. No doubt they are still very interesting, and highly instructive; but their poetry, their brightness, the fragrance which clung about them in their native air, their native soil, is in large measure gone! Well then,--with all due recognition of the value of the labours of the scientific folk-lorist, the comparative mythologist, whose work I would not for one moment be understood to undervalue,--is there not room, even at the present day, to study these stories from another point of view, and that the simplest and most obvious one--the point of view, I mean, of the story-teller pure and simple? One would hope that the time had not yet come when the old tales, considered on their own merits, have entirely ceased to charm; and it is an undeniable fact that there are still persons among us who would regard it as a real and personal loss could they be made to believe that the ideal hero of their childhood, as he falls heroically, in a bloody battle, wounded to the death, is in reality a myth, or an allegory to embody the setting of the sun; and who would even feel themselves aggrieved could they be brought to realise that the bugbear of their baby years--their own particular bugbear--is common also to the aborigines of Polynesia. So great is the power of early association. Well then, my proposal is to consider the Tales of the Scottish Peasantry simply from the literary, critical, or story-teller's point of view,--from the point of view, that is, of persons who actually tell them, to whom they are actually told.