Bullied and forced into a duel, he takes an even chance. And then he has many more chances to show his skills and ingenuities - from sailing a ship full of wetted and swelling rice to imprisonment and saving the lives of shipwrecked sailors. And along the way, he fights galleys, feeds cattle, stays out of the way of the guillotine, and makes friends with a Duchess. Here Hornblower becomes a man and develops the strength of character which will make him a hero to his men, and to all England.

    Newly arrived from her tour of the Continent, Sophy invites herself into the circle of her relatives. When Lady Ombersley agrees to take in her young niece, no one expects Sophy, who sweeps in and immediately takes the town by storm. Beautiful, gay, impulsive, shockingly direct, Sophy sweeps into elegant London society and scatters conventions and traditions before her like wisps in a windstorm. Resourceful, adventurous and utterly indefatigable, Sophy is hardly the mild-mannered girl that the Rivenhalls expect when they agree to take her in. Kind-hearted Aunt Lizzy is shocked, and her arrogant stern cousin Charles Rivenhall, the Ombersley heir, vows to rid his family of her meddlesome ways by marrying her off.But vibrant and irrepressible Sophy was no stranger to managing delicate situations. After all, she'd been keeping opportunistic females away from her widowed father for years. Staying with her relatives could be her biggest challenge yet. But Sophy discovers that her aunt's family is in desperate need of her talent for setting everything right: her aunt's husband is of no use at all, her ruthlessly handsome cousin Charles has tyrannical tendencies that are being aggravated by his pedantic bluestocking fiancee Eugenia Wraxton; her lovely cousin Cecelia is smitten with an utterly unsuitable suitor, a beautiful but feather-brained poet; her cousin Herbert is in dire financial straits and has fallen foul of a money-lender; and the younger children are in desperate need of some fun and freedom, and Sophy's arrived just in time to save them all. With her inimitable mixture of exuberance and grace, Sophy becomes the mainstay of her hilariously bedeviled family, as a horsewoman, social leader and above all, as an ingenious match-maker. Using her signature unorthodox methods, Sophy sets out to solve all of their problems. By the time she's done, Sophy has commandeered household and Charles's horses, but she finds herself increasingly drawn to her eldest cousin. Could it be that the Grand Sophy had finally met her match? Can she really be falling in love with him, and he with her? And what of his betrothal to grim Eugenia?

    Garnet Cameron, a fashionable young lady of New York, is leading a neat, proper life, full of elegant parties and polite young men, yet the prospect of actually marrying any of them appalls her. Yearning for adventure, she instead marries Oliver Hale, a wild trader who is about to cross the mountains and deserts to an unheard-of land called California. During Garnet and Oliver's honeymoon in New Orleans, she meets a dance-hall performer on the lam who calls herself Florinda Grove and is also traveling to California. Along the Jubilee Trail, Garnet and Florinda meet kinds of men never known to them before, and together they make their painstaking way over the harsh trail to Los Angeles, learning how to live without compromise and discover both true friendship and true love.

    Spittel is an anthropologist who has made a study of the Veddas, an aboriginal people who dwell in the remote jungles of Ceylon, and avowedly his aim has been that of "weaving details of ethnological value into the fabric of a tale". In doing this his scientific inclination has induced him to invent as little as possible and to confine his efforts to the reconstruction of the life story of a real man, Tissahamy, an outlaw whose murderous activities engaged all the resources of the authorities to put an end to them. In his childhood some attempt was made to tame Tissahamy's wild spirit and even to train the boy for the Buddhist priesthood, but the call of the blood was too potent, and he soon sought the sanctuary of his ancestral jungle and became a great hunter."

    Along the way, she met Curt Fletcher, an arrogant and passionate trailblazer who vowed that no other man would possess her. And Sunset Lee, a gentle mountain man whose kindness would drastically change her outlook on life. As the trio faced hunger, poverty, and death, their battle for survival was not the only war they waged, for the two pioneers wanted Kitty - at any cost!

    

    With rich imagination, excellent scholarship and his rare gift for narrative, Samuel Shellabarger tells here the story of a young Frenchman and a young Englishwoman who were caught in the wild plots and counterplots surrounding the Bourbon conspiracy against Francis I.

    His attempts may sometimes be ridiculous, a muddled scramble of half-in and half-out of a train window, or sometimes eerie tunneling twenty feet deep in the clay and earth of Poland ...

    Although I have used in this story numerous legends, I have tried all through it to picture a woman revealed to us in that brief but urgent message by which she tried to save Our Lord from crucifixion. -Drayton Mayrant

    A novel about Esther of the Old Testament, maiden, friend, wife, counselor, and queen.

    It's a book that comes from the heart for legendary Maine artist Dahlov Ipcar, who has lived on a farm in Georgetown, Maine, for more than seventy years. "It was the life I lived," she says.

    Written by an experienced Freemason with the interests of rank-and-file members of the ordinary lodge in mind-especially the young Craftsman who wished to learn the nature of Freemasonry's claim to have a history that goes back to ancient days-it provides key facts about masonic history, tradition, and lore. In doing so, the book offers a far greater scope of information than any other comparable book. And Bernard E. Jones critically examines conflicting ideas about how some of the traditions came to be, coming to conclusions of his own.

    

    

    and Mrs. Tailor were always having money trouble; David wanted to be a medical missionary; Caroline dreamed of becoming an artist and Benbow, who was still in nursery school, wanted a dog and a house in the country. They suddenly find themselves owners of three dogs and one cat, and so must move to the country. There they find good friends and help others to achieve their wishes as the Tailors achieve theirs. A gentle slow-moving English family novel.