Lifestyle

Looking for what?Good God! the man had pulled his hat down on his brows! No! the hat itself was gone! Where was the conical crown? Where the feathers —three white, two green? Not there!...

This picture put a kind of constraint upon me to look upward too— at the top of the bed. It was a gloomy and not an interesting object, and I looked back at the...

I raised myself on my elbow, and looked about the room—which was brightened by a lovely moonlight pouring straight through the window—to see if it contained any pictures or ornaments that I could at...

The giddiness left me, and I began to feel a little like a reasonable being again. My first thought was of the risk of sleeping all night in a gambling-house; my second, of the...

Just as the ex-brave ended his oration in very lachrymose tones, the coffee came in, ready poured out in two cups. My attentive friend handed me one of the cups with a bow. I...

“Ex-brave of the French Army!” cried I, in a mad state of exhilaration, “I am on fire! how are you? You have set me on fire! Do you hear, my hero of Austerlitz? Let...

And I did go on—went on at such a rate, that in another quarter of an hour the croupier called out, “Gentlemen, the bank has discontinued for to-night.” All the notes, and all the...

If I left everything to luck, and staked without any care or consideration, I was sure to win—to win in the face of every recognized probability in favor of the bank. At first some...

We had come to see blackguards; but these men were something worse. There is a comic side, more or less appreciable, in all blackguardism : here there was nothing but tragedy—mute, weird tragedy. The...

Wilkie Collins (1824—1889)William Wilkie Collins was born at London in 1824. Like his friend Dickens, he was a voluminous writer of novels and tales, an editor and a dramatist. He was rather more interested...