The P. and O. liner Sardinia was some twenty hours out of Shanghai, making a direct course for Nagasaki. Few passengers were on deck: it was drear and cold this January afternoon, the sky grey and sullen as with coming snow, the sea rolling heavily under a stiff north-easter that blew cuttingly through the Korea Strait. But beneath the bridge, somewhat sheltered from the wind, sat three figures in a group, talking earnestly. The eldest of the three, John Morton by name, a big shaggy Englis...

Japanese were for the first time measuring their strength in the China war.Bob Fawcett has the good fortune to do a service to Kobo San, the descendant of an ancient Samurai family and high in the Government Service. He was sent out to Japan before the outbreak of the war to test the range finding apparatus of the Japanese fleet.Kobo is a good story written by Herbert Strang.

We have heard it said, by those who are widely travelled, that there are three beautiful harbours in the world: Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil; Sydney Harbour, and--most beautiful of all--the harbour of Hong-Kong. The famous Peak rises above the town of Victoria and, at a height of about two thousand feet, buries its crest in the clouds. The harbour itself is in the shape of a crescent, enclosing the red, bare hills of Kow-lung. By day, from Lyemun to Stonecutter's Island, ferry-boats, sampans,...

One hot August afternoon, a motor-boat, with a little dinghy in tow, was thrashing its way up a narrow, winding river in Southern Wessex. The stream, swollen by the drainage of overnight rain from the high moors that loomed in the hazy blue distance, was running riotously, casting buffets of spray across the bows of the little craft, and tossing like a cork the dinghy astern. On either side a dense entanglement of shrubs, bushes, and saplings overhung the water's edge, forming a sort of ra...

Among the passengers who alighted from the train at the terminus of Shepperton, the little village near the Thames, one evening in early summer, was a young man differing noticeably, but in a way not easy to define, from all the rest. He was tall, but so were many; dark, but most men are dark; bronzed, but the young men who spent idle hours in sculling or punting on the river were as suntanned as he. Nor was it anything in his attire that marked him out from his fellow-men, unless, perhaps...

Daybreak! But, eastward, no glory of dawn. Black thundrous clouds roll sullenly across a livid sky, riven at moments by pale zigzags of flame. Rain tumbles in cascades. League upon league of white-crested waves chase one another in fury, hissing, roaring as they hurl themselves upon a stubborn shore, only to be broken and thrown back into the seething turmoil. The wind outstrips them, shrieking as it cleaves a way through the massed foliage, in mad haste to reach the mainland and smite the...

I was rising four years old when my parents died, both within one week, of the small-pox; and the day of their funeral is the Furthermost of my recollections. My nurse, having tied up the sleeves of my pinafore with black, held me with her in the great room down-stairs as the mourners assembled. Their solemn faces and whispered words, and the dreadful black garments, drove me into a state of terror, and I was not far from screaming among them when there entered a big man with a jolly red f...

In "A Thousand Miles an Hour," Herbert Strang masterfully intertwines adventure and exploration within the framework of early 20th-century scientific imagination. This captivating narrative follows the exhilarating journey of its protagonists as they confront the uncharted territories of innovation and human ingenuity. Strang employs a vivid, descriptive prose style, capturing both the thrill of discovery and the underlying philosophical inquiries regarding progress and its consequences. S...

"Humphrey Bold: A Story of the Times of Benbow" is a historical adventure novel written by Herbert Strang. Herbert Strang was the pseudonym used by two English authors, George Herbert Ely (18661958) and Charles James L'Estrange (18671947), who collaborated on a series of adventure stories for boys in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.The novel "Humphrey Bold" is set during the late 17th century and is inspired by the historical context of the times of Admiral John Benbow. Benbow was a...

Samba lay face downwards upon the yellow sand, amid which his body shone in the sunlight like polished ebony. Behind, the rising bank was thick with trees and shrubs ablaze with colour, overspread with the delicate tracery of lianas and, creeping plants. Here was a spot of red, there a dash of orange; at intervals the pale yellow flowers of climbing gourds and the mauve blossoms of convolvuli peeped from the wall of vivid green. Tiny rills made music as they trickled through the foliage; a...

On the afternoon of a certain day in spring a party of eighteen men was marching through the rocky, bush-covered country near the north-western corner of Lake Chad, in Northern Nigeria. It consisted of two white men, in khaki and sun helmets, and sixteen stalwart Hausas, wearing nothing but their loin-cloths, but carrying on their heads boxes and bundles of all shapes and sizes. The white men and nine of the negroes had rifles slung over their backs. They were marching wearily. Since early...

What I want to know, said Corporal Wilkes, banging his fist on the table in front of him—"what I want to know is, what you Dons are doing for all the coin we've spent on you." He was seated with a few other stalwarts of the 95th under the eastern colonnade of the Plaza Mayor, in Salamanca; a nondescript group of Spaniards, stolidly curious, blocked up the footway, and stood lounging against the balustrade. Getting no answer to his question, and probably expecting none, the corporal jerked ...