Quick Excerpts, from a Library of 492 Titles

Generated 2022-07-28 13:26:08

Excerpt #1, from The Terror: A Mystery, by Arthur Machen

…war. And that being so, it followed that the outrages which must be kept so secret were the work of the enemy, that is of concealed German agents. CHAPTER IV The Spread of the Terror It is time, I think, for me to make one point clear. I began this history with certain references to an extraordinary accident to an airman whose machine fell to the ground after collision with a huge flock of pigeons; and then to an explosion in a northern munition factory, an explosion, as I noted, of a very singular kind. Then I deserted the neighborhood of London, and the northern district, and dwelt on a mysterious and terrible series of events which occurred in the summer of 1915 in a Welsh county, which I have named, for convenience, Meirion. Well, let it be understood at once that all this detail that I have given about the occurrences in Meirion does not imply that the county in the far west was alone or especially afflicted by the terror that was over the land. They tell me that in the villages about Dartmoor the stout Devonshire hearts sank as men’s hearts used to sink in the time of plague and pestilence. There was horror, too, about the Norfolk Broads, and far up by Perth no one would venture on the path that leads by Scone…

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Excerpt #2, from Desert Dust, by Edwin L. Sabin

…“Will you offer me a ride, sir?” My response was instant: a long “Whoa-oa!” in best mule-whacker. The eight-team hauled negligent, their mulish senses steeped in the drudgery of the trail; only the wheel pair flopped inquiring ears. When I hailed again, Jenks came puffing. “What’s the matter hyar?” He ran rapid eye over wagon and animals and saw nothing amiss. “Mrs. Montoyo wishes to ride.” “The hell, man!” He snatched whip and launched it, up the faltering team. The cracker popped an inch above the off lead mule’s cringing haunch twenty feet before. “You can’t stop hyar! Can’t hold the rest of the train. Joe! Baldy! Hep with you!” The team straightened out; he restored me the whip. His wrath subsided, for in less dudgeon he addressed her. “Want to ride, do ye?” “I did, sir.” “Wall, in Gawd’s name ride, then. But we don’t stop for passengers.” With that, in another white heat he had picked her up bodily, swung her upon the nearest mule; so that before she knew (she scarce had time to utter an astonished little ejaculation as she yielded to his arms) there she was, perched, breathless, upon the sweaty hide. I awaited results. Jenks chuckled….

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Excerpt #3, from Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy, by Bernard Shaw

…DON JUAN. In that case, what is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married? Let us face the facts, dear Ana. The Life Force respects marriage only because marriage is a contrivance of its own to secure the greatest number of children and the closest care of them. For honor, chastity and all the rest of your moral figments it cares not a rap. Marriage is the most licentious of human institutions– ANA. Juan! THE STATUE. [protesting] Really!– DON JUAN. [determinedly] I say the most licentious of human institutions: that is the secret of its popularity. And a woman seeking a husband is the most unscrupulous of all the beasts of prey. The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error. Come, Ana! do not look shocked: you know better than any of us that marriage is a mantrap baited with simulated accomplishments and delusive idealizations. When your sainted mother, by dint of scoldings and punishments, forced you to learn how to play half a dozen pieces on the spinet which she hated as much as you did–had she any other purpose than to delude your suitors into the belief that your husband would have in his home an angel who would fill it with melody, or at least play him to sleep after dinner? You married my friend Ottavio: well, did you ever…

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Excerpt #4, from The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories, by Kate Chopin

…He took his hat from the table, and stood with eyes turned from her, looking into the dying fire. For a moment or two he kept an impressive silence. “Your manner has not misled me, Mrs. Pontellier,” he said finally. “My own emotions have done that. I couldn’t help it. When I’m near you, how could I help it? Don’t think anything of it, don’t bother, please. You see, I go when you command me. If you wish me to stay away, I shall do so. If you let me come back, I—oh! you will let me come back?” He cast one appealing glance at her, to which she made no response. Alcée Arobin’s manner was so genuine that it often deceived even himself. Edna did not care or think whether it were genuine or not. When she was alone she looked mechanically at the back of her hand which he had kissed so warmly. Then she leaned her head down on the mantelpiece. She felt somewhat like a woman who in a moment of passion is betrayed into an act of infidelity, and realizes the significance of the act without being wholly awakened from its glamour. The thought was passing vaguely through her mind, “What would he think?” She did not mean her husband; she was thinking of Robert Lebrun. Her husband seemed to her now like a person whom she had married without love as an excuse….

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Excerpt #5, from Anticipations, by H. G. Wells

…democratic state. Now, foreseeing this possibility, it is easy to step into the trap of the Napoleonic precedent. One hastens to foretell that either with the pressure of coming war, or in the hour of defeat, there will arise the Man. He will be strong in action, epigrammatic in manner, personally handsome and continually victorious. He will sweep aside parliaments and demagogues, carry the nation to glory, reconstruct it as an empire, and hold it together by circulating his profile and organizing further successes. He will–I gather this from chance lights upon contemporary anticipations–codify everything, rejuvenate the papacy, or, at any rate, galvanize Christianity, organize learning in meek intriguing academies of little men, and prescribe a wonderful educational system. The grateful nations will once more deify a lucky and aggressive egotism…. And there the vision loses breath. Nothing of the sort is going to happen, or, at any rate, if it happens, it will happen as an interlude, as no necessary part in the general progress of the human drama. The world is no more to be recast by chance individuals than a city is to be lit by sky rockets. The purpose of things emerges upon spacious issues, and the day of individual leaders is past. The analogies and precedents that lead one to forecast the coming of military one-man-dominions, the coming of such other parodies…

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Excerpt #6, from Essays of a Biologist, by Julian Huxley

…because of the very quality of its being. We live at a certain rhythm in time, at a certain level of size and space; beyond certain limits, events in the outer world are not directly appreciable by the ordinary channels of sense, although a symbolic picture of them may be presented to us by the intellect. When we are listening to the organ, sometimes there come notes which are on the border-line between sound and feeling: their separate vibrations are distinguishable and pulse through us, and the more the vibrations are separable, the more they are felt as mechanical shocks, the less as sound. However, we know perfectly well that all sounds as a matter of fact depend on vibratory disturbance, and that it is only some peculiarity of the registering machinery, in ear or brain, which enables us to hear a note as continuous. Still more remarkable are the facts of vision. As I write I see the tulips in my garden, red against the green grass: the red is a continuous sensation; but the physicists appear to be justified in telling us that the eye is being bombarded every second with a series of waves, not the few hundred or thousand that give us sound, but the half-billion or so which conspire to illuminate our vision. With sound, we alter the frequency of the waves and we get a difference of tone which seems to be merely a difference of more or less: but…

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Excerpt #7, from The Pirates’ Who’s Who, by Philip Gosse

…deserted. In an account of his execution on board H.M.S. Weymouth we read: “Being on board a Man of War there was no Body to press him to an Acknowledgement of the Crime he died for, nor of sorrowing in particular for it, which would have been exemplary, and made suitable Impressions on seamen; so that his last Hour was spent in lamenting and bewailing his Sins in general, exhorting the Spectators to an honest and good life, in which alone they could find Satisfaction.” This painful scene ended by the condemned singing with the spectators a few verses of the 140th Psalm: at the conclusion of which, at the firing of a gun, “he was tric’d up at the Fore Yard.” Died at the age of 34. ARNOLD, SION. A Madagascar pirate, who was brought to New England by Captain Shelley in 1699. ASHPLANT, VALENTINE. Born in the Minories, London. He served with Captain Howell Davis, and later with Bartholomew Roberts. He was one of the leading lights of Roberts’s crew, a member of the “House of Lords.” He took part in the capture and plundering of the King Solomon at Cape Apollonia, North-West Coast of Africa, in January, 1719, when the pirates,…

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Excerpt #8, from The Blue Castle: a novel, by L. M. Montgomery

…prim, dowdy little figure in her shabby raincoat and three-year-old hat, splashed occasionally by the mud of a passing motor with its insulting shrieks. Motors were still rather a novelty in Deerwood, though they were common in Port Lawrence, and most of the summer residents up at Muskoka had them. In Deerwood only some of the smart set had them; for even Deerwood was divided into sets. There was the smart set–the intellectual set–the old-family set–of which the Stirlings were members–the common run, and a few pariahs. Not one of the Stirling clan had as yet condescended to a motor, though Olive was teasing her father to have one. Valancy had never even been in a motorcar. But she did not hanker after this. In truth, she felt rather afraid of motorcars, especially at night. They seemed to be too much like big purring beasts that might turn and crush you–or make some terrible savage leap somewhere. On the steep mountain trails around her Blue Castle only gaily caparisoned steeds might proudly pace; in real life Valancy would have been quite contented to drive in a buggy behind a nice horse. She got a buggy drive only when some uncle or cousin remembered to fling her “a chance,” like a bone to a dog. CHAPTER V Of course she must buy the tea in Uncle Benjamin’s grocery-store. To buy it anywhere else was unthinkable. Yet Valancy hated to go to Uncle…

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Excerpt #9, from The Jest Book, by Mark Lemon

…DXCVII.–WORTHY OF CREDIT. A GENTLEMAN was applied to by a crossing-sweeper for charity. The gentleman replied, “I will remember you when I return.”–“Please your honor,” says the man, “I’m ruined by the credit I give in that way.” DXCVIII.–PAYING IN KIND. A FARMER, having lost some ducks, was asked by the counsel for the prisoner accused of stealing them to describe their peculiarity. After he had done so, the counsel remarked, “They can’t be such a rare breed, as I have some like them in my yard.”–“That’s very likely,” said the farmer; “these are not the only ducks of the same sort I’ve had stolen lately.” DXCIX.–VERY SERIOUS. A REGULAR physician being sent for by a quack, expressed his surprise at being called in on an occasion apparently trifling. “Not so trifling, neither,” replied the quack; “for, to tell you the truth, I have, by mistake, taken some of my OWN PILLS.” DC.–THE LATE LORD AUDLEY. MR. PHILIP THICKNESSE, father of the late Lord Audley, being in want of money, applied to his son for assistance. This being denied, he immediately hired a cobbler’s stall, directly opposite his lordship’s house, and put up a board, on which was inscribed, in large letters,…

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Excerpt #10, from From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan, by H. P. Blavatsky

…for an aggressive one, “why am I, I who have studied the most modern ideas of Western science, I who believe in its representatives–why am I suspected, pray, by Miss X—- of belonging to the tribe of the ignorant and superstitious Hindus? Why does she think that our perfected scientific theories are superstitions, and we ourselves a fallen inferior race?” Sham Rao stood before us with tears in his eyes. We were at a loss what to answer him, being confused to the last degree by this outburst. “Mind you, I do not proclaim our popular beliefs to be infallible dogmas. I consider them as mere theories, and try to the best of my ability to reconcile the ancient and the modern science. I formulate hypotheses just like Darwin and Haeckel. Besides, if I understood rightly, Miss X—- is a spiritualist, so she believes in bhutas. And, believing that a bhuta is capable of penetrating the body of a medium, how can she deny that a bhuta, and more so a less sinful soul, may enter the body of a vampire-bat?” I own, this logic was a little too condensed for us, and so, avoiding a direct answer to a metaphysical question of such delicacy, we tried to apologize and excuse Miss X—-’s rudeness as well as we could. “She did not mean to offend you,” we said, "she only repeated a calumny, familiar to every European. Besides, if she had taken the trouble to…

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Excerpt #11, from The Radio Boys Rescue the Lost Alaska Expedition, by Gerald Breckenridge

…it. The water, as Frank had predicted, was delightfully invigorating, and refreshed and with the young blood tingling in their veins, after a long sleep and a good swim, they returned to camp. They brought voracious appetites with them, but fortunately the fishermen had pulled in a big haul of beauties, and these, together with flapjacks made by that skillful chef, Art, and washed down with coffee tasting like none ever made in city restaurants, the whole having the tang of the outdoors and woodland smoke for sauce, made a delectable repast. “Now,” said Mr. Hampton, at its conclusion, “now for a discussion of what’s to be done.” Thereupon he set forth the facts of the situation. Lupo with five or six men at most was still at large. He might have turned back. He might be in hiding nearby. He might have gone on ahead in search of Thorwaldsson. In any case, Mr. Hampton declared, he felt it would be a waste of time to search for him in view of the fact that they had learned Thorwaldsson was somewhere to the north and east and their primary object was to join forces with that explorer. He wanted to know what the others had to say. Farnum, who had been talking matters over with Mr. Hampton, sat silent, nodding approval. The other was stating his own views. But MacDonald voiced a protest….

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Excerpt #12, from History for ready reference, Volume 1 (of 6), A

…and the rule of the Cassite dynasty came to an end." A. H. Sayce, Ancient Empires of the East, appendix 2. ALSO IN: G. Rawlinson, Five Great Monarchies: Chaldea, chapter 8. See, also, ASSYRIA. BABYLONIA: B. C. 625-539. The later Empire. For more than six centuries after the conquest of B. C. 1270, Babylonia was obscured by Assyria. During most of that long period, the Chaldean kingdom was subject to its northern neighbor and governed by Assyrian viceroys. There were frequent revolts and some intervals of independence; but they were brief, and the political life of Babylonia as a distinct power may be said to have been suspended from 1270 until 625 B. C., when Nabopolassar, who ruled first as the viceroy of the Assyrian monarch, threw off his yoke, took the attributes of sovereignty to himself, and joined the Medes in extinguishing the glory of Nineveh. "The Assyrian Empire was now shared between Media and Babylon. Nabucudur-utser, or Nebuchadrezzar, Nabopolassar’s eldest son, was the real founder of the Babylonian empire. The attempt of Pharaoh Necho…

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