Quick Excerpts, from a Library of 492 Titles

Generated 2022-07-28 13:24:24

Excerpt #1, from To Cuba and Back, by Richard Henry Dana

…are in two watches, and divide the night equally between them, which gives them six hours for sleep. In the day, they have half an hour for breakfast and one hour for dinner. Here, too, the very young and the very old are excused from the sugar-house, and the nursing mothers have lighter duties and frequent intervals of rest. The women worked at cutting the cane, feeding the mill, carrying the bagazo in baskets, spreading and drying it, and filling the wagons; but not in the sugar-house itself, or at the furnace doors. I saw that no boys or girls were in the mill–none but full-grown persons. The very small children do absolutely nothing all day, and the older children tend the cattle and run errands. And the engineer tells me that in the long run this liberal system of treatment, as to hours and duties, yields a better return than a more stringent rule. He thinks the crop this year, which has been a favorable one, will yield, in well-managed plantations a net interest of from fifteen to twenty-five per cent on the investment; making no allowance, of course, for the time and skill of the master. This will be a clear return to planters like Mr. Chartrand, who do not eat up their profits by interest on advances, and have no mortgages, and require no advances from the merchants. But the risks of the investment are great. The cane-fields are liable to…

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Excerpt #2, from Adventures of Bindle, by Herbert George Jenkins

…A wild cheer from the crowd attracted his attention. He looked out. Pushing their way towards the shop was a number of vegetables: a carrot, a turnip, a cabbage, a tomato, a cucumber, a potato, a marrow, to name only a few. Each seemed to be on legs and was playing an instrument of some description. Was he mad? Could that really be a melon playing the drum? Did bananas play cornets? Could cucumbers draw music from piccolos? Mr. Hearty blinked his eyes. Here indeed was a dream, a nightmare. He saw Bindle with an inspector and a constable turn the vegetables back, obviously denying them admission. He watched as one who has no personal interest in the affair. He saw the inspector enter with three constables, he saw the green and red band ejected, Ted and the whiskered man silenced, Charlie and the short genial man brought down protesting from upstairs. He saw the inspector’s busy pencil fly from side to side of his notebook, he saw Bindle grinning cheerfully as he exchanged remarks with the bandsmen, he saw what looked like a never-ending procession of bandsmen stream past him. He saw everything, he believed nothing. Perhaps it was brain fever. He had worked very hard over his new shop. If he were to die, Smith could never carry on the three businesses. What would become of them? He…

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Excerpt #3, from The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

…“She doesn’t look like her father,” explained Daisy. “She looks like me. She’s got my hair and shape of the face.” Daisy sat back upon the couch. The nurse took a step forward and held out her hand. “Come, Pammy.” “Goodbye, sweetheart!” With a reluctant backward glance the well-disciplined child held to her nurse’s hand and was pulled out the door, just as Tom came back, preceding four gin rickeys that clicked full of ice. Gatsby took up his drink. “They certainly look cool,” he said, with visible tension. We drank in long, greedy swallows. “I read somewhere that the sun’s getting hotter every year,” said Tom genially. “It seems that pretty soon the earth’s going to fall into the sun—or wait a minute—it’s just the opposite—the sun’s getting colder every year. “Come outside,” he suggested to Gatsby, “I’d like you to have a look at the place.” I went with them out to the veranda. On the green Sound, stagnant in the heat, one small sail crawled slowly toward the fresher sea. Gatsby’s eyes followed it momentarily; he raised his hand and pointed…

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Excerpt #4, from Planet of Sand, by Murray Leinster

…He cut away a flap of metal from the swelling. He tossed it away with his space-gloved hands. His suit-flash illuminated the hollow within. There was a motor inside, and it was remarkably familiar, though not a motor such as men made for the purpose of turning things. There was a shaft. There were four slabs of something that looked like graphite, rounded to fit the shaft. That was all. No coils. No armature. No sign of magnets. Men used this same principle, but for a vastly different purpose. Men used the reactive thrust of allotropic graphite against an electric current in their space ships. The Bowdoin-Hall field made such a thrust incredibly efficient, and it was such graphite slabs that drove the Stallifer–though these were monsters weighing a quarter of a ton apiece, impossible for the skid to lift. Insulated cables led to the slabs in wholly familiar fashion. The four cables joined to two and vanished in the seemingly solid girders which formed all the giant grid. Almost without hope, Stan slashed through two cables with his torch. He dragged out the recharging cable of the skid. He clipped the two ends to the two cut cables. They sparked! Then he stared. The meter of the skid showed current flowing into its power bank. An amazing amount of current. In minutes, the power-storage needle stirred from its pin. In a quarter of an hour it showed half-charge. Then a creaking began all…

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Excerpt #5, from Significant Achievements in Space Bioscience 1958

…—————————————————————– Carbonaceous chondrites 16 2.04 …—————————————————————– Most meteorites possess only traces of carbon, and studies of this carbon indicate that it is composed largely of graphite, cohenite, and moissanite, with some diamond. However, studies of the carbon in the carbonaceous chondrites have failed to detect any of these forms. Some carbonates are present in a minority of the carbonaceous group, but account for only a small percentage of the total carbon (perhaps about 10 percent of the total C in type I only). The carbonaceous chondrites contain organic carbon. The word “organic” is not used in a biological sense, merely as a chemical term to describe compounds of carbon other than carbonates, bicarbonates, and carbides. No evidence has been found of any form of carbon other than organic, except for traces of carbonates. Various studies have demonstrated possible methods of estimating the total amount of organic matter present in meteorites. Wiik ([ref.27]) has suggested that organics can be estimated by measuring the loss of weight on ignition. Unfortunately, this method has several disadvantages and gives very low values. Corrections must be made for weight gains due to oxidation of reduced constituents, such as FeO, Fe, Ni, and Co, and…

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Excerpt #6, from Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, by Lewis Carroll

…King, the Queen, and Alice, were in custody, and under sentence of execution. Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice “have you seen the Mock Turtle?” “No,” said Alice, “I don’t even know what a Mock Turtle is.” “Come on then,” said the Queen, “and it shall tell you its history.” As they walked off together, Alice heard the King say in a low voice, to the company generally, “you are all pardoned.” “Come, that’s a good thing!” thought Alice, who had felt quite grieved at the number of executions which the Queen had ordered. [Illustration] They very soon came upon a Gryphon, which lay fast asleep in the sun: (if you don’t know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture): “Up, lazy thing!” said the Queen, “and take this young lady to see the Mock Turtle, and to hear its history. I must go back and see after some executions I ordered,” and she walked off, leaving Alice with the Gryphon. Alice did not quite like the look of the creature, but on the whole she thought it quite as safe to stay as to go after that savage Queen: so she waited. The Gryphon sat up and rubbed its eyes: then it watched the Queen…

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Excerpt #7, from Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana

…time to be lost. We had nothing on but thin clothes, yet there was not a moment to spare, and at it we went. The boys of the other watch were in the tops, taking in the top-gallant studding-sails, and the lower and topmast studding-sails were coming down by the run. It was nothing but “haul down and clew up,” until we got all the studding-sails in, and the royals, flying-jib, and mizen top-gallant sail furled, and the ship kept off a little, to take the squall. The fore and main top-gallant sails were still on her, for the “old man” did not mean to be frightened in broad daylight, and was determined to carry sail till the last minute. We all stood waiting for its coming, when the first blast showed us that it was not be trifled with. Rain, sleet, snow, and wind, enough to take our breath from us, and make the toughest turn his back to windward! The ship lay nearly over on her beam-ends; the spars and rigging snapped and cracked; and her top-gallant masts bent like whip-sticks. “Clew up the fore and main top-gallant sails!” shouted the captain, and all hands sprang to the clewlines. The decks were standing nearly at an angle of forty-five degrees, and the ship going like a mad steed through the water, the whole forward part of her in a smother of foam. The halyards were let go and the yard clewed down, and the sheets started, and in a few minutes the sails smothered and…

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Excerpt #8, from Famous Modern Ghost Stories, by Dorothy Scarborough et al.

…sleeves–all through the discreditable proceedings we knew with whom we were dealing, murderer and coward that he was!" But nothing of this did Mr. King say. With his better light he was trying to penetrate the mystery of the man’s death. That he had not once moved from the corner where he had been stationed; that his posture was that of neither attack nor defense; that he had dropped his weapon; that he had obviously perished of sheer horror of something that he saw–these were circumstances which Mr. King’s disturbed intelligence could not rightly comprehend. Groping in intellectual darkness for a clew to his maze of doubt, his gaze, directed mechanically downward in the way of one who ponders momentous matters, fell upon something which, there, in the light of day and in the presence of living companions, affected him with terror. In the dust of years that lay thick upon the floor–leading from the door by which they had entered, straight across the room to within a yard of Manton’s crouching corpse–were three parallel lines of footprints–light but definite impressions of bare feet, the outer ones those of small children, the inner a woman’s. From the point at which they ended they did not return; they pointed all one way. Brewer, who had observed them at the same moment, was leaning forward in an attitude of rapt attention, horribly pale….

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Excerpt #9, from King’s Cutters and Smugglers 1700

…[4] A half-anker held 3-1/4 gallons. CHAPTER III THE GROWTH OF SMUGGLING About the middle of the eighteenth century the smuggling of tea into the country had reached such extensive limits that the revenue which ought to have been expected from this source was sinking instead of rising. In fact it came to this, that of all the tea that was consumed in this country not one half had paid duty and the rest was smuggled. The bands of smugglers were well financed, were themselves hardy sailors and skilful pilots. They had some of the best designed and best built cutters and luggers of that time. They were able to purchase from an almost inexhaustible market, and to make a quick passage to the English shores. Arrived there they could rely on both moral and physical support; for their friends were well mounted, well armed, and exceedingly numerous, so that ordinarily the cargo could be rapidly unshipped, and either hidden or run into the country with despatch. Not once, but times without number the smuggling cutters had evaded the Revenue cruisers at sea, showing them a clean pair of heels. With equal frequency had the Preventive men on land been outwitted, bribed, or overpowered. And inasmuch as the duties on the smuggled articles were high, had they passed through the Customs, so,…

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Excerpt #10, from Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson

…confusion, threw himself on his knees and held out his clasped hands in supplication. At that I once more stopped. “Who are you?” I asked. “Ben Gunn,” he answered, and his voice sounded hoarse and awkward, like a rusty lock. “I’m poor Ben Gunn, I am; and I haven’t spoke with a Christian these three years.” I could now see that he was a white man like myself and that his features were even pleasing. His skin, wherever it was exposed, was burnt by the sun; even his lips were black, and his fair eyes looked quite startling in so dark a face. Of all the beggar-men that I had seen or fancied, he was the chief for raggedness. He was clothed with tatters of old ship’s canvas and old sea-cloth, and this extraordinary patchwork was all held together by a system of the most various and incongruous fastenings, brass buttons, bits of stick, and loops of tarry gaskin. About his waist he wore an old brass-buckled leather belt, which was the one thing solid in his whole accoutrement. “Three years!” I cried. “Were you shipwrecked?” “Nay, mate,” said he; “marooned.” I had heard the word, and I knew it stood for a horrible kind of punishment common enough among the buccaneers, in which the offender…

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Excerpt #11, from Mr. Munchausen , by John Kendrick Bangs

…could you?" “I think I might try,” said Mr. Munchausen, puffing thoughtfully upon his cigar and making a ring with the smoke for Angelica to catch upon her little thumb. “I might try–but it will all depend upon whether you want me to tell you about Decoration Day as it is celebrated in the United States, or the way a band of missionaries I once knew in the Cannibal Islands observed it for twenty years or more.” “Why can’t we have both stories?” said Angelica. “I think that would be the nicest way. Two stories is twice as good as one.” “Well, I don’t know,” returned Mr. Munchausen. "You see the trouble is that in the first instance I could tell you only what a beautiful thing it is that every year the people have a day set apart upon which they especially honour the memory of the noble fellows who lost their lives in defence of their country. I’m not much of a poet and it takes a poet to be able to express how beautiful and grand it all is, and so I should be afraid to try it. Besides it might sadden your little hearts to have me dwell upon the almost countless number of heroes who let themselves be killed so that their fellow-citizens might live in peace and happiness. I’d have to tell you about hundreds and hundreds of graves scattered over the battle fields that no one knows about, and which, because no one knows of them, are not decorated at all,…

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Excerpt #12, from The Anabasis of Alexander, by Arrian

…were offered from feelings of hostility towards Thebes on the part of the bidders. [83] B.C. 415-413. See Grote’s Greece, vol. vii. [84] B.C. 405. See Thucydides (ii. 13); Xenophon (Hellenics, ii. 2). [85] By Conon’s victory at Cnidus, B.C. 394. [86] At Leuctra they lost 400 Spartans and 1,000 other Lacedaemonians. See Xen. (Hellen., vi. 4). [87] The Achaeans, Eleans, Athenians, and some of the Arcadians, were allies of Sparta at this crisis, B.C. 369. See Xen. (Hellen., vii. 5); Diodorus (xv. 85). [88] B.C. 426. See Thuc., iii. 52, etc. [89] B.C. 416 and 421. See Thuc., v. 32, 84, etc. [90] These persons must have forgotten that Alexander’s predecessor and namesake had served in the army of Xerxes along with the Thebans. See Herodotus vii. 173. [91] Plutarch (Lysander, 15) says that the Theban Erianthus moved that Athens should be destroyed. [92] See Aelian (Varia Historia, xii. 57). [93] Plutarch (Alexander, 13) tells us that Alexander was afterwards sorry for his cruelty to the Thebans. He believed that he had incurred the wrath of Dionysus, the tutelary deity of Thebes, who incited him to…

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