Quick Excerpts, from a Library of 492 Titles

Generated 2022-07-28 13:25:47

Excerpt #1, from Peter Pan, by J. M. Barrie

…Cinderella.” They talked of Cinderella, and Tootles was confident that his mother must have been very like her. It was only in Peter’s absence that they could speak of mothers, the subject being forbidden by him as silly. “All I remember about my mother,” Nibs told them, “is that she often said to my father, ‘Oh, how I wish I had a cheque-book of my own!’ I don’t know what a cheque-book is, but I should just love to give my mother one.” While they talked they heard a distant sound. You or I, not being wild things of the woods, would have heard nothing, but they heard it, and it was the grim song: “Yo ho, yo ho, the pirate life, The flag o’ skull and bones, A merry hour, a hempen rope, And hey for Davy Jones.” At once the lost boys—but where are they? They are no longer there. Rabbits could not have disappeared more quickly. I will tell you where they are. With the exception of Nibs, who has darted away to reconnoitre, they are already in their home under the ground, a very delightful residence of which we shall see a good deal…

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Excerpt #2, from Appletons’ Popular Science Monthly, March 1899, by Various

…more important modern languages and literatures. But in such institutions these subjects usually hold only a subordinate place. It can hardly be denied that generally throughout the country, even although the literary side of education still maintains its pre-eminence in our public schools and universities, it is losing ground, and that every year it occupies less of the attention of students of science. The range of studies which the science examinations demand is always widening, while the academic period within which these studies must be crowded undergoes no extension. Those students, therefore, who, whether from necessity or choice, have taken their college education in science, naturally experience no little difficulty in finding time for the absolutely essential subjects required for their degrees. Well may they declare that it is hopeless for them to attempt to engage in anything more, and especially in anything that will not tell directly on their places in the final class lists. With the best will in the world, and with even, sometimes, a bent for literary pursuits, they may believe themselves compelled to devote their whole time and energies to the multifarious exactions of their science curriculum. Such a result of our latest reformation in education may be unavoidable, but it is surely matter for regret. A training in science…

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Excerpt #3, from Primitive & Mediaeval Japanese Texts, by F. Victor Dickins

…hama mo se ni 15 okure nami wite koi-marobi kohi ka mo woramu ashi-zurishi ne nomi ya nakamu 20 Unakami no sono tsu wo sashite kimi ga kogi-yukeba. 6 make = môke. 15 se ni = semaki hodo ni. The m. k. (1) applies to Miyake (= miyake, a government granary or grange), see translation. For kotohiushi see List m. k. 117 Zhimuki (Jinki) itsutose to ifu toshi tsuchinoye tatsu hatsu tsuki ni [yomeru] uta hitotsu mata mizhika. Hito to naru 1 koto ha kataki wo wakuraba ni nareru aga mi ha…

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Excerpt #4, from My Man Jeeves, by P. G. Wodehouse

…“Hello!” I said. “Couldn’t you find her?” “Yes, I found her,” he replied, with one of those bitter, hollow laughs. “Well, then——?” Freddie sank into a chair and groaned. “This isn’t her cousin, you idiot!” he said. “He’s no relation at all. He’s just a kid she happened to meet on the beach. She had never seen him before in her life.” “What! Who is he, then?” “I don’t know. Oh, Lord, I’ve had a time! Thank goodness you’ll probably spend the next few years of your life in Dartmoor for kidnapping. That’s my only consolation. I’ll come and jeer at you through the bars.” “Tell me all, old boy,” I said. It took him a good long time to tell the story, for he broke off in the middle of nearly every sentence to call me names, but I gathered gradually what had happened. She had listened like an iceberg while he told the story he had prepared, and then—well, she didn’t actually call him a liar, but she gave him to understand in a general sort of way that if he and Dr. Cook ever happened to meet, and started swapping stories, it would be about the biggest duel on record. And then he had…

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Excerpt #5, from The Observations of Professor Maturin, by Clyde Furst

…when you have had enough.” Accepting our assent, he began: “Now that science can cause the Ethiopian to change his skin and the leopard his spots,–that is, can modify the color of rabbits and multiply the toes of guinea-pigs, or graft new characteristics on cattle or on grain,–it is high time to take thought for the efficient and economic working of that intellectual machinery which is not only the means to all such progress, but the fundamental condition of our mental being. Even if we do not accept Professor Lankester’s view that man has produced such a special state for himself that he must either acquire firmer hold of the conditions, or perish, we must agree with Professor James that the problem of access to different kinds of power is a practical issue of supreme importance. “Physical conditions, of course, are the basis of all mental hygiene. Whatever may be the relation between body and mind, no one can doubt its intimacy. Many persons, like Wordsworth and Lowell, suffer physical prostration after mental exertion; nor does Dr. Johnson need to tell us that ‘ill-health makes every one a scoundrel.’ Habits of confinement or exercise mean so much that we might almost know from their work that Balzac and Poe wrote in closed rooms; but that Wordsworth and Browning composed in the open air, Burns and Scott on horseback, Swinburne while swimming. It is true that, as Roger Ascham said, ‘walking alone into…

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Excerpt #6, from Roughing It in the Bush, by Susanna Moodie

…remarkable, that I must endeavour to describe it for the edification of the reader. Q—- kept a shop, or store, in C—-; but he left the principal management of this establishment to his clerks; while, taking advantage of the influx of emigrants, he pursued, with unrivalled success, the profitable business of land-jobbing. In his store, before taking to this business, he had been accustomed for many years to retail goods to the farmers at high prices, on the usual long credit system. He had thus got a number of farmers deeply in his debt, and, in many cases, in preference to suing them, had taken mortgages on their farms. By this means, instead of merely recovering the money owing to him by the usual process of law, he was enabled, by threatening to foreclose the mortgages, to compel them to sell their farms nearly on his own terms, whenever an opportunity occurred to re-sell them advantageously to new comers. Thus, besides making thirty or forty per cent. on his goods, he often realised more than a hundred per cent. on his land speculations. In a new country, where there is no great competition in mercantile business, and money is scarce, the power and profits of store-keepers are very great. Mr. Q—- was one of the most grasping of this class. His heart was case-hardened, and his conscience, like…

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Excerpt #7, from Mr. Standfast, by John Buchan

…They were the same all but one, and that one had a bold variation, for it contained four of the sentences used in the ordinary English advertisement. This struck me as fishy, and I started to write a letter to Macgillivray pointing out what seemed to be a case of trading with the enemy, and advising him to get on to Mr Gussiter’s financial backing. I thought he might find a Hun syndicate behind him. And then I had another notion, which made me rewrite my letter. I went through the papers again. The English ones which contained the advertisement were all good, solid, bellicose organs; the kind of thing no censorship would object to leaving the country. I had before me a small sheaf of pacifist prints, and they had not the advertisement. That might be for reasons of circulation, or it might not. The German papers were either Radical or Socialist publications, just the opposite of the English lot, except the Grosse Krieg. Now we have a free press, and Germany has, strictly speaking, none. All her journalistic indiscretions are calculated. Therefore the Boche has no objection to his rags getting to enemy countries. He wants it. He likes to see them quoted in columns headed “Through German Glasses”, and made the text of articles showing what a good democrat he is becoming. As I puzzled over the subject, certain conclusions began to form in my…

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Excerpt #8, from Weather, Crops, and Markets. Vol. 2, No. 6, by Anonymous

…Alfalfa: │ │ │ │ No. 1 │ │ │ │ alfalfa │ 17.00│ 25.00│ 24.00│ 22.50 Standard │ │ │ │ alfalfa │ 16.00│ 23.50│ │ 19.50 No. 2 │ │ │ │ alfalfa │ 14.00│ 22.00│ │ 17.00 Prairie: │ │ │ │ No. 1 upland│ │ │ │ No. 2 upland│ │ │ │ No. 1 │ │ │ │ midland │ │ │ │ Grain: │ │ │ │ No. 1 wheat │ │ │ │ No. 1 oat │ │ │ │ FEED │ │ │ │ (bagged). │ │ │ │ Wheat bran: │ │ │ │ Spring │ 21.00│ 24.00│ 24.00│ 18.50 Soft winter │ 21.50│ 24.00│ │ Hard winter │ 21.00│ 24.00│ │…

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Excerpt #9, from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

…actions, and if we ever got the least show we would give them the cold shake and clear out and leave them behind. Well, early one morning we hid the raft in a good, safe place about two mile below a little bit of a shabby village named Pikesville, and the king he went ashore and told us all to stay hid whilst he went up to town and smelt around to see if anybody had got any wind of the Royal Nonesuch there yet. (“House to rob, you mean,” says I to myself; “and when you get through robbing it you’ll come back here and wonder what has become of me and Jim and the raft–and you’ll have to take it out in wondering.”) And he said if he warn’t back by midday the duke and me would know it was all right, and we was to come along. So we stayed where we was. The duke he fretted and sweated around, and was in a mighty sour way. He scolded us for everything, and we couldn’t seem to do nothing right; he found fault with every little thing. Something was a-brewing, sure. I was good and glad when midday come and no king; we could have a change, anyway–and maybe a chance for the change on top of it. So me and the duke went up to the village, and hunted around there for the king, and by and by we found him in the back room of a little low doggery, very tight, and a lot of loafers bullyragging him for sport, and he a-cussing and a-threatening with all his might, and so tight he couldn’t walk, and couldn’t do nothing to…

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Excerpt #10, from Astrology: How to Make and Read Your Own Horoscope, by Sepharial

…or arousing the envy and malice of a considerable number of individuals. Nevertheless, there are only two aspects in this horoscope which seem to point to any sort of trouble from such causes. The points are those of Neptune, which afflicts both the Moon and Venus, and of Mars which afflicts Uranus in the Midheaven and the Sun in the 2nd House. By referring these two points to the Ecliptic we find they correspond to the Sun’s position on or about the 24th of May, and the 26th of January, and I shall leave the reader to look up his Almanac and find the individuals (illustrious they must needs be to find chronicle in Whittaker) who were capable of filling the requirements of the case. As to friends, Mr. Chamberlain should lack nothing. With the Moon in sextile to the Sun and Jupiter, the ruler of the 11th House, in the same benefic relations with the Moon, he would always be able to count upon a strong adherence, and the only adverse indication in this matter is that Mars, part ruler of the 11th House, holds the 12th House in square aspect to Uranus in the Midheaven. This would be interpreted to mean that some of his friends will be disposed to become his enemies, and to militate, although ineffectually, against his credit and position. Why ineffectually? Because Mercury, the ruler of the Ascendant and prime significator of Mr. Chamberlain, is angular and well aspected, while Mars is weak and afflicted by Uranus which is in elevation above it….

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Excerpt #11, from The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Complete, by Suetonius

…governments, where public affairs were directed more by the will of the sovereign or his ministers, than by refined suggestions of policy. From the character generally given of Claudius before his elevation to the throne, we should not readily imagine that he was endowed with any taste for literary composition; yet he seems to have exclusively enjoyed this distinction during his own reign, in which learning was at a low ebb. Besides history, Suetonius informs us that he wrote a Defence of Cicero against the Charges of Asinius Gallus. This appears to be the only tribute of esteem or approbation paid to the character of Cicero, from the time of Livy the historian, to the extinction of the race of the Caesars. Asinius Gallus was the son of Asinius Pollio, the orator. Marrying Vipsania after she had been divorced by Tiberius, he incurred the displeasure of that emperor, and died of famine, either voluntarily, or by order of the tyrant. He wrote a comparison between his father and Cicero, in which, with more filial partiality than justice, he gave the preference to the former. NERO CLAUDIUS CAESAR. (337) I. Two celebrated families, the Calvini and Aenobarbi, sprung from the race of the Domitii. The Aenobarbi derive both their extraction and their cognomen from one Lucius Domitius, of whom we have this tradition:…

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Excerpt #12, from Manual of Egyptian Archaeology and Guide to the Study of Antiquities in Egypt

…temples is in such wise devised as to lead gradually from the full sunshine of the outer world to the obscurity of their retreats. At the entrance we find large open spaces, where air and light stream freely in. The hypostyle hall is pervaded by a sober twilight; the sanctuary is more than half lost in a vague darkness; and at the end of the building, in the farthest of the chambers, night all but reigns completely. The effect of distance which was produced by this gradual diminution of light, was still further heightened by various structural artifices. The parts, for instance, are not on the same level. The ground rises from the entrance (fig. 80), and there are always a few steps to mount in passing from one part to another. In the temple of Khonsû the difference of level is not more than 5-1/4 feet, but it is combined with a lowering of the roof, which in most cases is very strongly marked. From the pylon to the wall at the farther end, the height decreases continuously. The peristyle is loftier than the hypostyle hall, and the hypostyle hall is loftier than the sanctuary. The last hall of columns and the farthest chamber are lower and lower still. The architects of Ptolemaic times changed certain details of arrangement. They erected chapels and oratories on the terraced roofs, and reserved space for the construction of secret passages and crypts in the thickness of the walls, wherein to hide the treasure of the god (fig. 81). They, however, introduced only two important modifications of the original plan. The…

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