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In the Cage is a novella by Henry James, first published as a book in 1898. This long story centers on an unnamed London telegraphist. She deciphers clues to her clients' personal lives from the often cryptic telegrams they submit to her as she sits in the cage at the post office. Sensitive and intelligent, the telegraphist eventually finds out more than she may want to know....

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Fiction, Literature

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Excerpt: The Reef by Edith Wharton.

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Excerpt: The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Volume One.

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Contents EARLY POEMS.............................................................................................................................. 12 STANZA, WRITTEN AT BRACKNELL................................................................................................................. 12 STANZAS.?APRIL, 1814........................................................................................................................................ 13 TO HARRIET. ........................................................................................................................................................... 14 TO MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN. ....................................................................................................... 15 TO ?. ......................................................................................................................................................................... 16 MUTABILITY............................................................................................................................................................ 16 ON DEATH. ..............................

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Excerpt: Old Moodie. The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my bachelor apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled Lady, when an elderly man of rather shabby appearance met me in an obscure part of the street....

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Excerpt: Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence.

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Excerpt: One day--and that day was many years ago now--I received a long, chatty letter from one of my old chums and fellow wanderers in Eastern waters. He was still out there, but settled down, and middle-aged; I imagined him--grown portly in figure and domestic in his habits; in short, overtaken by the fate common to all except to those who, being specially beloved by the gods, get knocked on the head early. The letter was of the reminiscent ?do you remember? kind--a wistful letter of backward glances. And, amongst other things, ?surely you remember old Nelson,? he wrote....

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Preface: When I first saw Mr. Osgood?s beautiful illustrated edition of The Lady of the Lake, I asked him to let me use some of the cuts in a cheaper annotated edition for school and household use; and the present volume is the result. The text of the poem has given me unexpected trouble. When I edited some of Gray?s poems several years ago, I found that they had not been correctly printed for more than half a century; but in the case of Scott I supposed that the text of Black?s so-called ?Author?s Edition? could be depended upon as accurate. Almost at the start, however, I detected sundry obvious misprints in one of the many forms in which this edition is issued, and an examination of others showed that they were as bad in their way....

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Excerpt: It was on a Saturday, at six in the morning, that I died after a three days? illness. My wife was searching a trunk for some linen, and when she rose and turned she saw me rigid, with open eyes and silent pulses. She ran to me, fancying that I had fainted, touched my hands and bent over me. Then she suddenly grew alarmed, burst into tears and stammered:...

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Excerpt: Tales and Fantasies by Robert Louis Stevenson.

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Contents THE MISADVENTURES OF JOHN NICHOLSON....... 4 THE BODY-SNATCHER .............................................. 63 THE STORY OF A LIE.................................................. 81...

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Excerpt: Nostromo. A Tale of the Seaboard by Joseph Conrad.

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Excerpt: In June last a division was substantially lost at or near Winchester, Va. At the time, it was under General Milroy as immediate commander in the field, General Schenck as department commander at Baltimore, and General Halleck as general- in-chief at Washington. General Milroy, as immediate commander, was put in arrest, and subsequently a court of inquiry examined chiefly with reference to disobedience of orders, and reported the evidence....

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Excerpt: Sartor Resartus. The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh.

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Excerpt: Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith.

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Excerpt: The O?Conors of Castle Conor, County Mayo by Anthony Trollope.

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This story is from Mary Cowden Clarke's multi-volume work The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, in which she imagined the early lives of characters from Portia to Beatrice to Lady Macbeth. In her revision of Ophelia from Hamlet, she creates a backstory for Shakespeare's tragic heroine, from her infancy to just before the action of Hamlet begins.(Summary by Elizabeth Klett)...

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Fiction, Literature

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Excerpt: I do not find it easy to get sufficiently far away from this Book, in the first sensations of having finished it, to refer to it with the composure which this formal heading would seem to require. My interest in it, is so recent and strong; and my mind is so divided between pleasure and regret -- pleasure in the achievement of a long design, regret in the separation from many companions -- that I am in danger of wearying the reader whom I love, with personal confidences, and private emotions....

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Excerpt: In the year 1800, toward the close of October, a foreigner, accompanied by a woman and a little girl, was standing for a long time in front of the palace of the Tuileries, near the ruins of a house recently pulled down, at the point where in our day the wing begins which was intended to unite the chateau of Catherine de Medici with the Louvre of the Valois....

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Excerpt: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

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Excerpt: The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part Two.

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Contents AFTERWAR .....................................................................................................4 THE FULNESS OF LIFE ...............................................................................33 A VENETIAN NIGHT?S ................................................................................43 ENTERTAINMENT........................................................................................43 XINGU............................................................................................................60 THE VERDICT...............................................................................................83 THE RECKONING ........................................................................................92...

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Excerpt: The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 by James Fenimore Cooper.