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Excerpt: Chapter 1. How did he get it? ?I can never bring myself to believe it, John,? said Mary Walker the pretty daughter of Mr. George Walker, attorney of Silverbridge. Walker and Winthrop was the name of the firm, and they were respectable people, who did all the solicitors? business that had to be done in that part of Barsetshire on behalf of the Crown, were employed on the local business of the Duke of Omnium, who is great in those parts, and altogether held their heads up high, as provincial lawyers often do. They--the Walkers--lived in a great brick house in the middle of the town, gave dinners, to which the county gentlemen not unfrequently condescended to come, and in a mild way led the fashion in Silverbridge. ?I can never bring myself to believe it, John,? said Miss Walker....

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Excerpt: I had taken Mrs. Prest into my confidence; in truth without her I should have made but little advance, for the fruitful idea in the whole business dropped from her friendly lips. It was she who invented the short cut, who severed the Gordian knot. It is not supposed to be the nature of women to rise as a general thing to the largest and most liberal view--I mean of a practical scheme; but it has struck me that they sometimes throw off a bold conception--such as a man would not have risen to-- with singular serenity....

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Excerpt: Certain persons have interrogated the author as to why there was such a demand for these tales that no year passes without his giving an installment of them, and why he has lately taken to writing commas mixed up with bad syllables, at which the ladies publicly knit their brows, and have put to him other questions of a like character....

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Contents PROLOGUE..................................................................................................................................... 4 PERSEVERANCE IN LOVE.......................................................................................................... 9 CONCERNING A PROVOST WHO DID NOT RECOGNISE THINGS............................. 25 ABOUT THE MONK AMADOR, WHO WAS A GLORIOUS ABBOT OF TURPENAY... 34 BERTHA THE PENITENT .......................................................................................................... 51 I HOW BERTHA REMAINED A MAIDEN IN THE MARRIED STATE ..................................................................... 51 II HOW BERTHA BEHAVED, KNOWING THE BUSINESS OF LOVE .................................................................... 59 III HORRIBLE CHASTISEMENT OF BERTHA AND EXPIATION OF THE SAME, WHO DIED PARDONED ..... 72 HOW THE PRETTY MAID OF PORTILLON CONVINCED HER JUDGE........................................................ 80 IN WHICH IT IS DEMONSTRATED THAT FORTUNE IS ALWAYS FEMININE ........... 86 CONCERNING A POOR MAN WHO WAS CALLED LE VIEUX PAR-CHEMINS..........

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Excerpt: Towards three o?clock in the afternoon of one October day in the year 1844, a man of sixty or thereabouts, whom anybody might have credited with more than his actual age, was walking along the Boulevard des Italians with his head bent down, as if he were tracking some one. There was a smug expression about the mouth--he looked like a merchant who has just done a good stroke of business, or a bachelor emerging from a boudoir in the best of humors with himself; and in Paris this is the highest degree of self-satisfaction ever registered by a human countenance....

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Excerpt: PART I. At the little town of Vevey, in Switzerland, there is a particularly comfortable hotel. There are, in deed, many hotels, for the entertainment of tourists is the business of the place, which, as many travelers will remember, is seated upon the edge of a remarkably blue lake--a lake that it behooves every tourist to visit....

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Excerpt: Dear Speed, yours of the 9th instant is duly received, which I do not meet as a ?bore,? but as a most welcome visitor. I will answer the business part of it first. In relation to our Congress matter here, you were right in supposing I would support the nominee. Neither Baker nor I, however, is the man, but Hardin, so far as I can judge from present appearances. We shall have no split or trouble about the matter; all will be harmony. In relation to the ?coming events? about which Butler wrote you, I had not heard one word before I got your letter; but I have so much confidence in the judgment of Butler on such a subject that I incline to think there may be some reality in it. What day does Butler appoint? By the way, how do ?events? of the same sort come on in your family? Are you possessing houses and lands, and oxen and asses, and men-servants and maid-servants, and begetting sons and daughters? We are not keeping house, but boarding at the Globe Tavern, which is very well kept now by a widow lady of the name of Beck....

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Excerpt: It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither. Gaslights flared in the shops with a haggard and unblest air, as knowing themselves to be night-creatures that had no business abroad under the sun; while the sun itself when it was for a few moments dimly indicated through circling eddies of fog, showed as if it had gone out and were collapsing flat and cold....

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Excerpt: DEDICATION. The word lorette is a euphemism invented to describe the status of a personage, or a personage of a status, of which it is awkward to speak; the French Academie, in its modesty, having omitted to supply a definition out of regard for the age of its forty members. Whenever a new word comes to supply the place of an unwieldy circumlocution, its fortune is assured; the word lorette has passed into the language of every class of society, even where the lorette herself will never gain an entrance. It was only invented in 1840, and derived beyond a doubt from the agglomeration of such swallows? nests about the Church of Our Lady of Loretto. This information is for etymoligists only. Those gentlemen would not be so often in a quandary if mediaeval writers had only taken such pains with details of contemporary manners as we take in these days of analysis and description....

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Excerpt: The Works of Edgar Allan Poe in Five Volumes: Volume Four.

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Contents THE DEVIL IN THE BELFRY ................................................................................................................................... 4 LIONIZING ................................................................................................................................................................ 12 X-ING A PARAGRAB ............................................................................................................................................... 17 METZENGERSTEIN ................................................................................................................................................ 23 THE SYSTEM OF DOCTOR TARR AND PROFESSOR FETHER ...................................................................... 31 HOW TO WRITE A BLACKWOOD ARTICLE ...................................................................................................... 48 A PREDICAMENT.................................................................................................................................................... 58 MYSTIFICATION ..............................................

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Excerpt: Welcome to the sixth volume of Best of Four. That?s right, we have been in business long enough to publish six volumes of the best student writing published in English 4 classes each fall, on the Hazleton Campus of Commonwealth College. Last year, and continuing this year, we?ve also been publishing work from students at other Commonwealth College locations. In the coming year, we will be making some major changes....

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Contents Transition Time: High School to College Alaina Watts ....................................................................................... 4 An Objective View of Cheerleading Erica Chinetski .......................................................................................... 5 She?s Come Undone Jill Giosa ............................................................................................................................ 7 Decisions for the Futrue Joseph M. Schifano ...................................................................................................... 8 Rewards Beyond Products Kari Barnett............................................................................................................ 10 The American Alex Groysman ........................................................................................................................... 11 The Glorious Five Days Alexandrea Satar ........................................................................................................ 12 Go Sharks! Beth Olexa .................................................................................

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Excerpt: Johnny Tarleton, an ordinary young business man of thirty or less, is taking his weekly Friday to Tuesday in the house of his father, John Tarleton, who has made a great deal of money out of Tarleton?s Underwear. The house is in Surrey, on the slope of Hindhead; and Johnny, reclining, novel in hand, in a swinging chair with a little awning above it, is enshrined in a spacious half hemisphere of glass which forms a pavilion commanding the garden, and, beyond it, a barren but lovely landscape of hill profile with fir trees, commons of bracken and gorse, and wonderful cloud pictures....

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Excerpt: The house of Heine Brothers, in Munich, was of good repute at the time of which I am about to tell,--a time not long ago; and is so still, I trust. It was of good repute in its own way, seeing that no man doubted the word or solvency of Heine Brothers; but they did not possess, as bankers, what would in England be considered a large or profitable business. The operations of English bankers are bewildering in their magnitude. Legions of clerks are employed. The senior book-keepers, though only salaried servants, are themselves great men; while the real partners are inscrutable, mysterious, opulent beyond measure, and altogether unknown to their customers. Take any firm at random,--Brown, Jones, and Cox, let us say,--the probability is that Jones has been dead these fifty years, that Brown is a Cabinet Minister, and that Cox is master of a pack of hounds in Leicestershire....

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. Above Buttons. Long after the hours when tradesmen are in the habit of commencing business, the shutters of a certain shop in the town of Lymport-on-the-Sea remained significantly closed, and it became known that death had taken Mr. Melchisedec Harrington, and struck one off the list of living tailors....

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Excerpt: Act I. A fine October morning in the north east suburbs of London, a vast district many miles away from the London of Mayfair and St. James?s, much less known there than the Paris of the Rue de Rivoli and the Champs Elysees, and much less narrow, squalid, fetid and airless in its slums; strong in comfortable, prosperous middle class life; wide-streeted, myriad-populated; well-served with ugly iron urinals, Radical clubs, tram lines, and a perpetual stream of yellow cars; enjoying in its main thoroughfares the luxury of grass-grown ?front gardens,? untrodden by the foot of man save as to the path from the gate to the hall door; but blighted by an intolerable monotony of miles and miles of graceless, characterless brick houses, black iron railings, stony pavements, slaty roofs, and respectably ill dressed or disreputably poorly dressed people, quite accustomed to the place, and mostly plodding about somebody else?s work, which they would not do if they themselves could help it. The little energy and eagerness that crop up show themselves in cockney cupidity and business ?push.?...

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Excerpt: Is it not a necessity to explain to a public curious to know everything, how I came to be sufficiently learned in the law to carry on the business of my little world? And in so doing, am I not bound to put on record the memory of the amiable and intelligent man who, meeting the Scribe (another clerkamateur) at a ball, said, ?Just give the office a turn; there is work for you there, I assure you?? But do you need this public testimony to feel assured of the affection of the writer?...