Excerpt: A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells.

Excerpt: PART I. It rose for them--their honey-moon--over the waters of a lake so famed as the scene of romantic raptures that they were rather proud of not having been afraid to choose it as the setting of their own. ?It required a total lack of humour, or as great a gift for it as ours, to risk the experiment,? Susy Lansing opined, as they hung over the inevitable marble balustrade and watched their tutelary orb roll its magic carpet across the waters to their feet....

Excerpt: Septimius Felton; or, The Elixir of Life by Nathanial Hawthorne.

Excerpt: Le Morte D?Arthur -- Glossary to volume two? by Sir Thomas Malory.

Excerpt: Arthurian Chronicles: Roman De Brut by Wace, translated by Eugene Mason.

Introduction: Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason....

Excerpt: Roderick Hudson by Henry James.

Excerpt: The Pathfinder by James Fenimore Cooper.

Excerpt: I believe he had seen us out of the window coming off to dine in the dinghy of a fourteen-ton yawl belonging to Marlow my host and skipper. We helped the boy we had with us to haul the boat up on the landing-stage before we went up to the riverside inn, where we found our new acquaintance eating his dinner in dignified loneliness at the head of a long table, white and inhospitable like a snow bank....

Excerpt: Returning Home by Anthony Trollope.

Excerpt: In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in....

Excerpt: Tom Tiddler?s Ground by Charles Dickens.

Excerpt: Ursula by Honore de Balzac, translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley.

Excerpt: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole.

Excerpt: The Uncommercial Traveler by Charles Dickens.

Excerpt: Chapter 1. The Rabourdin household in Paris, where men of thought and study bear a certain likeness to one another, living as they do in a common centre, you must have met with several resembling Monsieur Rabourdin, whose acquaintance we are about to make at a moment when he is head of a bureau in one of our most important ministries....

Excerpt: A Ride Across Palestine by Anthony Trollope.

Excerpt: My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglas.

Excerpt: IN 1828, at about one o?clock one morning, two persons came out of a large house in the Rue du Faubourg Saint- Honore, near the Elysee-Bourbon. One was the famous doctor, Horace Bianchon; the other was one of the most elegant men in Paris, the Baron de Rastignac; they were friends of long standing. Each had sent away his carriage, and no cab was to be seen in the street; but the night was fine, and the pavement dry....

Excerpt: Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad.

Contents AUTHOR?S NOTE ........................................................................................................................... 4 TALES OF UNREST ........................................................ 8 KARAIN: A MEMORY ...................................................................................8 THE IDIOTS ...................................................................................................51 AN OUTPOST OF PROGRESS .....................................................................76 THE RETURN ..............................................................................................102 THE LAGOON .............................................................................................160...