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Excerpt: At one period of its reverses, the House fell into the occupation of a Showman. He was found registered as its occupier, on the parish books of the time when he rented the House, and there was therefore no need of any clue to his name. But, he himself was less easy to be found; for, he had led a wandering life, and settled people had lost sight of him, and people who plumed themselves on being respectable were shy of admitting that they had ever known anything of him....

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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: Chapter 1. Well, when I had been dead about thirty years I begun to get a little anxious. Mind you, had been whizzing through space all that time, like a comet. Like a comet! Why, Peters, I laid over the lot of them! Of course there weren?t any of them going my way, as a steady thing, you know, because they travel in a long circle like the loop of a lasso, whereas I was pointed as straight as a dart for the Hereafter; but I happened on one every now and then that was going my way for an hour or so, and then we had a bit of a brush together....

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Excerpt: That homely proverb, used on so many occasions in England, viz. ?That what is bred in the bone will not go out of the flesh,? was never more verified than in the story of my Life. Any one would think that after thirty-five years? affliction, and a variety of unhappy circumstances, which few men, if any, ever went through before, and after near seven years of peace and enjoyment in the fullness of all things; grown old, and when, if ever, it might be allowed me to have had experience of every state of middle life, and to know which was most adapted to make a man completely happy; I say, after all this, any one would have thought that the native propensity to rambling which I gave an account of in my first setting out in the world to have been so predominant in my thoughts, should be worn out, and I might, at sixty one years of age, have been a little inclined to stay at home, and have done venturing life and fortune any more....

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Excerpt: An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids by Anthony Trollope.

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Excerpt: The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen, That was the kyng Priamus sone of Troye, In louynge how his auentures fellen ffro wo to wele, and after out of ioie, My purpos is, er that I parte fro ye. Thesiphone, thow help me for tendite Thise woful vers that wepen as I write. To the clepe I, thow goddesse of torment, Thow cruwel furie, sorwynge evere in peyne, Help me that am the sorwful instrument That helpeth loveres, as I kan, to pleyne; ffor wel sit it, the sothe for to seyne, A woful wight to han a drery feere, And to a sorwful tale a sory chere....

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Table of Contents: Book I, 1 -- Book II, 29 -- Book III, 74 -- Book IV, 121 -- Book V, 165

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Excerpt: A Dispersion. ?A telegram! Make haste and open it, Jane; they always make me so nervous! I believe that is the reason Reginald always will telegraph when he is coming,? said Miss Adeline Mohun, a very pretty, well preserved, though delicate-looking lady of some age about forty, as her elder sister, brisk and lively and some years older, came into the room....

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

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

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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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Preface: As the most striking lines of poetry are the most hackneyed, because they have grown to be the common inheritance of all the world, so many of the most noble deeds that earth can show have become the best known, and enjoyed their full meed of fame. Therefore it may be feared that many of the events here detailed, or alluded to, may seem trite to those in search of novelty; but it is not for such that the collection has been made....

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Excerpt: The Second Part of Henry the Fourth Containing his Death and the Coronation of King Henry the Fifth; Actus Primus -- Scoena Prima -- INDUCTION. Enter Rumour. Open your Eares: For which of you will stop The vent of Hearing, when loud Rumor speakes? I, from the Orient, to the drooping West (Making the winde my Post- horse) still unfold The Acts commenced on this Ball of Earth. Upon my Tongue, continuall Slanders ride, The which, in every Language, I pronounce, Stuffing the Eares of them with false Reports: I speake of Peace, while covert Enmitie (Under the smile of Safety) wounds the World: And who but Rumour, who but onely I Make fearfull Musters, and prepar?d Defence, Whil?st the bigge yeare, swolne with some other griefes, Is thought with childe, by the sterne Tyrant, Warre, And no such matter? Rumour, is a Pipe Blowne by Surmises, Ielousies, Conjectures; And of so easie, and so plaine a stop, That the blunt Monster, with uncounted heads, The still discordant, wavering Multitude, Can play upon it. But what neede I thus My well- knowne Body to Anathomize Among my houshold? Why is Rumour heere? I run before King Harries vict...

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Table of Contents: The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, 1 -- Actus Primus. Scoena Prima., 1 -- Scena Secunda., 2 -- Scena Tertia., 7 -- Scena Quarta., 12 -- Actus Secundus. Scoena Prima., 14 -- Scena Secunda., 18 -- Scena Tertia., 22 -- Scaena Quarta., 24 -- Actus Tertius. Scena Prima., 32 -- Scena Secunda., 35 -- Actus Quartus. Scena Prima., 42 -- Scena Secunda., 53 -- Actus Quintus. Scoena Prima., 62 -- Scena Secunda., 64 -- Scena Tertia., 68 -- Scena Quarta., 71 -- Scena Quinta., 72 -- EPILOGVE., 74...

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Excerpt: The increase of the towns of Manhattan, as, for the sake of convenience, we shall term New York and her adjuncts, in all that contributes to the importance of a great commercial mart, renders them one of the most remarkable places of the present age. Within the distinct recollections of living men, they have grown from a city of the fifth or sixth class to be near the head of all the purely trading places of the known world. That there are sufficient causes for this unparalleled prosperity, will appear in the analysis of the natural advantages of the port, in its position, security, accessories, and scale....