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: A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells.

Excerpt: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth -- 2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was uponthe face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of thewaters -- 3. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light -- 4. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the lightfrom the darkness -- 5. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.And the evening and the morning were the first day -- 6. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters,and let it divide the waters from the waters -- 7. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which wereunder the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so....

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: 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...

Excerpt: A Little Tour in France by Henry James.

Excerpt: On the Improvement of the Understanding (Teatise on the Emendation of the Intellect) Baruch Spinoza (Benedict de Spinoza), translated by R.H.M. Elwes....

Excerpt: It was nine o?clock. The little town of Vauchamp, dark and silent, had just retired to bed amid a chilly No vember rain. In the Rue des Recollets, one of the narrowest and most deserted streets of the district of Saint- Jean, a single window was still alight on the third floor of an old house, from whose damaged gutters torrents of water were falling into the street. Mme Burle was sitting up before a meager fire of vine stocks, while her little grandson Charles pored over his lessons by the pale light of a lamp....

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