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:...

Excerpt: Tales and Fantasies by Robert Louis Stevenson.

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

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

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....

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

Excerpt: Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith.

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

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....

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....

Excerpt: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

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

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

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

Excerpt: Accusations of ingratitude, and just accusations no doubt, are made against every inhabitant of this wicked world, and the fact is, that a man who is ceaselessly engaged in its trouble and turmoil, borne hither and thither upon the fierce waves of the crowd, bustling, shifting, struggling to keep himself somewhat above water--fighting for reputation, or more likely for bread, and ceaselessly occupied to-day with plans for appeasing the eternal appetite of inevitable hunger to-morrow--a man in such straits has hardly time to think of anything but himself, and, as in a sinking ship, must make his own rush for the boats, and fight, struggle, and trample for safety....

Excerpt: The Research Magnificent by H. G. Wells.

Excerpt: The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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

Excerpt: MME. VAUQUER (nee de Conflans) is an elderly person, who for the past forty years has kept a lodging-house in the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, in the district that lies between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel. Her house (known in the neighborhood as the Maison Vauquer) receives men and women, old and young, and no word has ever been breathed against her respectable establishment; but, at the same time, it must be said that as a matter of fact no young woman has been under her roof for thirty years, and that if a young man stays there for any length of time it is a sure sign that his allowance must be of the slenderest....

Excerpt: Nearly all young men have a compass with which they delight in measuring the future. When their will is equal to the breadth of the angle at which they open it the world is theirs. But this phenomenon of the inner life takes place only at a certain age. That age, which for all men lies between twenty-two and twenty-eight, is the period of great thoughts, of fresh conceptions, because it is the age of immense desires. After that age, short as the seed-time, comes that of execution. There are, as it were, two youths,--the youth of belief, the youth of action; these are often commingled in men whom Nature has favored and who, like Caesar, like Newton, like Bonaparte, are the greatest among great men....

Excerpt: The Pension Beaurepas by Henry James.

Excerpt: The Pit: A Story of Chicago by Frank Norris.