Quick Excerpts, from a Library of 492 Titles

Generated 2022-07-28 13:26:52

Excerpt #1, from Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853

…therefore, I donned my swallowtail; Meyer, however, I found in a business suit and surprised at my query as to whether he intended going home to dress? Just as we were, we walked across the street and, entering the hotel, whom should we meet but ex-Mayor John G. Nichols, wearing a grayish linen duster, popular in those days, that extended to his very ankles; while Pio and Andrés Pico came attired in blue coats with big brass buttons. Meyer, observing the Mayor’s outfit, facetiously asked me if I still wished him to go home and dress according to Los Angeles fashion; whereupon I drew off my gloves, buttoned up my overcoat and determined to sit out the banquet with my claw-hammer thus concealed. Mr. Seward, it is needless to say, was faultlessly attired. The Spanish archives were long neglected, until M. Kremer was authorized to overhaul and arrange the documents; and even then it was not until September 16th that the Council built a vault for the preservation of the official papers. Two years later, Kremer discovered an original proclamation of peace between the United States and Mexico. Elsewhere I allude to the slow development of Fort Street. For the first time, on the twenty-fourth of September street lamps burned there, and that was from six to nine months after darkness had been…

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Excerpt #2, from Planet of Sand, by Murray Leinster

…be easy to make terms with the life which held other life so cheaply. With the planet’s only source of power now guarded, matters looked less bright than before. But after they had reached the icecap, and when they slanted down out of the airlessness to the spot which was their home because their seeds had been planted there–as they dived down for a landing, their real situation appeared. There was a colossal object with many pairs of legs moving back and forth over the little space where their food plants sprouted. In days, those plants would have yielded food. They wouldn’t yield food now. Their garden was being trampled to nothingness by a multilegged machine of a size comparable to the other machine which had chased them on the grid. It was fifty feet high from ground to top, and had a round, tanklike body all of twenty feet in diameter. Round projections at one end looked like eyes. It moved on multiple legs which trampled in orderly confusion. It stamped the growing plants to pulped green stuff in the polar sand. It went over and over and over the place where the food necessary for the humans’ survival had promised to grow. It stamped and stamped: It destroyed all hope of food. And it destroyed all hope. Because, as Stan drove the skid down to see the machine more clearly, it stopped in its stamping. It swung about to face him, with a…

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Excerpt #3, from My Man Jeeves, by P. G. Wodehouse

…“I am amazed! What is the nature of my nephew’s business, Mr. Wooster?” “Oh, just business, don’t you know. The same sort of thing Carnegie and Rockefeller and all these coves do, you know.” I slid for the door. “Awfully sorry to leave you, but I’ve got to meet some of the lads elsewhere.” Coming out of the lift I met Bicky bustling in from the street. “Halloa, Bertie! I missed him. Has he turned up?” “He’s upstairs now, having some tea.” “What does he think of it all?” “He’s absolutely rattled.” “Ripping! I’ll be toddling up, then. Toodle-oo, Bertie, old man. See you later.” “Pip-pip, Bicky, dear boy.” He trotted off, full of merriment and good cheer, and I went off to the club to sit in the window and watch the traffic coming up one way and going down the other. It was latish in the evening when I looked in at the flat to dress for dinner. “Where’s everybody, Jeeves?” I said, finding no little feet pattering about the place. “Gone out?” “His grace desired to see some of the sights of the city, sir. Mr….

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Excerpt #4, from The Grand Inquisitor, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

…century. It was just at that time that a new and terrible heresy first made its appearance in the north of Germany.* [*Luther’s reform] A great star ‘shining as it were a lamp… fell upon the fountains waters’… and ‘they were made bitter.’ This ‘heresy’ blasphemously denied ‘miracles.’ But those who had remained faithful believed all the more ardently, the tears of mankind ascended to Him as heretofore, and the Christian world was expecting Him as confidently as ever; they loved Him and hoped in Him, thirsted and hungered to suffer and die for Him just as many of them had done before…. So many centuries had weak, trusting humanity implored Him, crying with ardent faith and fervour: ‘How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost Thou not come!’ So many long centuries hath it vainly appealed to Him, that at last, in His inexhaustible compassion, He consenteth to answer the prayer…. He decideth that once more, if it were but for one short hour, the people–His long-suffering, tortured, fatally sinful, his loving and child-like, trusting people–shall behold Him again. The scene of action is placed by me in Spain, at Seville, during that terrible period of the Inquisition, when, for the greater glory of God, stakes were flaming all over the country. Burning wicked heretics,…

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Excerpt #5, from Roughing It in the Bush, by Susanna Moodie

…Indian. Indian must learn your words to swear and take God’s name in vain.” Oh, what a reproof to Christian men! I felt abashed, and degraded in the eyes of this poor savage–who, ignorant as he was in many respects, yet possessed that first great attribute of the soul, a deep reverence for the Supreme Being. How inferior were thousands of my countrymen to him in this important point. The affection of Indian parents to their children, and the deference which they pay to the aged, is another beautiful and touching trait in their character. One extremely cold, wintry day, as I was huddled with my little ones over the stove, the door softly unclosed, and the moccasined foot of an Indian crossed the floor. I raised my head, for I was too much accustomed to their sudden appearance at any hour to feel alarmed, and perceived a tall woman standing silently and respectfully before me, wrapped in a large blanket. The moment she caught my eye she dropped the folds of her covering from around her, and laid at my feet the attenuated figure of a boy, about twelve years of age, who was in the last stage of consumption. “Papouse die,” she said, mournfully clasping her hands against her breast, and looking down upon the suffering lad with the most…

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Excerpt #6, from The American Diary of a Japanese Girl, by Yoné Noguchi

…Isn’t that “quarter-past” interesting? And I can never be ready before nine. 25th—I dragged my uncle off to the Chute to enrich my store of zoology. “One gape more, Uncle, to count up one dozen!” I said, and pulled his mustache in the car. It was lucky that no one saw my act. Poor Oji San! Playing chaperon is not a very promising occupation, is it? I stood by the “happy family” of monkeys. I tried to descry their point of view in orations. I gave it up. The vain Miss Polly worked hard to bring everybody to an understanding with one eternal “Hello, dear!” I found such grace in the elephant when he waved his honourable trunk. The stupid Mr. Elephant wasn’t stupid a bit in accepting my present. How philosophically he gazed at me! Very likely I was the first Jap girl to his audience. What respectable eyes! “You’ll bankrupt yourself in peanuts,” my uncle warned. 26th—A white apron on my black dress makes me so cute. I am just suited to be a chambermaid. Shall I volunteer as a servant?…

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Excerpt #7, from My Reminiscences, by Rabindranath Tagore

…within himself. This makes it impossible for him to avoid the creation of a great deal of rubbish during a considerable length of time. The ambition to work wonders with the modest gifts at one’s disposal is bound to be an obsession in the beginning, so that the effort to transcend at every step one’s natural powers, and therewith the bounds of truth and beauty, is always visible in early writings. To recover one’s normal self, to learn to respect one’s powers as they are, is a matter of time. However that may be, I have left much of youthful folly to be ashamed of, besmirching the pages of the Bharati; and this shames me not for its literary defects alone but for its atrocious impudence, its extravagant excesses and its high-sounding artificiality. At the same time I am free to recognise that the writings of that period were pervaded with an enthusiasm the value of which cannot be small. It was a period to which, if error was natural, so was the boyish faculty of hoping, believing and rejoicing. And if the fuel of error was necessary for feeding the flame of enthusiasm then while that which was fit to be reduced to ashes will have become ash, the good work done by the flame will not have been in vain in my life. PART V (24) Ahmedabad…

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Excerpt #8, from Modern Essays, by Harry Morgan Ayres et al.

…question. In “Sixes and Sevens,” a young man sinking under accidental morphia, is kept awake and alive by shouts, kicks, and blows. O. Henry’s public seems imaged in that young man. But I draw a sharp distinction between the tone of the style and its pattern. The tone is brazen, or, better perhaps, brassy; its self-advertisement is incorrigible; it reeks with that air of performance which is opposed to real efficiency. But the pattern is another matter. The South rounds its periods like its vowels; O. Henry has read, not widely, but wisely, in his boyhood. His sentences are built–a rare thing in the best writers of to-day. In conciseness, that Spartan virtue, he was strong, though it must be confessed that the tale-teller was now and then hustled from the rostrum by his rival and enemy, the talker. He can introduce a felicity with a noiselessness that numbers him for a flying second among the sovereigns of English. “In one of the second-floor front windows Mrs. McCaskey awaited her husband. Supper was cooling on the table. Its heat went into Mrs. McCaskey.” I regret the tomfoolery; I wince at the slang. Yet even for these levities with which his pages are so liberally besprinkled or bedaubed, some half-apology may be circumspectly urged. In nonsense his ease is consummate. A horseman who should dismount to pick up a bauble would be childish; O. Henry picks it up without dismounting. Slang, again, is…

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Excerpt #9, from The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

…smile…. People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible…. Yes, Mr. Gray, the gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes brings you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly…. Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing…. A new Hedonism—that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol. With your personality there is nothing…

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Excerpt #10, from The Book of Hallowe’en, by Ruth Edna Kelley

…O’er the Urdar-fountain." Völuspa saga. (Blackwell trans.) guarded by three fates, Was, Will, and Shall Be. The name of Was means the past, of Will, the power, howbeit small, which men have over present circumstances, and Shall Be, the future over which man has no control. Vurdh, the name of the latter, gives us the word “weird,” which means fate or fateful. The three Weird Sisters in Macbeth are seeresses. Besides the ash, other trees and shrubs were believed to have peculiar powers, which they have kept, with some changes of meaning, to this day. The elder (elves’ grave), the hawthorn, and the juniper, were sacred to supernatural powers. The priests of the Teutons sacrificed prisoners of war in consecrated groves, to Tyr, god of the sword. The victims were not burned alive, as by the Druids, but cut and torn terribly, and their dead bodies burned. From these sacrifices auspices were taken. A man’s innocence or guilt was manifested by gods to men through ordeals by fire; walking upon red-hot ploughshares, holding a heated bar of iron, or thrusting the hands into red-hot gauntlets, or into boiling water. If after a certain number of days no burns appeared the person was declared innocent. If a…

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Excerpt #11, from Significant Achievements in Space Bioscience 1958

…telemetry. Although all three mice were lost, the two experiments with Laska and Benji yielded physiological results. The experimenters designed effective instrumentation for registering the electrical activity of the mouse’s heart through a single commutated telemetry channel. Records were obtained for both animals during various portions of the flight. The results indicate that both animals were alive when the nose cones hit the water. Two South American squirrel monkeys (Gordo and Baker) and a rhesus monkey (Able) were launched into space from Cape Canaveral in 1958 and 1959 by U.S. Army Jupiter missiles. The vehicles reached speeds of approximately 10 000 mph and altitudes of 300 miles on flights which lasted about 15 min. Time courses of cardiac and respiratory rates ([ref.80]) of the two squirrel monkeys showed that the noise of the engine at liftoff immediately produced an increase in their heart rates. Respiration also increased temporarily, but slowed later with increasing acceleration. Heart rates fluctuated considerably during launch acceleration, which reached about 15 g at cutoff. The period of free flight and weightlessness was characterized by pronounced fluctuations of heart activity in the postacceleration phase. Thereafter, the heart rate of Baker remained relatively constant,…

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Excerpt #12, from The Story of Sir Francis Drake, by Letitia MacColl Elton

…fleet out of their different ports. To keep victuals from them. To follow them in case they should come out towards England or Ireland. To cut off as many of them as he could, and prevent their landing. To set upon the West Indian ships as they came or went.” But no sooner was he instructed than the Queen changed her bold orders to milder ones. He was not to enter any port by force, nor to offer violence to any towns, or ships in harbour. But Drake had got away to sea without the second orders, and acted on the first. He had heard that the ships were gathering in Cadiz harbour, and there he decided boldly to seek for them. The outer and inner harbours of Cadiz were crowded with shipping, most of which was getting ready for the invasion of England. Drake’s fleet sailed in, routed the defending galleys, and made havoc among the ships, about thirty-seven of which were captured, burnt, or sunk. One was a large ship belonging to the Marquis of Santa Cruz. They carried away four ships laden with wine, oil, biscuits, and dried fruit; “departing thence,” as Drake says, “at our pleasure, with as much honour as we could wish.” They were chased by Spanish galleys, which did little harm, for the wind favoured the English as they sailed away from Cadiz. The Spaniards thought Drake had gone to stop the treasure fleet. But Drake wished to stop the Armada, which was a much greater affair….

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