Quick Excerpts, from a Library of 492 Titles

Generated 2022-07-28 13:26:06

Excerpt #1, from Not that it Matters, by A. A. Milne

…I suppose this is the reason why diaries are so rarely kept nowadays–that nothing ever happens to anybody. A diary would be worth writing up if it could be written like this:– MONDAY.–“Another exciting day. Shot a couple of hooligans on my way to business and was forced to give my card to the police. On arriving at the office was surprised to find the building on fire, but was just in time to rescue the confidential treaty between England and Switzerland. Had this been discovered by the public, war would infallibly have resulted. Went out to lunch and saw a runaway elephant in the Strand. Thought little of it at the time, but mentioned it to my wife in the evening. She agreed that it was worth recording.” TUESDAY.–"Letter from solicitor informing me that I have come into £1,000,000 through the will of an Australian gold-digger named Tomkins. On referring to my diary I find that I saved his life two years ago by plunging into the Serpentine. This is very gratifying. Was late at the office as I had to look in at the Palace on the way, in order to get knighted, but managed to get a good deal of work done before I was interrupted by a madman with a razor, who demanded £100. Shot him after a desperate struggle. Tea at an ABC, where I met the Duke of —. Fell into the Thames…

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Excerpt #2, from The Busy Life of Eighty Five Years of Ezra Meeker, by Ezra Meeker

…pioneer life, and began writing. But this is not history, you will say. True, but we will come to that by and by. I had, during the summer of 1853, with an inexperienced companion, in an open boat—a frail skiff built with our own hands—crossed the path of Theodore Winthrop, spending more than a month on a cruise from Olympia to the Straits and return, while that adventurous traveler and delightful writer had with a crew of Indians made the trip from Port Townsend to Fort Nisqually in a canoe. I had followed Winthrop a year later through the Natchess Pass to the Columbia River and beyond, alone, except a companion pony that carried my sack of hard bread for food, the saddle blanket for my bed and myself across the turbulent rivers, and on easy grades. If Winthrop could write such a beautiful book, “The Canoe and the Saddle,” based upon such a trip, with Indians to paddle his canoe on the Sound, and with an attendant and three horses through the mountains, why should not my own experience of such a trip be interesting to my own children and their children’s children? And so I wrote these trips. Did you ever, when hungry, taste of a dish of fruit, a luscious, ripe, highly flavored apple for instance, that seemed only to whet but not satisfy your appetite? I know you have, and so can appreciate my feelings when these stories were written. I craved more of pioneer…

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Excerpt #3, from Famous Modern Ghost Stories, by Dorothy Scarborough et al.

…roast beef and ale, motor-cars, policemen, brass bands, and a dozen other things that proclaimed the soul of ordinariness or utility. The effect was immediate and astonishing even to myself. Psychologically, I suppose, it was simply a sudden and violent reaction after the strain of living in an atmosphere of things that to the normal consciousness must seem impossible and incredible. But, whatever the cause, it momentarily lifted the spell from my heart, and left me for the short space of a minute feeling free and utterly unafraid. I looked up at my friend opposite. “You damned old pagan!” I cried, laughing aloud in his face. “You imaginative idiot! You superstitious idolator! You—-” I stopped in the middle, seized anew by the old horror. I tried to smother the sound of my voice as something sacrilegious. The Swede, of course, heard it too–that strange cry overhead in the darkness–and that sudden drop in the air as though something had come nearer. He had turned ashen white under the tan. He stood bolt upright in front of the fire, stiff as a rod, staring at me. “After that,” he said in a sort of helpless, frantic way, “we must go! We can’t stay now; we must strike camp this very instant and go on–down the river.” He was talking, I saw, quite wildly, his words dictated by abject…

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Excerpt #4, from Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens

…and nieces, who had been perfectly inconsolable during the previous illness, and whose grief had been wholly irrepressible even on the most public occasions, they would be as happy among themselves as need be—quite cheerful and contented—conversing together with as much freedom and gaiety, as if nothing whatever had happened to disturb them. Husbands, too, bore the loss of their wives with the most heroic calmness. Wives, again, put on weeds for their husbands, as if, so far from grieving in the garb of sorrow, they had made up their minds to render it as becoming and attractive as possible. It was observable, too, that ladies and gentlemen who were in passions of anguish during the ceremony of interment, recovered almost as soon as they reached home, and became quite composed before the tea-drinking was over. All this was very pleasant and improving to see; and Oliver beheld it with great admiration. That Oliver Twist was moved to resignation by the example of these good people, I cannot, although I am his biographer, undertake to affirm with any degree of confidence; but I can most distinctly say, that for many months he continued meekly to submit to the domination and ill-treatment of Noah Claypole: who used him far worse than before, now that his jealousy was roused by seeing the new boy promoted to the black stick and hatband, while he, the old one, remained stationary in…

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Excerpt #5, from The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean, by R. M. Ballantyne

…infants along with them. One of those women was much younger than her companions, and we were struck with the modesty of her demeanour and the gentle expression of her face, which, although she had the flattish nose and thick lips of the others, was of a light-brown colour, and we conjectured that she must be of a different race. She and her companions wore short petticoats and a kind of tippet on their shoulders. Their hair was jet black, but instead of being long, was short and curly,–though not woolly–somewhat like the hair of a young boy. While we gazed with interest and some anxiety at these poor creatures, the big chief advanced to one of the elder females and laid his hand upon the child. But the mother shrank from him, and clasping the little one to her bosom, uttered a wail of fear. With a savage laugh, the chief tore the child from her arms and tossed it into the sea. A low groan burst from Jack’s lips as we witnessed this atrocious act and heard the mother’s shriek, as she fell insensible on the sand. The rippling waves rolled the child on the beach, as if they refused to be a party in such a foul murder, and we could observe that the little one still lived. The young girl was now brought forward, and the chief addressed her; but although we heard his voice, and even the words distinctly, of course we could not understand what he said. The girl made no answer to his fierce questions, and we saw by the way in which he pointed to the fire that he…

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Excerpt #6, from The Talking Horse, and Other Tales, by F. Anstey

…punishment was sufficient already, for, of course, I guessed that she had only accepted the Colonel under the first intolerable sting of desertion. No: I reserved all my wrath for Brutus, who had betrayed me at the moment of triumph. I planned revenge. Cost what it might I would ride him once more. In the eyes of the law I was his master. I would exercise my legal rights to the full. The afternoon came at last. I was in a white heat of anger, though as I ascended to the saddle there were bystanders who put a more uncharitable construction upon my complexion. Brutus cast an uneasy eye at my heels as we started: ‘What are those things you’ve got on?’ he inquired. ‘Spurs,’ I replied curtly. ‘You shouldn’t wear them till you have learnt to turn your toes in,’ he said. ‘And a whip, too! May I ask what that is for?’ ‘We will discuss that presently,’ I said very coldly; for I did not want to have a scene with my horse in the street. When we came round by the statue of Achilles and on to the Ride, I shortened my reins, and got a better hold of the whip, while I found that, from some cause I cannot explain, the roof of my mouth grew uncomfortably dry. ’I should be glad of a little quiet talk with you, if you’ve no…

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Excerpt #7, from Mr. Punch’s History of the Great War, by Charles L. Graves

…Lord Milner has gone so far in the House of Lords as to say that “such war news as is published has from first to last been seriously misleading.” The Balkan intelligence that is allowed to reach us does not exactly deserve this censure. To call it misleading would be too high praise; it seldom rises beyond a level of blameless irrelevance. It is hardly a burlesque of the facts to say that a cable from Amsterdam informs us that the Copenhagen correspondent of the Echo de Paris learns from Salonika, viâ Lemnos and Nijni Novgorod, that in high official circles in Bukarest it is rumoured that in Constantinople the situation is considered grave; and then we are warned that too much credence must not be given to this report. The number of Censors at the Press Bureau being exactly forty, and their minute knowledge of English literature having been displayed on several occasions, it is said that Sir John Simon contemplates their incorporation as an Academy of “Immortals–for the duration of the War.” [Illustration: PADDY (who has had his periscope smashed by a bullet): “Sure there’s seven years’ bad luck for the poor devil that broke that, anyhow.”] Mr. Punch’s Correspondent “Blanche” sends distressing details of some of the new complaints contracted by smart war workers. These include munition-wrists, shell-makers’ crouch, neuro-committee-itis, and Zeppelin-eye through looking up into the sky too long with a telescope. A great deal depends on what you look at and what you look through. Thus…

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Excerpt #8, from Masters of the vortex, by E. E. Smith

…street or somewhere beside or behind us . . . there isn’t a damn thing we can do. They’d have more gunnies than we could send in, even if we knew exactly where they were, and we can’t send a young army barging around without anything but a flimsy suspicion to go on—the lawmen would throw us in the clink in nothing flat. . . . Besides, this Mob idea isn’t exactly solid, either. How’d they get their cut from all these people? Especially the Vegian?” “The Vegian, probably not; the rest, probably so. They could have passed the word around that this is the big day. Anybody’d split fifty-fifty on a cold sure thing.” “Uh-uh. I won’t buy that, either. I’d’ve known about it—somebody would have leaked. No matter how you figure it, it doesn’t add up.” “Well, then?” “Only one thing we can do. Close down. While you’re doing that I’ll go shoot in a Class A Double Prime Urgent to top brass.” Hence Vesta’s croupier soon announced to his clientele that all betting was off, at least until the following day. All guests would please leave the building as soon as possible. For a couple of minutes Vesta simply could not take in the import of the announcement. She was stunned. Then: “Whee . . . yow . . . ow . . . erow!” she yowled, at the top of her not…

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Excerpt #9, from Direct Conversion of Energy, by William R. Corliss

…thermionic conversion. The MHD generators use high-velocity electrically conducting gases to produce power and are generically closer to dynamic conversion concepts. The only concept they carry forward from the preceding conversion ideas is that of the plasma, the electrically conducting gas. Yet they are commonly classified as direct because they replace the rotating turbogenerator of the dynamic systems with a stationary pipe or duct. [Illustration: Figure 9 In the MHD duct (a), the electrons in the hot plasma move to the right under influence of force F in the magnetic field B. The electrons collected by the right-hand side of the duct are carried to the load. In a wire in the armature of a conventional generator (b) the electrons are forced to the right by the magnetic field.] a MHD Duct HOT PLASMA IN COOL GAS OUT TO RADIATOR Magnetic Field LOAD ELECTRONS b…

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Excerpt #10, from The Writing of the Short Story, by Lewis Worthington Smith

…embodied in Browning’s Poetry. (Read before the Browning Society of London in 1882.) III. Browning’s Obscurity. IV. Browning’s Verse. V. Arguments of the Poems. VI. Poems. (Under this head are thirty-three representative poems, the Arguments of which are given in the preceding section.) A Source Book of Greek History By FREDERICK MORROW FLING, Professor of Ancient History, University of Nebraska. Cloth. xiv + 370 pages. Illustrated. Introduction price, $1.00. This book serves several purposes. It (1) supplies illustrative material, drawn from the best Greek sources, that may be used to supplement the school narrative; (2) by means of searching questions, it furnishes opportunity for more intensive study of certain periods; (3) by supplying data upon the writer of source, and at times, more than one source upon the same topic, it makes possible the study of simple problems in the value of evidence; (4) extracts are of sufficient length so that the pupil may be given some idea of Greek literature, as far as that is possible through the use of translations; (5) the illustrations not only supplement the written sources on the life of the Greeks, but have been selected with a view to impressing upon the minds of students the great value of the artistic work of the Greeks….

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Excerpt #11, from Investigation of Communist activities in Seattle, Wash., Area, Hearings, Part 2

…Harold Pritchett was the president of the organization. Another person whom I knew was Charles Daggett. Charles Daggett I knew in several different capacities. At one time he was the city editor of the Seattle Star, a paper which went out of business in Seattle a great number of years ago. Mr. Daggett later was known to me as an official in the inlandboatmen’s union,[9] having become elected business agent in the San Francisco branch of the organization, and got into financial difficulties there; later went to Los Angeles. That is the last I heard of him. Mr. TAVENNER. We have seen him since then, and he has testified before this committee and admitted his Communist Party membership. Did you know him in this area in any activity within the newspaper guild? Mr. DENNETT. Yes, I knew him in the newspaper guild, but I was not certain of his Communist Party activity at the time that I knew him then. I knew him as a Communist just as he left here. Mr. TAVENNER. Was he active in that field in Los Angeles? Mr. DENNETT. Yes, he was. He was very active as a newspaperman. He had a great deal to do with three other newspaper people whom I became closely acquainted with because of the official position that they held in the organization….

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Excerpt #12, from Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

…and these tremendous bulwarks enclosed me on every side. I felt the confinement, and wished for wings to reach still loftier cliffs, whose slippery sides no foot was so hardy as to tread. Yet what was it to see?–only a boundless waste of water–not a glimpse of smiling nature–not a patch of lively green to relieve the aching sight, or vary the objects of meditation. I felt my breath oppressed, though nothing could be clearer than the atmosphere. Wandering there alone, I found the solitude desirable; my mind was stored with ideas, which this new scene associated with astonishing rapidity. But I shuddered at the thought of receiving existence, and remaining here, in the solitude of ignorance, till forced to leave a world of which I had seen so little, for the character of the inhabitants is as uncultivated, if not as picturesquely wild, as their abode. Having no employment but traffic, of which a contraband trade makes the basis of their profit, the coarsest feelings of honesty are quickly blunted. You may suppose that I speak in general terms; and that, with all the disadvantages of nature and circumstances, there are still some respectable exceptions, the more praiseworthy, as tricking is a very contagious mental disease, that dries up all the generous juices of the heart. Nothing genial, in fact, appears around this place, or within the…

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