Quick Excerpts, from a Library of 492 Titles

Generated 2022-07-28 13:25:40

Excerpt #1, from 13 Days: The Chronicle of an Escape from a German Prison, by John Alan Lyde Caunter

…commandant’s office sooner or later. The members of one party on being caught were actually complimented on their fine work by the Boches, who were full of joy naturally at having found the tunnel. For many months before we left Crefeld the Germans used to search the ground floor rooms and cellars daily. Not infrequently they would pay two or three visits to the cellars in one night. Their searching included tapping the walls, ceilings and floors for hollow places. Periodically a search for the earth excavated from these holes and hidden away, would lead to the Boches discovering many hundredweights of sand and rubble stowed away safely. Searches were sometimes made in our rooms for articles of contraband. Civilian clothes, and maps, compasses and various tools were the chief objects of interest to them. These searches on some occasions were extended to the persons of the prisoners, especially after an order forbidding the possession of real German money had been issued. Of course none of us liked being searched and we showed our searchers pretty clearly what we thought of the whole affair. I must say that the commandant did not order many searches and probably those that did occur were due to the orders of a superior. These searches were usually carried out by the under-officers and men of a different unit from that which guarded the camp, in order to…

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Excerpt #2, from The Valley of the Moon, by Jack London

…anything,” Billy was saying to Saxon. “Listen to that,” Mary triumphed. “You bet the man that marries me’ll have to talk things over first.” “Billy’s only givin’ her hot air,” Bert plagued. “They all do it before they’re married.” Mary sniffed contemptuously. “I’ll bet Saxon leads him around by the nose. And I’m goin’ to say, loud an’ strong, that I’ll lead the man around by the nose that marries me.” “Not if you love him,” Saxon interposed. “All the more reason,” Mary pursued. Bert assumed an expression and attitude of mournful dejection. “Now you see why me an’ Mary don’t get married,” he said. “I’m some big Indian myself, an’ I’ll be everlastingly jiggerooed if I put up for a wigwam I can’t be boss of.” “And I’m no squaw,” Mary retaliated, “an’ I wouldn’t marry a big buck Indian if all the rest of the men in the world was dead.” “Well this big buck Indian ain’t asked you yet.” “He knows what he’d get if he did.” “And after that maybe he’ll think twice before he does ask you.” Saxon, intent on diverting the conversation into pleasanter channels, clapped her hands as if with sudden recollection….

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Excerpt #3, from A United States Midshipman in Japan, by Yates Stirling

…can’t miss the Broadway accent when you hear it so far from home.” While O’Neil was yet carrying on his one-sided conversation the carriage had stopped, and the mafoo was knocking loudly at the door of a Japanese house in one of the less pretentious parts of the city. After the occupants of the house had gone through the usual formula to discover the identity of their unexpected visitors, the door was opened and the two sailors were asked to enter. “Is Sago in?” O’Neil asked the shy girl who was holding the lantern inside the dark little anteroom, where visitors were expected to remove their shoes before entering the house. She nodded, and in her high-pitched voice a summons was directed upward. “Sorry to drag you out this time of the evening, Sago,” O’Neil explained as, in answer to the girl’s call, the captain’s Japanese steward came down the stairs to meet them, “but we need your help, so I looked you up.” Sago’s sphinx-like face did not portray the surprise which O’Neil’s words might have been expected to cause. “Please come inside,” the steward urged. “I wish to introduce you to my cousin and his family.” O’Neil and Marley readily followed the steward, while curious Japanese of all ages appeared mysteriously from many directions to gaze upon…

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Excerpt #4, from The Pirates’ Who’s Who, by Philip Gosse

…managed to get their money and jewellery away in safety. Gow’s crew marched back to their ship with a bagpiper playing at their head. They now sailed to Calfsound, seized three girls and took them aboard. Then to the Island of Eda to plunder the house of Mr. Fea, an old schoolmate of Gow’s. Arriving there on February 13th, by bad management they ran their vessel on the rocks. The bo’son and five men went ashore and met Mr. Fea, who entertained them at the local public-house. By a simple stratagem, Mr. Fea seized first the bo’son and afterwards the five men. Soon after this, Fea trapped Gow and all the rest of his crew of twenty-eight men. Help was sent for, and eventually the Greyhound frigate arrived and took Gow and his crew to London, arriving off Woolwich on March 26th, 1725. The prisoners were taken to the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark, and there found their old companion, Lieutenant Williams. Four men turned King’s evidence–viz., George Dobson, Job Phinnies, Tim Murphy, and William Booth. The trial at Newgate began on May 8th, when Gow was sullen and reserved and refused to plead. He was ordered to be pressed to death, which was the only form of torture still allowed by the law. At the last moment Gow yielded, and pleaded “not guilty.” Gow was found guilty, and hanged on June 11th, 1725, but "as he was turned off, he fell down from the Gibbit, the rope breaking by the weight of some that pulled his leg. Although…

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Excerpt #5, 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 #6, from A Few Practical Suggestions, by Logan Pearsall Smith and Society for Pure English

…in two forms they will give their preference to the one which is most English. There are some who may even help to enrich the language by a bolder conquest of useful terms, and although they may suffer ridicule, they will suffer it in a good cause, and will only be sharing the short-lived denunciation which former innovators incurred when they borrowed so many concise and useful terms from France and Italy to enlarge and adorn our English speech. If we are to use foreign words (and, if we have no equivalents, we must use them) it is certainly much better that they should be incorporated in our language, and made available for common use. Words like ‘garage’ and ‘nuance’ and ‘naivety’ had much better be pronounced and written as English words, and there are others, like ‘bouleverse’ and ‘bouleversement’, whose partial borrowing might well be made complete; and a useful word like malaise could with advantage reassume the old form ‘malease’ which it once possessed. II. Alien Plurals. The useless and pedantic process of de-assimilation takes other forms, one of the most common of which is the restoring their foreign plural forms to words borrowed from Greek, Latin, and Italian. No common noun is genuinely assimilated into our language and made available for the use of the whole community until it has an English plural, and thousands of indispensable words have been thus incorporated. We no longer write of ideæ, chori,…

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Excerpt #7, from The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy, by Ernst Haeckel

…Siebold proved at Munich these facts of miraculous conception in various insects, he was visited by the Catholic archbishop of the city, who expressed his gratification that there was now a scientific explanation possible of the conception of the Virgin Mary. Siebold had, unfortunately, to point out to him that the inference from the parthenogenesis of the articulate to that of the vertebrate was not valid, and that all mammals, like all other vertebrates, reproduce exclusively from impregnated ova. We also find parthenogenesis among the metaphyta, as in the chara crinita among the algæ, the antennaria alpina and the alchemilla vulgaris among the flowering plants. We are, as yet, ignorant for the most part of the causes of this lapse of fertilization. Some light has been thrown on it, however, by recent chemical experiments (the effect of sugar and other water-absorbing solutions), in which we have succeeded in parthenogenetically developing unfertilized ova. In the higher animals the complete maturity and development of the specific form are requisite for reproduction, but in many of the lower animals it has been observed recently that ovula and sperm-cells are even formed by the younger specimens in the larva stage. If impregnation takes place under these conditions, larvæ of the same form are born. And when these larvæ have afterwards reached…

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Excerpt #8, from The Principles of the Art of Conversation, by J. P. Mahaffy

…choosing your companion and seeking out the opportunity; but, on the contrary, two people of different sexes are often brought together and ordered (so to speak) to converse, for no other reason than the command of society. Thus a young man is introduced to a partner at a ball, or a man of soberer age is directed to take a lady down to dinner. Here, though the company is large, the conversation is really of the kind before us—a dialogue between two persons only, of different sexes, and often comparative strangers. There is no case more frequent where conversation is imperative, and where failures are common and conspicuous. It is bad enough to begin with truisms about the weather—an excusable exordium; it is far worse and more disgraceful to end with them, and positively many people get no further. And yet this failure is not from mere emptiness of mind. These very same people, young and old, could be brought into circumstances where almost any of them would be interesting—not a few of them eloquent. I have spent an evening shut up with a very unpromising commercial traveller in a remote country inn, and yet by trying honestly to find out what he knew and liked, succeeded in drawing from him a most interesting account of his experiences, first in tea-tasting, then in tea-selling to the Irish peasants in the remote glens of Donegal. What he told me was quite worthy to make an article in a good magazine. Yet a…

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Excerpt #9, from The Heroes; Or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children, by Charles Kingsley

…of mine that I cannot. The old songs end it sadly, and I believe that they are right and wise; for though the heroes were purified at Malea, yet sacrifices cannot make bad hearts good, and Jason had taken a wicked wife, and he had to bear his burden to the last. And first she laid a cunning plot to punish that poor old Pelias, instead of letting him die in peace. For she told his daughters, ‘I can make old things young again; I will show you how easy it is to do.’ So she took an old ram and killed him, and put him in a cauldron with magic herbs; and whispered her spells over him, and he leapt out again a young lamb. So that ‘Medeia’s cauldron’ is a proverb still, by which we mean times of war and change, when the world has become old and feeble, and grows young again through bitter pains. Then she said to Pelias’ daughters, ‘Do to your father as I did to this ram, and he will grow young and strong again.’ But she only told them half the spell; so they failed, while Medeia mocked them; and poor old Pelias died, and his daughters came to misery. But the songs say she cured Æson, Jason’s father, and he became young, and strong again. But Jason could not love her, after all her cruel deeds. So he was ungrateful to her, and wronged her; and she revenged herself on him. And a terrible revenge she took—too terrible to speak of here. But you will hear of it yourselves when you grow up, for it has been sung in noble…

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Excerpt #10, from Soldiers’ Stories of the War, by Walter Wood and A. C. Michael

…weeks, and the Black Marias did a good deal of mischief. On the Sunday, as our ambulance waggons retired, the Germans shelled them with these siege guns, and blew them to pieces. At the finish there was not an ambulance waggon available. Yes, that is what they did, and it was done deliberately, because any soldier can tell an ambulance waggon when he sees it. The Germans stuck at nothing to gain their ends; no trick is too dirty for them to play. One particularly vile one was the using of ambulance waggons for the purpose of carrying machine-guns. Our troops did not dream of firing at ambulance waggons; but when we saw that this wicked use was being made of them–and we did see it, for they came quite close to us–we gave the Germans in them what for. The Germans tried three or four times to break through our lines, but our Tommies were too good for them, and sent them back a great deal faster than they had come on. They swept them away with rifle fire, and the Germans never had a chance when our men could get fairly in with the bayonet. During that long month of fighting we were in a good many places in France and Belgium. At one time we were actually on the field of Waterloo, and could see in the distance the monument put up in memory of the battle. I dare say the Germans fancied they were going to do a lot…

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Excerpt #11, from Investigation of Communist Activities in Seattle, Wash., Area, Hearings, Part 1

…Mr. VELDE. It is not the purpose or intention of this committee, and I can very well speak for all of the members of the committee, to get you into a position where you are in contempt of Congress. I concur with Mr. Moulder in his statement a few moments ago. I think that you do have a problem. I think that you are confused about the situation. Nevertheless, you do have, in my opinion, some information which would be valuable to this committee. At the same time you could clear your own conscience, so to speak, if you would give us the benefit of the information you have regarding your Communist Party connections. So I am going to ask, Mr. Chairman, that the witness be excused and be given a chance to consult with his attorney and think the proposition over, and possibly he may decide to return and give us the information which we believe he has. Mr. MOULDER. I think that is a splendid suggestion Mr. Velde has made. You will be excused until tomorrow morning. You think this over, and in the meantime, if you wish to talk to any of the investigators or counsel or any member of the committee, we would be happy to talk to you. Give it serious thought. You will be excused until 9 o’clock in the morning….

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Excerpt #12, from The Reign of Greed, by José Rizal

…difficulty for the mestizos and natives then was that their trousers were too tight to permit of their imitating the Chinese. But to make the intention of humiliating them the more evident, the measure was carried out with great pomp and ceremony, the church being surrounded by a troop of cavalry, while all those within were sweating. The matter was carried to the Cortes, but it was repeated that the Chinese, as the ones who paid, should have their way in the religious ceremonies, even though they apostatized and laughed at Christianity immediately after. The natives and the mestizos had to be content, learning thus not to waste time over such fatuity. [36] Quiroga, with his smooth tongue and humble smile, was lavishly and flatteringly attentive to Simoun. His voice was caressing and his bows numerous, but the jeweler cut his blandishments short by asking brusquely: “Did the bracelets suit her?” At this question all Quiroga’s liveliness vanished like a dream. His caressing voice became plaintive; he bowed lower, gave the Chinese salutation of raising his clasped hands to the height of his face, and groaned: “Ah, Señor Simoun! I’m lost, I’m ruined!” [37] “How, Quiroga, lost and ruined when you have so many bottles of champagne and so many guests?”…

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