Quick Excerpts, from a Library of 492 Titles

Generated 2022-07-28 13:25:41

Excerpt #1, from Myths of the Norsemen: From the Eddas and Sagas, by H. A. Guerber

…“Then the dwarf raised his hand to his brow for the smart, Ere the iron well out was beat, And they found that the haft by an inch was too short, But to alter it then ’twas too late.” The Dwarfs, Oehlenschläger (Pigott’s tr.). Notwithstanding this mishap, Brock was sure of winning the wager and he did not hesitate to present himself before the gods in Asgard, where he gave Odin the ring Draupnir, Frey the boar Gullin-bursti, and Thor the hammer Miölnir, whose power none could resist. Loki in turn gave the spear Gungnir to Odin, the ship Skidbladnir to Frey, and the golden hair to Thor; but although the latter immediately grew upon Sif’s head and was unanimously declared more beautiful than her own locks had ever been, the gods decreed that Brock had won the wager, on the ground that the hammer Miölnir, in Thor’s hands, would prove invaluable against the frost giants on the last day. “And at their head came Thor, Shouldering his hammer, which the giants know.” Balder Dead (Matthew Arnold). In order to save his head, Loki fled precipitately, but was overtaken by Thor, who brought him back and handed him over to Brock, telling him, however, that although Loki’s head was rightfully his, he…

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Excerpt #2, from The School and Society, by John Dewey

…making the school an organic whole, instead of a composite of isolated parts. The isolation of studies as well as of parts of the school system disappears. Experience has its geographical aspect, its artistic and its literary, its scientific and its historical sides. All studies arise from aspects of the one earth and the one life lived upon it. We do not have a series of stratified earths, one of which is mathematical, another physical, another historical, and so on. We should not live very long in any one taken by itself. We live in a world where all sides are bound together. All studies grow out of relations in the one great common world. When the child lives in varied but concrete and active relationship to this common world, his studies are naturally unified. It will no longer be a problem to correlate studies. The teacher will not have to resort to all sorts of devices to weave a little arithmetic into the history lesson, and the like. Relate the school to life, and all studies are of necessity correlated. Moreover, if the school is related as a whole to life as a whole, its various aims and ideals—culture, discipline, information, utility—cease to be variants, for one of which we must select one study and for another another. The growth of the child in the direction of social capacity and service, his larger and more vital union with life, becomes the unifying aim; and discipline, culture and information fall into…

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Excerpt #3, from Home Life in Colonial Days, by Alice Morse Earle

…stood on tall, spindling legs, or were carefully shaped to be set up on trivets. They usually had, also, long, adjustable handles, which helped to make endurable the blazing heat of the great logs. All such irons as waffle-irons had far longer handles than are seen on any cooking-utensils in these days of stoves and ranges, where the flames are covered and the housewife shielded. Gridirons had long handles of wood or iron, which could be fastened to the shorter stationary handles. The two gridirons in the accompanying illustration are a century old. The circular one was the oldest form. The oblong ones, with groove to collect the gravy, did not vary in shape till our own day. Both have indications of fittings for long handles, but the handles have vanished. A long-handled frying-pan is seen hanging by the side of the slave-kitchen fireplace. An accompaniment of the kitchen fireplace, found, not in farmhouses, but among luxury-loving town-folk, was the plate-warmer. They are seldom named in inventories, and I know of but one of Revolutionary days, and it is here shown. Similar ones are manufactured to-day; the legs, perhaps, are shorter, but the general outline is the same. An important furnishing of every fireplace was the andirons. In kitchen fireplaces these were usually of iron, and the shape known as goose-neck were common. Cob irons were the simplest form, and merely supported the…

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Excerpt #4, from Sailors Narratives of Voyages Along the New England Coast, 1524

…which pieces so distributed they hang vp about their houses for prouision: and when they boile them, they blow off the fat, and put to their peaze, maiz, and other pulse, which they eat. [Illustration: (Decorative separator)] A briefe Note of what profits we saw the Countrey yeeld in the small time of our stay there. Trees. Oke of an excellent graine, strait, and great timber. Elme. Beech. Birch, very tall & great; of whose barke they make their Canoas. Wich-Hazell. Hazell. Alder. Cherry-tree. Ash. Maple. Yew. Spruce. Aspe. Firre….

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Excerpt #5, from Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, by John Wesley Powell

…[The Midē´ is communing with the medicine Man´idō´ with the Midē´ sack, which he holds in his hand. The voice lines extend from his mouth to the sack, which appears to be made of the skin of an Owl, as before noted in connection with the second character in this song.] [Illustration] They are sitting round the interior in a row. [This evidently signifies the Ghost Lodge, as the structure is drawn at right angles to that usually made to represent the Midē´wigân, and also because it seems to be reproduced from the Red Lake chart already alluded to and figured in Pl. III, No. 112. The spirits or shadows, as the dead are termed, are also indicated by crosses in like manner.] [Illustration] You who are newly hung; you have reached half, and you are now full. [The allusion is to three phases of the moon, probably having reference to certain periods at which some important ceremonies or events are to occur.] [Illustration] I am going for my dish. [The speaker intimates that he is going to make a feast, the dish…

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Excerpt #6, from The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

…pie, as the least convenient thing to carry. In a few minutes he came to a stream, and he climbed a fence and walked down the bank, along a woodland path. By and by he found a comfortable spot, and there he devoured his meal, slaking his thirst at the stream. Then he lay for hours, just gazing and drinking in joy; until at last he felt sleepy, and lay down in the shade of a bush. When he awoke the sun was shining hot in his face. He sat up and stretched his arms, and then gazed at the water sliding by. There was a deep pool, sheltered and silent, below him, and a sudden wonderful idea rushed upon him. He might have a bath! The water was free, and he might get into it—all the way into it! It would be the first time that he had been all the way into the water since he left Lithuania! When Jurgis had first come to the stockyards he had been as clean as any workingman could well be. But later on, what with sickness and cold and hunger and discouragement, and the filthiness of his work, and the vermin in his home, he had given up washing in winter, and in summer only as much of him as would go into a basin. He had had a shower bath in jail, but nothing since—and now he would have a swim! The water was warm, and he splashed about like a very boy in his glee. Afterward he sat down in the water near the bank, and proceeded to scrub himself—soberly and methodically, scouring every inch of him with…

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Excerpt #7, from Poirot Investigates, by Agatha Christie

…With a sudden grunt, the second man seized the cat from Poirot’s hand. “Oh, I forgot to introduce you,” said Japp. “Mr. Poirot, this is Mr. Burt of the United States Secret Service.” The American’s trained fingers had felt what he was looking for. He held out his hand, and for a moment speech failed him. Then he rose to the occasion. “Pleased to meet you,” said Mr. Burt. IV The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge “After all,” murmured Poirot, “it is possible that I shall not die this time.” Coming from a convalescent influenza patient, I hailed the remark as showing a beneficial optimism. I myself had been the first sufferer from the disease. Poirot in his turn had gone down. He was now sitting up in bed, propped up with pillows, his head muffled in a woollen shawl, and was slowly sipping a particularly noxious tisane which I had prepared according to his directions. His eye rested with pleasure upon a neatly graduated row of medicine bottles which adorned the mantelpiece. “Yes, yes,” my little friend continued. “Once more shall I be…

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Excerpt #8, from The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

…woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or—and the outward semblance is the same—crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more. The latter is perhaps the truest theory. She who has once been woman, and ceased to be so, might at any moment become a woman again if there were only the magic touch to effect the transfiguration. We shall see whether Hester Prynne were ever afterwards so touched, and so transfigured. Much of the marble coldness of Hester’s impression was to be attributed to the circumstance, that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to thought. Standing alone in the world,—alone, as to any dependence on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected,—alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she not scorned to consider it desirable,—she cast away the fragments of a broken chain. The world’s law was no law for her mind. It was an age in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many centuries before. Men of the sword had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and rearranged—not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was their most real abode—the…

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Excerpt #9, from Across Asia on a Bicycle, by Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben

…summit seemed but a token of the storm of circumstances. One thing was certain, the muleteer could go no farther up the mountain, and yet he was mortally afraid to return alone to the Kurdish robbers. He sat down, and began to cry like a child. This predicament of their accomplice furnished the zaptiehs with a plausible excuse. They now absolutely refused to go any farther without him. Our interpreter, the Greek, again joined the majority; he was not going to risk the ascent without the Turkish guards, and besides, he had now come to the conclusion that we had not sufficient blankets to spend a night at so high an altitude. Disappointed, but not discouraged, we gazed at the silent old gentleman at our side. In his determined countenance we read his answer. Long shall we remember Ignaz Raffl as one of the pluckiest, most persevering of old men. [Illustration: HELPING THE DONKEYS OVER A SNOW-FIELD.] There was now only one plan that could be pursued. Selecting from our supplies one small blanket, a felt mat, two long, stout ropes, enough food to last us two days, a bottle of cold tea, and a can of Turkish raki, we packed them into two bundles to strap on our backs. We then instructed the rest of the party to return to the Kurdish encampment and await our return. The sky was again clear at 2:30 P. M., when we bade good-by to our worthless comrades and resumed the ascent. We were now at a height of nine thousand feet, and it was our plan to camp at a point far enough up the…

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Excerpt #10, from Diego Collado’s Grammar of the Japanese Language, by Diego Collado

…same as coto de gozaru; e.g., naranu made or naranu coto de gozaru mean the same as naranu ‘it is not possible.’ Guijet tçucamatçurǒ to zonzuru coto va cacugo itasanu coto gia (10v) ‘the breaking of this friendship does not come to mind.’ Here the itasanu coto gia is the same as itasanu alone. The particle madeio is used to confirm what has been said; e.g., caita madeio ‘that which I wrote, I wrote.’ The particle toqi when added to the present tense, forms a preterit imperfect; e.g., jennin tachi va saigo ni voiobi tamó toqi va buji ni gozatta ‘when saints arrive at the time of their death, they are peaceful and quiet.’ Changing the ta of the preterit to tçu and the da of the negative to zzu[131] the meaning becomes ‘I do it this way and then that way’; e.g., mono vo caitçu, iôzzu, nando xite curasu bacari gia ‘I spend my life reading, writing and doing other things,’ tattçu itçu vocu iori zaxiqi ie ide zaxiqi iori vocu ie iri xitten battǒ xeraruru (11v) ‘standing and sitting, entering and departing, he stands up and falls down.’ The particle ri gives the same meaning after the preterit; e.g., xeqen no mono va netari voqitari nǒdari curasu bacari gia (11) ‘men of the world spend their lives sleeping, arising, and drinking,’ mazzu (46 _ite niva vo mo facaxetari, cusa vo mo ficaxetari iroiro no xigoto vo ategǒte cosó…

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Excerpt #11, from The Pursuit of the House Boat, by John Kendrick Bangs

…playing-cards, out among the audience, and on each of them was found printed the words: SHERLOCK HOLMES, DETECTIVE. FERRETING DONE HERE. Plots for Sale. “I think he made a mistake in not taking the £200 for the watch. Such carelessness destroys my confidence in him,” said Shylock, who was the first to recover from the surprise of the revelation. III THE SEARCH-PARTY IS ORGANIZED “WELL, Mr. Holmes,” said Sir Walter Raleigh, after three rousing cheers, led by Hamlet, had been given with a will by the assembled spirits, “after this demonstration in your honor I think it is hardly necessary for me to assure you of our hearty co-operation in anything you may venture to suggest. There is still manifest, however, some desire on the part of the ever-wise King Solomon and my friend Confucius to know how you deduce that Kidd has sailed for London, from the cigar end which you hold in your hand.” [Picture: Three rousing cheers, led by Hamlet, had been given] “I can easily satisfy their curiosity,” said Sherlock Holmes, genially….

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Excerpt #12, from 13 Days: The Chronicle of an Escape from a German Prison, by John Alan Lyde Caunter

…four hours, and it was not till roughly three o’clock that I thought I could risk a move. Very cautiously I now began to crawl on all-fours towards the road, carefully feeling all the ground as I did so in order to be able to remove the dead sticks lying across my track. By pushing through the bushes very slowly I avoided making much of a noise and gained the embankment along the top of which ran the road, without causing any suspicion. Here I had a breather and then continued my crawl upwards. I reached the top of the bank which was the edge of the road, and, knowing that I was well against the sky-line to the eyes of watchers below, did not waste much time before turning towards the bridge, and keeping well down, crawled steadily onwards, reducing the space of time in which I risked being seen very rapidly. Another fifty yards on all fours and I ventured to get on to my feet and walk, in my rubber-soled shoes. Fifty yards more and I was safely off the planking of the bridge and on to the road proper with plenty of cover all round me. As my clothes were of a light coffee tint they assimilated very well with the colours of the dusty road and the white painted woodwork of the bridge. I felt inclined to roar with laughter at the ambush after gaining the…

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