1857. NARRATIVE.Thiswas a very full year in many ways. In February, Charles Dickens obtained possession of Gad's Hill, and was able to turn workmen into it. In April he stayed, with his wife and sister-in-law, for a week or two at Wate's Hotel, Gravesend, to be at hand to superintend the beginning of his alterations of the house, and from thence we give a letter to Lord Carlisle. He removed... more...

AESOP'S FABLES The Wolf And The Lamb WOLF, meeting with a Lamb astray from the fold, resolved not to lay violent hands on him, but to find some plea to justify to the Lamb the Wolf's right to eat him. He thus addressed him: "Sirrah, last year you grossly insulted me." "Indeed," bleated the Lamb in a mournful tone of voice, "I was not then born." Then said the Wolf,... more...

I Dream.         True, I talk of dreams;Which are the children of an idle brain,Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,Which is as thin of substance as the air;And more inconstant than the wind, who woosEven now the frozen bosom of the north,And, being anger’d, puffs away from thence,Turning his face to the dew-dropping south. Il est naturel que nos idées les plus vives et les plus familières se... more...

CHAPTER I A NEW ARRIVAL "Next to home, there is really nothing quite so satisfying as our dear old High School!" exclaimed Grace Harlowe, as she entered the locker-room and beamed on her three friends who stood near by. "It does seem good to be back, even though we have had such a perfectly glorious summer," said Jessica Bright. "We are a notch higher, too. We're actually... more...

CHAPTER I DEMAND FOR INVENTIONS OF MERIT That there is a demand for inventions of merit which can be readily disposed of at a reasonable profit to the inventor, there can be no doubt. There perhaps never was a time in the history of our country when the demand for meritorious inventions was so great as the present. The conveniences of mankind, in all his varied vocations and callings, require continual... more...

SERMON I.  THE MYSTERY OF THE CROSS.  A GOOD FRIDAY SERMON. Philippians ii. 5-8. Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a slave, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient... more...

INTRODUCTION I This collection of slave narratives had its beginning in the second year of the former Federal Writers' Project (now the Writers' Program), 1936, when several state Writers' Projects—notably those of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina—recorded interviews with ex-slaves residing in those states. On April 22, 1937, a standard questionnaire for field workers drawn up by... more...

I. LETTER-WRITERS. Since old Leisure died, we have come to think ourselves altogether too fine and too busy to cultivate the delightful art of correspondence. Dickens seems to have been almost the last man among us who gave his mind to letter-writing; and his letters contain some of his very best work, for he plunged into his subject with that high-spirited abandonment which we see in... more...

CHAPTER IA Roadside Meeting The white dust, which lay thick upon the wide road between rolling fields of ripened grain, rose in little spirals from beneath the heavy feet of the plodding farm-horses drawing the empty hay-wagon, and had scarcely settled again upon the browning goldenrod and fuzzy milkweed which bordered the rail fences on either side when Ebb Fischel’s itinerant butcher-jitney rattled... more...

THE PLEASANTRIES OF COGIA NASR EDDIN EFENDI ‘A breeze, which pleasant stories bears,Relicks of long departed years.’ The story goes, one of the stories of a hundred, that Cogia Nasr Eddin Efendi one day ascending into the pulpit to preach, said, ‘O believers, do ye not know what I am going to say to you?’  The congregation answered, ‘Dear Cogia Efendi, we do not know.’  Then said the... more...