A DRAMA IN THE AIR by Jules Verne In the month of September, 185–, I arrived at Frankfort-on-the-Maine. My passage through the principal German cities had been brilliantly marked by balloon ascents; but as yet no German had accompanied me in my car, and the fine experiments made at Paris by MM. Green, Eugene Godard,…
SOLANGE BY ALEXANDRE DUMAS
SOLANGE: DR. LEDRU’S STORY OF THE REIGN OF TERROR Leaving l’Abbaye, I walked straight across the Place Turenne to the Rue Tournon, where I had lodgings, when I heard a woman scream for help. It could not be an assault to commit robbery, for it was hardly ten o’clock in the evening. I ran to…
THE SISTERS by James Joyce
THE SISTERS by James Joyce THERE was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he…
THE BET by Anton Chekhov
IT WAS a dark autumn night. The old banker was walking up and down his study and remembering how, fifteen years before, he had given a party one autumn evening
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for…
THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM by Edgar Allen Poe
THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM
Impia tortorum longos hic turba furores
Sanguinis innocui, non satiata, aluit.
Sospite nunc patria, fracto nunc funeris antro,
Mors ubi dira fuit vita salusque patent.
The Parson’s Daughter of Oxney Colne By Anthony Trollope
The Parson’s Daughter of Oxney Colne By Anthony Trollope (London Review, 2 March 1861) The prettiest scenery in all England—and if I am contradicted in that assertion, I will say in all Europe—is in Devonshire, on the southern and southeastern skirts of Dartmoor, where the rivers Dart and Avon and Teign form themselves, and where…
THE UNWRAPPING OF A MUMMY by THOPHILE GAUTIER
During the Exhibition of 1857, I was invited to be present at the opening of one of the mummy cases in the collection of Egyptian antiquities, and at the unwrapping of the mummy it contained.
A DAUGHTER OF THE LODGE by GEORGE GISSING
Portrait of the Painter’s Daughter Anna Catharina A DAUGHTER OF THE LODGE by GEORGE GISSING For a score of years the Rocketts had kept the lodge of Brent Hall. In the beginning Rockett was head gardener; his wife, the daughter of a shopkeeper, had never known domestic service, and performed her duties at the Hall…
A WHITE HERON by Sarah Orne Jewett
A WHITE HERON. Sarah Orne Jewett I. The woods were already filled with shadows one June evening, just before eight o’clock, though a bright sunset still glimmered faintly among the trunks of the trees. A little girl was driving home her cow, a plodding, dilatory, provoking creature in her behavior, but a valued companion for…
THE SELFISH GIANT by Oscar Wilde
THE SELFISH GIANT Every afternoon, as they were coming from school, the children used to go and play in the Giant’s garden. It was a large lovely garden, with soft green grass. Here and there over the grass stood beautiful flowers like stars, and there were twelve peach-trees that in the spring-time broke out into…
The Black Veil by Charles Dickens
The Black Veil One winter’s evening, towards the close of the year 1800, or within a year or two of that time, a young medical practitioner, recently established in business, was seated by a cheerful fire in his little parlor, listening to the wind which was beating the rain in pattering drops against the window…
THE REAL THING by Henry James
THE REAL THING CHAPTER I When the porter’s wife, who used to answer the house-bell, announced “A gentleman and a lady, sir,” I had, as I often had in those days?the wish being father to the thought?an immediate vision of sitters. Sitters my visitors in this case proved to be; but not in the sense…
Zadig the Babylonian by Voltaire
Zadig the Babylonian THE BLIND OF ONE EYE FRAN?OIS MARIE AROUET DE VOLTAIRE There lived at Babylon, in the reign of King Moabdar, a young man named Zadig, of a good natural disposition, strengthened and improved by education. Though rich and young, he had learned to moderate his passions; he had nothing stiff or affected…
TOBERMORY by Saki
TOBERMORY by Saki It was a chill, rain-washed afternoon of a late August day, that indefinite season when partridges are still in security or cold storage, and there is nothing to hunt?unless one is bounded on the north by the Bristol Channel, in which case one may lawfully gallop after fat red stags. Lady Blemley’s…