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• The Witch And Other Stories  by Anton Chekhov
  He was not asleep, though it was his habit to go to sleep at the same time as the hens. His coarse red hair peeped from under one end of the greasy patchwork quilt, made up of coloured rags, while his big unwashed feet stuck out from the other.

• The Village Watch-Tower  by Kate Douglas Wiggin
  It stood on the gentle slope of a hill, the old gray house, with its weather-beaten clapboards and its roof of ragged shingles. It was in the very lap of the road, so that the stage-driver could almost knock on the window pane without getting down from his seat, on those rare occasions when he brought "old Mis' Bascom" a parcel from Saco.

• Tales From Two Hemispheres  by Hjalmar Hjorth Boysen
  a young Norseman, Halfdan Bjerk by name, landed on the pier at Castle Garden. He passed through the straight and narrow gate where he was asked his name, birthplace, and how much money he had,--at which he grew very much frightened.

• The King of the Golden River  by John Ruskin
  It was surrounded on all sides by steep and rocky mountains rising into peaks which were always covered with snow and from which a number of torrents descended in constant cataracts. One of these fell westward over the face of a crag so high that when the sun had set to everything else, and all below was darkness, his beams still shone full upon this waterfall, so that it looked like a shower of gold. It was therefore called by the people of the neighborhood the Golden River.

• Taras Bulba and Other Tales  by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
  This constant menace, this perpetual pressure of foes on all sides, acted at last like a fierce hammer shaping and hardening resistance against itself. The fugitive from Poland, the fugitive from the Tatar and the Turk, homeless, with nothing to lose

• The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories  by Alice Dunbar
  If you had peered under the veil, you would have seen that Manuela's dark eyes were swollen and discoloured about the lids, as though they had known a sleepless, tearful night. There had been a picnic the day before, and as merry a crowd of giddy, chattering Creole girls and boys as ever you could see boarded the ramshackle dummy-train that puffed its way wheezily out wide Elysian Fields Street

• Stories of Modern French Novels  by Julian Hawthorne
  He had lived a year in Martinique when the yellow fever carried off one of his children. By a singular reaction in his vigorous temperament, it was about this time that his somber melancholy gave way to a bitter and sarcastic gayety

• Antonina  by Wilkie Collins
  And yet she had not been a young girl, ignorant and inexperienced, when she married. She had thought that she recognized unmistakably the call of love as stronger than the rights of her art, that the humanity in her was more vital than music.

• An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge  by Ambrose Bierce
  A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck.

• Over the Sliprails  by Henry Lawson
  There were about a dozen of us jammed into the coach, on the box seat and hanging on to the roof and tailboard as best we could. We were shearers, bagmen, agents, a squatter, a cockatoo, the usual joker -- and one or two professional spielers, perhaps.

• Malvina of Brittany  by Jerome K. Jerome
  As for old Littlecherry," the Doctor began again quite suddenly, "that's his speciality--folklore, occultism, all that flummery. If you knocked at his door with the original Sleeping Beauty on your arm he'd only fuss round her with cushions and hope that she'd had a good night. Found a seed once--chipped it out of an old fossil, and grew it in a pot in his study.

• Lemorne Versus Huell  by Elizabeth Drew Stoddard
  At the beginning of each visit to Aunt Eliza I was in the habit of dwelling on the contrast between her way of living and ours. We lived from "hand to mouth." Every thing about her wore a hereditary air; for she lived in my grandfather's house, and it was the same as in his day. If I was at home when these contrasts occurred to me I should have felt angry

• The Log of the Jolly Polly  by Richard H. Davis
  My first glance at the Farrells convinced me the interview was a waste of time. I was satisfied that from two such persons, nothing to my advantage could possibly emanate. On the contrary, from their lack of ease, it looked as though they had come to beg or borrow.

• The Love Of Ulrich Nebendahl  by Jerome K. Jerome
  "Why, at your age, Ulrich--at your age," repeated the Herr Pastor, setting down his beer and wiping with the back of his hand his large uneven lips, "I was the father of a family--two boys and a girl. You never saw her, Ulrich; so sweet, so good. We called her Maria." The Herr Pfarrer sighed and hid his broad red face behind the raised cover of his pewter pot.

• The Soul Of Nicholas Snyders  by Jerome K. Jerome
  Once upon a time in Zandam, which is by the Zuider Zee, there lived a wicked man named Nicholas Snyders. He was mean and hard and cruel, and loved but one thing in the world, and that was gold. And even that not for its own sake.

• Mrs. Korner Sins Her Mercies  by Jerome K. Jerome
  We had one bottle of claret between us," Mr. Korner would often recall to his mind, "of which he drank the greater part. And then he brought out the little green flask. He said it was made from pears--that in Peru they kept it specially for Children's parties. Of course, that may have been his joke

• The Cost Of Kindness  by Jerome K. Jerome
  Mrs. Pennycoop, gentlest of little women, laid her plump and still pretty hands upon her husband's shoulders. "Don't think, dear, I haven't sympathized with you. You have borne it nobly. I have marvelled sometimes that you have been able to control yourself as you have done, most times; the things that he has said to you

• Ivanhoe and the German Measles  by Dorothy Canfield
  There was another advantage about his part: it took up very little of his time, and as he was stage-manager, scene-shifter, property-man and guardian of the costumes, it was essential that he be left free. As the fateful day approached his excitement grew more and more intense. His laughing, little gray eyes gleamed with a breathless interest in every detail, and his thin little hands ached with pulling and hauling on the home-made scenery

• The Garden Party  by Katherine Mansfield
  Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it

• The Frame Up  by Richard H. Davis
  The prettiest girl in Utica showed herself worthy of her distinguished husband. She had given him children as beautiful as herself; as what Washington calls " a cabinet lady " she had kept her name out of the newspapers; as Madame L'Ambassatrice she had put archduchesses at their ease; and after ten years she was an adoring wife, a devoted mother

• Fantastic Fables  by Ambrose Bierce
  Then the Material Interest found a tongue, and by a strange coincidence it was its own tongue. "I don't think you are very good walking," it said. "I am a little particular about what I have underfoot. Suppose you get off into the water."

• Creatures That Once Were Men  by Maxim Gorky
  It is certainly a curious fact that so many of the voices of what is called our modern religion have come from countries which are not only simple, but may even be called barbaric. A nation like Norway has a great realistic drama without having ever had either a great classical drama or a great romantic drama.

• A Charmed Life  by Richard H. Davis
  As the correspondent of a newspaper, Chesterton had looked on at other wars; when the yellow races met, when the infidel Turk spanked the Christian Greek; and one he had watched from inside a British square, where he was greatly alarmed lest he should be trampled upon by terrified camels.

• The Blue Flower  by Henry van Dyke
  The parents were abed and sleeping. The clock on the wall ticked loudly and lazily, as if it had time to spare. Outside the rattling windows there was a restless, whispering wind. The room grew light, and dark, and wondrous light again, as the moon played hide-and-seek through the clouds. The boy, wide-awake and quiet in his bed, was thinking of the Stranger and his stories.

• A Thief in the Night  by E. W. Hornung
  Suffice it that I had been engaged to her before that mad March deed. True, her people called it "an understanding," and frowned even upon that, as well they might. But their authority was not direct; we bowed to it as an act of politic grace; between us, all was well but my unworthiness.

• Dead Men Tell No Tales  by E. W. Hornung
  Nothing is so easy as falling in love on a long sea voyage, except falling out of love. Especially was this the case in the days when the wooden clippers did finely to land you in Sydney or in Melbourne under the four full months.

• The Burial of the Guns   by Thomas Nelson Page
  Old maids have from most people a feeling rather akin to pity -- a hard heritage. They very often have this feeling from the young. This must be the hardest part of all -- to see around them friends, each "a happy mother of children," little ones responding to affection with the sweet caresses of childhood, whilst any advances that they, their aunts or cousins, may make are met with indifference or condescension.

• Billy and the Big Stick  by Richard H. Davis
  "It's very simple," he said. "The first time my wages were shy I went to the palace and told him if he didn't come across I'd shut off the juice. I think he was so stunned at anybody asking him for real money that while he was still stunned he opened his safe and handed me two thousand francs.

• Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home  by Bayard Taylor
  There was trouble one day, in the palace of Prince Alexis, of Kinesma. This edifice, with its massive white walls, and its pyramidal roofs of green copper, stood upon a gentle mound to the eastward of the town, overlooking it, a broad stretch of the Volga, and the opposite shore.

• The Artist  by Dorothy Canfield
  After the sickening stench of personality in theatrical life," the great Madame Orloff told the doctor with her usual free-handed use of language, "it is like breathing a thin, pure air to be here again with our dear inhuman old Vieyra. He hypnotizes me into his own belief that nothing matters -- not broken hearts, nor death, nor success, nor first love, nor old age -- nothing but the chiaroscuro of his latest acquisition."

• The Ninth Vibration  by L. Adams Beck
  and now the way is through a great wood where it has become a trail and no more, and still it climbs for many miles and finally a rambling bungalow, small and low, is sighted in the deeps of the trees, a mountain stream from unknown heights falling beside it. And this is known as the House in the Woods.

• Three Elephant Power and Other Stories  by A. B. Paterson
  Alfred was chauffeur to a friend of mine who owned a very powerful car. Alfred was part of that car. Weirdly intelligent, of poor physique, he might have been any age from fifteen to eighty. His education had been somewhat hurried, but there was no doubt as to his mechanical ability. He took to a car like a young duck to water.

• Works by Emile Zola 
  For a moment they remained silent and, looking upward, scanned the shadowy boxes. But the green paper with which these were hung rendered them more shadowy still. Down below, under the dress circle, the lower boxes were buried in utter night. In those on the second tier there was only one stout lady, who was stranded, as it were, on the velvet-covered balustrade in front of her. On the right hand and on the left, between lofty pilasters, the stage boxes, bedraped with long-fringed scalloped hangings, remained untenanted.

• Raffles  by E. W. Hornung
  Well, I must see it for myself, and the sooner the better, though work pressed. I was writing a series of articles upon prison life, and had my nib into the whole System; a literary and philanthropical daily was parading my "charges," the graver ones with the more gusto

• The Amateur Cracksman  by E. W. Hornung
  It was half-past twelve when I returned to the Albany as a last desperate resort. The scene of my disaster was much as I had left it. The baccarat-counters still strewed the table, with the empty glasses and the loaded ash-trays.

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