Excerpt: Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens).

Excerpt: This is a publication of The Pennsylvania State University

Excerpt: On Being Human by Woodrow Wilson.

Excerpt: Half-way down the Rue Saint-Denis, almost at the corner of the Rue du Petit-Lion, there stood formerly one of those delightful houses which enable historians to reconstruct old Paris by analogy. The threatening walls of this tumbledown abode seemed to have been decorated with hieroglyphics....

Excerpt: An Old Monastery. ?COME, deputy of the Centre, forward! Quick step! march! if we want to be in time to dine with the others. Jump, marquis! there, that?s right! why, you can skip across a stubble-field like a deer!?...

Excerpt: I am a Cheap Jack, and my own father?s name was Willum Marigold. It was in his lifetime supposed by some that his name was William, but my own father always consistently said, No, it was Willum. On which point I content myself with looking at the argument this way: If a man is not allowed to know his own name in a free country, how much is he allowed to know in a land of slavery? As to looking at the argument through the medium of the Register, Willum Marigold come into the world before Registers come up much,--and went out of it too. They wouldn?t have been greatly in his line neither, if they had chanced to come up before him....

Excerpt: How Sir Gawaine was nigh weary of the quest of the Sangreal, and of his marvellous dream. When Sir Gawaine was departed from his fellow ship he rode long without any adventure. For he found not the tenth part of adventure as he was wont to do. For Sir Gawaine rode from Whitsuntide until Michaelmas and found none adventure that pleased him. So on a day it befell Gawaine met with Sir Ector de Maris, and either made great joy of other that it were marvel to tell....

Excerpt: Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad.

Excerpt: Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac, translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley.

Excerpt: George Silverman?s Explanation by Charles Dickens.

Excerpt: Silas Marner, The Weaver of Raveloe by George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans).

Excerpt: ?The Legend of Sleepy Hollow? by Washington Irving.

Excerpt: Sketches of Young Couples by Charles Dickens.

Excerpt: Moby Dick; or The Whale by Herman Melville.

Excerpt: The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.

Excerpt: Chapter 1. ?KASPAR! MAKAN!? The well-known shrill voice startled Almayer from his dream of splendid future into the unpleasant realities of the present hour. An unpleasant voice too. He had heard it for many years, and with every year he liked it less. No matter; there would be an end to all this soon....

Excerpt: It is a very wholesome and regenerating change which a man undergoes when he ?comes to himself.? It is not only after periods of recklessness or infatuation, when he has played the spendthrift or the fool, that a man comes to comes to himself. He comes to himself after experiences of which he alone may be aware: when he has left off being wholly preoccupied with his own powers and interests and with every petty plan that centers in himself; when he has cleared his eyes to see the world as it is, and his own true place and function in it....

Excerpt: I have kept one secret in the course of my life. I am a bashful man. Nobody would suppose it, nobody ever does suppose it, nobody ever did suppose it, but I am naturally a bashful man. This is the secret which I have never breathed until now....

Excerpt: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by John Ormsby (1922 ed.).

Excerpt: In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary ?Pike County? dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding....