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Excerpt: A Grateful People. On the 20th of August, 1672, the city of the Hague, always so lively, so neat, and so trim that one might believe every day to be Sunday, with its shady park, with its tall trees, spreading over its Gothic houses, with its canals like large mirrors, in which its steeples and its almost Eastern cupolas are reflected, -- the city of the Hague, the capital of the Seven United Provinces, was swelling in all its arteries with a black and red stream of hurried, panting, and restless citizens, who, with their knives in their girdles, muskets on their shoulders, or sticks in their hands, were pushing on to the Buytenhof, a terrible prison, the grated windows of which are still shown, where, on the charge of attempted murder preferred against him by the surgeon Tyckelaer, Cornelius de Witt, the brother of the Grand Pensionary of Holland was confined....

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Excerpt: Introduction to Chronicles of the Canongate. The preceding volume of this Collection concluded the last of the pieces originally published under the Nominis umbra of The Author of Waverley; and the circumstances which rendered it impossible for the writer to continue longer in the possession of his incognito were communicated in 1827, in the Introduction to the first series of Chronicles of the Canongate, consisting (besides a biographical sketch of the imaginary chronicler) of three tales, entitled ?The Highland Widow,? ?The Two Drovers,? and ?The Surgeon?s Daughter.? In the present volume the two first named of these pieces are included, together with three detached stories which appeared the year after, in the elegant compilation called ?The Keepsake.? ?The Surgeon?s Daughter? it is thought better to defer until a succeeding volume?...

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Contents INTRODUCTION TO CHRONICLES OF THE CANONGATE. .......................................................................... 4 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................................................... 6 APPENDIX TO INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 19 CHRONICLES OF THE CANONGATE ..................................................................................................................... 41 THE HIGHLAND WIDOW ................................................................................................................................... 109 MR. CROFTANGRY INTRODUCES ANOTHER TALE. .................................................................................. 173 THE TWO DROVERS. .......................................................................................................................................... 176 NOTES............................................................................................................

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Excerpt: Bianchon, a physician to whom science owes a fine system of theoretical physiology, and who, while still young, made himself a celebrity in the medical school of Paris, that central luminary to which European doctors do homage, practiced surgery for a long time before he took up medicine. His earliest studies were guided by one of the greatest of French surgeons, the illustrious Desplein, who flashed across science like a meteor. By the consensus even of his enemies, he took with him to the tomb an incommunicable method. Like all men of genius, he had no heirs; he carried everything in him, and carried it away with him. The glory of a surgeon is like that of an actor: they live only so long as they are alive, and their talent leaves no trace when they are gone. Actors and surgeons, like great singers too, like the executants who by their performance increase the power of music tenfold, are all the heroes of a moment....

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Excerpt: It came without warning, at the very hour his hand was outstretched to crumple the Holz and Gunsberg Combine. The New York doctors called it overwork, and he lay in a darkened room, one ankle crossed above the other, tongue pressed into palate, wondering whether the next brain-surge of prickly fires would drive his soul from all anchorages. At last they gave judgment. With care he might in two years return to the arena, but for the present he must go across the water and do no work whatever. He accepted the terms. It was capitulation; but the Combine that had shivered beneath his knife gave him all the honours of war: Gunsberg himself, full of condolences, came to the steamer and filled the Chapins? suite of cabins with overwhelming flower-works....

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Contents Actions and Reactions ....................................................................................................................................................... 4 AN HABITATION ENFORCED ........................................................................................................................................ 4 THE RECALL ................................................................................................................................................................. 35 GARM?A HOSTAGE....................................................................................................................................................... 36 THE POWER OF THE DOG ............................................................................................................................................51 THE MOTHER HIVE ...................................................................................................................................................... 52 THE BEES AND THE FLIES ........................................................................................................