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Excerpt: ACT I. SCENE I. Windsor. Before PAGE?s house. [Enter SHALLOW, SLENDER, and SIR HUGH EVANS.] SHALLOW: Sir Hugh, persuade me not; I will make a Star-chamber matter of it: if he were twenty Sir John Falstaffs, he shall not abuse Robert Shallow, esquire. SLENDER: In the county of Gloucester, justice of peace and ?Coram.? SHALLOW: Ay, cousin Slender, and ?Custalorum. SLENDER: Ay, and ?Rato-lorum? too; and a gentleman born, master parson; who writes himself ?Armigero,? in any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation, ?Armigero.? SHALLOW: Ay, that I do; and have done any time these three hundred years....

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Excerpt: Phase the First; The Maiden -- I -- On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line. He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything in particular. An empty egg-basket was slung upon his arm, the nap of his hat was ruffled, a patch being quite worn away at its brim where his thumb came in taking it off. Presently he was met by an elderly parson astride on a gray mare, who, as he rode, hummed a wandering tune. ?Good night t?ee,? said the man with the basket. ?Good night, Sir John,? said the parson....

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Table of Contents: Phase the First ? The Maiden, 1 -- I, 1 -- II, 5 -- III, 10 -- IV, 16 -- V, 24 -- VI, 32 -- VII, 36 -- VIII, 39 -- IX, 43 -- X, 48 -- XI, 55 -- Phase the Second? Maiden No More, 61 -- XII, 61 -- XIII, 68 -- XIV, 70 -- XV, 80 -- Phase the Third? The Rally, 83 -- XVI, 83 -- XVII, 87 -- XVIII, 93 -- XIX, 99 -- XX, 105 -- XXI, 108 -- XXII, 113 -- XXIII, 116 -- XXIV, 122 -- Phase the Fourth? The Consequence, 126...

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Madame Butterfly is the story of the young Japanese girl Cho-Cho San, who marries a flighty American naval officer, and is thenceforth outcast from her relatives. Anxiously she awaits the return of her beloved husband, but when he finally anchors in the harbour, Cho-Cho San does not get the happy ending she was hoping for. This short story by John Luther Long has inspired Giacomo Puccini to write the opera of the same name. (Introduction by Availle)...

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Fiction, Literature, Romance

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil?s Row who were circling madly about the heap and pelting at him. His infantile countenance was livid with fury. His small body was writhing in the delivery of great, crimson oaths. ?Run, Jimmie, run! Dey?ll get yehs,? screamed a retreating Rum Alley child. ?Naw,? responded Jimmie with a valiant roar, ?dese micks can?t make me run.?...

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. How Queen Guenever rode a-Maying with certain knights of the Round Table and clad all in green. So it befell in the month of May, Queen Guenever called unto her knights of the Table Round; and she gave them warning that early upon the morrow she would ride a-Maying into woods and fields beside Westminster. And I warn you that there be none of you but that he be well horsed, and that ye all be clothed in green, outher in silk outher in cloth; and I shall bring with me ten ladies, and every knight shall have a lady behind him, and every knight shall have a squire and two yeomen; and I will that ye all be well horsed....

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Excerpt: PREFACE; I HAVE endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it. Their faithful Friend and Servant, C. D. December, ....

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Table of Contents: ILLUSTRATION: HE HAD BEEN TIM?S BLOOD HORSE, ii -- PREFACE, 1 -- MARLEY?S GHOST, 2 -- THE FIRST OF THE THREE SPIRITS, 17 -- THE SECOND OF THE THREE SPIRITS, 31 -- THE LAST OF THE THREE SPIRITS, 49 -- THE END OF IT, 61 -- ILLUSTRATION: BOB CRATCHIT AND TINY TIM., 67...

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Excerpt: Shanghaied This is to be a story of a battle, at least one murder, and several sudden deaths. For that reason it begins with a pink tea and among the mingled odors of many delicate perfumes and the hale, frank smell of Caroline Testout roses. There had been a great number of debutantes ?coming out? that season in San Francisco by means of afternoon teas, pink, lavender, and otherwise. This particular tea was intended to celebrate the fact that Josie Herrick had arrived at that time of her life when she was to wear her hair high and her gowns long, and to have a ?day? of her own quite distinct from that of her mother....

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Excerpt: Alexander Pope?s ?The Rape of the Lock?.

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Excerpt: The Shade of Cardinal Richelieu. In a splendid chamber of the Palais Royal, formerly styled the Palais Cardinal, a man was sitting in deep reverie, his head supported on his hands, leaning over a gilt and inlaid table which was covered with letters and papers. Behind this figure glowed a vast fireplace alive with leaping flames; great logs of oak blazed and crackled on the polished brass andirons whose flicker shone upon the superb habiliments of the lonely tenant of the room, which was illumined grandly by twin candelabra rich with wax-lights....

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Excerpt: Speeches: Literary and Social by Charles Dickens.

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Contents SPEECH: EDINBURGH, JUNE 25, 1841.................................................................................................................. 6 SPEECH: JANUARY, 1842. ..................................................................................................................................... 10 SPEECH: FEBRUARY 1842. ................................................................................................................................... 11 SPEECH: FEBRUARY 7, 1842. ............................................................................................................................... 15 SPEECH: NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 18, 1842. ..................................................................................................... 19 SPEECH: MANCHESTER, OCTOBER 5, 1843. ................................................................................................... 23 SPEECH: LIVERPOOL, FEBRUARY 26, 1844. .................................................................................................... 28 SPEECH: BIRMINGHAM, FEBRUARY 28, 1844. .........................................................

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Introduction: In several of the dialogues of Plato, doubts have arisen among his interpreters as to which of the various subjects discussed in them is the main thesis. The speakers have the freedom of conversation; no severe rules of art restrict them, and sometimes we are inclined to think, with one of the dramatis personae in the Theaetetus, that the digressions have the greater interest....

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Excerpt: A chapter of which the last page only is of any importance comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing. Credulity is not wooed through the impressionable senses; nor have we recourse to the small circular glow of the watchmaker?s eye to raise in bright relief minutest grains of evidence for the routing of incredulity....

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Excerpt: Preface By Way Of Criticism. These studies are collected from the monthly press. One appeared in the New Quarterly, one in MacMillan?s, and the rest in the Cornhill Magazine. To the Cornhill I owe a double debt of thanks; first, that I was received there in the very best society, and under the eye of the very best of editors; and second, that the proprietors have allowed me to republish so considerable an amount of copy....

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Contents PREFACE BY WAY OF CRITICISM. ........................................................................................... 4 CHAPTER I ? VICTOR HUGO?S ROMANCES ........................................................................ 15 CHAPTER II ? SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS.......................................................... 34 CHAPTER III ? WALT WHITMAN............................................................................................. 63 CHAPTER IV ? HENRY DAVID THOREAU: HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS........... 84 CHAPTER V ? YOSHIDA-TORAJIRO..................................................................................... 107 CHAPTER VI ? FRANCOIS VILLON, STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER.........117 CHAPTER VII ? CHARLES OF ORLEANS ............................................................................ 141 CHAPTER VIII ? SAMUEL PEPYS .......................................................................................... 170 CHAPTER IX ? JOHN KNOX AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN .................................. 190...

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. The Foreigner At Home. ?This is no my ain house; I ken by the biggin? o?t.? Two recent books* one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on France by the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set people thinking on the divisions of races and nations. Such thoughts should arise with particular congruity and force to inhabitants of that United Kingdom, peopled from so many different stocks, babbling so many different dialects, and offering in its extent such singular contrasts, from the busiest over-population to the unkindliest desert, from the Black Country to the Moor of Rannoch. It is not only when we cross the seas that we go abroad; there are foreign parts of England; and the race that has conquered so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate the islands whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish mountains still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech. It was but the other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show in Mousehole, on St. Michael?s Bay, the house of the last Cornish-speaking woman. English itself, which will now frank the traveller through the most of...

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Contents CHAPTER I: THE FOREIGNER AT HOME ..................................................................................... 5 CHAPTER II: SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES................................................................................ 14 CHAPTER III: OLD MORTALITY .................................................................................................. 20 CHAPTER IV: A COLLEGE MAGAZINE ...................................................................................... 28 CHAPTER V: AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER ............................................................................. 36 CHAPTER VI: PASTORAL .............................................................................................................. 41 CHAPTER VII: THE MANSE .......................................................................................................... 48 CHAPTER VIII: MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET .................................................................................... 53 CHAPTER IX: THOMAS STEVENSON ? CIVIL ENGINEER...................................................... 58 CHAPTER X: TALK AND TALKERS ....................

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Excerpt: Welcome to the fifth volume of Best of Four. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we have enjoyed bringing it to you. The purpose of Best of Four is to bring the best writing produced in English 004 each fall semester to the widest audience possible. Our students have important stories to tell and powerful voices to be heard. The students who read these essays will learn that they too have permission to state what is important to them in a public voice....

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Contents How to Use This Magazine .............................................................................................................. 3 High School to College Andrew Makhoul ........................................................................................ 4 Ignoring Problems Creates More! Ashley Morris................................................................................ 5 Hang in There Brad Hart ................................................................................................................. 6 Nate Brandi Saveri ........................................................................................................................... 7 The Best Birthday Is the Sixteenth Brent Heimbach ......................................................................... 9 Sharing the Bread of Angels Christa Sist ......................................................................................... 10 Tragedy in the Night Danielle Gehman .......................................................................................... 11 My Grandfather David Smith ..............................................

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Introduction: Benjamin Franklin was born in Milk Street, Boston, on January 6, 1706. His father, Josiah Franklin, was a tallow chandler who married twice, and of his seventeen children Benjamin was the youngest son. His schooling ended at ten, and at twelve he was bound apprentice to his brother James, a printer, who published the ?New England Courant.? To this journal he became a contributor, and later was for a time its nominal editor....

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Excerpt: ACT I. SCENE I. Rome. A street. [Enter FLAVIUS, MARULLUS, and certain Commoners.] FLAVIUS: Hence! home, you idle creatures get you home: Is this a holiday? what! know you not, Being mechanical, you ought not walk Upon a laboring day without the sign Of your profession? Speak, what trade art thou? First Commoner: Why, sir, a carpenter. MARULLUS: Where is thy leather apron and thy rule? What dost thou with thy best apparel on? You, sir, what trade are you? Second Commoner: Truly, sir, in respect of a fine workman, I am but, as you would say, a cobbler....

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This novel is subtitled The Mellstock Quire, A Rural Painting of the Dutch School. The Quire is the group of musicians who accompany the hymns at the local church and we follow the fortunes of one member, Dick Dewy, who falls in love with the new school mistress, Fancy Day. Another element of the book is the battle between the traditional musicians of the Quire and the local vicar, Parson Maybold, who installs a church organ. This battle illustrates the developing technology being introduced in the Victorian era and its threat to traditional country ways. The novel was published anonymously in 1872 and is often seen as Thomas Hardy's most gentle and pastoral novel. In 2005 Under the Greenwood Tree was adapted for a television version by Ashley Pharoah. (Summary by Rachel Lintern)...

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Literature, Romance

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. Lakeside was a pleasant little town of five or six thousand inhabitants, and a rather pretty one, too, as towns go in the Far West. It had church accommodations for thirty-five thousand, which is the way of the Far West and the South, where everybody is religious, and where each of the Protestant sects is represented and has a plant of its own. Rank was unknown in Lakeside--unconfessed, anyway; everybody knew everybody and his dog, and a sociable friendliness was the prevailing atmosphere....

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Contents THE $30,000 BEQUEST ............................................................................................................................................. 5 A DOG?S TALE ......................................................................................................................................................... 33 WAS IT HEAVEN? OR HELL?............................................................................................................................... 43 A CURE FOR THE BLUES ..................................................................................................................................... 61 THE CURIOUS BOOK ............................................................................................................................................ 79 THE CALIFORNIAN?S TALE ............................................................................................................................... 121 A HELPLESS SITUATION.................................................................................................................................... 128 A TELEPHONIC CONVERSAT...

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Excerpt: Chapter 1 Exposition. Notwithstanding the discipline which Marechal Suchet had introduced into his army corps, he was unable to prevent a short period of trouble and disorder at the taking of Tarragona. According to certain fair-minded military men, this intoxication of victory bore a striking resemblance to pillage, though the marechal promptly suppressed it. Order being re-established, each regiment quartered in its respective lines, and the commandant of the city appointed, military administration began. The place assumed a mongrel aspect. Though all things were organized on a French system, the Spaniards were left free to follow ?in petto? their national tastes....