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The reason I have written this work is because so many among us are interested in Tolstoy and so few seem to understand him. It would seem therefore that an English Life of Tolstoy is needed, and having lived in Russia for twenty-three years, known Tolstoy well for several years, visited him frequently in Moscow, and stayed with him repeatedly at Yásnaya Polyána, I am perhaps as well qualified as any one to write it, especially as I have long made a careful study of his views. My wife and I have translated several of his works, have known people closely connected with him, and some ten years ago we took part in an unsuccessful ‘Tolstoy’ Colony; besides which I went to Canada at his wish to make arrangements for the Doukhobór migration, of which I subsequently wrote the history.

During all this time Buddha was travelling about the country, preaching the law to those that were worthy to obtain the deliverance. He had reached his seventy-ninth year.

The sun gives forth to us heat and light rays, without which this old world could never be. Glory to warmth and light, which are power and wisdom shed upon us. But there is likewise a third kind of ray shed by old Sol, whose mission we may not so readily bless. The sun’s actinic rays are death-dealing. They cause disintegration, decomposition.

In presenting “The Lincoln Way” which consists of nine mes- sages purported to have come from Abraham Lincoln from realms beyond the earth plane — Lincoln Philosophical Research Founda- tion neither affirms or denies the authenticity as to source, of these messages.

All evening long the adults in the house had been conversing in agitated whispers, behind closed doors. Now they were asleep—or pretending to be asleep, as he was pretending. The house was unnaturally silent.

First published in the year 1916, Arnold Bennett’s novel ‘The Lion’s Share’ is one of his fictional works that carries the theme of thriller and mystery.

He was the most beautiful prince that ever was born.

Being a prince, people said this; and it was true. When he looked at the candle, his eyes had an earnest expression quite startling in a new-born baby. His nose was aquiline; his complexion was healthy; he was round, fat, and straight-limbed—a splendid baby.

His father and mother, King and Queen of Nomansland, and their subjects were proud and happy, having waited ten years for an heir. The only person not quite happy was the king’s brother, who would have been king had the baby not been born, but his Majesty was very kind to him, and gave him a Dukedom as large as a country.

First published in the year 1880, the present book ‘The Little Minister’ was written by famous Scottish author and dramatist J. M. Barrie, who is best known for his fictional character Peter Pan.

The Little Prince is a novella by French aristocrat, writer, and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was first published in English and French in the US by Reynal & Hitchcock in April 1943, and posthumously in France following the liberation of France as Saint-Exupéry’s works had been banned by the Vichy Regime.

A collection and study of popular short stories from various regions in the world. Julian Hawthorne has provided the curious readers with enough material to understand the roots of modern pulp fiction. ‘The Lock & Key Library’ is the classic overview of the history of the genre, at once a rousing read for fans of the unsolved and unknown.

These are inconsistencies for which skeptics never dream of reproaching themselves; they pass their lives in reasoning against reason. In short, Count Kostia respected nothing but facts, and believed that, properly viewed, there was nothing else, and that the universe, considered as an entirety, was but a collection of contradictory accidents.

Just why my father moved, at the close of the civil war, from Georgia to Texas, is to this good hour a mystery to me. While we did not exactly belong to the poor whites, we classed with them in poverty, being renters; but I am inclined to think my parents were intellectually superior to that common type of the South. Both were foreign born, my mother being Scotch and my father a north of Ireland man,—as I remember him, now, impulsive, hasty in action, and slow to confess a fault. It was his impulsiveness that led him to volunteer and serve four years in the Confederate army,—trying years to my mother, with a brood of seven children to feed, garb, and house. The war brought me my initiation as a cowboy, of which I have now, after the long lapse of years, the greater portion of which were spent with cattle, a distinct recollection. Sherman’s army, in its march to the sea, passed through our county, devastating that section for miles in its passing.

“The cow is there,” said Ansell, lighting a match and holding it out over the carpet. No one spoke. He waited till the end of the match fell off. Then he said again, “She is there, the cow. There, now.”

“You have not proved it,” said a voice.

“I have proved it to myself.”

“I have proved to myself that she isn’t,” said the voice. “The cow is not there.” Ansell frowned and lit another match.

“She’s there for me,” he declared. “I don’t care whether she’s there for you or not. Whether I’m in Cambridge or Iceland or dead, the cow will be there.”

“On the 27th of December, 1807, cruizing off the Black Rocks, and perceiving the approach of a gale, kept a look out for the commodore in the Dragon. The next morning (Monday) the gale increasing from the S.W. and not perceiving the Dragon in any direction, at nine o’clock, shaped our course for the Lizard, with a view of getting into Falmouth.

There are many dreary and dingy rows of ugly houses in certain parts of London, but there certainly could not be any row more ugly or dingier than Philibert Place. There were stories that it had once been more attractive, but that had been so long ago that no one remembered the time. It stood back in its gloomy, narrow strips of uncared-for, smoky gardens, whose broken iron railings were supposed to protect it from the surging traffic of a road which was always roaring with the rattle of busses, cabs, drays, and vans, and the passing of people who were shabbily dressed and looked as if they were either going to hard work or coming from it, or hurrying to see if they could find some of it to do to keep themselves from going hungry. The brick fronts of the houses were blackened with smoke, their windows were nearly all dirty and hung with dingy curtains, or had no curtains at all; the strips of ground, which had once been intended to grow flowers in, had been trodden down into bare earth in which even weeds had forgotten to grow. One of them was used as a stone-cutter’s yard, and cheap monuments, crosses, and slates were set out for sale, bearing inscriptions beginning with “Sacred to the Memory of.” Another had piles of old lumber in it, another exhibited second-hand furniture, chairs with unsteady legs, sofas with horsehair stuffing bulging out of holes in their covering, mirrors with blotches or cracks in them. The insides of the houses were as gloomy as the outside. They were all exactly alike. In each a dark entrance passage led to narrow stairs going up to bedrooms, and to narrow steps going down to a basement kitchen. The back bedroom looked out on small, sooty, flagged yards, where thin cats quarreled, or sat on the coping of the brick walls hoping that sometime they might feel the sun; the front rooms looked over the noisy road, and through their windows came the roar and rattle of it. It was shabby and cheerless on the brightest days, and on foggy or rainy ones it was the most forlorn place in London.

This is a reproduction of a book. We believe this work is culturally important, and have elected to bring it back into print. We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos.In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. We appreciate your understanding and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

The present book ‘The Lovers Assistant; Or, New Art of Love’ by Henry Fielding was first published in the year 1760. It is considered to be Fielding’s updated version of Ovid’s Art of Love.

“There’s no doubt about it, we really must economize somehow!” sighed Mrs. Woodward helplessly, with her housekeeping book in one hand, and her bank pass-book in the other, and an array of bills spread out on the table in front of her. “Children, do you hear what I say? The war will make a great difference to our income, and we can’t—simply can’t—go on living in exactly the old way. The sooner we all realize it the better. I wish I knew where to begin.”

“Might knock off going to church, and save the money we give in collections!” suggested Percy flippantly. “It must tot up to quite a decent sum in the course of a year, not to mention pew rent!”

His mother cast a reproachful glance at him.

Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk – that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh – a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.

And I have found both freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.—from book

You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen–the seven masks I have fashioined and worn in seven lives, — I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, “Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves.”
Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.
And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, “He is madman.” I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. and as if in a trance I cried, “Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks.”
Thus I became a madman.

The Magic of Believing’ by Claude M. Bristol is a classic motivational book that has seen consistent and heavy sales in the USA for more than 40 years. A book that encourages and inspires people to let go of their pessimistic attitudes and nurture a positive and action-oriented outlook to achieve their desired goal, it has been the secret behind a large number of success stories in people’s lives in the professional, marital, social, as well as personal spheres.

Raphael, a failed writer, finds himself deep in debt and unrequited in love, so he decides to take a suicidal plunge into the Seine River. Before he can, however, he discovers a magic leather skin in an antiquity shop. Its supernatural powers grant him his every wish, but it extracts a terrible toll! This parable depicts the malaise of nineteenth-century France.

First published in the year 1908, the present fantasy fiction novel ‘The Magician’ by British author W. Somerset Maugham is about a magician Oliver Haddo, a caricature of Aleister Crowley, who attempts to create life.

After a hundred years the history of a great war waged by a successful nation is commonly reviewed by that nation with retrospective complacency.
Distance dims the panorama; haze obscures the ragged gaps in the pageant until the long lines of victorious armies move smoothly across the horizon, with never an abyss to check their triumph.
Yet there is one people who cannot view the past through a mirage. The marks of the birth-pangs remain on the land; its struggle for breath was too terrible, its scars too deep to hide or cover.

Written by famous American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian – Henry David Thoreau, the present book ‘The Maine Woods’ was first published in the year 1864.

First published in the year 1869, the present book ‘The Malay Archipelago, Volume 1’ by the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, chronicles his scientific exploration, during the eight-year period 1854 to 1862, of the southern portion of the Malay Archipelago including Malaysia, Singapore, the islands of Indonesia, then known as the Dutch East Indies, and the island of New Guinea.

It was many years ago. Hadleyburg was the most honest and upright town in all the region round about. It had kept that reputation unsmirched during three generations, and was prouder of it than of any other of its possessions.

First published in the year 1914, famous writer P. G. Wodehouse’s present book ‘The Man Upstairs and Other Stories’ is a collection of short stories. It is a miscellaneous collection, not featuring any of Wodehouse’s regular characters; most of the stories concern love and romance.

One of the occasions when I experienced “that grand and glorious feeling” was when my law business had achieved proportions that justified my removal from my old office to new and more commodious quarters. I selected a somewhat pretentious building on Madison Avenue between Thirtieth and Fortieth Streets, and it was a red-letter day for me when I moved into my pleasant rooms on its top floor.