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First published in the year 1896, the present novel ‘The Seats of the Mighty, Complete’ by Gilbert Parker is a historical novel depicting the English conquest of Quebec with James Wolfe and the Marquis de Montcalm as two of the characters.

The Second Jungle Book is a sequel to The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. First published in 1895, it features five stories about Mowgli and three unrelated stories, all but one set in India,

Upon my tongues continual slanders ride, The which in every language I pronounce, Stuffing the ears of men with false reports. I speak of peace while covert emnity, Under the smile of safety, wounds the world; and who but Rumour, who but only I, Make fearful musters and prepar’d defence, Whiles the big year, swoln with some other grief, Is thought with child by the stern tyrant war, and no such matter? Rumour is a pipe Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures, and of so easy and so plain a stop.

Noted British author and anthropologist Joseph Conrad’s famous novel ‘The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale’ was first published in the year 1907. The novel is set in London. It revolves around the work of a spy for a country left unnamed in the novel.

When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. Her father had held a position under the English Government and had always been busy and ill himself, and her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people. She had not wanted a little girl at all, and when Mary was born she handed her over to the care of an Ayah, who was made to understand that if she wished to please the Mem Sahib she must keep the child out of sight as much as possible. So when she was a sickly, fretful, ugly little baby she was kept out of the way, and when she became a sickly, fretful, toddling thing she was kept out of the way also. She never remembered seeing familiarly anything but the dark faces of her Ayah and the other native servants, and as they always obeyed her and gave her her own way in everything, because the Mem Sahib would be angry if she was disturbed by her crying, by the time she was six years old she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived. The young English governess who came to teach her to read and write disliked her so much that she gave up her place in three months, and when other governesses came to try to fill it they always went away in a shorter time than the first one. So if Mary had not chosen to really want to know how to read books she would never have learned her letters at all.

First published in the year 1919, the present book ‘The Secret House’ is a classic crime thriller novel written by the famous novelist Edgar Wallace.

On a certain evening in early September—Friday the thirteenth—to be exact, a stranger in Claymore, Michigan, might have been startled to behold two figures, grotesque in long white sheets which draped them from head to foot, scurrying along an alley leading to Summit Street. It was an appropriate night for ghosts to be abroad. The moon was in the dark and the wind whistled weirdly through the trees.

On a certain sunny May morning, about forty years ago, the owner of Wyvern Towers stepped into a lovely glade of Barras Wood, which was a portion of his extensive property.

Felix Drelincourt was a man who stood a little over six feet in height. His black, silky hair had a careless wave in it, and his thin mustache, with its up curled tips, was the cause of his often being taken for a foreigner.

But his eyes were the most striking feature of a striking personality. They were black, and of an extraordinarily piercing quality, with a sort of veiled, somber glow in them at times, as it might be the glow thrown out from between the bars of some hidden furnace, the fire in which was eating its heart away in the flame of its own burning unrest. It was not easy to judge his age, but one might put it down as being somewhere between eight and twenty and four or five and thirty. This morning he was dressed in a velveteen shooting jacket, with cord breeches and leggings, and was wearing a low crowned felt hat.

Firs5t published in the year 1865, the present book ‘The Secret Service, the Field, the Dungeon, and the Escape’ by famos writer Albert D. Richardson is a collection of his memoirs of his time as a United States Secret Service agent and journalist during the Civil War. Also includes his time as a military prisoner.

Under a sky heavy with stars and faintly brighter for a low-hanging sickle moon, the gipsy caravan slept on the turf by the roadside, its shutters closed, its shafts stretched out like arms. In the shadow of the ditch nearby a stertorous horse was snoring.
Far away, above the black crest of the hills, a bright streak of sky announced the coming of the dawn. A church clock struck four. Here and there a bird awoke and began to sing. The air was soft and warm.
Abruptly, from the interior of the caravan, a woman’s voice cried:
“Saint-Quentin! Saint-Quentin!”
A head was thrust out of the little window which looked out over the box under the projecting roof.
“A nice thing this! I thought as much! The rascal has decamped in the night. The little beast! Nice discipline this is!”
Other voices joined in the grumbling. Two or three minutes passed, then the door in the back of the caravan opened and a shadowy figure descended the five steps of the ladder while two tousled heads appeared at the side window.

“In the following pages I have endeavored to give a simple account of problems which have occupied the attention of the human mind ever since the dawn of civilization, and which can never lose their interest until time shall be no more. While to most persons these subjects will have but an historical interest, yet even from this point of view they are of more value than the history of empires, for they are the intellectual battlefields upon which much of our progress in science has been won. To a few, however, some of them may be of actual practical importance, for although the schoolmaster has been abroad for these many years, it is an unfortunate fact that the circle-squarer and the perpetual-motion-seeker have not ceased out of the land.” -Preface

The Shadow Out of Time is a novella by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written between November 1934 and February 1935, it was first published in the June 1936 issue of Astounding Stories.

Contents include: Introduction: I. Definition and Development, II. Forms, III. The Short-story as Narration, IV. Representative Short-stories, V. Bibliography, Washington Irving: Rip Van Winkle (1820), Edgar Allan Poe: The Gold Bug (1842), The Purloined Letter (1845), Nathaniel Hawthorne: Howe’s Masquerade (1838), The Birthmark (1843), Francis Bret Harte: The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1869), Robert Louis Stevenson: The Sire de Maletroit’s Door (1878), Markheim (1885) and Rudyard Kipling: Wee Willie Winkie (1888).

The Shunned House’ is a horror novel by H. P. Lovecraft. It was first published in the October 1937 issue of “Weird Tales”. It is based on an actual house in Providence, Rhode Island, built around 1763 and still standing at 135 Benefit Street; Lovecraft was familiar with the house because his aunt, Lillian Clark, lived there in 1919-20 as a companion to Mrs. H. C. Babbit. But it was another house in Elizabeth, New Jersey that actually provoked Lovecraft to write the story.

About The AuthorEleanor Hallowell Abbott (Mrs. Fordyce Coburn) (September 22, 1872 June 4, 1958), born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a nationally recognized American author. She was a frequent contributor to The Ladies’ Home Journal.

There are steps of approach to the Silence. Stillness is one thing and the Silence is another. One may quiet himself physically and not be still, and he may be still without entering the Silence. When one becomes physically and mentally at rest, he is apt to become receptive to psychic influences; and when these are not desired it is advisable to protect oneself while mentally negative. One may affirm his Oneness with God, his being surrounded and protected by the divine Goodness, and may symbolize this by enveloping himself in thought with the white light of love or the mellowed tints of sunshine.

“What’s made him break out?” the comedian whispered, aside, to Adeler. For it was an open secret that this man, whose financial operations shook the thrones of monarchy, whose social fêtes were attended by the smartest people, was subject to outbursts of the kind which now saw him seated before a rapidly emptying magnum in a corner of the great restaurant. At such times he would frequent the promenades of music-halls, consorting with whom he found there, and would display the gross vulgarity of a Whitechapel pawnbroker or tenth-rate variety agent.

No,” said Pierre Jouvent, “I do not know Italy. I started to go there twice, but each time I was stopped at the frontier and could not manage to get any further.

The present book ‘The Skull’ by famous English writer Philip K. Dick was first publishe in the year 1952. This is a science fiction short story.

Only when the Nan-yang Maru sailed from Yuen-San did her terrible sense of foreboding begin to subside.
For four years, waking or sleeping, the awful subconsciousness of supreme evil had never left her.
But now, as the Korean shore, receding into darkness, grew dimmer and dimmer, fear subsided and grew vague as the half-forgotten memory of horror in a dream.
She stood near the steamer’s stern apart from other passengers, a slender, lonely figure in her silver-fox furs, her ulster and smart little hat, watching the lights of Yuen-San grow paler and smaller along the horizon until they looked like a level row of stars.

H. G. Wells’s dystopian novel ‘The Sleeper Awakes’ was first published as a book in the year 1899. It narrates the story of a man who wakes up after a very long continuous sleep of hundred and three years. What happens next to him and how the world has changed for him is told interestingly in this novel.

An informative compendium about the second war of Somme. This books would be useful and interesting to those, who are interested to know about and study deeply the history of various big wars and history of human distruction.

“‘Carmen won’t last more than a couple of days.’ Mason spat out a chunk of ice and surveyed the poor animal ruefully, then put her foot in his mouth and proceeded to bite out the ice which clustered cruelly between the toes.
“‘I never saw a dog with a highfalutin’ name that ever was worth a rap,’ he said, as he concluded his task and shoved her aside. ‘They just fade away and die under the responsibility. Did ye ever see one go wrong with a sensible name like Cassiar, Siwash, or Husky? No, sir! Take a look at Shookum here, he’s—’ Snap! The lean brute flashed up, the white teeth just missing Mason’s throat.” -an excerpt

Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone. His offices were in the Duke Block, over the drug store. Larry, the doctor’s man, had lit the overhead light in the waiting-room and the double student’s lamp on the desk in the study. The isinglass sides of the hard-coal burner were aglow, and the air in the study was so hot that as he came in the doctor opened the door into his little operating-room, where there was no stove. The waiting room was carpeted and stiffly furnished, something like a country parlor. The study had worn, unpainted floors, but there was a look of winter comfort about it. The doctor’s flat-top desk was large and well made; the papers were in orderly piles, under glass weights. Behind the stove a wide bookcase, with double glass doors, reached from the floor to the ceiling. It was filled with medical books of every thickness and color. On the top shelf stood a long row of thirty or forty volumes, bound all alike in dark mottled board covers, with imitation leather backs.

The present book is a 1891 essay written by Oscar Wilde in which he argues that, under capitalism, “the majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism—are forced, indeed, so to spoil them”: instead of realising their true talents, they waste their time solving the social problems caused by capitalism, without taking their common cause away. Thus, caring people “seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see in poverty but their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it” because, as Wilde puts it, “the proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.”

“The sketches in this book and in my previous one, “The Cross at the Front,” are attempts to show the soul of the soldier serving in France as I have seen it during the year and a half that I have been with him. It is a padre’s privilege and duty to be the voice with which, in public worship, the soldiers speak to God; and through which their last thoughts are borne to their friends at home. He is their voice both when they are sick or wounded, and when they lie silent in the grave. He speaks of their hopes and fears, hardships and heroisms, laughter and tears. As best he may he tries to tell, to those who have a right and a longing to know, how they thought, and how they bore themselves in the great day of trial when all risked their lives and many laid them down.” -Preface

American social scientist W. E. B. Du Bois’ classic work ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ is a seminal work in the history of sociology, and a cornerstone of African-American literary history. First published in 1903, it contains several essays on race. Some of these essays were previously published by the Atlantic Monthly magazine. To develop this work, Du Bois drew from his own experiences as an African American in the American society. Outside of its notable relevance in African-American history, ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ also holds an important place in social science as one of the early works in the field of sociology.

The Southern Literary Messenger’ was a periodical published in Richmond, Virginia, from August 1834 until June 1864. Each issue carried a subtitle of “Devoted to Every Department of Literature and the Fine Arts” or some variation and included poetry, fiction, non-fiction, reviews, and historical notes. It was founded by Thomas Willis White who served as publisher and occasional editor until his death in 1843.
Present compendium is its issue 4 of first volume.

The book is divided into two sections, the first comprising an historical account of the pretensions to the dominion of the sea; the second dealing with the relic of such pretensions, the territorial waters, more particularly in the aspect which they present under the Law of Nations and in relation to the rights of fishing. With some doubtful exceptions, the viii claim to a special sovereignty or dominion over the so-called British Seas was a doctrine of the Stuarts, introduced from Scotland to England with that dynasty, and terminating with it. It was aimed in particular against the Dutch, whose commerce, shipping, wealth, and power were believed to be derived from the fisheries which they carried on along the coasts of this country. Hence a very considerable part of the work refers to the dealings and negotiations with that people as to the liberty of fishing and the homage to the flag. -Preface

On the eighteenth day of August, 1886, as the sun was setting, I was floating in the Caribbean Sea. You may mark the place on the map as being approximately N. latitude 15°, and W. longitude 62° from Greenwich; or in other words, between one hundred and two hundred miles west of the French island of Martinique. A chest, well corded but partly filled with water, was all that kept my head above the surface. Without food or drink I had been floating thus since shortly after sunrise of the previous morning. At that time the sloop in which I was voyaging, capsized and sunk in a squall, drowning the negro captain and owner, and his son, who constituted the crew. In this little vessel I was bound for a small uninhabited island known as “Key Seven,” which was in plain sight when the disaster occurred. For two days and a night, without sleep or refreshment, I had been struggling to push the floating chest toward this land.