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Excerpt: Chapter I; I SCARCELY know where to begin, though I sometimes facetiously place the cause of it all to Charley Furuseth?s credit. He kept a summer cottage in Mill Valley, under the shadow of Mount Tamalpais, and never occupied it except when he loafed through the winter months and read Nietzsche and Schopenhaver to rest his brain. When summer came on, he elected to sweat out a hot and dusty existence in the city and to toil incessantly. Had it not been my custom to run up to see him every Saturday afternoon and to stop over till Monday morning, this particular January Monday morning would not have found me afloat on San Francisco Bay. Not but that I was afloat in a safe craft, for the Martinez was a new ferrysteamer, making her fourth or fifth trip on the run between Sausalito and San Francisco. The danger lay in the heavy fog which blanketed the bay, and of which, as a landsman, I had little apprehension. In fact, I remember the placid exaltation with which took up my position on the forward upper deck, directly beneath the pilot-house, and allowed the mystery of the fog to lay hold of my imagination. A fresh breeze was bl...

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Table of Contents: Chapter I, 1 -- Chapter II, 8 -- Chapter III, 14 -- Chapter IV, 24 -- Chapter V, 29 -- Chapter VI, 35 -- Chapter VII, 46 -- Chapter VIII, 49 -- Chapter IX, 55 -- Chapter X, 62 -- Chapter XI, 67 -- Chapter XII, 72 -- Chapter XIII, 80 -- Chapter XIV, 84 -- Chapter XV, 91 -- Chapter XVI, 96 -- Chapter XVII, 102 -- Chapter XVIII, 113 -- Chapter XIX, 119 -- Chapter XX, 125 -- Chapter XXI, 132 -- Chapter XXII, 136 -- Chapter XXIII, 139 -- Chapter XXIV, 143 -- Chapter XXV, 149 -- Chapter XXVI, 160 -- Chapter XXVII, 170 -- Chapter XXVIII, 177...

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Excerpt: THE PREFACE; If ever the story of any private Man?s Adventures in the World were worth making Publick, and were acceptable when Publish?d, the Editor of this Account thinks this will be so. The Wonders of this Man?s Life exceed all that (he thinks)is to be found extant; the Life of one Man being scarce capable of a greater Variety. The Story is told with Modesty, with Seriousness, and with a religious Application of Events to the Uses to which wise Men always apply them (viz.) to the Instruction of others by this Example, and to justify and honour the Wisdom of Providence in all the Variety of our Circumstances, let them happen how they will. The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it: And however thinks, because all such things are dispatch?d, that the Improvement of it, as well to the Diversion, as to the Instruction of the Reader, will be the same; and as such, he thinks, without father Compliment to the World, he does them a great Service in the Publication....

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Table of Contents: THE PREFACE, 1 -- THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE, &c., 2 -- THE JOURNAL., 51

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Excerpt: It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, mong the rest of my neighbors, heard in ordinary dis course that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence it came; but all agreed it was come into Holland again....

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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: 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: Colonel Chabert. ?Hullo! There is that old Box-coat again!? This exclamation was made by a lawyer?s clerk of the class called in French offices a gutter-jumper--a messenger in fact--who at this moment was eating a piece of dry bread with a hearty appetite. He pulled off a morsel of crumb to make into a bullet, and fired it gleefully through the open pane of the window against which he was leaning. The pellet, well aimed, rebounded almost as high as the window, after hitting the hat of a stranger who was crossing the courtyard of a house in the Rue Vivienne, where dwelt Maitre Derville, attorney-at-law....