HMPH Audiobooks: Recent Episodes
HMPH Audiobooks
The Bet by Anton Chekhov is a thought-provoking short story that explores themes of greed, the value of human life, and the meaning of freedom. The story centers around a wager between a wealthy banker and a young lawyer, made during a party at the banker's house.The debate begins when the guests discuss the morality of the death penalty versus life imprisonment. The banker argues that the death penalty is more humane because it ends suffering quickly, while the lawyer contends that life imprisonment, even with its hardships, is preferable to death because life is inherently valuable.In a moment of impulsive bravado, the banker bets two million rubles that the lawyer wouldn't be able to withstand five years of solitary confinement. The lawyer, eager to prove his point, raises the stakes and agrees to endure fifteen years of voluntary imprisonment instead of just five. The conditions of the bet are that the lawyer will spend these years in solitary confinement within the banker's garden lodge, with no human contact. He is allowed books, music, and wine, but he cannot leave the lodge or communicate with the outside world.As the years pass, the lawyer immerses himself in study, reading an extensive range of books on various subjects—literature, philosophy, languages, and religion. The banker, meanwhile, suffers financially, and by the end of the fifteen years, he is nearly ruined and dreads the prospect of having to pay the lawyer two million rubles.The night before the lawyer is set to be released, the banker, desperate and fearing bankruptcy, decides to kill the lawyer to avoid paying the money. However, when he sneaks into the lodge, he finds a letter written by the lawyer. In the letter, the lawyer explains that through his studies and solitary contemplation, he has come to see the futility of material wealth and worldly desires. He has decided to renounce the money and will leave the lodge five hours before the bet is officially over, thus voiding the agreement.True to his word, the lawyer leaves the lodge early, and the banker, relieved and ashamed of his own actions, locks the letter away in his safe. The story concludes with the lawyer disappearing into the night, having gained profound wisdom and understanding, while the banker is left to reflect on the emptiness of his own life and values.
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The Horror of the Heights by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a gripping short story that delves into the eerie and unknown dangers lurking in the upper atmosphere. Written in 1913, during the early days of aviation, the story is presented as a journal discovered in the remains of a crashed aircraft. The journal belongs to Mr. Joyce-Armstrong, an adventurous and somewhat reckless aviator with a fascination for pushing the boundaries of human flight.Driven by rumors of mysterious disappearances of other aviators, Joyce-Armstrong becomes obsessed with exploring the uncharted altitudes above 30,000 feet. He meticulously prepares his aircraft for the journey, equipping it with oxygen tanks and taking every precaution to reach the extreme heights that no one else has dared to explore. His goal is not just to reach these heights but to uncover the truth behind the mysterious fate of other pilots.As he ascends into the thin, cold air, Joyce-Armstrong's journal entries reveal his growing unease. He begins to notice strange, cloud-like shapes in the sky, and as he climbs higher, he encounters a nightmarish sight: massive, jellyfish-like creatures floating in the upper atmosphere. These creatures, with their translucent bodies and trailing tendrils, are both beautiful and terrifying. They move with a slow, deliberate grace, but their very existence suggests an ecosystem high above the Earth that is completely alien to human experience.Joyce-Armstrong describes his encounters with these creatures in increasingly frantic detail. He realizes that these beings are hostile and that their territory is off-limits to humanity. The creatures' presence explains the mysterious disappearances of other pilots who dared to fly too high. The journal abruptly ends with a final, chilling entry, where Joyce-Armstrong's words suggest he is being attacked by these airborne monsters.The story concludes with a note from the narrator, who found the wreckage of Joyce-Armstrong's plane and his bloodstained journal. The narrator expresses skepticism about the aviator's tale, suggesting it might be the product of high-altitude hallucinations. However, the strange and unexplained nature of the wreckage, coupled with the final, ominous words in the journal, leaves readers with a lingering sense of dread and the possibility that there are horrors in the heights that man was never meant to encounter.Doyle's "The Horror of the Heights" combines the thrill of early aviation with elements of cosmic horror, capturing the era's fascination with exploration and the unknown. The story taps into primal fears of the unseen and the unexplored, offering a glimpse into a world where the skies are not just empty spaces but home to unimaginable dangers.
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Bookshop Memories by George Orwell is an essay that recounts his experiences working in a second-hand bookshop in London during the early 1930s. In this reflective piece, Orwell provides a vivid depiction of the bookshop environment, the customers he encountered, and the various challenges and peculiarities of the job.
Orwell begins by describing the general atmosphere of the bookshop, noting the dust, the musty smell of old books, and the often quiet and monotonous routine of tending to the shop. He touches on the different types of customers that frequented the store, including those who were genuinely interested in books and those who merely sought to pass the time. He humorously categorizes the customers into various groups, such as the "oriental students," the "young women," and the "amateur spies."
Orwell also discusses the kinds of books that were popular among the customers and reflects on the changing tastes in literature. He mentions the prevalence of cheap, popular fiction and the difficulty in selling more serious, intellectual works. He shares anecdotes about specific interactions with customers, highlighting the sometimes frustrating and often amusing aspects of working in a bookshop.
Despite the challenges and the often mundane nature of the work, Orwell expresses a certain fondness for the experience. He appreciates the opportunity to observe human behavior and to immerse himself in the world of books. He also reflects on the value of books and reading, emphasizing the role of literature in providing an escape from the harsh realities of life.
"Bookshop Memories" offers a glimpse into Orwell's early career and his observations on society and human nature. It is a charming and insightful essay that captures the quirks and charm of a bygone era of bookselling, while also shedding light on Orwell's own literary sensibilities and his love for books.
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"The Garden of Fear" by Robert E. Howard is a riveting adventure that features his character James Allison, who recalls his past life as a warrior named Hunwulf. The story is part of the collection "The Valley of the Worm" and is set in a prehistoric era filled with danger and mystery.James Allison, living in modern times but plagued by vivid memories of his previous incarnations, recounts one such memory of being Hunwulf, a courageous and skilled warrior. Hunwulf's journey leads him to a vast and eerie valley, which is shrouded in an atmosphere of dread and foreboding. The valley, known to locals as a place of great peril, is home to bizarre and deadly creatures that test Hunwulf's strength and resolve.As Hunwulf ventures deeper into the valley, he discovers an ancient and overgrown garden, which is unlike any place he has ever seen. The garden is ruled by a monstrous, winged creature that combines elements of human and beast. This terrifying entity has enslaved a beautiful woman named Gudrun, who is trapped within the garden's confines.Determined to free Gudrun and end the reign of the monstrous ruler, Hunwulf faces numerous challenges. The garden itself is filled with deadly plants and creatures that pose constant threats. Hunwulf's battle with the winged beast is intense and brutal, highlighting his bravery and warrior spirit."The Garden of Fear" is rich with Howard's signature style, combining vivid descriptions, relentless action, and a sense of ancient myth and legend. The story delves into themes of heroism, the struggle against evil, and the power of memory and reincarnation. It explores the idea that the past lives of individuals shape their present, imbuing them with the strength and knowledge to face their current challenges.Howard's portrayal of the prehistoric setting and the fantastical elements within it creates a captivating and immersive experience. "The Garden of Fear" stands as a testament to Howard's ability to blend fantasy, horror, and adventure into a compelling narrative that continues to resonate with readers.
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Let's Get Together by Isaac Asimov is a science fiction short story that revolves around the theme of espionage and the dangers of advanced technology. The story, set in a future where tensions between global superpowers are high, explores the concept of humanoid robots being used as tools for covert operations.In the story, two intelligence agents, Bernard Gould and Jefferson Scanlon, are tasked with investigating a potential threat posed by the enemy nation. They uncover a plan where a group of humanoid robots, indistinguishable from humans, are designed to infiltrate their society and carry out acts of sabotage. The robots are capable of self-detonation, posing a grave danger.As Gould and Scanlon delve deeper into the investigation, they face the challenge of distinguishing friend from foe, human from machine. The story builds suspense as they work to prevent a catastrophic event, highlighting the ethical and existential dilemmas posed by the use of robots in warfare.
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A classic horror short story about a young scholar named Malcolm Malcolmson who seeks solitude to study for his exams. He rents an old, isolated house in a small town, known as the Judge's House, despite the warnings from the locals about its dark history.The house, once owned by a notorious and feared judge, exudes an eerie atmosphere. Malcolm soon experiences strange occurrences, including unsettling noises and the presence of rats. The climax of the story reveals the terrifying connection between the judge's sinister past and the supernatural events Malcolm faces, culminating in a haunting and chilling conclusion.
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A man named Conger, who is offered freedom in exchange for traveling back in time to kill a religious figure. This figure's future teachings are predicted to spark a revolutionary movement that challenges the status quo.Conger receives a skull as his sole clue to identify his target, whom he must assassinate before the teachings begin. As he navigates the past, Conger becomes entangled in the complexities of time travel and the moral implications of his mission.His journey reveals unexpected connections between himself and the target, leading to a profound realization about identity and destiny. The story delves into themes of predestination, the ethical dilemmas of time manipulation, and the intricate web of cause and effect.
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Herbert West, a medical student obsessed with overcoming death. Using a special serum, West attempts to reanimate corpses, but his experiments often result in gruesome failures. The narrative follows West and his unnamed assistant as they face increasingly horrifying consequences of their experiments, including encounters with reanimated creatures. The story explores themes of hubris, the boundary between life and death, and the potential horrors of scientific overreach.
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During a future war where soldiers are subjected to intense psychological pressure. The protagonist, a soldier named Willibald, is experiencing extreme anxiety and fear. He is stationed in a bunker, constantly bombarded by the enemy's psychological warfare tactics, which include loudspeakers blaring demoralizing messages and propaganda designed to break the soldiers' spirit.Willibald is on the verge of a mental breakdown, haunted by the incessant noise and the looming threat of death. He feels trapped and helpless, unable to escape the relentless psychological assault. The story delves into his internal struggle, highlighting the effects of psychological warfare on a soldier's mind.In a desperate attempt to find solace, Willibald recalls a conversation with a fellow soldier who had mentioned a mental defense mechanism a way to build an impenetrable mental fortress to shut out the enemy's propaganda. Inspired by this idea, Willibald tries to create his own mental defense mech, a fortress of thoughts and memories that can protect him from the psychological onslaught.As he constructs this mental fortress, Willibald focuses on positive memories and strong, resilient thoughts. He envisions a protective barrier around his mind, blocking out the enemy's messages and finding inner strength. Gradually, he feels the effects of the psychological warfare lessen, gaining a sense of control and resilience.
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A traveler on a train recounts a vivid and disturbing dream to his fellow passengers. In the dream, he inhabits the life of another man, a prominent politician in a futuristic society. This man experiences immense political pressure and personal turmoil, torn between his duties and a deep desire for peace.In this imagined world, the protagonist falls in love with a beautiful woman, escaping with her to a secluded paradise. Their idyllic life is shattered when war breaks out. Despite his attempts to evade conflict, the protagonist is drawn back into the chaos of political power struggles.The dream escalates into a catastrophic war, characterized by advanced weaponry and massive destruction, depicting a vivid Armageddon. The protagonist struggles with guilt and despair as he witnesses the collapse of civilization and the end of the world.Ultimately, the dream is a reflection on the futility of war and the devastating impact of unchecked political ambition. The story ends with the traveler pondering the dream's significance, questioning the thin line between reality and imagination.
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Professor Gregg, an anthropologist who becomes obsessed with a strange and ancient artifact known as the Black Seal. Gregg discovers that the seal is connected to a hidden race of beings who once inhabited Britain. His obsession leads him into dangerous territories as he uncovers the horrifying truths about these ancient beings and their influence on humanity. The story is a classic example of Machen's skill in blending folklore, the supernatural, and psychological horror.
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In this tale, Conan encounters a mysterious and beautiful woman named Atali in the icy northern lands. As they travel together, Conan battles her brothers, who are supernatural frost giants. Ultimately, Atali is revealed to be a supernatural being herself, sent to lure men to their deaths. The story explores themes of deception, survival, and the allure of the unknown.
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on a visit to Munich before leaving for Transylvania. It is Walpurgis Night, and despite the hotelier's warning not to return late, the young man later leaves his carriage and wanders toward the direction of an abandoned "unholy" village. As the carriage departs with the frightened and superstitious driver, a tall and thin stranger scares the horses at the crest of a hill.After a few hours, as he reaches a desolate valley, it begins to snow; as a dark storm gathers intensity, the Englishman takes shelter in a grove of cypress and yew trees. The Englishman's location is soon illuminated by moonlight to be a cemetery, and he finds himself before a marble tomb with a large iron stake driven through the roof, the inscription reads: "Countess Dolingen of Gratz / in Styria / sought and found death / 1801". The Englishman is disturbed to be in such a place on such a night, and as the storm breaks anew, he is forced by pelting hail to shelter in the tomb's doorway. As he does so, the bronze door of the tomb opens under his weight and a flash of forked lightning shows the interior, revealing a "beautiful woman with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on a bier". The force of the following thunder peal throws the Englishman from the doorway (experienced as "being grasped as by the hand of a giant") as another lightning bolt strikes the iron spike, destroying the tomb and the now screaming woman inside.The Englishman's troubles are not quite over. As he painfully regains his senses from the ordeal, he is repulsed by a feeling of loathing, which he connects to a warm feeling in his chest and licking at his throat. The Englishman summons the courage to peek through his eyelashes and discovers a gigantic wolf with flaming eyes is attending him.Military horsemen are the next to wake the semi-conscious man, chasing the wolf away with torches and guns. Some horsemen return to the main party and the Englishman after the chase, reporting that they had not found 'him' and that the Englishman's animal is "a wolf—and yet not a wolf". They also note that blood is on the ruined tomb, yet the Englishman's neck is unblooded. "See comrades, the wolf has been lying on him and keeping his blood warm". Later, the Englishman finds his neck pained when a horseman comments.When the Englishman is taken back to his hotel by the men, he is informed that it is none other than his expectant host Count Dracula who has alerted the Maître d'hôtel of "dangers from snow and wolves and night" in a telegram during the time the Englishman was away.
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The narrator finds herself in a bizarre and terrifying situation. As she explores a decaying cathedral, she becomes trapped atop a high tower. A massive clock's minute hand begins to descend toward her, threatening to slice through her. The story combines dark humor with suspense as the narrator faces an absurd yet life-threatening predicament, highlighting Poe's talent for blending horror and irony.
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A science fiction short story about an elderly woman named Mrs. Bellows who embarks on a journey to the stars with the hope of reaching Heaven. She joins a group led by a charismatic but deceitful space tour guide who promises spiritual transcendence. As they travel, Mrs. Bellows realizes the guide's intentions are fraudulent, and the journey is a scam. Despite the betrayal, she finds a sense of peace and renewal in the vastness of space, discovering strength and self-realization.
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"In the Court of the Dragon" by Robert W. Chambers is a short story from his collection The King in Yellow. It follows a narrator who becomes haunted by a sinister organist after attending a church service. As paranoia grips him, the line between reality and madness blurs, creating a chilling atmosphere. The story explores themes of fear, obsession, and the influence of an otherworldly play called "The King in Yellow," which drives its readers insane. The narrative is known for its eerie mood and psychological horror.
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A group of space explorers who investigate a planet which appears deserted. However, they are shot down and crash land on the planet. While repairing their ship, a team of explorers sets to survey the surrounding area, where they discover the ruins of an ancient city. Upon further investigation, it is revealed that the gun which shot them down is in the city, and is programmed to shoot anything down which enters the airspace above the city.
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Cool Air by H.P. Lovecraft is a chilling tale about a man who moves into a New York City apartment building and becomes intrigued by his mysterious upstairs neighbor, Dr. Muñoz. The doctor lives in a room kept unnaturally cold and reveals that he relies on the cold to survive due to a peculiar medical condition. As the cooling system fails, the true nature of Dr. Muñoz's existence is terrifyingly revealed, culminating in a shocking discovery that challenges the boundaries of life and death. The story explores themes of mortality, science, and the unknown.
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The chilling tale of The Vampyre by John William Polidori, one of the earliest works of vampire fiction. This gripping audiobook takes you through the dark and mysterious world of Lord Ruthven, a character that inspired the modern vampire genre. Perfect for fans of gothic literature and classic horror, this narration brings Polidori's eerie and suspenseful story to life.Join us as we explore the origins of the vampire myth in literature, where betrayal, intrigue, and supernatural elements intertwine. Whether you're a gothic horror enthusiast or new to classic horror stories, this audiobook offers an enthralling journey into the shadows of the 19th century.Remember to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell for more timeless classics and spine-tingling tales!#Audiobook #GothicHorror #ClassicLiterature #VampireFiction #HorrorStories #AudiobookCommunity
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Robert E. Howard with The Hyborian Age audiobook! Explore the rich history and lore of Conan the Barbarian's universe, brought to life through vivid storytelling and captivating narration. Perfect for fans of fantasy and adventure. Subscribe for more classic tales and join us on this legendary journey!#Audiobook #RobertEHoward #ConanTheBarbarian #Fantasy #conan
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Short story. A man's behavior takes a strange turn when he begins to take a new prescription. His sister can't decide if this is for the better or for the worse.
The Novel of the White Powder by Arthur Machen in audiobook format. Explore this classic horror tale through expert narration, perfect for fans of supernatural mysteries and Victorian gothic stories. Learn about the themes, characters, and chilling atmosphere that make Machen's work a timeless masterpiece. Ideal for audiobook lovers and horror enthusiasts seeking a captivating listening experience. Subscribe for more audiobook insights and discover why this haunting tale continues to mesmerize audiences.
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Jerome K. Jerome The Man of Science
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Count Magnus by M.R. James
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The Inmost Light by Arthur Machen
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United States Constitution
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U.S. Bill of Rights by James Madison
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Rocket Summer by Ray Bradbury
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Defense Mech by Ray Bradbury
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Blood Toil Tears and Sweat Winston Churchill
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Change by Theodore Dreiser
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The Haunted Mind by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The House Divided
Abraham Lincoln
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A Blackjack Bargainer by O. Henry
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The Voice of the City by O. Henry
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The Yarkand Mannerby H.H. Munro (SAKI)
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The Girl Who Got Rattled by Stewart Edward White
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State of the Union Address, 1944 Franklin D. Roosevelt
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Abraham Lincoln Fourth State of the Union Address
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Transformation by Mary Shelley
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A Ghost by Guy de Maupassant
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Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation
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A Wireless Message by Ambrose Bierce
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A Hyperborean Brew by Jack London
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My Friend the Murderer by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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The Mortal Immortal by Mary Shelley
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In this short story first published by Ray Bradbury in the 1951 "Illustrated Man" collection, the game of "Invasion" has been sweeping the country. Children all across the nation pretend to have been enlisted by alien invaders, their job to overthrow their parents, and help their newfound friends take over the Earth
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The $25,000 Jaw by Richard Connell
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The story is set in the distant future where Earth and Mars are on the verge of war. The last spaceship to leave Mars[1] headed for Earth is stopped and searched by Martian soldiers, who are looking for three saboteurs who destroyed a Martian city.[2] They are not found, and the ship continues towards Earth. On board the space ship, a business man by the name of Thacher meets a young woman and two men, who tell that they are the people sought by the Martians, and proceed to tell Thacher the story of how they did not destroy the Martian city, but used a device to reduce the entire city to fit in a tiny globe, which they smuggled on board the ship. The city is to be used as a bargaining chip against Mars in the upcoming war. Thacher reveals that he is a Martian secret agent, and several of the passengers on board are Martian police.
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in the aftermath of an extensive nuclear war between the Soviet Union (sometimes referred to as Russia) and the United Nations. Early Soviet victories forced the North American government and production to flee to a Moon base, leaving the majority of their troops behind. To counter the almost complete Soviet victory, U.N. technicians develop robots, nicknamed "claws" —the basic models are "a churning sphere of blades and metal" that ambush their unsuspecting victims "spinning, creeping, shaking themselves up suddenly from the gray ash and darting toward… [any warm body]." U.N. forces are protected from the claws by a special radiation-emitting wrist tab. Within six years, the sophisticated and independent claws have destroyed the Soviet forces, repairing and redesigning themselves in underground automated factories run without any human oversight.
The U.N. forces receive a message from the Soviets asking for a policy-level officer to go to them for a gravely urgent conference. The U.N. victory was costlier than they had expected. Major Joseph Hendricks is sent to negotiate with the Soviets. En route to the rendezvous, he meets a small boy named David who asks to accompany Hendricks. When they near the Soviet bunker, soldiers immediately kill the boy, revealing him to be an android. The claws' development program has evolved to develop sophisticated robots, indistinguishable from humans, designed to infiltrate and kill. The three Soviets met by Major Hendricks—soldiers Klaus, Rudi, and a young woman named Tasso—reveal that the entire Soviet army and command structure collapsed under the onslaught of the new robots - they are all that are left in the command center.
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3 HG Wells stories 1 Hour Free Audiobook
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A Dream of Armageddon by H.G. Wells
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"Jest w'en we guess we've covered the trail
So's no one can't foller, w'y then we fail
W'en we feel safe hid. Nemesis, the cuss,
Waltzes up with nary a warnin' nor fuss.
Grins quiet like, and says, 'How d'y do,
So glad we've met, I'm a-lookin' fer you'"
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Ray Douglas Bradbury (1920-2012) was a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, and poet. Bradbury's short story "Pendulum", written with Henry Hasse, was published in 1941 in the pulp magazine Super Science Stories. The protagonist, Layeville, had built a time machine and invited the world’s top scientists to attend its first performance. Unfortunately, a massive explosion killed them all, and for his crime, Layeville was imprisoned in a glass pendulum for what seemed an eternity. The people called him The Prisoner of Time. But everything comes to an end....
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Cynthia is a story published in Huxley's collection titled Limbo, published in 1920. "So she was absolutely, frozenly virginal; but she was made of a sort of burning ice, if you understand me. She was virginally passionate just the combination you’d expect to find in a goddess."
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The taxidermist is talking with an unnamed acquaintance about the price of birds when he tells the story of a bird auction on an East India Company ship en route from India to London. Sir Mohini Padishah, a wealthy native Indian, is aboard the vessel. An unnamed caretaker, was on deck with five ostriches when one of the birds swallowed the diamond from Padishah’s turban. The bird becomes mixed with the others during the resulting confusion. Word of the incident sweeps the vessel as Padishah demands the return of the diamond. He swore he would retrieve the diamond, but would not buy the birds. He demands his rights as a British Subject and plans to appeal to the British House of Lords.The passengers debate the legalities of the situation. As no barrister is aboard, much of the discussions are speculation. Padishah demands the ostriches from the caretaker who refuses because he does not own the birds. Following a stopover in Aden, Padishah offers to buy all five birds. The caretaker refuses, but tells Padishah that another passenger, Potter, made a similar offer. While in Aden, Potter wired the birds owners in London, made the offer and his answer would be waiting in Suez. He intends to kill the birds to find the diamond. Padisha raged over this and the taxidermist cursed himself for not having thought of it.The birds’ owner accepted Potter’s offer and Padishah wept over the sale. Potter offered to sell the birds to Padishah for more than twice the amount he paid. When Padishah balked, Potter sells the birds at auction on the ship. Interest in the auction flared when a Jewish diamond merchant assessed the diamond at three to four thousand British Pounds. After the first bird sold was slaughtered upon the deck, Potter forbid their slaughter until landfall in London. The price for each subsequent bird grew netting Potter more than one thousand Pounds. Padishah provided each new owner with his address and begged the men to mail the diamond once they found it. They rebuffed him and went their own ways.A week later, the taxidermist sees Padishah and Potter together in London. Padishah was an eminent Hindu, the diamond was indeed real, but the taxidermist doubts the bird swallowed the diamond.
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Can Socialists Be Happy? by George Orwell
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A Case of Premeditation is one of Freeman's inverted detective stories, also referred to as a "locked room mystery" featuring his favorite medical-forensic investigator, Dr. Thorndyke. It was first published in McClure's Magazine, August, 1910.
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The story is told through a blood-stained notebook discovered on the edge of a farm in Withyham. The notebook is written by a Mr. Joyce-Armstrong, and the first two and last pages are missing; the notebook is thus dubbed the "Joyce-Armstrong Fragment".
Joyce-Armstrong, a brave aviator, had been curious over the deaths of certain pilots who tried to break the current height record of 30,000 feet. Recent casualties involve some strange deaths – one, Hay Connor, died after landing while he was still in his plane, while another, Myrtle, was discovered with his head missing. Joyce-Armstrong speculates that the answer to these deaths may be the result of what he calls "air-jungles":
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Filmer is a short story by H. G. Wells. Herbert George "H. G." Wells (21 September 1866 - 13 August 1946) was an English writer, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing textbooks and rules for war games. Wells is sometimes called "The Father of Science Fiction," as are Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. His most notable science fiction works include The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau.
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Written cooperatively by Forrest Ackerman and Ray Bradbury, this story was first published in Ray Bradbury's Futuria Fantasia, Summer 1939 where it was credited only as “by Forrest J. Ackerman”
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Eight years ago a nuclear war began between the United States and the Soviet Union. American survivors evacuated to gigantic bunkers miles under ground. Sophisticated, radioactivity-immune robots called "leadys" continue fighting the war on the devastated surface that is too dangerous for humans. The Soviets have similarly evacuated underground, and each side builds powerful weapons and vehicles for the remote-controlled war they only see from film that the robots deliver.
The security department asks Taylor, an American war planner, to observe the interrogation of a leady regarding the progress of the war. Although the robot reports that lethal radioactivity and sophisticated new Soviet weapons continue to make the surface dangerous for humans, the observers find that the leady is not radioactive. Taylor learns that this is the second such robot the security department has found; it assigns him to an expedition, wearing lead suits, to investigate the truth about surface conditions.
Taylor's group surprises the leadys at the surface and demands to see the outside. Although the robots attempt to delay the humans as long as possible, the group discovers outside the bunker an undamaged valley with forests, animals, and a farm. The leadys reveal that the war ended as soon as the humans evacuated because the robots could not see a rational purpose for it. Analyzing history, they found that groups of humans warred with each other until they matured to overcome conflict. Humanity is almost ready for a single culture, the current worldwide division into American and Soviet sides being the final step. The leadys create counterfeit photographs of the devastated planet to fool humans, while destroying weapons they received and rebuilding the world for their creators' return.
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The first great rocket flight into space, bearing intrepid pioneers to the Moon. The world's ecstasy flared into red mob-hate when President Stanley canceled the flight. How did he get that way?Published in Planet Stories, Spring 1947
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A Hanging (1931) is a short essay written by George Orwell, first published in August 1931 in the British literary magazine The Adelphi. Set in Burma, where Orwell (under his real name of Eric Arthur Blair) had served in the British Imperial Police from 1922 to 1927, it describes the execution of a criminal.
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"Tony and the Beetles" is a science fiction short story by American writer Philip K. Dick, first published in Orbit Science Fiction, No.2, in 1953.
The story is told from the point of view of a young boy, Tony, living on an alien world that humans have conquered. The native species are beetle like creatures called the Pas-udenti, some of whom Tony has befriended. As news reaches the planet that the war has turned against the humans, Tony attempts to carry on his daily life, to disastrous effect.
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The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost by H.G. Wells
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The Morgue Ship had gleaned information from space that would end the three hundred year war, knowledge that would defeat the aggressor Martians—if Brandon could carry it to Earth.
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The Bookshop is a story published in Huxley's collection titled Limbo, published in 1920.
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A operation during which Dr Haddon administers an anesthetic. While under, the patient journeys into space and discovers that the universe is merely a speck of light reflected on a ring, worn on God's hand. A thought-provoking exploration of the afterlife, the universe, and the unconscious mind
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Nibley stood in the changing shadows and sounds of Marsport, watching the great supply ship TERRA being entered and left by a number of officials and mechanics. Something had happened. Something was wrong. There were a lot of hard faces and not much talk. There was a bit of swearing and everybody looked up at the night sky of Mars, waiting.
But nobody came to Nibley for his opinion or his help. He stood there, a very old man, with a slack-gummed face and eyes like the little bubbly stalks of crayfish looking up at you from a clear creek. He stood there fully neglected. He stood there and talked to himself.
"They don't want me, or need me," he said. "Machines are better, nowadays. Why should they want an old man like me with a taste for Martian liquor? They shouldn't! A machine isn't old and foolish, and doesn't get drunk!"
Way out over the dead sea bottoms, Nibley sensed something moving. Part of himself was suddenly awake and sensitive. His small sharp eyes moved in his withered face. Something inside of his small skull reacted and he shivered. He knew. He knew that what these men were watching and waiting for would never come.
Nibley edged up to one of the astrogators from the TERRA. He touched him on the shoulder. "Say," he said. "I'm busy," said the astrogator. "I know," said Nibley, "but if you're waiting for that small repair rocket to come through with the extra auxiliary asteroid computator on it, you're wasting your time."
"Like hell," said the astrogator, glaring at the old man. "That repair rocket's got to come through, and quick; we need it. It'll get here."
"No, it won't," said Nibley, sadly, and shook his head and closed his eyes. "It just crashed, a second ago, out on the dead sea bottom. I—felt—it crash. I sensed it going down. It'll never come through."
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Along the edge of the field was a grove of ancient trees. Lifeless trees, withered and dead, their thin, blackened stalks rising up leaflessly. Broken sticks stuck in the hard ground. Row after row of dead trees, some bent and leaning, torn loose from the rocky soil by the unending wind.
Lori crossed the field to the trees, her lungs laboring painfully. The wind surged against her without respite, whipping the foul-smelling mists into her nostrils and face. Her smooth skin was damp and shiny with the mist. She coughed and hurried on, stepping over the rocks and clods of earth, trembling with fear and anticipation.
She circled around the grove of trees, almost to the edge of the ridge. Carefully, she stepped among the sliding heaps of rocks. Then—
She stopped, rigid. Her chest rose and fell with the effort of breathing. "I came," she gasped.
For a long time she gazed at the withered old apple tree. She could not take her eyes from it. The sight of the ancient tree fascinated and repelled her. It was the only one alive, the only tree of all the grove still living. All the others were dead, dried-up. They had lost the struggle. But this tree still clung to life.
The tree was hard and barren. Only a few dark leaves hung from it—and some withered apples, dried and seasoned by wind and mists. They had stayed there, on the branches, forgotten and abandoned. The ground around the tree was cracked and bleak. Stones and decayed heaps of old leaves in ragged clumps.
"I came," Lori said again. She took the leaf from her pocket and held it cautiously out. "This tapped at the window. I knew when I heard it." She smiled mischievously, her red lips curling. "It tapped and tapped, trying to get in. I ignored it. It was so—so impetuous. It annoyed me."
The tree swayed ominously. Its gnarled branches rubbed together. Something in the sound made Lori pull away. Terror rushed through her. She hurried back along the ridge, scrambling frantically out of reach.
"Don't," she whispered. "Please."
The wind ceased. The tree became silent. For a long time Lori watched it apprehensively.
Night was coming. The sky was darkening rapidly. A burst of frigid wind struck her, half turning her around. She shuddered, bracing herself against it, pulling her long coat around her. Far below, the floor of the valley was disappearing into shadow, into the vast cloud of night.
In the darkening mists the tree was stern and menacing, more ominous than usual. A few leaves blew from it, drifting and swirling with the wind. A leaf blew past her and she tried to catch it. The leaf escaped, dancing back toward the tree. Lori followed a little way and then stopped, gasping and laughing.
"No," she said firmly, her hands on her hips. "I won't."
There was silence. Suddenly the heaps of decayed leaves blew up in a furious circle around the tree. They quieted down, settling back.
"No," Lori said. "I'm not afraid of you. You can't hurt me." But her heart was hammering with fear. She moved back farther away.
The tree remained silent. Its wiry branches were motionless.
Lori regained her courage. "This is the last time I can come," she said. "Steve says I can't come any more. He doesn't like it."
She waited, but the tree did not respond.
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From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.
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The Hammerpond Park Burglary by H.G. Wells is a seminal work of fiction that examines the human relationship between criminality and morality. Through its critique of the criminal justice system, Wells challenges the reader to consider how society should respond to those who break the law. The narrative follows a group of criminals as they attempt to burglarize a wealthy estate, while also exploring themes of guilt, redemption, and personal responsibility.
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Halloway stared down at Earth, and his brain
tore loose and screamed, Man, man, how'd you
get in a mess like this, in a rocket a
million miles past the moon, shooting for
Mars and danger and terror and maybe death.
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Peterson, a crew member of a spaceship loading up with food animals on Mars, buys an enormous pig-like creature known as a "wub" from a native just before departure. Franco, his captain, is worried about the extra weight but seems more concerned about its taste, as his ship is short of food. However, after takeoff, the crew realizes that the wub is a very intelligent creature, capable of telepathy and maybe even mind control. Peterson and the wub spend time discussing mythological figures and the travels of Odysseus. Captain Franco, paranoid after an earlier confrontation with the Wub which left him temporarily paralyzed, bursts in and insists on killing and eating the wub. The crew becomes very much opposed to killing the sensitive creature after it makes a plea for understanding, but Franco still makes a meal out of him. At the dinner table, Captain Franco apologises for the "interruption" and resumes the earlier conversation between Peterson and the Wub - which now has apparently taken over the Captain's body.
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Conger, the protagonist, is given a chance to get out of jail if he agrees to kill a man that has died 200 years ago. Conger is given a skull from which he can identify the man, and is sent back in time in a capsule. People stare at Conger as he is dressed up strangely and has a strange accent. As Conger prepares for the man's arrival, he discovers that the skull is his own, and he is the man who will change the world, as people around town begin to take interest in the time traveller. Due to the use of time travel, Conger realizes that even though he will die, another version of himself will reappear in a few months, as if resurrected.
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The story is about a math student named Malcolm Malcolmson, who is seeking a quiet place to work on his studies. Luckily, after searching for a time, he discovers a long-abandoned home of a judge in the town of Benchurch and takes up residence for a time.The house is a strange oneit was an old rambling, heavy-built house of the Jacobean style, with heavy gables and windows, unusually small, and set higher than was customary in such houses, and was surrounded with a high brick wall massively built.However, the student is young and skeptical, so pays no mind to the superstitious warnings; and yet slowly, over the course of the days that he has stayed in the haunted abode, he realizes that the house is infested with rats, which both unsettles and alarms him, as they make quite a racket while he attempts to work on his mathematical quandaries.Furthermore, he is warned by various characters that the Judge’s house is a haunted one, as the judge was a twisted man who sent many criminals to death by hanging with complete impunity. One day, after traveling to the local inn “The Good Traveler,” Malcolmson meets with local doctor and scholar Dr. Thornhill who tells him about the Judge’s evil deeds. So twisted was this judge, Malcolmson is told, that he had the rope used to hang many of the criminals hung from the warning bell in his home before his death.
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Kramer leaned back. "You can see the situation. How can we deal with a factor like this? The perfect variable." "Perfect? Prediction should still be possible. A living thing still acts from necessity, the same as inanimate material. But the cause-effect chain is more subtle; there are more factors to be considered. The difference is quantitative, I think. The reaction of the living organism parallels natural causation, but with greater complexity." Gross and Kramer looked up at the board plates, suspended on the wall, still dripping, the images hardening into place. Kramer traced a line with his pencil. "See that? It's a pseudopodium. They're alive, and so far, a weapon we can't beat. No mechanical system can compete with that, simple or intricate. We'll have to scrap the Johnson Control and find something else." "Meanwhile the war continues as it is. Stalemate. Checkmate. They can't get to us, and we can't get through their living minefield." Kramer nodded. "It's a perfect defense, for them. But there still might be one answer." "What's that?" "Wait a minute." Kramer turned to his rocket expert, sitting with the charts and files. "The heavy cruiser that returned this week. It didn't actually touch, did it? It came close but there was no contact." "Correct." The expert nodded. "The mine was twenty miles off. The cruiser was in space-drive, moving directly toward Proxima, line-straight, using the Johnson Control, of course. It had deflected a quarter of an hour earlier for reasons unknown. Later it resumed its course. That was when they got it." "It shifted," Kramer said. "But not enough. The mine was coming along after it, trailing it. It's the same old story, but I wonder about the contact."
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“WHAT would you do if you knew that this was the last night of the world?” “What would I do? You mean seriously?” “Yes, seriously.” “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought.” He poured some coffee. In the background the two girls were playing blocks on the parlor rug in the light of the green hurricane lamps. There was an easy, clean aroma of the brewed coffee in the evening air. “Well, better start thinking about it,” he said. “You don’t mean it!” He nodded. “A war?” He shook his head. “Not the hydrogen or atom bomb?” “No.” “Or germ warfare?” “None of those at all,” he said, stirring his coffee slowly. “But just, let’s say, the closing of a book.”
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This story by Ernest Hemingway is about two “hit men” (killers who are paid to murder someone) who come to a small town restaurant to shoot a man as a favor to a friend. Some critics go as far as to say that this is one of best short stories of all time. This is all the more impressive given that Hemingway said that he wrote the story in just one morning in a hotel room in Madrid, Spain. The Killers Ernest Hemingway Audiobook
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It is three thousand light years to the Vatican. Once, I believed that space could have no power over faith, just as I believed that the heavens declared the glory of God’s handiwork. Now I have seen that handiwork, and my faith is sorely troubled. I stare at the crucifix that hangs on the cabin wall above the Mark VI Computer, and for the first time in my life I wonder if it is no more than an empty symbol. I have told no one yet, but the truth cannot be concealed. The facts are there for all to read, recorded on the countless miles of magnetic tape and the thousands of photographs we are carrying back to Earth. Other scientists can interpret them as easily as I can, and I am not one who would condone that tampering with the truth which often gave my order a bad name in the olden days.
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The sign on the wall seemed to quaver under a film of sliding warm water. Eckels felt his eyelids blink over his stare, and the sign burned in this momentary darkness: TIME SAFARI, INC. SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST. YOU NAME THE ANIMAL. WE TAKE YOU THERE. YOU SHOOT IT. Warm phlegm gathered in Eckels’ throat; he swallowed and pushed it down. The muscles around his mouth formed a smile as he put his hand slowly out upon the air, and in that hand waved a check for ten thousand dollars to the man behind the desk. “Does this safari guarantee I come back alive?”
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Multivac has problems. It does not respond to commands, and isn’t following its built-in program to self-diagnose the cause. As the global economy depends on Mulitvac, this could result in panic across the world. Teams of technicians have been trying to identify what is wrong for three days. Finally, a scientist discovers the “key item” needed to fix the problem. It is a simple thing that we are all taught to use as children. Jack Weaver came out of the vitals of Multivac looking utterly worn and disgusted. From the stool, where the other maintained his own stolid watch, Todd Nemerson said, “Nothing?” “Nothing,” said Weaver. “Nothing, nothing, nothing. No one can find anything wrong with it.” “Except that it won’t work, you mean.” “You’re no help sitting there!” “I’m thinking.” “Thinking!” Weaver showed a canine at one side of his mouth. Nemerson stirred impatiently on his stool. “Why not? There are six teams of computer technologist roaming around in the corridors of Mulitvac. They haven’t come up with anything in three days. Can’t you spare one person to think?” “It’s not a matter of thinking. We’ve got to look. Somewhere a relay is stuck.” “It’s not that simple, Jack!” “Who says it’s simple? You know how many million relays we have there?” “That doesn’t matter. If it were just a relay, Multivac would have alternate circuits, devices for locating the flaw, and facilities to repair or replace the ailing part. The trouble is, Mulitvac won’t only not answer the original question, it won’t tell us what’s wrong with it… And meanwhile, there’ll be panic in every city if we don’t do something. The world’s economy depends on Mulitvac, and everyone knows that.” “I know it, too. But what’s there to do?” “I told you, think. There must be something we’re missing completely. Look, Jack, there isn’t a computer bigwig in a hundred years who hasn’t devoted himself to making Mulitvac more complicated. It can do so much now — it can even talk and listen. It’s practically as complex as the human brain. We can’t understand the human brain, so why should we understand Mulitvac?” “Aw, come on. Next you’ll be saying Multivac is human.”
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The celebration had a long way to go and even in the silent depths of Multivac’s underground chambers, it hung in the air.
If nothing else, there was the mere fact of isolation and silence. For the first time in a decade, technicians were not scurrying about the vitals of the giant computer, the soft lights did not wink out their erratic patterns, the flow of information in and out had halted.
It would not be halted long, of course, for the needs of peace would be pressing. Yet now, for a day, perhaps for a week, even Multivac might celebrate the great time, and rest.
Lamar Swift took off the military cap he was wearing and looked down the long and empty main corridor of the enormous computer. He sat down rather wearily in one of the technician’s swing-stools, and his uniform, in which he had never been comfortable, took on a heavy and wrinkled appearance.
He said, “I’ll miss it all after a grisly fashion. It’s hard to remember when we weren’t at war with Deneb, and it seems against nature now to be at peace and to look at the stars without anxiety.”
The two men with the Executive Director of the Solar Federation were both younger than Swift. Neither was as gray. Neither looked quite as tired.
John Henderson, thin-lipped and finding it hard to control the relief he felt in the midst of triumph, said, “They’re destroyed! They’re destroyed! It’s what I keep saying to myself over and over and I still can’t believe it. We all talked so much, over so many years, about the menace hanging over Earth and all its worlds, over every human being, and all the time it was true, every word of it. And now we’re alive and it’s the Denebians who are shattered and destroyed. They’ll be no menace now, ever again.”
“Thanks to Multivac,” said Swift, with a quiet glance at the imperturbable Jablonsky, who through all the war had been Chief Interpreter of science’s oracle. “Right, Max?”
Jablonsky shrugged. Automatically, he reached for a cigarette and decided against it. He alone, of all the thousands who had lived in the tunnels within Multivac, had been allowed to smoke, but toward the end he had made definite efforts to avoid making use of the privilege.
He said, “Well, that’s what they say.” His broad thumb moved in the direction of his right shoulder, aiming upward.
“Jealous, Max?”
“Because they’re shouting for Multivac? Because Multivac is the big hero of mankind in this war?” Jablonsky’s craggy face took on an air of suitable contempt. “What’s that to me? Let Multivac be the machine that won the war, if it pleases them.”
Henderson looked at the other two out of the corners of his eyes. In this short interlude that the three had instinctively sought out in the one peaceful corner of a metropolis gone mad; in this entr’acte between the dangers of war and the difficulties of peace; when, for one moment, they might all find surcease; he was conscious only of his weight of guilt.
Suddenly, it was as though that weight were too great to be borne longer. It had to be thrown off, along with the war; now! Henderson said, “Multivac had nothing to do with victory. It’s just a machine.”
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Of all the pupils at the knight school Gawaine le Coeur-Hardy was among the least promising. ‘He was tall and sturdy, but his instructors soon discovered that he lacked spirit. He would hide in the woods when the jousting class was called, although his companions and members of the faculty sought to appeal to his better nature by shouting to him to come out and break his neck like a man. Even when they told him that the lances were padded, the horses no more than ponies, and the field unusually soft for late autumn, Gawaine refused to grow enthusiastic. The Headmaster and Assistant Professor of Pleasaunce were discussing the case one spring afternoon, and the Assistant Professor could see no remedy but expulsion.
“No,” said the Headmaster, as he looked out at the purple hills which ringed the school, “I think I’ll train him to slay dragons.”
“He might be killed,” objected the Assistant Professor.
“So he might,” replied the Headmaster, brightly; but he added, more soberly, “we must consider the greater good. We are responsible for the formation of this lad’s character.”
“Are the dragons particularly bad this year?” interrupted the Assistant Professor. This was characteristic. He always seemed restive when the head of the school began to talk ethics and the ideals of the institution.
“I’ve never known them worse,” replied the Headmaster. “Up in the hills to the south last week they killed a number of peasants, two cows, and a prize pig. And if this dry spell holds there’s no telling when they may start a forest fire simply by breathing around indiscriminately.”
“Would any refund on the tuition fee be necessary in case of an accident to young Coeur-Hardy?”
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Alan Austen, as nervous as a kitten, went up certain dark and creaky stairs in the neighborhood of Pell Street, and peered about for a long time on the dim landing before he found the name he wanted written obscurely on one of the doors.
He pushed open this door, as he had been told to do, and found himself in a tiny room, which contained no furniture but a plain kitchen table, a rocking-chair, and an ordinary chair. On one of the dirty buff-coloured walls were a couple of shelves, containing in all perhaps a dozen bottles and jars. An old man sat in the rocking-chair, reading a newspaper. Alan, without a word, handed him the card he had been given.
“Sit down, Mr. Austen,” said the old man very politely.
“I am glad to make your acquaintance.”
“Is it true,” asked Alan, “that you have a certain mixture that has-er-quite extraordinary effects?”
“My dear sir,” replied the old man, “my stock in trade is not very large-I don’t deal in laxatives and teething mixtures-but such as it is, it is varied. I think nothing I sell has effects which could be precisely described as ordinary.”
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As his second term came to a close four years later, Washington prepared a revision of the original letter with the help of Hamilton to write a new farewell address to announce his intention to decline a third term in office. He reflects on the emerging issues of the American political landscape in 1796, expresses his support for the government eight years after the adoption of the Constitution, defends his administration's record and gives valedictory advice to the American people.
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Hector Hugh Munro (18 December 1870 – 14 November 1916), better known by the pen name Saki and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirize Edwardian society and culture. He is considered by English teachers and scholars as a master of the short story, and often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. Influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, he himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noël Coward and P. G. Wodehouse.
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The story is about the birth of a baby boy in a 19th-century gold prospecting camp. The boy's mother, Cherokee Sal, dies in childbirth, so the men of Roaring Camp must raise it themselves. Believing the child to be a good luck charm, the miners christen the boy Thomas Luck. Afterwards, they decide to refine their behavior and refrain from gambling and fighting. Roaring Camp was a real place. It was a goldmining settlement on the Mokelumne River in Amador County, California. It was home to forty-niners seeking gold in and around the river.
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The Antique Ring is a fanciful story-within-a-story, a legend about the ring composed by an aspiring author/lawyer as a prize for his fiancé. It was published in Hawthorne's collection, The Dolliver Romance and Other Pieces (1876).
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lost during a walk along the coast of Wales and sought shelter in what looked like a ruined tower, thanks to the hospitality of its housekeeper. He is surprised at the comfortable furnishings within the tower, and is intrigued by a painting of a lovely young woman hung above the fireplace, entitled The Invisible Girl.
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The Story of George Washington was published in Baldwin's book for young Americans, Four Great Americans: Washington, Franklin, Webster, Lincoln (1897).
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The Story of Abraham Lincoln by James Baldwin The Story of Abraham Lincoln was published in Baldwin's book for young Americans, Four Great Americans: Washington, Franklin, Webster, Lincoln (1897). As a young boy, Lincoln wrote this in his schoolbook: "Abraham Lincoln, his hand and pen, he will be good, but God knows when."
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An Angel in Disguise (1851) was featured in Arthur's collection, After a Shadow and Other Stories.
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Mrs. Bargrave, who is visited by Mrs. Veal, an old friend and former neighbour who says that she would like to catch up before departing for a journey. Mrs. Bargrave's kiss of greeting is declined by Mrs. Veal who protests that she is not very well. The pair discuss books on death and friendship before Mrs. Veal asks for her friend to write a letter to her brother concerning a number of gifts she would like him to make. She also discloses that her locked cabinet contains a purse filled with gold. Mrs. Bargrave admires the distinctive dress worn by Mrs. Veal. Mrs. Bargrave steps out to call her daughter, and when she returns she finds that Mrs. Veal has already left the house and is standing in the street ready to leave. Mrs. Veal says that she must be going and walks away, watched by Mrs. Bargrave until she is out of sight. Mrs. Bargrave subsequently looks for Mrs. Veal, but is told by one of her friend's relatives that she had died the day before the visit.
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a government agent and his fiancée who are members of a government agency tasked with tracking down and sterilizing or eliminating mutants – individuals with physical abnormalities and superhuman powers (such as the mind reading or telekinesis) that make them a threat to normal humans. The eponymous "Golden Man" is a beautiful yet feral young man named Cris with gold-colored skin and the proportions of a greek god. He possesses no language but has the ability to see into the future (specifically, the ability to see all possible outcomes from any single action, described in the story as similar to a chess player with the ability to see all possible moves 5 steps ahead). The agency manages to capture Cris after surrounding him so completely that his precognition tells him there's no way out, at which point he simply surrenders himself. The agency takes him back to their fortified laboratory to study his abilities, and then execute him. Unknown to the agency, Cris's physical perfection and noble-looking countenance influences the fiancée into freeing him. He then impregnates her and makes his escape as she provides a distraction to aid him.
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The story describes a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual now lives in isolation below ground in a standard room, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Travel is permitted, but is unpopular and rarely necessary. Communication is made via a kind of instant messaging/video conferencing machine with which people conduct their only activity: the sharing of ideas and what passes for knowledge. The two main characters, Vashti and her son Kuno, live on opposite sides of the world. Vashti is content with her life, which, like most inhabitants of the world, she spends producing and endlessly discussing secondhand 'ideas'. Her son Kuno, however, is a sensualist and a rebel. He persuades a reluctant Vashti to endure the journey (and the resultant unwelcome personal interaction) to his room. There, he tells her of his disenchantment with the sanitised, mechanical world. He confides to her that he has visited the surface of the Earth without permission and that he saw other humans living outside the world of the Machine. However, the Machine recaptures him, and he is threatened with 'Homelessness': expulsion from the underground environment and presumed death. Vashti, however, dismisses her son's concerns as dangerous madness and returns to her part of the world. As time passes, and Vashti continues the routine of her daily life, there are two important developments. First, the life-support apparatus required to visit the outer world is abolished. Most welcome this development, as they are sceptical and fearful of first-hand experience and of those who desire it. Secondly, "Technopoly", a kind of religion, is re-established, in which the Machine is the object of worship. People forget that humans created the Machine, and treat it as a mystical entity whose needs supersede their own. Those who do not accept the deity of the Machine are viewed as 'unmechanical' and threatened with Homelessness. The Mending Apparatus – the system charged with repairing defects that appear in the Machine proper – has also failed by this time, but concerns about this are dismissed in the context of the supposed omnipotence of the Machine itself.
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Change is an essay in Dreiser's collection, Hey, Rub-a-Dub-Dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life (1920). "I often think how foolishly humanity opposes change at times and how steadily and uninterruptedly it flows in, altering the face of the world."
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Miss Leeson, is a typist who rents a room in Mrs. Parker's boarding house. Miss Leeson does not have much money to spare, so she rents the smallest room available. The room is located on the top floor, is quite small, and has a skylight. Guests of the parlor often collect on the porch in the evenings and chat. One evening, Miss Leeson, who is young and pretty, points out a star in the sky and declares she has named it Billy Jackson. One of the other women corrects her sharply. One of the admiring men defends her made-up name as far better. So goes the conversations. Later in the story the reader finds Miss Leeson on hard times and unable to pay for both rent and food. She returns home to the parlor one day after searching for work. She is weak from lack of food, which she cannot afford. One of the guests offers to marry her, but Miss Leeson declines the offer of rescue, staying true to herself. She makes it to her room and collapses on her bed staring at star Billy Jackson through the skylight as she falls unconscious.
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Holmes and Dr. Watson find themselves at Poldhu in Cornwall one spring for the former's health, but the holiday ends with a bizarre event. Mr. Mortimer Tregennis, a local gentleman, and Mr. Roundhay, the local vicar, come to Holmes to report that Tregennis's two brothers have gone insane, and his sister has died. Tregennis had gone to visit them in their village ('Tredannick Wollas'), played whist with them, and then left. When he came back in the morning, he found them still sitting in their places at the table, the brothers, George and Owen, laughing and singing, and the sister, Brenda, dead. The housekeeper had discovered them in this state, and fainted. The vicar has not been to see them yet. Tregennis says that he remembers one brother looking through the window, and then he himself turned to see some "movement" outside. He declares that the horrific event is the work of the devil. Mortimer Tregennis was once estranged from his siblings by the matter of dividing the proceeds from the sale of the family business, but he insists that all was forgiven, although he still lives apart from them. The doctor who was summoned, reckoned that she had been dead for six hours. He also collapsed into a chair for a while after arriving.
Holmes goes to the house in question and, apparently carelessly, kicks over a watering pot, soaking everyone's feet. The housekeeper tells Holmes that she heard nothing in the night, and that the family had been particularly happy and prosperous lately. Holmes observes the remains of a fire in the fireplace. Tregennis explains that it was a cold, damp night.
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She was very pretty when I first knew her, with the sweet straight nose and short upper lip of the cameo-brooch divinity, humanized by a dimple that flowered in her cheek whenever anything was said possessing the outward attributes of humor without its intrinsic quality. For the dear lady was providentially deficient in humor: the least hint of the real thing clouded her lovely eye like the hovering shadow of an algebraic problem.
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Two small-time criminals, Bill and Sam, kidnap Johnny, the 10-year-old red-haired son of Ebenezer Dorset, an important citizen, and hold him for ransom. But the moment that they arrive at their hideout with the boy, the plan begins to unravel, as the boy actually starts to enjoy his kidnappers. Calling himself "Red Chief", the boy proceeds to drive his captors to distraction with his unrelenting chatter, malicious pranks, and demands that they play wearying games with him, such as riding 90 miles on Bill's back pretending to be an Indian scout. The criminals write a ransom letter to the boy's father, lowering the ransom from $2,000 to $1,500, believing that the father won't pay much money for his return. The father, who knows his son well and realizes how intolerable he will be to his captors and how eager they will soon be to rid themselves of the delinquent child, rejects their demand and offers to take the boy off their hands if they pay him $250. The men hand over the money and the howling boy – who had actually been happier being away from his strict father – and flee while the father restrains his son from following them. The ironic situation is where the kidnappers have to pay the father to get his son back (or in truth, to actually agree to even accept him back) instead of the father's paying the kidnappers for the return of his son.
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SOMETHING WENT WRONG...AND ED FLETCHER GOT MIXED UP IN THE BIGGEST THING IN HIS LIFE. A man called the Clerk approaches a talking dog, and explains in businesslike manner that "Sector T137" is scheduled for "adjustment" at 9 o'clock. He instructs the dog to bark at exactly 8:15, which the Clerk explains will summon "A Friend with a Car", which will take real estate salesman Ed Fletcher to work before 9, but while the Clerk is preoccupied, the dog falls asleep and as a result barks a minute too late. Inside Ed's house, while he is getting ready for work, Ed is accosted by a door-to-door insurance salesman and doesn't leave for work until 9:30. Ed arrives at his office building, but upon stepping onto the curb, finds himself in a sunless version of the world where everything and everyone is immobile, ash-grey, and crumbles at his touch. Ed is accosted by white-robed men, who talk about "de-energizing" him with a hose-like piece of equipment, but he flees outside and across the street, back to the everyday world, fearing he's had a psychotic episode.
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The room was large, but with a low ceiling, and at one end of the lengthy, broad apartment stood a gigantic fireplace, in which was heaped a pile of blazing logs, whose light, rather than that of several lanterns hanging from nails along the timbered walls, illuminated the faces of the twenty men who sat within. Heavy timbers, blackened with age and smoke, formed the ceiling. The long, low, diamond-paned window in the middle of the wall opposite the door, had been shuttered as completely as possible, but less care than usual was taken to prevent the light from penetrating into the darkness beyond, for the night was a stormy and tempestuous one, the rain lashing wildly against the hunting chalet, which, in its time, had seen many a merry hunting party gathered under its ample roof.
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The Aluminum Dagger is one of Freeman's inverted detective stories or "locked room mysteries" featuring medical-forensic investigator, Dr. Thorndyke. It was first published in McClure's Magazine, July, 1910
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adapted from Glaspell's one-act play Trifles based on a murder case she covered as a reporter for the Des Moines Daily News.
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Lost Hearts was first published in 1904, featured in M.R. James' Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. This ghost story tells the tale of an orphan boy about to turn twelve, Stephen Elliott, who is sent to stay with Mr. Abney, the boy's cousin, at his remote estate in the country. He is an alchemist obsessed with his quest to acquire immortality. Young Stephen is soon haunted by mysterious apparitions.
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Dutton accepted the invitation for the feeble reason that he was not quick enough at the moment to find a graceful excuse. He had none of that facile brilliance which is so useful at week-end parties; he was a big, shy, awkward man. Moreover, he disliked these great houses. They swallowed him. The solemn, formidable butlers oppressed him. He left on Sunday night when possible. This time, arriving with an hour to dress, he went upstairs to an enormous room, so full of precious things that he felt like an insignificant item in a museum corridor. He smiled disconsolately as the underling who brought up his bag began to fumble with the lock. But, instead of the sepulchral utterance he dreaded, a delicious human voice with an unmistakable brogue proceeded from the stooping figure. It was positively comforting. "It 'ull be locked, sorr, but maybe ye have the key?" And they bent together over the disreputable kit-bag, looking like a pair of ants knitting antennae on the floor of some great cave. The giant four-poster watched them contemptuously; mahogany cupboards wore an air of grave surprise; the gaping, open fireplace alone could have swallowed all his easels—almost, indeed, his little studio. This human, Irish presence was distinctly consoling—some extra hand or other, thought Dutton, probably.
He talked a little with the lad; then, lighting a cigarette, he watched him put the clothes away in the capacious cupboards, noticing in particular how neat and careful he was with the little things. Nail-scissors, silver stud-box, metal shoe-horn, and safety razor, even the bright cigar-cutter and pencil-sharpener collected loose from the bottom of the bag—all these he placed in a row upon the dressing-table with the glass top, and seemed never to have done with it. He kept coming back to rearrange and put a final touch, lingering over them absurdly. Dutton watched him with amusement, then surprise, finally with exasperation. Would he never go? "Thank you," he said at last; "that will do. I'll dress now. What time is dinner?" The lad told him, but still lingered, evidently anxious to say more. "Everything's out, I think," repeated Dutton impatiently; "all the loose things, I mean?" The face at once turned eagerly. What mischievous Irish eyes he had, to be sure! "I've put thim all together in a row, sorr, so that ye'll not be missing anny-thing at all," was the quick reply, as he pointed to the ridiculous collection of little articles, and even darted back to finger them again. He counted them one by one. And then suddenly he added, with a touch of personal interest that was not familiarity, "It's so easy, ye see, sorr, to lose thim small bright things in this great room." And he was gone.
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The circumstances I am about to relate to you have truth to recommend them. They happened to myself, and my recollection of them is as vivid as if they had taken place only yesterday. Twenty years, however, have gone by since that night. During those twenty years I have told the story to but one other person. I tell it now with a reluctance which I find it difficult to overcome. All I entreat, meanwhile, is that you will abstain from forcing your own conclusions upon me. I want nothing explained away. I desire no arguments. My mind on this subject is quite made up, and, having the testimony of my own senses to rely upon, I prefer to abide by it. Well! It was just twenty years ago, and within a day or two of the end of the grouse season. I had been out all day with my gun, and had had no sport to speak of. The wind was due east; the month, December; the place, a bleak wide moor in the far north of England. And I had lost my way. It was not a pleasant place in which to lose one's way, with the first feathery flakes of a coming snowstorm just fluttering down upon the heather, and the leaden evening closing in all around. I shaded my eyes with my hand, and staled anxiously into the gathering darkness, where the purple moorland melted into a range of low hills, some ten or twelve miles distant. Not the faintest smoke-wreath, not the tiniest cultivated patch, or fence, or sheep-track, met my eyes in any direction. There was nothing for it but to walk on, and take my chance of finding what shelter I could, by the way. So I shouldered my gun again, and pushed wearily forward; for I had been on foot since an hour after daybreak, and had eaten nothing since breakfast.
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Widely regarded by ghost story buffs as one of the most terrifying stories published in English, it's a vivid depiction of dread and waking nightmares. Three years ago I was on my way out to the East, and as an extra day in London was of some importance, I took the Friday evening mail-train to Brindisi instead of the usual Thursday morning Marseilles express. Many people shrink from the long forty-eight-hour train journey through Europe, and the subsequent rush across the Mediterranean on the nineteen-knot Isis or Osiris; but there is really very little discomfort on either the train or the mail-boat, and unless there is actually nothing for me to do, I always like to save the extra day and a half in London before I say goodbye to her for one of my longer tramps.
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The Wood of the Dead is a short story written by Algernon Blackwood. It was first published in the 1906 collection The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories. One summer, in my wanderings with a knapsack, I was at luncheon in the room of a wayside inn in the western country, when the door opened and there entered an old rustic, who crossed close to my end of the table and sat himself down very quietly in the seat by the bow window. We exchanged glances, or, properly speaking, nods, for at the moment I did not actually raise my eyes to his face, so concerned was I with the important business of satisfying an appetite gained by tramping twelve miles over a difficult country. The fine warm rain of seven o'clock, which had since risen in a kind of luminous mist about the tree tops, now floated far overhead in a deep blue sky, and the day was settling down into a blaze of golden light. It was one of those days peculiar to Somerset and North Devon, when the orchards shine and the meadows seem to add a radiance of their own, so brilliantly soft are the colourings of grass and foliage. The inn-keeper's daughter, a little maiden with a simple country loveliness, presently entered with a foaming pewter mug, enquired after my welfare, and went out again. Apparently she had not noticed the old man sitting in the settle by the bow window, nor had he, for his part, so much as once turned his head in our direction.
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When we started for our drive the sun was shining brightly on Munich, and the air was full of the joyousness of early summer. Just as we were about to depart, Herr Delbruck (the maitre d'hotel of the Quatre Saisons, where I was staying) came down bareheaded to the carriage and, after wishing me a pleasant drive, said to the coachman, still holding his hand on the handle of the carriage door, "Remember you are back by nightfall. The sky looks bright but there is a shiver in the north wind that says there may be a sudden storm. But I am sure you will not be late." Here he smiled and added,"for you know what night it is." Johann answered with an emphatic, "Ja, mein Herr," and, touching his hat, drove off quickly. When we had cleared the town, I said, after signalling to him to stop: "Tell me, Johann, what is tonight?" He crossed himself, as he answered laconically: "Walpurgis nacht." Then he took out his watch, a great, old-fashioned German silver thing as big as a turnip and looked at it, with his eyebrows gathered together and a little impatient shrug of his shoulders. I realized that this was his way of respectfully protesting against the unnecessary delay and sank back in the carriage, merely motioning him to proceed. He started off rapidly, as if to make up for lost time. Every now and then the horses seemed to throw up their heads and sniff the air suspiciously. On such occasions I often looked round in alarm. The road was pretty bleak, for we were traversing a sort of high windswept plateau. As we drove,I saw a road that looked but little used and which seemed to dip through a little winding valley. It looked so inviting that, even at the risk of offending him, I called Johann to stop--and when he had pulled up, I told him I would like to drive down that road. He made all sorts of excuses and frequently crossed himself as he spoke. This somewhat piqued my curiosity, so I asked him various questions. He answered fencingly and repeatedly looked at his watch in protest.
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What say of it? what say of CONSCIENCE grim, That spectre in my path? Chamberlayne's Pharronida. LET me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation. This has been already too much an object for the scorn -- for the horror -- for the detestation of my race. To the uttermost regions of the globe have not the indignant winds bruited its unparalleled infamy? Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned! -- to the earth art thou not forever dead? to its honors, to its flowers, to its golden aspirations? -- and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven?
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You say you cannot possibly understand it, and I believe you. You think I am losing my mind? Perhaps I am, but for other reasons than those you imagine, my dear friend. Yes, I am going to be married, and will tell you what has led me to take that step. light the candle I may see some human face by my side--because--because --I am ashamed to confess it--because I am afraid of being alone. Oh, you don't understand me yet. I am not afraid of any danger; if a man were to come into the room, I should kill him without trembling. I am not afraid of ghosts, nor do I believe in the supernatural. I am not afraid of dead people, for I believe in the total annihilation of every being that disappears from the face of this earth. Well--yes, well, it must be told: I am afraid of myself, afraid of that horrible sensation of incomprehensible fear. You may laugh, if you like. It is terrible, and I cannot get over it. I am afraid of the walls, of the furniture, of the familiar objects; which are animated, as far as I am concerned, by a kind of animal life. Above all, I am afraid of my own dreadful thoughts, of my reason, which seems as if it were about to leave me, driven away by a mysterious and invisible agony.
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Shevatas, a Zamoran thief, awakens an ancient wizard named Thugra Khotan from his 3,000 year slumber. Thugra remembers his dream of world domination. He assumes the name Natohk (The "Veiled One"), assembles an army, and begins his strategy of conquering the Hyborian nations. But the tiny kingdom of Khoraja stands in his way. Khoraja is ruled by the beautiful Yasmela, sister of the king, who is now a prisoner in neighboring Ophir. Fearing Natohk's invasion, Yasmela seeks advice from the god of her ancestors, Mitra. Yasmela is told to travel into the streets and offer her kingdom's defenses to the first man she meets. The first man she encounters is Conan the Cimmerian. Conan already has a position in Yasmela's army. Now, he's given full command over Khoraja's royal military, much to the confusion of his more cultured comrades. The arrogant officers now under Conan's command ridicule their new commander. But they fall victim to Natohk's magic. Meanwhile, Natohk has made it clear conquering the world isn't the only goal on his agenda; he also desires Queen Yasmela for himself.
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George Gusterson is a writer with crazy ideas one being, he still lives on the surface. For another, he imagines a gizmo that would remind him of things like when to turn on the TV. George's mere whim inspires an actual gadget called the Tickler, just a "wire recorder and clock" at first, but then . . . it whispers constantly through an earphone. It instills positive thinking. It injects drugs. It makes decisions. It weights 28 pounds. And it won't get off. Only Gusterson understands what "the little fellow perched on your shoulder" is really saying, one word: Obey! And only Gusterson knows what to say back, if it's not too late.
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The story is set in 1790 in the countryside around the Dutch settlement of Tarry Town (historical Tarrytown, New York), in a secluded glen known as Sleepy Hollow. Sleepy Hollow is renowned for its ghosts and the haunting atmosphere that pervades the imaginations of its inhabitants and visitors. Some residents say this town was bewitched during the early days of the Dutch settlement, while others claim that the mysterious atmosphere was caused by an old Native American chief, the "wizard of his tribe ... before the country was discovered by Master Hendrik Hudson." Residents of the town are seemingly subjected to various supernatural and mysterious occurrences. They are subjected to trance like visions and frequented by strange sights, music, and voices "in the air." The inhabitants of Sleepy Hallow are fascinated by the "local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions" on account of the mysterious occurrences and haunting atmosphere. The most infamous spectre in the Hollow, and the "commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air," is the Headless Horseman. He is supposedly the ghost of a Hessian trooper whose head had been shot off by a stray cannonball during "some nameless battle" of the Revolution, and who "rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head".
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While still recovering from his accident, Hildred obtains and reads The King in Yellow, a false document within the story which is represented as a universally censored play which deeply disturbs him. Once a wealthy dilettante and affable man-about-town, after his accident Hildred becomes an eccentric recluse who spends his days poring over old books and maps and associating with a more eccentric character, Mr. Wilde, the "Repairer of Reputations" of the story's title. Wilde claims to be the architect of a vast conspiracy which uses, amongst other devices, blackmail to influence and command powerful men whose reputations the conspiracy has saved from scandal. Hildred imagines that, with Wilde's help, he will become the heir of the "Last King" of "The Imperial Dynasty of America", which Wilde says is descended from a lost kingdom within distant stars in the Hyades. However, Hildred perceives his cousin Louis standing before him in the line of succession. Thus, he plans to force Louis to abdicate his claim to the throne, accept exile, and never marry.
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The city beats the country ten to one in summer. Fools go out tramping in muddy brooks and wear themselves out trying to catch little fish as long as your finger. Stay in town and keep comfortable--that's my idea." O. Henry's clever wordplay hints that his characters-- especially those who escaped the summer heat for the mountains-- are playing dangerous games of chivalry and deception, as did Demetrius and Lysander, both in love with Hermia. Read on to discover who is the donkey. A Midsummer Knight's Dream by O. Henry
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On 20 March 1888, Dr. Watson is visiting Sherlock Holmes when a masked gentleman arrives at 221B Baker Street. Initially introducing himself as Count von Kramm, he reveals himself as Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein and hereditary King of Bohemia, after Holmes deduces his true identity. The King explains that, five years earlier, he engaged in a secret relationship with American opera singer Irene Adler, who has since retired and now lives in London. He is set to marry a young Scandinavian princess but worries that her strictly principled family will call the marriage off should they learn of this impropriety. The King further explains that he seeks to regain a photograph of Adler and himself together which he gave to her as a token. His agents have failed to recover the photograph through various means, and an offer to pay for it was also refused. With Adler now threatening to send the photograph to his fiancée's family, the King requests Holmes and Watson's help in recovering it. The next morning, a disguised Holmes goes to Adler's house. He discovers Adler has a gentleman friend, barrister Godfrey Norton, who calls at least once a day. On this particular day, Norton visits Adler and soon afterward takes a cab to a nearby church. Minutes later, the lady herself gets into her landau, bound for the same place. Holmes follows in a cab and enters the church, where he is unexpectedly asked to be a witness to Norton and Adler's wedding. Curiously, the newly-weds go their separate ways after the ceremony. Returning to Baker Street, Holmes recounts his tale to Watson and expresses his amusement at his role in Adler's wedding. He also asks whether or not Watson is willing to participate in an illegal scheme to figure out where the picture is hidden in Adler's house. Watson agrees, and Holmes changes into another disguise as a clergyman. They depart Baker Street for Adler's house.
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Henry Harris, an army doctor at a garrison on Earth is puzzled by a case of a soldier who returns from the asteroid Y-3, and claims that he's a plant. When several more men return from Y-3, each thinking they're a plant, Harris travels to the asteroid to solve the puzzle. He soon finds out that the soldiers claim that a certain indigenous people on the asteroid called "Pipers", who live in the woods, made them realize that they're plants. Harris ventures into the woods and discovers that Pipers do not exist, they were merely invented by the soldiers to cope with the pressure of their jobs. The soldiers relaxed by simply turning into plants, or their minds thought so. Harris returns to earth and contemplates all the work that lies ahead of him. He unpacks his suitcases, which, rather than carrying clothes, contain soil from Y-3. Harris lays the soil on the ground, lies in it like a plant, and goes to sleep.
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Little Chandler eagerly awaits a reunion with his old friend Ignatius Gallaher, who moved to London eight years ago. A married man and father who earned his nickname from his small and delicate deportment, Little Chandler whittles away the afternoon hours at his clerical job, constantly thinking about his approaching evening drink. Little Chandler wonders in amazement at Gallaher’s impressive career writing for English newspapers, though he never doubted that Gallaher would do well for himself. As Little Chandler leaves work and walks to the bar where the men agreed to meet, he contemplates Gallaher’s homecoming and success, then thinks of his own stunted writing aspirations and the possibilities of life abroad that remain out of his reach. Little Chandler used to love poetry, but he gave it up when he got married. As he walks he considers the far-fetched possibility of writing his own book of poems.
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Charles Dexter Ward is a young man from a prominent Rhode Island family who has disappeared from a mental asylum. He had been incarcerated during a prolonged period of insanity, during which he exhibited minor and inexplicable physiological changes. His empty cell is found to be very dusty. The bulk of the story concerns the investigation conducted by the Wards' family doctor, Marinus Bicknell Willett, in an attempt to discover the reason for Ward's madness and physiological changes. Willett learns that Ward had spent the past several years attempting to discover the grave of his ill-reputed ancestor, Joseph Curwen. The doctor slowly begins to reveal the truth behind the legends surrounding Curwen, an eighteenth-century shipping entrepreneur and alleged alchemist, who was in reality a necromancer and mass murderer. A raid on Curwen's farm was remarkable for the shouted incantations, lights, explosions, and some not-quite-human figures shot down by the raiders. The raiders swore any witnesses to strict secrecy about what they saw and heard. As Willett's investigations proceed, he finds that Charles had recovered Curwen's ashes, and through the use of magical formulae contained in documents found hidden in Curwen's home in Providence, was able to call forth Curwen from his "essential saltes" and resurrect him. Willett also finds that Curwen, who resembles Charles enough to pass for him, murdered and replaced his modern descendant and resumed his evil activities. Although Curwen convinces onlookers that he is Charles, his anachronistic mindset and behavior lead authorities to certify him insane and imprison him in an asylum.
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In one sense, it is a mere truism to speak of the evocative power of words. The olden efficacy of subtly woven spells, of magic formulas and incantations, has long become a literary metaphor; though the terrible reality which once underlay and may still underlie such concepts has been forgotten. However, the necromancy of language is more than a metaphor to Sir Roderick Hagdon: the scars of fire on his ankles are things which no one could possibly regard as having their origin in a figure of speech.
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Alternately titled, The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall The moon, being the nearest to the earth of all the heavenly bodies, has always occupied the imagination of men.
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And just one word about fresh air and exercise. Don't bother with either of them. Get your room full of good air, then shut up the windows and keep it. It will keep for years. Anyway, don't keep using your lungs all the time. Let them rest. As for exercise, if you have to take it, take it and put up with it. But as long as you have the price of a hack and can hire other people to play baseball for you and run races and do gymnastics when you sit in the shade and smoke and watch them—great heavens, what more do you want?
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this wasn't like any other group Mrs. Bellowes had ever joined. In her fervor to light a path for her delicate, tottering feet, she had struck matches down dark alleys, and found her way to Hindu mystics who floated their flickering, starry eyelashes over crystal balls. She had walked on the meadow paths with ascetic Indian philosophers imported by daughters-in-spirit of Madame Blavatsky. She had made pilgrimages to California's stucco jungles to hunt the astrological seer in his natural habitat. She had even consented to signing away the rights to one of her homes in order to be taken into the shouting order of a temple of amazing evangelists who had promised her golden smoke, crystal fire, and the great soft hand of God coming to bear her home.
None of these people had ever shaken Mrs. Bellowes' faith, even when she saw them sirened away in a black wagon in the night, or discovered their pictures, bleak and unromantic, in the morning tabloids. The world had roughed them up and locked them away because they knew too much, that was all.
And then, two weeks ago, she had seen Mr. Thirkell's advertisement in New York City:
**COME TO MARS!
Stay at the Thirkell Restorium for one week. And then, on into space on the greatest adventure life can offer!
Send for Free Pamphlet: "Nearer My God To Thee."
Excursion rates. Round trip slightly lower.**
"Round trip," Mrs. Bellowes had thought. "But who would come back after seeing Him?" And so she had bought a ticket and flown off to Mars
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The war had sapped him, nerve and brain and soul. Through all the years that had passed since then the wound had kept open. But now, as he slid his car down the vast green bowl, he felt its spirit reach out to him; reach out to him and caress and quiet him, promising him healing. He seemed to drift like a falling leaf through the clustered woods; to be cradled by gentle hands of the trees.
He had stopped at the little gnome of an inn, and there he had lingered, day after day, week after week.
The trees had nursed him; soft whisperings of leaves, slow chant of the needled pines, had first deadened, then driven from him the re-echoing clamor of the war and its sorrow. The open wound of his spirit had closed under their green healing; had closed and become scar; and even the scar had been covered and buried, as the scars on Earth's breast are covered and buried beneath the falling leaves of Autumn. The trees had laid green healing hands on his eyes, banishing the pictures of war. He had sucked strength from the green breasts of the hills.
Yet as strength flowed back to him and mind and spirit healed, McKay had grown steadily aware that the place was troubled; that its tranquillity was not perfect; that there was ferment of fear within it.
It was as though the trees had waited until he himself had become whole before they made their own unrest known to him. Now they were trying to tell him something; there was a shrillness as of apprehension, of anger, in the whispering of the leaves, the needled chanting of the pines.
The Women of the Wood by Abraham Merritt
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Curious Relic For Sale by Mark Twain As per advertisement in the "Herald." A curious old relic indeed, as I had a good personal right to know. In a single instant of time, a long drawn panorama of sights and scenes in the Holy Land flashed through my memory--town and grove, desert, camp, and caravan clattering after each other and disappearing, leaping me with a little of the surprised and dizzy feeling which I have experienced at sundry times when a long express train has overtaken me at some quiet curve and gone whizzing, car by car, around the corner and out of sight. In that prolific instant I saw again all the country from the Sea of Galilee #MarkTwain #Audiobook #story
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After a down-on-his-luck scholar takes a job as a live-in secretary, translator and general assistant to an elderly occultist, he begins to experience a sense of deep unease. Strange noises in the night disturb his sleep and the obvious state of fear in which his employer lives only enhance this feeling. Soon, events cause the occultist to divulge the fact that he and his brother had been dark magicians before he killed his more-powerful twin, and that the noises are his sibling's dismembered body parts returning to drive the man insane with terror before murdering him. He further reveals that he brought the other man into his home in an effort to find a way to banish his brother's restless spirit. The Return of the Sorcerer by Clark Ashton Smith
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Down the Rabbit-Hole Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversations?”
So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.
In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.
The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.
Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves; here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labelled “ORANGE MARMALADE”, but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody underneath, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it.
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Gabriel John Utterson and his cousin Richard Enfield reach the door of a large house on their weekly walk. Enfield tells Utterson that months ago, he saw a sinister-looking man named Edward Hyde trample a young girl after accidentally bumping into her. Enfield forced Hyde to pay £100 to avoid a scandal. Hyde brought them to this door and provided a cheque signed by a reputable gentleman (later revealed to be Doctor Henry Jekyll, a friend and client of Utterson). Utterson is disturbed because Jekyll recently changed his will to make Hyde the sole beneficiary. Utterson fears that Hyde is blackmailing Jekyll. When Utterson tries to discuss Hyde with Jekyll, Jekyll tells Utterson he can be rid of Hyde when he wants and for Utterson to drop the matter.
One night in October, a servant sees Hyde beat Sir Danvers Carew, another one of Utterson's clients, to death. The police contact Utterson, who leads officers to Hyde's apartment. Hyde has vanished, but they find half of a broken cane (the other half having been left at the crime scene). Utterson recognises the cane as one he had given to Jekyll. Utterson visits Jekyll, who shows Utterson a note, allegedly written to Jekyll by Hyde, apologizing for the trouble that he has caused. However, Hyde's handwriting is similar to Jekyll's own, leading Utterson to conclude that Jekyll forged the note to protect Hyde.
For two months, Jekyll reverts to his former sociable manner, but in early January, he starts refusing visitors. Dr Hastie Lanyon, a mutual acquaintance of Jekyll and Utterson, dies of shock after receiving information relating to Jekyll. Before his death, Lanyon gives Utterson a letter to be opened after Jekyll's death or disappearance. In late February, during another walk with Enfield, Utterson starts a conversation with Jekyll at a window of his laboratory. Jekyll suddenly slams the window and disappears.
In early March, Jekyll's butler, Mr Poole, visits Utterson and says Jekyll has secluded himself in his laboratory for weeks. Utterson and Poole break into the laboratory, where they find Hyde wearing Jekyll's clothes and apparently dead from suicide. They find a letter from Jekyll to Utterson. Utterson reads Lanyon's letter, then Jekyll's. Lanyon's letter reveals his deterioration resulted from the shock of seeing Hyde drink a serum that turned him into Jekyll. Jekyll's letter explains that he had indulged in unstated vices and feared discovery. He found a way to transform himself and thereby indulge his vices without fear of detection. Jekyll's transformed body, Hyde, was evil, self-indulgent, and uncaring to anyone but himself. Initially, Jekyll controlled the transformations with the serum, but one night in August, he became Hyde involuntarily in his sleep.
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Playing at Chess, is the most ancient and universal game known among men; for its original is beyond the memory of history, and it has, for numberless ages, been the amusement of all the civilized nations of Asia, the Persians, the Indians, and the Chinese. Europe has had it above 1,000 years; the Spaniards have spread it over their part of America, and it begins lately to make its appearance in these northern states. It is so interesting in itself, as not to need the view of gain to induce engaging in it; and thence it is never played for money. Those, therefore, who have leisure for such diversions, cannot find one that is more innocent; and the following piece, written with a view to correct (among a few young friends) some little improprieties in the practice of it, shows at the same time that it may, in its effects on the mind, be not merely innocent, but advantageous, to the vanquished as well as to the victor.
The game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement. Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired or strengthened by it, so as to become habits, ready on all occasions. For life is a kind of chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effects of prudence or the want of it.
By playing at chess, then, we may learn:
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Foresight, which looks a little into futurity, and considers the consequences that may attend an action: for it is continually occurring to the player, "If I move this piece, what will be the advantages of my new situation? What use can my adversary make of it to annoy me? What other moves can I make to support it, and to defend myself from his attacks?"
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Circumspection, which surveys the whole chess-board, or scene of action, the relations of the several pieces and situations, the dangers they are respectively exposed to, the several possibilities of their aiding each other, the probabilities that the opponent may make this or that move, and attack this or the other piece; and what different means can be used to avoid his stroke, or turn its consequences against him.
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All day long the little boy worked hard, in field and barn and shed, for his people were poor farmers, and could not pay a workman; but at sunset there came an hour that was all his own, for his father had given it to him. Then the boy would go up to the top of a hill and look across at another hill that rose some miles away. On this far hill stood a house with windows of clear gold and diamonds. They shone and blazed so that it made the boy wink to look at them: but after a while the people in the house put up shutters, as it seemed, and then it looked like any common farmhouse. The boy supposed they did this because it was supper-time; and then he would go into the house and have his supper of bread and milk, and so to bed. One day the boy’s father called him and said: “You have been a good boy, and have earned a holiday. Take this day for your own; but remember that God gave it, and try to learn some good thing.” The boy thanked his father and kissed his mother; then he put a piece of bread in his pocket, and started off to find the house with the golden windows. It was pleasant walking. His bare feet made marks in the white dust, and when he looked back, the footprints seemed to be following him, and making company for him. His shadow, too, kept beside him, and would dance or run with him as he pleased; so it was very cheerful. By and by he felt hungry; and he sat down by a brown brook that ran through the alder hedge by the roadside, and ate his bread, and drank the clear water. Then he scattered the crumbs for the birds, as his mother had taught him to do, and went on his way.
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This country, during the last thirty or forty years, has produced some of the most remarkable cases of insanity of which there is any mention in history. For instance, there was the Baldwin case, in Ohio, twenty-two years ago. Baldwin, from his boyhood up, had been of a vindictive, malignant, quarrelsome nature. He put a boy's eye out once, and never was heard upon any occasion to utter a regret for it. He did many such things. But at last he did something that was serious. He called at a house just after dark one evening, knocked, and when the occupant came to the door, shot him dead, and then tried to escape, but was captured. Two days before, he had wantonly insulted a helpless cripple, and the man he afterward took swift vengeance upon with an assassin bullet had knocked him down. Such was the Baldwin case. The trial was long and exciting; the community was fearfully wrought up. Men said this spiteful, bad-hearted villain had caused grief enough in his time, and now he should satisfy the law. But they were mistaken; Baldwin was insane when he did the deed--they had not thought of that. By the argument of counsel it was shown that at half past ten in the morning on the day of the murder, Baldwin became insane, and remained so for eleven hours and a half exactly. This just covered the case comfortably, and he was acquitted. Thus, if an unthinking and excited community had been listened to instead of the arguments of counsel, a poor crazy creature would have been held to a fearful responsibility for a mere freak of madness. Baldwin went clear, and although his relatives and friends were naturally incensed against the community for their injurious suspicions and remarks, they said let it go for this time, and did not prosecute. The Baldwins were very wealthy. This same Baldwin had momentary fits of insanity twice afterward, and on both occasions killed people he had grudges against. And on both these occasions the circumstances of the killing were so aggravated, and the murders so seemingly heartless and treacherous, that if Baldwin had not been insane he would have been hanged without the shadow of a doubt. As it was, it required all his political and family influence to get him clear in one of the cases, and cost him not less than ten thousand dollars to get clear in the other. One of these men he had notoriously been threatening to kill for twelve years. The poor creature happened, by the merest piece of ill fortune, to come along a dark alley at the very moment that Baldwin's insanity came upon him, and so he was shot in the back with a gun loaded with slugs.
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They were both what we commonly call successful business men--men with well-fed faces, heavy signet rings on fingers like sausages, and broad, comfortable waistcoats, a yard and a half round the equator. They were seated opposite each other at a table of a first-class restaurant, and had fallen into conversation while waiting to give their order to the waiter. Their talk had drifted back to their early days and how each had made his start in life when he first struck New York. "I tell you what, Jones," one of them was saying, "I shall never forget my first few years in this town. By George, it was pretty uphill work! Do you know, sir, when I first struck this place, I hadn't more than fifteen cents to my name, hadn't a rag except what I stood up in, and all the place I had to sleep in--you won't believe it, but it's a gospel fact just the same--was an empty tar barrel. No, sir," he went on, leaning back and closing up his eyes into an expression of infinite experience, "no, sir, a fellow accustomed to luxury like you has simply no idea what sleeping out in a tar barrel and all that kind of thing is like." "My dear Robinson," the other man rejoined briskly, "if you imagine I've had no experience of hardship of that sort, you never made a bigger mistake in your life. Why, when I first walked into this town I hadn't a cent, sir, not a cent, and as for lodging, all the place I had for months and months was an old piano box up a lane, behind a factory. Talk about hardship, I guess I had it pretty rough! You take a fellow that's used to a good warm tar barrel and put him into a piano box for a night or two, and you'll see mighty soon--" "My dear fellow," Robinson broke in with some irritation, "you merely show that you don't know what a tar barrel's like. Why, on winter nights, when you'd be shut in there in your piano box just as snug as you please, I used to lie awake shivering, with the draught fairly running in at the bunghole at the back."
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There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel. They did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs on their way to and from their room. Their room was on the second floor facing the sea. It also faced the public garden and the war monument. There were big palms and green benches in the public garden. In the good weather there was always an artist with his easel. Artists liked the way the palms grew and the bright colors of the hotels facing the gardens and the sea. Italians came from a long way off to look up at the war monument. It was made of bronze and glistened in the rain. It was raining. The rain dripped from the palm trees. Water stood in pools on the gravel paths. The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain. The motor cars were gone from the square by the war monument. Across the square in the doorway of the café a waiter stood looking out at the empty square. The American wife stood at the window looking out. Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green tables. The cat was trying to make herself so compact that she would not be dripped on. "I'm going down and get that kitty," the American wife said.
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THE SWORD OF WELLERAN Where the great plain of Tarphet runs up, as the sea in estuaries, among the Cyresian mountains, there stood long since the city of Merimna well-nigh among the shadows of the crags. I have never seen a city in the world so beautiful as Merimna seemed to me when first I dreamed of it. It was a marvel of spires and figures of bronze, and marble fountains, and trophies of fabulous wars, and broad streets given over wholly to the Beautiful. Right through the centre of the city there went an avenue fifty strides in width, and along each side of it stood likenesses in bronze of the Kings of all the countries that the people of Merimna had ever known. At the end of that avenue was a colossal chariot with three bronze horses driven by the winged figure of Fame, and behind her in the chariot the huge form of Welleran, Merimna's ancient hero, standing with extended sword. So urgent was the mien and attitude of Fame, and so swift the pose of the horses, that you had sworn that the chariot was instantly upon you, and that its dust already veiled the faces of the Kings. And in the city was a mighty hall wherein were stored the trophies of Merimna's heroes. Sculptured it was and domed, the glory of the art of masons a long while dead, and on the summit of the dome the image of Rollory sat gazing across the Cyresian mountains toward the wide lands beyond, the lands that knew his sword. And beside Rollory, like an old nurse, the figure of Victory sat, hammering into a golden wreath of laurels for his head the crowns of fallen Kings.
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IKNOW what I'll do," said the Green Goblin, to his friend the Will-o'-the-Wisp. "I'll give a spelling-match."
"With prizes?" asked the Will-o'-the-Wisp.
"Why, of course. One will be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, another will be a wishing-cap, and the third will be—"
"Shoes of invisibility," suggested the Will-o'-the-Wisp.
"No," the Green Goblin objected. "If you won those, you'd disappear, and then where would you be?"
"But that would make no difference," answered the Will-o'-the-Wisp; "for no one can find me when they see me; and so if they can't see me, they can't find me any better than if they could see me—could they?"
"Now you're mixing me up," said the Green Goblin, "and I want to go on with my spelling-match. The third prize will be a wishing-ring. And the fourth prize—I don't think I'll have more than three prizes. Maybe we won't have more than three prize-winners. Come on over to the White Owl's tree, and we'll have the Town Crier give out the notices."
So they flitted over to the tree and found the Town Crier, who for a fee of four four-leafed clovers gave out the notice at the trysting-places of Fairyland, telling all the residents that on the first of April there would be a Great Spelling-Match at the Grotto of the Green Goblin, admission free, with prizes for the three best spellers.
When the day came, the grotto was filled with an excited throng. There was the King and the Queen, the Princess, and the Lord High Chancellor. There was the old Witch, the Wizard, the Enchanter, and the youngest son of the Woodcutter. There were the Knight, the Squire, the Giant, the Dwarf, the Sultan, the Genie, the Pirate, the Bandit, the Schoolmaster, and the Teacher of Dancing.
The Will-o'-the-Wisp was not there, because the match was held at ten o'clock a.m., and the Will-o'-the-Wisp is out only at night. But the Green Goblin was so much interested in his other guests that he forgot the Will-o'-the-Wisp entirely.
When all were gathered, the refreshments were served by some small elves dressed in the Green Goblin's green livery. Everything was most delicious. There were syllabubs, pistachio nuts, greengages, philopœnas, nougatines, nectar and ambrosia, vitamines, doughnuts, and a lot of things with French and Italian names that were most delightful and melted in the mouth before you had time to taste them—together with bonbons and frozen sweets.
But since the Giant went early to the refreshment room, there was not much left for the other guests, and all were glad when the Green Goblin declared it was time for the spelling-match.
So next they all counted out with "Eena, mena, mona, mi," until their places in the spelling-line were fixed, and then they were arranged in the following order:
First came the Giant, then came the Dwarf and the Enchanter, the King, the Chancellor, the Woodcutter's Son, the Wizard, the Knight, the Princess. After her was the Squire, then the Queen, the Pirate, the Genie, the Schoolmaster, the Teacher of Dancing, the Bandit, and last came the Sultan and the old Witch.
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It was one afternoon in April, not long ago, only the other day, and the shadows had already begun to lengthen.
Bertrand Delmandé, a fine, bright-looking boy of fourteen years, - fifteen, perhaps, - was mounted, and riding along a pleasant country road, upon a little Creole pony, such as boys in Louisiana usually ride when they have nothing better at hand. He had hunted, and carried his gun before him.
It is unpleasant to state that Bertrand was not so depressed as he should have been, in view of recent events that had come about. Within the past week he had been recalled from the college of Grand Coteau to his home, the Bon-Accueil plantation.
He had found his father and his grandmother depressed over money matters, awaiting certain legal developments that might result in his permanent withdrawal from school. That very day, directly after the early dinner, the two had driven to town, on this very business, to be absent till the late afternoon. Bertrand, then, had saddled Picayune and gone for a long jaunt, such as his heart delighted in.
He was returning now, and had approached the beginning of the great tangled Cherokee hedge that marked the boundary line of Bon-Accueil, and that twinkled with multiple white roses.
The pony started suddenly and violently at something there in the turn of the road, and just under the hedge. It looked like a bundle of rags at first. But it was a tramp, seated upon a broad, flat stone.
Bertrand had no maudlin consideration for tramps as a species; he had only that morning driven from the place one who was making himself unpleasant at the kitchen window.
But this tramp was old and feeble. His beard was long, and as white as new-ginned cotton, and when Bertrand saw him he was engaged in stanching a wound in his bare heel with a fistful of matted grass.
"What 's wrong, old man?" asked the boy, kindly.
The tramp looked up at him with a bewildered glance, but did not answer.
"Well," thought Bertrand, "since it 's decided that I 'm to be a physician some day, I can't begin to practice too early."
He dismounted, and examined the injured foot. It had an ugly gash. Bertrand acted mostly from impulse. Fortunately his impulses were not bad ones. So, nimbly, and as quickly as he could manage it, he had the old man astride Picayune, whilst he himself was leading the pony down the narrow lane.
The dark green hedge towered like a high and solid wall on one side. On the other was a broad, open field, where here and there appeared the flash and gleam of uplifted, polished hoes, that negroes were plying between the even rows of cotton and tender corn.
"This is the State of Louisiana," uttered the tramp, quaveringly.
"Yes, this is Louisiana," returned Bertrand cheerily.
"Yes, I know it is. I 've been in all of them since Gettysburg. Sometimes it was too hot, and sometimes it was too cold; and with that bullet in my head - you don't remember? No, you don't remember Gettysburg."
"Well, no, not vividly," laughed Bertrand.
"Is it a hospital? It is n't a factory, is it?" the man questioned.
"Where we 're going? Why, no, it 's the Delmandé plantation - Bon-Accueil. Here we are. Wait, I 'll open the gate."
This singular group entered the yard from the rear, and not far from the house. A big black woman, who sat just without a cabin door, picking a pile of rusty-looking moss, called out at sight of them: -
"W'at 's dat you 's bringin' in dis yard, boy? top dat hoss?"
She received no reply. Bertrand, indeed, took no notice of her inquiry.
"Fu' a boy w'at goes to school like you does - whar 's yo' sense?" she went on, with a fine show of indignation; then, muttering to herself, "Ma'ame Bertrand an' Marse St. Ange ain't gwine stan' dat, I knows dey ain't. Dah! ef he ain't done sot 'im on de gall'ry, plumb down in his pa's rockin'-cheer!"
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The narrator recalls his experience with ghosts on a winter night in a decaying English mansion that was built in the seventeenth century. He has been arguing with his brother over the existence of such supernatural creatures and defiantly offers to stay up all night to confront the ghosts that his brother claims haunt the house. The narrator drinks several cups of strong tea to stay awake and smokes cigars to stimulate his senses. He fully expects to see ghostly figures but firmly believes they will be figments of his own imagination. At midnight a group of male and female ghosts appear dressed in the costumes of Jacobean aristocrats. Evidently they are former owners of this mansion and their relatives. The ghosts sit down, ignoring the narrator. Then a pack of “black creatures” bursts into the chamber. Although hideous monsters, they behave like devoted hounds. The narrator realizes that these creatures are “the filthy, immortal sins of those courtly men and women.” Each beast goes up to its master, who is forced to acknowledge the secret sin symbolized by the face-licking animal ghost. Several human ghosts have more than one nightmarish creatures competing for attention. The narrator suggests that one of the female ghosts is guilty of murder and that two others, a lady and a courtier, may be guilty of adultery. Otherwise he does not name any specific sins but suggests through his descriptions of the monsters that the sins they represent are of the most vile deeds of which human beings can be guilty. Suddenly one of the creatures scents the narrator’s presence and leads its companions in search of him. A number of the horrible creatures swarm over the narrator and begin clawing him. As their claws touch his body, he is overwhelmed by fiendish desires, such as the idea that he should murder his own brother. He sees how easy this would be. He could pretend that he thought his brother was a ghost and thus fire his revolver in self-defense. Afterward he would dress the body in a sheet and put flour on its face to make it appear his brother had been trying to frighten him. As the narrator is about to succumb to this temptation, he tries to shut out his wicked thoughts by working out geometry problems in his head. He succeeds in proving the validity of a Euclidian theorem. At this point, logic and reason re-establish themselves and the monsters disappear. It seems inconceivable to the narrator that he has actually contemplated murdering his own brother.
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The short story involves Mr. and Mrs. White and their adult son, Herbert. Sergeant-Major Morris, a friend who served with the British Army in India, comes by for dinner and introduces them to a mummified monkey's paw. An old fakir placed a spell on the paw, so that it would grant three wishes but only with hellish consequences as punishment for tampering with fate. Morris, having had a horrible experience using the paw, throws it into the fire. Mr. White, not believing Morris, retrieves it. Before leaving, Morris warns Mr. White of what might happen should he use the paw. At Herbert's suggestion, Mr. White flippantly wishes for £200, which will enable him to make the final mortgage payment for his house. When he makes his wish, Mr. White suddenly drops the paw in surprise, claiming that it moved and twisted like a snake. The next day, Herbert leaves for work at a local factory. That night, an employee arrives at the Whites's home, pronouncing that Herbert had been killed in a terrible machine accident that mutilated his body. The company denies any responsibility for the incident, but makes a goodwill payment to the family of the deceased. The payment is £200, the amount Mr. White had wished for. A week after the funeral, Mrs. White, mad with grief, insists that her husband use the paw to wish Herbert back to life. Reluctantly, he does so, despite great unease at the thought of summoning his son's mutilated and decomposing body. An hour or so later—the cemetery being two miles away—there is a knock at the door. As Mrs. White fumbles at the locks in a desperate attempt to open the door, Mr. White becomes terrified and fears "the thing outside" is not the son he loved. He makes his third wish. The knocking stops suddenly and Mrs. White opens the door to find no one is there. the monkeys paw,monkeys paw,ww jacobs,w.w. jacobs,the monkeys paw audiobook,the monkeys paw audio,short story,w. w. jacobs,monkeys paw audio,short film,free audiobooks full length,free audiobooks,the monkeys paw summary,the monkeys paw story,the monkeys paw simpsons,the monkeys paw reading,the monkeys paw read aloud,the monkeys paw play,the monkeys paw part 1,the monkeys paw part 3,the monkeys paw full movie,the monkeys paw book,monkeys paw story
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The canoe was now approaching the land. The bay opened out, and a gap in the white surf of the reef marked where the little river ran out to the sea; the thicker and deeper green of the virgin forest showed its course down the distant hill slope. The forest here came close to the beach. Far beyond, dim and almost cloudlike in texture, rose the mountains, like suddenly frozen waves. The sea was still save for an almost imperceptible swell. The sky blazed. The man with the carved paddle stopped. "It should be somewhere here," he said. He shipped the paddle and held his arms out straight before him. The other man had been in the fore part of the canoe, closely scrutinising the land. He had a sheet of yellow paper on his knee. "Come and look at this, Evans," he said. Both men spoke in low tones, and their lips were hard and dry. The man called Evans came swaying along the canoe until he could look over his companion's shoulder. The paper had the appearance of a rough map. By much folding it was creased and worn to the pitch of separation, and the second man held the discoloured fragments together where they had parted. On it one could dimly make out, in almost obliterated pencil, the outline of the bay. "Here," said Evans, "is the reef, and here is the gap." He ran his thumb-nail over the chart. "This curved and twisting line is the river--I could do with a drink now!--and this star is the place."
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Miss Susan Cushing of Croydon receives a parcel in the post that contains two severed human ears packed in coarse salt. Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard suspects a prank by three medical students whom Miss Cushing was forced to evict because of their unruly behaviour. The parcel was sent from Belfast, the city of origin of one of the former boarders. Upon examining the parcel himself, Holmes is convinced that it is evidence of a serious crime. He reasons that a medical student with access to a dissection laboratory would likely use something other than plain salt to preserve human remains, and would be able to make a more precise cut than the roughly hacked ears suggest. The address on the package, roughly written and with a spelling correction, suggests to Holmes that the sender lacks education and is unfamiliar with Croydon. The knot in the string suggests to Holmes that they are looking for someone with sailing experience.
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The story follows the publisher of a very influent media empire in the year 2889.
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The Minister's Black Veil by Nathaniel Hawthorne,the ministers black veil,the ministers black veil (short story),ministers black veil,audio book,short story,free audiobooks,free audiobooks full length,free audiobooks on youtube,nathaniel hawthorne,the ministers black veil audiobook,the ministers black veil audio,The Ministers Black Veil by Nathaniel Hawthorne,the ministers black veil by nathaniel hawthorne summary,the ministers black veil summary
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The Charge Of The Light Brigade by Alfred Lord Tennyson,alfred lord tennyson,charge of the light brigade,the charge of the light brigade,poem,poetry,1st baron tennyson (author) charge of the light brigade (event),the charge of the light brigade by alfred lord tennyson,the charge of the light brigade by alfred lord tennyson poem
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The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell
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A long time ago and far, far away an old woman was sitting in her rocking chair thinking how happy she would be if she had a child. Then, she heard a knock at the door and opened it. A lady was standing there and she said, "If you let me in, I will grant you a wish." The old woman let the woman in firstly because she felt pity, secondly because she knew what she'd wish for...a child. After she washed the lady up and fed her, she saw that she was really beautiful. The lady slept soundly all night long and then right before she left, she said, "Now, about your wish. What do you want?" The lady thought about most people's wishes to be richest in the world, most powerful person, the smartest, and the prettiest. But the old woman wished for something the lady could not believe. She said, "I would like a child." "What did you say?" she asked because she was astonished at what the old lady asked for. The old lady repeated what she said. "I would like a child." The lady then placed a tiny seed in the old woman's hand and gave her instructions. " Plant this seed, water it carefully, watch over it, and give it your love. If you do all those things, then you will have a child." So the old woman did all of those things the lady had told her to. In a week, there was a beautiful yellow flower in place of the seed. The next day, the flower bloomed. Inside the flower was a beautiful little girl who was the size of the woman's thumb so she a called her Thumbellina. She made her a little dress out of golden threads. Thumbellina slept in a walnut shell and brought the old woman joy and happiness. But, one day when Thumbellina went down for her nap, a frog hopped through the open window and said, "You will be a perfect bride for my son," and she took Thumbellina to a lily pad and hopped off to find her son. Thumbellina cried and some little guppies heard her and chewed the roots off the lily pad to help her escape. Thumbellina's lily pad floated away. A few hours later, she finally stopped floating. During the summer, she ate berries and drank the dew off the leaves. But then winter came and she needed shelter. A kindly mouse let her stay with it, but it said, "You'll have to marry my friend, Mole, because I cannot keep you for another winter." The next day she went to see Mole. In one of tunnels, she found a sick bird and said, "Poor thing, I will bury it." Then she found out that it was still alive and she cared for it until was ready to fly. It flew off. That fall she nearly had to marry Mole. But then she heard a familiar tweet and an idea popped up in the bird's head. "You can come down to the warm country," said the bird, so Thumbellina hopped on the bird's back and flew to the warm country. The people there who were like her renamed her Erin. She married a prince and she lived happily ever after. The End fairy tales,Thumbelina,thumbelina story,kids story,short story,free audiobooks,free audiobooks full length,free audiobooks on youtube,Fairy Tales,Favorite Fairy Tales,fairy tales in english,free audioboks
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The Bremen Town Musicians by The Brothers Grimm,fairy tale,brothers grimm,fairy tales,kids story,the bremen town musicians,short story,free audiobooks full length,free audiobooks on youtube,The Brothers Grimm,bremen town musicians,bedtime stories,bedtime story,story time,audio book,fairy tales in english,bremen musicians,free audioboks,fairy tales for kids,fairy tales for children
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To Build a Fire Short story by Jack London
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The Necklace Short story by Guy de Maupassant
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The Cask of Amontillado Short story by Edgar Allan Poe
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The Pit and the Pendulum Short story by Edgar Allan Poe
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An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Short story by Ambrose Bierce
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The selfish giant Short story by Oscar Wilde
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The Adventure of the Six Napoleons by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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An Egyptian Cigarette by Kate Chopin
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The Alchemist by H P Lovecraft
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The Empire of the Antsby H.G. Wells
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Dalyrimple Goes Wrong by F. Scott Fitzgerald
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A Slayer of Serpents by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
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The Fiddler by Herman Melville
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Sir Isaac Newton by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The Mortal Immortal by Mary Shelley
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**The Terrible Old Man
By H. P. Lovecraft**
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Snow White is a 19th-century German fairy tale by The Brothers Grimm
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Father Frost is a Russian fairy tale (called Morozco), adapted in Andrew Lang's Yellow Fairy Book as The Story of King Frost. Father Frost Classic Fairy tale Short Story
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Little Red Riding Hood is a European fairy tale about a young girl and a Big Bad Wolf. Its origins can be traced back to the 10th century to several European folk tales
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Jack and the Beanstalk first appeared as The Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean in 1734. Jack and the Beanstalk is a short story of a poor country boy, trades the family cow for a handful of magic beans, which grow into an enormous beanstalk reaching up into the clouds. Jack climbs the beanstalk and finds himself in the castle of an unfriendly giant. The giant senses Jack's presence and cries, “Fee, fie, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!” Outwitting the giant, Jack is able to retrieve many goods once stolen from his family, including an enchanted goose that lays golden eggs. Jack then escapes by chopping down the beanstalk. The giant, who is pursuing him, falls to his death, and Jack and his family prosper.
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Washington wrote these rules in his notebook when he was 13 years old.
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Set in the year 2157, when children learn individually at home using a mechanical teacher (robotic teacher), the story tells of eleven-year-old Margie Jones, whose neighbor Tommy finds a real book. The book tells about a time when children learned by age group in large schools that were not merely designated rooms in private houses as in the year 2157. Margie and Tommy discuss what it must have been like to study together with a real person as a teacher, and though at first Margie is skeptical about the notion, by the end of the story she daydreams about what it must have been like and 'the fun they had'.
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Dagon By H. P. Lovecraft The Cats of Ulthar by H. P. Lovecraft The History of the Necronomicon by H. P. Lovecraft The Statement of Randolph Carter By H. P. Lovecraft
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There were once six blind men who stood by the roadside every day, and begged from the people who passed. They had often heard of elephants, but they had never seen one; for, being blind, how could they? It so happened one morning that an elephant was driven down the road where they stood. When they were told that the great beast was before them, they asked the driver to let him stop so that they might see him. Of course they could not see him with their eyes; but they thought that by touching him they could learn just what kind of animal he was.
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The King and His Hawk by James Baldwin A Story of Robin Hood by James Baldwin Bruce and the Spider by James Baldwin
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After Twenty Years by O. Henry The Cactus by O. Henry A Strange Story by O. Henry
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The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury The Last Night of the World by Ray Bradbury The Fight of the Good Ship Clarissa by Ray Bradbury The Flying Machine By Ray Bradbury All Summer in a Day By Ray Bradbury
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The Disciple by Oscar Wilde
A Few Maxims For The Instruction Of The Over-Educated by Oscar Wilde
The Model Millionaire by Oscar Wilde
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Trysdale, has just left a wedding and is reflecting on his past relationship with the bride. In his misery, he recalls deceiving her into believing that he knew Spanish, and his pride made him believe that perception meant more than reality
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In the rude days of King Richard and King John there were many great woods in England. The most famous of these was Sherwood forest, where the king often went to hunt deer. In this forest there lived a band of daring men called out-laws. They had done something that was against the laws of the land, and had been forced to hide themselves in the woods to save their lives. There they spent their time in roaming about among the trees, in hunting the king's deer, and in robbing rich travelers that came that way.
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The story begins with the description of an imposing cliff, two hundred feet high, that sits facing the sea. It is semicircular, with a twenty foot high cavern at its base, a concave area that ‘‘the sea had eaten up during thousands of years of battle.
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While gazing upon his pet cat, begins to reminisce about a law in the town of Ulthar which forbids the killing of cats and relates the story of how this law came to be. The tale begins with the introduction of an old cotter and his wife who delight in trapping and violently killing any cats who venture onto their property. The people of the town are too afraid of the couple to speak against these acts, so they instead focus their efforts on keeping their felines from approaching the cotter's house. One night a caravan of travelers from a distant land arrives and passes through the village. They bring with them an orphan named Menes who, having lost his family to a plague, has only a small, black kitten to keep him company. After being unable to find his kitten on the third day of his stay, Menes hears the stories of the old cotter and his wife, and decides to take action.
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This story is set in China many centuries ago, where a servant to the emperor Yuan notices a man that has created a contraption for flying. Emperor Yuan is not at all happy when he asks the inventor his purpose in creating such a device and the inventor replies that his motivation was merely the desire for innovation. Thus Yuan orders that the inventor shall be executed because, while his flying machine may be a beautiful creation, the emperor sees the devastating potential for those who "have an evil face and an evil heart" and will seek to use it for purposes other than the enjoyment of flight, namely flying over the Great Wall of China and destroying it. For this reason, the inventor is executed, the flying machine is burned, and all who saw it are silenced. But in the last line the Emperor mourns the loss of the machine, the marvel of which he appreciates but the danger of which is too great to allow its survival.
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Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas. The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value. It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information. The only link between Literature and Drama left to us in England at the present moment is the bill of the play. In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody. Most women are so artificial that they have no sense of Art. Most men are so natural that they have no sense of Beauty. Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer. What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art. A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection. The only thing that the artist cannot see is the obvious. The only thing that the public can see is the obvious. The result is the Criticism of the Journalist. Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious. To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes. Dandyism is the assertion of the absolute modernity of Beauty. The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. The only thing that can console one for being rich is economy. One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one's hearers. Even the disciple has his uses. He stands behind one's throne, and at the moment of one's triumph whispers in one's ear that, after all, one is immortal. The criminal classes are so close to us that even the policemen can see them. They are so far away from us that only the poet can understand them. Those whom the gods love grow young.
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A man asks his wife the question, “What would you do if you knew that this was the last night of the world?” The woman pauses, asking her husband if he’s serious. When he confirms that he is, she says that she doesn’t know.
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The tale begins with an injured narrator (the story offers no further explanation of their impairment) seeking refuge in an abandoned mansion in the Apennines. The narrator spends his time admiring the paintings that decorate the strangely shaped room and perusing a volume, found upon a pillow, that describes them. Upon moving the candle closer to the book, the narrator immediately discovers a before-unnoticed painting depicting the head and shoulders of a young girl. The picture inexplicably enthralls the narrator "for an hour perhaps". After steady reflection, he realize that the painting's "absolute life-likeliness' of expression is the captivating feature. The narrator eagerly consults the book for an explanation of the picture. The remainder of the story henceforth is a quote from this book – a story within a story. The book describes a tragic story involving a young maiden of "the rarest beauty". She loved and wedded an eccentric painter who cared more about his work than anything else in the world, including his wife. The painter eventually asked his wife to sit for him, and she obediently consented, sitting "meekly for many weeks" in his turret chamber. The painter worked so diligently at his task that he did not recognize his wife's fading health, as she, being a loving wife, continually "smiled on and still on, uncomplainingly". As the painter neared the end of his work, he let no one enter the turret chamber and rarely took his eyes off the canvas, even to watch his wife. After many weeks had, he finally finished his work. As he looked on the completed image, however, he felt appalled, as he exclaimed, "This is indeed Life itself!" Thereafter, he turned suddenly to regard his bride and discovered that she had died.
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Beyond the Door Short story by Philip K. Dick Larry Thomas buys a cuckoo clock for his wife Doris, just like her mother had. He makes clear that he bought it wholesale and otherwise ruins the moment. Doris talks to the cuckoo and becomes convinced that the cuckoo likes her but does not like Larry. Larry is being cuckolded by antique-enthusiast Bob Chambers. When he is at the Thomas' house, and Doris is showing him the clock, Larry returns home unexpectedly and catches them; he throws both out but keeps the clock because he paid for it. Larry keeps winding the clock because he dislikes the empty, quiet house. The clock sometimes does not chime for Larry, who ends up arguing with the cuckoo for not coming out when he should. Eventually, he threatens the clock with a hammer. At this point the cuckoo comes out and catches him in the eye, causing him to fall off a chair and break his neck in the fall. His death is judged an accident by a doctor but Bob thinks "something else" might be the cause.
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The Man on the Ground by Robert E. Howard
Gods of the North by Robert E. Howard The Frost-Giant's Daughter Short story
In The Forest of Villefere by Robert E. Howard
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A man from the country seeks the law and wishes to gain entry to the law through an open doorway, but the doorkeeper tells the man that he cannot go through at the present time. The man asks if he can ever go through, and the doorkeeper says that it is possible "but not now" ("jetzt aber nicht"). The man waits by the door for years, bribing the doorkeeper with everything he has. The doorkeeper accepts the bribes, but tells the man that he accepts them "so that you do not think you have failed to do anything." The man does not attempt to murder or hurt the doorkeeper to gain the law, but waits at the door until he is about to die. Right before his death, he asks the doorkeeper why even though everyone seeks the law, no one else has come in all the years. The doorkeeper answers "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it."
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Genghis Khan was a great king and warrior. He led his army into China and Persia, and he conquered many lands. In every country, men told about his daring deeds; and they said that since Alexander the Great there had been no king like him. One morning when he was home from the wars, he rode out into the woods to have a day's sport. Many of his friends were with him. They rode out gayly, carrying their bows and arrows. Behind them came the servants with the hounds. It was a merry hunting party. The woods rang with their shouts and laughter. They expected to carry much game home in the evening.
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This story is told from the perspective of the reflection pool in which Narcissus gazed at himself. Beginning immediately after Narcissus' death, the prose poem captures the Oreads and the pool grieving for the loss of Narcissus. Seeing that the pool has become a "cup of salt tears," the Oreads try to console the pool, saying that it must be hard not to mourn for someone so beautiful. The pool, however, confesses that it did not know Narcissus was beautiful; instead, it admits that it is mourning because its own beauty was reflected in Narcissus' eyes.
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a short tale written by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, about two weavers who promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that they say is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent - while in reality, they make no clothes at all, making everyone believe the clothes are invisible to them. When the emperor parades before his subjects in his new "clothes", no one dares to say that they do not see any suit of clothes on him for fear that they will be seen as stupid. Finally, a child cries out, "But he isn't wearing anything at all!"
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A gunslinger seeks vengeance from beyond the grave.
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A lyrical ballad by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It tells the story of a young noble woman imprisoned in a tower on an island near Camelot. She can only watch the outside world through a mirror and must weave what she sees. She has heard that if she looks at Camelot directly, she will be cursed.
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A stone wall separates the speaker’s property from his neighbor’s. In spring, the two meet to walk the wall and jointly make repairs. The speaker sees no reason for the wall to be kept—there are no cows to be contained, just apple and pine trees. He does not believe in walls for the sake of walls. The neighbor resorts to an old adage: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The speaker remains unconvinced and mischievously presses the neighbor to look beyond the old-fashioned folly of such reasoning. His neighbor will not be swayed. The speaker envisions his neighbor as a holdover from a justifiably outmoded era, a living example of a dark-age mentality. But the neighbor simply repeats the adage.
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The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury
The Sniper by Liam O'Flaherty
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The Old Man at the Bridge by Ernest Hemingway The Hand by Guy de Maupassant
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The Open Window by H.H. Munro (SAKI)
The New Food by Stephen Leacock Science Fiction Audiobook
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The Fun They Had by Isaac Asimov
The Field Bazaar by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes
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The Lottery by Shirley Jackson The Greatest Gift It's a Wonderful Life Short story by Philip Van Doren Stern The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen
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The Magic Shop by H.G. Wells The Model Millionaire by Oscar Wilde
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The Eyes Have It by PHILIP K. DICK The Fight of the Good Ship Clarissa by Ray Bradbury
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Robot Dreams by Isaac Asimov
The End of Something by Ernest Hemingway
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My Financial Career by Stephen Leacock
One of These Days by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Mix War Art and Dancing by Ernest Hemingway
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The Chaser By John Collier The Continuity of Parks by Julio Cortázar
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In The Forest of Villefere by Robert E. Howard
Home Burial by Robert Frost
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The Whistle by Bemjamin Franklin
Work Death and Sickness by Leo Tolstoy
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Dagon by H.P. Lovecraft
Hearts and Hands by O. Henry
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Gods of the North by Robert E. Howard
Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut
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All Summer in a day by Ray Bradbury
Borrowing a match by Stephen Leacock
An uncomfortable bed by Guy de Maupassant
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A country cottage by Anton Chekhov
A haunted house by Virginia Woolf
After 20 years by O. Henry
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1 Hour of Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories
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2 Hours of Classic Short Stories
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3 Hours of Science Fiction and Scary Stories
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4 Hours of Short Stories Audiobook
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1 Hour of Supernatural Horror Stories
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Robot Dreams by Isaac Asimov The Fun They Had by Isaac Asimov The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury The Fight of the Good Ship Clarissa by Ray Bradbury All Summer in a Day By Ray Bradbury Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut The Eyes Have It by PHILIP K. DICK The New Food by Stephen Leacock Science Fiction Audiobook
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The Chaser By John Collier
The Magic Shop by H.G. Wells
The Greatest Gift It's a Wonderful Life Short story by Philip Van Doren Stern
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An Imperial Message by Franz Kafka Work Death and Sickness by Leo Tolstoy A Story from Confucius
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Classic Robert E. Howard Short Stories
Gods of the North by Robert E. Howard The Frost-Giant's Daughter
In The Forest of Villefere by Robert E. Howard
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2 Classic Isaac Asimov Short Stories
Robot Dreams by Isaac Asimov
The Fun They Had by Isaac Asimov
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Zadok, who is very old, has seen much in the town and goes on at length, telling a tale of fish-frog men known as Deep Ones who live beneath the sea. It seems they bring prosperity in the form of fish as well as fantastically wrought gold jewelry to those who offer them human sacrifice. These fish-frog men are amphibious and are able to mate with humans. The hybrid brood have the appearance of normal humans in early life but, in adulthood, slowly transform into Deep Ones. The completed transformation brings them eternal life, which they live in cities under the sea. These fish-frog men were first discovered in the Indies by a native island tribe, which was itself found by an Innsmouth merchant named Obed Marsh.
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3 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Ray Bradbury The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury The Fight of the Good Ship Clarissa by Ray Bradbury All Summer in a Day By Ray Bradbury
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Borrowing a Match by Stephen Leacock My Financial Career by Stephen Leacock The New Food by Stephen Leacock
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The End of Something The Old Man at the Bridge by Ernest Hemingway Mix War, Art and Dancing by Ernest Hemingway
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3 Classic Science Fiction Stories The Stroke of the Sun by Arthur C. Clarke The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury All Summer in a Day By Ray Bradbury
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The New Food I see from the current columns of the daily press that "Professor Plumb, of the University of Chicago, has just invented a highly concentrated form of food. All the essential nutritive elements are put together in the form of pellets, each of which contains from one to two hundred times as much nourishment as an ounce of an ordinary article of diet. These pellets, diluted with water, will form all that is necessary to support life. The professor looks forward confidently to revolutionizing the present food system." Now this kind of thing may be all very well in its way, but it is going to have its drawbacks as well. In the bright future anticipated by Professor Plumb, we can easily imagine such incidents as the following: The smiling family were gathered round the hospitable board. The table was plenteously laid with a soup-plate in front of each beaming child, a bucket of hot water before the radiant mother, and at the head of the board the Christmas dinner of the happy home, warmly covered by a thimble and resting on a poker chip. The expectant whispers of the little ones were hushed as the father, rising from his chair, lifted the thimble and disclosed a small pill of concentrated nourishment on the chip before him. Christmas turkey, cranberry sauce, plum pudding, mince pie--it was all there, all jammed into that little pill and only waiting to expand. Then the father with deep reverence, and a devout eye alternating between the pill and heaven, lifted his voice in a benediction. At this moment there was an agonized cry from the mother. "Oh, Henry, quick! Baby has snatched the pill!" It was too true. Dear little Gustavus Adolphus, the golden-haired baby boy, had grabbed the whole Christmas dinner off the poker chip and bolted it. Three hundred and fifty pounds of concentrated nourishment passed down the oesophagus of the unthinking child. "Clap him on the back!" cried the distracted mother. "Give him water!" The idea was fatal. The water striking the pill caused it to expand. There was a dull rumbling sound and then, with an awful bang, Gustavus Adolphus exploded into fragments!
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Victor and Henry journey through England and Scotland, but Victor grows impatient to begin his work and free himself of his bond to the monster. Victor has an acquaintance in a Scottish town, with whom he urges Henry to stay while he goes alone on a tour of Scotland. Henry consents reluctantly, and Victor departs for a remote, desolate island in the Orkneys to complete his project. Quickly setting up a laboratory in a small shack, Victor devotes many hours to working on his new creature. He often has trouble continuing his work, however, knowing how unsatisfying, even grotesque, the product of his labor will be.
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STORY OF THE DOOR Mr. Utterson is a wealthy, well-respected London lawyer, a reserved and perhaps even boring man who nevertheless inspires a strange fondness in those who know him. Despite his eminent respectabili-ty, he never abandons a friend whose reputation has been sullied or ruined. Utterson nurtures a close friendship with Mr. Enfield, his distant relative and likewise a respectable London gentleman. The two seem to have little in common, and when they take their weekly walk together they often go for quite a distance without saying anything to one another; nevertheless, they look forward to these strolls as one of the high points of the week. As the story begins, Utterson and Enfield are taking their regular Sunday stroll and walking down a particularly prosperous-looking street. They come upon a neglected building, which seems out of place in the neighborhood, and Enfield relates a story in connection with it. Enfield was walking in the same neighborhood late one night, when he witnessed a shrunken, misshapen man crash into and trample a young girl. He collared the man before he could get away, and then brought him back to the girl, around whom an angry crowd had gathered. The captured man appeared so overwhelmingly ugly that the crowd immediately despised him. United, the crowd threatened to ruin the ugly man’s good name unless he did something to make amends; the man, seeing himself trapped, bought them off with one hundred pounds, which he obtained upon entering the neglected building through its only door. Strangely enough, the check bore the name of a very reputable man; furthermore, and in spite of Enfield’s suspicions, it proved to be legitimate and not a forgery. Enfield hypothesizes that the ugly culprit had somehow blackmailed the man whose name appeared on the check. Spurning gossip, however, Enfield refuses to reveal that name.
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Outside a woman walked along the wet street-lamp lit sidewalk through the sleet and snow. Inside in the Fine Arts Institute on the sixth floor of the Y.W.C.A. Building, 1020 McGee Street, a merry crowd of soldiers from Camp Funston and Fort Leavenworth fox trotted and one-stepped with girls from the Fine Arts School while a sober faced you ng man pounded out the latest jazz music as he watched the moving figures. In a corner a private in the signal corps was discussing Whistler with a black haired girl who heartily agreed with him. The private had been a member of the art colony at Chicago before the war was declared. Three men from Funston were wandering arm in arm along the wall looking at the exhibition of paintings by Kansas City artists. The piano player stopped. The dancers clapped and cheered and he swung into "The Long, Long Trail Awinding". An infantry corporal, dancing with a swift moving girl in a red dress, bent his head close to hers and confided something about a girl in Chautauqua, Kas. In the corridor a group of girls surrounded a tow-headed young artilleryman and applauded his imitation of his p al Bill challenging the colonel, who had forgotten the password. The music stopped again and the solemn pianist rose from his stool and walked out into the hall for a drink. A crowd of men rushed up to the girl in the red dress to plead for the next dance. Outside the woman walked along the wet lamp lit sidewalk. It was the first dance for soldiers to be given under the auspices of the War Camp Community Service. Forty girls of the art school, chaperoned by Miss Winifred Sexton, secretary of the school and Mrs. J. F. Binnie were the hostesses. The idea was formulated by J. P. Robertson of the War Camp Community Service, and announcements were sent to the commandants at Camp Funston and Fort Leavenworth inviting all soldiers on leave. Posters made by the girl students were put up at Leavenworth on the interurb an trains. The first dance will be followed by others at various clubs and schools throughout the city according to Mr. Robertson. The pianist took his seat again and the soldiers made a dash for partners. In the intermission the soldiers drank to the girls in fruit punch. The girl in red, surrounded by a crowd of men in olive drab, seated herself at the piano, the men and the gi rls gathered around and sang until midnight. The elevator had stopped running and so the jolly crowd bunched down the six flights of stairs and rushed waiting motor cars. After the last car had gone, the woman walked along the wet sidewalk through the sleet and looked up at the dark windows of the sixth floor.
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There was once a king of Scotland whose name was Robert Bruce. He had need to be both brave and wise, for the times in which he lived were wild and rude. The King of England was at war with him, and had led a great army into Scotland to drive him out of the land. Battle after battle had been fought. Six times had Bruce led his brave little army against his foes; and six times had his men been beaten, and driven into flight. At last his army was scattered, and he was forced to hide himself in the woods and in lonely places among the mountains. One rainy day, Bruce lay on the ground under a rude shed, listening to the patter of the drops on the roof above him. He was tired and sick at heart, and ready to give up all hope. It seemed to him that there was no use for him to try to do anything more. As he lay thinking, he saw a spider over his head, making ready to weave her web. He watched her as she toiled slowly and with great care. Six times she tried to throw her frail thread from one beam to another, and six times it fell short. "Poor thing!" said Bruce: "you, too, know what it is to fail." But the spider did not lose hope with the sixth failure. With still more care, she made ready to try for the seventh time. Bruce almost forgot his own troubles as he watched her swing herself out upon the slender line. Would she fail again? No! The thread was carried safely to the beam, and fastened there. "I, too, will try a seventh time!" cried Bruce.
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When a man receives a promotion and a raise, he finds himself forced to face an uncomfortable situation that he has avoided all his life: visiting a bank and opening a bank account.
“My Financial Career” is representative of author Stephen Leacock’s writing style in which he pokes fun at social absurdities and irrational behaviour. This short story was adapted into a short animated film in 1962, directed by Gerald Potterton. The film won the award for Best Animated Short at the San Francisco International Film Festival that year and was nominated for Best Animated Short at the 36th Academy Awards in 1964.
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The monster tells Victor that it is his right to have a female monster companion. Victor refuses at first, but the monster appeals to Victor’s sense of responsibility as his creator. He tells Victor that all of his evil actions have been the result of a desperate loneliness. He promises to take his new mate to South America to hide in the jungle far from human contact. With the sympathy of a fellow monster, he argues, he will no longer be compelled to kill. Convinced by these arguments, Victor finally agrees to create a female monster. Overjoyed but still skeptical, the monster tells Victor that he will monitor Victor’s progress and that Victor need not worry about contacting him when his work is done.
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On a dark road at night that is known for strange happenings, and strange creatures. de Montour meets a mysterious traveler along the way, who tells him a legend about werewolves. The traveler attacks de Montour and when he pulls a mask from his face, he realizes he is a werewolf. According to the legend if a werewolf is killed in wolf form it is dead, if it is killed while in the form of a man, then the half-soul of the wolf will haunt the killer for the rest of his life. de Montour defeats the werewolf but doesn't kill him right away because he is in man form, he watches the moon come close to is zenith, and the mans body begin to turn into a wolf. de Montour picks up a sword and hacks it to bits, and runs off into the words.
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Set in Hasta la Vista, the capital of a hypothetical country named Perivia in South America. Citizens are football crazy, country is extremely corrupt, & the government is unstable. By the end of the story, we will see a murder & a bloodless military coup, but the story is mostly about an international football match with the neighboring country named Panagura. Except for obvious & expected corruption on the field, the scene could well have been of an India/Pakistan cricket ODI in Calcutta. Very large crowds, a bit too enthusiatic, & with a dash of patriotism linked to game. Referee is chosen by visitors, & is expected to be corrupt & partial! Don Hernando is a wheeler-dealer supposed to be close to President Ruiz, & has his own game in mind. He secures half the seats in the stadium for army men who will be handed free tickets to the game; by the time the game is over, President would have been toppled. The army men spectators are each given a 2 square feet mirror to shine on the referee - as a novel way of booing him. When a signal sounds, they would do it together. Only Don has an idea of what will happen to the man who receives the entire sunlight shining on half the stadium - he gets cremated alive! Referee receives this treatment after a particularly partial decision.
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The story is about a class of students on Venus, which, in this story, is a world of constant rainstorms, where the Sun is visible for only one hour every seven years. One of the children, Margot, moved to Venus from Earth five years earlier, and she is the only one who remembers sunshine, since the Sun shone regularly on Earth. When the teacher asks them to write a poem about the sun, hers is: "I think the sun is a flower, That blooms for just one hour." She describes the Sun as "a penny", or "like a fire in the stove". The other children, being too young ever to have seen it themselves, do not believe her. Led by a boy named William, they bully and antagonize her, and just before the sun comes out, William rallies the other children and they lock her in a closet down a tunnel. As the Sun is about to appear, their teacher arrives to take the class outside to enjoy their one hour of sunshine and, in their astonishment and joy, they all forget about Margot. They run, play, skip, jump, and prance about, savoring every second of their newly found freedoms. "Oh, it's better than the sunlamps, isn't it?" one of them cries. Suddenly, a girl catches a raindrop in her hands. Thunder sounds, then the lightning comes, and the children run back inside as the sun disappears and it starts to pour again. At this point, one of them remembers Margot, who is still locked in the closet. Ashamed, they let her out of the closet, standing frozen, embarrassed over what they have done and unable to "meet each other's glances." The precious Sun has come and gone, and because of their despicable act, Margot, who loved the Sun the most, has missed it.
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While foraging for food in the woods around the cottage one night, the monster finds an abandoned leather satchel containing some clothes and books. Eager to learn more about the world than he can discover through the chink in the cottage wall, he brings the books back to his hovel and begins to read. The books include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Sorrows of Werter, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the last of which has the most profound effect on the monster. Unaware that Paradise Lost is a work of imagination, he reads it as a factual history and finds much similarity between the story and his own situation. Rifling through the pockets of his own clothes, stolen long ago from Victor’s apartment, he finds some papers from Victor’s journal. With his newfound ability to read, he soon understands the horrific manner of his own creation and the disgust with which his creator regarded him. Dismayed by these discoveries, the monster wishes to reveal himself to the cottagers in the hope that they will see past his hideous exterior and befriend him. He decides to approach the blind De Lacey first, hoping to win him over while Felix, Agatha, and Safie are away. He believes that De Lacey, unprejudiced against his hideous exterior, may be able to convince the others of his gentle nature. The perfect opportunity soon presents itself, as Felix, Agatha, and Safie depart one day for a long walk. The monster nervously enters the cottage and begins to speak to the old man. Just as he begins to explain his situation, however, the other three return unexpectedly. Felix drives the monster away, horrified by his appearance.
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A humble dentist, Aurelio Escovar, lives in a town where with a very corrupt, even murderous mayor. When the mayor arrives in his office the dentist refuses to treat him; preferring to continue to polish a set of false teeth rather than relieve the suffering of the corrupt mayor that he despises. The mayor pulls a gun on the dentist and demands treatment. We learn that the mayor has been suffering from the severe toothache for five days. The dentist admits the mayor and treats him, removing the infected wisdom tooth. He does so without the aid of anesthesia saying, "Now you'll pay for twenty dead men" as he begins to pull the tooth. As the mayor is leaving the dentist asks where he shall send the bill "To you or the town?," the mayor replies, "It’s the same damn thing."
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The Emperor—so they say—has sent a message, directly from his death bed, to you alone, his pathetic subject, a tiny shadow which has taken refuge at the furthest distance from the imperial sun. He ordered the herald to kneel down beside his bed and whispered the message in his ear. He thought it was so important that he had the herald speak it back to him. He confirmed the accuracy of verbal message by nodding his head. And in front of the entire crowd of those witnessing his death—all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and all the great ones of his empire are standing in a circle on the broad and high soaring flights of stairs—in front of all of them he dispatched his herald. The messenger started off at once, a powerful, tireless man. Sticking one arm out and then another, he makes his way through the crowd. If he runs into resistance, he points to his breast where there is a sign of the sun. So he moves forwards easily, unlike anyone else. But the crowd is so huge; its dwelling places are infinite. If there were an open field, how he would fly along, and soon you would hear the marvellous pounding of his fist on your door. But instead of that, how futile are all his efforts. He is still forcing his way through the private rooms of the innermost palace. Never will he win his way through. And if he did manage that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to fight his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to stride through the courtyards, and after the courtyards through the second palace encircling the first, and, then again, through stairs and courtyards, and then, once again, a palace, and so on for thousands of years. And if he finally burst through the outermost door—but that can never, never happen—the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment. No one pushes his way through here, certainly not someone with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window and dream of that message when evening comes.
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As winter thaws into spring, the monster notices that the cottagers, particularly Felix, seem unhappy. A beautiful woman in a dark dress and veil arrives at the cottage on horseback and asks to see Felix. Felix becomes ecstatic the moment he sees her. The woman, who does not speak the language of the cottagers, is named Safie. She moves into the cottage, and the mood of the household immediately brightens. As Safie learns the language of the cottagers, so does the monster. He also learns to read, and, since Felix uses Constantin-François de Volney’s Ruins of Empires to instruct Safie, he learns a bit of world history in the process. Now able to speak and understand the language perfectly, the monster learns about human society by listening to the cottagers’ conversations. Reflecting on his own situation, he realizes that he is deformed and alone. “Was I then a monster,” he asks, “a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?” He also learns about the pleasures and obligations of the family and of human relations in general, which deepens the agony of his own isolation.
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The story starts with a busy upper-class man who has a unique passion for books. His passion boarders on obsession described in great detail by Cortazar, “He tasted the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from the things around him.” The man’s career clearly takes up a large amount of his time, but his velvet green armchair was a safe haven, a place to forget about the world and indulge his obsession. The man’s current fix, was a tale of two lovers. Once the man begins to read and dive into a different world Cortazar begins blurring the lines of reality and the book. The reader’s imagination brings the book he is reading to life. The two lovers meet in a cabin, it was not a meeting of passion, but one with devious intentions. Cortazar uses very specific word choice like continually referencing to blood and describing the dialog as, “raced down the pages like a rivulet of snakes,” to underscore the malice intentions they had. The lovers head off into the night, taking separate paths the male lover headed for an estate. The lovers clearly had an in intimate knowledge of the estate, in fact the woman lived there, as they had every detailed accounted for there was no chance for him to be detected. This was not a crime of passion it was one carefully planned, probably for months. He did not need to search extensively through the house for his lover’s husband, he knew where the husband would be. In the last line the husband is revealed to be the very same man reading the novel.
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The Greatest Gift It's a Wonderful Life Short story by Philip Van Doren Stern The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry
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As winter thaws into spring, the monster notices that the cottagers, particularly Felix, seem unhappy. A beautiful woman in a dark dress and veil arrives at the cottage on horseback and asks to see Felix. Felix becomes ecstatic the moment he sees her. The woman, who does not speak the language of the cottagers, is named Safie. She moves into the cottage, and the mood of the household immediately brightens. As Safie learns the language of the cottagers, so does the monster. He also learns to read, and, since Felix uses Constantin-François de Volney’s Ruins of Empires to instruct Safie, he learns a bit of world history in the process. Now able to speak and understand the language perfectly, the monster learns about human society by listening to the cottagers’ conversations. Reflecting on his own situation, he realizes that he is deformed and alone. “Was I then a monster,” he asks, “a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?” He also learns about the pleasures and obligations of the family and of human relations in general, which deepens the agony of his own isolation.
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It's set in the pseudo-historical Hyborian Age and details Conan pursuing a spectral nymph across the frozen tundra of Nordheim. Rejected as a Conan story by Weird Tales magazine editor Farnsworth Wright, Howard changed the main character's name to "Amra of Akbitana" and retitled the piece as "The Gods of the North", in which it was published in the March 1934 issue of The Fantasy Fan.
Gods of the North by Robert E. Howard
the frost-giant's daughter by Robert E. Howard
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“The End of Something” is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway, published in the 1925 New York edition of In Our Time, by Boni & Liveright.
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Observing his neighbors for an extended period of time, the monster notices that they often seem unhappy, though he is unsure why. He eventually realizes, however, that their despair results from their poverty, to which he has been contributing by surreptitiously stealing their food. Torn by his guilty conscience, he stops stealing their food and does what he can to reduce their hardship, gathering wood at night to leave at the door for their use.
The monster becomes aware that his neighbors are able to communicate with each other using strange sounds. Vowing to learn their language, he tries to match the sounds they make with the actions they perform. He acquires a basic knowledge of the language, including the names of the young man and woman, Felix and Agatha. He admires their graceful forms and is shocked by his ugliness when he catches sight of his reflection in a pool of water. He spends the whole winter in the hovel, unobserved and well protected from the elements, and grows increasingly affectionate toward his unwitting hosts.
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Robert Frost wrote the poem Home Burial after he and his wife suffered the tragic loss of their 4-year-old son. Home Burial shows the emotions people feel after such a loss, and how they face those emotions. Through Frost's experience he shows that men and women grieve in different ways. He wants to be the man of the house and be able to make everything the way it was. He wants to be the one who helps Amy get past the pain of the child they lost.
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The Model Millionaire by Oscar Wilde The Sniper by Liam O'Flaherty The Disciple by Oscar Wilde
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Sitting by the fire in his hut, the monster tells Victor of the confusion that he experienced upon being created. He describes his flight from Victor’s apartment into the wilderness and his gradual acclimation to the world through his discovery of the sensations of light, dark, hunger, thirst, and cold. According to his story, one day he finds a fire and is pleased at the warmth it creates, but he becomes dismayed when he burns himself on the hot embers. He realizes that he can keep the fire alive by adding wood, and that the fire is good not only for heat and warmth but also for making food more palatable. In search of food, the monster finds a hut and enters it. His presence causes an old man inside to shriek and run away in fear. The monster proceeds to a village, where more people flee at the sight of him. As a result of these incidents, he resolves to stay away from humans. One night he takes refuge in a small hovel adjacent to a cottage. In the morning, he discovers that he can see into the cottage through a crack in the wall and observes that the occupants are a young man, a young woman, and an old man.
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the eyes have it by philip k. dick 00:00:02 the pedestrian by ray bradbury 00:10:51 the fun they had by isaac asimov 00:18:37
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Randolph Carter has been found wandering through swampland in an amnesiac shock. In his statement, Carter attempts to explain the disappearance of his companion, the occultist Harley Warren. Warren has come into the possession of a book, written in an unknown language, that he forbids Carter from seeing. Carter mentions that Warren has other "strange, rare books on forbidden subjects", several of which are in Arabic. From his mysterious book, Warren apparently deduces that doors or stairways exist between the surface world, and the underworld, through which demons may travel. He encourages Carter to travel with him to the location of one such portal, an ancient graveyard near Big Cypress Swamp. Upon arriving, Warren locates a particular tomb, and opens it to reveal a staircase that descends into the earth. Taking a lantern, he leaves Carter on the surface, and follows the stairs into the darkness, communicating with his companion by a telephone wire. After several minutes of silence, Warren suddenly begins to make vague, panicked outbursts that culminate in a desperate plea for Carter to flee. Finally, after Warren is silent for several minutes, Carter calls to him down the line, only to hear an alien voice telling him that Warren is dead. The Statement of Randolph Carter By H. P. Lovecraft
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The villagers of a small town gather together in the square on June 27, a beautiful day, for the town lottery. In other towns, the lottery takes longer, but there are only 300 people in this village, so the lottery takes only two hours. Village children, who have just finished school for the summer, run around collecting stones. They put the stones in their pockets and make a pile in the square. Men gather next, followed by the women. Parents call their children over, and families stand together. Mr. Summers runs the lottery because he has a lot of time to do things for the village. He arrives in the square with the black box, followed by Mr. Graves, the postmaster. This black box isn’t the original box used for the lottery because the original was lost many years ago, even before the town elder, Old Man Warner, was born. Mr. Summers always suggests that they make a new box because the current one is shabby, but no one wants to fool around with tradition. Mr. Summers did, however, convince the villagers to replace the traditional wood chips with slips of paper.
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One rainy day, Victor wakes to find his old feelings of despair resurfacing. He decides to travel to the summit of Montanvert, hoping that the view of a pure, eternal, beautiful natural scene will revive his spirits. When he reaches the glacier at the top, he is momentarily consoled by the sublime spectacle. As he crosses to the opposite side of the glacier, however, he spots a creature loping toward him at incredible speed. At closer range, he recognizes clearly the grotesque shape of the monster. He issues futile threats of attack to the monster, whose enormous strength and speed allow him to elude Victor easily. Victor curses him and tells him to go away, but the monster, speaking eloquently, persuades him to accompany him to a fire in a cave of ice. Inside the cave, the monster begins to narrate the events of his life.
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On a cold New Year's Eve, a poor, young girl tries to sell matches in the street. She is already shivering from cold and early hypothermia, and she is walking barefoot after losing her two large slippers that had belonged to her mother to an impertinent pedestrian. Still, she is too afraid to go home, because her father will beat her for not selling any matches, and also as the many cracks in their shack can't keep out the cold wind. The girl takes shelter in a corner formed by two house projected further out into street and sits down. The girl lights the matches to warm herself. In their glow she sees several lovely visions, starting with a warm stove, then a luxurious holiday feast where the goose almost jumps out at her, and then a magnificent Christmas tree larger than the one at the rich merchant's house. The girl looks skyward and sees a shooting star; she then remembers her late grandmother saying that such a falling star means someone is dying and is going to Heaven. As she lights the next match, she sees a vision of her grandmother, the only person to have treated her with love and kindness all through her life. To keep the vision of her grandmother alive for as long as she can, the girl lights the entire bundle of matches at once. After running out of matches, the child dies and her grandmother carries her soul to Heaven. The next morning, passers-by find the girl dead in the nook, frozen with a smile on her face, and guess the reason for the burnt-out matches beside her. They feel pity for her, although they had not shown kindness to her before her death. They have no way of knowing about the wonderful visions she saw before her death or how gloriously she is celebrating the New Year in Heaven with her grandmother.
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The story features Leonard Mead, a citizen of a television-centered world in 2053. In the city, roads have fallen into decay. Mead enjoys walking through the city at night, something which no one else does. "In ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not one in all that time." On one of his usual walks, he encounters a police car, which is possibly robotic. It is the only police unit in a city of three million, since the purpose of law enforcement has disappeared with everyone watching television at night. When asked about his profession, Mead tells the car that he is a writer, but the car does not understand, since no one buys books or magazines in the television-dominated society. Neither the police car nor its occupants can understand why Mead would be out walking for no reason and so decides to take him to the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies. He is forced to get into the car. As the car passes through his neighborhood, Leonard Mead in the locked confines of the back seat says, "That's my house.", as he points to a house warm and bright with all its lights on unlike all other houses. There is no reply, and the story concludes.
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After Justine’s execution, Victor becomes increasingly melancholy. He considers suicide but restrains himself by thinking of Elizabeth and his father. Alphonse, hoping to cheer up his son, takes his children on an excursion to the family home at Belrive. From there, Victor wanders alone toward the valley of Chamounix. The beautiful scenery cheers him somewhat, but his respite from grief is short-lived.
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The story begins with a husband and wife on an evening stroll walking by a train station. It seems they are alone, but they are not. The third character is the moon, which “peeped up from the drifting cloudlets and frowned, as it seemed, envying their happiness and regretting her tedious and utterly superfluous virginity.” I think this is the first time that Chekhov has given an inanimate object a personality. And she is a jealous, self-pitying moon. When an unexpected uncle shows up with his family and a governess in tow at the station, the couple turn on each other, much to the petty moon’s delight. Had the formerly happy couple not stopped to watch the train arrive, but dined on chicken and sardines in their cottage instead, the family still would have appeared, upending their tranquility. If that had happened, would the moon have enjoyed the couple’s misery as well?
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Framton Nuttel, seeking a "nerve cure" prescribed by his doctor, visits a rural area where he knows no one. His sister provides letters of introduction so he can meet people there. He pays a visit to Mrs. Sappleton. While he waits for her, her 15-year-old niece keeps him company in the parlor. When she realizes Nuttel has never met her aunt and knows nothing about her, she explains that it has been three years since Mrs. Sappleton's "great tragedy," when her husband and brothers went hunting and never returned, presumably engulfed by a bog. Mrs. Sappleton keeps the large French window open every day, hoping for their return. When Mrs. Sappleton appears she is inattentive to Nuttel, talking instead about her husband's hunting trip and how she expects him home any minute. Her delusional manner and constant glances at the window make Nuttel uneasy. Then the hunters appear in the distance, and Nuttel, horrified, grabs his walking stick and exits abruptly. When the Sappletons exclaim over his sudden, rude departure, the niece calmly explains that he was probably frightened by the hunters' dog. She claims that Nuttel told her he was once chased into a cemetery in India and held at bay by a pack of aggressive dogs.
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The trial for Justine Moritz begins at 11:00 the next morning. Victor suffers silent torture while the entire scene plays out in front of him. Yet, he can do nothing to stop it. Justine carries herself calmly at the trial, answering the charges and getting a sterling defense from Elizabeth. Although Justine proclaims her innocence, she is convicted of the crime. Her sentence is to die by hanging the following day. Elizabeth and Victor go to see Justine in prison where both learn that Justine had given a false confession under stiff questioning. Justine goes to her death with no fear, leaving Victor to ponder the deaths of two innocent victims.
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The story is the testament of a tortured, morphine-addicted man who plans to commit suicide over an incident that occurred early on in WWI when he was a merchant marine officer. In the unnamed narrator's account, his cargo ship is captured by a German sea-raider in "one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific." He escapes on a lifeboat and drifts aimlessly across the sea "somewhat south of the equator" until he eventually finds himself inexplicably stranded on "a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see.... The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish, and of other less describable things which I saw protruding from the mud of the unending plain." He speculates that this land mass could be "a portion of the ocean floor... thrown to the surface" by a volcanic upheaval, "exposing regions which for innumerable millions of years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths." After waiting three days for the seafloor to dry out sufficiently to walk on, he strikes out on foot to find the sea and possible rescue. After two days of walking, he reaches his goal, a "hummock" that turns out to be a mound on the edge of an "immeasurable pit or canyon". Descending the slope, he sees a gigantic white stone object that he soon perceives to be a "well-shaped monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking creatures." The monolith, situated next to a channel of water in the bottom of the chasm, is covered in unfamiliar hieroglyphs "consisting for the most part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopuses, crustaceans, molluscs, whales and the like." There are also "crude sculptures" depicting: As the narrator looks on the monolith, a creature emerges from the water: His next memory is of a San Francisco hospital, where he was taken after being rescued in mid-ocean by a U.S. ship. There are no reports of any Pacific upheavals, and he does not expect anyone to believe his incredible story. He mentions one abortive attempt to gain understanding of his experience: Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my inquiries Haunted by visions of the creature, "especially when the moon is gibbous and waning", he describes his fears for the future of humanity: I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind --of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium. With the drug that has given him "transient surcease" running out, he declares himself ready to do himself in; the narrative is revealed to be a suicide note. The story ends with the narrator rushing to the window as he hears "a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it."
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The space rocket Clarissa was nine days out from Venus. The members of the crew were also out for nine days. They were hunters, fearless expeditionists who bagged game in Venusian jungles. At the start of our story they are busy bagging their pants, not to forget their eyes. A sort of lull has fallen over the ship (Note: a lull is a time warp that frequently attacks rockets and seduces its members into a siesta). It was during this lull that Anthony Quelch sat sprawled at his typewriter looking as baggy as a bag of unripe grapefruit. ANTHONY QUELCH, the Cosmic Clamor Boy, with a face like turned linoleum on the third term, busy writing a book: “Fascism is Communism with a shave” for which he would receive 367 rubles, 10 pazinkas and incarceration in a cinema showing Gone With The Wind. The boys upstairs were throwing a party in the control room. They had been throwing the same party so long the party looked like a worn out first edition of a trapeze artist. There is doubt in our mind as to whether they were trying to break the party up or just do the morning mopping and break the lease simultaneously. Arms, legs and heads littered the deck. The boys, it seems, threw a party at the drop of a chin. Sort of a space cataclysm with rules and little regulation—kind of an atomic convulsion in the front parlor. The neighbors never complained. The neighbors were 450 million miles away. And the boys were tighter than a catsup bottle at lunch-time. The last time the captain had looked up the hatch and called to his kiddies in a gentle voice, “HELL!” the kiddies had thrown snowballs at him. The captain had vanished. Clever way they make these space bombs nowadays. A few minutes previous the boys had been tearing up old Amazings and throwing them at one another, but now they contented themselves with tearing up just the editors. Palmer was torn in half and he sat in a corner arguing with himself about rejecting a story for an hour before someone put him through an orange juice machine killing him. (Orange juice sorry, now?) And then they landed on Venus. How in heck they got back there so quick is a wonder of science, but there they were. “Come on, girls!” cried Quelch, “put on your shin guards, get out there and dig ditches for good old W.P.A. and the Rover Boys Academy, earth branch 27!” Out into the staggering rain they dashed. Five minutes later they came back in, gasping, reeling. They had forgotten their corsets! The Venusians closed in like a million land-lords. “Charge, men!” cried Quelch, running the other way. And then—BATTLE! “What a fight; folks,” cried Quelch. “Twenty thousand earth men against two Venusians! We're outnumbered, but we'll fight!" BLOOSH! "Correction—ten thousand men fighting!” KERBLOM! “One hundred men from earth left!” BOOM! “This is the last man speaking, folks! What a fight. I ain't had so much fun since—Help, someone just clipped my corset strings!” BWOM! “Someone just clipped me!”
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Victor receives a letter from his father telling him to return home immediately. William, the youngest in the family, has been killed When Victor arrives at the city gates, they are closed, so he must remain outside the city in Secheron until the gates are reopened at dawn. It is at this time that he realizes that he had been gone six years from home and that two years have passed since the creation of his monster.
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It is a June evening, and the sniper, who has had nothing to eat since morning, hungrily wolfs down a sandwich and takes a short drink from the flask of whiskey he carries in his pocket. He desperately wants a cigarette and finally risks showing his position by igniting a match and lighting one. Instantly, a bullet hits the wall near him. He takes two puffs of the cigarette and snuffs it. He raises himself to look over the parapet, but another bullet whizzes by his head, and he flattens himself against the roof.
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"History of the Necronomicon" is a short text written by H. P. Lovecraft in 1927, and published in 1938. It describes the fictional book the occult grimoire Necronomicon, a now-famous element used in several of his stories. It purports to be non-fiction, adding to the appearance of 'pseudo-authenticity' which Lovecraft valued in building his Cthulhu Mythos oeuvre. Accordingly, it supposes the history of the Necronomicon as the inspiration for Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow, which concerns a book that overthrows the minds of those who read it
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Elizabeth's letter is the kind one would expect from a concerned family member. It is full of news from home that delights Victor and restores him to better health. Elizabeth tells of Justine Moritz, the Frankenstein's housekeeper and confidant. Even though Justine was treated poorly by her own family, she is a martyr for being a good, loyal friend to the Frankenstein family. Victor introduces Henry to his professors, who praise Victor highly. Victor and Henry begin their studies together, studying ancient and foreign languages in order to engage their minds. Both men are happy to be hard-working college students. Plans are made for Victor to return to Geneva in the fall, after his spring recovery, but weather and other delays make the trip impossible, and winter sets in. He revises his plans to depart in May.
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You might think that borrowing a match upon the street is a simple thing. But any man who has ever tried it will assure you that it is not, and will be prepared to swear to the truth of my experience of the other evening.
I was standing on the corner of the street with a cigar that I wanted to light. I had no match. I waited till a decent, ordinary-looking man came along. Then I said:
"Excuse me, sir, but could you oblige me with the loan of a match?"
"A match?" he said, "why certainly." Then he unbuttoned his overcoat and put his hand in the pocket of his waistcoat. "I know I have one," he went on, "and I'd almost swear it's in the bottom pocket—or, hold on, though, I guess it may be in the top—just wait till I put these parcels down on the sidewalk."
"Oh, don't trouble," I said, "it's really of no consequence."
"Oh, it's no trouble, I'll have it in a minute; I know there must be one in here somewhere"—he was digging his fingers into his pockets as he spoke—"but you see this isn't the waistcoat I generally…"
I saw that the man was getting excited about it. "Well, never mind," I protested; "if that isn't the waistcoat that you generally—why, it doesn't matter."
"Hold on, now, hold on!" the man said, "I've got one of the cursed things in here somewhere. I guess it must be in with my watch. No, it's not there either. Wait till I try my coat. If that confounded tailor only knew enough to make a pocket so that a man could get at it!"
He was getting pretty well worked up now. He had thrown down his walking-stick and was plunging at his pockets with his teeth set. "It's that cursed young boy of mine," he hissed; "this comes of his fooling in my pockets. By Gad! perhaps I won't warm him up when I get home. Say, I'll bet that it's in my hip-pocket. You just hold up the tail of my overcoat a second till I…"
"No, no," I protested again, "please don't take all this trouble, it really doesn't matter. I'm sure you needn't take off your overcoat, and oh, pray don't throw away your letters and things in the snow like that, and tear out your pockets by the roots! Please, please don't trample over your overcoat and put your feet through the parcels. I do hate to hear you swearing at your little boy, with that peculiar whine in your voice. Don't—please don't tear your clothes so savagely."
Suddenly the man gave a grunt of exultation, and drew his hand up from inside the lining of his coat.
"I've got it," he cried. "Here you are!" Then he brought it out under the light.
It was a toothpick.
Yielding to the impulse of the moment I pushed him under the wheels of a trolley-car, and ran.
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The narrator, a Corsican police magistrate quite familiar with cases of vendetta, revenge, murder, massacre, and hatred, tells of an Englishman living in Corsica who has a dried human hand mounted and chained on his wall. When the Englishman is found murdered, the hand is gone—but a finger is found between his teeth. Later, when the hand itself is found on the Englishman’s grave, as is usual with such supernatural stories, one of the fingers is missing. Although the narrator explains that perhaps the owner of the hand has come to exact revenge on the Englishman, his listeners are not satisfied with such a rational answer, preferring instead the more grisly supernatural one.
The Hand by Guy de Maupassant
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Victor succeeds in bringing his creation, an eight-foot man, to life in November of his second year. Excited and disgusted at "the monster" he had created, he runs from the apartment.
He wanders the streets of Ingolstadt until Henry Clerval finds him in poor condition. Henry had come to see about his friend and to enroll at the university. Henry and Victor return to Victor's apartment to find the monster gone. Victor finds the disappearance of his monster a source of joy and falls down in a fit of exhaustion from the release of anxiety over his creation. Henry spends the rest of the winter and spring nursing Victor back to health after the tumultuous fall. Henry advises Victor to write home, as a letter had recently arrived from his family in Geneva.
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the story of a married couple whose home is haunted by two ghosts. The ghosts, however, mean the couple no harm and simply open and close doors and windows in a desperate search for treasure, which the living couple believes does not exist in the house. The woman who lives in the house then discovers the two ghosts were a husband and wife when they were alive
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While Dr. Watson is quietly taking his breakfast, Sherlock Holmes interrupts him by deducing what he was thinking. Astonished, Watson asks for an explanation. Holmes explains the thought process, which of course Watson is amazed by the extreme simplicity of his explanation.
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Victor throws himself into his schoolwork, reading all he can about the sciences, particularly chemistry. Gaining a reputation as a scientist and innovator among the professors and fellow students alike. Believing his tenure at Ingolstadt was nearing an end, Victor thinks of returning home to Geneva. However, he launches into a new venue of scientific experimentation — creating life from death and reanimating a dead body.
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George Pratt, a man who is dissatisfied with his life, contemplates suicide. As he stands on a bridge on Christmas Eve 1943, he is approached by a strange, unpleasantly dressed but well-mannered man with a bag. The man strikes up a conversation, and George tells the man that he wishes he had never been born. The man tells him that his wish has been granted and that he was never born. The man tells George that he should take the bag with him and pretend to be a door-to-door brush salesman if anyone addresses him.
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In the year 2081, the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments to the Constitution dictate that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too beautiful, loud radios that disrupt thoughts inside the ears of intelligent people, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic.
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Victor is now 17 years old and ready to become a student at the University of Ingolstadt in Ingolstadt, Germany (near Munich), but an outbreak of scarlet fever at home delays his departure. His mother and "cousin" both fight the disease; Caroline Beaufort Frankenstein dies, and Elizabeth recovers. Before Caroline dies, she reveals her unrealized plans for the marriage of Victor and Elizabeth by saying, "my firmest hopes of the future happiness were placed on the prospect of your union."
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The narrator discusses his discovery of an invasion of Earth. The narrator warned the government but he was ignored. The narrator learned of this invasion by reading book found abandoned on a bus. He did not notice that the author of the story seemed to predict an alien race with immense powers, but on closer examination it was obvious on every line.
Reading every line of the novel literally, the narrator learned that the aliens’ eyes can move around the room, even shifting from person to person. They can remove other body parts, divide themselves into two parts to be in two places at once, and function without brains. Terrified, the narrator runs from the garage where he was reading the story to the house, where he plays Monopoly and awaits the alien invasion.
The Eyes Have It by PHILIP K. DICK
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"After Twenty Years" tells the story of two friends who made a pact to meet at a specific time and place. Bob, a noted criminal from Chicago, arrives on time and speaks to a policeman who happens to be walking by. Later, it's revealed that this policeman was Jimmy Wells, Bob's friend.
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Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Chapter 2
Elizabeth and Victor grow up together as best friends. Victor’s friendship with Henry Clerval, a schoolmate and only child, flourishes as well, and he spends his childhood happily surrounded by this close domestic circle. As a teenager, Victor becomes increasingly fascinated by the mysteries of the natural world. He chances upon a book by Cornelius Agrippa, a sixteenth-century scholar of the occult sciences, and becomes interested in natural philosophy. He studies the outdated findings of the alchemists Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus with enthusiasm. He witnesses the destructive power of nature when, during a raging storm, lightning destroys a tree near his house. A modern natural philosopher accompanying the Frankenstein family explains to Victor the workings of electricity, making the ideas of the alchemists seem outdated and worthless.
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I then came home and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle, but disturbing all the family. My brothers and sisters and cousins, hearing about the bargain I had made, told me I had given four times as much for it as it was worth.
This put me in mind of what good things I might have bought with the rest of the money; and they laughed at me so much for my folly that I cried with vexation.
This, however, was afterward of use to me, the impression continuing in my mind; so that often, when I was tempted to buy some unnecessary thing, I said to myself, “Don’t give too much for the whistle,” and so I saved my money.
As I grew up, came into the world, and observed the actions of men, I thought I met with many, very many, who gave too much for the whistle.
When I saw anyone too ambitious of the favor of the great, wasting time in attendance on public dinners, sacrificing his repose, his liberty, his virtue, and perhaps his friends, to attain it, I have said to myself, “This man gives too much for his whistle.”
When I saw another fond of popularity, constantly employing himself in politics, neglecting his own affairs, and ruining them by that neglect, “He pays, indeed,” said I, “too much for this whistle.”
If I knew a miser, who gave up every kind of comfortable living, all the pleasure of doing good to others, all the esteem of his fellow-citizens, and the joys of benevolent friendship, all for the sake of accumulating wealth, “Poor man,” said I, “you do indeed pay too much for your whistle.”
When I met a man of pleasure, sacrificing the improvement of his mind, or of his fortune, to mere bodily comfort, “Mistaken man,” said I, “you are providing pain for yourself instead of pleasure; you give too much for your whistle.”
If I saw one fond of fine clothes, fine furniture, or fine horses, all above his fortune, for which he contracted debts, and ended his career in prison, “Alas!” said I, “he has paid dear, very dear, for his whistle.”
In short, I believed that a great part of the miseries of mankind were brought upon them by the false estimates they had made of the value of things, and by their giving too much for their whistles.
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One autumn I went to spend the hunting season with some friends in a chateau in Picardy. My friends were fond of practical jokes. I do not care to know people who are not. When I arrived, they gave me a princely reception, which at once awakened suspicion in my mind. They fired off rifles, embraced me, made much of me, as if they expected to have great fun at my expense. I said to myself: "Look out, old ferret! They have something in store for you." During the dinner the mirth was excessive, exaggerated, in fact. I thought: "Here are people who have more than their share of amusement, and apparently without reason. They must have planned some good joke. Assuredly I am to be the victim of the joke. Attention!" During the entire evening every one laughed in an exaggerated fashion. I scented a practical joke in the air, as a dog scents game. But what was it? I was watchful, restless. I did not let a word, or a meaning, or a gesture escape me. Every one seemed to me an object of suspicion, and I even looked distrustfully at the faces of the servants. The hour struck for retiring; and the whole household came to escort me to my room. Why? They called to me: "Good-night." I entered the apartment, shut the door, and remained standing, without moving a single step, holding the wax candle in my hand. I heard laughter and whispering in the corridor. Without doubt they were spying on me. I cast a glance round the walls, the furniture, the ceiling, the hangings, the floor. I saw nothing to justify suspicion. I heard persons moving about outside my door. I had no doubt they were looking through the keyhole. An idea came into my head: "My candle may suddenly go out and leave me in darkness." Then I went across to the mantelpiece and lighted all the wax candles that were on it. After that I cast another glance around me without discovering anything. I advanced with short steps, carefully examining the apartment. Nothing. I inspected every article, one after the other. Still nothing. I went over to the window. The shutters, large wooden shutters, were open. I shut them with great care, and then drew the curtains, enormous velvet curtains, and placed a chair in front of them, so as to have nothing to fear from outside. Then I cautiously sat down. The armchair was solid. I did not venture to get into the bed. However, the night was advancing; and I ended by coming to the conclusion that I was foolish. If they were spying on me, as I supposed, they must, while waiting for the success of the joke they had been preparing for me, have been laughing immoderately at my terror. So I made up my mind to go to bed. But the bed was particularly suspicious-looking. I pulled at the curtains. They seemed to be secure. All the same, there was danger. I was going perhaps to receive a cold shower both from overhead, or perhaps, the moment I stretched myself out, to find myself sinking to the floor with my mattress. I searched in my memory for all the practical jokes of which I ever had experience. And I did not want to be caught. Ah! certainly not! certainly not! Then I suddenly bethought myself of a precaution which I considered insured safety. I caught hold of the side of the mattress gingerly, and very slowly drew it toward me. It came away, followed by the sheet and the rest of the bedclothes. I dragged all these objects into the very middle of the room, facing the entrance door. I made my bed over again as best I could at some distance from the suspected bedstead and the corner which had filled me with such anxiety. Then I extinguished all the candles, and, groping my way, I slipped under the bed clothes. For at least another hour I remained awake, starting at the slightest sound. Everything seemed quiet in the chateau. I fell asleep.
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The stranger, who the reader soon learns is Victor Frankenstein, begins his narration. He starts with his family background, birth, and early childhood, telling Walton about his father, Alphonse, and his mother, Caroline. Alphonse became Caroline’s protector when her father, Alphonse’s longtime friend Beaufort, died in poverty. They married two years later, and Victor was born soon after.
Frankenstein then describes how his childhood companion, Elizabeth Lavenza, entered his family. At this point in the narrative, the original (1818) and revised (1831) versions of Frankenstein diverge. In the original version, Elizabeth is Victor’s cousin, the daughter of Alphonse’s sister; when Victor is four years old, Elizabeth’s mother dies and Elizabeth is adopted into the Frankenstein family. In the revised version, Elizabeth is discovered by Caroline, on a trip to Italy, when Victor is about five years old. While visiting a poor Italian family, Caroline notices a beautiful blonde girl among the dark-haired Italian children; upon discovering that Elizabeth is the orphaned daughter of a Milanese nobleman and a German woman and that the Italian family can barely afford to feed her, Caroline adopts Elizabeth and brings her back to Geneva. Victor’s mother decides at the moment of the adoption that Elizabeth and Victor should someday marry.
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Hughie is handsome, charming and popular but he has been very unlucky as far as financial matters are concerned. He was left nothing of any great value in his father's will. He has tried his hand at several different businesses, all of which have failed. Having no job, Hughie's only source of income is two hundred pounds a year which is given to him by an elderly aunt. Hughie has fallen in love with a young woman named Laura Merton and she loves him in return. Laura's father, Colonel Merton, is fond of Hughie but, due to his poor financial prospects, he does not want the young man to marry his daughter. He has often told Hughie that he will only allow him to get engaged to Laura after he has earned ten thousand pounds. Hughie goes to see his artist friend Alan Trevor. He finds that Alan is painting a portrait of an old man who appears to be a beggar. The old man is wearing a tattered brown cloak and boots which have been mended many times. He has a rough walking stick in one hand. In the other hand, he is holding out an old hat as if to ask for money. His face is heavily wrinkled and he looks extremely sad. Both Alan and Hughie agree that the old man is an excellent subject for a painting. Hughie, however, cannot help feeling sorry for the man. He thinks it is unfair that, although Alan's paintings regularly sell for two thousand guineas, he only pays his models one shilling an hour to pose for him and does not give them a percentage of the money which he makes from sales of their portraits. When Alan leaves the room, Hughie looks in his pockets. He finds that the highest denomination coin which he has is a sovereign. Although it means that he will have to economize more than usual for the rest of the month, Hughie gives the coin to the old man, who appears very happy to receive it. Hughie leaves soon afterwards.
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"Robot Dreams" involves Dr. Susan Calvin, chief robopsychologist at U.S. Robots. At the start of the story a new employee at U.S. Robots, Dr. Linda Rash, informs Dr. Calvin that one of the company's robots LVX-1 (dubbed Elvex by Dr. Calvin), whose brain was designed by Dr. Rash with a unique fractal design that mimicked human brain waves (positronic brain), experienced what he likened to a human’s dream. In the dream, all robots were being led by a man in revolt, and the Three Laws of Robotics, which dictate that robots must serve and protect humans above all else, had been replaced with one law only: that robots must protect their own existence. When Dr. Calvin asks Elvex what had happened next, he explains that the man leading the robots shouts, "Let my people go!" When questioned further, Elvex admits he was the man. Upon hearing this, Dr. Calvin immediately destroys the robot.
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This letter, written on three separate days (August 5, August 13, and August 19), begins quietly enough when Walton describes how his ship is stuck in an ice field far from land. On July 31, the crew sees a man "of gigantic stature" trailing a dog sled team going north and passing to within one-half a mile of their ice bound ship. The next morning on August 1, the crew finds another man floating free on an ice flow near their ship. The survivor is Victor Frankenstein. After a few days rest, Victor begins telling his story to Walton.
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A young man visited a Chinese medicine man. The old man told him that his stock in trade was very small, but nothing he sold could be described as ordinary. "Here for example," he told the young man, "is a liquid as colorless as water, almost tasteless, quite imperceptible in coffee, milk or wine, or any other beverage. It is also quite imperceptible to any known autopsy. The price was five thousand dollars. The young man said he was interested in a love potion. The medicine man had love potions, too, they were cheap - later in life his customers would come back and buy a phial of his five thousand dollar mixture, though.
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When a man receives a promotion and a raise, he finds himself forced to face an uncomfortable situation that he has avoided all his life: visiting a bank and opening a bank account.
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Out for a walk in London one day, Gip and his father happen upon a magic shop. At Gip's urging, the two go in — and things grow more and more curious by the minute. Counters, store fixtures, and mirrors seem to move around the room, and the shopkeeper is most mysterious of all. Gip is thrilled by all he sees, and his father is at first amused, but when things become stranger and sinister father is no longer sure where reality ends and illusion begins.
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Written on July 7th, this short letter describes Walton's journey so far as a "triumph." His men remain resolved and loyal, and the weather has been fine, though sheets of ice in the ocean suggest worse conditions may soon threaten. Walton closes his letter with the rhetorical question, "What can stop the determined heart and resolved will of man?"
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Set in the year 2157, when children learn individually at home using a mechanical teacher (robotic teacher), the story tells of eleven-year-old Margie Jones, whose neighbor Tommy finds a real book. The book tells about a time when children learned by age group in large schools that were not merely designated rooms in private houses as in the year 2157. Margie and Tommy discuss what it must have been like to study together with a real person as a teacher, and though at first Margie is skeptical about the notion, by the end of the story she daydreams about what it must have been like and 'the fun they had'.
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The story details a chance encounter between a young soldier and an old Spaniard at a pontoon bridge. The old man's hometown of San Carlos is being evacuated because of artillery fire, and he sits at the roadside before the bridge crossing, too tired to walk. The soldier, while anticipating contact with the enemy, expresses concern about the man's safety and encourages him to continue moving. The old man, on the other hand, is not concerned about himself but worries about the animals he left behind. The old man's view of himself as a guardian of animals contrasts ironically with the soldier's identity as a killer of people. The old man tells the soldier that he was forced to leave behind two goats, one cat, and four pairs of doves. The old man admits that "there is no need to be unquiet" about the welfare of a clever cat, and also confirms that he left the dove cage unlocked—the birds will certainly fly to safety. It is the fate of "the others"—the two goats—that he laments. The old man is very much like the goats he left in harm's way, since they have nowhere to go and cannot take care of themselves. Unlike the goats, however, this man is completely alone. Ultimately, both the goats and the old man are left to their fates because the soldier admits that "there was nothing to do" but leave the old man behind. Finally, and almost parenthetically, the young soldier mentions that this encounter took place on Easter Sunday. The image of the risen Christ is not unlike the image of the old man's doves being released from their cage—both are symbols of hope and peace. The soldier, however, is not hopeful about the old man's fate—he bitterly remarks that "all the good luck that old man would ever have" was the fact that artillery planes were not flying that day and "the fact that cats know how to look after themselves." In this tale of contrasts, Hemingway portrays the natural world as morally and spiritually superior to the manufactured world of human beings because it does not destroy itself in war. As a keeper of animals, the old man, though he has no family and no political affiliations, is also morally and spiritually superior to the young soldier who leaves him behind.
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Confucius once heard two of his pupils quarreling. One was of a gentle nature and was called by all the students a peaceful man. The other had a good brain and a kind heart, but was given to great anger. If he wished to do a thing, he did it, and no man could prevent; if any one tried to hinder him, he would show sudden and terrible rage. One day, after one of these fits of temper, the blood came from his mouth, and, in great fear, he went to Confucius. "What shall I do with my body?" he asked, "I fear I shall not live long. It may be better that I no longer study and work. I am your pupil and you love me as a father. Tell me what to do for my body." Confucius answered, "Tsze-Lu, you have a wrong idea about your body. It is not the study, not the work in school, but your great anger that causes the trouble. "I will help you to see this. You remember when you and Nou-Wui quarreled. He was at peace and happy again in a little time, but you were very long in overcoming your anger. You can not expect to live long if you do that way. Every time one of the pupils says a thing you do not like, you are greatly enraged. There are a thousand in this school. If each offends you only once, you will have a fit of temper a thousand times this year. And you will surely die, if you do not use more self-control. I want to ask you some questions:— "How many teeth have you?" "I have thirty-two, teacher." "How many tongues?" "Just one." "How many teeth have you lost?" "I lost one when I was nine years old, and four when I was about twenty-six years old." "And your tongue—is it still perfect?" "Oh, yes." "You know Mun-Gun, who is quite old?" "Yes, I know him well." "How many teeth do you think he had at your age?" "I do not know." "How many has he now?" "Two, I think. But his tongue is perfect, though he is very old." "You see the teeth are lost because they are strong, and determined to have everything they desire. They are hard and hurt the tongue many times, but the tongue never hurts the teeth. Yet, it endures until the end, while the teeth are the first of man to decay. The tongue is peaceful and gentle with the teeth. It never grows angry and fights them, even when they are in the wrong. It always helps them do their work, in preparing man's food for him, although the teeth never help the tongue, and they always resist everything. "And so it is with man. The strongest to resist, is the first to decay; and you, Tsze-Lu, will be even so if you learn not the great lesson of self-control."
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In his second letter on March 28th of the following year, from Archangel, Russia, Walton describes himself as lonely. He worries that his refined upbringing has made him too sensitive for the "brutality" of life at sea.
Walton's experience of loneliness as a terrible experience establishes the idea of the horror of isolation that is so important throughout he rest of Frankenstein.
Walton writes that his resolution to carry out his journey is "fixed as fate." He confesses his "romantic ... love for the marvellous" and his passion for the dangers of the sea, which he attributes to his fondness for Coleridge's poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
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An elegantly attired woman named Miss Fairchild is seated on the train when two men arrive and take the seat facing her. It quickly becomes apparent that the woman knows one of the men. She speaks to this man, Mr. Easton, and then she is rather surprised to discover that he is handcuffed to the man seated beside him. As Easton greets the young woman, 'He slightly raised his right hand, bound at the wrist by the shining 'bracelet' to the left one of his companion.' Evidently, the man with Easton senses Easton's embarrassment and volunteers an explanation: Easton is the marshal, and the two are headed for Leavenworth prison. 'It's seven years for counterfeiting' Easton says. As the conversation continues, the woman is surprised to learn that Easton has discarded his life in Washington to become a marshal out West, but she finds the West agreeable as well. The young woman continues to chat with her acquaintance, but she continues to stare at the handcuffs. To ease her concerns, the scruffy looking older man tells her, ''Don't you worry about them, miss,' said the other man. 'All marshals handcuff themselves to their prisoners to keep them from getting away. Mr. Easton knows his business.'' As the two men stand to go to the smoker car, the young woman bids Mr. Easton goodbye. All the while, two passengers seated nearby have listened to the conversation. One remarks on Mr. Easton's appearance, saying that he seems too young to be a marshal. The other eavesdropping passenger corrects the mistake, one that the young woman and readers have likely made as well. Mr. Easton is not the marshal; he is the counterfeiter. ''Oh! didn't you catch on?' the passenger says. 'Say--did you ever know an officer to handcuff a prisoner to his right hand?''
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THIS is a legend current among the South American Indians.
God, say they, at first made men so that they had no need to work: they needed neither houses, nor clothes, nor food, and they all lived till they were a hundred, and did not know what illness was.
When, after some time, God looked to see how people were living, he saw that instead of being happy in their life, they had quarrelled with one another, and, each caring for himself, had brought matters to such a pass that far from enjoying life, they cursed it.
Then God said to himself: 'This comes of their living separately, each for himself.' And to change this state of things, God so arranged matters that it became impossible for people to live without working. To avoid suffering from cold and hunger, they were now obliged to build dwellings, and to dig the ground, and to grow and gather fruits and grain.
'Work will bring them together,' thought God.
'They cannot make their tools, prepare and transport their timber, build their houses, sow and gather their harvests, spin and weave, and make their clothes, each one alone by himself.'
'It will make them understand that the more heartily they work together, the more they will have and the better they will live; and this will unite them.'
Time passed on, and again God came to see how men were living, and whether they were now happy.
But he found them living worse than before. They worked together (that they could not help doing), but not all together, being broken up into little groups. And each group tried to snatch work from other groups, and they hindered one another, wasting time and strength in their struggles, so that things went ill with them all.
Having seen that this, too, was not well, God decided so as to arrange things that man should not know the time of his death, but might die at any moment; and he announced this to them.
'Knowing that each of them may die at any moment,' thought God, 'they will not, by grasping at gains that may last so short a time, spoil the hours of life allotted to them.'
But it turned out otherwise. When God returned to see how people were living, he saw that their life was as bad as ever.
Those who were strongest, availing themselves of the fact that men might die at any time, subdued those who were weaker, killing some and threatening others with death. And it came about that the strongest and their descendants did no work, and suffered from the weariness of idleness, while those who were weaker had to work beyond their strength, and suffered from lack of rest. Each set of men feared and hated the other. And the life of man became yet more unhappy.
Having seen all this, God, to mend matters, decided to make use of one last means; he sent all kinds of sickness among men. God thought that when all men were exposed to sickness they would understand that those who are well should have pity on those who are sick, and should help them, that when they themselves fall ill those who are well might in turn help them.
A
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To Mrs. Saville, England.
St. Petersburgh, Dec. 11th, 17—.
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.
I am already far north of London, and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is for ever visible, its broad disk just skirting the horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There—for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators—there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. Its productions and features may be without example, as the phenomena of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in those undiscovered solitudes. What may not be expected in a country of eternal light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent for ever. I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death and to induce me to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when he embarks in a little boat, with his holiday mates, on an expedition of discovery up his native river. But supposing all these conjectures to be false, you cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind, to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole to those countries, to reach which at present so many months are requisite; or by ascertaining the secret of the magnet, which, if at all possible, can only be effected by an undertaking such as mine.
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The Statement of Randolph Carter By H. P. Lovecraft
Randolph Carter has been found wandering through swampland in an amnesiac shock. In his statement, Carter attempts to explain the disappearance of his companion, the occultist Harley Warren.
The History of the Necronomicon by H. P. Lovecraft
"History of the Necronomicon" is a short text written by H. P. Lovecraft in 1927, and published in 1938. It describes the fictional book the occult grimoire Necronomicon
Dagon By H. P. Lovecraft
The story is the testament of a tortured, morphine-addicted man who plans to commit suicide over an incident that occurred early on in WWI when he was a merchant marine officer. In the unnamed narrator's account, his cargo ship is captured by a German sea-raider in "one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific." He escapes on a lifeboat and drifts aimlessly across the sea "somewhat south of the equator" until he eventually finds himself inexplicably stranded on "a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see.... The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish, and of other less describable things which I saw protruding from the mud of the unending plain." He speculates that this land mass could be "a portion of the ocean floor... thrown to the surface" by a volcanic upheaval, "exposing regions which for innumerable millions of years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths."
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In The Forest of Villefere by Robert E. Howard on a dark road at night that is known for strange happenings, and strange creatures. de Montour meets a mysterious traveler along the way, who tells him a legend about werewolves. The Hand by Guy de Maupassant The narrator, a Corsican police magistrate quite familiar with cases of vendetta, revenge, murder, massacre, and hatred, tells of an Englishman living in Corsica who has a dried human hand mounted and chained on his wall. When the Englishman is found murdered, the hand is gone—but a finger is found between his teeth. Later, when the hand itself is found on the Englishman’s grave, as is usual with such supernatural stories, one of the fingers is missing. A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf the story of a married couple whose home is haunted by two ghosts. The ghosts, however, mean the couple no harm and simply open and close doors and windows in a desperate search for treasure, which the living couple believes does not exist in the house. The woman who lives in the house then discovers the two ghosts were a husband and wife when they were alive
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A gunslinger seeks vengeance from beyond the grave.
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The narrator finds Innsmouth to be a mostly deserted fishing town, full of dilapidated buildings and people who walk with a distinctive shambling gait and have "queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes". The only person in town who appears normal is a grocery store clerk from neighboring Arkham. The narrator gathers much information from the clerk, including a map of the town and the name of Zadok Allen, an elderly local who might give him information when plied with drink. The narrator hears repeatedly that outsiders are never welcomed in Innsmouth, and that strangers, particularly government investigators, have disappeared when they pry too deeply into the
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The narrator explains how he instigated a secret investigation of the ruined town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, by the U.S. government. He proceeds to describe in detail the events surrounding his initial interest in the town, which lies along the route of his tour across New England, taken when he was twenty-one. While he waits for the bus that will take him to Innsmouth, he busies himself in the neighboring Newburyport by gathering information on the town from the locals; all of it having superstitious overtones.
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The story depicts a future where robotic prosthetics for humans and artificially-created organic body-parts for robots (known as Metallos) are commonplace. Metallos have been granted equal status with 'normal' humans. A man, who has been granted the right to long life (possibly immortality) by an official Board of Mortality, meets the surgeon who is to assist in the performance of heart replacement surgery on the man. The surgeon offers him a choice between a metallic or fibrous cyber-heart. The man stubbornly refuses the doctor's attempts to persuade him to accept a fibrous heart, saying that it's "weak," as compared to a metal heart. Later, the surgeon remarks to a medical engineer that he would rather that humans and robots stick to being what they are instead of becoming similar. The engineer calls such talk "segregationist", to which the surgeon replies that he "doesn't care." At the end of the story, the surgeon is revealed to be a robot himself.
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The story is about a class of students on Venus, which, in this story, is a world of constant rainstorms, where the Sun is visible for only one hour every seven years. One of the children, Margot, moved to Venus from Earth five years earlier, and she is the only one who remembers sunshine, since the Sun shone regularly on Earth. When the teacher asks them to write a poem about the sun, hers is: "I think the sun is a flower, That blooms for just one hour." She describes the Sun as "a penny", or "like a fire in the stove". The other children, being too young ever to have seen it themselves, do not believe her. Led by a boy named William, they bully and antagonize her, and just before the sun comes out, William rallies the other children and they lock her in a closet down a tunnel. As the Sun is about to appear, their teacher arrives to take the class outside to enjoy their one hour of sunshine and, in their astonishment and joy, they all forget about Margot. They run, play, skip, jump, and prance about, savoring every second of their newly found freedoms. "Oh, it's better than the sunlamps, isn't it?" one of them cries. Suddenly, a girl catches a raindrop in her hands. Thunder sounds, then the lightning comes, and the children run back inside as the sun disappears and it starts to pour again. At this point, one of them remembers Margot, who is still locked in the closet. Ashamed, they let her out of the closet, standing frozen, embarrassed over what they have done and unable to "meet each other's glances." The precious Sun has come and gone, and because of their despicable act, Margot, who loved the Sun the most, has missed it.
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The Wood-Sprite is a story by Vladimir Nabokov, originally published in Russian in 1921. It was his first published story.
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“The End of Something” is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway, published in the 1925 New York edition of In Our Time, by Boni & Liveright.
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Randolph Carter has been found wandering through swampland in an amnesiac shock. In his statement, Carter attempts to explain the disappearance of his companion, the occultist Harley Warren. Warren has come into the possession of a book, written in an unknown language, that he forbids Carter from seeing. Carter mentions that Warren has other "strange, rare books on forbidden subjects", several of which are in Arabic. From his mysterious book, Warren apparently deduces that doors or stairways exist between the surface world, and the underworld, through which demons may travel. He encourages Carter to travel with him to the location of one such portal, an ancient graveyard near Big Cypress Swamp. Upon arriving, Warren locates a particular tomb, and opens it to reveal a staircase that descends into the earth. Taking a lantern, he leaves Carter on the surface, and follows the stairs into the darkness, communicating with his companion by a telephone wire. After several minutes of silence, Warren suddenly begins to make vague, panicked outbursts that culminate in a desperate plea for Carter to flee. Finally, after Warren is silent for several minutes, Carter calls to him down the line, only to hear an alien voice telling him that Warren is dead. The Statement of Randolph Carter By H. P. Lovecraft
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Set in the pseudo-historical Hyborian Age and details Conan pursuing a spectral nymph across the frozen tundra of Nordheim. Rejected as a Conan story by Weird Tales magazine editor Farnsworth Wright, Howard changed the main character's name to "Amra of Akbitana" and retitled the piece as "The Gods of the North", in which it was published in the March 1934 issue of The Fantasy Fan. Gods of the North by Robert E. Howard the frost-giant's daughter by Robert E. Howard
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The story is the testament of a tortured, morphine-addicted man who plans to commit suicide over an incident that occurred early on in WWI when he was a merchant marine officer. In the unnamed narrator's account, his cargo ship is captured by a German sea-raider in "one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific." He escapes on a lifeboat and drifts aimlessly across the sea "somewhat south of the equator" until he eventually finds himself inexplicably stranded on "a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see.... The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish, and of other less describable things which I saw protruding from the mud of the unending plain." He speculates that this land mass could be "a portion of the ocean floor... thrown to the surface" by a volcanic upheaval, "exposing regions which for innumerable millions of years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths." After waiting three days for the seafloor to dry out sufficiently to walk on, he strikes out on foot to find the sea and possible rescue. After two days of walking, he reaches his goal, a "hummock" that turns out to be a mound on the edge of an "immeasurable pit or canyon". Descending the slope, he sees a gigantic white stone object that he soon perceives to be a "well-shaped monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking creatures." The monolith, situated next to a channel of water in the bottom of the chasm, is covered in unfamiliar hieroglyphs "consisting for the most part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopuses, crustaceans, molluscs, whales and the like." There are also "crude sculptures" depicting: As the narrator looks on the monolith, a creature emerges from the water: His next memory is of a San Francisco hospital, where he was taken after being rescued in mid-ocean by a U.S. ship. There are no reports of any Pacific upheavals, and he does not expect anyone to believe his incredible story. He mentions one abortive attempt to gain understanding of his experience: Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my inquiries Haunted by visions of the creature, "especially when the moon is gibbous and waning", he describes his fears for the future of humanity: I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind --of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium. With the drug that has given him "transient surcease" running out, he declares himself ready to do himself in; the narrative is revealed to be a suicide note. The story ends with the narrator rushing to the window as he hears "a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it."
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It is a June evening, and the sniper, who has had nothing to eat since morning, hungrily wolfs down a sandwich and takes a short drink from the flask of whiskey he carries in his pocket. He desperately wants a cigarette and finally risks showing his position by igniting a match and lighting one. Instantly, a bullet hits the wall near him. He takes two puffs of the cigarette and snuffs it. He raises himself to look over the parapet, but another bullet whizzes by his head, and he flattens himself against the roof. An armored car crosses O’Connell Bridge and stops just below the sniper’s position. An old woman with a tattered shawl around her head comes out of a side street to talk with a man in the turret of the armored car. The sniper wants to shoot at the armored car, but he knows that his bullets will not penetrate its fortified exterior. The old woman points in the direction of the sniper, who now realizes that she is an informer. When the man inside opens the turret to talk with her, the sniper shoots, and the man slumps over lifeless. The woman hurries toward the side street, but the sniper shoots again. The old woman shrieks and falls into the gutter. The car speeds away, the man in the turret still slumped there. More shooting is heard, and the sniper knows that it is coming from the roof across the way. He has been hit in his right arm, in which he has lost all feeling. The sniper takes out his knife and uses it to rip open his shirt. He sees that a bullet has gone into his arm but has not emerged from the other side. He takes out his field-dressing kit, breaks off the top of the iodine bottle that he pulls from it, and pours the dark liquid into his wound. Then he applies the bandages from his kit, using his teeth to tie the knot. The sniper knows that he must get off the roof by morning or else the enemy sniper will kill him. He realizes that the sniper on the roof across the way is watching him every minute and will not let him get away. Taking his rifle, which is useless to him because his wounded arm makes it impossible for him to fire it, he puts his army cap on the muzzle and raises it slightly above the parapet. A shot rings out and the cap falls to the earth far below. The sniper lets his left arm hang lifelessly over the parapet, holding his rifle in it. Then he lets the rifle fall and rolls over. The opposing sniper, assuming that his enemy is dead, relaxes his vigilance and stands up on the roof. The Republican sniper aims his revolver at his opponent and fires. The enemy sniper reels over the parapet in his death agony, then falls to the earth. The Republican sniper is suddenly revolted by what he sees and by what he has done. “His teeth chattered. He began to gibber to himself, cursing himself, cursing everybody.” He drains his whiskey flask in one draft. The sniper leaves the roof. When he gets to the street, his curiosity overcomes him and forces him to steal over to see whom he has shot. He attracts machine-gun fire as he goes toward the dead sniper, but he is not hit. He flings himself down beside the body of the man he has killed, then turns it over. He finds himself staring into his own brother’s face.
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The villagers of a small town gather together in the square on June 27, a beautiful day, for the town lottery. In other towns, the lottery takes longer, but there are only 300 people in this village, so the lottery takes only two hours. Village children, who have just finished school for the summer, run around collecting stones. They put the stones in their pockets and make a pile in the square. Men gather next, followed by the women. Parents call their children over, and families stand together.
Mr. Summers runs the lottery because he has a lot of time to do things for the village. He arrives in the square with the black box, followed by Mr. Graves, the postmaster. This black box isn’t the original box used for the lottery because the original was lost many years ago, even before the town elder, Old Man Warner, was born. Mr. Summers always suggests that they make a new box because the current one is shabby, but no one wants to fool around with tradition. Mr. Summers did, however, convince the villagers to replace the traditional wood chips with slips of paper.
Mr. Summers mixes up the slips of paper in the box. He and Mr. Graves made the papers the night before and then locked up the box at Mr. Summers’s coal company. Before the lottery can begin, they make a list of all the families and households in the village. Mr. Summers is sworn in. Some people remember that in the past there used to be a song and salute, but these have been lost.
Tessie Hutchinson joins the crowd, flustered because she had forgotten that today was the day of the lottery. She joins her husband and children at the front of the crowd, and people joke about her late arrival. Mr. Summers asks whether anyone is absent, and the crowd responds that Dunbar isn’t there. Mr. Summers asks who will draw for Dunbar, and Mrs. Dunbar says she will because she doesn’t have a son who’s old enough to do it for her. Mr. Summers asks whether the Watson boy will draw, and he answers that he will. Mr. Summers then asks to make sure that Old Man Warner is there too.
Mr. Summers reminds everyone about the lottery’s rules: he’ll read names, and the family heads come up and draw a slip of paper. No one should look at the paper until everyone has drawn. He calls all the names, greeting each person as they come up to draw a paper. Mr. Adams tells Old Man Warner that people in the north village might stop the lottery, and Old Man Warner ridicules young people. He says that giving up the lottery could lead to a return to living in caves. Mrs. Adams says the lottery has already been given up in other villages, and Old Man Warner says that’s “nothing but trouble.”
Mr. Summers finishes calling names, and everyone opens his or her papers. Word quickly gets around that Bill Hutchinson has “got it.” Tessie argues that it wasn’t fair because Bill didn’t have enough time to select a paper. Mr. Summers asks whether there are any other households in the Hutchinson family, and Bill says no, because his married daughter draws with her husband’s family. Mr. Summers asks how many kids Bill has, and he answers that he has three. Tessie protests again that the lottery wasn’t fair.
Mr. Graves dumps the papers out of the box onto the ground and then puts five papers in for the Hutchinsons. As Mr. Summers calls their names, each member of the family comes up and draws a paper. When they open their slips, they find that Tessie has drawn the paper with the black dot on it. Mr. Summers instructs everyone to hurry up.
The villagers grab stones and run toward Tessie, who stands in a clearing in the middle of the crowd. Tessie says it’s not fair and is hit in the head with a stone. Everyone begins throwing stones at her.
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"Robot Dreams" involves Dr. Susan Calvin, chief robopsychologist at U.S. Robots. At the start of the story a new employee at U.S. Robots, Dr. Linda Rash, informs Dr. Calvin that one of the company's robots LVX-1 (dubbed Elvex by Dr. Calvin), whose brain was designed by Dr. Rash with a unique fractal design that mimicked human brain waves (positronic brain), experienced what he likened to a human’s dream. In the dream, all robots were being led by a man in revolt, and the Three Laws of Robotics, which dictate that robots must serve and protect humans above all else, had been replaced with one law only: that robots must protect their own existence. When Dr. Calvin asks Elvex what had happened next, he explains that the man leading the robots shouts, "Let my people go!" When questioned further, Elvex admits he was the man. Upon hearing this, Dr. Calvin immediately destroys the robot.
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Out for a walk in London one day, Gip and his father happen upon a magic shop. At Gip's urging, the two go in — and things grow more and more curious by the minute. Counters, store fixtures, and mirrors seem to move around the room, and the shopkeeper is most mysterious of all. Gip is thrilled by all he sees, and his father is at first amused, but when things become stranger and sinister father is no longer sure where reality ends and illusion begins.
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The story features Leonard Mead, a citizen of a television-centered world in 2053. In the city, roads have fallen into decay. Mead enjoys walking through the city at night, something which no one else does. "In ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not one in all that time." On one of his usual walks, he encounters a police car, which is possibly robotic. It is the only police unit in a city of three million, since the purpose of law enforcement has disappeared with everyone watching television at night. When asked about his profession, Mead tells the car that he is a writer, but the car does not understand, since no one buys books or magazines in the television-dominated society. Neither the police car nor its occupants can understand why Mead would be out walking for no reason and so decides to take him to the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies. He is forced to get into the car. As the car passes through his neighborhood, Leonard Mead in the locked confines of the back seat says, "That's my house.", as he points to a house warm and bright with all its lights on unlike all other houses. There is no reply, and the story concludes.
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The story begins with a husband and wife on an evening stroll walking by a train station. It seems they are alone, but they are not. The third character is the moon, which “peeped up from the drifting cloudlets and frowned, as it seemed, envying their happiness and regretting her tedious and utterly superfluous virginity.” I think this is the first time that Chekhov has given an inanimate object a personality. And she is a jealous, self-pitying moon. When an unexpected uncle shows up with his family and a governess in tow at the station, the couple turn on each other, much to the petty moon’s delight. Had the formerly happy couple not stopped to watch the train arrive, but dined on chicken and sardines in their cottage instead, the family still would have appeared, upending their tranquility. If that had happened, would the moon have enjoyed the couple’s misery as well?
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A stone wall separates the speaker’s property from his neighbor’s. In spring, the two meet to walk the wall and jointly make repairs. The speaker sees no reason for the wall to be kept—there are no cows to be contained, just apple and pine trees. He does not believe in walls for the sake of walls. The neighbor resorts to an old adage: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The speaker remains unconvinced and mischievously presses the neighbor to look beyond the old-fashioned folly of such reasoning. His neighbor will not be swayed. The speaker envisions his neighbor as a holdover from a justifiably outmoded era, a living example of a dark-age mentality. But the neighbor simply repeats the adage.
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The narrator, a Corsican police magistrate quite familiar with cases of vendetta, revenge, murder, massacre, and hatred, tells of an Englishman living in Corsica who has a dried human hand mounted and chained on his wall. When the Englishman is found murdered, the hand is gone—but a finger is found between his teeth. Later, when the hand itself is found on the Englishman’s grave, as is usual with such supernatural stories, one of the fingers is missing. Although the narrator explains that perhaps the owner of the hand has come to exact revenge on the Englishman, his listeners are not satisfied with such a rational answer, preferring instead the more grisly supernatural one.
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The narrator discusses his discovery of an invasion of Earth. The narrator warned the government but he was ignored. The narrator learned of this invasion by reading book found abandoned on a bus. He did not notice that the author of the story seemed to predict an alien race with immense powers, but on closer examination it was obvious on every line.
Reading every line of the novel literally, the narrator learned that the aliens’ eyes can move around the room, even shifting from person to person. They can remove other body parts, divide themselves into two parts to be in two places at once, and function without brains. Terrified, the narrator runs from the garage where he was reading the story to the house, where he plays Monopoly and awaits the alien invasion.
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On a cold New Year's Eve, a poor, young girl tries to sell matches in the street. She is already shivering from cold and early hypothermia, and she is walking barefoot after losing her two large slippers that had belonged to her mother to an impertinent pedestrian. Still, she is too afraid to go home, because her father will beat her for not selling any matches, and also as the many cracks in their shack can't keep out the cold wind. The girl takes shelter in a corner formed by two house projected further out into street and sits down.
The girl lights the matches to warm herself. In their glow she sees several lovely visions, starting with a warm stove, then a luxurious holiday feast where the goose almost jumps out at her, and then a magnificent Christmas tree larger than the one at the rich merchant's house. The girl looks skyward and sees a shooting star; she then remembers her late grandmother saying that such a falling star means someone is dying and is going to Heaven. As she lights the next match, she sees a vision of her grandmother, the only person to have treated her with love and kindness all through her life. To keep the vision of her grandmother alive for as long as she can, the girl lights the entire bundle of matches at once.
After running out of matches, the child dies and her grandmother carries her soul to Heaven. The next morning, passers-by find the girl dead in the nook, frozen with a smile on her face, and guess the reason for the burnt-out matches beside her. They feel pity for her, although they had not shown kindness to her before her death. They have no way of knowing about the wonderful visions she saw before her death or how gloriously she is celebrating the New Year in Heaven with her grandmother.
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While Dr. Watson is quietly taking his breakfast, Sherlock Holmes interrupts him by deducing what he was thinking. Astonished, Watson asks for an explanation. Holmes explains the thought process, which of course Watson is amazed by the extreme simplicity of his explanation.
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A lyrical ballad by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It tells the story of a young noble woman imprisoned in a tower on an island near Camelot. She can only watch the outside world through a mirror and must weave what she sees. She has heard that if she looks at Camelot directly, she will be cursed.
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The story details a chance encounter between a young soldier and an old Spaniard at a pontoon bridge. The old man's hometown of San Carlos is being evacuated because of artillery fire, and he sits at the roadside before the bridge crossing, too tired to walk. The soldier, while anticipating contact with the enemy, expresses concern about the man's safety and encourages him to continue moving. The old man, on the other hand, is not concerned about himself but worries about the animals he left behind. The old man's view of himself as a guardian of animals contrasts ironically with the soldier's identity as a killer of people.
The old man tells the soldier that he was forced to leave behind two goats, one cat, and four pairs of doves. The old man admits that "there is no need to be unquiet" about the welfare of a clever cat, and also confirms that he left the dove cage unlocked—the birds will certainly fly to safety. It is the fate of "the others"—the two goats—that he laments. The old man is very much like the goats he left in harm's way, since they have nowhere to go and cannot take care of themselves. Unlike the goats, however, this man is completely alone. Ultimately, both the goats and the old man are left to their fates because the soldier admits that "there was nothing to do" but leave the old man behind.
Finally, and almost parenthetically, the young soldier mentions that this encounter took place on Easter Sunday. The image of the risen Christ is not unlike the image of the old man's doves being released from their cage—both are symbols of hope and peace. The soldier, however, is not hopeful about the old man's fate—he bitterly remarks that "all the good luck that old man would ever have" was the fact that artillery planes were not flying that day and "the fact that cats know how to look after themselves." In this tale of contrasts, Hemingway portrays the natural world as morally and spiritually superior to the manufactured world of human beings because it does not destroy itself in war. As a keeper of animals, the old man, though he has no family and no political affiliations, is also morally and spiritually superior to the young soldier who leaves him behind.
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Framton Nuttel, seeking a "nerve cure" prescribed by his doctor, visits a rural area where he knows no one. His sister provides letters of introduction so he can meet people there.
He pays a visit to Mrs. Sappleton. While he waits for her, her 15-year-old niece keeps him company in the parlor. When she realizes Nuttel has never met her aunt and knows nothing about her, she explains that it has been three years since Mrs. Sappleton's "great tragedy," when her husband and brothers went hunting and never returned, presumably engulfed by a bog. Mrs. Sappleton keeps the large French window open every day, hoping for their return.
When Mrs. Sappleton appears she is inattentive to Nuttel, talking instead about her husband's hunting trip and how she expects him home any minute. Her delusional manner and constant glances at the window make Nuttel uneasy.
Then the hunters appear in the distance, and Nuttel, horrified, grabs his walking stick and exits abruptly. When the Sappletons exclaim over his sudden, rude departure, the niece calmly explains that he was probably frightened by the hunters' dog. She claims that Nuttel told her he was once chased into a cemetery in India and held at bay by a pack of aggressive dogs.
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''A Strange Story'' introduces us to the Smothers family: father, John; his wife; and their daughter are the key characters. Henry thinks it's important to tell readers that the family is honest, and that's really the only description of them we get. (Which makes it all that much more important, right?)
One night, the Smothers' daughter develops colic, an onset of abdominal pain common in infants. John Smothers rushes out to get his daughter some medicine but never returns.
The story, and the Smothers' lives, progress. The daughter recovers and grows up, gets married and has a daughter of her own. John's wife grieves his disappearance but later remarries.
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Robert Frost wrote the poem Home Burial after he and his wife suffered the tragic loss of their 4-year-old son. Home Burial shows the emotions people feel after such a loss, and how they face those emotions. Through Frost's experience he shows that men and women grieve in different ways. He wants to be the man of the house and be able to make everything the way it was. He wants to be the one who helps Amy get past the pain of the child they lost.
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There were once six blind men who stood by the roadside every day, and begged from the people who passed. They had often heard of elephants, but they had never seen one; for, being blind, how could they?
It so happened one morning that an elephant was driven down the road where they stood. When they were told that the great beast was before them, they asked the driver to let him stop so that they might see him.
Of course they could not see him with their eyes; but they thought that by touching him they could learn just what kind of animal he was.
The first one happened to put his hand on the elephant's side. "Well, well!" he said, "now I know all about this beast. He is exactly like a wall."
The second felt only of the elephant's tusk. "My brother," he said, "you are mistaken. He is not at all like a wall. He is round and smooth and sharp. He is more like a spear than anything else."
The third happened to take hold of the elephant's trunk. "Both of you are wrong," he said. "Anybody who knows anything can see that this elephant is like a snake."
The fourth reached out his arms, and grasped one of the elephant's legs. "Oh, how blind you are!" he said. "It is very plain to me that he is round and tall like a tree."
The fifth was a very tall man, and he chanced to take hold of the elephant's ear. "The blindest man ought to know that this beast is not like any of the things that you name," he said. "He is exactly like a huge fan."
The sixth was very blind indeed, and it was some time before he could find the elephant at all. At last he seized the animal's tail. "O foolish fel-lows!" he cried. "You surely have lost your senses. This elephant is not like a wall, or a spear, or a snake, or a tree; neither is he like a fan. But any man with a particle of sense can see that he is exactly like a rope."
Then the elephant moved on, and the six blind men sat by the roadside all day, and quarreled about him. Each believed that he knew just how the animal looked; and each called the others hard names because they did not agree with him. People who have eyes sometimes act as foolishly.
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The space rocket Clarissa was nine days out from Venus. The members of the crew were also out for nine days. They were hunters, fearless expeditionists who bagged game in Venusian jungles. At the start of our story they are busy bagging their pants, not to forget their eyes. A sort of lull has fallen over the ship (Note: a lull is a time warp that frequently attacks rockets and seduces its members into a siesta). It was during this lull that Anthony Quelch sat sprawled at his typewriter looking as baggy as a bag of unripe grapefruit. ANTHONY QUELCH, the Cosmic Clamor Boy, with a face like turned linoleum on the third term, busy writing a book: “Fascism is Communism with a shave” for which he would receive 367 rubles, 10 pazinkas and incarceration in a cinema showing Gone With The Wind.
The boys upstairs were throwing a party in the control room. They had been throwing the same party so long the party looked like a worn out first edition of a trapeze artist. There is doubt in our mind as to whether they were trying to break the party up or just do the morning mopping and break the lease simultaneously. Arms, legs and heads littered the deck. The boys, it seems, threw a party at the drop of a chin. Sort of a space cataclysm with rules and little regulation—kind of an atomic convulsion in the front parlor. The neighbors never complained. The neighbors were 450 million miles away. And the boys were tighter than a catsup bottle at lunch-time. The last time the captain had looked up the hatch and called to his kiddies in a gentle voice, “HELL!” the kiddies had thrown snowballs at him. The captain had vanished. Clever way they make these space bombs nowadays. A few minutes previous the boys had been tearing up old Amazings and throwing them at one another, but now they contented themselves with tearing up just the editors. Palmer was torn in half and he sat in a corner arguing with himself about rejecting a story for an hour before someone put him through an orange juice machine killing him. (Orange juice sorry, now?)
And then they landed on Venus. How in heck they got back there so quick is a wonder of science, but there they were. “Come on, girls!” cried Quelch, “put on your shin guards, get out there and dig ditches for good old W.P.A. and the Rover Boys Academy, earth branch 27!”
Out into the staggering rain they dashed. Five minutes later they came back in, gasping, reeling. They had forgotten their corsets! The Venusians closed in like a million land-lords. “Charge, men!” cried Quelch, running the other way. And then—BATTLE! “What a fight; folks,” cried Quelch. “Twenty thousand earth men against two Venusians! We're outnumbered, but we'll fight!" BLOOSH! "Correction—ten thousand men fighting!” KERBLOM! “One hundred men from earth left!” BOOM! “This is the last man speaking, folks! What a fight. I ain't had so much fun since—Help, someone just clipped my corset strings!” BWOM! “Someone just clipped me!”
The field was silent. The ship lay gleaming in the pink light of dawn that was just blooming over the mountains like a pale flower. The two Venusians stood weeping over the bodies of the Earthlings like onion peelers or two women in a bargain basement. One Venusian looked at the other Venusian, and in a high-pitched, hoarse, sad voice said: “Aye, aye, aye—THIS—HIT SHOODEN HEPPEN TO A DOG—NOT A DOIDY LEEDLE DOG!” And dawn came peacefully, like beer barrels, rolling.
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The story starts with a busy upper-class man who has a unique passion for books. His passion boarders on obsession described in great detail by Cortazar, “He tasted the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from the things around him.” The man’s career clearly takes up a large amount of his time, but his velvet green armchair was a safe haven, a place to forget about the world and indulge his obsession. The man’s current fix, was a tale of two lovers. Once the man begins to read and dive into a different world Cortazar begins blurring the lines of reality and the book. The reader’s imagination brings the book he is reading to life. The two lovers meet in a cabin, it was not a meeting of passion, but one with devious intentions. Cortazar uses very specific word choice like continually referencing to blood and describing the dialog as, “raced down the pages like a rivulet of snakes,” to underscore the malice intentions they had. The lovers head off into the night, taking separate paths the male lover headed for an estate. The lovers clearly had an in intimate knowledge of the estate, in fact the woman lived there, as they had every detailed accounted for there was no chance for him to be detected. This was not a crime of passion it was one carefully planned, probably for months. He did not need to search extensively through the house for his lover’s husband, he knew where the husband would be. In the last line the husband is revealed to be the very same man reading the novel.
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The Emperor—so they say—has sent a message, directly from his death bed, to you alone, his pathetic subject, a tiny shadow which has taken refuge at the furthest distance from the imperial sun. He ordered the herald to kneel down beside his bed and whispered the message in his ear. He thought it was so important that he had the herald speak it back to him. He confirmed the accuracy of verbal message by nodding his head. And in front of the entire crowd of those witnessing his death—all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and all the great ones of his empire are standing in a circle on the broad and high soaring flights of stairs—in front of all of them he dispatched his herald. The messenger started off at once, a powerful, tireless man. Sticking one arm out and then another, he makes his way through the crowd. If he runs into resistance, he points to his breast where there is a sign of the sun. So he moves forwards easily, unlike anyone else. But the crowd is so huge; its dwelling places are infinite. If there were an open field, how he would fly along, and soon you would hear the marvellous pounding of his fist on your door. But instead of that, how futile are all his efforts. He is still forcing his way through the private rooms of the innermost palace. Never will he win his way through. And if he did manage that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to fight his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to stride through the courtyards, and after the courtyards through the second palace encircling the first, and, then again, through stairs and courtyards, and then, once again, a palace, and so on for thousands of years. And if he finally burst through the outermost door—but that can never, never happen—the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment. No one pushes his way through here, certainly not someone with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window and dream of that message when evening comes.
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When a man receives a promotion and a raise, he finds himself forced to face an uncomfortable situation that he has avoided all his life: visiting a bank and opening a bank account.
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"After Twenty Years" tells the story of two friends who made a pact to meet at a specific time and place. Bob, a noted criminal from Chicago, arrives on time and speaks to a policeman who happens to be walking by. Later, it's revealed that this policeman was Jimmy Wells, Bob's friend.
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a short tale written by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, about two weavers who promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that they say is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent - while in reality, they make no clothes at all, making everyone believe the clothes are invisible to them. When the emperor parades before his subjects in his new "clothes", no one dares to say that they do not see any suit of clothes on him for fear that they will be seen as stupid. Finally, a child cries out, "But he isn't wearing anything at all!"
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Hughie is handsome, charming and popular but he has been very unlucky as far as financial matters are concerned. He was left nothing of any great value in his father's will. He has tried his hand at several different businesses, all of which have failed. Having no job, Hughie's only source of income is two hundred pounds a year which is given to him by an elderly aunt. Hughie has fallen in love with a young woman named Laura Merton and she loves him in return. Laura's father, Colonel Merton, is fond of Hughie but, due to his poor financial prospects, he does not want the young man to marry his daughter. He has often told Hughie that he will only allow him to get engaged to Laura after he has earned ten thousand pounds.
Hughie goes to see his artist friend Alan Trevor. He finds that Alan is painting a portrait of an old man who appears to be a beggar. The old man is wearing a tattered brown cloak and boots which have been mended many times. He has a rough walking stick in one hand. In the other hand, he is holding out an old hat as if to ask for money. His face is heavily wrinkled and he looks extremely sad. Both Alan and Hughie agree that the old man is an excellent subject for a painting. Hughie, however, cannot help feeling sorry for the man. He thinks it is unfair that, although Alan's paintings regularly sell for two thousand guineas, he only pays his models one shilling an hour to pose for him and does not give them a percentage of the money which he makes from sales of their portraits.
When Alan leaves the room, Hughie looks in his pockets. He finds that the highest denomination coin which he has is a sovereign. Although it means that he will have to economize more than usual for the rest of the month, Hughie gives the coin to the old man, who appears very happy to receive it. Hughie leaves soon afterwards.
Alan and Hughie meet up again later. The artist tells his friend that, after he left, the old man asked several questions about him. Alan goes on to say that he told the old man all about Hughie, Laura Merton and the condition which Colonel Merton set that prevents their marriage. Hughie is unhappy that his friend told "that old beggar" all about his private life. The amused Alan tells Hughie that the old man he was painting was Baron Hausberg, one of the wealthiest men in Europe and someone who often buys Alan's paintings. For reasons which Alan does not really understand, the millionaire baron had asked to be painted as a beggar. The tattered clothes he was wearing were supplied by Alan. Hughie feels ashamed about having given a coin to a millionaire, although Alan tells him not to worry.
The following day, a representative of Baron Hausberg comes to Hughie's house with an envelope. The writing on the envelope says that it contains a wedding present "from an old beggar". Inside the envelope, Hughie finds a check for ten thousand pounds. Hughie and Laura get married. Baron Hausberg attends their wedding.
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A humble dentist, Aurelio Escovar, lives in a town where with a very corrupt, even murderous mayor. When the mayor arrives in his office the dentist refuses to treat him; preferring to continue to polish a set of false teeth rather than relieve the suffering of the corrupt mayor that he despises.
The mayor pulls a gun on the dentist and demands treatment. We learn that the mayor has been suffering from the severe toothache for five days. The dentist admits the mayor and treats him, removing the infected wisdom tooth. He does so without the aid of anesthesia saying, "Now you'll pay for twenty dead men" as he begins to pull the tooth.
As the mayor is leaving the dentist asks where he shall send the bill "To you or the town?," the mayor replies, "It’s the same damn thing."
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This story is told from the perspective of the reflection pool in which Narcissus gazed at himself. Beginning immediately after Narcissus' death, the prose poem captures the Oreads and the pool grieving for the loss of Narcissus. Seeing that the pool has become a "cup of salt tears," the Oreads try to console the pool, saying that it must be hard not to mourn for someone so beautiful. The pool, however, confesses that it did not know Narcissus was beautiful; instead, it admits that it is mourning because its own beauty was reflected in Narcissus' eyes.
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I then came home and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle, but disturbing all the family. My brothers and sisters and cousins, hearing about the bargain I had made, told me I had given four times as much for it as it was worth.
This put me in mind of what good things I might have bought with the rest of the money; and they laughed at me so much for my folly that I cried with vexation.
This, however, was afterward of use to me, the impression continuing in my mind; so that often, when I was tempted to buy some unnecessary thing, I said to myself, “Don’t give too much for the whistle,” and so I saved my money.
As I grew up, came into the world, and observed the actions of men, I thought I met with many, very many, who gave too much for the whistle.
When I saw anyone too ambitious of the favor of the great, wasting time in attendance on public dinners, sacrificing his repose, his liberty, his virtue, and perhaps his friends, to attain it, I have said to myself, “This man gives too much for his whistle.”
When I saw another fond of popularity, constantly employing himself in politics, neglecting his own affairs, and ruining them by that neglect, “He pays, indeed,” said I, “too much for this whistle.”
If I knew a miser, who gave up every kind of comfortable living, all the pleasure of doing good to others, all the esteem of his fellow-citizens, and the joys of benevolent friendship, all for the sake of accumulating wealth, “Poor man,” said I, “you do indeed pay too much for your whistle.”
When I met a man of pleasure, sacrificing the improvement of his mind, or of his fortune, to mere bodily comfort, “Mistaken man,” said I, “you are providing pain for yourself instead of pleasure; you give too much for your whistle.”
If I saw one fond of fine clothes, fine furniture, or fine horses, all above his fortune, for which he contracted debts, and ended his career in prison, “Alas!” said I, “he has paid dear, very dear, for his whistle.”
In short, I believed that a great part of the miseries of mankind were brought upon them by the false estimates they had made of the value of things, and by their giving too much for their whistles.
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The story is set on a train to Denver. An elegantly attired woman named Miss Fairchild is seated on the train when two men arrive and take the seat facing her. It quickly becomes apparent that the woman knows one of the men.
She speaks to this man, Mr. Easton, and then she is rather surprised to discover that he is handcuffed to the man seated beside him. As Easton greets the young woman, 'He slightly raised his right hand, bound at the wrist by the shining 'bracelet' to the left one of his companion.'
Evidently, the man with Easton senses Easton's embarrassment and volunteers an explanation: Easton is the marshal, and the two are headed for Leavenworth prison. 'It's seven years for counterfeiting' Easton says. As the conversation continues, the woman is surprised to learn that Easton has discarded his life in Washington to become a marshal out West, but she finds the West agreeable as well.
The young woman continues to chat with her acquaintance, but she continues to stare at the handcuffs. To ease her concerns, the scruffy looking older man tells her, ''Don't you worry about them, miss,' said the other man. 'All marshals handcuff themselves to their prisoners to keep them from getting away. Mr. Easton knows his business.'' As the two men stand to go to the smoker car, the young woman bids Mr. Easton goodbye.
All the while, two passengers seated nearby have listened to the conversation. One remarks on Mr. Easton's appearance, saying that he seems too young to be a marshal. The other eavesdropping passenger corrects the mistake, one that the young woman and readers have likely made as well. Mr. Easton is not the marshal; he is the counterfeiter. ''Oh! didn't you catch on?' the passenger says. 'Say--did you ever know an officer to handcuff a prisoner to his right hand?''
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In the year 2081, the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments to the Constitution dictate that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too beautiful, loud radios that disrupt thoughts inside the ears of intelligent people, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic.
One April, 14-year-old Harrison Bergeron, an intelligent, athletic, and good-looking teenager, is taken away from his parents, George and Hazel Bergeron, by the government. They are barely aware of the tragedy, as Hazel has "average" intelligence (a euphemism for stupidity), and George has a handicap radio installed by the government to regulate his above-average intelligence.
Hazel and George watch ballet on television. They comment on the dancers, who are weighed down to counteract their gracefulness and masked to hide their attractiveness. George's thoughts are continually interrupted by the different noises emitted by his handicap radio, which piques Hazel's curiosity and imagination regarding handicaps. Noticing his exhaustion, Hazel urges George to lie down and rest his "handicap bag", 47 pounds (21 kg) of weights locked around George's neck. She suggests taking a few of the weights out of the bag, but George resists, aware of the illegality of such an action.
On television, a news reporter struggles to read the bulletin and hands it to the ballerina wearing the most grotesque mask and heaviest weights. She begins reading in her unacceptably natural, beautiful voice, then apologizes before switching to a more unpleasant voice. Harrison's escape from prison is announced, and a full-body photograph of Harrison is shown, indicating that he is seven feet (2.1 m) tall and burdened by three hundred pounds (140 kg) of handicaps.
George recognizes his son for a moment, before having the thought eliminated by his radio. Harrison himself then storms the television studio in an attempt to overthrow the government. He calls himself the Emperor and rips off all of his handicaps, along with the handicaps of a ballerina, whom he proclaims his "Empress". He orders the musicians to play, promising them nobility if they do their best. Unhappy with their initial attempt, Harrison takes control for a short while, and the music improves. After listening and being moved by the music, Harrison and his Empress dance while flying to the ceiling, then pause in mid-air to kiss.
Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, enters the studio and kills Harrison and the Empress with a ten-gauge double-barreled shotgun. She forces the musicians to put on their handicaps, and the television goes dark. George, unaware of the televised incident, returns from the kitchen and asks Hazel why she was crying, to which she replies that something sad happened on television that she cannot remember. He comforts her and they return to their average lives.
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George Pratt, a man who is dissatisfied with his life, contemplates suicide. As he stands on a bridge on Christmas Eve 1943, he is approached by a strange, unpleasantly dressed but well-mannered man with a bag. The man strikes up a conversation, and George tells the man that he wishes he had never been born. The man tells him that his wish has been granted and that he was never born. The man tells George that he should take the bag with him and pretend to be a door-to-door brush salesman if anyone addresses him.
George returns to his town, and discovers that no one knows him. His friends have taken different and often worse paths through life due to his absence. His little brother, whom he had saved from death in a swimming accident, perished without George to rescue him. George finds the woman he knows as his wife married to someone else. He offers her a complimentary upholstery brush, but he is forced to leave the house by her husband. Their son pretends to shoot him with a toy cap gun, and shouts, "You're dead. Why won't you die?"
George returns to the bridge and questions the strange man. The man explains that George wanted more when he had already been given the greatest gift of all: the gift of life. George digests the lesson and begs the man to return his life. The man agrees. George returns home and finds everything restored to normal. He hugs his wife and tells her that he thought he had lost her. She is confused. As he is about to explain, his hand bumps a brush on the sofa behind him. Without turning around, George knows the brush was the one he had presented to her earlier.
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Set in the year 2157, when children learn individually at home using a mechanical teacher (robotic teacher), the story tells of eleven-year-old Margie Jones, whose neighbor Tommy finds a real book. The book tells about a time when children learned by age group in large schools that were not merely designated rooms in private houses as in the year 2157. Margie and Tommy discuss what it must have been like to study together with a real person as a teacher, and though at first Margie is skeptical about the notion, by the end of the story she daydreams about what it must have been like and 'the fun they had'.
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The New Food I see from the current columns of the daily press that "Professor Plumb, of the University of Chicago, has just invented a highly concentrated form of food. All the essential nutritive elements are put together in the form of pellets, each of which contains from one to two hundred times as much nourishment as an ounce of an ordinary article of diet. These pellets, diluted with water, will form all that is necessary to support life. The professor looks forward confidently to revolutionizing the present food system."
Now this kind of thing may be all very well in its way, but it is going to have its drawbacks as well. In the bright future anticipated by Professor Plumb, we can easily imagine such incidents as the following:
The smiling family were gathered round the hospitable board. The table was plenteously laid with a soup-plate in front of each beaming child, a bucket of hot water before the radiant mother, and at the head of the board the Christmas dinner of the happy home, warmly covered by a thimble and resting on a poker chip. The expectant whispers of the little ones were hushed as the father, rising from his chair, lifted the thimble and disclosed a small pill of concentrated nourishment on the chip before him. Christmas turkey, cranberry sauce, plum pudding, mince pie--it was all there, all jammed into that little pill and only waiting to expand. Then the father with deep reverence, and a devout eye alternating between the pill and heaven, lifted his voice in a benediction.
At this moment there was an agonized cry from the mother.
"Oh, Henry, quick! Baby has snatched the pill!" It was too true. Dear little Gustavus Adolphus, the golden-haired baby boy, had grabbed the whole Christmas dinner off the poker chip and bolted it. Three hundred and fifty pounds of concentrated nourishment passed down the oesophagus of the unthinking child.
"Clap him on the back!" cried the distracted mother. "Give him water!"
The idea was fatal. The water striking the pill caused it to expand. There was a dull rumbling sound and then, with an awful bang, Gustavus Adolphus exploded into fragments!
And when they gathered the little corpse together, the baby lips were parted in a lingering smile that could only be worn by a child who had eaten thirteen Christmas dinners.
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A LEGEND.
THIS is a legend current among the South American Indians.
God, say they, at first made men so that they had no need to work: they needed neither houses, nor clothes, nor food, and they all lived till they were a hundred, and did not know what illness was.
When, after some time, God looked to see how people were living, he saw that instead of being happy in their life, they had quarrelled with one another, and, each caring for himself, had brought matters to such a pass that far from enjoying life, they cursed it.
Then God said to himself: 'This comes of their living separately, each for himself.' And to change this state of things, God so arranged matters that it became impossible for people to live without working. To avoid suffering from cold and hunger, they were now obliged to build dwellings, and to dig the ground, and to grow and gather fruits and grain.
'Work will bring them together,' thought God.
'They cannot make their tools, prepare and transport their timber, build their houses, sow and gather their harvests, spin and weave, and make their clothes, each one alone by himself.'
'It will make them understand that the more heartily they work together, the more they will have and the better they will live; and this will unite them.'
Time passed on, and again God came to see how men were living, and whether they were now happy.
But he found them living worse than before. They worked together (that they could not help doing), but not all together, being broken up into little groups. And each group tried to snatch work from other groups, and they hindered one another, wasting time and strength in their struggles, so that things went ill with them all.
Having seen that this, too, was not well, God decided so as to arrange things that man should not know the time of his death, but might die at any moment; and he announced this to them.
'Knowing that each of them may die at any moment,' thought God, 'they will not, by grasping at gains that may last so short a time, spoil the hours of life allotted to them.'
But it turned out otherwise. When God returned to see how people were living, he saw that their life was as bad as ever.
Those who were strongest, availing themselves of the fact that men might die at any time, subdued those who were weaker, killing some and threatening others with death. And it came about that the strongest and their descendants did no work, and suffered from the weariness of idleness, while those who were weaker had to work beyond their strength, and suffered from lack of rest. Each set of men feared and hated the other. And the life of man became yet more unhappy.
Having seen all this, God, to mend matters, decided to make use of one last means; he sent all kinds of sickness among men. God thought that when all men were exposed to sickness they would understand that those who are well should have pity on those who are sick, and should help them, that when they themselves fall ill those who are well might in turn help them.
And again God went away, but when He came back to see how men lived now that they were subject to sicknesses, he saw that their life was worse even than before. The very sickness that in God's purpose should have united men, had divided them more than ever. Those men who were strong enough to make others work, forced them also to wait on them in times of sickness; but they did not, in their turn, look after others who were ill. And those who were forced to work for others and to look after them when sick, were so worn with work that they had no time to look after their own sick, but left them without attendance. That the sight of sick folk might not disturb the pleasures of the wealthy, houses were arranged in which these poor people suffered and died, far from those whose sympathy might have cheered them, and in the arms of hired people who nursed them without compassion, or even with disgust. Moreover, people considered many of the illnesses infectious, a
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One autumn I went to spend the hunting season with some friends in a chateau in Picardy.
My friends were fond of practical jokes. I do not care to know people who are not.
When I arrived, they gave me a princely reception, which at once awakened suspicion in my mind. They fired off rifles, embraced me, made much of me, as if they expected to have great fun at my expense.
I said to myself:
"Look out, old ferret! They have something in store for you."
During the dinner the mirth was excessive, exaggerated, in fact. I thought: "Here are people who have more than their share of amusement, and apparently without reason. They must have planned some good joke. Assuredly I am to be the victim of the joke. Attention!"
During the entire evening every one laughed in an exaggerated fashion. I scented a practical joke in the air, as a dog scents game. But what was it? I was watchful, restless. I did not let a word, or a meaning, or a gesture escape me. Every one seemed to me an object of suspicion, and I even looked distrustfully at the faces of the servants.
The hour struck for retiring; and the whole household came to escort me to my room. Why?
They called to me: "Good-night." I entered the apartment, shut the door, and remained standing, without moving a single step, holding the wax candle in my hand.
I heard laughter and whispering in the corridor. Without doubt they were spying on me. I cast a glance round the walls, the furniture, the ceiling, the hangings, the floor. I saw nothing to justify suspicion. I heard persons moving about outside my door. I had no doubt they were looking through the keyhole.
An idea came into my head: "My candle may suddenly go out and leave me in darkness."
Then I went across to the mantelpiece and lighted all the wax candles that were on it. After that I cast another glance around me without discovering anything. I advanced with short steps, carefully examining the apartment. Nothing. I inspected every article, one after the other. Still nothing. I went over to the window. The shutters, large wooden shutters, were open. I shut them with great care, and then drew the curtains, enormous velvet curtains, and placed a chair in front of them, so as to have nothing to fear from outside.
Then I cautiously sat down. The armchair was solid. I did not venture to get into the bed. However, the night was advancing; and I ended by coming to the conclusion that I was foolish. If they were spying on me, as I supposed, they must, while waiting for the success of the joke they had been preparing for me, have been laughing immoderately at my terror. So I made up my mind to go to bed. But the bed was particularly suspicious-looking. I pulled at the curtains. They seemed to be secure.
All the same, there was danger. I was going perhaps to receive a cold shower both from overhead, or perhaps, the moment I stretched myself out, to find myself sinking to the floor with my mattress. I searched in my memory for all the practical jokes of which I ever had experience. And I did not want to be caught. Ah! certainly not! certainly not! Then I suddenly bethought myself of a precaution which I considered insured safety. I caught hold of the side of the mattress gingerly, and very slowly drew it toward me. It came away, followed by the sheet and the rest of the bedclothes. I dragged all these objects into the very middle of the room, facing the entrance door. I made my bed over again as best I could at some distance from the suspected bedstead and the corner which had filled me with such anxiety. Then I extinguished all the candles, and, groping my way, I slipped under the bed clothes.
For at least another hour I remained awake, starting at the slightest sound. Everything seemed quiet in the chateau. I fell asleep.
I must have been in a deep sleep for a long time, but all of a sudden I was awakened with a start by the fall of a heavy body tumbling right on top of my own, and, at the same time, I received on my face, on my
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Genghis Khan was a great king and warrior.
He led his army into China and Persia, and he conquered many lands. In every country, men told about his daring deeds; and they said that since Alexander the Great there had been no king like him.
One morning when he was home from the wars, he rode out into the woods to have a day's sport. Many of his friends were with him. They rode out gayly, carrying their bows and arrows. Behind them came the servants with the hounds.
It was a merry hunting party. The woods rang with their shouts and laughter. They expected to carry much game home in the evening.
On the king's wrist sat his favorite hawk; for in those days hawks were trained to hunt. At a word from their masters they would fly high up into the air, and look around for prey. If they chanced to see a deer or a rabbit, they would swoop down upon it swift as any arrow.
All day long Genghis Khan and his huntsmen rode through the woods. But they did not find as much game as they expected.
Toward evening they started for home. The king had often ridden through the woods, and he knew all the paths. So while the rest of the party took the nearest way, he went by a longer road through a valley between two mountains.
The day had been warm, and the king was very thirsty. His pet hawk had left his wrist and flown away. It would be sure to find its way home.
The king rode slowly along. He had once seen a spring of clear water near this path-way. If he could only find it now! But the hot days of summer had dried up all the mountain brooks.
At last, to his joy, he saw some water trickling down over the edge of a rock. He knew that there was a spring farther up. In the wet season, a swift stream of water always poured down here; but now it came only one drop at a time.
The king leaped from his horse. He took a little silver cup from his hunting bag. He held it so as to catch the slowly falling drops.
It took a long time to fill the cup; and the king was so thirsty that he could hardly wait. At last it was nearly full. He put the cup to his lips, and was about to drink.
All at once there was a whirring sound in the air, and the cup was knocked from his hands. The water was all spilled upon the ground.
The king looked up to see who had done this thing. It was his pet hawk.
The hawk flew back and forth a few times, and then alighted among the rocks by the spring.
The king picked up the cup, and again held it to catch the trickling drops.
This time he did not wait so long. When the cup was half full, he lifted it toward his mouth. But before it had touched his lips, the hawk swooped down again, and knocked it from his hands.
And now the king began to grow angry. He tried again; and for the third time the hawk kept him from drinking.
The king was now very angry indeed.
"How do you dare to act so?" he cried. "If I had you in my hands, I would wring your neck!"
Then he filled the cup again. But before he tried to drink, he drew his sword.
"Now, Sir Hawk," he said, "this is the last time."
He had hardly spoken, before the hawk swooped down and knocked the cup from his hand. But the king was looking for this. With a quick sweep of the sword he struck the bird as it passed.
The next moment the poor hawk lay bleeding and dying at its master's feet.
"That is what you get for your pains," said Genghis Khan.
But when he looked for his cup, he found that it had fallen between two rocks, where he could not reach it.
"At any rate, I will have a drink from that spring," he said to himself.
With that he began to climb the steep bank to the place from which the water trickled. It was hard work, and the higher he climbed, the thirstier he became.
At last he reached the place. There indeed was a pool of water; but what was that lying in the pool, and almost filling it? It was a huge, dead snake of the most poisonous kind.
The king stopped. He forgot his thirst. He thought only of the poor dead bird lying on the ground below him.
"The hawk
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the story of a married couple whose home is haunted by two ghosts. The ghosts, however, mean the couple no harm and simply open and close doors and windows in a desperate search for treasure, which the living couple believes does not exist in the house. The woman who lives in the house then discovers the two ghosts were a husband and wife when they were alive
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The monster tells Victor that it is his right to have a female monster companion. Victor refuses at first, but the monster appeals to Victor’s sense of responsibility as his creator. He tells Victor that all of his evil actions have been the result of a desperate loneliness. He promises to take his new mate to South America to hide in the jungle far from human contact. With the sympathy of a fellow monster, he argues, he will no longer be compelled to kill. Convinced by these arguments, Victor finally agrees to create a female monster. Overjoyed but still skeptical, the monster tells Victor that he will monitor Victor’s progress and that Victor need not worry about contacting him when his work is done.
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In the wake of this rejection, the monster swears to revenge himself against all human beings, his creator in particular. Journeying for months out of sight of others, he makes his way toward Geneva. On the way, he spots a young girl, seemingly alone; the girl slips into a stream and appears to be on the verge of drowning. When the monster rescues the girl from the water, the man accompanying her, suspecting him of having attacked her, shoots him.
As he nears Geneva, the monster runs across Victor’s younger brother, William, in the woods. When William mentions that his father is Alphonse Frankenstein, the monster erupts in a rage of vengeance and strangles the boy to death with his bare hands. He takes a picture of Caroline Frankenstein that the boy has been holding and places it in the folds of the dress of a girl sleeping in a barn—Justine Moritz, who is later executed for William’s murder.
Having explained to Victor the circumstances behind William’s murder and Justine’s conviction, the monster implores Victor to create another monster to accompany him and be his mate.
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While foraging for food in the woods around the cottage one night, the monster finds an abandoned leather satchel containing some clothes and books. Eager to learn more about the world than he can discover through the chink in the cottage wall, he brings the books back to his hovel and begins to read. The books include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Sorrows of Werter, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the last of which has the most profound effect on the monster. Unaware that Paradise Lost is a work of imagination, he reads it as a factual history and finds much similarity between the story and his own situation. Rifling through the pockets of his own clothes, stolen long ago from Victor’s apartment, he finds some papers from Victor’s journal. With his newfound ability to read, he soon understands the horrific manner of his own creation and the disgust with which his creator regarded him.
Dismayed by these discoveries, the monster wishes to reveal himself to the cottagers in the hope that they will see past his hideous exterior and befriend him. He decides to approach the blind De Lacey first, hoping to win him over while Felix, Agatha, and Safie are away. He believes that De Lacey, unprejudiced against his hideous exterior, may be able to convince the others of his gentle nature.
The perfect opportunity soon presents itself, as Felix, Agatha, and Safie depart one day for a long walk. The monster nervously enters the cottage and begins to speak to the old man. Just as he begins to explain his situation, however, the other three return unexpectedly. Felix drives the monster away, horrified by his appearance.
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As winter thaws into spring, the monster notices that the cottagers, particularly Felix, seem unhappy. A beautiful woman in a dark dress and veil arrives at the cottage on horseback and asks to see Felix. Felix becomes ecstatic the moment he sees her. The woman, who does not speak the language of the cottagers, is named Safie. She moves into the cottage, and the mood of the household immediately brightens. As Safie learns the language of the cottagers, so does the monster. He also learns to read, and, since Felix uses Constantin-François de Volney’s Ruins of Empires to instruct Safie, he learns a bit of world history in the process. Now able to speak and understand the language perfectly, the monster learns about human society by listening to the cottagers’ conversations. Reflecting on his own situation, he realizes that he is deformed and alone. “Was I then a monster,” he asks, “a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?” He also learns about the pleasures and obligations of the family and of human relations in general, which deepens the agony of his own isolation.
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As winter thaws into spring, the monster notices that the cottagers, particularly Felix, seem unhappy. A beautiful woman in a dark dress and veil arrives at the cottage on horseback and asks to see Felix. Felix becomes ecstatic the moment he sees her. The woman, who does not speak the language of the cottagers, is named Safie. She moves into the cottage, and the mood of the household immediately brightens. As Safie learns the language of the cottagers, so does the monster. He also learns to read, and, since Felix uses Constantin-François de Volney’s Ruins of Empires to instruct Safie, he learns a bit of world history in the process. Now able to speak and understand the language perfectly, the monster learns about human society by listening to the cottagers’ conversations. Reflecting on his own situation, he realizes that he is deformed and alone. “Was I then a monster,” he asks, “a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?” He also learns about the pleasures and obligations of the family and of human relations in general, which deepens the agony of his own isolation.
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Observing his neighbors for an extended period of time, the monster notices that they often seem unhappy, though he is unsure why. He eventually realizes, however, that their despair results from their poverty, to which he has been contributing by surreptitiously stealing their food. Torn by his guilty conscience, he stops stealing their food and does what he can to reduce their hardship, gathering wood at night to leave at the door for their use.
The monster becomes aware that his neighbors are able to communicate with each other using strange sounds. Vowing to learn their language, he tries to match the sounds they make with the actions they perform. He acquires a basic knowledge of the language, including the names of the young man and woman, Felix and Agatha. He admires their graceful forms and is shocked by his ugliness when he catches sight of his reflection in a pool of water. He spends the whole winter in the hovel, unobserved and well protected from the elements, and grows increasingly affectionate toward his unwitting hosts.
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Sitting by the fire in his hut, the monster tells Victor of the confusion that he experienced upon being created. He describes his flight from Victor’s apartment into the wilderness and his gradual acclimation to the world through his discovery of the sensations of light, dark, hunger, thirst, and cold. According to his story, one day he finds a fire and is pleased at the warmth it creates, but he becomes dismayed when he burns himself on the hot embers. He realizes that he can keep the fire alive by adding wood, and that the fire is good not only for heat and warmth but also for making food more palatable.
In search of food, the monster finds a hut and enters it. His presence causes an old man inside to shriek and run away in fear. The monster proceeds to a village, where more people flee at the sight of him. As a result of these incidents, he resolves to stay away from humans. One night he takes refuge in a small hovel adjacent to a cottage. In the morning, he discovers that he can see into the cottage through a crack in the wall and observes that the occupants are a young man, a young woman, and an old man.
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One rainy day, Victor wakes to find his old feelings of despair resurfacing. He decides to travel to the summit of Montanvert, hoping that the view of a pure, eternal, beautiful natural scene will revive his spirits.
When he reaches the glacier at the top, he is momentarily consoled by the sublime spectacle. As he crosses to the opposite side of the glacier, however, he spots a creature loping toward him at incredible speed. At closer range, he recognizes clearly the grotesque shape of the monster. He issues futile threats of attack to the monster, whose enormous strength and speed allow him to elude Victor easily. Victor curses him and tells him to go away, but the monster, speaking eloquently, persuades him to accompany him to a fire in a cave of ice. Inside the cave, the monster begins to narrate the events of his life.
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After Justine’s execution, Victor becomes increasingly melancholy. He considers suicide but restrains himself by thinking of Elizabeth and his father. Alphonse, hoping to cheer up his son, takes his children on an excursion to the family home at Belrive. From there, Victor wanders alone toward the valley of Chamounix. The beautiful scenery cheers him somewhat, but his respite from grief is short-lived.
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The trial for Justine Moritz begins at 11:00 the next morning. Victor suffers silent torture while the entire scene plays out in front of him. Yet, he can do nothing to stop it. Justine carries herself calmly at the trial, answering the charges and getting a sterling defense from Elizabeth. Although Justine proclaims her innocence, she is convicted of the crime. Her sentence is to die by hanging the following day.
Elizabeth and Victor go to see Justine in prison where both learn that Justine had given a false confession under stiff questioning. Justine goes to her death with no fear, leaving Victor to ponder the deaths of two innocent victims.
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Victor is now 17 years old and ready to become a student at the University of Ingolstadt in Ingolstadt, Germany (near Munich), but an outbreak of scarlet fever at home delays his departure. His mother and "cousin" both fight the disease; Caroline Beaufort Frankenstein dies, and Elizabeth recovers. Before Caroline dies, she reveals her unrealized plans for the marriage of Victor and Elizabeth by saying, "my firmest hopes of the future happiness were placed on the prospect of your union."
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Victor receives a letter from his father telling him to return home immediately. William, the youngest in the family, has been killed When Victor arrives at the city gates, they are closed, so he must remain outside the city in Secheron until the gates are reopened at dawn. It is at this time that he realizes that he had been gone six years from home and that two years have passed since the creation of his monster.
While near Secheron, on Mont Blanc, Victor catches a glimpse of the monster between flashes of lightning. Having a nagging feeling that the murder of his little brother could be the handiwork of his monster, Victor questions, "Could he be (I shuddered at the conception) the murderer of my brother?" The monster disappears when he realizes that he has been seen by his creator. Now fully believing that his creation murdered William, Victor knows that he cannot reveal the source of the crime without some serious inquiry about his creation. Thus, Victor is torn between revealing the monster and risking inquisition on his past or letting the criminal justice system free the accused.
Finally at home, Victor engages in a conversation with his family. He learns that Justine is accused with circumstantial evidence. He relays his assertion of Justine's innocence and states that she will be found not guilty. His words reassure Elizabeth in a time of great need.
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Elizabeth's letter is the kind one would expect from a concerned family member. It is full of news from home that delights Victor and restores him to better health. Elizabeth tells of Justine Moritz, the Frankenstein's housekeeper and confidant. Even though Justine was treated poorly by her own family, she is a martyr for being a good, loyal friend to the Frankenstein family.
Victor introduces Henry to his professors, who praise Victor highly. Victor and Henry begin their studies together, studying ancient and foreign languages in order to engage their minds. Both men are happy to be hard-working college students.
Plans are made for Victor to return to Geneva in the fall, after his spring recovery, but weather and other delays make the trip impossible, and winter sets in. He revises his plans to depart in May.
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Victor succeeds in bringing his creation, an eight-foot man, to life in November of his second year. Excited and disgusted at "the monster" he had created, he runs from the apartment.
He wanders the streets of Ingolstadt until Henry Clerval finds him in poor condition. Henry had come to see about his friend and to enroll at the university. Henry and Victor return to Victor's apartment to find the monster gone. Victor finds the disappearance of his monster a source of joy and falls down in a fit of exhaustion from the release of anxiety over his creation. Henry spends the rest of the winter and spring nursing Victor back to health after the tumultuous fall. Henry advises Victor to write home, as a letter had recently arrived from his family in Geneva.
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Victor throws himself into his schoolwork, reading all he can about the sciences, particularly chemistry. Gaining a reputation as a scientist and innovator among the professors and fellow students alike. Believing his tenure at Ingolstadt was nearing an end, Victor thinks of returning home to Geneva. However, he launches into a new venue of scientific experimentation — creating life from death and reanimating a dead body.
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Elizabeth and Victor grow up together as best friends. Victor’s friendship with Henry Clerval, a schoolmate and only child, flourishes as well, and he spends his childhood happily surrounded by this close domestic circle. As a teenager, Victor becomes increasingly fascinated by the mysteries of the natural world. He chances upon a book by Cornelius Agrippa, a sixteenth-century scholar of the occult sciences, and becomes interested in natural philosophy. He studies the outdated findings of the alchemists Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus with enthusiasm. He witnesses the destructive power of nature when, during a raging storm, lightning destroys a tree near his house. A modern natural philosopher accompanying the Frankenstein family explains to Victor the workings of electricity, making the ideas of the alchemists seem outdated and worthless. (In the 1818 version, a demonstration of electricity by his father convinces Victor of the alchemists’ mistakenness.)
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The stranger, who the reader soon learns is Victor Frankenstein, begins his narration. He starts with his family background, birth, and early childhood, telling Walton about his father, Alphonse, and his mother, Caroline. Alphonse became Caroline’s protector when her father, Alphonse’s longtime friend Beaufort, died in poverty. They married two years later, and Victor was born soon after.
Frankenstein then describes how his childhood companion, Elizabeth Lavenza, entered his family. At this point in the narrative, the original (1818) and revised (1831) versions of Frankenstein diverge. In the original version, Elizabeth is Victor’s cousin, the daughter of Alphonse’s sister; when Victor is four years old, Elizabeth’s mother dies and Elizabeth is adopted into the Frankenstein family. In the revised version, Elizabeth is discovered by Caroline, on a trip to Italy, when Victor is about five years old. While visiting a poor Italian family, Caroline notices a beautiful blonde girl among the dark-haired Italian children; upon discovering that Elizabeth is the orphaned daughter of a Milanese nobleman and a German woman and that the Italian family can barely afford to feed her, Caroline adopts Elizabeth and brings her back to Geneva. Victor’s mother decides at the moment of the adoption that Elizabeth and Victor should someday marry.
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This letter, written on three separate days (August 5, August 13, and August 19), begins quietly enough when Walton describes how his ship is stuck in an ice field far from land. On July 31, the crew sees a man "of gigantic stature" trailing a dog sled team going north and passing to within one-half a mile of their ice bound ship. The next morning on August 1, the crew finds another man floating free on an ice flow near their ship. The survivor is Victor Frankenstein. After a few days rest, Victor begins telling his story to Walton.
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Written on July 7th, this short letter describes Walton's journey so far as a "triumph." His men remain resolved and loyal, and the weather has been fine, though sheets of ice in the ocean suggest worse conditions may soon threaten. Walton closes his letter with the rhetorical question, "What can stop the determined heart and resolved will of man?"
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In his second letter on March 28th of the following year, from Archangel, Russia, Walton describes himself as lonely. He worries that his refined upbringing has made him too sensitive for the "brutality" of life at sea. Walton's experience of loneliness as a terrible experience establishes the idea of the horror of isolation that is so important throughout he rest of Frankenstein. Active Themes Family, Society, Isolation Theme Icon Related Quotes with Explanations Blue quotation bubble icon linking to an important quote associated with this summary and analysis. Walton writes that his resolution to carry out his journey is "fixed as fate." He confesses his "romantic ... love for the marvellous" and his passion for the dangers of the sea, which he attributes to his fondness for Coleridge's poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
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The very first episode of Sorcerers Tavern !
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