Summary In 2073, the world returned to a wilderness state, following a strange scourge that ravaged the planet and caused an almost immediate death of its inhabitants. This scarlet plague, so named because it caused a red coloring of the skin, totally upset the natural order and virtually scratched the man from the surface of the globe. Only a few individuals, mysteriously spared, survived the pandemic and managed to recreate a form of society, without past and without culture. An old man, questioned by his grandchildren, tries to make the old world understand to beings incapable of imagining...

Extract: THE WAYSIDE INN. One Autumn night, in Sudbury town, Across the meadows bare and brown, The windows of the wayside inn Gleamed red with fire-light through the leaves Of woodbine, hanging from the eaves Their crimson curtains rent and thin. As ancient is this hostelry As any in the land may be, Built in the old Colonial day, When men lived in a grander way, With ampler hospitality; A kind of old Hobgoblin Hall, Now somewhat fallen to decay, With weather-stains upon the wall, And stairways worn, and crazy doors, And creaking and uneven floors, And chimneys huge, and tiled and tall. A...

The Song of Hiawatha is an epic poem in free verse by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and is symbolic of American literature of Indian inspiration of the nineteenth century. The poem, which evokes the life of an Indian named Hiawatha, draws its references from the legends and stories of the North American Indian tribes, especially those of the Ojibwa of Northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, Algic Researches and History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States by American historian Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, pioneer explorer and ethnographer. He was from 1836 to 1841...

The Million Dollar Mystery CHAPTER I There are few things darker than a country road at night, particularly if one does not know the lay of the land. It is not difficult to traverse a known path; no matter how dark it is, one is able to find the way by the aid of a mental photograph taken in the daytime. But supposing you have never been over the road in the daytime, that you know nothing whatever of its topography, where it dips or rises, where it narrows or forks. You find yourself in the same unhappy state of mind as a blind man suddenly thrust into a strange house. One black night, along...

Extract: THE HOUSE OF CARNE If by any chance you should ever sail on a low ebb-tide along a certain western coast, you will, if you are of a receptive humour and new to the district, receive a somewhat startling impression of the dignity of the absolutely flat. Your ideas of militant and resistant grandeur may have been associated hitherto with the iron frontlets and crashing thunders of Finisterre or Sark, of Cornwall or the Western Isle. Here you are faced with a repressive curbing of the waters, equal in every respect to theirs, but so quietly displayed as to be somewhat awesome, as mighty...

Background Page from the original manuscript copy of Alice's Adventures Under Ground, 1864 Alice was published in 1865, three years after Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed a boat up the Isis on 4 July 1862 (this popular date of the "golden afternoon" might be a confusion or even another Alice-tale, for that particular day was cool, cloudy, and rainy) with the three young daughters of Henry Liddell (the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University and Dean of Christ Church): Lorina Charlotte Liddell (aged 13, born 1849, "Prima" in the book's prefatory verse); Alice...

Extract: EXCELSIOR. "Goblin, lead them up and down." The ruddy glow of sunset was already fading into the sombre shadows of night, when two travellers might have been observed swiftly-at a pace of six miles in the hour-descending the rugged side of a mountain; the younger bounding from crag to crag with the agility of a fawn, while his companion, whose aged limbs seemed ill at ease in the heavy chain armour habitually worn by tourists in that district, toiled on painfully at his side. As is always the case under such circumstances, the younger knight was the first to break the silence. "A...

Sylvie and Bruno is a novel written from 1867 by Lewis Carroll. Roman in which he explores just about all combinations of humor and nonsense while dealing with his favorite themes: logic and its paradoxes, the gap between signifiers and signifieds. Sylvie and Bruno is the third and last novel by Lewis Carroll, published in two volumes: Sylvie & Bruno in 1889; Sylvie & Bruno concluded in 1893. Two stories intersect: one centered on the fantasies of childhood and the other on the amorous or political intrigues. Situations and events follow one another in numerous processes of great originality:...

PREFACE. Nearly the whole of this volume is a reprint of the serious portion of Phantasmagoria and other Poems, which was first published in 1869 and has long been out of print. "The Path of Roses" was written soon after the Crimean War, when the name of Florence Nightingale had already become a household-word. "Only a Woman's Hair" was suggested by a circumstance mentioned in The Life of Dean Swift, viz., that, after his death, a small packet was found among his papers, containing a single lock of hair and inscribed with those words. "After Three Days" was written after seeing Holman Hunt's...

The Ghost of Canterville features a ghost named Sir Simon and an American minister, Mr. Otis, accompanied by his family. On arrival, Lord Canterville, the former owner of the premises, warned Otis and his family that the ghost of Sir Simon haunted the castle since the latter had killed his wife Eleonore several centuries ago. However, this ghost, which has always frightened all the people who lived in this castle, does not succeed in frightening this American family which displays a resolutely modern and pragmatic attitude. The ghost exhausts all its arsenal of techniques. For example, when...