This is the story of a young Irish boy named Sandy Kilday, who at the age of sixteen, being without home or relatives, decides to try his luck in the new country across the sea. Accordingly he slips aboard one of the big ocean liners as a stowaway, but is discovered before the voyage is half over and in spite of his entreaties is told he must be returned by the next steamer. Sandy, however, who has a winning way and sunny smile, arouses the interest of the ship's doctor, who pays his passage and gives him some money with which to start his new life. On the voyage Sandy has made friends with a...

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was an American novelist. She is best known for the novel Little Women, published in 1868. Due to her family's poverty, she began work at an early age as an occasional teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic helper, and writer - her first book was Flower Fables (1854). As she grew older, she developed as both an abolitionist and a feminist. A lesserknown part of her work are the passionate, fiery novels and stories she wrote, usually under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, such as A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866). Alcott also produced moralistic and wholesome stories...

"The Chimes" is Charles Dickens 1844 novella that concerns the disillusionment of Toby "Trotty" Veck, a poor working-class man. When Trotty has lost his faith in Humanity and believes that his poverty is the result of his unworthiness he is visited on New Year's Eve by spirits to help restore his faith and show him that nobody is born evil, but rather that crime and poverty are things created by man.

nheritors is a three-act play written by the American dramatist Susan Glaspell, written in 1921. The play concerns the legacy of an idealistic farmer who wills his highly coveted midwest farmland to the establishment of a college. Forty years later, when his granddaughter stands up for the rights of Hindu nationals to protest at the college her grandfather founded, she jeopardizes funding for the college itself and sets herself against her own uncle, the president of the institution's trustees. Ultimately, she defies her family's wishes, and as a consequence is bound for prison herself. The...

"One day, Mr. H. M. Woggle-Bug, became separated from his comrades who had accompanied him from the Land of Oz. Finding that time hung heavy on his hands -- and he had four of them -- he decided to walk down the Main Street of the City and try to discover something-or-other of interest." So begins the adventures of the largest Woggle-Bug you have ever seen -- if you have ever seen even one -- in a thoroughly modern 1905 American city -- strutting down the street, his pink handkerchief in hand, his cane swirling . . . only to fall in love with the most stirringly enchanting beauty in a window...

Originally published in 1891 when Wilde was at the height of his form, these brilliant essays on art, literature, criticism, and society display the flamboyant poseur's famous wit and wide learning. A leading spokesman for the English Aesthetic movement, Wilde promoted "art for art's sake" against critics who argued that art must serve a moral purpose. On every page of this collection the gifted literary stylist admirably demonstrates not only that the characteristics of art are "distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power," but also that criticism itself can be raised to an art form...