It was at Homburg, several years ago, before the gaming had been suppressed. The evening was very warm, and all the world was gathered on the terrace of the Kursaal and the esplanade below it to listen to the excellent orchestra; or half the world, rather, for the crowd was equally dense in the gaming-rooms around the tables. Everywhere the crowd was great. The night was perfect, the season was at its height, the open windows of the Kursaal sent long shafts of unnatural light into the dusky woods, and now and then, in the intervals of the music, one might almost hear the clink of the...

The data for a life of Nathaniel Hawthorne are the reverse of copious, and even if they were abundant they would serve but in a limited measure the purpose of the biographer. Hawthorne's career was probably as tranquil and uneventful a one as ever fell to the lot of a man of letters; it was almost strikingly deficient in incident, in what may be called the dramatic quality. Few men of equal genius and of equal eminence can have led on the whole a simpler life. His six volumes of Note-Books illustrate this simplicity; they are a sort of monument to an unagitated fortune.

It had occurred to her early that in her position-that of a young person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or a magpie-she should know a great many persons without their recognising the acquaintance. That made it an emotion the more lively-though singularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity still very much smothered-to see any one come in whom she knew outside, as she called it, any one who could add anything to the meanness of her function.

The view from the terrace at Saint-Germain-en-Laye is immense and famous. Paris lies spread before you in dusky vastness, domed and fortified, glittering here and there through her light vapours and girdled with her silver Seine. Behind you is a park of stately symmetry, and behind that a forest where you may lounge through turfy avenues and light-chequered glades and quite forget that you are within half an hour of the boulevards. One afternoon, however, in mid-spring, some five years ago, a young man seated on the terrace had preferred to keep this in mind. His eyes were fixed in idle...

William Hathorne died in 1681; but those hard qualities that his descendant speaks of were reproduced in his son John, who bore the title of Colonel, and who was connected, too intimately for his honour, with that deplorable episode of New England history, the persecution of-the so-called Witches of Salem. John Hathorne is introduced into the little drama entitled The Salem Farms in Longfellow's New England Tragedies.

A CLASSIC VICTORIAN HORROR NOVELLA A governess is employed to take care of the recently orphaned Miles and Flora by their disinterested uncle... Taking the children to a large house in the country, the governess begins to see visitors in the grounds near the house... visitors she very soon suspects may be malignant spirits.... A classic horror story which remains as popular and potent as it was when it was first published. The book has been adapted many times for film, TV and radio.

A protagonist who returns home to confront his alter ego. Spencer Brydon is fifty-six when the novel begins. He returns home to New York City after living in Europe for thirty-three years. He has inherited two properties and is curious to see his hometown. While the town was simple when he left, it has become monstrous, housing skyscrapers, a crowded population, and a bustling social scene. Spencer is shocked by how much his home has changed. Later in the story, he renews a friendship with Alice Staverton, an old acquaintance. Alice has the patience for Spencer; she understands his complex...

Spencer Brydon returns to New York City after thirty-three years abroad. He has returned to -look at his 'property, '- two buildings, one his boyhood home on -the jolly corner.- The second, larger structure is now going to be renovated into a big apartment building.These properties have been the source of his income since the deaths of his family members. Spencer finds he is good at directing this renovation, despite never having done this work before, suggesting that his innate ability for business was hiding deep within him unused. Spencer rekindles a relationship with an old friend, Alice...

First published in 1903 by best-selling author Henry James, this dark comedy, seen as one of the masterpieces of James's final period, follows the trip of protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether to Europe in pursuit of Chad Newsome, his widowed fiancee's supposedly wayward son; he is to bring the young man back to the family business, but he encounters unexpected complications. The third-person narrative is told exclusively from Strether's point of view.

John Marcher is reacquainted with May Bartram, a woman he knew ten years earlier, who remembers his odd secret: Marcher is seized with the belief that his life is to be defined by some catastrophic or spectacular event, lying in wait for him like a -beast in the jungle.- May decides to buy a house in London with the money she inherited from a great aunt, and to spend her days with Marcher, curiously awaiting what fate has in store for him. Marcher is a hopeless egoist, who believes that he is precluded from marrying so that he does not subject his wife to his -spectacular fate-. He takes May...