“If you don’t like Christmas stories, don’t read this one!And if you don’t like dogs I don’t know just what to advise you to do!For I warn you perfectly frankly that I am distinctly pro-dog and distinctly pro-Christmas, and would like to bring to this little story whatever whiff of fir-balsam I can cajole from the make-believe forest in my typewriter, and every glitter of tinsel, smudge of toy candle, crackle of wrapping paper, that my particular brand of brain and ink can conjure up on...

Throughout three years of school, Rae Malgregor had been perfectly pliant, perfectly compliant to all the demands placed on her. But now, on the eve of graduation, she couldn’t go on with the mask of artificiality and the air of perfection. She had been chasing this nursing job three whole years, but there was just no wag to it! The Superintendent was stunned. Her best student! The Senior Surgeon was all grey granite business and livid that his time was being taken up with a hysterical nurse! And yet, though he wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, especially himself, his interest was piqued.

Eve Edgarton is not who she seems she is. A short encounter with Mr. Barton show that first impressions are not always right or indicative of one’s seemingly obvious preference or one’s proclivity.

Carl Stanton is an invalid suffering from an unusual bout of rheumatism. His fiancée is gone for the winter and though he begs her to write to help ease his boredom and pain she is stingy with her letters. She sends him what she calls a "ridiculous circular" which she states is very apropos of his sentimental passion for letters. In a sudden fit of mischief, malice and rheumatism, Carl decides to respond to the circular which results in bringing about the necessary distraction in a flurry of letters that do ease Carl’s boredom and pain but also bring him something else that he never quite expected.

This, volume 21 of the Chronicles of Canada series, describes the settlement of the Red River Colony by Lord Selkirk, and the struggles it had against the North-West Company. The fledgling settlement eventually became the city of Manitoba.

Virginia Woolf is one of the most influential and controversial feminine figures in the literary life of the London society. Night and Day is one of her first novels published in 1919 which displays the moral and spiritual issues that people confront. The author herself was an emotionally unstable person, her episodes of mental illness and suicidal depression being recurrent and always brought into the public attention. The novel revolves around the life of the main character, Katherine Hilbery, a superb girl, free spirited and living in her twenties...

The Voyage Out is the first novel by Virginia Woolf, published in 1915 by Duckworth; and published in the U.S. in 1920 by Doran. One of Woolf's wittiest social satires.Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship and is launched on a course of self-discovery in a kind of modern mythical voyage. The mismatched jumble of passengers provide Woolf with an opportunity to satirize Edwardian life. The novel introduces Clarissa Dalloway, the central character of Woolf's later novel, Mrs...

The novel centers, in a very ambiguous way, around the life story of the protagonist Jacob Flanders, and is presented entirely by the impressions other characters have of Jacob [except for those times when we do indeed get Jacob's perspective]. Thus, although it could be said that the book is primarily a character study and has little in the way of plot or background, the narrative is constructed as a void in place of the central character, if indeed the novel can be said to have a 'protagonist' in conventional terms. Motifs of emptiness and absence haunt the novel and establish its elegiac feel.

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction...

CANADA, THE EMPIRE OF THE NORTHBy Agnes C. LautPREFACETo re-create the shadowy figures of the heroic past, to clothe the dead once more in flesh and blood, to set the puppets of the play in life's great dramas again upon the stage of action,--frankly, this may not be formal history, but it is what makes the past most real to the present day. Pictures of men and women, of moving throngs and heroic episodes, stick faster in the mind than lists of governors and arguments on treaties. Such pictures may not be history, but they breathe life into the skeletons of the past...

Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (1776 – 1822), better known by his pen name E.T.A. Hoffmann (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann), was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist. Hoffmann's stories were very influential during the 19th century, and he is one of the major authors of the Romantic movement.He is the subject and hero of Jacques Offenbach's famous but fictional opera The Tales of Hoffmann, and the author of the novelette The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which the famous ballet The Nutcracker is based...

Anyone who's ever visited the Yosemite National Park will find this book a treasure trove of descriptions, information and evocations of the fabled beauty of this amazing piece of heaven on earth! The Yosemite by John Muir was published in 1912. Born in Scotland, England, this world-famous conservationist was a multi-talented genius. He was a geologist, naturalist, engineer, writer, botanist and a passionate and prolific writer on the preservation of the natural environment. His family migrated to America when he was just a few years old, the third of eight boisterous children...

First published in 1894, this wonderful travelogue by a famed naturalist and conservationist still remains a book that delights and informs its readers. The Mountains of California by John Muir recounts the author's exploration of the Yosemite Valley, Mount Whitney, the famed sequoia forests and King's Canyon among other places of immense natural beauty. Written in his characteristic zestful style, with a deep understanding and respect for nature, the book is a treasure trove of geography, geology, botany, biology and sheer love of the magical planet we live in...

The journal of nature-lover John Muir who spent the summer of 1869 walking California’s Sierra Nevada range. From French Bar to Mono Lake and the Yosemite Valley, Muir was awestruck by everything he saw. The antics of the smallest “insect people” amazed him as much as stunted thousand-year old Juniper trees growing with inconceivable tenacity from tiny cracks in the stone. Muir spent the rest of his life working to preserve the high Sierra, believing that “the clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” John Muir (1838-1914) was born in Dunbar, Scotland and grew up in Wisconsin, USA. This recording commemorates the 140th anniversary of that first summer.

“The only fire for the whole house was the kitchen stove, with a fire box about eighteen inches long and eight inches wide and deep,- scant space for three or four small sticks, around which in hard zero weather all the family of ten shivered, and beneath which in the morning we found our socks and coarse, soggy boots frozen solid.” Thus, with perceptive eye for detail, the American naturalist, John Muir, describes life on a pioneer Wisconsin farm in the 1850’s. Muir was only eleven years old when his father uprooted the family from a relatively comfortable life in Dunbar, Scotland, to settle in the backwoods of North America...

In 1879 John Muir went to Alaska for the first time. Its stupendous living glaciers aroused his unbounded interest, for they enabled him to verify his theories of glacial action. Again and again he returned to this continental laboratory of landscapes. The greatest of the tide-water glaciers appropriately commemorates his name. Upon this book of Alaska travels, all but finished before his unforeseen departure, John Muir expended the last months of his life.

A collection of Muir's previously unpublished essays, released shortly after his death. "This volume will meet, in every way, the high expectations of Muir's readers. The recital of his experiences during a stormy night on the summit of Mount Shasta will take rank among the most thrilling of his records of adventure. His observations on the dead towns of Nevada, and on the Indians gathering their harvest of pine nuts, recall a phase of Western life that has left few traces in American literature...

A great dog story, a well told tale — the naturalist and adventurer John Muir recounts how he and his companion, a dog named Stickeen, each, alone, confronted and conquered their fears of an icy Alaskan glacier in 1880.

Emily Bronte’s first and only novel, Wuthering Heights, portrays the obsessive and vengeful love story between Heathcliff and Catherine. Images of cruelty and passion with an incorporation of gothic supernatural elements set the dark and misty atmosphere present throughout the novel. Moving between two neighboring houses, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, the wild love story turned destructive obsession is narrated by Mr. Lockwood through his diary entries. Bronte sets the novel into motion with the arrival of Mr...

The first book in Galsworthy’s trilogy, The Forsyte Saga, The Man of Property revolves around the lives of the Forsytes, a self-conceited and cold family, who place a high value on propagating money and rising from their yeoman roots. The novel chronicles the events that lead to their inevitable demise, which is instigated by the stuffy man of property, Soames Forsyte, as he pursues the ideals of the preceding generation, whilst maintaining his own obsession with ownership. At the same time, Galsworthy candidly criticizes the values of the upper-middle classes, by means of satire, irony, a mixed array of realistic characters, an evocative setting, and an intricate plot...

‘The Forsyte Saga’ is the story of a wealthy London family stretching from the eighteen-eighties until the nineteen-twenties. In Chancery is the second book in the saga. Five years have passed since Irene left Soames and the death of Bosinney. Old Jolyon meets Irene and is enchanted by her. At his death he leaves her a legacy sufficient for her to live an independent life in Paris. Soames, who is desperate for a son, attempts to effect a rapprochement but is rejected by her. Meanwhile Young Jolyon, now a widower who is Irene’s trustee, falls in love with her...

‘The Forsyte Saga’ is the story of a wealthy London family stretching from the eighteen-eighties until the nineteen-twenties. To Let is the third and final book in the saga (although Galsworthy later published two further trilogies which extend the story). We are now in 1920, about twenty years since Irene married Young Jolyon and gave birth to John and since Soames married Annette, who gave him a daughter, Fleur. The two sides of the family have not met since those times and John and Fleur do not even know of each other’s existence...

This 1918 book consists of five short stories or novelettes by Galsworthy. They are The First and Last (1914), A Stoic, The Apple Tree (1916), The Juryman, Indian Summer of a Forsyte (1918) This last became part of the trilogy The Forsyte Saga. (Introduction by David Wales)

Gyp, the daughter of ex-Major Charles Claire Winton, at the age of 23 marries Fiorsen, a Swedish violin virtuoso. Her mother, the wife of another man, has been Winton's mistress; she had died when Gyp was born. A highly sensitive child, Gyp has grown up in isolated surroundings with a kind, but very British, father. As she gets older her father tries to introduce her into society. An attack of gout takes him to Wiesbaden for a cure and, as he never goes anywhere without her, she accompanies him...

A small play in three acts. A kind of comic tragedy. The plot tells the story of the interaction between two very different families in rural England just after the end of the First World War. Squire Hillcrist lives in the manor house where his family has lived for generations. He has a daughter, Jill, who is in her late teens; and a wife, Amy, as well as servants and retainers. He is "old money", although his finances are at a bit of low ebb. The other family is the "nouveau riche" Hornblowers,...

This narrative poem is composed in three parts, and consists of a dialogue between the aged Irish hero Oisín and St. Patrick. Oisín relates his three-hundred year sojourn in the immortal isles of Faerie. In the isles, Oisín married the beautiful Sidhe Niamh: together they traveled, feasted, and quested. At last Oisín succumbs to the temptation to return and visit the lands of mortal men: inadvertently slipping from his faerie horse, his body touches the ground and instantly puts on the flesh of a decrepit old man. Oisín describes various islands and what he did there: contrasting his noble deeds with the degenerate weakness of the present generation.

The first novel in her renowned series of detective fiction, Sayers introduces Lord Peter Wimsey, a bon vivant gentleman, whose hobby of playing detective is put to the test, as he is launched into his first official crime investigation. The mystery begins when the body of an unidentified man has been found in the bathtub of local architect Mr. Thipps. Adding to the peculiarity of the situation is the fact that the corpse is stark naked except for a pair of expensive pince-nez glasses. Due to the incriminating circumstances of the murder, the official investigator suspects Thipps to be the perpetrator of the bizarre murder...

In this chilling short-story by a master of the craft, Kurt Vonnegut creates a fictional world of the future where life and death are no longer matters of individual choice or destiny. The title refers to the famous quote from Hamlet, “To be or not to be....” with “0” being pronounced as “naught.” It also refers to the eternal dilemma of life and death that face every human being at some point in their lives. Written in 1962 it is set in some unspecified time in the future, when earth has become a Utopia...

A collection to celebrate Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 200th birthday, on 27th February, 2007.

I sing the Song of Hiawatha,Brave of heart and strong of arm.Daughter’s son of old Nokomis,Fathered by the harsh West Wind. With its regular, beating rhythm, the Song of Hiawatha has often been parodied, but in truth, it is a powerful, emotional epic; a hero’s life, his loves and suffering. The legends and traditions of the North American Indian swirl together through the tale like a mountain stream, tumbling white over the rocks, and caressing the mossy tree roots.

Evangeline is one of Longfellow’s most popular poems and was once a great favorite with the American people. For many years almost every school child studied this poem during the middle school years. Although the decline of the reputation of the once-idolized poet has also brought neglect to this classic, it is still a very touching and expertly written work of art. It is based upon the tragic expulsion of the French settlers from Acadia (located in the Canadian maritime provinces) during the French & Indian War (1754-1763)...

Mostly a collection of story-telling poems told by a group of friends in a tavern late one night. "Tales" includes the famous Paul Revere's ride, together with poems of many tales, countries and styles.