The Enchanted BluffWe had our swim before sundown, and while we were cooking oursupper the oblique rays of light made a dazzling glare on the whitesand about us. The translucent red ball itself sank behind thebrown stretches of cornfield as we sat down to eat, and the warmlayer of air that had rested over the water and our clean sand bargrew fresher and smelled of the rank ironweed and sunflowersgrowing on the flatter shore. The river was brown and sluggish,like any other of the half-dozen streams that water the Nebraskacorn lands. On one shore was an irregular line of bald clay bluffswhere a few scrub oaks with thick trunks and flat, twisted tops...　

THE ILIADby Homertranslated by Samuel ButlerBOOK ISing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that broughtcountless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it sendhurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogsand vultures, for so were the counsels of Jove fulfilled from theday on which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles, firstfell out with one another.And which of the gods was it that set them on to quarrel? It was theson of Jove and Leto; for he was angry with the king and sent apestilence upon the host to plague the people, because the son of...　

On the Improvement of the UnderstandingOn the Improvement ofthe Understandingby Baruch SpinozaTranslated by R. H. M. Elwes1- Page 2-On the Improvement of the Understanding[1] (1) After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundingsof social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fearscontained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far asthe mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether theremight be some real good having power to communicate itself, which...　

The Commonwealth of Oceanaby James Harrington1656JANOTTI, the most excellent describer of the Commonwealth of Venice, divides the whole series of government into two times or periods: the one ending with the liberty of Rome, which was the course or empire, as I may call it, of ancient prudence, first discovered to mankind by God himself in the fabric of the commonwealth of Israel, and afterward picked out of his footsteps in nature, and unanimously followed by the Greeks and Romans; the other beginning with the arms of Caesar, which, extinguishing liberty, were the transition of ancient into modern prudence, introduced by those inundations of Huns, Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Saxons, which, b　

　　The drug-induced sleep wore off into nothingness, and the girl began the agonizing struggle back to consciousness. A dim and hazy light greeted her slowly opening eyes while a disgusting, putrid stench invaded her nostrils. She was nude, her bare back pressed flat against a damp, yellow, slime-coated wall. It was unreal, an impossibility, she tried to tell herself upon awakening. It had to be some kind of horrifying nightmare. Then suddenly, before she had a chance to fight the panic mushrooming inside her, the yellow slime on the floor rose and began working up the thighs of her defenseless body.　　Terrified beyond all reason, she began screaming screaming insanely as the abomination craw　

　　　　I was following Derry Welfram at a prudent fifty paces when he stumbled, fell face down on the wet tarmac and lay still. I stopped, watching, as nearer hands stretched to help him up, and saw the doubt, the apprehension, the shock flower in the opening mouths of the faces around him. The word that formed in consequence in my own brain was violent, of four letters and unexpressed.　　Derry Welfram lay face down, unmoving, while the fourteen runners for the three-thirty race at York stalked closely past him, the damp jockeys looking down and back with muted curiosity, minds on the business ahead, bodies shivering in the cold near-drizzle of early October. The man was drunk. One could read t　

THE MARK OF DEATH　　THE MOUNTAIN LIMITED was clicking slowly over the rails that trail through the highest and wildest land in America-the western slope of the Rockies.　　Speed was cut down as the big special labored toward the highest point on its line-nearly seven thousand feet above sea level.　　Midnight had struck.　　Outside, the gloomy mountains hung over the track; seemed about to close in on it, and wipe out the train and all its passengers.　　Within the club car of the train, only a handful of men remained in the fortable chairs.　　All of these were dozing away, with the exception of one who sat at the end of the car, puffing furiously at a pipe that was no longer alight. His lips twit　

The SportsmanThe Sportsmanby XenophonTranslation by H. G. Dakyns1- Page 2-The SportsmanXenophon the Athenian was born 431 B.C. He was a pupil ofSocrates. He marched with the Spartans, and was exiled from Athens.Sparta gave him land and property in Scillus, where he lived for manyyears before having to move once more, to settle in Corinth. He died in354 B.C.The Sportsman is a manual on hunting hares, deer and wild boar,...　

The Monster Menby Edgar Rice Burroughs1THE RIFTAs he dropped the last grisly fragment of the dismembered and mutilated body into the small vat of nitric acid that was to devour every trace of the horrid evidence which might easily send him to the gallows, the man sank weakly into a chair and throwing his body forward upon his great, teak desk buried his face in his arms, breaking into dry, moaning sobs.Beads of perspiration followed the seams of his high, wrinkled forehead, replacing the tears which might have lessened the pressure upon his overwrought nerves. His slender frame shook, as with ague, and at times was racked by a convulsive shudder. A sudden step upon the stairway leading to　

PROPOSED ROADS TO FREEDOMPROPOSED ROADS TOFREEDOMBY BERTRAND RUSSELL, F.R.S.1- Page 2-PROPOSED ROADS TO FREEDOMINTRODUCTIONTHE attempt to conceive imaginatively a better ordering of humansociety than the destructive and cruel chaos in which mankind has hithertoexisted is by no means modern: it is at least as old as Plato, whose``Republic' set the model for the Utopias of subsequent philosophers.Whoever contemplates the world in the light of an idealwhether what he...　

　　The eyes behind the wide black rubber goggles were cold as flint. In the howling speed-turmoil of a BSA M20 doing seventy, they were the only quiet things in the hurtling flesh and metal. Protected by the glass of the goggles, they stared fixedly ahead from just above the centre of the handlebars, and their dark unwavering focus was that of gun muzzles. Below the goggles, the wind had got into the face through the mouth and had wrenched the lips back into a square grin that showed big tombstone teeth and strips of whitish gum. On both sides of the grin the cheeks had been blown out by the wind into pouches that fluttered slightly. To right and left of the hurtling face under the crash hel　

The Illustrious Gaudissartby Honore de BalzacTranslated by Katharine Prescott WormeleyDEDICATIONTo Madame la Duchesse de Castries.THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSARTCHAPTER IThe commercial traveller, a personage unknown to antiquity, is one ofthe striking figures created by the manners and customs of our presentepoch. May he not, in some conceivable order of things, be destined tomark for coming philosophers the great transition which welds a periodof material enterprise to the period of intellectual strength? Ourcentury will bind the realm of isolated power, abounding as it does in...