Excerpt: Mama exclaimed Elsie May there's something squeaking in one of the chinks in the fireplace and it stops whenever I come in I wonder what it is.

Chapter I: THE WEAVING OF THE SHUTTLE NO man knew when the Shuttle began its slow and heavy weaving from shore to shore, that it was held and guided by the great hand of Fate. Fate alone saw the meaning of the web it wove, the might of it, and its place in the making of a world's history. Men thought but little of either web or weaving, calling them by other names and lighter ones, for the time unconscious of the strength of the thread thrown across thousands of miles of...

Excerpt: THE NEW LODGERS AT NO. J PHILIBERT PLACE. THERE are many dreary and dingy rows of ugly houses in certain parts of London, but there certainly could not be any row more ugly or dingier than Philibert Place. There were stories that it had once been more attractive, but that had been so long ago that no one remembered the time. It stood back in its gloomy, narrow strips of uncared-for, smoky gardens, whose broken iron railings were supposed to protect it from the s...

Excerpt: This is the story of the grasshopper that fiddled all summer and didn't have any place to go when the cold winter wind began to blow.

Excerpt: THERE are men and classes of men that stand above the common herd: the soldier, the sailor and the shepherd not infrequently; the artist rarely; rarely still, the clergyman; the physician almost as a rule. He is the flower (such as it is) of our civilization; and when that stage of man is done with, and only remembered to be marveled at in history, he will be thought to have shared as little as any in the defects of the period, and most notably exhibited the vir...

Excerpt: THE SECOND CABIN. I first encountered my fellow-passengers on the Broomielaw in Glasgow. Thence we descended the Clyde in no familiar spirit, but looking askance on each other as on possible enemies. A few Scandinavians, who had already grown acquainted on the North Sea, were friendly and voluble over their long pipes; but among English speakers distance and suspicion reigned supreme. The sun was soon overclouded, the wind freshened and grew sharp as we continue...

Excerpt: About American Fairy Tales. Since its publication in September 1900, L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has become America's greatest and best loved homegrown fairytale. The first totally American fantasy for children, it is one of the most-read children's books. It has also engendered a long series of sequels, stage plays and musicals, movies and television shows, biographies of Baum, scholarly studies of the significance of the book and film, advertise...

Excerpt: We are about to relate a story of mingled fact and fancy. The facts are borrowed from the Russian author, Petjerski; the fancy is our own. Our task will chiefly be to soften the outlines of incidents almost too sharp and rugged for literary use, to supply them with the necessary coloring and sentiment, and to give a coherent and proportioned shape to the irregular fragments of an old chronicle. We know something, from other sources, of the customs described, som...

Excerpt: Now, said he, set to work and cook some bran and cabbage; I am going to bid the wedding guests. And soon they were all collected. Would you like to know who they were? Well, I can only tell you what was told to me; all the hares came, and the crow who was to be the parson to marry them, and the fox for the clerk, and the altar was under the rainbow. But the maiden was sad, because she was so lonely. Get up! Get up! said the rabbit, the wedding folk are all merry...

Excerpt: Of course you know that in the good old once upon-a -time tales of people who live in the Distant country in the shores of the far-off sea the strangest things always happen.

Excerpt: This little book is intended to be used as supplementary material after the child has completed a good lasal Primer.

Chapter 1: Sara Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares. She sat with her feet tucked under her, and leaned against her father, who held her in his arm, as she stared out of the window at the passing people with a qu...

Excerpt: When good King Arthur was reigning in England, there lived in the Duchy of Cornwall a countryman who had an only son called Jack.

Excerpt: Three Little Pigs Once Upon a Time there was an old pig with three little pigs and one day she said to them My children, it is time for you to go out in the world and seek your fortune.

Excerpt: Once upon a time, in a thick forest, there lived three bears One was a great big father bear, with a big head, and large paws, and a great voice...

Excerpt: IT was three nights before Christmas the snow flakes falling steadily covered the roof of the yellow market house with a white coat the clock in the tower struck two in deep muffled tones little Heiskell perched above it on his staff bent over the old solemn face and laughed teasingly he was feeling very gay and flippant for hadn't he received a gorgeous new uniform bright with gold butt...

Excerpt: In the south west of London stands a cathedral which from outside looks like a child's castle of bricks. But when you go inside you see nothing at first but a large emptiness-a ceiling somewhere up in the clouds supported by huge marble columns.

Excerpt: THE KERGUELEN ISLANDS. No doubt the following narrative will be received: with entire incredulity, but I think it well that the public should be put in possession of the facts narrated in ?An Antarctic Mystery.? The public is free to believe them or not, at its good pleasure. No more appropriate scene for the wonderful and terrible adventures which I am about to relate could be imagined than the Desolation Islands, so called, in 1779, by Captain Cook. I lived th...

Excerpt: Among so many effective and artistic tales, it is difficult to give a preference to one over all the rest. Yet, certainly, even amid Verne's remarkable works, his Off on a Comet must be given high rank. Perhaps this story will be remembered when even Round the World in Eighty Days and Michael Strogoff has been obliterated by centuries of time. At least, of the many books since written upon the same theme as Verne's, no one has yet succeeded in equaling or even a...

Excerpt: Peter Rabbit and his big cousin Jumper the Hare were humming this together as they scampered through the Green Forest which wasn't green at all now with snow. Peter Rabbit felt very big and important as he hopped along close behind his big cousin but all the time his heating a wee bit faster than usual and funny little choky.