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John Hendricks was bear-leading at the time. He had originally studied for Holy Orders, but had abandoned the Church later for private reasons connected with his faith, and had taken to teaching and tutoring instead. He was an honest, upstanding fellow of five-and-thirty, incorruptible, intelligent in a simple, straightforward way. He played games with his head, more than most Englishmen do, but he went through life without much calculation. He had qualities that made boys like and respect him; he won their confidence. Poor, proud, ambitious, he realised that fate offered him a chance when the Secretary of State for Scotland asked him if he would give up his other pupils for a year and take his son, Lord Ernie, round the world upon an educational trip that might make a man of him.

The object of this little book is to offer a survey of the remarkable civilisation which arose in ancient India thousands of years ago and which influenced not only the manners, religion and customs of the people of the Malaya Archipelago and Indo-China, but gave also a thin veneer of culture to the nomads of Central Asiatic steppes, through her commercial enterprise and religiouspropaganda.

Personally I have known Mr. Chitta Ranjan Das from the days of his youth. His father, the late Babu Bhuban Mohan Das was a friend of mine. Bhuban Mohan was a well-known Attorney of the Calcutta High Court. For some time he was connected also with Bengalee journalism. As editor, first, of the Brahmo Public Opinion, and subsequently of the Bengal Public Opinion, he made a very high position for himself among Bengalee journalists. His style was very simple, and he spoke with a directness that was rather rare in our more successful English weeklies of those days. Babu Bhuban Mohan was a sincere patriot, and though like good many English educated Bengalees of his generation, he threw himself heart and soul into the Brahmo Samaj Movement, in his personal life and more particularly in his dealings with his Hindu relatives, he belonged to the old Hindu type, and spent whatever he earned,—and he earned a lot—for the support of his poorer relatives. Indeed he spent upon them more than his finances allowed and consequently got involved in heavy liabilities that forced him, during the closing years of his professional life, to take refuge in the Insolvency Court.

What is India? I make no apology for answering the question in the words used by Lord Dufferin at the St. Andrew’s dinner, Calcutta, on November 80, 1888, for they give the most vivid picture of what we mean by India that has been drawn in a few lines. ‘It is an Empire,’ he said, ‘equal in size, if Russia be excluded, to the entire Continent of Europe, with a population of 250,000,000 souls.

The collection of lectures of F. Max Müller portrays India, specially, the Vedic India, as an epitome of virtuosity & morality, whose glory is equal if not greater to the classical Greek or Roman Civilizations. Müller urges the Westerners to come out of their supreme colonial mindset & admire & adopt the multidimensional efficacy that is inherent in India. He espouses an amazing depth of love & reverence for India, & highlights such positive aspects about her that it compels the reader to look at his or her own country in a different positive light.

Such ghost stories are a source of pleasure, and are read as a pastime and are often vastly enjoyed, because though the reader is a bit afraid of what he does not know, still he likes to be assured that ghosts do not in reality exist.

This book deals with the myths and legends of India, which survive in the rich and abundant storehouse of Sanskrit literature. The reader is introduced to the various sacred works of the Hindus. Reprint, with illustrations.

Tense quiet filled the crooked streets of Bromfield, the quiet that presages storm. Vine Larimore looked anxiously from the window. She was not afraid of tempests: she reveled in them. But a great fear had gripped her in the night. Why had Calvin failed to stop on his way home from the station? What business was it that took Calvin Stone to Rochester every week or two? Another sweetheart? She would not give the hideous thought house room. Was not she, Lavinia Larimore, the handsomest girl in Bromfield? Was not her father, next to the Calvins and the Stones, the most important man in the rusty old New York village? Had she not worn Calvin’s ring for three endless years? Most of the girls in her set were already married, and at New Year’s she had worn the green stockings for her seventeen-year-old sister, Isabel. The wedding dress she had made with so much care and skill, two years agone, hid its once modish lines beneath the cover of the cedar chest—the hope chest that Calvin had ordered for her at Stephen Trench’s shop

Planetfall.
Here the forest was green and cool. A soft, damp wind promised rain. The colonists moved down the ramp, staring at the crew members piling crates of supplies in the meadow beyond.
Frowns. Then whispers.
Saxon glanced up. His nostrils flared. “Hurry,” he told the crewmen, and came forward, beaming. He was tired. It showed in his feverish, too-bright smile as he said, “Afraid Engineering’s a little behind schedule. They’ll be here tomorrow morning to erect your city. Tonight you’ll have to rough it.”

“Are you an unusually persevering and persistent person? Or, like most of us, do you sometimes find it difficult to stick to the job until it is done? What is your usual experience in this respect?
“Is it not this, that you work steadily along until of a sudden you become conscious of a feeling of weariness, crying “Enough!” for the time being, and that you then yield to the impulse to stop?” -An excerpt

Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development’ is an 1883 book by Francis Galton, in which he covers a variety of psychological phenomena and their subsequent measurement. In this text he also references the idea of eugenics and coined the term for the first time. (courtesy: wikipedia)

First published in the year 1891, the present book ‘Intentions’ was written by Oscar Wilde. It is a collection of literary essays that present his views on art and criticism. Wilde’s aesthetic philosophy and his commentaries on art, literature, criticism, and society asserts the philosophy of ‘art for art’s sake’: art is an end in itself, and literature does not need to convey didactic lessons to be valuable.

The young Duc de Hardimont happened to be at Aix in Savoy, whose waters he hoped would benefit his famous mare, Perichole, who had become wind-broken since the cold she had caught at the last Derby,—and was finishing his breakfast while glancing over the morning paper, when he read the news of the disastrous engagement at Reichshoffen.

In the annals of Invention and Discovery, it may be said without undue boasting, no nation of modern times can lay claim to such an eminent position as Great Britain; and her many ingenious and intrepid adventurers into what they found unknown regions of the arts, the sciences, and the earth’s surface, have so largely contributed to raise her to her great place and power, that it is mere justice and self-interest to bestow on them grateful rewards in life, and renown after death. In this little volume are brought together a number of sketches and memoranda, illustrating the history of discovery, and the lives and labours of inventors and explorers, not of our own country alone, but of others—for knowledge is of no country, but of all. The object of the collector has been rather to present the popular than the strictly scientific side of his subject—to furnish materials of interest and amusement, as well as instruction; and if now and then he has been tempted to stray into bye-paths of anecdote and gossip, excuse may readily be found in the fact that the private life of our men of science, often singularly noble and full of character, is apt to be altogether obscured by the brilliancy of the results of their secret and silent toil. This volume will have served its purpose, if it excites an appetite for fuller and deeper inquisition into the sources of British greatness and of modern civilisation.

“To show that inventors have accomplished more than most persons realize, not only in bringing forth new mechanisms, but in doing creative work in many walks of life, is, in part, the object of this book. To suggest what they may do, if properly encouraged, is its main intention. For, since it is to inventors mainly that we owe all that civilization is, it is to inventors mainly that we must look for all that civilization can be made to be.” -Preface

The great World War was more than two-thirds over when America entered the struggle, and yet in a sense this country was in the war from its very beginning. Three great inventions controlled the character of the fighting and made it different from any other the world has ever seen. These three inventions were American. The submarine was our invention; it carried the war into the sea. The airplane was an American invention; it carried the war into the sky. We invented the machine-gun; it drove the war into the ground.

Every head of a corporation, every business man, in fact everyone employed in a responsible position and upon whose judgment the success of an enterprise largely depends, should provide himself with a general knowledge of the problem of investments and speculation.

Investments (1917) by Edward David Jones.
Edward Jones is an investment firm that believes your financial goals deserve a face to face conversation.

The Ion is the shortest, or nearly the shortest, of all the writings which bear the name of Plato, and is not authenticated by any early external testimony. The grace and beauty of this little work supply the only, and perhaps a sufficient, proof of its genuineness. The plan is simple; the dramatic interest consists entirely in the contrast between the irony of Socrates and the transparent vanity and childlike enthusiasm of the rhapsode Ion. The theme of the Dialogue may possibly have been suggested by the passage of Xenophon’s Memorabilia in which the rhapsodists are described by Euthydemus as ‘very precise about the exact words of Homer, but very idiotic themselves.’ (Compare Aristotle, Met.)

Tourists at Pompeii are shown a temple of Isis. The impartial cinders have preserved for us there, not only the temple, but the secret passage which the priests used in the production of what are nowadays called “phenomena.”

First published in the year 1855, the present novel ‘Israel Potter’ by American writer Herman Melville is loosely based on a 108-page long pamphlet autobiography that he acquired in the 1840s, ‘Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter’.

This is a volume of inspirational poems. Its purpose is to bring men courage and resolution, to cheer them, to fire them with new confidence when they grow dispirited, to strengthen their faith that THINGS CAN BE DONE. It is better for this purpose than the entire works of any one poet, for it takes the cream of many and has greater diversity than any one writer can show.

This is a volume of inspirational poems. Its purpose is to bring men courage and resolution, to cheer them, to fire them with new confidence when they grow dispirited, to strengthen their faith that THINGS CAN BE DONE. It is better for this purpose than the entire works of any one poet, for it takes the cream of many and has greater diversity than any one writer can show.

“There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” That is one of the main lessons to be learned from the strange story of the Gunpowder Plot. The narrative here given, so far as its historical portion is concerned, is taken chiefly from original and contemporaneous documents. It has been carefully kept to facts—in themselves more interesting than any fiction—and scarcely a speech or an incident has been admitted, however small, for which authority could not be adduced. Those of my Readers who have made the acquaintance of Lettice Eden, and Joyce Morrell’s Harvest, will meet some old friends in this tale.

Absorbed as he was in his book, you probably picture him as a slight, pale little chap, somewhat underweight for his ten years, with pale cheeks, a bulging brow, large horn spectacles, completely immersed in a volume of Emerson’s Essays. Not at all. He had a round, brown face, a strong, lithe body, excellent arm and leg muscles, and nice brown eyes that were in unusually good condition because he never overworked them on school books. He had never opened Emerson’s Essays in his life, and the large volume that just now held his attention so completely was a book of fairy tales.

First published in the year 1906, the present book ‘Italian Backgrounds’ is a travel diary written by renowned author Edith Wharton. He gave cultural backgrounds of the civilization of Italy in his travel diary present here in the form of a book.