Not all American women remained at home while the men fought the Civil War. Some wives, particularly those of officers, followed their husbands to the front lines of battle and lived with them at soldiers’ camps. Some unmarried women spent time at the soldiers’ camps as well, cooking, doing laundry, and sometimes serving as prostitutes—even though the traditional values of society frowned upon this practice...

Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land...

Of those few fools, who with ill stars are curst, Sure scribbling fools, called poets, fare the worst: For they’re a sort of fools which fortune makes, And, after she has made ’em fools, forsakes. With Nature’s oafs ’tis quite a diff’rent case, For Fortune favours all her idiot race. In her own nest the cuckoo eggs we find, O’er which she broods to hatch the changeling kind: No portion for her own she has to spare, So much she dotes on her adopted care...

"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don’t tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist--I really believe he is Antichrist--I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my ’faithful slave,’ as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have frightened you--sit down and tell me all the news...

"Honest folks like me! How do ye ken whether I am honest, or what I am? I may be the deevil himsell for what ye ken, for he has power to come disguised like an angel of light; and, besides, he is a prime fiddler. He played a sonata to Corelli, ye ken." There was something odd in this speech, and the tone in which it was said...

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again...

My godmother lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton. Her husband’s family had been residents there for generations, and bore, indeed, the name of their birthplace--Bretton of Bretton: whether by coincidence, or because some remote ancestor had been a personage of sufficient importance to leave his name to his neighbourhood, I know not. When I was a girl I went to Bretton about twice a year, and well I liked the visit...

As the manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place...

Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the town of P----, in Kentucky. There were no servants present, and the gentlemen, with chairs closely approaching, seemed to be discussing some subject with great earnestness. For convenience sake, we have said, hitherto, two gentlemen...

(The Persons represented in the Play...