"We could prefer not to have known at all our neighbor..."

At once profitable and precarious, the moonshiner trade attracted only the most spirited individuals.

"The scale over there across the street is truly an ingenious device...."

The story of the dentist McTeague's wooing of his patient, Trina, is one readers can sink their teeth into.

"Care's a canker that benumbs...."

Some people watch what they eat. The narrator of one obscure French novel would rather watch than eat.

"A pause...."

In precapitalist times wealth was considered neither a rational consequence of thrift and smart investment nor evidence of some inborn excellence. Rather, it was regarded as status enjoyed at the sufferance of providence and was therefore subject to revocation. A sudden turn of Fortune's wheel and Dives became Lazarus; Lazarus, Dives. Giving charity appeared, then,

"After a slow start, things went off like clockwork...."

Men were like butterflies to Margaret Fountaine: They were apt to flit away without warning or leave-taking....

“You know about innards? The trick they play on tramps in the country?..."

In the harsh arctic region Laplanders inhabit, joy, like summer, is fleeting.

There was a time when late-night wakefulness wasn't something to be dreaded but welcomed. Centuries ago, sleepers woke with pleasure, even eagerness. Between "first" and "second" sleep, so called, men, women and children stirred to enjoy activities domestic and romantic, spiritual and intellectual.

“What a typical picture for anyone from out of New York...."

The cosmopolitan leisure that the Parisian café has come to symbolize belies its humbler origin. The story of its emergence is written in blood and fire, namely, that which was spilled and ignited during the Napoleonic Wars.