Wee Willie Winkie_, Rudyard Kipling.

_Baa Baa Black Sheep_, Rudyard Kipling.

_Captains Courageous_, Rudyard Kipling.

_The Jungle Books_, Rudyard Kipling.

_They_, Rudyard Kipling.

_The Brushwood Boy_, Rudyard Kipling.

_Christ in Flanders_, Honore de Balzac.

_The Old Gentleman of the Black Stock_, Thomas Nelson Page.

_A New England Nun_, Mary Wilkins Freeman.

_Outcasts of Poker Flat_, Bret Harte.

_The Siege of Berlin_, Alphonse Dadoed.

_The Prisoner of Assiout_, Grant Allen.

_A Terribly Strange Bed_, Wilkie Collins.

_The Prisoners_, Guy de Maupassant.

_Mr. Isaacs_, F. Marion Crawford.

_Where Love Is, There God Is Also_, Leo Tolstoi.

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER [1]

_By Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)_

Son coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitot qu'on le touche il resonne.
--De Beranger.[2]

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of
the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had
been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of
country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew
on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it
was; but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of
insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the
feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because
poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the
sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the
scene before me--upon the mere house, and the simple landscape
features of the domain--upon the bleak walls--upon the vacant eye-like
windows--a few rank sedges--and upon a few white trunks of decayed
trees--with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no
earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the
reveller upon opium--the bitter lapse into every-day life--the hideous
dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening
of the heart--an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of
the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was
it--I paused to think--what was it that so unnerved me in the
contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble;
nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I
pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion
that while, beyond