General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard was one of the senior commanders of Southern forces during the Civil War. It was he who initiated the hostilities by opening fire on Ft. Sumter in Charleston harbor, in April, 1861.

In July of that year, having taken command of the Confederate Army of the Potomac, he triumphed in the first serious clash of the war, at Manassas, Virginia. His army, aided by reinforcements from Johnston’s army in the Shenandoah Valley, routed a Federal army under General McDowell. Had it been his army instead that routed, it is possible the Civil War might have ended that same year, as the path to Richmond would have been wide open.

This is his account of the battle, including the strategic situation leading up to it. As an afterward, he added a very revealing appraisal of the relations between him and Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and the reasons why, in his opinion, the South failed to win its war of secession.

My Review

I have an interest in the American Civil War going back many years and so when I noticed this non fiction book on Librivox I rushed home to download it. To my delight I found that it was read by one of my favourite Librivox readers, Mark Smith.

The book was well paced, with the General leading us though the run up to the battle and into the events of the battle itself. I found it very interesting and satisfying to hear the details and concerns of a General who was actually there in the middle of the action.

My only disapointment with the book was that it was so short. These military memoirs often are.

If you have any interest in the American Civil War, then this book is a must read(listen) and due to it being a short one, you no excuse not to!

Reading 3/3
Production 2/3
Story 3/3

Total Score 8/9

This book is available from Librivox

Source: Well Told Tales
Length: 23 min
Reader: Rick Stringer

The story: This gangster story provides enough violence and double-crosses to satisfy a Sopranos fan. Mafia initiate Danny has just pulled off his first mob hit, icing Fat Larry for skimming profits. As the story begins, he and veteran mobster Sal DeLuca are headed to the Florida Everglades to dump the body. When they get to the swamp, Danny finds more dangers than just the alligators.

The story is told in coarse forthright language which lends it a sneering tough-guy attitude. Goldman provides the gory details to make this story a compelling window into mob life. Although the story moves slowly at first, Goldman doles out twists that make the earlier descriptive passages more than just atmosphere building in hindsight. This is not a story for the ages, but it accomplishes what it intends: entertainment.

Rating: 6/10

The reader: Rick Stringer gives a fantastic narrative performance. Varying his pacing with the action, Stringer builds the tension up to the story’s climax. He does not overdo the Italian accent but instead voices the mobsters as individual characters: Danny with newbie excitation and Sal with ruthless callousness. The recording is well-produced by an entertaining podcast.

Bailey’s writing has been described thusly by the Newark Evening News: ‘Mr. Bailey centered all his plots in the animal, bird and insect worlds, weaving natural history into the stories in a way that won educator’s approval without arousing the suspicions of his young readers. He made it a habit to never ‘write down’ to children and frequently used words beyond the average juvenile vocabulary, believing that youngsters respond to the stimulus of the unfamiliar. (Wikipedia)

• Gutenberg e-text
• Wikipedia - Arthur Scott Bailey
• LibriVox’s The Tale Of Tommy Fox Internet Archive page
• Zip file of the entire book (54.8M)

This book includes the classic alphabet, Sing-A-Song Of Sixpence, The Frog Who Would A Wooing Go, The Three Little Pigs, Puss In Boots, and The Ugly Duckling. Fun for all ages! (Summary by Sam Stinson)

• Gutenberg e-text
• LibriVox’s Aunt Friendly’s Picture Book Internet Archive page
• Zip file of the entire book - 10.2MB

This short novel of Twain’s, from 1903, is told from the point of view of a loyal and beloved family pet. Themes of heroics, valor and heart-wrenching tenderness fill this work. The story is also filled with happy events as well as sad ones and is ultimately about what dogs are to us : best friends. A Dog’s Tale is quintessentially Twain. (Summary by Aaron Elliott)

• Gutenberg e-text
• Wikipedia - Mark Twain
• Wikipedia - A Dog’s Tale
• LibriVox’s A Dog’s Tale Internet Archive page
• Zip file of the entire book (14 MB)

Ein klassicher Text des deutschen Liberalismus (Summary by redaer)

• Online text
• Wikipedia - Wilhem von Humboldt
• LibriVox’s Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen Internet Archive page
• Zip file of the entire book - 275.4MB

Mommsen (1817-1903) erhielt für die Römische Geschichte 1902 den Nobelpreis für Literatur.

Zweites Buch: Von der Abschaffung des römischen Königtums bis zur Einigung Italiens

(Summary by redaer)

• Gutenberg e-text
• Wikipedia - Theodor_Mommsen
• Wikipedia - Theodor_Mommsen (engl.)
• Wikipedia - History of Rome (engl.)
• LibriVox’s Römische Geschichte Buch 2 Internet Archive page
• Zip file of the entire book (476.5MB)

A collection of children’s alphabet rhymes including Footsteps On the Road to Learning - a short text from 1850 which teaches children the English alphabet in rime-so that a child may not become a dunce! The Anti Slavery Alphabet - a book prepared to encourage young children to speak against the institution of slavery in 19th century United States. The method used is an alphabetical listing of the evils of slavery. The Peter Pan Alphabet and The Alphabet of Celebrities - Oliver Herford’s teaching guides to the English alphabet-using Peter Pan and famous names! (Summary by Sam Stinson and Wikipedia)

• LibriVox’s A Soup of Alphabets from A-Z Internet Archive page
• Zip file of the entire collection - 25.2MB

LibriVox volunteers bring you 12 different recordings of A Thrush Before Dawn by Alice Meynell. This was the weekly poetry project for the week of June 8th, 2008.

• Bartleby e-text
• Wikipedia - Alice Meynell
• LibriVox’s A Thrush Before Dawn Internet Archive page
• Zip file of the entire book (10.4MB)

The following essay by Stephen Burt on A.R. Ammons, whose “A Coast of Trees” won the 1981 NBCC award in poetry, is part of the NBCC’s “In Retrospect” series on Critical Mass, in which critics and writers revisit NBCC award winners and finalists from previous years.

The German poet, playwright, and critic Friedrich Schiller thought there were two kinds of poets: ’sentimental’ and ‘naive’ (and neither term, for Schiller, was an insult). Sentimental poets, he said, are self-conscious and retrospective; hey ‘look for lost nature’ in the people and things they write about. Their characteristic works, Schiller believed, sound carefully wrought, conclusive, even if written at high speed. Naive poets, on the other hand, seem to ‘be nature’-poetry seems to come out of them as wind from the sky, or leaves from the trees, as if it were their native speech. Naive poets often sound as if they never revise, even when we know they’ve worked hard on many drafts; their poetry seems to flow and does not want to end.

A.R. Ammons (1926-2001) was in Schiller’s sense the most ‘naive’ of America’s very good poets. His poems, written over nearly 50 years, include almost every kind of speech-act a person can say, from shrugs to prophecies, and they sound spontaneous even when it’s clear they reflect decades of thought. Ammons wrote book-length poems (his first and strangest, the 1965 volume Tape for the Turn of the Year, on a roll of adding-machine tape) and poems just a few lines long (enough of them to make a book, the aptly titled The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammons). His 1981 National Book Critics Circle award winner A Coast of Trees, a collection finished soon after two big book-length works, returned to the scale-one to three pages per poem-that we usually expect from modern lyric. The book shows this most ‘naive’ of poets taking on topics and problems we associate with ’sentimental’ writers; it is a book of elegies and backward glances, endings and deaths, memory and old age. A Coast of Trees also works to reconcile what Ammons learned from another ‘naive’ American poet, William Carlos Williams-whose work provides the only precedent for Ammons’ propulsively irregular rhythms-with what he learned from the decidedly ’sentimental’ Robert Frost, whose New England hills, woods, and graveyards haunt the icy streams and gorges of Ammons’ Ithaca, New York. Trained as a chemist, Ammons liked to consider nonhuman nature on every scale, from atoms to pebbles to mountains to galaxies; A Coast of Trees shows him thinking as well about people, about individual human beings’ legacies, about how we mourn, how we die, and how we go on.

Perhaps half the poems in the volume lament a death, take place in graveyards, or anticipate the poet’s own demise. ‘Where’ picks up the centuries-old theme called, in Latin, ubi sunt (where are), asking, ‘Where are the shifts / of the tide kept, so many: / (where are they put away)’? Nowhere, of course, and after we, too, pass away, we will disappear as completely as each wave on the sea. ‘In Memoriam Mae Noblitt,’ a poem read at Ammons’ own memorial service, is the first of the elegies and the first poem of old age in the book. It takes up a device Williams likely invented, repeating the same sentence four times at irregular intervals within one poem. Where Williams played around with its line breaks, though, Ammons repeats the sentence as a unit: ‘This is just a place.’ Noblitt’s death should remind us, the poet implies, that the Earth is one place among many in the cosmos; that the material world is only one place, and not the best, for our souls; that the cemetery is only one of the places we sometimes go, mourning just one of the moods we can harbor, even though (while we mourn) it feels like the only one.

The most famous poem in A Coast of Trees, ‘Easter Morning,’ is also its longest elegy: Ammons’ tribute to a brother who died young. ‘I have a life that did not become,’ he writes. ‘I hold it in me like a pregnancy or / as on my lap a child / not to grow or grow old but dwell on.’ The brother who died becomes the brother and sister all of us contain; the child we once were, still alive in our memories, whose full potential we will never realize. Children look out from themselves and see their futures: Whitman wrote, ‘There was a child went forth every day, / And the first object he looked upon, that object he became.’ Adults must also live in their own pasts:

the child in me that could not become
was not ready for others to go,
to go on into change, blessings and
horrors, but stands there by the road
where the mishap occurred, crying out for
help, come and fix this or we
can’t get by, but the great ones who
were to return, they could not or did
not hear and went on in a flurry and
now, I say in the graveyard, here
lies the flurry . . .

Here (most likely in a family graveyard) stands the ’sentimental’ Ammons at his odd, colloquial, and only apparently spontaneous best: no matter how far we extend ourselves into each moment, into each scene, into each new day, if we are adults, some part of us looks backward instead.

And yet the adult Ammons lives in the present too: he asks himself in ‘Easter Morning’ to do justice both to nostalgic, ’sentimental,’ backward-looking regret and to the ongoing unbroken perception that his ‘naive’ style usually involves. Even on the site of an accident, even in a graveyard, he goes forth, at least a bit like Whitman, and a bit like Christ resurrected (thus the title). Ammons says as much in lines that seem at first grotesque, on second reading credible:

I stand on the stump
of a child, whether myself
or my little brother who died, and
yell as far as I can, I cannot leave this place, for
for me it is the dearest and the worst,
it is life nearest to life which is
life lost: it is my place where
I must stand and fail

Every place in nature is a gravesite, each place on Earth includes some sort of loss-if not human death, then predation, decay, fire, flood. Conversely, even the worst place, or the hardest place to leave, contains renewal and change. ‘Easter Morning’ itself contains what Ammons so often avoids-religious symbols, confessional modes, family history-but ends where Ammons likes to end, with news from the inhuman world: ‘Something I had / never seen before, two great birds, / maybe eagles,’ pass over him. From here on, the poem includes no other people and only one personal pronoun. ‘Having / patterns and routes, breaking / from them to explore other patterns or / better ways to routes, and then the / return,’ the eagles show him how to look both ways, how to go on.

Exceptional for its retrospects and elegies, A Coast of Trees also shows the sort of thing Ammons did well throughout his work: for instance, his striking diction. If you look at any poem of a page or more (’Swells,’ say), you can see how Ammons used three levels of diction almost never found together outside his poems:

• A ‘normal’ range of language for poetry, including the standard English of educated conversation and the slightly rarer words we expect to see in literature (’vast,’ ’summon,’ ‘universal’).
• A demotic register, including the folk-speech of eastern North Carolina, where he grew up (’dibbles’) and broader American chatter unexpected in serious poems (’blip’).
• The Greek- and Latin-derived phraseology of the natural sciences (’millimeter,’ ‘information of actions / summarized’), especially geology, physics, and cybernetics.

Changes of diction are also changes of mood, as in the opening lines of ‘Traveling Shows.’ I have put asterisks (*) at each of the shifts in diction:

I found vision and it
was terrific, the sight
enabling and abiding, * but
I couldn’t get these
old bones there * and light’s
a byproduct of
rapid decomposition:

Such disorienting shifts from one register to another, like his shifts from atoms to people to nebulae, from seconds to years to epochs, remind us that the middle range of social speech, human goals, and human life spans is just one among many ways to measure the world.

Many other poets mix high and low, Latinate and Anglo-Saxon, diction, but few have done so as insistently, and none made recourse of the vocabulary of natural sciences as frequently. The inhuman perspectives of ecological processes, which can make other poets sound bitter or bored, can make Ammons exciting to read, because he explains and emulates the processes he understands, and because his vocabulary-so intimate with the sciences, so unbuttoned and un-’literary’ in some respects-works as science education, too. For Ammons, as for Williams, we, too, are part-though just one part-of nature. ‘The end of / a corrugated pipe / undercrossing the road’ joins the rest of a site’s hydrology; rebuilding ‘our own ruins,’ which always fall again, we are no better, but no worse, than ferns’ annual shoots or burrowing moles. ‘Dry Spell Spiel,’ which begins with a squirrel on Ammons’ ‘garage roof,’ becomes another piece of science education: Ammons himself (drinking in and then pissing out water) and Ammons’ household faucet illustrate the evapotranspiration cycle. To say that people are examples of biology, and biology a special case of the general, homeostatic order that is nature’s law, is not for Ammons (as it is for Frost) to deprecate people, but to extend a bemused reverence to all nature’s examples. Of ‘butterflies’ and of ‘clear-eyed / babies gumming French fries,’ Ammons says in ‘Sunday at McDonald’s,’ ‘nature / is holding them, somehow.’ Both exemplify metabolism; both seem fleeting, viewed in cosmic time.

You can find such attitudes, such pleasures, in almost all of Ammons’ books. You can go to A Coast of Trees, in particular, for this frequently solitary poet’s dealings with other people, with their mortality, with the looks backward occasioned by their lives and by his own. When he is not viewing people in cosmic time, not imagining himself alone amid nonhuman nature, Ammons uses all the facets of his style-its enjambed, ongoing focus on action, its tendency to favor present tense-to write poems about death or human decline. ‘Sweetened Change’ might be the most consoling good poem ever written about geriatric frailty, a page-long look at how a ‘white-headed man’ undertakes the ‘ten-minute / procedure’ of extracting his wheelchair-bound, helpless wife from their car. Another graveyard poem, ‘Night Finding’ (emulating the Robert Frost of ‘In a Disused Graveyard’ and ‘The Need of Being Versed in Country Things’), redescribes its cemetery as a place of continuing nonhuman life, ‘honeysucklebush brush,’ ‘weed clumps,’ ‘pheasant in the earliest pearl / of dusk.’

To imagine death, we must imagine closure, considering (as ‘naive’ poets can have trouble doing) how poems and lives handle their ends. Ammons’ long poems (especially Tape for the Turn of the Year) try to seem endless, which lyric poetry cannot do; the best it can do is to emulate perfect circles, which have limits but no termini-Ammons’ poem ‘Fourth Dimension’ thus tells us that ‘poetry can / come complete, take on / shape, end into / winding up itself.’ This book of cemeteries and ‘Persistences,’ of things and people contemplating their ends, offers as its penultimate poem ‘An Improvisation for Jerald Bullis’ (emphasis added). In that poem Ammons watches a forest (pine needles, ‘rose or rat,’ a ‘big garden spider’) and sees not endings, not even a seasonal cycle, but homeostatic semipermanence: even a bad year is simply part of one era in the life of the Earth. Each day, each year, from a nonhuman perspective, includes a multitude of deaths, and each unit of time implies its own renewals: there are, in each year, ’so many falls all summer and / even earlier in earliest spring and / later falls than fall.’ On each scale-a season, a moment, a life span-Ammons has found symbols for persistence: ways to imagine conclusions, and then to go on.–Stephen Burt

A.R. Ammons, “For Edwin Wilson” and “For Emily Wilson.” Ammons is a featured poet in the June issue on Poetry magazine’s website, where this “In Retrospect” appreciation of Ammons first appeared.

‘The Legend of the Lamp’ by Tina Monson is a two volume novel on MP3 download.When Oliver Cowdry is dying,
he writes a letter to Heber C.Kimball giving him a specific charge to search out and
protect an amazing treasure that was detailed to him by the Angel Moroni at the time the golden plates
were returned to the Hill Cumorah.This charge is to remain with the Kimball family and its
descendants throughout time until the Lord returns, and is not to be discussed with any one outside of the family.
Many years later, Heber C Kimball’s descendants Hunter, Hannah, and Hayden are told the legend of the lamp by their
grandfather, as they are leaving for a Church History Tour with their parents for summer vacation.
This new knowledgwe alters their attitudes and enthusiasm for summer vacation,as they search for clues to unlock the treasure
foretold to them.
This is a great novel, and although it is fiction,the author has added at the beginning of the story that
she got the inspiration for this story as her father told her about a
lamp that had been passed down in her own family from the time of Joseph Smith.
As I Listened to this story, I found myself getting excited about Church History, and also about
genealogy and the hope that I might have some amazing stories in my own family.
It was hard not to get drawn into this story. I was very frustrated when I had to recharge my mp3 player,
so that I could finish listening to this story.I loved listening to ‘The Legend of the Lamp’ by Tina Monson.
Thanks Tina for getting me excited about Church History and Family History..Great job!

Where I Belong written by Rachel Ann Nunes,is a fictional book which I listened to in the audio form.
The story covers a brief span of time in the lives of Tanner and Heather, who have been best friends and neighbors since
they were sixteen years of age.
Our first glimpse of them comes at the time of their first meeting.
Years later, Heather, who has always had a love of painting, becomes very confused and torn between her
love of family and the gospel and her passion to paint.Wonderful opportunities to follow this passion lead her
away from her family, church, and friends.How can Heather find a place for herself and still
achieve her other lifetime goals? This is a choice that many adults, young and old, may face.
I could see some of myself at Heather’s age, and certainly can see that my daughters have faced similar dilemmas.
The writing style is easy to listen to and the characters are well-developed and easy to relate to at any age.
Several serious events take place which eventually influence Heather’s direction.The story evolves smoothly as she uses
her free agency and prayerful consideration to take the next step towards her future. To see how Tanner fits into this story,
you’ll have to listen to the book!Where I Belong’ by Rachel Ann Nunes,
is a book that will come to mind again and again as life’s choices present themselves.

We’re happy to release the finale episode of Steve Saylor’s superhero-meets-superpowers serialized free audiobook, Black Shadow.

This is Premier league quality entertainment:. Seriously good stuff.

At the start of the book (and following on from book 1) there were a few ‘Yes but that doesn’t make sense because of:.’ questions running through my head. But by the end of the book I realised that J.C, Alpha and the clones had thought them through, they weren’t loose ends at all, they were thought through plot points and strengthened the story.

Book 1 was great: book 2 was awesome: guess which final part of a trilogy I’ve just subscribed to

As 7th Son: Book Two - Deceit begins, the Beta clones are demoralized, reeling from their loss … and about to learn that John Alpha’s plans are far from over.

To prevent the next phase of Alpha’s plan, John, Kilroy2.0, and the others must unearth more dark secrets about the government project from which they were spawned. They will experience the horrors of betrayal, and race cross-country to track John Alpha.

And they will finally realize the scope of Alpha’s wrath — the bloodshed the clones have witnessed is merely a prelude to the world-rending destruction to come. Unless they can stop it first.

Deceit is the second novel in J.C. Hutchins’ 7th Son thriller trilogy.

I was wowed by the first book in the trilogy. I was blown away by the second! In this sequel the action gets ramped up, the tension increases. We learnt about the clones in the first book, in this one we learn to like them. The depth of thier characters really come to the fore and makes every tense minute more real.

The audio production in this version has notched up a step as well. The author has overdubbed his voice so you can hear thoughts as conversations continue. Excellently done. He had used editors brush to create literally breath taking moments and he has even learnt to use silence which is a tough trick.

Each chapter is delivered and most end with a cliff hanger that leave you drooling.

Yep, I liked it… a lot.

Reading 3/3
Production 3/3
Story 3/3

Total Score 9/9

This book is available from

http://podiobooks.com/title/7th-son-book-two—deceit

Who hasn’t heard of Robin Hood? He could make a claim to be the most famous Englishman who ever lived. His story has been told and retold many times. We have tried to stay true in spirt to one of the earliest ballads about the famous robber.

The word ‘gest’ is old English, and a bit of a pun. It could mean a ‘jest’ or a ‘guest’ and it has an ancient meaning as a ‘heroic deed’.

Normally Robin likes to entertain his guests in Sherwood Forrest with food and wine, before relieving them of their gold. But in this story his guest is a sad Knight who has no money to surrender. Instead, Robin lends him money so that he can repay a loan to the cruel Abbot.

As in all Robin Hood stories, anybody in authority is a baddie (except King Richard) - and that includes the leaders of the church who are abusing their power.

More episodes will follow

Read by Natasha. Duration 14.18
Of all the thieves and high-way robbers who have ever lived, by far the politest was Robin Hood. He liked to entertain those he robbed as guests in his own home. And although his home was a rough camp in Green Wood, which was the thickest and darkest part of Sherwood forest, his table was always heavy with rich food and wine. He was very choosy about those whom he invited to his layer. He only liked to rob the best sort of people - nobles, knights, barons, and leading figures of the church. He treated his victims with such great courtesy and hospitality, that afterwards some of them said that it had been a privilege to have robbed by Robin Hood.

One day, Robin and his men had been out shooting game in the King’s Forest. It was this habit that had made them outlaws in the first place - for for the King’s brother, John, had declared that all the forests belonged to him - and anyone who hunted there without his permission would face severe punishment. King Richard himself would not have deprived the foresters of food, but he was away fighting wars oversees. And while he was away, his brother John ruled England with cruelty and injustice.

On this day, the hunting had been good, and Robin Hood and his men were looking forward to a fine dinner.

‘But let us not be greedy and keep all this fine food to ourselves,’ said Robin. ‘I will not eat until I have a worthy guest at my table. Little John, go and find me a fitting guest and invite him to dine with us.’

Little John’s real name was John Little, but everyone called him Little John because he was so huge. He was six foot five inches tall and as broad as a tree. He was Robin’s most trusted partner in crime, and feared nothing and nobody - not even Robin. Although he was hungry, he agreed to go and find a guest. He took two of the best men - Will Scarlock and Much the Miller’s son, and went up to the highway to wait for a suitable guest to come along.

The road was quiet and they waited an hour or more for a suitable victim. At last a Knight came riding down the road. As he drew near they saw that he was lost in thought, and that there was a look of great sadness on his face. The three men jumped out and pointed their arrows at his chest. Their long bows were so powerful that they could easily pass through any armoured breast plate or chain-mail.

‘Cheer Up Gentle Sir Knight,’ called out Little John. ‘You Are invited to the table of my master for dinner tonight.’

The Knight was startled and replied: ‘But I plan to dine in Barnslydale tonight, for tomorrow I must go to see the Abbot on urgent business.’

‘T’is a pity,’ said Little John, still aiming his arrow at the Knight’s chest, ‘For my master will take great offence should you refuse his kind invitation.’

‘And who might your master be?’ asked the Knight.

‘His name should be known to all who pass by Sherwood forest, for it is Robin Hood.’

‘In that case I shall come,’ said the Knight, ‘For I have heard much about him.’

Will Scarlock placed a blindfold over the knight’s eyes, and they led him through the forest to the hide-away. Robin greeted the knight with great courtesy;

‘Welcome to Green Wood Gentle Sir Knight, all ours is yours.’. They washed their hands together in the stream, and then they dined on Pheasant, trout, cuts of venison, and barley bread, and swilled it down with plenty of red wine.

‘I have not eaten such a dinner in these last three months,’ declared the Knight. ‘And if you visit my castle, I shall make you a fine feast in return.’

‘Ah,’ said Robin, ‘I would much prefer, Kind Sir, that you paid before you leave - for it is the custom in Green Wood that a peasant’s son such as I should not pay for a knight.’

The sad expression returned to the Knight’s face.

‘I have but ten shillings,’ he said.

Robin had not entertained such a poor guest at his table before.

‘If what you say is true,’ he said, ‘I will not take one penny off you. Indeed, I shall lend you money from my own coffers.’

And he sent Little John to look through the Knight’s belongings. When he had checked them, he said.

‘Our gentle Knight is indeed a pauper.’

‘How come so poor?’ asked Robin.

And the sad Knight told his story. He had a son who was a fine, strong, but hot-tempered young man. He liked to joust, and in a contest he had killed the son of a Baron. The Baron demanded blood-money of four hundred pounds, and if it was not paid, the Knight’s son would be put on trial for murder and executed. In those days, four hundred pounds was a great deal of money, and although the knight had a steady income from his lands, he did not have such a sum ready to give. He was forced to borrow from a wealthy churchman, the Abbot of the Monastery of St. Mary.. The Abbot gave the Knight just three months to repay the loan, and if he failed to pay back the money in that time, the Knight must give the Abbot all his land instead. The time of the loan was almost up, and the Knight was travelling to the Abbot to plead for more time to pay,

‘But the Abbot did not become rich by showing mercy,’ said the Knight, ‘And therefore I fully expect that by tomorrow evening I will truly be a landless pauper. I plan to take a ship join King Richard who is fighting in the Holy Lands.’

‘Too many good knights are overseas,’ said Robin, ‘Which is why there is so much injustice at home. No, by St. Mary who is dear to me, I shall make you a loan of four hundred pounds and you shall repay the Abbot.’

The next day, at the Monastery of St. Mary, a monk spoke to the Abbot:

‘Your worshipful Grace. . Today the Knight must repay his loan or forfeit his lands.’

‘He will surely forfeit, ‘ replied the Abbot, ‘For I do not think he will find Four Hundred Pounds in so short a time.’

When the Knight and Little John arrived outside the Monastery, they changed into their poor clothes again, before entering and asking to see the Abbot.

The porter at the gate said: ‘That surely is the shabbiest and saddest looking Knight that I ever did see.’

Inside the main hall, the Knight knelt down before Abbot. The Abbot did not greet him, but said straight out:

‘Well, have you brought my money?’

‘Not one penny,’ replied the night.

The monk said: ‘Then why did you come to waste his Grace’s time like this? Your lands are lost. Go away.’

‘I came, ‘ said the knight, ‘To ask for mercy and more time to pay.’

‘You shall not have a minute more,’ said the Abbot. ‘Your lands are mine. Be off.’

‘If you give me more time, I shall serve you faithfully,’ said the Knight. ‘Show mercy. For it is good help one who has need.’

At this the Abbot swore a great oath and roundly cursed him.

‘Out false Knight ! Speed out of my hall!’ he shouted.

‘I am no false knight,’ replied the debtor. And with that he opened his bag and emptied the gold onto the floor. ‘If you had shown mercy, I would have repaid your debt and served you faithfully, but as it is, here is your money. Now the papers to my land, your Grace, if you please.’

And the Abbot had no choice but to hand back the deeds to the Knight’s land - -although he was sorry to do so - for it was worth a good deal more than four hundred pounds in gold.

Two day’s later, the Knight returned to his castle wearing his sad expression. ‘Are we paupers?’ asked his wife. ‘No,’ said he brightening up,’We are saved. And God Bless Robin Hood!’

A year passed, and the Knight gathered together four hundred pounds to repay his debt to Robin. He also made 100 arrows and had them plumbed with peacock feathers as a gift to show his gratitude.

A good friar arranged a meeting with Robin beneath a great oak tree in Green Wood. On the way, the Knight stopped to watch a wrestling match between the son of a nobleman and a peasant. The two men, pushed, grappled, arm-locked, tripped, and threw each other, but the peasant was the stronger, and he soon had the nobleman’s son pinned to the ground and unable to move. He claimed his prize - a pound in gold - but the nobleman’s friends would not pay. Instead, the judge of the contest drew his sword and was about to kill the peasant for his impudence.

Seeing this, the Knight rode up and declared. ‘The man that harms the victor of this match will have to contend with me!’ The nobleman’s friends did not want to take on a knight, and they released the peasant.

‘Follow me,’ said the Knight, ‘And I will take you to join Robin Hood and his men.’

The peasant agreed, for he knew that if he did not, the noblemen would get him later.

The Knight arrived late for his meeting with Robin, and when he explained what had delayed him on the way, Robin said.

‘Gentle Sir Knight, Consider the four hundred pounds a gift, for I will not accept a penny from a man who stands up for justice.’

‘Then take these,’ said the Knight, and he showed Robin the 100 arrows plumbed with peacock feathers.

That evening the gentle Knight was a guest at Robin’s table for a second time, and they feasted until they could eat no more

http://media.libsyn.com/media/blogrelations/GuestRobinHood.mp3

Faces and Places is a collection of articles on nineteenth century travel, events and personalities by the British journalist Henry Lucy, who wrote for the Daily News, a London newspaper. His open letter To Those About to Become Journalists rings as true today as when it was written.

The first article, ‘Fred’ Burnaby, includes a lively account of a balloon trip, while Night and Day on the Cars in Canada and Easter on Les Avants relate Lucy’s experiences of rail travel at that time. Other travel tales (A Night on a Mountain, Mosquitoes and Monaco, and Oysters and Arcachon) provide an insight into the Victorian Englishman’s attitude to Europe.

Three of the pieces, Peggotty and Ham, A Cinque Port and Christmas Eve at Watts’s, concern the county of Kent, where Lucy had a country house. Christmas Eve at Watts’s contains an interesting exposé of Dickens’ short story The Seven Poor Travellers.

Other articles are of historical interest: A Wreck in the North Sea is an account of the wreck of the ship ‘Deutschland’ in 1875; A Historic Crowd describes the massive popular interest in the 1871 trial of the Tichborne Claimant; The Battle of Merthyr contains an eye-witness account of the Merthyr Riots of 1831; The Prince of Wales paints a portrait of the future King Edward VII.

Lucy, who also wrote as ‘Toby, M.P.’ for the satirical magazine Punch, loved to poke gentle fun, particularly at the establishment, and this is especially evident in A Peep at an Old House of Commons and Some Preachers I Have Known.

This eclectic collection, mostly affectionately humorous, but with moments of great pathos, was originally published in 1892 in The Whitefriars Library of Wit & Humour.

(Summary by Ruth Golding)

• Gutenberg e-text
• LibriVox’s Faces and Places Internet Archive page
• Zip file of the entire book 201MB

We are weary of witnessing the greed, selfishness and cruelty of ‘civilized’ man toward the wild creatures of the earth. We are sick of tales of slaughter and pictures of carnage. It is time for a sweeping Reformation; and that is precisely what we now demand. -William Temple Hornaday

• Gutenberg e-text
• LibriVox’s Our Vanishing Wild Life Internet Archive page
• Zip file of the entire book (538.9M)

‘All the privilege I claim for my own sex : is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.’ In persuasion, her last novel, Austen explores the theme of postponed but enduring love, delayed by class boundaries and excessive pride. Anne Elliot, the story’s aged (27 year old) heroine, suffers from a decision that was forced upon her several years ago-to break off a relationship with Capn. Frederick Wentworth, the man she deeply loved. As Austen examines the causes and consequences of this action, she sketches for us the social complexities of being part of the upper-middle-class in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century. (Summary by Moira Fogarty)

• Gutenberg e-text
• Wikipedia - Jane Austen
• Wikipedia - Persuasion
• LibriVox’s Persuasion Internet Archive page
• Zip file of the entire book (244 MB)

The book: Lord Peter Whimsey’s mother has telephoned him to get her son to help out Mr. Thipp, an architect she has hired to do restoration work at her church. Thipp is apparently in trouble with the police over a dead body wearing nothing but a pince-nez who was found in the bathtub of Thipp’s upper-floor apartment. Meanwhile, the family of Sir Reuben Levy has reported Sir Reuben to be missing. Are the two events connected? Is the body Sir Reuben’s? If not, whose body is it?

The mystery, while suitably labyrinthine, is conventional of the genre, with clues dropped along the way and everything tied up neatly at the end. The main thing that sets this novel apart from other mysteries is the character of Lord Peter Whimsey. Whimsey is unusual among mystery novel detectives in that he’s not that unusual. True, he’s rich and slightly eccentric, but unlike Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot or Auguste Dupin, Whimsey is no social misfit. Instead, he’s an engaging, likeable character who the reader cares about when he winds up in danger toward the end of the book. It’s no wonder that Sayers returned to write about him for many more novels.

Rating: 8/10