OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Cucus and Courtesy

HIS real name is Sam, but we named him "Cucus" because when he first arrived from his birthplace in southern Italy and began his daily round with his push cart delivering fruit and vegetables at our back door, he had his own difficulties with our unmusical language and cut short the unmanageable cucumbers to "cucus".
His honesty, his soft, pleasant voice, and his ingratiating manners won trade for him, and it was not long until he was driving a wagon of his own with his name painted in gold along the side. He learned to speak a little better, and at night school he learned to write a very round and a very readable hand.
He had his own troubles, too, as other business men have had, and sometimes he ​told them confidentially to me. His consignments of fruit were not always good, he could not always dispose of his stock before it became stale, and sometimes landladies did not pay him or unregenerate students gave him bad checks.
It was about such a check that he spoke to me a week or two ago. There had been some error, or misunderstanding on some one's part, but whatever it was Cucus was out eight dollars which he could ill afford to lose. He had somehow developed a feeling that I need but say the word and any recreant undergraduate would immediately come to time. When he had told me his story, I found that his was not a difficult matter of adjustment. I agreed to manage it for him, received his gracious thanks and a handful of fresh carrots, attended to the little business the next day, and forgot about it.
Yesterday I found a note from him in my morning mail. The spelling is his own; the ​"Urbanana" probably an echo of his favorite morning announcement at our back door.
Champaign, Illinois.
Oct. 18 - 1916
Mr. Thomas Arkle Clark
    University of Illinois
       Urbanana, Illinois
My dear Mr. Clarke
I droped you this few lines to let you know that Mr. Devine paid me today so I have get my money from him. I am thank you very much, and I remain your very sincery freind
Sam
I held the letter in my hand a long time, thinking. I do business mostly with cultivated, educated people; I wish they were all as thoughtful and courteous as this Italian fruit vender.
October
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Civic Pride

THEY were having their weekly clean up at one of the rooming houses on John Street a few days ago, and as I walked by I saw one of the fellows raise a window and empty a waste paper basket out into the air. The wind caught the contents, and Sunday supplements and first drafts of themes, and scratch paper, and excelsior went whirling off to land in a score of door yards and to litter up a dozen fence corners.
I have no doubt but that many a man who uses his neighbor's back yard as a dumping ground could write, perhaps has already written, a stirring paper on the beautifying of our cities, but he still continues to throw his cigarette stubs and his Hershey chocolate wrappers, and his empty pop corn bags into the street or to drop his newspaper wherever he happens to have tired of it; it is not his ​business, he affirms, to keep the streets clean.
I am sure that many of our citizens would find it a profitable investment to buy a paper baler, and to gather up and sell the waste paper that blows across their premises from the careless hands of those whose civic pride has never been adequately stimulated.
It takes more than a clean-up day or a superintendent of streets to make a clean or a beautiful city. It takes the constant co-operation of every man and woman and of every school child. If we would all keep our walks clean and our yards neat, if we would gather up the paper and the trash that we see lying or blowing about, rather than help to scatter it, we would soon see a material improvement in the appearance of these two towns. If there is any community which should present an ideal appearance, it is a colllege town. We are studying sanitation and sociology and economics and ethics but for too many it is mere theory and not practice. One needs no more than half an ​Civie Pride eye when walking down Green or Wright streets in Champaign or Illinois street in Urbana to observe what an untidy, slatternly appearance we make, and all because the individual citizen has mot developed any civic pride.
April
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Good Resolutions

THE business man's good resolutions are filed and recorded on the first of January; the college student formulates his at the opening of the semester. His failures and shortcomings are still so vividly before his mind that he has something of the same virtuous feeling as the inebriate has the morning after the night before.
"Never again for me," Bradley said to me when we were talking over his grades, "I'm no bone head, and next semester I shall be up with the dawn and be waiting for the professor at the class room door with my work in hand. No more cutting or back work."
Then followed a recital of his various scholastic woes and misfortunes, all of which had resulted from his only too easy habit of procrastination and late sleeping—​of delayed term papers, and postponed collateral reading, of neglected "sources" and forgotten notes. In the future he was to be a changed man.
It is difficult to correct the mistakes of today; it seems easy to avoid the errors of tomorrow. There is no one so kindly disposed toward virtue as the man whose immoralities have just brought him disaster; there is none so temperate as the man who is racked with the pain of last night's orgies; and no one so keen for intellectual achievement as the student who has just flunked.
It is the man who gets his work done today, not the one who swears he is going without fail to do it tomorrow, whose good resolutions count for anything. It is not the future but the present with which we should concern ourselves. There are few things so unsafe to deal with as futures. I have no doubt that Mr. Longfellow had the good resolutions of the college flunker in mind ​when he dropped so easily and gracefully into verse:
As I stopped off at Kandy's to get shined up a little yesterday I caught sight of Bradley through the open door of the billiard room deep in his fourth game of billiards, his outside reading neglected, his good resolutions forgotten. "What's the use anyway?" he was thinking, if his brain was in operation at all; "It's one hundred and fourteen days until examinations."
February
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Bread and Butter Letters

"I WONDER if George will write" Nancy said to me at the breakfast table one morning last winter. George was a recent guest of ours who had been eating our breakfast bacon for a few days and occupying my comfortable bed while I bunked on a hard cot in the cold attic.
"Very unlikely," I replied, for I am older than Nancy, and have had experience with summer school lectures and interscholastic visitors and delegates to societies and conventions who have lodged with me for a season and have never afterwards been heard from. My faith, therefore, was weak.
Most men pay their taxes—and some pay their class dues and their laundry bills—but too few pay the little debts of courtesy which ​they owe to those who have entertained them or who have shown them thoughtful kindnesses. In time we answer a business letter, or an invitation to dinner, but to our friends, unless we want something, we seldom write. There are various reasons for this. Unless when the inspiration or the kindly thought seizes us we "take our pen in hand" we are likely to procrastinate; tomorrow, we argue, will do as well as today. Sometimes the happy phrase does not occur to us; we do not quite know what to say, and we are afraid we may say the wrong or the awkward thing. Perhaps it may be selfishness that holds us back from voicing our thanks, or our congratulations, or our words of condolence to our friends, and the letter is not written and the debt is not paid. Sometimes it is ignorance or inexperience or self-consciousness; we do not realize that the conventions of society require that we should pay these obligations, just as we must call after we have been to a dinner ​party, or must pay the gas bill before the tenth of the month if we expect the discount.
Nothing brings more pleasure than the unexpected personal letter, the gracious note of thanks, or a line of congratulation when one has met with happiness or good fortune. It's like getting an unexpected check from home, or having one's salary raised, or finding a five dollar bill in an old pair of trousers.
Don't come in on a freight train. Christmas letters should get off before Easter; letters of congratulation should not be delayed until the event has lost its joy or has been forgotten. If Interscholastic is in May, you should write your letter of thanks before August. Even from a purely selfish point of view it would be a good thing to learn and practice the art of paying these social debts. There are few things that bring one surer favor, or that give one better standing with one's friends than a reputation for thoughtfulness in letter writing.
​I met George in Detroit last week. He told me that he had enjoyed my bed and Nancy's bacon, and he apologized—he really had intended to write.
May
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Happiness

UNTIL he was forty a neighbor of mine lived a happy, active, useful life. He had a good job at which he earned a salary sufficient to support his family comfortably. He was interested in community affairs, he was a useful citizen, he was enthusiastic over paying for the pretty house he had built, and his future seemed bright and satisfying.
Then, unfortunately, his aunt died and left him fifty thousand dollars. He gave up his job immediately, quit work, and set out to enjoy himself. The income from his legacy was scarcely as much as his salary had previously been, and as his leisure increased his desires multiplied quite disproportionately. He became discontented, nomadic, a lazy, useless citizen, who is happy nowhere. He spends his winters in Florida and his summers camping out in the woods or drift​ing up and down the river in a motor boat. He is bringing up his two boys to be unhappy loafers like himself. But he is a pathetic figure. He has not learned the lesson that there is no real happiness without work. The most unhappy discontented people I have ever known are those who have money enough to live on without following any regular daily occupation, and who put in their time looking for pleasure. The woman who has no occupation but bridge whist is a miserable creature, and the man who is trying to pay his obligations to the world by playing golf or billiards is an unhappy, discontented grouch. The most wretched men in the world are those who give up work before they are compelled to do so.
Sometimes when the days are hot and long and the tasks are hard and life seems too full of duties for us to fulfill them all we might be helped if we stopped long enough to realize that real happiness is always synonymous with work. It is the hard job, the difficult ​and often the disagreeable task that brings us joy in the accomplishment.
The greatest blessing that God ever bestowed upon fallen man was the privilege of earning his bread by the sweat of his brow. It was the best possible substitute for paradise.
October
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/False Faces

BILL WITHERS and I—Bill lived just across the road from us—had been reading "Bentley Burrows, or The Skeleton Hand", a tale of ghosts and bandits and general horrors continued from week to week in the Saturday Night, a literary journal which our hired man bought every week at Cole's drug store in town. Shivering with fear, I was just finishing the last chapter in the dusk of a dull November evening, when I heard a knock at the door. I called "Come in", as was the polite custom in our community, and to my horror a real bandit entered—leather leggins, big revolver, bristling moustache, and all. I was frightened for a moment, and then I caught sight of a lock of curly red hair sticking out through a hole in the sombrero and a freckled ear ​protruding. It was only Bill Withers wearing a false face and trying to fool me.
I have had the experience often since.
I called at a fraternity house recently when rushing was on. Through the dim light I could see that all the fellows were wearing false faces. Above the din of the rag time whanged from the long-suffering piano I could detect the hollow, unnatural voices issuing through the masks that the men were wearing. The older fellows, more skilled in their strategy, had adjusted their disguises with greater cleverness than the others, but even the freshmen, their false faces sometimes awry, were attempting to cover up their real selves.
I ran onto Jim Burton one Sunday this summer at church with his parents. He was looking pious, attentive, and altogether unsophisticated. As he leaned over to pick a hymn book from the floor I could see how crudely he had adjusted his false face, for underneath he was the same irreligious, ir​reverent, irresponsible youth whom I had known at college.
I was watching Mary Gay at a party last week, rosy cheeked and bright eyed, and I thought I had never seen a happier and a more animated face. She was smiling on every one and showing a vivacity and an interest that held a pleased crowd about her. A few minutes later I came upon her unobserved as she was standing before the mirror in the hallway surreptitiously adjusting her false face, and I could see how pitifully bored and tired she looked.
These false faces which we wear or see every day seldom deceive anyone. They are like rouge or oleomargarine or hair dye or face powder—no one ever thinks them real. We put them on to make ourselves beautiful or impressive to our teachers or our sweethearts or the tax collector or the home folks or the minister or our Creator, but more often than otherwise the lock of red ​hair escapes or the freckled ear sticks out and gives us away.
February
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Examinations

I MET him as he was coming out of University Hall just released from an examination in English 20. He was hot, revolutionary, protestant. The test had been imbecile, unfair, unreasonable. He had studied conscientiously, he said, only to be disappointed in what he had gone up against. He had got nothing that he had expected, and he was against the whole system.
A surgeon friend of mine told me once that when he performed his first independent operation for appendicitis instead of finding the offending appendage as he should have done just under the spot where he had been taught to make the incision, after an exciting game of hide and seek among the viscera, he discovered it tucked securely away behind the innocent patient's liver, from which spot he dug it out with ​some difficulty. Of course it was an idiotic and unreasonable place for an appendix to be in and no doctor ought to be expected to get the right answer under those conditions,—but unless he does he is likely to lose his patient, and flunk the quiz.
My experience has been that in real life we seldom get the problems we are looking for. The questions that are put to us are not like those in the book, and the examinations we must pass are very seldom the ones for which we have made such painstaking, diligent preparation. It is very desirable to know what the book says, but it is quite as necessary to have cultivated judgment and the power of independent thought.
What are examinations for?
The more difficult and unreasonable they are—and in college they are neither to any extreme—the more they are a test of a man's judgment or his resourcefulness, or his independence and originality. The right sort of preparation for an examination ought to ​Examinations give a man a broader and a more comprehensive view of the subject in question than he has got through his scrappy daily study; it ought to help him to organize his facts and to get a final grasp of his information.
An examination is most of all a test of a man's character, for it shows as nothing else can that a man is yellow and crooked, and a quitter, or that he is game, and square, and an intellectual fighter who can meet and conquer unexpected difficulties, honestly and independently—without cribbing and without whining.
And remember that in real life it is always the unexpected question that we must answer.
February
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Getting in to Things

I HAD a talk during examination time with a young fellow who was to receive his bachelor's degree, but who wished to be excused from attendance upon the exercises of Commencement.
"I don't care anything for your fool exercises," he said. "There's a lot of things I'd rather do than go through that sort of red tape."
"Have you no sentiment for the University?" I asked.
"No," he answered. "I came here for a degree, and now that I have earned it, I think I am entitled to it without any further foolishness."
His is not an uncommon view point. He had come from another college. He had been at the University during his senior year only, and there was no romance or sen​timent or loyalty in his feelings; he had developed few associations, he had been touched by few traditions; he was stirred no more at the sight of the old buildings and the smooth sward and the graceful elms of the campus than he might have been by the sight of Mr. Ford's factory where the jitney bus in which he had ridden had been manufactured. He was after information, and the more he could get for his money, the better he was satisfied.
He had never gotten into things.
Few colleges will give a man a degree until he has been in residence for a certain time. There are, perhaps, many reasons for this, but one of them, at least, is that he may have time to get something of the spirit of the institution, to develop a feeling for it, to fall into its customs, and to get into things connected indirectly with its operation.
Students who do their work in summer sessions are often either from desire or ne​cessity more practical, more serious, more eager for mere information than are regular students. They too often get little or nothing of the real life of the institution outside of the class-room, and so they frequently develop little or no feeling for the college. There are no tender family or home relations in the college life for them,—they are being fed at an intellectual boarding house or a quick lunch counter.
There are many activities about the campus at every session, and into these the student may very well go. They will broaden his sympathies, widen his horizon, and give him a feeling of ownership in the institution which is to be his alma mater.
"What good can I do these things?" a man asked me yesterday.
"Very little, perhaps," I answered; "but they can do you immeasurable good, if you will let them."
Even though he is in college for only a ​few weeks, it will do every man good to get into things.
July
# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Doing What We Like

"I DON'T care for my work; it doesn't suit me. If I could only find something I liked and was interested in, I think I might get on," a shiftless sophomore said to me a few days ago.
As he spoke I called to mind the figure of an old man I had seen the last time I passed through the country town where I spent my childhood. He was sitting on the station platform whittling and watching the train go through. He was bent, unshaven, unkempt,—the living picture of failure.
I saw him first when I was seven and he a strong young fellow of thirty. He was running the grain elevator then with good business prospects, but he didn't like it; it did not seem to suit him. He had talents. He sang in the church choir, he led the village band, he presided at public meetings. ​He gave up the elevator shortly and opened a grocery store. He tried farming and market gardening; he ran a news stand; he was postmaster, but he never put his best effort into any one of these activities, because he was not interested; he thought it was not what he was cut out for. He couldn't just get down to it.
He drifted from Presbyterianism to Christian Science; his political favorites ranged from St. John and Grover Cleveland to Theodore Roosevelt. He stuck to no principle or profession, he got nowhere because he could not find anything that really held his interest. Men with half his talent and one-fourth of his opportunity far outstripped him, and because he was never willing to do well the thing at hand, he found himself at seventy no further than the station platform. Through all the years he had been watching the train go by because he could never make up his mind where he wanted to go.
​I see students like him every day. They have opportunity to get training, but they are not satisfied; they are looking for some more interesting, more suitable, less exacting work. They hold back or shift about with the hope that they will discover some intellectual occupation that will so thrill them that they will go to it with constant enthusiasm and without personal effort. They fail because they can't get what they like, not realizing that it is possible to learn to like almost anything and obligatory to do our work whether we like it or not.
The man who succeeds does more difficult, disagreeable, unpleasant, uninteresting things in a week than are crowded into a whole college course. He doesn't whine and look about for something soft—he goes to it.
July
# The Story of the Treasure Seekers

This story is the first in The Bastables Series. Its sequels are The Wouldbegoods (1901) and The New Treasure Seekers (1904).
The Story of the
Treasure Seekers
BEING THE ADVENTURES OF
THE BASTABLE CHILDREN
IN SEARCH OF A FORTUNE
BY E. NESBIT
AUTHOR OF "LAYS AND LEGENDS," "THE SEVEN DRAGONS," ETC.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY GORDON
BROWN AND LEWIS BAUMER
london
T. FISHER UNWIN Paternoster Square 1899
"Dora and H. O. had clubbed their money together and bought a melon."
To
OSWALD BARRON
WITHOUT WHOM THIS BOOK COULD
NEVER HAVE BEEN WRITTEN
"THE TREASURE SEEKERS" IS DEDICATED
IN MEMORY OF CHILDHOODS
IDENTICAL BUT FOR THE
ACCIDENTS OF TIME
AND SPACE.
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
From a drawing by Lewis Baumer.
From a drawing by Lewis Baumer.
From a drawing by Gordon Brown.
From a drawing by Gordon Brown.
From a drawing by Gordon Brown.
From a drawing by Gordon Brown.
From a drawing by Gordon Brown.
From a drawing by Gordon Brown.
From a drawing by Gordon Brown.
From a drawing by Gordon Brown.
From a drawing by Gordon Brown.
From a drawing by Gordon Brown.
From a drawing by Gordon Brown.
From a drawing by Gordon Brown.
From a drawing by Gordon Brown.
From a drawing by Gordon Brown.
From a drawing by Gordon Brown.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1924, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 99 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse
# The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon

* The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon (1819)
* The Sketch Book (1820) Dana Estes edition (start transcription)
* Six selections from Irving's Sketch-book (1878) (transcription project)