Showing results for "Lightning" in Classics

Once upon a time, in an alleyway in the slums of the City of Lockes, a young and somewhat lonely boy named Sam Haversford turns a group of teenage douchebags into stone completely by accident. Of course, this catches the attention of a higher power, and Sam's pulled from the only world he knows to become an apprentice to the king's wizard, Morgan of Shadows.

While Blandings Castle sleeps in the summer sun, the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, brother of the Earl of Emsworth, is busily engaged in writing his Reminiscences, and they look set to be as warm as the weather, if not warmer. For Galahad has led a thoroughly misspent life, and his acquaintances can all too easily recall their past follies in his company. Reputations are at stake and even the nobility and gentry are beginning to panic.

As Blandings Castle slumbers in the sunshine, secret passions are astir: Lord Emsworth's niece, Millicent, wants to marry impecunious secretary, Hugo Carmody; and his nephew, Ronnie Fish, wants to marry chorus girl Sue Brown.

One of the very best in the popular Blandings series, set in that idyllic Shropshire countryside, where the sun always shines. Comedy centres around Clarence, the dotty ninth Earl of Emsworth, doting on his prize pig: The Empress. His brother Galahad fears her fate is under threat with Clarence's rival Sir Gregory Parsloe. Parsloe is aiming to prevent her taking the County Prize. He lives in fear of Galahad publishing his memoirs and revealing their wild younger days.

Chosen for inclusion in William Evans Burton's Cyclopediae of Wit and Humor of 1857, The Lightning-Rod Man was the one Melville tale to be available throughout his lifetime, thanks to reissues of this volume. More a parable than a character-driven story, the Lightning-Rod man is a charlatan who tries to profit by selling fearful people lightning-rods during thunderstorms. The narrator has a difficult encounter with the Lightning-Rod man in this story about overcoming fear and superstition.

After spending the summer of 1853 in the Berkshire Mountains, where he supposedly had a real life encounter with a lightning-rod salesman, Melville published "The Lightning-Rod Man". At the end of this short story, the lightning-rod salesman is exposed for the fraud that he is. However, that will not keep his successors from fanning out to the Middle West, where lightning storms abound and farmers are gullible.