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Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories is a collection of short semi-comic mystery stories that were written by Oscar Wilde and published in 1891. Contents: Lord Arthur Savile's Crime / The Canterville Ghost / The Sphinx Without a Secret / The Model Millionaire / The Portrait of Mr. W. H.

In a town full of suffering poor people, a swallow who was left behind after his flock flew off to Egypt for the winter meets the statue of the late Happy Prince, who has never experienced true sorrow, for he lived in a palace where sorrow was not allowed to enter. Viewing various scenes of people suffering in poverty from his tall monument, the Happy Prince asks the swallow to take the ruby from his hilt, the sapphires from his eyes, and the gold leaf covering his body to give to the poor.

When a family from the United States buys Canterville Chase, they are told it is haunted by a horrible spirit, but this does not deter them in the slightest. Indeed, when they find a recurring blood stain on the floor, and hear creaking chains in the night, even seeing the ghost himself, all they do is clean up the blood and insist that the ghost oil his manacles if he is going to keep living in the house. This perturbs the ghost to no end, and he does everything he can to try to frighten the family.

The Adventure of the Empty House, one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of 13 stories in the cycle collected as The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Public pressure forced Conan Doyle to bring the sleuth back to life, and explain his apparently miraculous survival of a deadly struggle with Professor Moriarty. This is the first Holmes story set after his supposed death at the Reichenbach Falls, as recounted in The Final Problem. The Hound of the Baskervilles had seen the return of a pre-Reichenbach Falls Sherlock Holmes, which only served to whet readers' appetites.

Benito Cereno is a novella by Herman Melville, a fictionalized account about the revolt on a Spanish slave ship captained by Don Benito Cereno, first published in three installments in Putnam's Monthly in 1855.

A nightingale overhears a student complaining that the professor's daughter will not dance with him, as he is unable to give her a red rose; a lizard, a butterfly and a daisy laugh at the student for doing so. The nightingale visits all the rose-trees in the garden, and one of the roses tells her there is a way to produce a red rose, but only if the nightingale is prepared to sing the sweetest song for the rose all night with her heart pressing into a thorn, sacrificing her life.

This story concerns a firework, who is one of many to be let off at the wedding of a prince and princess. The rocket is extremely pompous and self-important, and denigrates all the other fireworks, eventually bursting into tears to demonstrate his "sensitivity." As this makes him wet, he fails to ignite and, the next day, is thrown away into a ditch.

The Selfish Giant owns a beautiful garden which has 12 peach trees and lovely fragrant flowers, in which children love to play after returning from school. On the giant's return after visiting his friend the Cornish Ogre for seven years, he takes offence at the children and builds a wall to keep them out.

Helen Stoner worries her stepfather may be trying to kill her after he contrives to move her to the bedroom where her sister had died two years earlier, shortly before her wedding. Stoner is herself now engaged, and Holmes learns that her stepfather's annuity (from the estate of his wife — Stoner's mother) would be greatly reduced if either sister married. During a late-night investigation of the bedroom, Holmes and Watson discover a dummy bell-pull near a ventilator. As they lie in wait a whistle sounds, then a snake appears through the ventilator.

Up until the moment I approached the door everything had been effortless. My connections from Amsterdam to Bialystok had been on time, and there, at the airport, had been my old friend David to greet me.

Hughie Erskine is in love and wants to marry, but the girl's father will not allow it, since Erskine has no money. Erskine's friend Alan Trevor is a painter, and he visits him at his studio one day to find him with a pitiable beggar—the model for his painting. Erskine only has one coin, on which he depends for transportation, but he decides he can walk for a couple of weeks and gives the beggar the coin.

Wilde's story is narrated by a friend of a man called Erskine, who is preoccupied by the Hughes theory. Erskine had learned the idea from one Cyril Graham, who had tried to persuade Erskine of it based on the text of the sonnets, but Erskine was frustrated by the lack of external historical evidence for Willie Hughes's existence. Graham tried to find such evidence but failed; instead, he fakes a portrait of Hughes in which Hughes is depicted with his hand on a book on which can be seen the dedication from the sonnets.

The main character, Lord Arthur Savile, is introduced by Lady Windermere to Mr Septimus R. Podgers, a chiromantist, who reads his palm and tells him that it is his destiny to be a murderer. Lord Arthur wants to marry, but decides he has no right to do so until he has committed the murder.

In the story, Lord Murchison recounts to his old friend a strange tale of a woman he had loved and intended to marry, but was now dead. She had always been very secretive and mysterious, and he one day followed her to see where she went, discovering her stealthily going to a boarding house. He suspected there was another man, and confronted her the next day. She confessed to having been there, but said nothing happened. He did not believe her and left; she died some time later.

When a young solicitor, Jonathan Harker, visits the heart of Transylvania - ostensibly to meet reclusive nobleman Count Dracula - he cannot begin to imagine what horrors might lie in store for him there...or the chain of events he will set in motion at Castle Dracula. Soon, Dracula's bloodlust spreads to England's shores, and Harker's fiancée, Mina Murray, becomes embroiled in his affairs.

The Piazza Tales is a collection of six short stories by American writer Herman Melville, published by Dix & Edwards in the United States in May 1856 and in Britain in June. Except for the newly written title story, "The Piazza," all of the stories had appeared in Putnam's Monthly between 1853 and 1855. The collection includes what has long been regarded as three of Melville's most important achievements in the genre of short fiction, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," "Benito Cereno," and "The Encantadas," his sketches of the Galápagos Islands.

"Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville, first serialized anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam's Magazine.

The Piazza published by Herman Melville in 1856. The sketch describes Melville's farmhouse, called Arrowhead, in Pittsfield, Mass. Supposedly, the other tales in the collection, including Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno, were narrated on the piazza of the farmhouse.

The Bell-Tower appeared in 1855 in Putnam's Monthly Magazine no. 32 (August). In the south of Europe, nigh a once frescoed capital, now with dank mould cankering its bloom, central in a plain, stands what, at distance, seems the black mossed stump of some immeasurable pine, fallen, in forgotten days, with Anak and the Titan.

"The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles" is a novella by American author Herman Melville. First published in Putnam's Magazine in 1854, it consists of ten philosophical "Sketches" on the Encantadas, or Galápagos Islands. An anonymous narrator unites the ten disparate "Sketches", each of which begin with a few lines of poetry, mostly taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. All of the stories are replete with symbolism reinforcing the cruelty of life on the Encantadas.