19.05.2024

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In eighteenth century English society it was even more difficult for a girl to advance above her station than it was for a young man. Without the proper connections and lineage it was almost impossible for even the most attractive of young girls to marry a man who could give her a life of comfort. Seeing no other way around this dilemma, some parents took the grave risk of sending their daughters to India, where the men who survived the climate and the competition were seeking wives as gorgeous as the silks and gems they carried home as spoils. One of these girls was named Fanny Chamberlain.
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18.05.2024

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I had a good job. I was the editor and part owner of a weekly newspaper in Waverly, Kansas. It was a town of about 1000 souls, settled after the Civil War by a group of pioneers from Ohio. In fact the main event of the year was a large gathering in a clearing on the edge of town and it was called Old Ohio Days. I had a good house, a modest three bedroom bungalow within walking distance of my job. I had two good children who had long-since grown up and moved away.
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12.09.2021

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I'm close to the end of my life now, and as you reach your twilight years mostly all you have left is memories. Especially since I lost my wife of more than 50 years, Katie, I spend most of my time looking back.: my youth in Nebraska; my brief spell as a college football star; the first time I ever saw Katie, and fell in love with her; and, of course, the War.
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16.06.2021

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"I'm sorry, what was that you just said, Mrs. Pettington?"
What a tiresome woman. I had just now been distracted from listening to her by the way she snapped her fingers at Kisula and then gave him a distasteful look when he refilled her coffee cup.
"I said, Mr. Woolston, that I hardly think we need worry about these rumblings from the tribal huts. England has held this protectorate in Tanzania since the war, and we will do so as long as the London cafés need their coffee."
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08.06.2021

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It had been a very bad winter. It had been freezing down in the village, and there was no fruit or fresh vegetables of any kind left. All they had was salted meats and tubers, a state of affairs that left Samantha, not accustomed to not getting her own way, very frustrated.
The manor house, up on its lonesome hill, was a perpetual temptation to the people in the town below.
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28.04.2021

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In the year 1008 as reckoned in Rome on the Julian Calendar, Brother Cyryl Procopius was given a writ of Accession to take over the Parish of St. Adelbert in the Polish town of Virlun at the edge of the God-forsaken Wood of Mldawa. It was well known that the world ended at the Bug river, and that the Woods of Mldawa were the beginning of the Great Wilderness that surrounded the realm of Blessed Christendom, a place where Satan and his minions held sway out of the reach of God and his all his angels;
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01.04.2021

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The bride worried that she would shatter. She felt as fragile as the glass bottles of oils and perfumes set out for her bath--a bath she didn't welcome, and one she knew would never make her feel clean. In the water, a gilded lion gushed rose-scented water from his mouth. Julia had always thought the fountain beautified the room, but now the lion seemed like he was just another predator waiting to pounce.
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29.01.2021

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"I think it's wreckage of a ship. From the storm last night. It's not strange to find ship wreckage on the Cefalu beach after a tempest like that."
Two scouts, on their regular patrol along the Adrano coastline while the forces of the Prince of Madness sought to invade the island nation, had stopped on the beach, their attention arrested by shattered ship planking and tangles of shredded sailcloth washing up in the surf.
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03.05.2020

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Early in the morning of August 21, 1863 William Clarke Quantrell and his band of Missouri ruffians sacked and burned the city of Lawrence, Kansas and changed my life forever. Amost all of the city was destroyed including the Lawrence Journal newspaper, where I worked, and the Eldridge House Hotel, where I lived. Fortunately I was in Topeka on that day, covering the newly-formed and very contentious Kansas Legislature.
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19.02.2020

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Dutch came first. It was a particularly busy and boisterous night in the Dick Hut, tucked in the back shadows of an alley off the Nuuanu Stream in the heart of Honolulu's red light district. The sign over the door actually said "Richard's," but that's not what everyone called it. Naval ships were in harbor, more than ninety of them, I was told, and all of Oahu was abuzz at the rumbling of war, with the Japs getting more belligerent with each passing day.
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