The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser In Plain English, Or, Medicine Simplified. By R.V. Pierce, M.D. INTRODUCTORY WORDS. Health and disease are physical conditions upon which pleasure and pain, success and failure, depend. Every individual gain increases public gain. Upon the health of its people is based the prosperity of a nation; by it every value is increased, every joy enhanced. Life is incomplete without the enjoyment of healthy organs and faculties, for these give rise to the delightful sensations of existence...

Like the later and more famous novel Middlemarch, Deerbrook describes the life of country people in a fictional English town. The Grey family live in one of the loveliest houses in Deerbrook, but a change in their lives is going to take place... The Ibbotson sisters, Hester and Margaret, orphaned distant cousins of Mr. Grey. Like in Jane Austen's novels, we see how the sisters are trying to advance themselves. In Victorian England, the chief way for women to "advance themselves" is to marry well. But will they succeed? And if they succeed, will they be happy?

On Christmas Eve, two children, a brother and sister, leave their grandmother's house in an Alpine village and get lost in the mountain snow. They become trapped among the rock crystals of the frozen glacier. This short and gripping novel, by 19th century Austrian master Adalbert Stifter, influenced Thomas Mann and others with its suspenseful, simple, myth-like story and majestic depictions of nature. Poet W.H. Auden called the work "a quiet and beautiful parable about the relation of people to places, of man to nature."(Introduction by Greg W.)