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  The Two Pilgrims

  Leo Tolstoy

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  eo Tolstoy's story Two Old Men tells the tale of two men, Efim and Elisha, who decide that before they die they must make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. After months of planning, they collect what they will need and begin to walk. After a long day on the road, they come to a village that seems deserted. No one is about, and seeing a small hut, they look in to see what has happened. They enter its darkness and smell death. As their eyes adjust to the lack of light, they see bodies on beds. With trepidation they come close, and see that the people are still alive, but barely.Elisha wants to stay and help. He encourages his companion to go on beyond the village, "And I will catch up with you." But as Elisha opens doors and windows, and offers them food and drink, he begins to see that their needs are more complex than he first imagined—and that it is not only them, but the whole village that is suffering. He finds his friend and tells Efim that he wants to stay longer, encouraging him to make his way on to Jerusalem. "I will find you," he says.So one man stays in the village, helping the villagers find their way again to happiness and health, never going on to Jerusalem, eventually returning home; the other man makes his way to Jerusalem. He keeps waiting for his friend who never comes, so before long he returns home to Russia—again, walking across a continent. At one point along the way, he comes to a village that seems strangely familiar to him. And then he realizes that it is where he left his friend—but everything seems very different now. Men and women, older and younger, are busy at work and play; animals are healthy, and the crops are growing, and so he asks, "What has happened?" In simple innocence, the villagers explain that a man stopped along the way and gave them back their life.Possible Preaching Angle: The story concludes with both men finally at home, telling the stories of their pilgrimages. Tolstoy has no desire to tell a black-and-white story, with a good man and a bad man; it is more nuanced than that, as life is. The last lines tell of their joy in meeting together again. But, clearly, one man paid attention to the needs around him. His pilgrimage became saving the village.What is your pilgrimage?

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  A Witch in the Peak

  R. Murray Gilchrist

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  Robert Murray Gilchrist (1867 – 1917) was an English novelist and author of short stories often set in the Peak District. He is best known today for his Gothic short horror stories, which earn him a deserved position alongside the likes of Stevenson, Stoker, Wilde and Stenbock.A Witch in the Peak tells the story of a money-lender trying to recover a debt from an old woman who has been recently widowed. She throws him out of her house with a curse... and what happens next terrifies the man almost to death.

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  Robinson Crusoe

  Daniel Defoe

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  The son of a middle-class Englishman, Robinson Crusoe takes to the sea to find adventure. 
   
  And find it he does when he is shipwrecked on a deserted South American island for thirty-five years. 
   
  After scavenging his broken ship for useful items, he had only his skills and ingenuity to keep him alive. For twenty-four years there was to be no one else on the island. In the middle of that twenty-fourth year he rescued a native about to be eaten by cannibals who were using his island for a place of feasting. Crusoe named this man Friday, after the day of his rescue. Friday became his faithful servant and friend, even after they were able to leave the island. 
   
  Listeners will enjoy Crusoe's determination for survival against all odds and admire the spirituality that gave him the strength to survive. 
   
   This novel is part of Brilliance Audio's extensive Classic Collection, bringing you timeless masterpieces that you and your family are sure to love.

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  The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle

  Beatrix Potter

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  Once upon a time there was a little girl called Lucie, who lived at a farm called Little-town. She was a good little girl—only she was always losing her pocket-handkerchiefs! One day little Lucie came into the farm-yard crying—oh, she did cry so! I’ve lost my pocket-handkin! Three handkins and a pinny! Have you seen them, Tabby Kitten?An Interactive Media audio production.

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  My Own True Ghost Story...

  Rudyard Kipling

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  This tale was first published in The Week's News on 25 February 1888, and then included the same year in Volume 5 of the Indian Railway Library - The Phantom 'Rickshaw and other Eerie Tales. It was collected in Wee Willie Winkie and Other Stories in 1895, and in numerous later editions of that collection.The narrator stays the night in a rather sinister old dâk-bungalow. During the night he hears the 'unmistakable' sound of a game of billiards being played in the non-existent room next door. In the morning the ancient servant tells him that in old times there had been a billiard-room there, and that one night one of the sahibs had fallen dead across the table. The narrator is excited to have found what seems to be an authentic ghost story. But then he hears the sound again; it was a little rat running to and fro inside the ceiling cloth, and his imagination had done the rest.

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  Adventure of the Solitary...

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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  "The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist", 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. Holmes is contacted by Miss Violet Smith of Farnham, Surrey about an unusual turn in her and her mother's lives. Violet's father has recently died and left his wife and daughter rather poor. There was an ad in the news asking about their whereabouts. Answering it, they met Mr. Carruthers and Mr. Woodley, the former a pleasant enough man, but the latter a bully.

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