Delve deep into the mysteries of the universe and let this book take you on a journey from the start of the universe at the Big Bang to furthest reaches of the universe observable to man. Somewhere between theory and mystery, learn about all the near-magical bodies of the universe, covering supermassive black holes, neutron stars, hypernovas, wormholes and nebulas.
When Black Beauty is trained to carry a rider on his back, or to pull a carriage behind him, he finds it hard at first. But he is lucky - his first home is a good one, where his owners are kind people, who would never be cruel to a horse.
But in the nineteenth century many people were cruel to their horses, whipping them and beating them, and using them like machines until they dropped dead. Black Beauty soon finds this out, and as he describes his life, he has many terrible stories to tell.
Mary Strokes was walking through Dead Man's Copse when she saw the body of a young woman dressed in a black coat, black gloves, no hat and an eternity ring set with diamonds in her ear but when she took Detective Sergeant Frank Abbott to the wood, the body had vanished.
Long, long ago, in the winter-time, when the snowflakes were falling like little white feathers from the sky, a beautiful Queen sat beside her window, which was framed in black ebony, and stitched. As she worked, she looked sometimes at the falling snow, and so it happened that she pricked her finger with her needle, so that three drops of blood fell upon the snow. How pretty the red blood looked upon the dazzling white! The Queen said to herself as she saw it, "Ah me! If only I had a dear little child as white as the snow, as rosy as the blood, and with hair as black as the ebony window-frame..."
The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man - Unabridged edition 2012
It is 1862, though not the 1862 it should be.... Time has been altered, and Sir Richard Francis Burton, the king's agent, is one of the few people who know that the world is now careening along a very different course from that which Destiny intended. When a clockwork-powered man of brass is found abandoned in Trafalgar Square, Burton and his assistant, the wayward poet Algernon Swinburne, find themselves on the trail of the stolen Garnier Collection - black diamonds rumored to be fragments of the Lemurian Eye of Naga, a meteorite that fell to Earth in prehistoric times.
