Read The Three Partners in Englishwith every sentence explained

The Three Partners by Bret Harte was first published in 1897. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and mystery and crime.

Half a million dollars in gold. One last night in the old cabin.

After years of labour for "grub wages" on Heavy Tree Hill, three California miners have finally made their strike. Cool-headed Demorest, sardonic Stacy and eager young George Barker have sold their claim for a fortune, and on the eve of leaving the mountain they sit silent by the fire, with three huge nuggets under a blanket in the corner.

Then visitors climb the trail: the good-natured drunkard Whiskey Dick, a coarse stranger named Steptoe who stares at the gold too long, and Van Loo, a smooth young agent. Years later Stacy runs a palatial bank in San Francisco and Barker has married his sweetheart Kitty, but the fortune that made them rich keeps testing what holds the three together.

Bret Harte, whose Gold Rush stories helped shape the Western, brings back the partners of his tale "Barker's Luck" for a full novel of luck, loyalty and greed, with a cameo from the gambler Jack Hamlin.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate English book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.