Originally published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1891 as "Tales of Soldiers and Civilians" and retitled in Britain as "In the Midst of Life", this audiobook is a collection of 11 short stories from the tales of civilians. Ambrose Bierce loved to focus on the troubled, and perhaps marginally insane, citizens of his time, and the power of the mind, and love gone wrong. For example, "The Man and the Snake" is a story where the snake never attacks, but the man dies.