Axidava

The Lost Millionaire

Edward H. Smith

Some time before three o’clock on the afternoon of December 2, 1919, Ambrose Joseph Small deposited in the Dominion Bank, of Toronto, a check for one million dollars. At seven fifteen o’clock that evening the lean, swart, saturnine master of Canadian playhouses bought his habitual newspapers from the familiar boy under the lamps of Adelaide Street, before his own Grand Theater, turned on his heel, and strode off into the night, to return no more.

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The Kidnappers Of Central Park

Edward H. Smith

On the afternoon of Sunday, May 14, 1899, Mrs. Arthur W. Clarke, the young wife of a British publisher’s agent residing at 159 East Sixty-fifth Street, New York, found this advertisement in the New York Herald, under the heading, “Employment Wanted:”

GIRL (20) as child’s nurse; no experience in city. Nurse, 274 Herald, Twenty-third Street.

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A Nun In Vivisepulture

Edward H. Smith

Whoever is familiar with Central European popular literature has tucked away in his memory some part or parcel of the story of Barbara Ubrik. The romance of her life and parentage has furnished material for countless novels, plays, short stories, tales and poems of the imaginative kind. Bits of her history appear in more serious literature, in religious and social polemics, even in the memoirs of personages.

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The Vanished Archduke

Edward H. Smith

One of the most engrossing of modern mysteries is that which hides the final destination of Archduke Johann Salvator of Austria, better known to a generation of newspaper readers as John Orth.

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The Ambrose Bierce Irony

Edward H. Smith

Some time in his middle career, Ambrose Bierce wrote three short tales of vanishment—weird and supernatural things in one of his favorite veins. The three sketches—for they are no more—he classed under the heading, “Mysterious Disappearances,” a subject which occupied his speculations from time to time. Herein lies a complete irony. Bierce himself was later to disappear as mysteriously as any of his heroes.

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The Charlie Ross Enigma

Edward H. Smith

Late on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of June, 1874, two men in a shabby-covered buggy stopped their horse under the venerable elms of Washington Lane in Germantown, that sleepy suburb of Philadelphia, with its grave-faced revolutionary houses and its air of lavendered maturity.

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