Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation. This has been already too much an object for the scorn—for the horror—for the detestation of my race.
(more…)
The fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to him to prove that he was dead: he had always been a hard man to convince.
(more…)
It was Detective Gilbert who told the story to a group of boarders seated on the piazza of one of the quaint old Rhinelander houses. These dwellings, though situated on West Eleventh Street, in the very heart of New York, present an almost rural spectacle, with their green lawns, wide piazzas, and vine-covered balconies.
(more…)
“There is a wild beast in your woods,” said the artist Cunningham, as he was being driven to the station. It was the only remark he had made during the drive, but as Van Cheele had talked incessantly his companion’s silence had not been noticeable.
(more…)
“No, my dear,” my Uncle Abraham answered me, “no—nothing romantic ever happened to me—unless—but no: that wasn’t romantic either——”
(more…)
Monsieur Pierre Agénor de Vargnes, the Examining Magistrate, was the exact opposite of a practical joker. He was dignity, staidness, correctness personified. As a sedate man, he was quite incapable of being guilty, even in his dreams, of anything resembling a practical joke, however remotely.
(more…)
In the eventful year of the eruption of Vesuvius, there lived in Pompeii a young Greek by the name of Glaucus. Heaven had given him every blessing but one; it had denied him the heritage of freedom.
(more…)
Carrin decided that he could trace his present mood to Miller’s suicide last week. But the knowledge didn’t help him get rid of the vague, formless fear in the back of his mind. It was foolish. Miller’s suicide didn’t concern him.
(more…)
Extract from hospital record of the case of John Anderson, patient of Dr. Brown, Ward 3, Room 6:
August 3. Arrived at hospital in extreme mental distress, having been bitten on the wrist three hours previously by dog known to have been rabid. Large, strong man, full-blooded and well nourished. Sanguine temperament. Pulse and temperature higher than normal, due to excitement. Cauterized wound at once (2 P.M.) and inoculated with antitoxin.
(more…)
On the 29th of July, 1835, Kasper Boeck, a shepherd of the little village of Hirschwiller, with his large felt hat tipped back, his wallet of stringy sackcloth hanging at his hip, and his great tawny dog at his heels, presented himself at about nine o’clock in the evening at the house of the burgomaster, Petrus Mauerer, who had just finished supper and was taking a little glass of kirchwasser to facilitate digestion.
(more…)
We sat in the Purple Lily—Tain Dirk, that far too handsome young man, with me.
I drank coffee; Tain Dirk drank liquor—secretly and alone. The night was drenched with sweating summer heat, but I felt cold as ice. Presently we went up to the Palm Grove Roof, where Bimi Tal was to dance.
(more…)
“Come,” said the Sultan to his hasheesh-eater in the very furthest lands that know Bagdad, “dream to me now of London.”
(more…)
“A gentleman to see you, doctor.”
From across the common a clock sounded the half hour.
“Ten-thirty!” I said. “A late visitor. Show him up, if you please.”
(more…)
It was late in the evening of Melbourne Cup Day. In one of the dining-rooms of the Victoria Club three men sat smoking and talking earnestly together. Certainly the events of the last sixteen hours furnished ample subject for conversation.
(more…)
The bad old woman in black ran down the street of the ox-butchers.
Windows at once were opened high up in those crazy gables; heads were thrust out: it was she.
(more…)
Aye, Sir, since you have asked, there has been many a guess about where Black Jean finally disappeared to.
He was a French-Canadian and a weed of a man—six-feet-five in his socks; his eyes were little and close together and black; he wore a long thin mustache that drooped; and he was as hairy as his two bears.
(more…)
I was just thirty-seven when my Uncle Philip died. A week before that event he sent for me; and here let me say that I had never set eyes on him. He hated my mother, but I do not know why. She told me long before his last illness that I need expect nothing from my father’s brother.
(more…)
When I was a little boy I once went with my father to call on Adrian Borlsover. I played on the floor with a black spaniel while my father appealed for a subscription. Just before we left my father said, “Mr. Borlsover, may my son here shake hands with you? It will be a thing to look back upon with pride when he grows to be a man.”
(more…)
