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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Greatest Short Stories of Bram Stoker," readers are invited into the rich and atmospheric world crafted by one of the Gothic literature's most revered figures. This collection encompasses a diverse range of narratives that deftly blend elements of horror, suspense, and the supernatural, showcasing Stoker's exceptional command of language and his ability to evoke a visceral sense of dread. From the chilling narrative of a tragic love lost to the eerie distortions of reality, each tale reveals Stoker's exploration of societal fears and human psychology against the backdrop of the late Victorian era, a time marked by both fervent scientific inquiry and a fascination with the occult. Bram Stoker, best known for his iconic novel "Dracula," draws heavily from his own life experiences and the cultural tensions of his time which have informed his profound understanding of the darker aspects of the human condition. His diverse career, which included positions as a theater manager and a personal assistant to the renowned actor Henry Irving, greatly influenced his storytelling technique and thematic choices. Stoker's engagement with folklore and history is also crucial, providing depth and realism to his imaginative works. This collection is a must-read for those intrigued by Gothic fiction and the intricate layering of characters and themes in Stoker's narratives. It not only serves as a testament to his literary genius but also provides a glimpse into the shadowy corners of the human psyche. Readers will find themselves captivated by the timeless quality of these tales, which continue to resonate with modern audiences, inviting contemplation of both fear and fascination. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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The Greatest Short Stories of Bram Stoker
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Greatest Short Stories of Bram Stoker assembles a representative selection of the author’s finest shorter fiction, offering a panoramic view of his imagination beyond the famous novel for which he is best known. Conceived as a single-author compendium, its purpose is to gather a broad range of pieces that demonstrate Stoker’s versatility, his command of atmosphere, and his sustained engagement with the uncanny, the theatrical, and the moral fable. Rather than a complete works, this collection presents a curated array that allows readers to trace recurrent concerns and evolving techniques across different phases of his career and across diverse narrative modes.
The contents center on short stories. Within that form, the collection spans multiple subgenres and text types: Gothic and supernatural tales; weird fiction; adventure and urban menace; crime and sensation sketches; theatrical anecdotes; comic and domestic vignettes; and visionary or allegorical fables written for younger readers. There are no novels, poems, letters, diaries, or essays here; what unites the book is the concision and intensity of the short story. The variety shows how Stoker adapts a compact structure to deliver mood, mystery, irony, and moral reflection, whether the stage is a haunted room, a coast of shifting sands, or a fairy-tale kingdom.
These stories first appeared across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in magazines and in volumes such as Under the Sunset (1881), Snowbound: The Record of a Theatrical Touring Party (1908), and the posthumous Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories (1914). Together they map a career that moved from youthful fantasies to mature studies of dread and human motive. By drawing from multiple original contexts, the present collection restores a sense of the breadth with which Stoker wrote for distinct audiences—children, theatre-goers, general readers—while keeping faith with the integrity of each tale as a self-contained performance of voice, setting, and suspense.
Across this diversity, unifying themes emerge. Stoker returns repeatedly to borders—between reason and superstition, safety and peril, the domestic and the wild, the living and the shadow that seems to press upon it. His protagonists often test the limits of knowledge, only to encounter lingering patterns of fate, retribution, or inexplicable agency. Moral choice matters, as do promises kept and broken. Skepticism strains against vision and prophecy; scientific confidence meets older lore. The result is fiction that registers the energies and anxieties of its era while preserving a timeless core: the human response to fear, wonder, guilt, courage, loyalty, and love.
Stylistically, Stoker’s short fiction is recognizable for its vivid staging, precise control of pace, and an eye for telling detail. He frequently uses frame narratives or stories-within-stories, and he deploys letters, anecdotes, and quasi-reportorial voices to lend immediacy. His long service as a theatre manager informs a flair for entrances, reveals, and climactic set-pieces. Dialogue is often colloquial, occasionally dialectal, to capture social milieu and character tics. Settings—rooms, alleys, ruins, coasts—are mapped with practical clarity so that uncanny events register against convincing physical spaces. Above all, he writes with the assurance that the short story’s brevity can intensify dread and surprise.
Readers will find here a strong core of Gothic and supernatural tales in which isolation, omen, and obsession accumulate a pressure that feels both psychological and otherworldly. Dangerous lodgings, ominous prophecies, perilous wanderings, and inexplicable visitations serve as initial premises rather than puzzles to be neatly solved. In such pieces the menace often grows from ordinary circumstances: a scholar’s lodging, a seaside holiday, a city’s margins. Stoker lets rational explanations contend with residues of older beliefs, ensuring that even when daylight returns, something unsettled remains. These stories exhibit the concentrated power that has kept Stoker central to the tradition of the weird.
Another through-line is the visionary and allegorical mode represented by the Under the Sunset stories, including The Rose Prince, The Invisible Giant, How 7 Went Mad, Lies and Lilies, The Castle of the King, and The Wondrous Child. Written for younger readers but resonant for adults, these fables blend wonder with moral urgency. Kingdoms, journeys, and personified forces create landscapes where courage, truth, and compassion are tested. The language is luminous yet plain, the imagery startling without gratuitous fear. They reveal Stoker’s talent for consolation as well as terror, and for shaping parable-like narratives that address communal responsibility and personal integrity.
Stoker’s theatre-world tales add a distinctive register. Drawing on professional experience at London’s Lyceum Theatre, he populates stages, wings, and touring circuits with performers, managers, craft workers, and spectators. Stories of backstage ingenuity, rivalry, and hazard invite readers behind the scenes, where illusion is both trade and trap. Practical details of props, lighting, and production lend authenticity, while the line between performance and reality grows thin. Comedy often shadows peril; glamour is edged with grit. These narratives broaden the collection’s scope, showing Stoker attentive not only to supernatural chills but also to the drama inherent in art, labor, and reputation.
Comic and domestic sketches balance the darker pieces, tracing the small catastrophes and quiet triumphs of everyday life. Tales of household ambitions, pets and property, social misunderstandings, and urban heroism display a lighter touch: brisk irony, warmth for eccentrics, and delight in problem-solving. Even here, tension and release are carefully managed, and ethical stakes emerge without sermonizing. The humor sharpens observation, revealing how pride, vanity, generosity, or resourcefulness operate in ordinary settings. By including such work alongside Gothic and allegorical tales, the collection presents a fuller picture of Stoker’s sensibility—curious about people, patient with foibles, and alive to the comic turn.
Geography and travel also shape these stories. Stoker moves across provincial towns, coastal resorts, great cities, and continental byways, attentive to local custom and rumor. He contrasts modern confidence—law, medicine, engineering, journalism—with older explanations grounded in folklore, omen, and communal memory. Characters test warnings, misread landscapes, or underestimate forces that do not yield to calculation. Themes of vow and betrayal, hospitality and trespass, repeatedly surface. The resulting fiction binds adventure to moral inquiry: dangers are physical and ethical, choices carry consequences, and the past, whether historical or legendary, persists as a pressure upon the present moment.
Taken together, these short stories show why Stoker’s reputation cannot be confined to a single book. They illustrate his range across tone and form, his command of momentum, and his instinct for situating terror against convincing human motives. They also document the literary energies of their time—modernization, spectacle, social mobility—while remaining accessible to contemporary readers. The compactness of the short form concentrates his effects: a setting is established, tensions rise, a decisive image lingers. Whether confronting shadows, celebrating ingenuity, or imagining just governance, these works continue to matter because they crystallize enduring questions in striking, memorable narratives.
Readers may approach this collection in any order, moving between modes to appreciate the breadth of Stoker’s craft. Noting recurring motifs—warnings heeded or ignored, rooms and thresholds, staged illusions, vows and bargains—enriches the experience. Some titles have appeared in different groupings over time, and minor textual or spelling variations may occur; the present volume privileges clarity while preserving period flavor. Above all, its aim is simple: to bring together many of Bram Stoker’s most compelling shorter tales so that their variety and vitality can be felt side by side. The result is an invitation to rediscover a master storyteller in full.
Author Biography
Bram Stoker (1847–1912) was an Irish author and theater professional whose work helped shape modern Gothic fiction. Writing in the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods, he is best known for the novel Dracula, a landmark of epistolary horror that consolidated vampire lore for an English-speaking readership. Stoker combined diligent research with a keen sense of atmosphere, drawing on contemporary anxieties about science, travel, and urban life. Alongside his literary output, he spent decades in theatrical management, giving him practical insight into performance, pacing, and public taste. His career bridged popular entertainment and serious fiction, leaving a durable imprint on genre and culture.
Stoker grew up in Dublin and studied at Trinity College Dublin, where he read mathematics and participated actively in debating societies. After graduating, he entered the Irish civil service, gaining administrative experience that later informed his methodical approach to research and publication. He also produced a legal-administrative handbook, The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879), which reflects his precision and organizational skill. During these years he began publishing journalism and criticism, cultivating a disciplined routine that supported his later fiction. His university education and civic work grounded him in logical argument and documentation, traits visible in the carefully assembled materials of his later narratives.
While still in Dublin, Stoker wrote theater reviews—most notably for the Dublin Evening Mail—developing a reputation for conscientious criticism that brought him into contact with leading performers. He became closely associated with the actor Henry Irving and, in the late 1870s, moved to London to serve as business manager of the Lyceum Theatre. The post required extensive touring, planning, and correspondence, exposing Stoker to a wide circle of writers, artists, and patrons. He continued to write fiction alongside these duties, building professional friendships that supported his publishing career. The discipline of stage management sharpened his sense of scene construction and dramatic rhythm, qualities that animate his later novels.
Before Dracula, Stoker produced children’s tales and early fiction, including Under the Sunset (1881) and the novel The Snake’s Pass (1890). He undertook wide-ranging research for his writing, consulting libraries and periodicals on folklore, medicine, technology, and travel. Critics have long noted his attention to sources such as Emily Gerard’s discussion of Transylvanian beliefs, which helped inform the cultural backdrop of his most famous work. Stoker also visited coastal settings in Britain, and such locales entered his imaginative geography. His method combined topical detail with Gothic conventions, fusing reportage, letters, and diaries into narratives that feel both documentary and uncanny, a hallmark of his mature style.
Dracula appeared in 1897 and quickly distinguished itself through its mosaic of documents—journals, telegrams, and newspaper clippings—which lend credibility to extraordinary events. Contemporary reviews were mixed but attentive, and the book maintained steady readership. In the decades that followed, the novel’s influence grew, inspiring stage adaptations in the 1920s and prominent film versions in the early 1930s. An unauthorized German film in the early 1920s prompted legal action by Stoker’s estate, underscoring the story’s international reach. The figure of the modern literary vampire, adaptable across media and cultures, owes much to Stoker’s synthesis of folklore, modern travel, communications, and scientific discourse.
Stoker’s later career was productive across genres. He wrote maritime and espionage-inflected fiction in The Mystery of the Sea (1902), supernatural archaeology in The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), and continued with The Man (1905), The Lady of the Shroud (1909), and The Lair of the White Worm (1911). His major nonfiction included Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906), a substantial portrait of the actor and of theatrical life, and Famous Impostors (1910), reflecting his interest in deception and celebrity. Posthumously, Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories (1914) collected shorter work. Across these books, Stoker balanced sensation, meticulous background research, and an interest in public myths and fears.
After the Lyceum era ended in the early 1900s, Stoker devoted more time to writing and to surveying the theatrical world he had helped manage. He died in London in the early 1910s. Today, his legacy rests foremost on Dracula, which continues to anchor studies of Gothic literature and modern popular culture. Scholars read his work alongside late nineteenth-century debates about technology, law, medicine, and empire, noting how documentary structures frame the uncanny. The novel’s adaptability has ensured constant reinvention on stage and screen, while Stoker’s broader oeuvre is increasingly appreciated for its craft, research habits, and exploration of public spectacle and belief.
Historical Context
Bram Stoker’s short fiction emerged across the late Victorian and early Edwardian decades, a period defined by rapid urbanization, imperial expansion, scientific innovation, and religious uncertainty. Born in 1847 in Clontarf, Dublin, and dying in London in 1912, Stoker wrote stories that reflect anxieties and enthusiasms of an era stretching from the 1870s to the eve of the First World War. Pieces later gathered in Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories (1914, posthumous) and in earlier volumes such as Under the Sunset (1881) sit beside tales published in newspapers and magazines, together mapping a cultural landscape where theatre, journalism, folklore, and science collide.
Stoker’s formation in Dublin is crucial context for the whole corpus. Educated at Trinity College Dublin (B.A. 1870; M.A. 1875), he worked in the Irish civil service at Dublin Castle and served as a drama critic for the Dublin Evening Mail, a paper associated with Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, an influence on Irish Gothic. His professional manual The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879) evidences a procedural mind that later shapes documentary and testimonial modes in his fiction. The Land War (1879–82), Home Rule crises (1886, 1893), and debates over Irish identity provide political pressure behind his fascination with law, authority, and communal cohesion.
In 1876 Stoker met the actor Henry Irving; by 1878 he had moved to London to manage Irving’s Lyceum Theatre, a post he held until 1902. The West End’s backstage workings—touring schedules, star systems, scene machinery, gas and then electric illumination, and the precarious lives of performers and staff—constitute a living archive that informs multiple tales of ambition, deception, risk, and spectacle. Ellen Terry’s stardom, Irving’s knighthood in 1895, and arduous American tours forged Stoker’s global perspective. The precision of cues, props, and illusions echoes in stories where doors, lights, and sudden apparitions drive suspense, translating stagecraft into narrative mechanics.
Victorian magazine culture sustained Stoker’s shorter works. Periodicals, Christmas numbers, and railway-bookstall weeklies provided seasonal markets for ghost stories, comic sketches, and exotic adventures. Irish outlets like The Shamrock and London magazines such as London Society and The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News welcomed his contributions across the 1870s–1890s. The New Journalism of W. T. Stead, with its crusading sensationalism, and the rise of mass-circulation dailies contextualize tales shaped by headlines about crime, scandal, and catastrophe. The Whitechapel murders of 1888 intensified London’s appetite for eerie urban narratives and offered a template for representing terror amid gaslit streets and crowded tenements.
Scientific and occult crosscurrents coursed through late nineteenth-century culture. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Huxley’s popular lectures, and advances in physiology and neurology sat beside mesmerism and hypnotism (James Braid; Jean-Martin Charcot), psychical research (Society for Psychical Research, 1882), and Theosophy (Helena Blavatsky, 1875). Degeneration theory (Max Nordau, 1892) and criminal anthropology (Cesare Lombroso) informed debates about heredity and crime. New technologies—fingerprinting (Francis Galton, 1892), X-rays (1895), electric lighting, telephones, and stage illusions like Pepper’s Ghost—complicated the boundary between rational explanation and supernatural possibility. Stoker’s stories frequently pivot on that contested threshold, dramatizing how evidence can be both persuasive and profoundly ambiguous.
London itself furnishes a setting and a problem. The expansion of the metropolis, with its rookeries, workhouses, and docks, offered material for scenes of poverty and heroism. The Poor Law legacy, philanthropic schemes, and the Great Dock Strike (1889) established a social vocabulary of class tension. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (founded 1824) and the Royal Humane Society exemplified rescue culture on river and sea. Policing was modernizing in the wake of the 1888 murders, and sensational trials riveted readers. In that context, stories about waiters, backstage hands, river accidents, or petty crime draw on a city where anonymity, spectacle, and necessity shape moral choice.
Stoker’s travels across Britain and the Continent enriched his geographical imagination. Whitby in 1890 furnished coastal lore and archival ambience; trips through Munich and Vienna in the same year exposed him to Germanic and Central European legends attached to Walpurgisnacht, wolves, and revenants. Northern Scotland—particularly Cruden Bay in Aberdeenshire, which he visited in the 1890s—offered shifting sands, cliff-top ruins, and storm-battered communities that become charged landscapes in his fiction. Parisian fringes, too, with their refuse heaps and ragpickers, exemplified fears of urban abjection. Cheaper railways and Baedeker-guided tourism widened British horizons, while also reinforcing stereotypes of foreign peripheries as mysterious and perilous.
Irish folklore and memory saturate Stoker’s imagination. His mother, Charlotte Thornley Stoker, recounted the Sligo cholera outbreak of 1832, a formative narrative of contagion, quarantine, and communal terror that echoes in pestilence-centered allegories. Banshees, fairies, and moralized wonders appear not as quaint survivals but as vehicles for meditating on justice, fate, and social order. The Celtic Revival of the 1890s, with W. B. Yeats among its champions, brought vernacular legend into polite print culture. Stoker’s fairy tales in Under the Sunset (1881) adapt such materials to Victorian moral pedagogy, while asserting that older beliefs persist, often productively, alongside the claims of science and progress.
Imperial pressures inflect the atmosphere of danger, discipline, and mobility. Memories of the Indian Uprising (1857), campaigns in Sudan (1885), and the South African War (1899–1902) produced a literature of siege, scouts, and redoubts. Colonial ideologies intersected with metropolitan fears about borders—of cities, nations, and bodies—yielding plots that imagine encroachments by criminal bands, roaming outsiders, or supernatural forces. Continental scenes may mirror colonial anxieties, recasting the Paris dump, the Scottish dune, or the Balkan mountain as contested frontier. The language of fortification, patrol, and honor in several tales borrows from contemporary dispatches that celebrated heroism while registering unease about empire’s moral and material costs.
Gender debates shaped the late Victorian imaginary. The New Woman controversy of the 1890s, catalyzed by changes to property and divorce law and by increasing women’s education and employment, unsettled domestic certainties. The Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885) and social purity campaigns tried to discipline sexuality, while the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895 exposed the fragility of reputations and the reach of the press. Stoker’s stories frequently stage marital vows, betrayals, and inheritance disputes, drawing on a culture in which legal rights and moral duties were being renegotiated. Female agency appears variably as wisdom, threat, or redress, reflecting a society arguing over autonomy and guardianship.
Religious feeling and doubt coexist throughout the period. The Victorian “crisis of faith,” intensified by geology and evolutionary thought, did not erase sacramental and devotional practice; rather, it provoked a more embattled yet imaginative Christianity. Evangelical fervor, Anglo-Catholic ritualism, and Catholic-Protestant tensions, especially acute in Ireland, provided idioms for thinking about sin, penance, and redemption. Stoker’s tales align prayer, curse, and vow with legal and theatrical speech acts, recognizing ritual’s power to bind communities and to generate unintended consequences. Conscience remains a hard tribunal in these narratives, even where supernatural justice seems to intervene, suggesting an ethical universe not fully severed from providence.
Law and punishment loom as institutional backdrops. Public executions ended in 1868, but the spectacle of justice persisted through newspapers, coroner’s inquests, and assize reports. Judges embodied a stern Victorian legalism whose authority outlived individual life, and juridical memory—case records, sworn testimony—echoes in stories that turn on curses, wills, and retributive logic. Police professionalism expanded; forensic techniques from photography to fingerprints promised certainty while also inviting doubt. Salvage law, maritime insurance, and the protocols of property and debt animate tales of wreck, disappearance, and discovery. The courtroom and the stage, both places of performance, frame how truth is produced, witnessed, and contested.
Domestic modernity furnished new settings and perils. Suburban expansion, speculative building, and the cult of comfort created spaces ripe for moral experiment and uncanny intrusion. Gaslight yielded to electricity; telephones entered homes; cameras democratized seeing. Mechanical novelties from elevators to safety devices promised control yet created fresh anxieties about malfunction and fraud. Pet-keeping, faddish collectibles, and parlour entertainments supplied comic material for sketches while also signaling shifting urban middle-class identities. The new house, boarding establishment, or seaside lodging becomes a laboratory for etiquette, class encounter, and the sudden irruption of danger—whether from the inhuman, the criminal, or the merely foolish and vain.
Class and labor dynamics give many stories their texture. The precarious economies of waiters, porters, stagehands, and music-hall performers, alongside the secure eminence of “stars,” dramatize aspiration and risk in a city of opportunity and exhaustion. Casual dock labor, costermongers, watermen, and ragpickers populate the riverine and fringe zones where rescue and predation coexist. The workhouse—colloquially the “work’us”—and philanthropic schemes to reform the poor generate comic, sentimental, and grim situations. Popular entertainments, traveling shows, and sideshow exhibitions reveal a Victorian appetite for novelty allied to a classificatory gaze that measured bodies and voices, while also providing one of the few ladders out of poverty.
Stoker’s documentary habits—lists, letters, depositions—reflect both civil service training and transatlantic networking. He admired Walt Whitman, corresponded with him from the 1870s and met him in Camden in 1884, and cultivated friendships with journalists and men of letters in Britain and America. Tours with Irving exposed Stoker to New York, Boston, and Chicago, cities emblematic of modern speed and scale, and to American press practices. International expositions, including the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, popularized electricity, anthropology, and new amusements. That traffic of ideas and machinery surfaces in narratives where evidence, novelty, and showmanship jostle—and where the American and European sensibilities productively clash.
The later years darkened Stoker’s outlook. Irving’s death in 1905 ended an era; Stoker’s Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906) is both tribute and reckoning with the cost of spectacle. Famous Impostors (1910) catalogs hoaxes and credulity, reflecting a skeptical temper sharpened by decades amid illusions, spiritualist claims, and tabloid sensations. Financial strain and ill health shadowed his final decade, even as he continued to publish fiction that tested the borders of miracle and fraud. The Edwardian mood—nostalgic yet anxious—pervades late tales, in which loyalty, endurance, and the hope of “greater love” contend with weariness in a world bristling with mechanical marvels and moral puzzles.
Taken together, the stories now gathered under titles like Dracula’s Guest, Under the Sunset, and Midnight Tales were composed between the early 1870s and the early twentieth century, then dispersed through magazines before later consolidation. Seasonal ghost-story traditions, charitable Christmas numbers, and summer railway reading originally shaped their cadence. Editorial frames, illustrations, and the locations of first publication—Dublin, London, New York, Paris—tuned readers’ expectations. Modern anthologies reunite pieces that share recurring preoccupations: the stage and its doubles, law and its shadows, old beliefs under new lights, urban crowds and coastal margins. Their historical matrix is Victorian modernity itself, with all its brilliance and dread.
Synopsis (Selection)
Dracula's Guest
An English traveler ignores warnings on Walpurgis Night near Munich and stumbles into a deserted tomb and a vampiric presence, foreshadowing the perils of Dracula.
The Judge's House
A student rents a notorious house for solitude, only to find that rats, a noose, and a legend of a hanging judge converge into a relentless haunting.
The Squaw
An American tourist’s cruelty to a cat in Nuremberg leads to grisly retribution within a chamber of medieval torture.
The Secret of the Growing Gold
After a betrayal, a dead woman’s luxuriant hair seems to keep growing, ensnaring the guilty in a slow, uncanny revenge.
The Gipsy Prophecy
A fortune-teller warns a woman she will die by her husband’s hand; every attempt to avert fate edges the couple closer to it.
The Coming of Abel Behenna
A Cornish love triangle is upended when a long-absent sailor returns unexpectedly, triggering jealousy and a fatal misunderstanding.
The Burial of the Rats
Lured into Paris’s rag-pickers’ quarter, a flâneur fights for his life against human predators amid swarming vermin.
A Dream of Red Hands
A respectable man is tormented by recurring visions of bloodstained hands that drive him toward confession and the truth about a hidden crime.
Crooken Sands
A Londoner vacationing on Scotland’s coast toys with disguise and local lore, only to face a deadly double on treacherous sands.
Snowbound: The Record of a Theatrical Touring Party tales (The Occasion; A Lesson in Pets; Coggins's Property; The Slim Syrens; A New Departure in Art; Mick the Devil; In Fear of Death; At Last; Chin Music; A Deputy Waiter; Work'us; A Corner in Dwarfs; A Criminal Star; A Star Trap; A Moon-Light Effect)
Linked tales told by actors on tour mix backstage intrigue, practical jokes, romances, and brushes with crime and catastrophe. Each anecdote pivots on theatrical craft and coincidence, often ending in ironic twists.
Under the Sunset cycle (Under the Sunset; The Rose Prince; The Invisible Giant; The Shadow Builder; How 7 Went Mad; Lies and Lilies; The Castle of the King; The Wondrous Child; The Red Stockade)
Allegorical fairy tales in which children, innocents, and humble folk confront tyrants, unseen plagues, and shadowy forces, guided by courage and moral choice. The cycle blends wonder with menace, offering redemptive endings without detailing the darker turns.
The Dualists
Two privileged boys form a blood pact that escalates from cruel pranks to murder, a stark fable of genteel brutality gone unchecked.
The Crystal Cup
In a mythic city, a visionary artisan fashions a flawless crystal vessel for a despot at great personal cost, a poetic meditation on art, power, and sacrifice.
Buried Treasures
A discovery of hidden wealth awakens greed and old enmities, turning the promise of fortune into a perilous hunt tied to past secrets.
The Chain of Destiny
In a seaside town, lovers investigate a string of deaths linked to an heirloom chain, confronting a hereditary curse that threatens their future.
The Seer
A renowned clairvoyant’s vision entangles a couple in a prophecy whose gradual fulfillment yields unintended and tragic consequences.
Social and Domestic Sketches (Our New House; The Man from Shorrox'; A Yellow Duster; The 'Eroes of the Thames; The Way of Peace; Greater Love; Lord Castleton Explains)
Light, often humorous vignettes of everyday life and character—domestic misadventures, a blunt North-countryman outwitting sophisticates, small objects sparking large misunderstandings, and tributes to river rescuers. Short moral pieces emphasize duty, reconciliation, and self-sacrifice, while a titled speaker’s self-serving ‘explanations’ gently satirize privilege.
Midnight Tales (collection)
A miscellany of shorter pieces—crime sketches, theatrical anecdotes, and uncanny vignettes—unified by brisk pacing and twist endings, gathering works not originally issued together.
The Greatest Short Stories of Bram Stoker
Dracula's Guest
When we started for our drive the sun was shining brightly on Munich, and the air was full of the joyousness of early summer. Just as we were about to depart, Herr Delbrück (the maître d'hôtel of the Quatre Saisons, where I was staying) came down, bareheaded, to the carriage and, after wishing me a pleasant drive, said to the coachman, still holding his hand on the handle of the carriage door:
'Remember you are back by nightfall. The sky looks bright but there is a shiver in the north wind that says there may be a sudden storm. But I am sure you will not be late.' Here he smiled, and added, 'for you know what night it is.'
Johann answered with an emphatic, 'Ja, mein Herr,' and, touching his hat, drove off quickly. When we had cleared the town, I said, after signalling to him to stop:
'Tell me, Johann, what is tonight?'
He crossed himself, as he answered laconically: 'Walpurgis nacht.' Then he took out his watch, a great, old-fashioned German silver thing as big as a turnip, and looked at it, with his eyebrows gathered together and a little impatient shrug of his shoulders. I realised that this was his way of respectfully protesting against the unnecessary delay, and sank back in the carriage, merely motioning him to proceed. He started off rapidly, as if to make up for lost time. Every now and then the horses seemed to throw up their heads and sniffed the air suspiciously. On such occasions I often looked round in alarm. The road was pretty bleak, for we were traversing a sort of high, wind-swept plateau. As we drove, I saw a road that looked but little used, and which seemed to dip through a little, winding valley. It looked so inviting that, even at the risk of offending him, I called Johann to stop—and when he had pulled up, I told him I would like to drive down that road. He made all sorts of excuses, and frequently crossed himself as he spoke. This somewhat piqued my curiosity, so I asked him various questions. He answered fencingly, and repeatedly looked at his watch in protest. Finally I said:
'Well, Johann, I want to go down this road. I shall not ask you to come unless you like; but tell me why you do not like to go, that is all I ask.' For answer he seemed to throw himself off the box, so quickly did he reach the ground. Then he stretched out his hands appealingly to me, and implored me not to go. There was just enough of English mixed with the German for me to understand the drift of his talk. He seemed always just about to tell me something—the very idea of which evidently frightened him; but each time he pulled himself up, saying, as he crossed himself: 'Walpurgis-Nacht!'
I tried to argue with him, but it was difficult to argue with a man when I did not know his language. The advantage certainly rested with him, for although he began to speak in English, of a very crude and broken kind, he always got excited and broke into his native tongue—and every time he did so, he looked at his watch. Then the horses became restless and sniffed the air. At this he grew very pale, and, looking around in a frightened way, he suddenly jumped forward, took them by the bridles and led them on some twenty feet. I followed, and asked why he had done this. For answer he crossed himself, pointed to the spot we had left and drew his carriage in the direction of the other road, indicating a cross, and said, first in German, then in English: 'Buried him—him what killed themselves.'
I remembered the old custom of burying suicides at cross-roads: 'Ah! I see, a suicide. How interesting!' But for the life of me I could not make out why the horses were frightened.
Whilst we were talking, we heard a sort of sound between a yelp and a bark. It was far away; but the horses got very restless, and it took Johann all his time to quiet them. He was pale, and said, 'It sounds like a wolf—but yet there are no wolves here now.'
'No?' I said, questioning him; 'isn't it long since the wolves were so near the city?'
'Long, long,' he answered, 'in the spring and summer; but with the snow the wolves have been here not so long.'
Whilst he was petting the horses and trying to quiet them, dark clouds drifted rapidly across the sky. The sunshine passed away, and a breath of cold wind seemed to drift past us. It was only a breath, however, and more in the nature of a warning than a fact, for the sun came out brightly again. Johann looked under his lifted hand at the horizon and said:
'The storm of snow, he comes before long time.' Then he looked at his watch again, and, straightway holding his reins firmly—for the horses were still pawing the ground restlessly and shaking their heads—he climbed to his box as though the time had come for proceeding on our journey.
I felt a little obstinate and did not at once get into the carriage.
'Tell me,' I said, 'about this place where the road leads,' and I pointed down.
Again he crossed himself and mumbled a prayer, before he answered, 'It is unholy.'
'What is unholy?' I enquired.
'The village.'
'Then there is a village?'
'No, no. No one lives there hundreds of years.' My curiosity was piqued, 'But you said there was a village.'
'There was.'
'Where is it now?'
Whereupon he burst out into a long story in German and English, so mixed up that I could not quite understand exactly what he said, but roughly I gathered that long ago, hundreds of years, men had died there and been buried in their graves; and sounds were heard under the clay, and when the graves were opened, men and women were found rosy with life, and their mouths red with blood. And so, in haste to save their lives (aye, and their souls!—and here he crossed himself) those who were left fled away to other places, where the living lived, and the dead were dead and not—not something. He was evidently afraid to speak the last words. As he proceeded with his narration, he grew more and more excited. It seemed as if his imagination had got hold of him, and he ended in a perfect paroxysm of fear—white-faced, perspiring, trembling and looking round him, as if expecting that some dreadful presence would manifest itself there in the bright sunshine on the open plain. Finally, in an agony of desperation, he cried:
'Walpurgis nacht!' and pointed to the carriage for me to get in. All my English blood rose at this, and, standing back, I said:
'You are afraid, Johann—you are afraid. Go home; I shall return alone; the walk will do me good.' The carriage door was open. I took from the seat my oak walking-stick—which I always carry on my holiday excursions—and closed the door, pointing back to Munich, and said, 'Go home, Johann—Walpurgis-nacht doesn't concern Englishmen.'
The horses were now more restive than ever, and Johann was trying to hold them in, while excitedly imploring me not to do anything so foolish. I pitied the poor fellow, he was deeply in earnest; but all the same I could not help laughing. His English was quite gone now. In his anxiety he had forgotten that his only means of making me understand was to talk my language, so he jabbered away in his native German. It began to be a little tedious. After giving the direction, 'Home!' I turned to go down the cross-road into the valley.
With a despairing gesture, Johann turned his horses towards Munich. I leaned on my stick and looked after him. He went slowly along the road for a while: then there came over the crest of the hill a man tall and thin. I could see so much in the distance. When he drew near the horses, they began to jump and kick about, then to scream with terror. Johann could not hold them in; they bolted down the road, running away madly. I watched them out of sight, then looked for the stranger, but I found that he, too, was gone.
With a light heart I turned down the side road through the deepening valley to which Johann had objected. There was not the slightest reason, that I could see, for his objection; and I daresay I tramped for a couple of hours without thinking of time or distance, and certainly without seeing a person or a house. So far as the place was concerned, it was desolation itself. But I did not notice this particularly till, on turning a bend in the road, I came upon a scattered fringe of wood; then I recognised that I had been impressed unconsciously by the desolation of the region through which I had passed.
I sat down to rest myself, and began to look around. It struck me that it was considerably colder than it had been at the commencement of my walk—a sort of sighing sound seemed to be around me, with, now and then, high overhead, a sort of muffled roar. Looking upwards I noticed that great thick clouds were drifting rapidly across the sky from North to South at a great height. There were signs of coming storm in some lofty stratum of the air. I was a little chilly, and, thinking that it was the sitting still after the exercise of walking, I resumed my journey.
The ground I passed over was now much more picturesque. There were no striking objects that the eye might single out; but in all there was a charm of beauty. I took little heed of time and it was only when the deepening twilight forced itself upon me that I began to think of how I should find my way home. The brightness of the day had gone. The air was cold, and the drifting of clouds high overhead was more marked. They were accompanied by a sort of far-away rushing sound, through which seemed to come at intervals that mysterious cry which the driver had said came from a wolf. For a while I hesitated. I had said I would see the deserted village, so on I went, and presently came on a wide stretch of open country, shut in by hills all around. Their sides were covered with trees which spread down to the plain, dotting, in clumps, the gentler slopes and hollows which showed here and there. I followed with my eye the winding of the road, and saw that it curved close to one of the densest of these clumps and was lost behind it.
As I looked there came a cold shiver in the air, and the snow began to fall. I thought of the miles and miles of bleak country I had passed, and then hurried on to seek the shelter of the wood in front. Darker and darker grew the sky, and faster and heavier fell the snow, till the earth before and around me was a glistening white carpet the further edge of which was lost in misty vagueness. The road was here but crude, and when on the level its boundaries were not so marked, as when it passed through the cuttings; and in a little while I found that I must have strayed from it, for I missed underfoot the hard surface, and my feet sank deeper in the grass and moss. Then the wind grew stronger and blew with ever increasing force, till I was fain to run before it. The air became icy-cold, and in spite of my exercise I began to suffer. The snow was now falling so thickly and whirling around me in such rapid eddies that I could hardly keep my eyes open. Every now and then the heavens were torn asunder by vivid lightning, and in the flashes I could see ahead of me a great mass of trees, chiefly yew and cypress all heavily coated with snow.
I was soon amongst the shelter of the trees, and there, in comparative silence, I could hear the rush of the wind high overhead. Presently the blackness of the storm had become merged in the darkness of the night. By-and-by the storm seemed to be passing away: it now only came in fierce puffs or blasts. At such moments the weird sound of the wolf appeared to be echoed by many similar sounds around me.
Now and again, through the black mass of drifting cloud, came a straggling ray of moonlight, which lit up the expanse, and showed me that I was at the edge of a dense mass of cypress and yew trees. As the snow had ceased to fall, I walked out from the shelter and began to investigate more closely. It appeared to me that, amongst so many old foundations as I had passed, there might be still standing a house in which, though in ruins, I could find some sort of shelter for a while. As I skirted the edge of the copse, I found that a low wall encircled it, and following this I presently found an opening. Here the cypresses formed an alley leading up to a square mass of some kind of building. Just as I caught sight of this, however, the drifting clouds obscured the moon, and I passed up the path in darkness. The wind must have grown colder, for I felt myself shiver as I walked; but there was hope of shelter, and I groped my way blindly on.
I stopped, for there was a sudden stillness. The storm had passed; and, perhaps in sympathy with nature's silence, my heart seemed to cease to beat. But this was only momentarily; for suddenly the moonlight broke through the clouds, showing me that I was in a graveyard, and that the square object before me was a great massive tomb of marble, as white as the snow that lay on and all around it. With the moonlight there came a fierce sigh of the storm, which appeared to resume its course with a long, low howl, as of many dogs or wolves. I was awed and shocked, and felt the cold perceptibly grow upon me till it seemed to grip me by the heart. Then while the flood of moonlight still fell on the marble tomb, the storm gave further evidence of renewing, as though it was returning on its track. Impelled by some sort of fascination, I approached the sepulchre to see what it was, and why such a thing stood alone in such a place. I walked around it, and read, over the Doric door, in German:
COUNTESS DOLINGEN OF GRATZ IN STYRIA SOUGHT AND FOUND DEATH 1801
On the top of the tomb, seemingly driven through the solid marble—for the structure was composed of a few vast blocks of stone—was a great iron spike or stake. On going to the back I saw, graven in great Russian letters:
'The dead travel fast[1q].'
There was something so weird and uncanny about the whole thing that it gave me a turn and made me feel quite faint. I began to wish, for the first time, that I had taken Johann's advice. Here a thought struck me, which came under almost mysterious circumstances and with a terrible shock. This was Walpurgis Night!
Walpurgis Night, when, according to the belief of millions of people, the devil was abroad—when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel. This very place the driver had specially shunned. This was the depopulated village of centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay; and this was the place where I was alone—unmanned, shivering with cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again upon me! It took all my philosophy, all the religion I had been taught, all my courage, not to collapse in a paroxysm of fright.
And now a perfect tornado burst upon me. The ground shook as though thousands of horses thundered across it; and this time the storm bore on its icy wings, not snow, but great hailstones which drove with such violence that they might have come from the thongs of Balearic slingers—hailstones that beat down leaf and branch and made the shelter of the cypresses of no more avail than though their stems were standing-corn. At the first I had rushed to the nearest tree; but I was soon fain to leave it and seek the only spot that seemed to afford refuge, the deep Doric doorway of the marble tomb. There, crouching against the massive bronze door, I gained a certain amount of protection from the beating of the hailstones, for now they only drove against me as they ricocheted from the ground and the side of the marble.
As I leaned against the door, it moved slightly and opened inwards. The shelter of even a tomb was welcome in that pitiless tempest, and I was about to enter it when there came a flash of forked-lightning that lit up the whole expanse of the heavens. In the instant, as I am a living man, I saw, as my eyes were turned into the darkness of the tomb, a beautiful woman, with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on a bier. As the thunder broke overhead, I was grasped as by the hand of a giant and hurled out into the storm. The whole thing was so sudden that, before I could realise the shock, moral as well as physical, I found the hailstones beating me down. At the same time I had a strange, dominating feeling that I was not alone. I looked towards the tomb. Just then there came another blinding flash, which seemed to strike the iron stake that surmounted the tomb and to pour through to the earth, blasting and crumbling the marble, as in a burst of flame. The dead woman rose for a moment of agony, while she was lapped in the flame, and her bitter scream of pain was drowned in the thundercrash. The last thing I heard was this mingling of dreadful sound, as again I was seized in the giant-grasp and dragged away, while the hailstones beat on me, and the air around seemed reverberant with the howling of wolves. The last sight that I remembered was a vague, white, moving mass, as if all the graves around me had sent out the phantoms of their sheeted-dead, and that they were closing in on me through the white cloudiness of the driving hail.
Gradually there came a sort of vague beginning of consciousness; then a sense of weariness that was dreadful. For a time I remembered nothing; but slowly my senses returned. My feet seemed positively racked with pain, yet I could not move them. They seemed to be numbed. There was an icy feeling at the back of my neck and all down my spine, and my ears, like my feet, were dead, yet in torment; but there was in my breast a sense of warmth which was, by comparison, delicious. It was as a nightmare—a physical nightmare, if one may use such an expression; for some heavy weight on my chest made it difficult for me to breathe.
This period of semi-lethargy seemed to remain a long time, and as it faded away I must have slept or swooned. Then came a sort of loathing, like the first stage of sea-sickness, and a wild desire to be free from something—I knew not what. A vast stillness enveloped me, as though all the world were asleep or dead—only broken by the low panting as of some animal close to me. I felt a warm rasping at my throat, then came a consciousness of the awful truth, which chilled me to the heart and sent the blood surging up through my brain. Some great animal was lying on me and now licking my throat. I feared to stir, for some instinct of prudence bade me lie still; but the brute seemed to realise that there was now some change in me, for it raised its head. Through my eyelashes I saw above me the two great flaming eyes of a gigantic wolf. Its sharp white teeth gleamed in the gaping red mouth, and I could feel its hot breath fierce and acrid upon me.
For another spell of time I remembered no more. Then I became conscious of a low growl, followed by a yelp, renewed again and again. Then, seemingly very far away, I heard a 'Holloa! holloa!' as of many voices calling in unison. Cautiously I raised my head and looked in the direction whence the sound came; but the cemetery blocked my view. The wolf still continued to yelp in a strange way, and a red glare began to move round the grove of cypresses, as though following the sound. As the voices drew closer, the wolf yelped faster and louder. I feared to make either sound or motion. Nearer came the red glow, over the white pall which stretched into the darkness around me. Then all at once from beyond the trees there came at a trot a troop of horsemen bearing torches. The wolf rose from my breast and made for the cemetery. I saw one of the horsemen (soldiers by their caps and their long military cloaks) raise his carbine and take aim. A companion knocked up his arm, and I heard the ball whizz over my head. He had evidently taken my body for that of the wolf. Another sighted the animal as it slunk away, and a shot followed. Then, at a gallop, the troop rode forward—some towards me, others following the wolf as it disappeared amongst the snow-clad cypresses.
As they drew nearer I tried to move, but was powerless, although I could see and hear all that went on around me. Two or three of the soldiers jumped from their horses and knelt beside me. One of them raised my head, and placed his hand over my heart.
'Good news, comrades!' he cried. 'His heart still beats!'
Then some brandy was poured down my throat; it put vigour into me, and I was able to open my eyes fully and look around. Lights and shadows were moving among the trees, and I heard men call to one another. They drew together, uttering frightened exclamations; and the lights flashed as the others came pouring out of the cemetery pell-mell, like men possessed. When the further ones came close to us, those who were around me asked them eagerly:
'Well, have you found him?'
The reply rang out hurriedly:
'No! no! Come away quick—quick! This is no place to stay, and on this of all nights!'
'What was it?' was the question, asked in all manner of keys. The answer came variously and all indefinitely as though the men were moved by some common impulse to speak, yet were restrained by some common fear from giving their thoughts.
'It—it—indeed!' gibbered one, whose wits had plainly given out for the moment.
'A wolf—and yet not a wolf!' another put in shudderingly.
'No use trying for him without the sacred bullet,' a third remarked in a more ordinary manner.
'Serve us right for coming out on this night! Truly we have earned our thousand marks!' were the ejaculations of a fourth.
'There was blood on the broken marble,' another said after a pause—'the lightning never brought that there. And for him—is he safe? Look at his throat! See, comrades, the wolf has been lying on him and keeping his blood warm.'
The officer looked at my throat and replied:
'He is all right; the skin is not pierced. What does it all mean? We should never have found him but for the yelping of the wolf.'
'What became of it?' asked the man who was holding up my head, and who seemed the least panic-stricken of the party, for his hands were steady and without tremor. On his sleeve was the chevron of a petty officer.
'It went to its home,' answered the man, whose long face was pallid, and who actually shook with terror as he glanced around him fearfully. 'There are graves enough there in which it may lie. Come, comrades—come quickly! Let us leave this cursed spot.'
The officer raised me to a sitting posture, as he uttered a word of command; then several men placed me upon a horse. He sprang to the saddle behind me, took me in his arms, gave the word to advance; and, turning our faces away from the cypresses, we rode away in swift, military order.
As yet my tongue refused its office, and I was perforce silent. I must have fallen asleep; for the next thing I remembered was finding myself standing up, supported by a soldier on each side of me. It was almost broad daylight, and to the north a red streak of sunlight was reflected, like a path of blood, over the waste of snow. The officer was telling the men to say nothing of what they had seen, except that they found an English stranger, guarded by a large dog.
'Dog! that was no dog,' cut in the man who had exhibited such fear. 'I think I know a wolf when I see one.'
The young officer answered calmly: 'I said a dog.'
'Dog!' reiterated the other ironically. It was evident that his courage was rising with the sun; and, pointing to me, he said, 'Look at his throat. Is that the work of a dog, master?'
Instinctively I raised my hand to my throat, and as I touched it I cried out in pain. The men crowded round to look, some stooping down from their saddles; and again there came the calm voice of the young officer:
'A dog, as I said. If aught else were said we should only be laughed at.'
I was then mounted behind a trooper, and we rode on into the suburbs of Munich. Here we came across a stray carriage, into which I was lifted, and it was driven off to the Quatre Saisons—the young officer accompanying me, whilst a trooper followed with his horse, and the others rode off to their barracks.
When we arrived, Herr Delbrück rushed so quickly down the steps to meet me, that it was apparent he had been watching within. Taking me by both hands he solicitously led me in. The officer saluted me and was turning to withdraw, when I recognised his purpose, and insisted that he should come to my rooms. Over a glass of wine I warmly thanked him and his brave comrades for saving me. He replied simply that he was more than glad, and that Herr Delbrück had at the first taken steps to make all the searching party pleased; at which ambiguous utterance the maître d'hôtel smiled, while the officer pleaded duty and withdrew.
'But Herr Delbrück,' I enquired, 'how and why was it that the soldiers searched for me?'
He shrugged his shoulders, as if in depreciation of his own deed, as he replied:
'I was so fortunate as to obtain leave from the commander of the regiment in which I served, to ask for volunteers.'
'But how did you know I was lost?' I asked.
'The driver came hither with the remains of his carriage, which had been upset when the horses ran away.'
'But surely you would not send a search-party of soldiers merely on this account?'
'Oh, no!' he answered; 'but even before the coachman arrived, I had this telegram from the Boyar whose guest you are,' and he took from his pocket a telegram which he handed to me, and I read:
Bistritz.
Be careful of my guest—his safety is most precious to me. Should aught happen to him, or if he be missed, spare nothing to find him and ensure his safety. He is English and therefore adventurous. There are often dangers from snow and wolves and night. Lose not a moment if you suspect harm to him. I answer your zeal with my fortune.—Dracula.
As I held the telegram in my hand, the room seemed to whirl around me; and, if the attentive maître d'hôtel had not caught me, I think I should have fallen. There was something so strange in all this, something so weird and impossible to imagine, that there grew on me a sense of my being in some way the sport of opposite forces—the mere vague idea of which seemed in a way to paralyse me. I was certainly under some form of mysterious protection. From a distant country had come, in the very nick of time, a message that took me out of the danger of the snow-sleep and the jaws of the wolf.
The Judge's House
When the time for his examination drew near Malcolm Malcolmson made up his mind to go somewhere to read by himself. He feared the attractions of the seaside, and also he feared completely rural isolation, for of old he knew it charms, and so he determined to find some unpretentious little town where there would be nothing to distract him. He refrained from asking suggestions from any of his friends, for he argued that each would recommend some place of which he had knowledge, and where he had already acquaintances. As Malcolmson wished to avoid friends he had no wish to encumber himself with the attention of friends' friends, and so he determined to look out for a place for himself. He packed a portmanteau with some clothes and all the books he required, and then took ticket for the first name on the local time-table which he did not know.
When at the end of three hours' journey he alighted at Benchurch, he felt satisfied that he had so far obliterated his tracks as to be sure of having a peaceful opportunity of pursuing his studies. He went straight to the one inn which the sleepy little place contained, and put up for the night. Benchurch was a market town, and once in three weeks was crowded to excess, but for the remainder of the twenty-one days it was as attractive as a desert. Malcolmson looked around the day after his arrival to try to find quarters more isolated than even so quiet an inn as 'The Good Traveller' afforded. There was only one place which took his fancy, and it certainly satisfied his wildest ideas regarding quiet; in fact, quiet was not the proper word to apply to it—desolation was the only term conveying any suitable idea of its isolation. It was an old rambling, heavy-built house of the Jacobean style, with heavy gables and windows, unusually small, and set higher than was customary in such houses, and was surrounded with a high brick wall massively built. Indeed, on examination, it looked more like a fortified house than an ordinary dwelling. But all these things pleased Malcolmson. 'Here,' he thought, 'is the very spot I have been looking for, and if I can get opportunity of using it I shall be happy.' His joy was increased when he realised beyond doubt that it was not at present inhabited.
From the post-office he got the name of the agent, who was rarely surprised at the application to rent a part of the old house. Mr. Carnford, the local lawyer and agent, was a genial old gentleman, and frankly confessed his delight at anyone being willing to live in the house.
'To tell you the truth,' said he, 'I should be only too happy, on behalf of the owners, to let anyone have the house rent free for a term of years if only to accustom the people here to see it inhabited. It has been so long empty that some kind of absurd prejudice has grown up about it, and this can be best put down by its occupation—if only,' he added with a sly glance at Malcolmson, 'by a scholar like yourself, who wants its quiet for a time.'
