Premium Short Stories Collection - Blackmailing, Crank, Spook & Classic Tales

This carefully crafted ebook: 'Premium Short Stories Collection - Blackmailing, Crank, Spook & Classic Tales' is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents.
Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist and short story writer, known professionally as E.F. Benson. He started his novel writing career in 1893 with the fashionably controversial Dodo, which was an instant success, and followed it with a variety of satire and romantic and supernatural melodrama. He repeated the success of Dodo, with sequels to this novel, but the greatest success came relatively late in his career with The Mapp and Lucia series consisting of six novels and two short stories. The novels feature humorous incidents in the lives of (mainly) upper-middle-class British people in the 1920s and 1930s, vying for social prestige and one-upmanship in an atmosphere of extreme cultural snobbery. Benson was also known as a writer of atmospheric, oblique, and at times humorous or satirical ghost stories.
Table of Contents:
The Room in the Tower, and Other Stories
The Room in the Tower
Gavon's Eve
The Dust-Cloud
The Confession of Charles Linkworth
At Abdul Ali's Grave
The Shootings of Achnaleish
How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery
Caterpillars
The Cat
The Bus-Conductor
The Man Who Went Too Far
Between the Lights
Outside the Door
The Other Bed
The Thing in the Hall
The House with the Brick-Kiln
The Terror by Night
The Countess of Lowndes Square, and Other Stories
BLACKMAILING STORIES
The Countess of Lowndes Square
The Blackmailer of Park Lane
GENERAL STORIES
The Dance on the Beefsteak
The Oriolist
In the Dark
The False Step
CAT STORIES
'Puss-cat'
There Arose a King
CRANK STORIES
The Tragedy of Oliver Bowman
Philip's Safety Razor
SPOOK STORIES
The Case of Frank Hampden
Mrs. Andrews's Control
The Ape
'Through'

This carefully crafted ebook: "Premium Short Stories Collection - Blackmailing, Crank, Spook & Classic Tales" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist and short story writer, known professionally as E.F. Benson. He started his novel writing career in 1893 with the fashionably controversial Dodo, which was an instant success, and followed it with a variety of satire and romantic and supernatural melodrama. He repeated the success of Dodo, with sequels to this novel, but the greatest success came relatively late in his career with The Mapp and Lucia series consisting of six novels and two short stories. The novels feature humorous incidents in the lives of (mainly) upper-middle-class British people in the 1920s and 1930s, vying for social prestige and one-upmanship in an atmosphere of extreme cultural snobbery. Benson was also known as a writer of atmospheric, oblique, and at times humorous or satirical ghost stories. Table of Contents: The Room in the Tower, and Other Stories The Room in the Tower Gavon's Eve The Dust-Cloud The Confession of Charles Linkworth At Abdul Ali's Grave The Shootings of Achnaleish How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery Caterpillars The Cat The Bus-Conductor The Man Who Went Too Far Between the Lights Outside the Door The Other Bed The Thing in the Hall The House with the Brick-Kiln The Terror by Night The Countess of Lowndes Square, and Other Stories BLACKMAILING STORIES The Countess of Lowndes Square The Blackmailer of Park Lane GENERAL STORIES The Dance on the Beefsteak The Oriolist In the Dark The False Step CAT STORIES "Puss-cat" There Arose a King CRANK STORIES The Tragedy of Oliver Bowman Philip's Safety Razor SPOOK STORIES The Case of Frank Hampden Mrs. Andrews's Control The Ape "Through"

Échantillon de lecture
Gavon's Eve
Table of Contents

It is only the largest kind of ordnance map that records the existence of the village of Gavon, in the shire of Sutherland, and it is perhaps surprising that any map on whatever scale should mark so small and huddled a group of huts, set on a bare, bleak headland between moor and sea, and, so one would have thought, of no import at all to any who did not happen to live there. But the river Gavon, on the right bank of which stand this half-dozen of chimneyless and wind-swept habitations, is a geographical fact of far greater interest to outsiders, for the salmon there are heavy fish, the mouth of the river is clear of nets, and all the way up to Gavon Loch, some six miles inland, the coffee-coloured water lies in pool after deep pool, which verge, if the river is in order and the angler moderately sanguine, on a fishing probability amounting almost to a certainty. In any case, during the first fortnight of September last I had no blank day on those delectable waters, and up till the 15th of that month there was no day on which some one at the lodge in which I was stopping did not land a fish out of the famous Picts' pool. But after the 15th that pool was not fished again. The reason why is here set forward.

The river at this point, after some hundred yards of rapid, makes a sudden turn 'round a rocky angle, and plunges madly into the pool itself. Very deep water lies at the head of it, but deeper still further down on the east side, where a portion of the stream flicks back again in a swift dark backwater towards the top of the pool again. It is fishable only from the western bank, for to the east, above this backwater, a great wall of black and basaltic rock, heaved up no doubt by some fault in strata, rises sheer from the river to the height of some sixty feet. It is in fact nearly precipitous on both sides, heavily serrated at the top, and of so curious a thinness, that at about the middle of it where a fissure breaks its topmost edge, and some twenty feet from the top, there exists a long hole, a sort of lancet window, one would say, right through the rock, so that a slit of daylight can be seen through it. Since, therefore, no one would care to cast his line standing perched on that razor-edged eminence, the pool must needs be fished from the western bank. A decent fly, however, will cover it all.

It is on the western bank that there stand the remains of that which gave its title to the pool, namely, the ruins of a Pict castle, built out of rough and scarcely hewn masonry, unmortared but on a certain large and impressive scale, and in a very well-preserved condition considering its extreme antiquity. It is circular in shape and measures some twenty yards of diameter in its internal span. A staircase of large blocks with a rise of at least a foot leads up to the main gate, and opposite this on the side towards the river is another smaller postern through which down a rather hazardously steep slope a scrambling path, where progress demands both caution and activity, conducts to the head of the pool which lies immediately beneath it. A gate-chamber still roofed over exists in the solid wall: inside there are foundation indications of three rooms, and in the centre of all a very deep hole, probably a well. Finally, just outside the postern leading to the river is a small artificially levelled platform, some twenty feet across, as if made to support some super-incumbent edifice. Certain stone slabs and blocks are dispersed over it.

Brora, the post-town of Gavon, lies some six miles to the south-west, and from it a track over the moor leads to the rapids immediately above the Picts' pool, across which by somewhat extravagant striding from boulder to boulder a man can pass dry-foot when the river is low, and make his way up a steep path to the north of the basaltic rock, and so to the village. But this transit demands a