Of course the cultivated reader has heard of Aubrey Vair. He has published on three several occasions volumes of delicate verses⁠—some, indeed, border on indelicacy⁠—and his column “Of Things Literary...

Here are some of the secrets of taxidermy. They were told me by the taxidermist in a mood of elation. He told me them in the time between the first glass of whisky and the fourth, when a man is no lon...

“This again,” said the Bacteriologist, slipping a glass slide under the microscope, “is well⁠—a preparation of the Bacillus of cholera⁠—the cholera germ.” The pale-faced man peered down the microscope...

It is a moot point whether burglary is to be considered as a sport, a trade, or an art. For a trade, the technique is scarcely rigid enough, and its claims to be considered an art are vitiated by the ...

As I sit writing in my study, I can hear our Jane bumping her way downstairs with a brush and dustpan. She used in the old days to sing hymn tunes, or the British national song for the time being, to ...

The buying of orchids always has in it a certain speculative flavour. You have before you the brown shrivelled lump of tissue, and for the rest you must trust your judgment, or the auctioneer, or your...

The observatory at Avu, in Borneo, stands on the spur of the mountain. To the north rises the old crater, black at night against the unfathomable blue of the sky. From the little circular building, wi...

Some business had detained me in Chancery Lane nine in the evening, and thereafter, having some inkling of a headache, I was disinclined either for entertainment or further work. So much of the sky as...

The canoe was now approaching the land. The bay opened out, and a gap in the white surf of the reef marked where the little river ran out to the sea; the thicker and deeper green of the virgin forest ...

After his legs were set, they carried Bailey into the study and put him on a couch before the open window. There he lay, a live⁠—even a feverish man down to the loins, and below that a double-barrelle...

The chief attendant of the three dynamos that buzzed and rattled at Camberwell, and kept the electric railway going, came out of Yorkshire, and his name was James Holroyd. He was a practical electrici...

The man with the scarred face leant over the table and looked at my bundle. “Orchids?” he asked. “A few,” I said. “Cypripediums,” he said. “Chiefly,” said I. “Anything new? I thought not. I did these ...

“Talking of the prices of birds, I’ve seen an ostrich that cost three hundred pounds,” said the Taxidermist, recalling his youth of travel. “Three hundred pounds!” He looked at me over his spectacles....

The Ethnologist looked at the bhimraj feather thoughtfully. “They seemed loth to part with it,” he said. “It is sacred to the Chiefs,” said the lieutenant; “just as yellow silk, you know, is sacred to...

It is quite impossible to say whether this thing really happened. It depends entirely on the word of R. M. Harringay, who is an artist. Following his version of the affair, the narrative deposes that ...

Probably you have heard of Hapley⁠—not W. T. Hapley, the son, but the celebrated Hapley, the Hapley of Periplaneta Hapliia, Hapley the entomologist. If so you know at least of the great feud between H...

The transitory mental aberration of Sidney Davidson, remarkable enough in itself, is still more remarkable if Wade’s explanation is to be credited. It sets one dreaming of the oddest possibilities of ...

The transitory mental aberration of Sidney Davidson, remarkable enough in itself, is still more remarkable if Wade’s explanation is to be credited. It sets one dreaming of the oddest possibilities of ...

It was just then that Boyce came in. So soon as he spoke Davidson exclaimed: “Old Boyce! Dead too! What a lark!” I hastened to explain that Davidson was in a kind of somnambulistic trance. Boyce was i...

That was the beginning. For three weeks this strange affection of Davidson’s eyes continued unabated. It was far worse than being blind. He was absolutely helpless, and had to be fed like a newly-hatc...

For three weeks Davidson remained in this singular state, seeing what at the time we imagined was an altogether phantasmal world, and stone blind to the world around him. Then, one Tuesday, when I cal...

And now to tell of the queerest thing of all. About two years after his cure I dined with the Davidsons, and after dinner a man named Atkins called in. He is a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and a plea...

The little shop was not paying. The realisation came insensibly. Winslow was not the man for definite addition and subtraction and sudden discovery. He became aware of the truth in his mind gradually,...

It was in a swampy village on the lagoon river behind the Turner Peninsula that Pollock’s first encounter with the Porroh man occurred. The women of that country are famous for their good looks⁠—they ...

The night was hot and overcast, the sky red-rimmed with the lingering sunset of midsummer. They sat at the open window, trying to fancy the air was fresher there. The trees and shrubs of the garden st...

One saw Monson’s Flying Machine from the windows of the trains passing either along the Southwestern main line or along the line between Wimbledon and Worcester Park⁠—to be more exact, one saw the hug...

Outside the laboratory windows was a watery-grey fog, and within a close warmth and the yellow light of the green-shaded gas lamps that stood two to each table down its narrow length. On each table st...

“What if I die under it?” The thought recurred again and again, as I walked home from Haddon’s. It was a purely personal question. I was spared the deep anxieties of a married man, and I knew there we...

“I can assure you,” said I, “that it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me.” And I stood up before the fire with my glass in my hand. “It is your own choosing,” said the man with the withered...

Whether the story of Gottfried Plattner is to be credited or not is a pretty question in the value of evidence. On the one hand, we have seven witnesses⁠—to be perfectly exact, we have six and a half ...

I set this story down, not expecting it will be believed, but, if possible, to prepare a way of escape for the next victim. He, perhaps, may profit by my misfortune. My own case, I know, is hopeless, ...

The lieutenant stood in front of the steel sphere and gnawed a piece of pine splinter. “What do you think of it, Steevens?” he asked. “It’s an idea,” said Steevens, in the tone of one who keeps an ope...

“I must get rid of it,” said the man in the corner of the carriage, abruptly breaking the silence. Mr. Hinchcliff looked up, hearing imperfectly. He had been lost in the rapt contemplation of the coll...

Mr. Coombes was sick of life. He walked away from his unhappy home, and, sick not only of his own existence but of everybody else’s, turned aside down Gaswork Lane to avoid the town, and, crossing the...

Until the extraordinary affair at Sidmouth, the peculiar species Haploteuthis ferox was known to science only generically, on the strength of a half-digested tentacle obtained near the Azores, and a d...

Until the extraordinary affair at Sidmouth, the peculiar species Haploteuthis ferox was known to science only generically, on the strength of a half-digested tentacle obtained near the Azores, and a d...

And, as if he had not already been in sufficient peril that day, Mr. Fison went with the boat to point out the exact spot of his adventure. As the tide was down, it required a considerable detour to r...

So it was Haploteuthis ferox made its appearance upon the Devonshire coast. So far, this has been its most serious aggression. Mr. Fison’s account, taken together with the wave of boating and bathing ...

There was, until a year ago, a little and very grimy-looking shop near Seven Dials, over which, in weatherworn yellow lettering, the name of “C. Cave, Naturalist and Dealer in Antiquities,” was inscri...

“My uncle,” said the man with the glass eye, “was what you might call a hemi-semi-demi millionaire. He was worth about a hundred and twenty thousand. Quite. And he left me all his money.” I glanced at...

This story is of a time beyond the memory of man, before the beginning of history, a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish T...

This story is of a time beyond the memory of man, before the beginning of history, a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish T...

In the days when Eudena and Ugh-lomi fled from the people of Uya towards the fir-clad mountains of the Weald, across the forests of sweet chestnut and the grass-clad chalkland, and hid themselves at l...

In the days before Ugh-lomi there was little trouble between the horses and men. They lived apart⁠—the men in the river swamps and thickets, the horses on the wide grassy uplands between the chestnuts...

The old lion was in luck. The tribe had a certain pride in their ruler, but that was all the satisfaction they got out of it. He came the very night that Ugh-lomi killed Uya the Cunning, and so it was...

Ugh-lomi lay still, his back against an alder, and his thigh was a red mass terrible to see. No civilised man could have lived who had been so sorely wounded, but Eudena got him thorns to close his wo...

The excellent Mr. Morris was an Englishman, and he lived in the days of Queen Victoria the Good. He was a prosperous and very sensible man; he read the Times and went to church, and as he grew towards...

The excellent Mr. Morris was an Englishman, and he lived in the days of Queen Victoria the Good. He was a prosperous and very sensible man; he read the Times and went to church, and as he grew towards...

The world, they say, changed more between the year 1800 and the year 1900 than it had done in the previous five hundred years. That century, the nineteenth century, was the dawn of a new epoch in the ...

Prominent if not paramount among world-changing inventions in the history of man is that series of contrivances in locomotion that began with the railway and ended for a century or more with the motor...

Under the stars one may reach upward and touch resignation, whatever the evil thing may be, but in the heat and stress of the day’s work we lapse again, come disgust and anger and intolerable moods. H...

In Bindon’s younger days he had dabbled in speculation and made three brilliant flukes. For the rest of his life he had the wisdom to let gambling alone, and the conceit to believe himself a very clev...

It was on the first day of the new year that the announcement was made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that whe...

It is doubtful whether the gift was innate. For my own part, I think it came to him suddenly. Indeed, until he was thirty he was a sceptic, and did not believe in miraculous powers. And here, since it...

Miss Winchelsea was going to Rome. The matter had filled her mind for a month or more, and had overflowed so abundantly into her conversation that quite a number of people who were not going to Rome, ...

My friend, Mr. Ledbetter, is a round-faced little man, whose natural mildness of eye is gigantically exaggerated when you catch the beam through his glasses, and whose deep, deliberate voice irritates...

Mr. Bessel was the senior partner in the firm of Bessel, Hart, and Brown, of St. Paul’s Churchyard, and for many years he was well known among those interested in psychical research as a liberal-minde...

“It isn’t everyone who’s been a god,” said the sunburnt man. “But it’s happened to me⁠—among other things.” I intimated my sense of his condescension. “It don’t leave much for ambition, does it?” said...

“You can’t be too careful who you marry,” said Mr. Brisher, and pulled thoughtfully with a fat-wristed hand at the lank moustache that hides his want of chin. “That’s why⁠—” I ventured. “Yes,” said Mr...

Bru-a-a-a. I listened, not understanding. Wa-ra-ra-ra. “Good Lord!” said I, still only half awake. “What an infernal shindy!” Ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra Ta-ra-rra-ra. “It’s enough,” said I, “to wake⁠—...

Bru-a-a-a. I listened, not understanding. Wa-ra-ra-ra. “Good Lord!” said I, still only half awake. “What an infernal shindy!” Ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra Ta-ra-rra-ra. “It’s enough,” said I, “to wake⁠—...

The last note jerked me out of my grave like a hooked minnow. I saw my monument (rather a mean little affair, and I wished I knew who’d done it), and the old elm tree and the sea view vanished like a ...

“Prompt,” said the little man beside me. “Very prompt. Do you see the angel with the book?” He was ducking and craning his head about to see over and under and between the souls that crowded round us....

“Is this all?” asked the Lord God. The angel at the book⁠—it was one of countless volumes, like the British Museum Reading-room Catalogue, glanced at us and seemed to count us in the instant. “That’s ...

The angel opened the book and read a name. It was a name full of A’s, and the echoes of it came back out of the uttermost parts of space. I did not catch it clearly, because the little man beside me s...

Everybody was laughing. Even the prophet of the Lord whom the Wicked Man had tortured had a smile on his face. The Wicked Man was really such a preposterous little fellow. “And then,” read the Recordi...

“Has God got Hell up his sleeve then?” said the little man beside me. “Is there a Hell?” I asked. “If you notice,” he said⁠—he peered between the feet of the great angels⁠—“there’s no particular indic...

“He was Lord of the Earth, but I was the prophet of the God of Heaven,” cried the Saint, “and all the people marvelled at the sign. For I, O God, knew of the glories of thy Paradise. No pain, no hards...

“And now,” said God, as he shook us out of his sleeve upon the planet he had given us to live upon, the planet that whirled about green Sirius for a sun, “now that you understand me and each other a l...

The man with the white face entered the carriage at Rugby. He moved slowly in spite of the urgency of his porter, and even while he was still on the platform I noted how ill he seemed. He dropped into...

Certainly, if ever a man found a guinea when he was looking for a pin, it is my good friend Professor Gibberne. I have heard before of investigators overshooting the mark, but never quite to the exten...

In truth the mastery of flying was the work of thousands of men⁠—this man a suggestion and that an experiment, until at last only one vigorous intellectual effort was needed to finish the work. But th...

“There’s a man in that shop,” said the Doctor, “who has been in Fairyland.” “Nonsense!” I said, and stared back at the shop. It was the usual village shop, post-office, telegraph wire on its brow, zin...

The young lieutenant lay beside the war correspondent and admired the idyllic calm of the enemy’s lines through his field-glass. “So far as I can see,” he said, at last, “one man.” “What’s he doing?” ...

The young lieutenant lay beside the war correspondent and admired the idyllic calm of the enemy’s lines through his field-glass. “So far as I can see,” he said, at last, “one man.” “What’s he doing?” ...

It was opposite the trenches called after Hackbone’s Hut that the battle began. There the ground stretched broad and level between the lines, with scarcely shelter for a lizard, and it seemed to the s...

The defender had relied chiefly upon his rifles in the event of an assault. His guns he kept concealed at various points upon and behind the ridge ready to bring them into action against any artillery...

Subsequent authorities have found fault with the first land ironclads in many particulars, but assuredly they served their purpose on the day of their appearance. They were essentially long, narrow, a...

The private adventures of the war correspondent terminated in surrender about one o’clock in the afternoon, and by that time he had stolen a horse, pitched off it, and narrowly escaped being rolled up...

Towards midday the three pursuers came abruptly round a bend in the torrent bed upon the sight of a very broad and spacious valley. The difficult and winding trench of pebbles along which they had tra...

He sits not a dozen yards away. If I glance over my shoulder I can see him. And if I catch his eye⁠—and usually I catch his eye⁠—it meets me with an expression⁠— It is mainly an imploring look⁠—and ye...

I had seen the Magic Shop from afar several times; I had passed it once or twice, a shop window of alluring little objects, magic balls, magic hens, wonderful cones, ventriloquist dolls, the material ...

Three hundred miles and more from Chimborazo, one hundred from the snows of Cotopaxi, in the wildest wastes of Ecuador’s Andes, there lies that mysterious mountain valley, cut off from the world of me...

I was⁠—you shall hear immediately why I am not now⁠—Egbert Craddock Cummins. The name remains. I am still (Heaven help me!) Dramatic Critic to the Fiery Cross. What I shall be in a little while I do n...

The scene amidst which Clayton told his last story comes back very vividly to my mind. There he sat, for the greater part of the time, in the corner of the authentic settle by the spacious open fire, ...

One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so far as he was concerned it was a true story. He told it me ...

One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so far as he was concerned it was a true story. He told it me ...

He looked up with a sudden smile. “Did you ever play Northwest Passage with me?⁠ ⁠… No, of course you didn’t come my way!” “It was the sort of game,” he went on, “that every imaginative child plays al...

For a time my friend stared silently into the red heart of the fire. Then he said: “I never saw it again until I was seventeen. “It leapt upon me for the third time⁠—as I was driving to Paddington on ...

I can see now his rather pallid face, and the unfamiliar sombre fire that had come into his eyes. I see him very vividly tonight. I sit recalling his words, his tones, and last evening’s Westminster G...

When Captain Gerilleau received instructions to take his new gunboat, the Benjamin Constant, to Badama on the Batemo arm of the Guaramadema and there assist the inhabitants against a plague of ants, h...

When Captain Gerilleau received instructions to take his new gunboat, the Benjamin Constant, to Badama on the Batemo arm of the Guaramadema and there assist the inhabitants against a plague of ants, h...

The next morning Holroyd learnt they were within forty kilometres of Badama, and his interest in the banks intensified. He came up whenever an opportunity offered to examine his surroundings. He could...

Holroyd and the captain came out of the cabin in which the swollen and contorted body of the lieutenant lay and stood together at the stern of the monitor, staring at the sinister vessel they trailed ...

I heard this story in a fragmentary state from Holroyd not three weeks ago. These new ants have got into his brain, and he has come back to England with the idea, as he says, of “exciting people” abou...

There was once a little man whose mother made him a beautiful suit of clothes. It was green and gold, and woven so that I cannot describe how delicate and fine it was, and there was a tie of orange fl...

The pearl is lovelier than the most brilliant of crystalline stones, the moralist declares, because it is made through the suffering of a living creature. About that I can say nothing because I feel n...

No European is known to have seen a live Aepyornis, with the doubtful exception of MacAndrew, who visited Madagascar in 1745. —⁠H. G. W. ↩ “Remarks on a Recent Revision of Microlepidoptera.” Quart. Jo...