In the five Northumbrian counties you will scarcely find so bleak, ugly, and yet, in a savage way, so picturesque a moor as Dardale Moss. The moor itself spreads north, south, east, and west, a great undulating sea of black peat and heath. What we may term its shores are wooded wildly with birch, hazel, and dwarf-oak. No towering mountains surround it, but here and there you have a rocky knoll rising among the trees, and many a wooded promontory of the same pretty, because utterly wild, forest, running out into its dark level. Habitations are thinly scattered in this barren...
Short Stories - Post by : betterprofits4u - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 1942
CHAPTER I. Peg O'Neill Pays the Captain's Debts A very odd thing happened to my uncle, Mr. Watson, of Haddlestone; and to enable you to understand it, I must begin at the beginning. In the year 1822, Mr. James Walshawe, more commonly known as Captain Walshawe, died at the age of eighty-one years. The Captain in his early days, and so long as health and strength permitted, was a scamp of the active, intriguing sort; and spent his days and nights in sowing his wild oats, of which he seemed to have an inexhaustible stock. The harvest of this tillage was...
Short Stories - Post by : normanh2 - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 1402
Eastward of the old city of Limerick, about ten Irish miles under the range of mountains known as the Slieveelim hills, famous as having afforded Sarsfield a shelter among their rocks and hollows, when he crossed them in his gallant descent upon the cannon and ammunition of King William, on its way to the beleaguering army, there runs a very old and narrow road. It connects the Limerick road to Tipperary with the old road from Limerick to Dublin, and runs by bog and pasture, hill and hollow, straw-thatched village, and roofless castle, not far from twenty miles. Skirting the healthy...
Short Stories - Post by : aries - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 1272
When the present writer was a boy of twelve or thirteen, he first made the acquaintance of Miss Anne Baily, of Lough Guir, in the county of Limerick. She and her sister were the last representatives at that place, of an extremely good old name in the county. They were both what is termed "old maids," and at that time past sixty. But never were old ladies more hospitable, lively, and kind, especially to young people. They were both remarkably agreeable and clever. Like all old county ladies of their time, they were great genealogists, and could recount the origin, generations,...
Short Stories - Post by : salesbooster - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 1703
At the edge of melancholy Catstean Moor, in the north of England, with half-a-dozen ancient poplar-trees with rugged and hoary stems around, one smashed across the middle by a flash of lightning thirty summers before, and all by their great height dwarfing the abode near which they stand, there squats a rude stone house, with a thick chimney, a kitchen and bedroom on the ground-floor, and a loft, accessible by a ladder, under the shingle roof, divided into two rooms. Its owner was a man of ill repute. Tom Chuff was his name. A shock-headed, broad-shouldered, powerful man, though somewhat short,...
Short Stories - Post by : rodneyzeng - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 2848
PART I About the year 1822 I resided in a comfortable and roomy old house, the exact locality of which I need not particularise, further than to say that it was not very far from Old Brompton, in the immediate neighbourhood, or rather continuity (as even my Connemara readers perfectly well know), of the renowned city of London. Though this house was roomy and comfortable, as I have said, it was not, by any means, a handsome one. It was composed of dark red brick, with small windows, and thick white sashes; a porch, too--none of your flimsy trellis-work, but a...
Short Stories - Post by : boston - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 2767
Take my word for it, there is no such thing as an ancient village, especially if it has seen better days, unillustrated by its legends of terror. You might as well expect to find a decayed cheese without mites, or an old house without rats, as an antique and dilapidated town without an authentic population of goblins. Now, although this class of inhabitants are in nowise amenable to the police authorities, yet, as their demeanor directly affects the comforts of her Majesty's subjects, I cannot but regard it as a grave omission that the public have hitherto been left without any...
Short Stories - Post by : theeb13 - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 2548
(The Editor of the UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE submits the following very remarkable statement, with every detail of which he has been for some years acquainted, upon the ground that it affords the most authentic and ample relation of a series of marvellous phenoma, in nowise connected with what is technically termed "spiritualism," which he has anywhere met with. All the persons--and there are many of them living--upon whose separate evidence some parts, and upon whose united testimony others, of this most singular recital depend, are, in their several walks of life, respectable, and such as would in any matter of judicial investigation...
Short Stories - Post by : rambominger - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 3527
CHAPTER I. The Jacobite's Legacy In my youth I heard a great many Irish family traditions, more or less of a supernatural character, some of them very peculiar, and all, to a child at least, highly interesting. One of these I will now relate, though the translation to cold type from oral narrative, with all the aids of animated human voice and countenance, and the appropriate _mise-en-scene_ of the old-fashioned parlour fireside and its listening circle of excited faces, and, outside, the wintry blast and the moan of leafless boughs, with the occasional rattle of the clumsy old window-frame behind shutter...
Short Stories - Post by : Delmen - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 3122
"For he is not a man as I am that we should come together; neither is there any that might lay his hand upon us both. Let him, therefore, take his rod away from me, and let not his fear terrify me." There exists, at this moment, in good preservation a remarkable work of Schalken's. The curious management of its lights constitutes, as usual in his pieces, the chief apparent merit of the picture. I say _apparent_, for in its subject,...
Short Stories - Post by : GIICorp - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 2261
It is not worth telling, this story of mine--at least, not worth writing. Told, indeed, as I have sometimes been called upon to tell it, to a circle of intelligent and eager faces, lighted up by a good after-dinner fire on a winter's evening, with a cold wind rising and wailing outside, and all snug and cosy within, it has gone off--though I say it, who should not--indifferent well. But it is a venture to do as you would have me. Pen, ink, and paper are cold vehicles for the marvellous, and a "reader" decidedly a more critical animal than a...
Short Stories - Post by : Luiggi - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 1116
PROLOGUE Martin Hesselius, the German Physician Though carefully educated in medicine and surgery, I have never practised either. The study of each continues, nevertheless, to interest me profoundly. Neither idleness nor caprice caused my secession from the honourable calling which I had just entered. The cause was a very trifling scratch inflicted by a dissecting knife. This trifle cost me the loss of two fingers, amputated promptly, and the more painful loss of my health, for I have never been quite well since, and have seldom been twelve months together in the same place. In my wanderings I became acquainted with...
Short Stories - Post by : dibbs - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 3538
PROLOGUE On this case Doctor Hesselius has inscribed nothing more than the words, "Harman's Report," and a simple reference to his own extraordinary Essay on "The Interior Sense, and the Conditions of the Opening thereof." The reference is to Vol. I., Section 317, Note Z^{a}. The note to which reference is thus made, simply says: "There are two accounts of the remarkable case of the Honourable Mr. Justice Harbottle, one furnished to me by Mrs. Trimmer, of Tunbridge Wells (June, 1805); the other at a much later date, by Anthony Harman, Esq. I much prefer the former; in the first place,...
Short Stories - Post by : gpsmith12 - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 2702
"And they lay wait for their own blood: they lurk privily for their own lives. "So are the ways of every one that is greedy of gain; which taketh away the life of the owner thereof." This story of the Irish peerage is written, as nearly as possible, in the very words in which it was related by its "heroine," the late Countess D----, and is therefore told in the first person. My mother died when I was an infant, and of her I have no recollection, even the faintest. By her death my education was left solely to the direction...
Short Stories - Post by : surinam - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 1622
The sunsets were red, the nights were long, and the weather pleasantly frosty; and Christmas, the glorious herald of the New Year, was at hand, when an event--still recounted by winter firesides, with a horror made delightful by the mellowing influence of years--occurred in the beautiful little town of Golden Friars, and signalized, as the scene of its catastrophe, the old inn known throughout a wide region of the Northumbrian counties as the George and Dragon. Toby Crooke, the sexton, was lying dead in the old coach-house in the inn yard. The body had been discovered, only half an hour before...
Short Stories - Post by : Ina_Collins - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 1198
Twenty years have passed since you last saw Mrs. Jolliffe's tall slim figure. She is now past seventy, and can't have many mile-stones more to count on the journey that will bring her to her long home. The hair has grown white as snow, that is parted under her cap, over her shrewd, but kindly face. But her figure is still straight, and her step light and active. She has taken of late years to the care of adult invalids, having surrendered to younger hands the little people who inhabit cradles, and crawl on all-fours. Those who remember that good-natured face...
Short Stories - Post by : cce12247 - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 1866
Let the reader fancy a soft summer evening, the fresh dews falling on bush and flower. The sun has just gone down, and the thrilling vespers of thrushes and blackbirds ring with a wild joy through the saddened air; the west is piled with fantastic clouds, and clothed in tints of crimson and amber, melting away into a wan green, and so eastward into the deepest blue, through which soon the stars will begin to peep. Let him fancy himself seated upon the low mossy wall of an ancient churchyard hundreds of grey stones rise above the sward, under the...
Short Stories - Post by : sensa35 - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 2306
Being a Twelfth Extract from the Legacy of the late Francis Purcell, P.P. of Drumcoolagh. As I rode at a slow walk, one soft autumn evening, from the once noted and noticeable town of Emly, now a squalid village, towards the no less remarkable town of Tipperary, I fell into a meditative mood. My eye wandered over a glorious landscape; a broad sea of corn-fields, that might have gladdened even a golden age, was waving before me; groups of little cabins, with their poplars, osiers, and light mountain ashes, clustered shelteringly around them, were scattered over the plain; the thin blue...
Short Stories - Post by : valu39 - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 3494
Being an Eleventh Extract from the Legacy of the late Francis Purcell, P.P. of Drumcoolagh. The following brief narrative contains a faithful account of one of the many strange incidents which chequered the life of Hardress Fitzgerald--one of the now-forgotten heroes who flourished during the most stirring and, though the most disastrous, by no means the least glorious period of our eventful history. He was a captain of horse in the army of James, and shared the fortunes of his master, enduring privations, encountering dangers, and submitting to vicissitudes the most galling and ruinous, with a fortitude and a heroism which...
Short Stories - Post by : zamrony - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 1576
Being a Tenth Extract from the Legacy of the late Francis Purcell, P.P. of Drumcoolagh. INTRODUCTION. In the following narrative, I have endeavoured to give as nearly as possible the ipsissima verba of the valued friend from whom I received it, conscious that any aberration from HER mode of telling the tale of her own life would at once impair its accuracy and its effect. Would that, with her words, I could also bring before you her animated gesture, her expressive countenance, the solemn and thrilling air and accent with which she related the dark passages in her strange story; and,...
Short Stories - Post by : DBeaver - Date : August 2011 - Author : Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Read : 3756