The Lock and Key Library: The most interesting stories of all nations: American

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Коллектив авторов. The Lock and Key Library: The most interesting stories of all nations: American

"Riddle Stories" Introduction by Julian Hawthorne

American Mystery Stories

F. Marion Crawford

By the Waters of Paradise

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

The Shadows on the Wall

Melville Davisson Post

Introduction to The Corpus Delicti

The Corpus Delicti

Ambrose Bierce

An Heiress from Redhorse

The Man and the Snake

Edgar Allan Poe

The Oblong Box

The Gold-Bug

Washington Irving

Wolfert Webber, or Golden Dreams

Adventure of the Black Fisherman

Charles Brockden Brown

Wieland's Madness

FIRST PART

SECOND PART

THIRD PART

Fitzjames O'Brien

The Golden Ingot

My Wife's Tempter

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Minister's Black Veil

Anonymous

Horror: A True Tale

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I remember my childhood very distinctly. I do not think that the fact argues a good memory, for I have never been clever at learning words by heart, in prose or rhyme; so that I believe my remembrance of events depends much more upon the events themselves than upon my possessing any special facility for recalling them. Perhaps I am too imaginative, and the earliest impressions I received were of a kind to stimulate the imagination abnormally. A long series of little misfortunes, so connected with each other as to suggest a sort of weird fatality, so worked upon my melancholy temperament when I was a boy that, before I was of age, I sincerely believed myself to be under a curse, and not only myself, but my whole family and every individual who bore my name.

I was born in the old place where my father, and his father, and all his predecessors had been born, beyond the memory of man. It is a very old house, and the greater part of it was originally a castle, strongly fortified, and surrounded by a deep moat supplied with abundant water from the hills by a hidden aqueduct. Many of the fortifications have been destroyed, and the moat has been filled up. The water from the aqueduct supplies great fountains, and runs down into huge oblong basins in the terraced gardens, one below the other, each surrounded by a broad pavement of marble between the water and the flower-beds. The waste surplus finally escapes through an artificial grotto, some thirty yards long, into a stream, flowing down through the park to the meadows beyond, and thence to the distant river. The buildings were extended a little and greatly altered more than two hundred years ago, in the time of Charles II., but since then little has been done to improve them, though they have been kept in fairly good repair, according to our fortunes.

.....

"If I do move, we can't both sit at that table. Caroline has her paper all spread around. Why don't you set the lamp on the study table in the middle of the room, then we can both see?"

Rebecca hesitated. Her face was very pale. She looked with an appeal that was fairly agonizing at her sister Caroline.

.....