Title:  The Lock And Key Library Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English

Author:  Various

Editor:  Julian Hawthorne

Release Date:  June 4, 2005 [EBook #2038]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

*** Start of this project gutenberg EBOOK the lock and key library ***

Produced by Don Lainson.  Text file originally posted in
January, 2000 with an html conversion added by Walter
Deboeuf in 2003.  The present text and html files were
produced by Suzanne Shell, M, and the Online Distributed
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The
lock and key
library

Classic mystery and
detective stories

EDITED BY Julian Hawthorne

MODERN ENGLISH

Rudyard Kipling A. Conan Doyle

Egerton Castle

Stanley J. Weyman Wilkie Collins

Robert Louis Stevenson

New York
the review of reviews co.
1909

[Illustration:  “And Sent out a Jet of Fire from His Nostrils”

Drawing by Power O’Malley.  To illustrate “In the House of Suddhoo,” by Rudyard Kipling]

Rudyard Kipling

My Own True Ghost Story

As I came through the Desert thus it was—­
As I came through the Desert.
The City of Dreadful Night.

Somewhere in the Other World, where there are books and pictures and plays and shop windows to look at, and thousands of men who spend their lives in building up all four, lives a gentleman who writes real stories about the real insides of people; and his name is Mr. Walter Besant.  But he will insist upon treating his ghosts—­he has published half a workshopful of them—­with levity.  He makes his ghost-seers talk familiarly, and, in some cases, flirt outrageously, with the phantoms.  You may treat anything, from a Viceroy to a Vernacular Paper, with levity; but you must behave reverently toward a ghost, and particularly an Indian one.

There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold, pobby corpses, and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveler passes.  Then they drop upon his neck and remain.  There are also terrible ghosts of women who have died in child-bed.  These wander along the pathways at dusk, or hide in the crops near a village, and call seductively.  But to answer their call is death in this world and the next.  Their feet are turned backward that all sober men may recognize them.  There are ghosts of little children who have been thrown into wells.  These haunt well curbs and the fringes of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch women by the wrist and beg to be taken up and carried.  These and the corpse ghosts, however, are only vernacular articles and do not attack Sahibs.  No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have frightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have scared the life out of both white and black.