THE TOAD
(Continued from page 53)
its sightless eyes met mine. The grisly jaws sagged open as if to speak.
Then from beneath the skull, jauntily stepped the toad. It fixed me with a burning look of hatred. Turning to the police like a lawyer addressing a jury, and nodding sidewise at me, it made many strange sounds—sounds which were too well understood. At last the toad paused and waited expectantly as for a verdict. Comprehension stole over the faces of the police, and the toad swelled with satisfaction. Then, with one final and dreadful croak of vengeance, the toad sank to my feet, its life gone out.
I turned to the police and noted their silent question.
"Arrest me," I replied. "Yes, I killed my master!"
CREATURES OF THE NIGHT
(Continued from page 74)
cradled as the vast masses of the ocean bed imperceptibly rose and fell.
Once I "came to," and seeing nothing in the darkness, I pressed my fingers close to my eyes. They were warm and smelled salty. They were covered with sticky blood, whether my own or that of another, I could not tell.
One morning—months later, as I soon found out—I awoke to find that the sun was streaming in through the half-open window and the curtains were making fluttering patterns of light on the bedspread. Some people came in, and I tried to tell them exactly what I had witnessed and been through, but they only looked pained and disturbed. I was surprised to find the weather so very warm and at last discovered that the summer was well advanced into August.
One day a class-mate, of whom I was very fond, came to see me and I told him what had happened. He listened quietly and sympathetically to what I said.
"But, take it from me," he commented, "they will keep you locked up here just as long as you think and talk about that. You and I know how strange and how evil those vile beings are that come abroad at intervals in the night. But I advise you to do all you can to forget them and say nothing more about them to anybody."
I have kept his advice. Few besides yourself have ever heard me speak of it. But I am just as sure tonight, years afterward, as I am of these books and bottles, that what I saw and felt that night really exists.
MASTERPIECES OF WEIRD FICTION
(Continued from page 79)
was not very high, like Mr. Lord's—nor yet very low, like that of Mr. Lord’s reviewers, but upon the whole I made sure that he would clear it. And then what if he did not?—ah, that was the question—what if he did not? "What right," said I, "had the old gentleman to make any other gentleman jump? The little old dot-and-carry-one! who is he? If he asks me to jump, I don't do it, that’s flat, and I don't care who the devil he is." The bridge, as I say, was arched and covered in, in a very ridiculous manner, and there was a most uncomfortable echo about it at all times—an echo which I never before so particularly observed as when I uttered the four last words of my remark.
But what I said, or what I thought, or what I heard, occupied only an instant. In less than five seconds from his starting, my poor Toby had taken the leap. I saw him run nimbly, and spring grandly from the floor of the bridge, cutting the most awful flourishes with his legs as he went up. I saw him high in the air, pigeon-winging it to admiration just over the top of the stile; and, of course, I thought it an unusually singular thing that he did not continue to go over. But the whole leap was the affair of a moment, and, before I had a chance to make any profound reflections, down came Mr. Dammit on the flat of his back, on the same side of the stile from which he had started. In the same instant I saw the old gentleman limping off at the top of his speed, having caught and wrapped up in his apron something that fell heavily into it from the darkness of the arch just over the turnstile. At all this I was much astonished; but I had no leisure to think, for Mr. Dammit lay particularly still, and I concluded that his feelings had been hurt, and that he stood in need of my assistance. I hurried up to him and found that he had received what might be termed a serious injury. The truth is, he had been deprived of his head, which after a close search I could not find anywhere—so I determined to take him home, and send for the homœopathists. In the meantime a thought struck me, and I threw open an adjacent window of the bridge; when the sad truth flashed upon me at once. About five feet just above the top of the turnstile, and crossing the arch of the foot-path so as to constitute a brace, there extended a flat iron bar, lying with its breadth horizontally, and forming one of a series that served to strengthen the structure throughout its extent. With the edge of this brace it appeared evident that the neck of my unfortunate friend had come precisely in contact.
He did not long survive this terrible loss. The homœopathists did not give him little enough physic, and what little they did give him he hesitated to take, So in the end he grew worse, and at length died, a lesson to all riotous livers. I bedewed his grave with my tears, worked a bar sinister on his family escutcheon, and for the general expenses of his funeral, sent in my very moderate bill to the transcendentalists. The scoundrels refused to pay it, so I had Mr. Dammit dug up at once, and sold him for dog's meat.
"Why don't you write some problem novels?"
"I can't think of any novel problems."—Boston Transcript.
THE HOUSE IN THE FOREST
(Continued from page 77)
lowing day, after it had killed the farmer's wife.
Fearing the anger of his outraged neighbors, he kept his own counsel, chaining the creature up until such a time as he could dispose of it. My presence in the house led the old people to go to its room to make doubly sure that it was properly secured.
The crazed animal—man, or whatever it may be called—had attacked the old woman. Lang, rushing to her assistance, lost his own life as I have described.
When she had completed her story, I again sought the outdoors, preferring the storm to another hour under the roof of tragedy. Before morning broke the storm abated and I finally ran into a party of searchers organized by Brayton who, alarmed by my prolonged absence, had started into the forest in search of my body, believing that I, too, had fallen a victim to the murderer.
The people didn't merely look at Prof. Branefog—they stared. He knew he was absentminded at times, and he wondered whether he had rubbed his face with boot polish instead of cold cream after he had shaved, or whether he had forgotten to change his dressing gown for his frock coat.
But a kindly policeman put things right.
"Are you aware, sir, that you are carrying a joint of beef in your arms?" he asked.
"Goodness me!" said the professor. "I knew something was wrong. My wife told me to put her Sunday hat on the bed, to place this joint in the oven, and to take the baby and the dog for a walk."
"You've not put the baby in the oven, surely?" said the policeman.
"I put something in it," said Branefog: "but I don't know whether it was the baby or the dog!"
With bated breath they hurried to the professor's house. Here, on the bed, lay the baby and the dog; but it was just as bad for Branefog. It was his wife's Sunday hat that was in the oven!
The traveler had returned to his native village after being abroad for twenty years. He stopped as he saw a little boy with a small baby coming down the road.
"Ah! a new face, I see!"
"No, it isn't, sir," replied the boy, looking at the baby. It's just been washed, that's all!"
