opportunity for an adept working out of a genuinely weird plot. Incidentally, we had the opportunity of reading this story in manuscript—and felt it would have been an ideal serial for WEIRD TALES had space permitted. As it is, we can very enthusiastically recommend the book to the fans; for the author is the worthy follower of a great tradition.
Up the Garden Path?
From Crandon, Wisconsin, Virginia Combs writes:
I have just read the last issue of WEIRD TALES and enjoyed it immensely, as usual. Where are you, Mr. Biggs belonged in an StF mag, but it was a good story just the same. I do have a kick about Birthmark. Nonsense. The minute I read it I said to myself, "Mr. Quinn is leading us up the garden." If Mrs. Watrous had been carried off by the gorilla only one week before she was delivered, there was no possibility of the child having a physical mark as a result of her mother's fright. She might have had monkey-like tendencies, such as surprising agility of the feet to grasp and hold things, and an ungirlish ability to climb trees, but that is all. I am no doctor, but a child, even premature, as Fedoda doubtless was, cannot assume a physical appearance foreign to the species homo in one week. The foetus must have been fully developed, for Fedocia lived and was healthy although born only one week after her mother's fright. Do you suppose that some chemical reaction of fear in the mother's blood dissolved a pair of human feet on an unborn infant and replaced them with those of a gorilla? Nonsense Mr. Quinn. If you had said that Fedocia was born five months later, such a birthmark might have been possible, if you believe in such things, and I have seen enough in my short span to know that not all things are guessed at in our philosophy.
On the other hand, I thought the nature of the birthmark in taste with the events that lead up to it. The gorilla did not harm Mrs. Watrous, only frightened her, therefore Fedocia's beauty remained unmarred. Only her feet showed that tragic influence.
Ye Anciente Booke of Runes
Edward Goodell writes from Kansas City, Kansas:
I wish to thank you for printing my letter in full in the last issue of WEIRD TALES; I have received some very nice letters from people all over the country.
I am inclosing an actual spell in poem form from the book of Runes that I mentioned in my former letter to you (the one that was published). It has been translated from the Old English script that it was originally written in. I have had to add a modern word, or series of words, here and there to keep it in rhyme, as the original is. I have called it The Witch's Curse, though it is really the spell to kill a rival.
THE WITCH'S CURSE
A pentagon drawn in chicken's blood,
Lighted by lamps of a grave's dank mud,
Now I weave my spell my vengeance to wreak,
On her whose beauty my lover would seek,
I'll curse her with toil, I'll curse her with trouble,
Ah! The cauldron begins to bubble.
First a snake, a toad, a bat,
And now a lump of corpse's fat,
Now the eye of a Gypsy newly dead,
Oh! To see her writhe in her bed.
Next an owl's claw, and a walnut hull,
And then the moss from a dead man's skull,
Now the head of an eel, a scorpion's sting,
That to her will agony bring,
Last a handful of maggots, and carrion flies,
With these I curse her shining eyes.
Now I take up a mannikin made of church candles stole,
Soon Satan my master will have her pale soul.
How I rock with laughter, and cackle in glee,
As I think of the horrors that's coming to she.
Now I dress the thing up in her kerchief so white,
That I filched from her room in the dead of the night,
Now a lock of her hair she never missed,
As in her dreams my lover she kissed.
Holding the image of her a-cursed,
Into the knees the needles go first,
Now into the arms and the eyes staring small,
I know as I do this she swooning will fall,
At last now a pin pushed into the head,
I now am avenged. For the girl, she is dead.
