Famous Modern Ghost Stories | Page 5

the supernatural, one whom his generation has not been
discerning enough to appreciate. Some of his material is painfully morbid, but his pen is
magic and his inkwell holds many dark secrets.
In this collection I have attempted to include specimens of a few of the distinctive types
of modern ghosts, as well as to show the art of individual stories. Examples of the
humorous ghosts are omitted here, as a number of them will be brought together in
Humorous Ghost Stories, the companion volume to this. The ghost lover who reads these
pages will think of others that he would like to see included--for I believe that readers are
more passionately attached to their own favorite ghost tales than to any other form of
literature. But critics will admit the manifest impossibility of bringing together in one
volume all the famous examples of the art. Some of the well-known tales, particularly the
older ones on which copyright has expired, have been reprinted so often as to be almost
hackneyed, while others have been of necessity omitted because of the limitations of
space.
D.S.
NEW YORK, March, 1921.

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: THE IMPERISHABLE GHOST
THE WILLOWS BY ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
THE SHADOWS ON THE WALL BY MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN
THE MESSENGER BY ROBERT W. CHAMBERS
LAZARUS BY LEONID ANDREYEV
THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS BY W. F. HARVEY
THE MASS OF SHADOWS BY ANATOLE FRANCE

WHAT WAS IT? BY FITZ-JAMES O'BRIEN
THE MIDDLE TOE OF THE RIGHT FOOT BY AMBROSE BIERCE
THE SHELL OF SENSE BY OLIVIA HOWARD DUNBAR
THE WOMAN AT SEVEN BROTHERS BY WILBUR DANIEL STEELE
AT THE GATE BY MYLA JO CLOSSER
LIGEIA BY EDGAR ALLAN POE
THE HAUNTED ORCHARD BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
THE BOWMEN BY ARTHUR MACHEN
A GHOST BY GUY DE MAUPASSANT

The Willows
BY ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
From The Listener, by Algernon Blackwood. Published in America by E.P. Dutton, and
in England by Everleigh Nash, Ltd. By permission of the publishers and Algernon
Blackwood.
I
After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Buda-Pesth, the Danube enters a
region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides
regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles,
covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes. On the big maps this deserted area is painted
in a fluffy blue, growing fainter in color as it leaves the banks, and across it may be seen
in large straggling letters the word _Sümpfe_, meaning marshes.
In high flood this great acreage of sand, shingle-beds, and willow-grown islands is almost
topped by the water, but in normal seasons the bushes bend and rustle in the free winds,
showing their silver leaves to the sunshine in an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty.
These willows never attain to the dignity of trees; they have no rigid trunks; they remain
humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying on slender stems that answer
to the least pressure of the wind; supple as grasses, and so continually shifting that they
somehow give the impression that the entire plain is moving and alive. For the wind
sends waves rising and falling over the whole surface, waves of leaves instead of waves
of water, green swells like the sea, too, until the branches turn and lift, and then silvery
white as their under-side turns to the sun.
Happy to slip beyond the control of stern banks, the Danube here wanders about at will

among the intricate network of channels intersecting the islands everywhere with broad
avenues down which the waters pour with a shouting sound; making whirlpools, eddies,
and foaming rapids; tearing at the sandy banks; carrying away masses of shore and
willow-clumps; and forming new islands innumerable which shift daily in size and shape
and possess at best an impermanent life, since the flood-time obliterates their very
existence.
Properly speaking, this fascinating part of the river's life begins soon after leaving
Pressburg, and we, in our Canadian canoe, with gipsy tent and frying-pan on board,
reached it on the crest of a rising flood about mid-July. That very same morning, when
the sky was reddening before sunrise, we had slipped swiftly through still-sleeping
Vienna, leaving it a couple of hours later a mere patch of smoke against the blue hills of
the Wienerwald on the horizon; we had breakfasted below Fischeramend under a grove
of birch trees roaring in the wind; and had then swept on the tearing current past Orth,
Hainburg, Petronell (the old Roman Carnuntum of Marcus Aurelius), and so under the
frowning heights of Theben on a spur of the Carpathians, where the March steals in
quietly from the left and the frontier is crossed between Austria and Hungary.
Racing along at twelve kilometers an hour soon took us