Anon - Strange Tales of Peril and Adventure

[dem bones]

Anon - Strange Tales of Peril and Adventure (Religious Tract Society, n.d., circa 1904; originally 1890?)

A Night Adventure in France
A Climb to the Highest Point in Europe
Early Australian Explorers
The Mouse and the Merchant
Strange Adventures of Linnaeus
The Cornish Apprentice
Released by the King's Death
The Downward Path
A Manx Adventure
The Crimson Chamber
A Glimpse of the Reign of Terror
An Adventure on a Bridge
The Winter Post Across the St. Gothard
The Missing One
A Gallop for Life
Night upon the Alps
The Forlorn Shop and the Story of its Tenants
A Night in the Old Oak Chamber
The Fatal Shot

Curio, includes a few horrors and the odd faux ghost story.

The Crimson Chamber: Narrator spends a winter's night at the home of his neighbour. Mr. Melnot offers him the crimson room. "You know that it is haunted?" He does, but not being a superstitious man, takes it. Sleep eludes him. The portrait of a grim-looking William the Conqueror leers bed-ward from the shadows, and there's a scratching and scraping from a deep chest beneath the bed — culminating in a ghastly howl! A reworking of The Mistletoe Bough with a dog standing in for the doomed bride and an ending .... the less said about the ending the better. Anyway, there's no such thing as haunted chambers. "The fear of God gives true courage, and puts to flight all superstitious terror; when young people have any dread of ghosts or goblins, or find themselves alarmed by any unusual noise (which, because unusual, is alarming), let them summon up their courage, and proceed at once to scrutinize the cause, and they will find their fears as unfounded as did the writer of the above true story."

A Glimpse of the Reign of Terror: Mrs Elliott Darlrymple, "a lady of high Scottish family," provides an account of her danger and suffering in Paris at the beginning of the French Revolution. Edited highlights include the liberation of the Bastille, the Tuileries massacre, Mrs Darlymple's imprisonment and meeting with Samson, the executioner ("It will soon be off your neck, it is so long and small. If I am to despatch you, it will be nothing but a squeeze.")

The Fatal Shot: Unjustly reprimanded by the Squire, an angry Jim West, the beater, throws in his lot with poaching brothers, Dick and Tom Bird, for a night's shooting game in the woods on the Purwood Estate. Tragically, Jim mistakes a small white figure flitting through the trees for a hare. Extreme Victorian melodrama.

The Cornish Apprentice: Taken in by Mr Vincent the shopkeeper to perform "various offices of drudgery," Robert the workhouse orphan progresses to great things through hard work, subservience to his betters and reading his scripture.

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A Night in the Old Oak Chamber: A True Christmas Ghost Story: Mrs Linley, late housekeeper of Castle Constable, died under suspicion of linen theft. Only Lucy, madam Constable's great-niece, believes the faithful servant innocent. On Christmas Eve, Lucy exchanges rooms with a guest of sensitive disposition who finds the oak room too gloomy. She is disturbed in the night by what she takes to be a man in a white sheet scraping along the floor — we should be so lucky.

Strange Adventures of Linnaeus: Peter Straussel, landscape gardener, regards himself Gods gift to horticulture - if he can't get Meneer Clifford's brilliant, bell-shaped flower to root then nobody can. A stranger arrives at the Clifford residence seeking gardening work and, even if you think you don't, you know the rest. Wonder how many children received this book for Christmas, decided on a life of crime there and then?