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163 stories from 11 authors
It happened that the cat met the fox in a forest, and as she thought to herself: ‘He is clever and full of experience, and much esteemed in the world,’ she spoke to him in a friendly way.
From the dark at the foot of the stairs, Jonathan watched his wife stand at the top of the landing and look out the window.
It is well known that the old Manton house is haunted.
HOW THEY WENT TO THE MOUNTAINS TO EAT NUTS ‘The nuts are quite ripe now,’ said Chanticleer to his wife Partlet, ‘suppose we go together to the mountains, and eat as many as we can, before the squirrel takes them all away.’ ‘With all my heart,’ said Partlet, ‘let us go and make a holiday of it together.’ So they went to the mountains; and as it was a lovely day, they stayed there till the evening.
Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank, where a dim and little-travelled trail led eastward through the fat spruce timberland.
She sat down in one corner of the room, and began to bewail her hard fate; when on a sudden the door opened, and a droll-looking little man hobbled in, and said, ‘Good morrow to you, my good lass; what are you weeping for?’ ‘Alas!’ said she, ‘I must spin this straw into gold, and I know not how.’ ‘What will you give me,’ said the hobgoblin, ‘to do it for you?’ ‘My necklace,’ replied the maiden.
There was a king who had twelve beautiful daughters.
There was once a shoemaker, who worked very hard and was very honest: but still he could not earn enough to live upon; and at last all he had in the world was gone, save just leather enough to make one pair of shoes.
There was once a cook named Gretel, who wore shoes with red heels, and when she walked out with them on, she turned herself this way and that, was quite happy and thought: ‘You certainly are a pretty girl!’ And when she came home she drank, in her gladness of heart, a draught of wine, and as wine excites a desire to eat, she tasted the best of whatever she was cooking until she was satisfied, and said: ‘The cook must know what the food is like.’ It came to pass that the master one day said to her: ‘Gretel, there is a guest coming this evening; prepare me two fowls very daintily.’ ‘I will see to it, master,’ answered Gretel.
Once upon a time there was a dear little girl who was loved by everyone who looked at her, but most of all by her grandmother, and there was nothing that she would not have given to the child.
The mother of Hans said: ‘Whither away, Hans?’ Hans answered: ‘To Gretel.’ ‘Behave well, Hans.’ ‘Oh, I’ll behave well.
There was once a miller who had one beautiful daughter, and as she was grown up, he was anxious that she should be well married and provided for.
Once upon a time there was a widow who had two daughters; one of them was beautiful and industrious, the other ugly and lazy.
There was once a fisherman who lived with his wife in a pigsty, close by the seaside.
Two kings’ sons once upon a time went into the world to seek their fortunes; but they soon fell into a wasteful foolish way of living, so that they could not return home again.
In a village dwelt a poor old woman, who had gathered together a dish of beans and wanted to cook them.
There was once a forester who went into the forest to hunt, and as he entered it he heard a sound of screaming as if a little child were there.
There were once a man and a woman who had long in vain wished for a child.
A certain cat had made the acquaintance of a mouse, and had said so much to her about the great love and friendship she felt for her, that at length the mouse agreed that they should live and keep house together.
A shepherd’s dog had a master who took no care of him, but often let him suffer the greatest hunger.
An honest farmer had once an ass that had been a faithful servant to him a great many years, but was now growing old and every day more and more unfit for work.
An aged count once lived in Switzerland, who had an only son, but he was stupid, and could learn nothing.
There was once a man who had a daughter who was called Clever Elsie.
The king of a great land died, and left his queen to take care of their only child.
I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia.
There was once upon a time an old goat who had seven little kids, and loved them with all the love of a mother for her children.
One fine evening a young princess put on her bonnet and clogs, and went out to take a walk by herself in a wood; and when she came to a cool spring of water, that rose in the midst of it, she sat herself down to rest a while.
A king and queen once upon a time reigned in a country a great way off, where there were in those days fairies.
A poor woodman sat in his cottage one night, smoking his pipe by the fireside, while his wife sat by his side spinning.
Once upon a time, a mouse, a bird, and a sausage, entered into partnership and set up house together.
The wife of a rich man fell sick; and when she felt that her end drew nigh, she called her only daughter to her bed-side, and said, ‘Always be a good girl, and I will look down from heaven and watch over you.’ Soon afterwards she shut her eyes and died, and was buried in the garden; and the little girl went every day to her grave and wept, and was always good and kind to all about her.
There was a certain village wherein no one lived but really rich peasants, and just one poor one, whom they called the little peasant.
A long time ago there lived a king who was famed for his wisdom through all the land.
It was the middle of winter, when the broad flakes of snow were falling around, that the queen of a country many thousand miles off sat working at her window.
A shepherd had a faithful dog, called Sultan, who was grown very old, and had lost all his teeth.
There was once upon a time a queen to whom God had given no children.
Once in summer-time the bear and the wolf were walking in the forest, and the bear heard a bird singing so beautifully that he said: ‘Brother wolf, what bird is it that sings so well?’ ‘That is the King of birds,’ said the wolf, ‘before whom we must bow down.’ In reality the bird was the willow-wren.
A certain king had a beautiful garden, and in the garden stood a tree which bore golden apples.
There were two brothers who were both soldiers; the one was rich and the other poor.
One summer’s morning a little tailor was sitting on his table by the window; he was in good spirits, and sewed with all his might.
“Poirot,” I said, “a change of air would do you good.” “You think so, mon ami?” “I am sure of it.” “Eh—eh?” said my friend, smiling.
A farmer had a faithful and diligent servant, who had worked hard for him three years, without having been paid any wages.
There was once a man called Frederick: he had a wife whose name was Catherine, and they had not long been married.
“Holmes,” said I as I stood one morning in our bow-window looking down the street, “here is a madman coming along.
There was once upon a time a woman who was a real witch and had two daughters, one ugly and wicked, and this one she loved because she was her own daughter, and one beautiful and good, and this one she hated, because she was her stepdaughter.
There was once an old castle, that stood in the middle of a deep gloomy wood, and in the castle lived an old fairy.
We were speaking of sequestration, alluding to a recent lawsuit.
Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor wood-cutter with his wife and his two children.
Long, long ago, some two thousand years or so, there lived a rich man with a good and beautiful wife.
When I look back, I realize what a peculiar friendship it was.
There was once a very old man, whose eyes had become dim, his ears dull of hearing, his knees trembled, and when he sat at table he could hardly hold the spoon, and spilt the broth upon the table-cloth or let it run out of his mouth.
Some men are born to good luck: all they do or try to do comes right—all that falls to them is so much gain—all their geese are swans—all their cards are trumps—toss them which way you will, they will always, like poor puss, alight upon their legs, and only move on so much the faster.
Of all the problems which have been submitted to my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, for solution during the years of our intimacy, there were only two which I was the means of introducing to his notice—that of Mr. Hatherley’s thumb, and that of Colonel Warburton’s madness.
“Right here was where Pa ran over the skunk.” “It was further on.” “It don’t make no difference where it was,” Joe said without turning his head.
The first thing I did was to look at the clock as I entered the waiting-room of the station at Loubain, and I found that I had to wait two hours and ten minutes for the Paris express.
I have always considered that one of the most thrilling and dramatic of the many adventures I have shared with Poirot was that of our investigation into the strange series of deaths which followed upon the discovery and opening of the Tomb of King Men-her-Ra.
On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic.
It was the green heart of the canyon, where the walls swerved back from the rigid plan and relieved their harshness of line by making a little sheltered nook and filling it to the brim with sweetness and roundness and softness.
John Messner clung with mittened hand to the bucking gee-pole and held the sled in the trail.
Poirot and I had many friends and acquaintances of an informal nature.
Around the major’s eyes were two white circles where his snow-glasses had protected his face from the sun on the snow.
The Lord St. Simon marriage, and its curious termination, have long ceased to be a subject of interest in those exalted circles in which the unfortunate bridegroom moves.
They limped painfully down the bank, and once the foremost of the two men staggered among the rough-strewn rocks.
I was standing at the window of Poirot’s rooms looking out idly on the street below.
Pushing his adventurous shins through the deep snow that had fallen overnight, and encouraged by the glee of his little sister, following in the open way that he made, a sturdy small boy, the son of Grayville's most distinguished citizen, struck his foot against something of which there was no visible sign on the surface of the snow.
One sunny autumn afternoon a child strayed away from its rude home in a small field and entered a forest unobserved.
Poirot and I were expecting our old friend Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard to tea.
I had been called away from town for a few days, and on my return found Poirot in the act of strapping up his small valise.
Jerome Searing, a private soldier of General Sherman's army, then confronting the enemy at and about Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, turned his back upon a small group of officers with whom he had been talking in low tones, stepped across a light line of earthworks, and disappeared in a forest.
She had delayed, because of the dew-wet grass, in order to put on her overshoes, and when she emerged from the house found her waiting husband absorbed in the wonder of a bursting almond-bud.
He had followed the trail of his fleeing people for eleven days, and his pursuit had been in itself a flight; for behind him he knew full well were the dreaded Russians, toiling through the swampy lowlands and over the steep divides, bent on no less than the extermination of all his people.
Keesh lived long ago on the rim of the polar sea, was head man of his village through many and prosperous years, and died full of honors with his name on the lips of men.
He had a dreamy, far-away look in his eyes, and his sad, insistent voice, gentle-spoken as a maid’s, seemed the placid embodiment of some deep-seated melancholy.
“Upon my word,” said Colonel Laporte, “although I am old and gouty, my legs as stiff as two pieces of wood, yet if a pretty woman were to tell me to go through the eye of a needle, I believe I should take a jump at it, like a clown through a hoop.
Every Sunday, as soon as they were free, the little soldiers would go for a walk.
Mr Calhoun Kidd was a very young gentleman with a very old face, a face dried up with its own eagerness, framed in blue-black hair and a black butterfly tie.
“I do not see why you should not turn this immense amount of unusual information to account,” I told him.
The grey warm evening of August had descended upon the city and a mild warm air, a memory of summer, circulated in the streets.
"Do you think, Colonel, that your brave Coulter would like to put one of his guns in here?" the general asked.
For several days in succession fragments of a defeated army had passed through the town.
I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season.
A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below.
I was sitting on the pier of the small port of Obernon, near the village of Salis, looking at Antibes, bathed in the setting sun.
It was one of those chilly and empty afternoons in early winter, when the daylight is silver rather than gold and pewter rather than silver.
“What a number of bond robberies there have been lately!” I observed one morning, laying aside the newspaper.
When I glance over my notes and records of the Sherlock Holmes cases between the years ’82 and ’90, I am faced by so many which present strange and interesting features that it is no easy matter to know which to choose and which to leave.
“My dear fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.
Eight years before he had seen his friend off at the North Wall and wished him godspeed.
The small engine attached to the Neuilly steam-tram whistled as it passed the Porte Maillot to warn all obstacles to get out of its way and puffed like a person out of breath as it sent out its steam, its pistons moving rapidly with a noise as of iron legs running.
Since the beginning of the campaign Lieutenant Lare had taken two cannon from the Prussians.
“To cook by your fire and to sleep under your roof for the night,” I had announced on entering old Ebbits’s cabin; and he had looked at me blear-eyed and vacuous, while Zilla had favored me with a sour face and a contemptuous grunt.
The cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road.
Major Graf Von Farlsberg, the Prussian commandant, was reading his newspaper as he lay back in a great easy-chair, with his booted feet on the beautiful marble mantelpiece where his spurs had made two holes, which had grown deeper every day during the three months that he had been in the chateau of Uville.
I should say I did remember that Epiphany supper during the war! exclaimed Count de Garens, an army captain.
“After all,” murmured Poirot, “it is possible that I shall not die this time.” Coming from a convalescent influenza patient, I hailed the remark as showing a beneficial optimism.
Now that war and the problems of war are things of the past, I think I may safely venture to reveal to the world the part which my friend Poirot played in a moment of national crisis.
Two gentlemen who were in the lavatory at the time tried to lift him up: but he was quite helpless.
There was not a sound in the forest save the indistinct, fluttering sound of the snow falling on the trees.
Isa Whitney, brother of the late Elias Whitney, D.D., Principal of the Theological College of St. George’s, was much addicted to opium.
Sitka Charley smoked his pipe and gazed thoughtfully at the Police Gazette illustration on the wall.
The bell rang furiously and, when Miss Parker went to the tube, a furious voice called out in a piercing North of Ireland accent: “Send Farrington here!” Miss Parker returned to her machine, saying to a man who was writing at a desk: “Mr Alleyne wants you upstairs.” The man muttered “Blast him!” under his breath and pushed back his chair to stand up.
I had called upon my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, one day in the autumn of last year and found him in deep conversation with a very stout, florid-faced, elderly gentleman with fiery red hair.
There is somewhere in Brompton or Kensington an interminable avenue of tall houses, rich but largely empty, that looks like a terrace of tombs.
The best soldier of our staff was Lieutenant Herman Brayle, one of the two aides-de-camp.
Old Jack raked the cinders together with a piece of cardboard and spread them judiciously over the whitening dome of coals.
Maurice Brun and Armand Armagnac were crossing the sunlit Champs Elysee with a kind of vivacious respectability.
The picturesque city and state of Heiligwaldenstein was one of those toy kingdoms of which certain parts of the German Empire still consist.
This subject of Latin that has been dinned into our ears for some time past recalls to my mind a story—a story of my youth.
So far, in the cases which I have recorded, Poirot’s investigations have started from the central fact, whether murder or robbery, and have proceeded from thence by a process of logical deduction to the final triumphant unravelling.
The problem presented to us by Miss Violet Marsh made rather a pleasant change from our usual routine work.
North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free.
Mr James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious.
Flambeau and his friend the priest were sitting in the Temple Gardens about sunset; and their neighbourhood or some such accidental influence had turned their talk to matters of legal process.
The road of the pass was hard and smooth and not yet dusty in the early morning.
The bell rang furiously and, when Miss Parker went to the tube, a furious voice called out in a piercing North of Ireland accent: “Send Farrington here!” Miss Parker returned to her machine, saying to a man who was writing at a desk: “Mr Alleyne wants you upstairs.” The man muttered “Blast him!” under his breath and pushed back his chair to stand up.
The matron had given her leave to go out as soon as the women’s tea was over and Maria looked forward to her evening out.
Father Brown was walking home from Mass on a white weird morning when the mists were slowly lifting—one of those mornings when the very element of light appears as something mysterious and new.
All lines had been cast off, and the Seattle No. 4 was pulling slowly out from the shore.
We were seated at breakfast one morning, my wife and I, when the maid brought in a telegram.
Edward Nutt, the industrious editor of the Daily Reformer, sat at his desk, opening letters and marking proofs to the merry tune of a typewriter, worked by a vigorous young lady.
The great Muscari, most original of the young Tuscan poets, walked swiftly into his favourite restaurant, which overlooked the Mediterranean, was covered by an awning and fenced by little lemon and orange trees.
Two men appeared simultaneously at the two ends of a sort of passage running along the side of the Apollo Theatre in the Adelphi.
Mr Holohan, assistant secretary of the Eire Abu Society, had been walking up and down Dublin for nearly a month, with his hands and pockets full of dirty pieces of paper, arranging about the series of concerts.
The consulting-rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist and specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the sea-front at Scarborough, in a series of very large and well-lighted french windows, which showed the North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue-green marble.
I don’t think much of Stephen Mackaye any more, though I used to swear by him.