Nine Tales (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos or missing text. Not indexed. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1918. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... THE SACRIFICE IT was a grey autumn morning, misty and uninviting, and under ordinary circumstances Mr. William Wellfield would certainly not have been out of doors before the breakfast which he took at nine. He was a country gentleman who kept himself in condition; but he was past middle-age and took no foolish risks with rheumatism or chill of any kind. "After a proper breakfast," he would say, "I can still face any weather." But since the declaration of war he had risen half an hour earlier and taking a glass of cold water (bottled French water; not even war could induce him to drink water from a tap), walked wet or fine to the drive gates to meet the postman, who arrived between 8.35 and 8.40. James, the postman, was as punctual as Mr. Wellfield, whose greeting was always in the same words like a formula. James would probably have commented upon any change in this formula, as he would have done if Mr. Wellfield had shaved his bushy moustache. Mr. Wellfield was a man of habit (good habits, he was proud to know) which followed him, or which he introduced, into the innermost nooks of his consciousness. He made no fetish of them. Other people might in his vicinity be as disorderly as they liked: he offered hardly a remonstrance; but for himself he preferred to do things in one way, the right way, his own way. Sometimes his daughter, whom he adored, would twit him about the fixity of his habits. He always answered her bright comments with the same twinkle and the same quotation: "Budge says the fiend. Budge not, says my conscience " And that marks his most notable habit; for though he disowned any taste for letters, it was attractively like him to read one author and one only, and that the best. He had read Shakespeare constantly for thirty years, and his k...