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cture and conception of that, to which one may well give the accepted titles of Heaven and Hell; yet can I promise certain thrills, merely taking the story as a story.

William Hope Hodgson. December 17, 1907 TO MY FATHER

(Whose feet tread the lost aeons)

"Open the door, And listen! Only the wind's muffled roar, And the glisten Of tears round the moon. And, in fancy, the tread Of vanishing shoon-- Out in the night with the Dead. "Hush! and hark To the sorrowful cry Of the wind in the dark. Hush and hark, without murmur or sigh, To shoon that tread the lost aeons: To the sound that bids you to die. Hush and hark! Hush and Hark!" Shoon of the Dead

I THE FINDING OF THE MANUSCRIPT

RIGHT AWAY in the west of Ireland lies a tiny hamlet called Kraighten. It is situated, alone, at the base of a low hill. Far around there spreads a waste of bleak and totally inhospitable country; where, here and there at great intervals, one may come upon the ruins of some long desolate cottage--unthatched and stark. The whole land is bare and unpeopled, the very earth scarcely covering the rock that lies beneath it, and with which the country abounds, in places rising out of the soil in wave-shaped ridges.

Yet, in spite of its desolation, my friend Tonnison and I had elected to spend our vacation there. He had stumbled on the place, by mere chance, the year previously, during the course of a long walking tour, and discovered the possibilities for the angler, in a small and unnamed river that runs past the outskirts of the little village.

I have said that the river is without name; I may add that no map that I have hitherto consulted has shown either village or stream. They seem to have entirely escaped observation: indeed, they might never exist for all that the average guide tells one. Possibly, this can be partly accounted for by the fact that the nearest railway-station (Ardrahan) is some forty miles distant.

It was early one warm evening when my friend and I

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