Scoop
That evening, sometime after the advertised hour, Mr. Salter alighted at Boot Magna Halt. An hour earlier, at Taunton, he had left the express, and changed into a train such as he did not know existed outside the imagination of his Balkan correspondents; a single...
Scoop
After an early luncheon, William went to say goodbye to his grandmother. She looked at him with doleful, mad eyes. Going to London, eh? Well I hardly suppose I shall be alive when you return. Wrap up warm, dear.’ It was eternal winter in Mrs Boot’s sunny bedroom. All...
Forty Stories
Overnight To Many Distant CitiesIn London I met a man who was not in love. Beautiful shoes, black as black marble, and a fine suit. We went to the theatre together, matter of a few pounds, he knew which plays were the best plays, on several occasions he brought his...
The Surgeon Of Crowthorne
Lambeth belonged administratively, at least until 1888, to the county of Surrey – meaning that the relatively strict laws that applied to the capital’s citizens did not apply to anyone who ventured, via one of the new bridges like Waterloo, Blackfriars, Westminster or Hungerford, into the wen of Lambeth. The village thus became fast known as a site of revelry and abandon, a place where public houses and brothels and lewd theatres abounded, and where a man could find entertainment of all kinds – and disease of all varieties – for no more than a handful of pennies.