Genre Fiction. Page - 275

F A LETTER

The mechanical construction of a letter, whether social, friendly, or business, falls into six or seven parts. This arrangement has become established by the best custom. The divisions are as follows:

1. Heading 2. Inside address (Always used in business letters but omitted in social and friendly letters) 3. Salutation 4. Body 5. Complimentary close 6. Signature 7. Superscription

1. THE HEADING

The heading of a letter contains the street address, city, state, and the date. The examples below will illustrate:

2018 Calumet Street or 1429 Eighth Avenue Chicago, Ill. New York, N.Y. May 12, 1921 March 8, 1922

[Illustration: In the business letterhead appear the name of the firm, its address, and the kind of business engaged in]

When the heading is typewritten or written by hand, it is placed at the top of the first letter sheet close to the right-hand margin. It should begin about in the center, that is, it should extend no farther to the left than the ce

The Willows by Algernon Blackwood
The Shadows On The Wall by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
The Messenger by Robert W. Chambers
Lazarus by Leonid Andreyev
The Beast With Five Fingers by W. F. Harvey
The Mass Of Shadows by Anatole France
What Was It? by Fitz-James O'Brien
The Middle Toe Of The Right Foot by Ambrose Bierce
The Shell Of Sense by Olivia Howard Dunbar
The Woman At Seven Brothers by Wilbur Daniel Steele
At The Gate by Myla Jo Closser
Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe
The Haunted Orchard by Richard Le Gallienne
The Bowmen by Arthur Machen
A Ghost by Guy De Maupassant

EOPATRA.
Hear the ambassadors.

ANTONY.
Fie, wrangling queen!
Whom everything becomes,--to chide, to laugh,
To weep; whose every passion fully strives
To make itself in thee fair and admir'd!
No messenger; but thine, and all alone
To-night we'll wander through the streets and note
The qualities of people. Come, my queen;
Last night you did desire it:--speak not to us.

[Exeunt ANTONY and CLEOPATRA, with their Train.]

DEMETRIUS.
Is Caesar with Antonius priz'd so slight?

PHILO.
Sir, sometimes when he is not Antony,
He comes too short of that great property
Which still should go with Antony.

DEMETRIUS.
I am full sorry
That he approves the common liar, who
Thus speaks of him at Rome: but I will hope
Of better deeds to-morrow. Rest you happy!

[Exeunt.]

SCENE II. Alexandria. Another Room in CLEOPATRA'S palace.

[Enter CH

earfully hungry, and made terrible havoc among the mice.

Then the queen of the mice held a council.

"These cats will eat every one of us," she said, "if the captain of the ship does not shut the ferocious animals up. Let us send a deputation to him of the bravest among us."

Several mice offered themselves for this mission and set out to find the young captain.

"Captain," said they, "go away quickly from our island, or we shall perish, every mouse of us."

"Willingly," replied the young captain, "upon one condition. That is that you shall first bring me back a bronze ring which some clever magician has stolen from me. If you do not do this I will land all my cats upon your island, and you shall be exterminated."

The mice withdrew in great dismay. "What is to be done?" said the Queen. "How can we find this bronze ring?" She held a new council, calling in mice from every quarter of the globe, but nobody knew where the bronze ring was. Suddenly three mice arrived from a ve

nd fits of creative energy. And then its pleasure, its repose,are an exhausting debauch, swarthy and black with blows, white withintoxication, or yellow with indigestion. It lasts but two days, butit steals to-morrow's bread, the week's soup, the wife's dress, thechild's wretched rags. Men, born doubtless to be beautiful--for allcreatures have a relative beauty--are enrolled from their childhoodbeneath the yoke of force, beneath the rule of the hammer, the chisel,the loom, and have been promptly vulcanized. Is not Vulcan, with hishideousness and his strength, the emblem of this strong and hideousnation--sublime in its mechanical intelligence, patient in its season,and once in a century terrible, inflammable as gunpowder, and ripewith brandy for the madness of revolution, with wits enough, in fine,to take fire at a captious word, which signifies to it always: Goldand Pleasure! If we comprise in it all those who hold out their handsfor an alms, for lawful wages, or the five francs that are granted

the consumption of himself and his friends.

No. Philip Hornby had some strong motive in paying a heavy bribe to avoid the visit of the dogana. If he really had paid, he must have paid very heavily; of that I was convinced.

Was it possible that some mystery was hidden on board that splendidly appointed craft?

Presently the gong sounded, and we went below into the elegantly fitted saloon, where was spread a table that sparkled with cut glass and shone with silver. Around the center fresh flowers had been trailed by some artistic hand, while on the buffet at the end the necks of wine bottles peered out from the ice pails. Both carpet and upholstery were in pale blue, while everywhere it was apparent that none but an extremely wealthy man could afford such a magnificent craft.

Hornby took the head of the table, and we sat on either side of him, chatting merrily while we ate one of the choicest and best cooked dinners it has ever been my lot to taste. Chater and I drank wine o

Bruce read:

"I opened your message. Alice not here. I have not seen her for over a week. What do you mean by wire? Am coming to town at once.--EDITH."

The baronet's pale face and strained voice betrayed the significance of the thought underlying the simple question.

"What do you make of it, Claude?"

Bruce, too, was very grave. "The thing looks queer," he said; "though the explanation may be trifling. Come, I will help you. Let us reach your house. It is the natural centre for inquiries."

They hailed a hansom and whirled off to Portman Square. They did not say much. Each man felt that the affair might not end so happily and satisfactorily as he hoped.

CHAPTER II

INSPECTOR WHITE

Lady Dyke had disappeared.

Whether dead or alive, and if alive, whether detained by force or absent of her own unfettered volition, this handsome and well-known leader of Society had vanished utterly from the moment when Cl

He was so angry I thought he was going to pop. You know I said I'd only seen him lose his cool rarely? That night, he lost it more than he ever had.

"You wouldn't believe it. This cop, he was like eighteen years old and he kept saying, 'But sir, why were you in Berkeley yesterday if your client is in Mountain View?' I kept explaining to him that I teach at Berkeley and then he'd say, 'I thought you were a consultant,' and we'd start over again. It was like some kind of sitcom where the cops have been taken over by the stupidity ray.

"What's worse was he kept insisting that I'd been in Berkeley today as well, and I kept saying no, I hadn't been, and he said I had been. Then he showed me my FasTrak billing and it said I'd driven the San Mateo bridge three times that day!

"That's not all," he said, and drew in a breath that let me know he was really steamed. "They had information about where I'd been, places that didn't have a toll plaza. They'd been polling my pass just on the street, at random. And it was wrong! Holy crap, I mean, they're spying on us all and they're not even competent!"

with a keener interest, for she had seen a great deal of merciless riding since she came West and it always angered her. The cowpunchers used "hoss-flesh" rather than horses, a distinction that made her hot. If a horse were not good enough to be loved it was not good enough to be ridden. That was one of her maxims. She stepped closer to the window. Certainly that pony had been cruelly handled for the little grey gelding swayed in rhythm with his panting; from his belly sweat dripped steadily into the dust and the reins had chafed his neck to a lather. Marianne flashed into indignation and that, of course, made her scrutinize the rider more narrowly. He was perfect of that type of cowboy which she detested most: handsome, lithe, childishly vain in his dress. About his sombrero ran a heavy width of gold-braid; his shirt was blue silk; his bandana was red; his boots were shop-made beauties, soft and flexible; and on his heels glittered--gilded spurs!

"And I'll wager," thought the indignant Maria

ginal,convinced that every departure from him would be punished with theforfeiture of some grace or beauty for which I could substitute noequivalent. The epithets that would consent to an English form I havepreserved as epithets; others that would not, I have melted into thecontext. There are none, I believe, which I have not translated in oneway or other, though the reader will not find them repeated so oftenas most of them are in HOMER, for a reason that need not be mentioned.

Few persons of any consideration are introduced either in the Iliad orOdyssey by their own name only, but their patronymic is given also. Tothis ceremonial I have generally attended, because it is a
circumstance of my author's manner.

HOMER never allots less than a whole line to the introduction of aspeaker. No, not even when the speech itself is no longer than theline that leads it. A practice to which, since he never departs fromit, he must have been determined by some cogent reason. He probablydeemed it a