PROJECT ASHABI
African Stories. Limitless Worlds.
PROJECT ASHABI
African Stories. Limitless Worlds.
Project Gutenberg Archive
Complete unabridged public-domain literary work from the Project Gutenberg archive.
Project Ashabi is being built as the home of original African comics, webtoons, graphic novels, and fiction.
This third-party Novel / Book title is temporary preview content. Step by step, third-party titles will be phased out and replaced exclusively by Ashabi Originals created by African writers and artists.
1. Words which may seem to be transcriber's typos, or otherwise suspect, but which are reproduced faithfully (archaic spellings, printer's typos--sometimes I couldn't tell):
Ch. I: befel, undigged Ch. III: chaperon Ch. IV: babby, mun, valtz Ch. V: zounded, dimpsey, after'n, ax'n, ax Ch. VI: picquet, damitol Ch. XI: alwaies, Desarts, Eternitie
2. Diphthongs, given as single characters in the printed copy, are transcribed as two separate characters.
A spinster, having borrowed a man's hat to decorate her front hall, excused herself on the ground that the house 'wanted a something.' By inscribing your name above this little story I please myself at the risk of helping the reader to discover not only that it wants a something, but precisely what that something is. It wants--to confess and have done with it--all the penetrating subtleties of insight, all the delicacies of interpretation, you would have brought to Dorothea's aid, if for a moment I may suppose her worth your championing. So I invoke your name to stand before my endeavour like a figure outside the brackets in an algebraical sum, to make all the difference by multiplying the meaning contained.
But your consent gives me another opportunity even more warmly desired. And I think that you, too, will take less pleasure in discovering how excellent your genius appears to one who nevertheless finds it a mystery in operation, than in learning that he has not missed to admire, at least, and with a sense almost of personal loyalty, the sustained and sustaining pride in good workmanship by which you have set a common example to all who practise, however diversely, the art in which we acknowledge you a master.
CHAPTER III A BALL, A SNOWSTORM, AND A SNOWBALL
CHAPTER IV ENCOUNTER BETWEEN A HIGH HORSE AND A HOBBY
CHAPTER V BEGINS WITH ANCIENT HISTORY AND ENDS WITH AN OLD STORY
Arthur Conan Doyle
