The Library 📚

A ghostly couple wanders their old house at night, looking for the treasure they buried.

“Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple…”

Mrs. Sommers finds fifteen unexpected dollars and one afternoon for herself.

“Little Mrs. Sommers one day found herself the unexpected possessor of fifteen dollars. It seemed to her a very large amount of money, and the way in w…”

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.

“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the wh…”

Two old friends promised to meet on this corner exactly twenty years later.

“The policeman on the beat moved up the avenue impressively. The impressiveness was habitual and not for show, for spectators were few. The time was ba…”

The ghost at Lyng is the kind you never know you've seen — until long afterward.

““Oh, there is one, of course, but you’ll never know it.””

A condemned man stands on a railroad bridge in Alabama, rope around his neck.

“A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the…”

A Dublin boy promises to bring something back from the bazaar for Mangan's sister.

“North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house …”

A Wall Street copyist who would prefer not to.

“I am a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem a…”

Cousin Marjorie makes Bernice popular — then dares her to actually do it.

“After dark on Saturday night one could stand on the first tee of the golf-course and see the country-club windows as a yellow expanse over a very blac…”

Bertha is thirty, absurdly happy, and about to understand why.

“Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement…”

Désirée, foundling bride of a Louisiana planter, has a beautiful baby boy.

“As the day was pleasant, Madame Valmondé drove over to L’Abri to see Désirée and the baby.”

Nineteen, at the window, boat tickets to Buenos Aires in Frank's hand.

“She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dus…”

Wing Biddlebaum's restless hands made him famous, and ruined his life.

“Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walke…”

Leila's first ball is perfect, until a fat bald man asks her to dance.

“Exactly when the ball began Leila would have found it hard to say. Perhaps her first real partner was the cab. It did not matter that she shared the c…”

The Devil hears a peasant boast that with enough land he'd fear no one.

“An elder sister came to visit her younger sister in the country. The elder was married to a tradesman in town, the younger to a peasant in the village…”

A summer afternoon in the flower beds, four couples drifting past a snail.

“From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at t…”

A sledge-driver's son has died, and nobody in Petersburg has a minute to listen.

“The twilight of evening. Big flakes of wet snow are whirling lazily about the street lamps, which have just been lighted, and lying in a thin soft lay…”

Every Sunday Miss Brill wears her fur to the park and joins the play.

“Although it was so brilliantly fine—the blue sky powdered with gold and great spots of light like white wine splashed over the Jardins Publiques—Miss …”

Opening a bank account rattles a man completely. Fifty-six dollars, all at once.

“When I go into a bank I get rattled. The clerks rattle me; the wickets rattle me; the sight of the money rattles me; everything rattles me.”

A good-natured idler helps a stranger carry a keg into the Catskills and sleeps in.

“Whoever has made a voyage up the Hudson must remember the Kaatskill mountains. They are a dismembered branch of the great Appalachian family, and are …”

A sickly boy keeps a secret god in the tool-shed.

“Conradin was ten years old, and the doctor had pronounced his professional opinion that the boy would not live another five years. The doctor was silk…”

A terrified woman, a locked bedroom, a low whistle in the dark.

“On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I fin…”

A banker and a lawyer wager two million roubles on fifteen years of solitary confinement.

“It was a dark autumn night. The old banker was walking up and down his study and remembering how, fifteen years before, he had given a party one autum…”

A scientist marries a nearly perfect woman and cannot stop looking at the 'nearly.'

“In the latter part of the last century there lived a man of science, an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy, who not long before …”

A once-gentle man, his cat, and a confession that claws its way out.

“For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a ca…”

The great detective Valentin chases Europe's master thief — and keeps finding a small round priest.

“Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies, among …”

Everyone wondered why the cabin's one window stayed boarded up.

“In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost unbroken forest. The whole region was sparsely…”

A scholar pieces together his late uncle's notes on a dream-cult and a sunken city.

“"Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival ... a survival of a hugely remote period when ... consciousness was manife…”

A connoisseur lures an old rival into his wine cellar for one last tasting.

“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of…”

Jim Smiley will bet on anything — especially his educated frog, Dan'l Webster.

“In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired af…”

All Soapy wants for winter is to get arrested — but New York won't cooperate.

“On his bench in Madison Square Soapy moved uneasily. When wild geese honk high of nights, and when women without sealskin coats grow kind to their hus…”

In 1860 Baltimore, the Buttons' newborn son is seventy years old.

“As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the first cries …”

Olenka can only love by becoming whoever she loves.

“Olenka, the daughter of the retired collegiate assessor, Plemyanniakov, was sitting in her back porch, lost in thought. It was hot, the flies were per…”

The weather is perfect for the Sheridans' party; down the lane, a man has died.

“And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky wit…”

Della has $1.87 and one day to find Jim a Christmas present.

“One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer an…”

A gilded statue and a swallow who stayed too late in the season.

“High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince. He was gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold, for eyes he had two…”

Two feuding neighbors meet in the forest each hoping to catch the other — then the tree falls.

“In a forest of mixed growth somewhere on the eastern spurs of the Karpathians, a man stood one winter night watching and listening, as though he waite…”

Nathalie has the game perfectly planned — the rich fiancé and the kiss too.

“It was still quite light out of doors, but inside with the curtains drawn and the smouldering fire sending out a dim, uncertain glow, the room was ful…”

A cynical Moscow banker meets a lady walking her Pomeranian in Yalta.

“It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog. Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov, who had by then been a fortnight at Yal…”

Behind one door a tiger, behind the other a bride — and the princess knows which is which.

“In the very olden time there lived a semi-barbaric king, whose ideas, though somewhat polished and sharpened by the progressiveness of distant Latin n…”

Ichabod Crane, a covetous schoolmaster, rides home late past the church bridge.

“A pleasing land of drowsy head it was, Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye; And of gay castles in the clouds that pass, …”

She composes; the maddening man upstairs paints; the wall between them is thin.

“There were three distinct stages in the evolution of Annette Brougham's attitude towards the knocking in the room above. In the beginning it had been …”

A poor Petersburg clerk saves kopeck by kopeck for a new overcoat.

“In a certain Russian ministerial department——”

A prince walls his court away from the plague and throws a masquerade.

“The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness an…”

A dried little paw that grants three wishes — its previous owner's third was for death.

“Without, the night was cold and wet, but in the small parlour of Laburnam Villa the blinds were drawn and the fire burned brightly. Father and son wer…”

One borrowed necklace, one perfect evening, ten years to pay for it.

“The girl was one of those pretty and charming young creatures who sometimes are born, as if by a slip of fate, into a family of clerks. She had no dow…”

A student needs one red rose; a nightingale knows the terrible price of one.

““She said that she would dance with me if I brought her red roses,” cried the young Student; “but in all my garden there is no red rose.””

A very self-possessed fifteen-year-old explains why the window is kept open.

““My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel,” said a very self-possessed young lady of fifteen; “in the meantime you must try and put up with me.””

A thrifty peasant picks up a bit of string from the road — and is seen doing it.

“It was market-day, and from all the country round Goderville the peasants and their wives were coming toward the town. The men walked slowly, throwing…”

Two kidnappers pick the wrong ten-year-old.

“It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you. We were down South, in Alabama—Bill Driscoll and myself—when this kidnapping idea struck us. It…”

The Giant builds a wall around his garden, and winter moves in for good.

“Every afternoon, as they were coming from school, the children used to go and play in the Giant’s garden.”

A bachelor on a hot train tells three children a story about a horribly good little girl.

“It was a hot afternoon, and the railway carriage was correspondingly sultry, and the next stop was at Templecombe, nearly an hour ahead. The occupants…”

A murderer insists he is perfectly sane — if only that heartbeat would stop.

“True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—n…”

The rest cure: a rented summer house, a barred nursery, and that wallpaper.

“It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.”

A king seeks the right time, the right people, and the most important thing to do.

“It once occurred to a certain king, that if he always knew the right time to begin everything; if he knew who were the right people to listen to, and …”

Seventy-five below on the Yukon trail, one man, one dog, and matches.

“Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank, where a …”

A house-party cat learns to talk, and knows exactly what everyone has been saying.

“It was a chill, rain-washed afternoon of a late August day, that indefinite season when partridges are still in security or cold storage, and there is…”

During the siege of Paris, two fishing buddies risk everything for one afternoon at the river.

“Besieged Paris was in the throes of famine. Even the sparrows on the roofs and the rats in the sewers were growing scarce. People were eating anything…”

On Christmas Eve, a nine-year-old writes a letter addressed simply: to grandfather, in the village.

“Vanka Zhukov, a boy of nine, who had been for three months apprenticed to Alyahin the shoemaker, was sitting up on Christmas Eve. Waiting till his mas…”

Four luminous Petersburg nights, a dreamer, and a girl waiting on a bridge.

“It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader. The sky was so starry, so bright that, looking at it, one c…”

Goodman Brown kisses Faith goodbye and walks into the night forest.

“Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into the street at Salem village; but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting …”