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  The Legend of Saint Julian the...

  Gustave Flaubert

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  Gustave Flaubert was born on 12th December 1821 in Rouen, in Normandy, France.  
   
  A gifted child he began writing as early as eight. 
   
  He was educated at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen until 1840 and thence to Paris to study law, a city he disliked. He studied little, made few friends and preferred to spend his time writing. His first finished work was ‘November’, a novella, completed in 1842. By 1846 after an attack of epilepsy, he left Paris and abandoned his law studies. 
   
  That same year he began a relationship with the poet Louise Colet which lasted eight years.  His politics developed in these years of revolutions throughout Europe as stridently against despotism, and as one who celebrated protest against the elite and the establishment. 
   
  In September 1849, Flaubert completed ‘The Temptation of Saint Anthony’. After 4 days reading it aloud to two friends, they advised him to destroy it and to focus his writing on day-to-day life rather than the fantastic. 
   
  A long journey to the Middle East brought encounters with both female and male prostitutes and a case of syphilis caught in Beirut.  On his return he began ‘Madame Bovary’ a work he would take 5 years to complete. When it was serialized in the Revue de Paris in 1856 the government brought an immorality action against both publisher and author, but both were acquitted. This was the birth of French Realism and Flaubert, fastidious with every word, was becoming regarded as a literary genius. He wrote in sullen solitude, sometimes spending a week on a single page, avoiding the inexact, the abstract and the vague.   
   
  He visited Carthage in 1858 to conduct research for ‘Salammbô’, which took 4 years to complete.  ‘Sentimental Education’ took a further 7 and published only in 1869.  The next few years were difficult.  Prussian soldiers occupied his house during the War and his mother died pushing him into financial difficulty and this, together with failing health, especially venereal diseases, shortened his life. 
   
  He toiled on his unfinished ‘Bouvard et Pécuchet’ but did complete ‘Three Tales’ in 1877 from which ‘The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller’ is taken.  
   
  Gustave Flaubert died at Croisset from a cerebral hemorrhage on 8th May 1880. He was 58.

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  The Man with the Roller

  E. G. Swain

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  Edmund Gill Swain (1861-1938) was an English cleric and author. He was a longtime friend of M. R. James, and his ghost stories show James' influence.'The Man with the Roller' is a strange tale about a photograph in which a strange figure of a man with a roller appears and drags the roller from one part of the lawn to another.But how can this happen? Who is the man? Why is he constantly rolling the lawn?

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  A Skinful of Trouble

  Arthur Morrison

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  Arthur George Morrison (1863-1945) was an English writer and journalist known for his realistic novels and stories about working-class life in London's East End. This collection contains a selection of Morrison's best work, including humorous and horror stories. " A Skinful of Trouble" is the humorous tale of Mr. Dowdall, a gentleman who has invested as shareholder in a circus of dubious repute. All attempts to pursue the circus and recoup his investment are frustrated, but as his letters become more and more threatening, the circus manager writes back announcing that in the lack of funds, he will send property of the circus to the value of the sum demanded. Mr Dowdall is quite satisfied with this resolution of the dispute. Until next afternoon when a large crate is delivered containing a circus tiger, which is duly deposited on the street outside the Dowdall house in London. Dowdall's efforts to rid himself if the tiger are increasingly frantic and comical.

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  The Gift of the Magi

  O. Henry

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  This is a short story about a poor, young, married couple who both sell their most prized possession in order to purchase a holiday gift for the other. A lesson in sacrifice and the true meaning of giving is beautifully told in this classic tale with a heart wrenching ending.

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  Evil Clergyman The (Unabridged)

  H. P. Lovecraft

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  "The Evil Clergyman" is an excerpt from a letter written by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft in 1933. After his death, it was published in the April 1939 issue of Weird Tales as a short story. The story was later adapted into the unreleased 1987 anthology film Pulse Pounders. The letter, to his friend Bernard Austin Dwyer, recounted a dream that Lovecraft had had. Although Lovecraft frequently based stories on his dreams, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia notes that " is difficult to say how HPL would have developed this conventional supernatural scenario.

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  The Former Passengers

  B. M. Croker

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  Bithia Mary Croker (1848-1920) was an Irish-born novelist and a notable writer of ghost stories; much of her work concerned life and society in British India.'The Former Passengers' (1893) tells the story of Mr. Lawrence, who is on his way to Singapore to give his sister away at her wedding. As he finds he has missed the steamer he intended to catch, he persuades Captain Blane to take him in his cargo boat, the Wandering Star.Despite warnings to the contrary, his accommodation turns out to be sumptuous, and he thinks he's rather lucky to be travelling on the Star - until the steamer hits bad weather, and strange events take hold of the ship.

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