The Project Gutenberg eBook, Beasts and Super-Beasts, by Saki

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Title: Beasts and Super-Beasts

Author: Saki

Release Date: April 19, 2005 [eBook #269]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BEASTS AND SUPER-BEASTS***

Transcribed from the 1914 John Lane, The Bodley Head edition by David
Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

BEASTS AND SUPER-BEASTS

AUTHOR'S NOTE

"The Open Window," "The Schartz-Metterklume Method," and "Clovis on
Parental Responsibilities," originally appeared in the _Westminster
Gazette_, "The Elk" in the _Bystander_, and the remaining stories in the
_Morning Post_. To the Editors of these papers I am indebted for their
courtesy in allowing me to reprint them.

H. H. M.

THE SHE-WOLF

Leonard Bilsiter was one of those people who have failed to find this
world attractive or interesting, and who have sought compensation in an
"unseen world" of their own experience or imagination--or invention.
Children do that sort of thing successfully, but children are content to
convince themselves, and do not vulgarise their beliefs by trying to
convince other people. Leonard Bilsiter's beliefs were for "the few,"
that is to say, anyone who would listen to him.

His dabblings in the unseen might not have carried him beyond the
customary platitudes of the drawing-room visionary if accident had not
reinforced his stock-in-trade of mystical lore. In company with a
friend, who was interested in a Ural mining concern, he had made a trip
across Eastern Europe at a moment when the great Russian railway strike
was developing from a threat to a reality; its outbreak caught him on the
return journey, somewhere on the further side of Perm, and it was while
waiting for a couple of days at a wayside station in a state of suspended
locomotion that he made the acquaintance of a dealer in harness and
metalware, who profitably whiled away the tedium of the long halt by
initiating his English travelling companion in a fragmentary system of
folk-lore that he had picked up from Trans-Baikal traders and natives.
Leonard returned to his home circle garrulous abou