ney--
From distant, dreaming Blakeney;
Love and Remembrance: These are sure;
Though Death is strong they shall endure,
Till all things cease to be._

_A. J. R._

_Blakeney,
Norfolk._

PREFACE

As the scenes of this story are laid in a part of Norfolk which will be
readily identified by many Norfolk people, it is perhaps well to state
that all the personages are fictitious, and that the Norfolk police
officials who appear in the book have no existence outside these pages.
They and the other characters are drawn entirely from imagination.

To East Anglian readers I offer my apologies for any faults there may be
in reproducing the Norfolk dialect. My excuse is the fascination the
language produced on myself, and that it is as essential to the scene of
the story as the marshes and the sea. Though I have found it impossible
to transliterate the pronunciation into the ordinary English alphabet, I
hope I have been able to convey enough of the characteristic speech of
the native to enable those familiar with it to put it for themselves
into the accents of their own people. To those who are not familiar with
the dialect, I can only say, "Go and study this relic of old English in
that remote part of the country where the story is laid, where the
ghosts of a ruined past mingle with the primitive survivors of to-day,
who walk very near the unseen."

A. J. R.
LONDON

THE SHRIEKING PIT

CHAPTER I

Colwyn had never seen anything quite so eccentric in a public room as
the behaviour of the young man breakfasting alone at the alcove table in
the bay embrasure, and he became so absorbed in watching him that he
permitted his own meal to grow cold, impatiently waving away the waiter
who sought with obtrusive obsequiousness to recall his wandering
attention by thrusting the menu card before him.

To outward seeming the occupant of the alcove table was a good-looking
young man, whose clear blue eyes, tanned skin and well-knit frame
indicated the truly national product of common sense, cold water, and
out-of-door pursuits; of a wholesomely English if not markedly
intellectual type, pleasant to look at, and unmistakably of good birth
and breeding. When a young man of this description, your fellow guest at
a fashionable seaside hotel, who had been in the habit of giving you a
courteous nod on his morning journey across the archipelago of
snowy-topped tables under the convoy of the head waiter