Widdershins

E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
1911
From Ghaisttes, Ghoulies and long-leggity Beasties and Things that go Bump in the night—
Good Lord, deliver us!
I have pleasure in acknowledging the courtesy of the proprietors of Shurey's Publications by whose permission The Cigarette Case is included in the present volume. Also it has been suggested that a definition should be given of the word that forms the volume's title. That word means contrary to the course of the Sun.
The three or four To Let boards had stood within the low paling as long as the inhabitants of the little triangular Square could remember, and if they had ever been vertical it was a very long time ago. They now overhung the palings each at its own angle, and resembled nothing so much as a row of wooden choppers, ever in the act of falling upon some passer-by, yet never cutting off a tenant for the old house from the stream of his fellows. Not that there was ever any great stream through the square; the stream passed a furlong and more away, beyond the intricacy of tenements and alleys and byways that had sprung up since the old house had been built, hemming it in completely; and probably the house itself was only suffered to stand pending the falling-in of a lease or two, when doubtless a clearance would be made of the whole neighbourhood.
It was of bloomy old red brick, and built into its walls were the crowns and clasped hands and other insignia of insurance companies long since defunct. The children of the secluded square had swung upon the low gate at the end of the entrance-alley until little more than the solid top bar of it remained, and the alley itself ran past boarded basement windows on which tramps had chalked their cryptic marks. The path was washed and worn uneven by the spilling of water from the eaves of the encroaching next house, and cats and dogs had made the approach their own. The chances of a tenant did not seem such as to warrant the keeping of the To Let boards in a state of legibility and repair, and as a matter of fact they were not so kept.