The Toys of Peace, and Other Papers

by Saki

Transcribed from the 1919 John Lane edition by Jane Duff and David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

THE TOYS OF PEACE
AND OTHER PAPERS

TO
THE 22nd ROYAL FUSILIERS

Note

Thanks are due to the Editors of the Morning Post, the Westminster Gazette, and the Bystander for their amiability in allowing tales that appeared in these journals to be reproduced in the present volume.

R. R.

Contents

	PAGE
A Memoir of H. H. Munro	[ix]
The Toys of Peace	[3]
Louise	[13]
Tea	[21]
The Disappearance of Crispina Umberleigh	[29]
The Wolves of Cernogratz	[39]
Louis	[49]
The Guests	[59]
The Penance	[67]
The Phantom Luncheon	[79]
A Bread and Butter Miss	[87]
Bertie’s Christmas Eve	[97]
Forewarned	[107]
The Interlopers	[119]
Quail Seed	[129]
Canossa	[141]
The Threat	[149]
Excepting Mrs. Pentherby	[157]
Mark	[167]
The Hedgehog	[175]
The Mappined Life	[185]
Fate	[193]
The Bull	[201]
Morlvera	[209]
Shock Tactics	[217]
The Seven Cream Jugs	[227]
The Occasional Garden	[237]
The Sheep	[245]
The Oversight	[255]
Hyacinth	[265]
The Image of the Lost Soul	[277]
The Purple of the Balkan Kings	[281]
The Cupboard of the Yesterdays	[287]
For the Duration of the War	[295]

HECTOR HUGH MUNRO

“When peace comes,” wrote an officer of the 22nd Royal Fusiliers, the regiment in which Munro was a private and in which he rose to the rank of lance-sergeant, “Saki will give us the most wonderful of all the books about the war.” But that book of the war will not be written; for Munro has died for King and country. In this volume are his last tales. And it is because these tales, brilliant and elusive as butterflies, hide, rather than reveal, the character of the man who wrote them, give but a suggestion of his tenderness and simplicity, of his iron will, of his splendour in the grip of war, that it is my duty to write these pages about him, now that he lies in the kind earth of France. It is but to do what his choice of a pen-name makes me sure he himself would have done for a friend.