Austin And His Friends

The old-fashioned ghost-story was always terrifying and ghastly; something that made people afraid to go to bed, or to look over their shoulders, or to enter a room in the dark. It dealt with apparitions in a white sheet, and clanking chains, and dreadful faces that peered out from behind the window curtains in a haunted chamber. And the more blood-curdling it was, the more keenly people enjoyed it-until they were left alone, and then they were apt to wish that they had been reading "Robinson Crusoe" or Alison's "History of Europe" instead. Now the present book embodies an attempt to write a c…