A fanfare of trumpets is blowing to which women the world over are listening. They listen even against their wills, and not all of them answer, though all are disturbed. Shut their ears to it as they will, they cannot wholly keep out the clamor of those trumpets, but whether in thrall to love or to religion, they are stirred.
Kate," she announced, "you look like a kind eagle." "A wounded one, then, Honora." "You've a story for me, I see. Sit down and tell it." So Kate told it, compelling the history of her humiliating failure to stand out before the calm, adjudging mind of her friend. "But oughtn't we to forgive everything to the old?" cried Honora at the conclusion of the recital. "Oh, is father old?" responded Kate in anguish. "He doesn't seem old -- only formidable. If I'd thought I'd been wrong I never would have come up here to ask you to sustain me in my obstinacy. Truly, Honora, it isn't a question of age. He's hardly beyond his prime, and he has been using all of his will, which has grown strong with having his own way, to break me down the way most of the men in Silvertree have broken their women down. I was getting to be just like the others, and to start when I heard him coming in at the door, and to hide things from him so that he wouldn't rage. I'd have been lying next." "Kate!" "Oh, you think it isn't decent for me to speak that way of my father! You can't think how it seems to me -- how -- how irreligious! But let me save my soul, Honora! Let me do that!" The girl's pallid face, sharpened and intensified, bore the imprint of genuine misery.
The ghostly tales of a highly distinguished female American author Elia Peattie was a prolific American author, journalist and critic of the later 19th and early twentieth centuries. The young Elia was an avid reader and writer and although she left school at the age of fourteen, she was exceptionally talented. By her early twenties she was writing short stories for newspapers and soon became a journalist for the 'Chicago Tribune.' During her career she held a number of senior journalistic posts and wrote for many of the most prestigious American periodicals of the day. She wrote novels, non-fiction guides and travel books, which were well regarded, as well as books for younger readers. 'The Shape of Fear, ' her only volume of short stories of the strange and ghostly has been augmented here, by several previously uncollected tales, to create a collection that includes such evocative titles as 'From the Loom of the Dead, ' 'On the Northern Ice, ' 'Story of an Obstinate Corpse, ' 'Story of the Vanishing Patient, ' 'The Angel With the Broom' and 'The Blood Apple.' This special Leonaur edition is therefore the most complete collection of Elia Peattie's supernatural fiction available and it will be a welcome addition to the libraries of all those fascinated by he genre. Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands
The cover of this little book looks to be woven of mists and moonbeams, as mystical and as exquisite as the tales themselves. Exquisite may seem a singular term to apply to a volume of ghost lore, but no other word could so well convey an idea of the first impression of the work. Sweetness, beauty and grace are its earliest effects, and these are not the usual characteristics of the shapes of fear assumed to revisit the glimpses of the moon...such slender, shadowy delicate little studies of the unknown that the effect which they produce appears at first out of proportion to the size of the work...The stories are works of art; the spirit of the work is of the noblest; the style is of the best and the simplest, so simple that only the very greatest is more simple. -- The Bookman, Jan. 1899
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