: The Third Circle by Irwin Will Author Of Introduction Etc Norris Frank - Short stories American; American fiction

@FreeBooks

Posted in: #FreeBooks #FreeBooksIndia #FreeBooksApp #gg

Vote Up Vote Down   0 Reactions

Login to give Reaction!

The Third Circle The House With the Blinds Little Dramas of the Curbstone Shorty Stack, Pugilist The Strangest Thing A Reversion to Type "Boom" The Dis-Associated Charities Son of a Sheik A Defense of the Flag Toppan A Caged Lion "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" Dying Fires Grettir at Drangey The Guest of Honour

He was a hero to us all in those days, as he will ever remain a heroic memory--that unique product of our Western soil, killed, for some hidden purpose of the gods, before the time of full blossom. He had gone East but a year since to publish the earliest in his succession of rugged, virile novels--"Moran of the Lady Letty," "McTeague," "Blix," "A Man's Woman," "The Octopus," and "The Pit." The East was just beginning to learn that he was great; we had known it long before. With a special interest, then, did I, his humble cub successor as sub editor and sole staff writer, follow that prentice work of his from the period of his first brief sketches, through the period of rough, brilliant short stories hewed out of our life in the Port of Adventures, to the period of that first serial which brought him into his own.

Here collected are the longest and most important of his prentice products. Even without those shorter sketches whose interest is, after all, mainly technical, they are an incomparable study in the way a genius takes to find himself. It is as though we saw a complete collection of Rembrandt's early sketches, say--full technique and co-ordination not yet developed, but all the basic force and vision there. Admirable in themselves, these rough-hewn tales, they are most interesting when compared with the later work which the world knows, and when taken as a melancholy indication of that power of growth which was in him and which must have led, if the masters of fate had only spared him, to the highest achievement in letters.

WILL IRWIN. March, 1909.

There are more things in San Francisco's Chinatown than are dreamed of in Heaven and earth. In reality there are three parts of Chinatown--the part the guides show you, the part the guides don't show you, and the part that no one ever hears of. It is with the latter part that this story has to do. There are a good many stories that might be written about this third circle of Chinatown, but believe me, they never will be written--at any rate not until the "town" has been, as it were, drained off from the city, as one might drain a noisome swamp, and we shall be able to see the strange, dreadful life that wallows down there in the lowest ooze of the place--wallows and grovels there in the mud and in the dark. If you don't think this is true, ask some of the Chinese detectives , ask them to tell you the story of the Lee On Ting affair, or ask them what was done to old Wong Sam, who thought he could break up the trade in slave girls, or why Mr. Clarence Lowney is now a "dangerous" inmate of the State Asylum--ask them to tell you why Matsokura, the Japanese dentist, went back to his home lacking a face--ask them to tell you why the murderers of Little Pete will never be found, and ask them to tell you about the little slave girl, Sing Yee, or--no, on the second thought, don't ask for that story.

The tale I am to tell you now began some twenty years ago in a See Yup restaurant on Waverly Place--long since torn down--where it will end I do not know. I think it is still going on. It began when young Hillegas and Miss Ten Eyck found their way into the restaurant of the Seventy Moons, late in the evening of a day in March.

"What a dear, quaint, curious old place!" exclaimed Miss Ten Eyck.

She sat down on an ebony stool with its marble seat, and let her gloved hands fall into her lap, looking about her at the huge hanging lanterns, the gilded carven screens, the lacquer work, the inlay work, the coloured glass, the dwarf oak trees growing in Satsuma pots, the marquetry, the painted matting, the incense jars of brass, high as a man's head, and all the grotesque jim-crackery of the Orient. The restaurant was deserted at that hour. Young Hillegas pulled up a stool opposite her and leaned his elbows on the table, pushing back his hat and fumbling for a cigarette.

"Might just as well be in China itself," he commented.

"Might?" she retorted; "we are in China, Tom--a little bit of China dug out and transplanted here. Fancy all America and the Nineteenth Century just around the corner! Look! You can even see the Palace Hotel from the window. See out yonder, over the roof of that temple--the Ming Yen, isn't it?--and I can actually make out Aunt Harriett's rooms."

"I say, Harry let's have some tea."

"Tom, you're a genius! Won't it be fun! Of course we must have some tea. What a lark! And you can smoke if you want to."

Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg

(0)

Login to post a comment!