The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Disentanglers, by Andrew Lang

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Title: The Disentanglers

Author: Andrew Lang

Release Date: November 8, 2005 [eBook #17031]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DISENTANGLERS***

Transcribed from the 1903 Longmans, Green, and Co. edition by David
Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

THE DISENTANGLERS
by Andrew Lang

with illustrations by H. J. Ford

_Second Impression_

Longmans, Green, and Co.
39 Paternoster Row, London
New York and Bombay
1903

TO HERBERT HILLS, ESQ.
These Studies
OF LIFE AND CHARACTER
_ARE DEDICATED_

PREFACE

It has been suggested to the Author that the incident of the Berbalangs,
in The Adventure of the Fair American, is rather improbable. He can only
refer the sceptical to the perfectly genuine authorities cited in his
footnotes.

I. THE GREAT IDEA

The scene was a dusky shabby little room in Ryder Street. To such caves
many repair whose days are passed, and whose food is consumed, in the
clubs of the adjacent thoroughfare of cooperative palaces, Pall Mall. The
furniture was battered and dingy; the sofa on which Logan sprawled had a
certain historic interest: it was covered with cloth of horsehair, now
seldom found by the amateur. A bookcase with glass doors held a crowd of
books to which the amateur would at once have flown. They were in
'boards' of faded blue, and the paper labels bore alluring names: they
were all First Editions of the most desirable kind. The bottles in the
liqueur case were antique; a coat of arms, not undistinguished, was in
relief on the silver stoppers. But the liquors in the flasks were humble
and conventional. Merton, the tenant of the rooms, was in a Zingari
cricketing coat; he occupied the arm-chair, while Logan, in evening
dress, maintained a difficult equilibrium on the slippery sofa. Both men
were of an age between twenty-five and twenty-nine, both were pleasant to
the eye. Merton was, if anything, under the middle height: fair, slim,
and active. As a freshman he had coxed his College Eight, later he rowed
Bow in that vessel. He