The Project Gutenberg EBook of Four Weird Tales, by Algernon Blackwood

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Title: Four Weird Tales

Author: Algernon Blackwood

Release Date: September 20, 2005 [EBook #16726]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOUR WEIRD TALES ***

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FOUR WEIRD TALES

BY

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

INCLUDING:

"The Insanity of Jones"
"The Man Who Found Out"
"The Glamour of the Snow" and
"Sand"

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

These stories first appeared in Blackwood's story collections:
"The Insanity of Jones" in _The Listener and Other Stories_ (1907);
"The Man Who Found Out" in _The Wolves of God and Other Fey Stories_
(1921);
"The Glamour of the Snow," and "Sand" in _Pan's Garden_ (1912).

* * * * *

_The Insanity of Jones_

(A Study in Reincarnation)

Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the
way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for
them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar,
thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the
great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them
and the world of causes behind.

For only to the few whose inner senses have been quickened, perchance
by some strange suffering in the depths, or by a natural temperament
bequeathed from a remote past, comes the knowledge, not too welcome,
that this greater world lies ever at their elbow, and that any moment a
chance combination of moods and forces may invite them to cross the
shifting frontier.

Some, however, are born with this awful certainty in their hearts, and
are called to no apprenticeship, and to this select company Jones
undoubtedly belonged.

All his life he had realised that his senses brought to him merely a
more or less interesting set of sham appearances; that space, as men
measure it, was utterly misleading; that time, as the clock ticked it
in a succession of minutes, was arbitrary nonsense; and, in fact, that
all his sensory percepti