In the Wrong Paradise, and Other Stories Read online

  Transcribed from the 1886 Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. edition by DavidPrice, email ccx074@coventry

  In the Wrong Paradise and Other Storiesby Andrew Lang

  Contents:

  The End of PhaeaciaIn the Wrong ParadiseA Cheap NiggerThe Romance of the First RadicalA Duchess's SecretThe House of Strange StoriesIn Castle PerilousThe Great Gladstone MythMy Friend the Beach-Comber

  DEDICATION.

  DEAR RIDER HAGGARD,

  I have asked you to let me put your name here, that I might have theopportunity of saying how much pleasure I owe to your romances. Theymake one a boy again while one is reading them; and the student of "TheWitch's Head" and of "King Solomon's Mines" is as young, in heart, aswhen he hunted long ago with Chingachgook and Uncas. You, who know thenoble barbarian in his African retreats, appear to retain more than mostmen of his fresh natural imagination. We are all savages under our whiteskins; but you alone recall to us the delights and terrors of the world'snonage. We are hunters again, trappers, adventurers bold, while we studyyou, and the blithe barbarian wakens even in the weary person of letters.He forgets proof-sheets and papers, and the "young lion" seeks his foodfrom God, in the fearless ancient way, with bow or rifle. Of all modernheroes of romance, the dearest to me is your faithful Zulu, and I own Icried when he bade farewell to his English master, in "The Witch's Head."

  In the following tales the natural man takes a hand, but he is seenthrough civilized spectacles, not, as in your delightful books, with theeyes of the sympathetic sportsman. If Why-Why and Mr. Gowles amuse you alittle, let this be my Diomedean exchange of bronze for gold--of the newPhaeacia for Kukuana land, or for that haunted city of Kor, in which yourfair Ayesha dwells undying, as yet unknown to the future lovers of She.

  Very sincerely yours,A. LANG.CROMER, August 29, 1886.

  PREFACE.

  The writer of these apologues hopes that the Rev. Mr. Gowles will not beregarded as his idea of a typical missionary. The countrymen ofCodrington and Callaway, of Patteson and Livingstone, know better whatmissionaries may be, and often are. But the wrong sort as well as theright sort exists everywhere, and Mr. Gowles is not a very grosscaricature of the ignorant teacher of heathendom. I am convinced that hewould have seen nothing but a set of darkened savages in the ancientGreeks. The religious eccentricities of the Hellenes are not exaggeratedin "The End of Phaeacia;" nay, Mr. Gowles might have seen odder things inAttica than he discovered, or chose to record, in Boothland.

  To avoid the charge of plagiarism, perhaps it should be mentioned that"The Romance of the First Radical" was written long before I readTanner's "Narrative of a Captivity among the Indians." Tanner, like Why-Why, had trouble with the chief medicine-man of his community.

  If my dear kinsman and companion of old days, J. J. A., reads "My Friendthe Beach-comber," he will recognize many of his own yarns, but theportrait of the narrator is wholly fanciful.

  "In Castle Perilous" and "A Cheap Nigger" are reprinted from the CornhillMagazine; "My Friend the Beach-comber," from Longman's; "The GreatGladstone Myth," from Macmillan's; "In the Wrong Paradise," from theFortnightly Review; "A Duchess's Secret," from the Overland Mail; "TheRomance of the First Radical," from Fraser's Magazine; and "The End ofPhaeacia," from Time, by the courteous permission of the editors andproprietors of those periodicals.