One saw Monson's Flying Machine from the windows of the trains passing either along the South-Western main line or along the line between Wimbledon and Worcester Park,-to be more exact, one saw the huge scaffoldings which limited the flight of the apparatus. They rose over the tree-tops, a massive alley of interlacing iron and timber, and an enormous web of ropes and tackle, extending the best part of two miles...
A young man volunteers to go and stay overnight in the Red Room? The room is known to be haunted and there are many myths and legends about death that are brought up during the story.... when his fear has taken his sense of reasoning and he tries to leave the room and accidently knocks him out. When he finally wakes up the next morning he realises that there was nothing supernatural about the room but only peoples fear of the unknown.
An obsessed amateur scientist steals a diamond (and murders its owner) in order to make a lens for a super-powerful microscope; his experiment succeeds but he is driven mad by what he discovers.
"What if I die under it?" The thought recurred again and again, as I walked home from Haddon's. It was a purely personal question. I was spared the deep anxieties of a married man, and I knew there were few of my intimate friends but would find my death troublesome chiefly on account of their duty of regret. I was surprised indeed, and perhaps a little humiliated, as I turned the matter over, to think how few could possibly exceed the conventional requirement.
Here he is again, the irrepressible Septimus Spink, in a tale as rollicking as an elder giant juggling the stars and the planets in his great, golden hands and laughing mirthfully as one tiny world--our own--goes spinning away from him into caverns measureless to man.
It has been ordained that a select few must from time to time pass over the threshold that divides a mortal's present life from the future. Written well over a century ago, John Uri Lloyd was a visionary who spoke of far distant worlds, dead civilizations, other dimensions and in particular, a world few of us will ever get to visit. A world hidden beneath our feet inside the earth.
These four-and-twenty stories, though not by any means of equal merit, reach, on the whole, a good level of excellence. "The Chemistry of Anarchy" is in particular a capital tale. A young man entangles himself in some Anarchist plots, and is delivered by a scientific friend who finally frightens the revolu- tionists out of their wits. Somewhat resembling this is "A New Explosive." The recipient of a terrible secret thinks it best that secret and inventor should disappear together...
Arthur Granger, an aristocratic and unsuccessful novelist, betrays the ideals he prides himself on for the unrequited love of a young woman. And no ordinary woman, she, but an ethereal, goddess-like, nameless agent from a strange world.
