[BNP/E3, 13 – 40]
III
{…}
IV
Ah, what avails all mourning? Thou art gone
From life and hope and grand loveliness,
And that deep rest that man call drunkenness.
Ah, Corydon! Ah Corydon!
Thou, the first hope of all our race,
Hast left the blessed paths of peace and love —
Ah, wilt thou be content to rove
{…}
From shop to shop with her, thy mother-in-law,
Or tremble pall to hear at night,
With horror deep, and deep affright
The worthy torrent from thy spouse’s jaw?
V
Oh, the troubles to come to thee can ever I dare name?
To work on the day and at night to walk the bedroom’s length
On a seeming heavy baby to waste the seeming warning strength
And as the husband of thy wife to reach the light of fame.
Now my voice broken with weeping and mine eyes-red, as with sand:
And my stomach worn with sighing and with sighing won my breast
Ah farewell thee thou art gone now to the dreaded, obscure land
Where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary never rest.
Charles Robert Anon.
[40v]
___
…
___
Ah, frailness of mankind, {…}
Thou, that didst sneer at woman and didst hold
Thyself superior, now (alas!) wilt find
Amid the waning joy and waning gold
Thou learndst in a sorry school
That thought thee to disdain
The seeming-tender being whose iron rules
Shall now wreak on thee horrid pain!
Too late now wilt thou learn, too late!
When thy voice is low and humble thy gait,
When thy soul is crush’d and thy dress sedate
The greatest of all ills the Gods on humans rain.
Charles Robert Anon etc Charles Robert Anon
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6th April 1905
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One great stumbling-block in the way of writers of detective stories is the difficulty they find in making the discovery of the criminal a real surprise to the reader. That is to say, a detective story loses much of its interest if the criminal, when discovered, turns out to be a person unknown (to the reader), that is, one who has not appeared in the tale. A writer of mean imagination thinks that he solves this problem by making a terrible series of embroilments, at the end of which a person the reader does not suspect is found to be the criminal, very often indeed, a person who has been helping the detective. Nay, I shall assert that I have somewhere read a detective story where the investigator himself turns out to be the criminal.
