Fancies and Goodnights Read Online Free PDF

FALLEN STAR
    In Hell, as in other places we know of, conditions are damnably
disagreeable. Well-adjusted, energetic, and ambitious devils take
this very much in their stride. They expect to improve their lot
and ultimately to become friends of distinction.
    In the great mass of ordinary, plodding, run-of-the-mill devils,
any escapist tendencies are sufficiently ventilated by
entertainments akin to radio and television, which offer them
glimpses of what they take to be Paradise, interrupted by screaming
commercials.
    There are, however, certain idle, worthless, and altogether
undevilish devils who dream incessantly of getting away from it
all, and a few of them have actually managed to do so. The
authorities are at no great pains to recapture them, for they are
invariably chronic unemployables and nothing but a burden on the
community.
    Some of the fugitives have established themselves on sundry
minute planetoids which are scattered here and there along the
outer fringes of the Pleiades. These tiny worlds rise like green
atolls in the everlasting blue. Here the deserters build their
sorry shacks, and subsist on a little desultory soul-fishing. They
live like beachcombers, growing fatter and lazier every year, and
they compare themselves to the mutineers of the Bounty .
    When they want a bit of change, they take a swim in the azure
ether, and sometimes go as far as the cliffs of Heaven, just to
take a look at the girls, who, naturally enough, are as beautiful
as angels.
    The cliffs of Heaven, you may be sure, are studded with summer
resorts and well-supervised bathing beaches. There are also some
quiet creeks and unfrequented bays where the ether washes in
sapphire waves upon golden rocks, and over sands of a quality to
make any honest digger call for spade and pail. Here, where no
lifeguard stands with unfolded pinions, bathing is strictly
prohibited. This is because of the occasional presence of one of
those lurking, sharkish, runaway devils, and whoever goes in in
defiance of the regulations must be prepared to face the
consequences. But in spite of the risk, or because of it, some of
the younger set of Heaven take a huge delight in breaking the
rules, as the younger set do everywhere.
    Thus a certain delightful young she-angel came down one morning
into one of these forbidden caves. The weather was heavenly and her
heart was as vibrant as one of her own harpstrings. She felt that
her blissful existence might blossom into something even more
blissful at any moment She sat a long while on an overhanging rock,
and sang as gaily as the lark of the morning. Then she stood up,
made a pose or two, she hardly knew why, and finally she took off
with a swan-dive into the exhilarating ether.
    An elderly, fat, and most unprepossessing devil had been hanging
off-shore in the shallows for no other purpose than to play the
Peeping Tom. The sight of this lovely creature aroused a ticklish
and insistent longing in the old reprobate; it rose up in his black
heart like a belch in a tar caldron. He swung in and seized her as
a shark might seize on a bathing beauty, and he swept her swooning
off to his little verdant planet, and on to the rickety porch of
his cabin, which jutted out from the rocks for all the world like
one of those fishing shacks that are to be found on any island in
the tropics.
    She came to herself with a gasp, and looked with horror at her
repulsive captor, whose paunch sagged over his greasy belt, and
whose tattered jeans scarcely sufficed to conceal his devilishness.
He, with a rusty pair of shears, was already at work clipping her
wings, and, gathering up the feathers:

THE TOUCH OF NUTMEG MAKES IT
    A dozen big firms subsidize our mineralogical institute, and
most of them keep at least one man permanently on research there.
The library has the intimate and smoky atmosphere of a club. Logan
and I had been there longest and had the two tables in the big
window bay. Against the wall, just at the edge of the bay, where
the