WELSH RAREBIT TALES.

“There, creeping out of the darkness, was thathideous thing.” (See page 171.)

Welsh Rarebit Tales

BY
HARLE OREN CUMMINS

Illustrated by
R. EMMETT OWEN

Cover and Decorations by BIRD

The Mutual Book Company
Boston, Mass.

Copyright, by
The Mutual Book Company
1902

Plimpton Press
PRINTERS AND BINDERS
NORWOOD, MASS.

To my Mother

The author wishes to express his thanks to S. S. McClure& Co., F. A. Munsey, The Shortstory Publishing Company,and others, for their courtesy in allowing him book rights onthe following tales.

A PREFACE is the placewhere an author usually apologizesto the public for whathe is about to inflict. Suchbeing the case, I hasten tostate that I am only jointlyresponsible for this aggregationof tales, which resemble, more than anythingelse, the creations of a disordered brain.

The origin of the Welsh Rarebit Tales wasas follows: A certain literary club, of which Iam a member, is accustomed to hold semi-occasionalmeetings at some of the uptown hotels.At the close of the dinner each of the fifteenmembers is permitted to read to the others whathe considers his most acute spasm since the previousmeeting. The good and bad points of themanuscript are then discussed, and we believethat much mutual benefit is thereby derived.

Having run short of first-class plots, the clubat a recent meeting decided to try a gastro-literaryexperiment. Knowing the effect upon thedigestive and cerebral organs of indulging in[vi]concentrated food before retiring, we each andevery one partook, just before adjourning, of thefollowing combination:—

At the second meeting of the club (the nextmeeting, by the way, had to be postponed onaccount of illness of fourteen of the members)the accompanying tales were related.

Partly as a warning to injudicious diners, wedecided to publish the result of our experiment,hoping that all who read this book, and see thenightmares which were produced, will be warnednever to try a similar feat (or eat)....