Produced by Suzanne Shell, Stephen Blundell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net The House of Souls By Arthur Machen _Short Story Index Reprint Series_ AYER COMPANY PUBLISHERS, INC. NORTH STRATFORD, NH 03590 First Published 1922 Reprint Edition, 1999 AYER Company Publishers, Inc. Lower Mill Road North Stratford, NH 03590 INTERNATIONAL STANDARD BOOK NUMBER: 0-8369-3806-2 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 72-152947 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Transcriber's Note: Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. The oe ligature is shown as [oe]. Contents A Fragment of Life 1 The White People 111 The Great God Pan 167 The Inmost Light 245 Introduction _It was somewhere, I think, towards the autumn of the year 1889 that the thought occurred to me that I might perhaps try to write a little in the modern way. For, hitherto, I had been, as it were, wearing costume in literature. The rich, figured English of the earlier part of the seventeenth century had always had a peculiar attraction for me. I accustomed myself to write in it, to think in it; I kept a diary in that manner, and half-unconsciously dressed up my every day thoughts and common experiences in the habit of the Cavalier or of the Caroline Divine. Thus, when in 1884 I got a commission to translate the Heptameron, I wrote quite naturally in the language of my favourite period, and, as some critics declare, made my English version somewhat more antique and stiff than the original. And so "The Anatomy of Tobacco" was an exercise in the antique of a different kind; and "The Chronicle of Clemendy" was a volume of tales that tried their hardest to be mediaeval; and the translation of the "Moyen de Parvenir" was still a thing in the ancient mode._