The Uncanny Reader by Marjorie Sandor Page A

uncanny and picturesque. He looked fitter for restraint than liberty—the restraint of a hospital.
    With no defined purpose I rose and confronted him. He raised his head and looked me full in the face. I have no words to describe the ghastly change that came over his own; it was a look of unspeakable terror—he thought himself eye to eye with a ghost. But he was a courageous man. “Damn you, John Stevens!” he cried, and lifting his trembling arm he dashed his fist feebly at my face and fell headlong upon the gravel as I walked away.
    Somebody found him there, stone-dead. Nothing more is known of him, not even his name. To know of a man that he is dead should be enough.

 
    ON THE WATER
    Guy de Maupassant
    Translated by Edward Gauvin
    Last summer, I rented a little cottage on the banks of the Seine, several leagues from Paris, to which I retired nightly. After a few days, I came to know one of my neighbors. He could have been anywhere between thirty and forty, and was quite the strangest fellow I had ever laid eyes on. An old hand at boating, he was really quite fanatical about it—always down by the water, on the water, in the water. He must have been born in a boat, and when the time comes, it is in a boat that he will meet his end.
    One evening, as we were strolling by the Seine, I asked him to regale me with a few tales from his life on the water. All of a sudden the good gentleman lit up, wouldn’t you know—was transfigured, waxed eloquent, almost poetic. In his heart was a great passion, a devouring, irresistible passion: the river.
    â€œAh!” said he, “how many memories I have of the river you see flowing along beside us! You city dwellers with your streets simply have no idea what the river is. But hear how a fisherman utters the word. To a fisherman, the river is that mysterious thing—profound, uncharted, a land of mirages and phantasmagoria, where by night one sees things that are not, hears noises that one knows not, shivers without reason, as when passing through a graveyard: indeed, it is that most sinister of graveyards, where not a single grave is to be found.
    â€œTo a fisherman the earth is bounded, and in the shadows of a moonless night, the river is limitless. A sailor hardly feels the same thing out at sea. Harsh and wicked as it is, howl and scream as it may, the open sea is honest and true, but the river is silent and perfidious. It never roars; it always flows without a sound, and this eternal movement of water is more terrifying to me than the high ocean waves.
    â€œDreamers claim the sea hides in its bosom vast bluish lands where the drowned toss and turn amidst giant fish in strange forests and crystalline grottoes. The river’s only depths are black and rotten with mud. Yet how beautiful the river is when it shimmers in the rising sun and laps gently at its banks rife with murmuring reeds.
    â€œThe great Hugo said, speaking of the Ocean:
    O tides, how many tearful tales you know!
    Fathomless tides, your stories whispering,
    You drive the fearful mothers to their prayer
    And give the waves their voices of despair
    As rising you draw near in evening.
    Well, if you ask me, the stories those slender reeds whisper ever so sweetly in their little voices are surely more sinister still than the tearful tragedies told by the roaring of the waves.
    â€œBut since you’ve asked me for a few memories, I shall tell you of a singular adventure that befell me here, about ten years ago.
    â€œAt the time I was living, as I still do today, at old Mother Lafon’s place, and one of my best friends, Louis Bernet, who has since given up boating and his wild, carefree ways in favor of a seat on the Council of State, had set himself up in the village of C., two leagues away. We dined together every night, sometimes at his place, sometimes at mine.
    â€œOne night, as I was coming home alone, fairly tired, laboriously lugging my big boat behind me, a