Genres: Fantasy
Cast of Wonders 13: The Name-Day
Show Notes
Today I wanted to present The Loot of Bombasharna by Lord Dunsany. However, I didn’t check the copyrights well enough. Lord Dunsany’s works are only in the Public Domain in the US, and certainly not in the UK and Australia. My apologies.
However, another very well-known writer was Hector Hugh Munro who used the pen-name Saki. Today we present his story The Name-Day. Saki’s works frequently satirised Edwardian society and culture and often had a mischievous twist, sometimes leaning toward the bizarre. An example of the mischievous is Down Pens, a story about the trials of responding to gift-givers with notes of gratitude, for politeness’ sake.
You can find out more about Saki at the ultimate arbiter of absolute truth, Wikipedia.
The Name-Day
by Saki
Adventures, according to the proverb, are to the adventurous. Quite as often they are to the non-adventurous, to the retiring, to the constitutionally timid. John James Abbleway had been endowed by Nature with the sort of disposition that instinctively avoids Carlist intrigues, slum crusades, the tracking of wounded wild beasts, and the moving of hostile amendments at political meetings. If a mad dog or a Mad Mullah had come his way he would have surrendered the way without hesitation. At school he had unwillingly acquired a thorough knowledge of the German tongue out of deference to the plainly-expressed wishes of a foreign-languages master, who, though he taught modern subjects, employed old-fashioned methods in driving his lessons home. It was this enforced familiarity with an important commercial language which thrust Abbleway in later years into strange lands where adventures were less easy to guard against than in the ordered atmosphere of an English country town.