"The Pied Piper of Hamelin," by Robert Browning

In which it is important to pay your rodent-exterminating musicians lest he leads your children into a mountain forever, and in which the narrator pretends he has some sense of poetic rhythm.



Hey hey, everyone! One of the creepier classic children's stories out there has always been "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," what with the stealing all the children away and piping and such, so that's this year's choice for our (slightly belated) Halloween story. As I discuss in the probably overlong intro, the story is inspired by a circa 1300 stained-glass church window in the town of Hamelin, Germany, and the earliest written record of the town from 1384 which states "It is 100 years since our children left." The actual cause is unknown (Plague? Drowning? Landslide? Children's crusade? Mass emigration?), as is what the piper represents. He might've been an actual person leading them away (like an emigration recruiter, or a crusade leader), or a symbolic figure of death or the devil. The rats were added to the story a few hundred years later.

1592 painting based on the Hamelin window, which was destroyed in 1660.

 Illustrations and notes after the jump!

The Time Machine, Chapters Eight and Nine

In which our hero explores a museum and find some useful tools, attempts to return to the Sphinx, is waylaid by some Morlocks, and ends up just watching the world burn; and in which our narrator once again wonders at how smart our genius inventor is, but supposes allowances can be made for panic and lack of sleep, I GUESS.



Oh, poor Weena. She was a good little pet humanoid.

Covers! Two more covers tonight:

Haha, oh, this one. It's from 1968, in case you couldn't guess, printed by Berkeley. The blurb at the top reads "The famous novel of one man's defiant gamble with the unknown. The science-fiction masterpiece that heralded the coming of the flower children!" The Eloi on the cover are, of course, wearing mini-skirt-length dresses and are bedecking each other with flowers, while the Time Traveler bursts in on what could very well be a motorcycle through a psychedelic portal between them and the Morlocks below (bearing one of them off). It's, like, a trip, man. I'm not sure if the blurb-writer was trying to make a point of comparing hippies to the childlike, barely sapient Eloi, or if they didn't really look into it that deeply and just wanted to cash in on the latest trend.

Another cover and notes after the jump!

The Time Machine, Chapter FIve

In which the Time Machine most mysteriously goes missing, presumed inside the sphinx; the Time Traveler makes a little friend; and discovers new structures an inhabitants that lead him to revise his politico-evolutionary hypothesis.



Enter the Morlocks! They naturally will play a most important part to come, and as the Time Traveler has already mentioned he has not quite gotten the whole picture yet.

Today's cover is from a 1927 edition by Heinemann. And... nope, I have no idea what's going on here. I mean, I may have forgotten some scene after we rejoin the framing narrative wherein someone at the dinner party starts having some sort of convulsions, but I don't think so. And even if there is, or were, that's the scene you put on the cover? Nothing science-fictiony at all? No future world, no strange creatures, no Time Machine, nothing even vaguely time-related, like a clock or the sun? You want it to look like a murder-mystery? Suit yourself, artist whose work was not scanned in hi-res enough for me to make out the signature, and whose cover I can't find anywhere other than here.

And now useful notes, after the jump! Mostly definitions, but also some talk of sewers. Yay!

"The Ransom of Red Chief," by O. Henry

In which a perfectly honest kidnapping scheme is ruined by a most obstreperous child, and our narrator is glad to be accenting now in the American South.



William Sydney Porter, better known as O. Henry, published "The Ransom of Red Chief" in The Saturday Evening Post in 1907, and then in his short story collection Whirligigs in 1910. It's since become one of the most well-known short comic stories in American literature, and even if you haven't read it before you've surely seen homages to it countless times without even realizing it.

I mention this in the recording, but I'll repeat it here: be aware that this story contains not only a portrayal of an early 1900s child playacting a Native American in a very early-1900s way, but also contains an actual racial slur. You know the one. It's used in a quick and frankly baffling manner, but it's there.

Now illustrations! As far as I could tell, there aren't any "original" illustrations, or at least none that I could find, so I've got a pair here from the Boy Scouts Book of Stories, published for the Boy Scouts of America by D. Appleton and Company in 1920. The line-drawing "decoration" up at the top of the post headed the story and was done by Arthur D. Scott, and the fully-painted illustration here was by Walter Louderback.

15:13 - The Black Scout jumps on Bill's
back and digs his heels in his side.

A couple of quick notes from the text: at 2:12, we are told that the entire motivating factor behind the kidnapping is to acquire funds for a "town-lot scheme." Near as I can tell, this is essentially the old "got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell ya" con, where they sell plots of land they don't quite have the rights to. My guess is that the money was to actually purchase a single plot of land and then sell it multiple times to different people.

A moment later, our loquacious narrator uses the wonderful word "philoprogenitiveness," which is the condition of either producing many offspring or of loving one's offspring, either of which would rather work in context.

Last, around 11:02 Bill says that his favorite Bible character is King Herod. This presumably refers not to the King Herod who challenged Jesus to walk across his swimming pool, but rather his father, Herod the Great, who was the King of Judea who, in the Gospel of Matthew, heard that a new "king of the Jews" was to be born in Bethlehem and thus ordered the deaths of all young boys in and around Bethlehem.

And that's it for this short story interlude! Check back soon for the start of our next book.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Around the World in Eighty Days, Chapters Twenty-Nine and Thirty

In which certain incidents are related, only to be met with on the railroads of the United States; Phileas Fogg simply does his duty; and in which there is a depiction of Native Americans that our narrator supposes technically could have been worse, but, you know, still.



All right, we're gonna get back on track here. We're closing in on the end of the story, and we're suddenly getting some serious action (even if some of the "action," such as Passepartout's rescue, is kinda glossed over). Stay tuned to see if our heroes make it back in time!

No notes this time (it's handy now being in my native land!), but a surprising number of illustrations for only two chapters:

1:17 - "The railroad reached its highest point."

4:00 - "'I should play a diamond.'"

10:18 - "The Sioux entered the cars."

12:05 - "There, suspended by one hand between the baggage car and the tender..."

18:49 - "An enormous shadow, preceded by a lurid light, slowly advanced."

24:04 - "The Frenchman had knocked down three of them with his fist."

If you would like to read along, my translation by Stephen W. White can be found courtesy of Choptank Press on Google Books. If you prefer one of the other options, the George Towle translation can be found at Zvi Har’El’s Jules Verne Collection, which is also where I got the illustrations, or the more accurate but rather fusty Henry Frith translation can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Around the World in Eighty Days, Chapters Twelve to Fourteen

In which Phileas Fogg and his companions venture through the forests of India, and what follows; Passepartout proves again that Fortune smiles upon the bold; Phileas Fogg descends the entire splendid valley of the Ganges without ever thinking of looking at it; and in which the narrator wonders about the cultural accuracy of the novel, is thankful for the first female character in the book, and eagerly awaits her achieving the power of speech.



And so, we pass through most of India and our first real adventure with our heroes, we say goodbye to the good Sir Francis Cromarty, and greet our new major character, Mrs. Auoda. Let's see the visuals!

1:48 - "He laughed in the midst of his somersaults."

In this area, we run into a couple of perhaps unfamiliar but fairly prosaic words: "syenite" at 2:41, which (as you can pretty much tell from context) is a kind of rock; "betel" at 5:44, which is a kind of plant possibly used for dye at some point I guess; and "damascened" at 7:01, which means metalwork inlaid or etched with wavy patterns, related to damask where similar patterns are made in cloth, and both of which derive their name from the ancient city of Damascus. 

9:56 - "But this unfortunate did not seem to make any resistance."

14:41 - "The guards of the rajah, lighted by smoky torches..."

19:18 - "A cry of terror arose."

So around the 25:00 mark, we launch into this rather lengthy passage where the poet-king Ucaf Uddaul describes all the physical charms of a very lovely queen. Thing is, it seems that this "Ucaf Uddaul" is completely made up. I think Verne put this in so that he could get away with passages like "the wealth of her bosom, where youth in its prime displays its most perfect treasures," because... boobs, right? He's talking about boobs?

Oh, also, "Ucaf Uddaul" at 25:49 refers to the immortal sculptor Vicvarcarma, which I'm pretty sure means Vishvakarman, the Hindu deity of craftsmen and architects. Man, some of these archaic names, translated into French and then translated into English....

27:28 - "Passepartout, not at all frightened..."

30:51 - "Bands of Hindus of both sexes"

Anyway, I'm sure it's all clear sailing from here on out!


If you would like to read along, I unfortunately can't find my translation by Stephen W. White online, but the George Towele translation can be found at Zvi Har’El’s Jules Verne Collection, which is also where I got the illustrations, or the more accurate but rather fusty Henry Frith translation at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Chapters Eleven and Twelve

In which our heroes encounter the many forms of Oz, who hires them to whack the Wicked Witch of the West, and then one of the most iconic villains of American children's literature is introduced, encountered, and dispatched in the space of one chapter; and in which the film audience wonders how we can be done with the Wicked Witch if the book is only half over.



We did a full four chapters last time, so we make up for it this time by only doing two. They're extra-long chapters, though, so we've still got a full twenty-three Denslow illustrations to peruse.

"The Snow Queen," First to Third Stories

In which a demon's mirror freezes a young boy's heart, allowing him to be abducted by the eponymous Snow Queen, at which point his young friend Gerda sets out to find him, only to be waylaid by a beautiful garden.



For this short story interlude, I thought that, in honor of the opening of Disney's Frozen, I would read the story that (very) loosely inspired it: "The Snow Queen," by Hans Christian Andersen. Originally published in Danish in 1845, this specific translation was done by Alice Lucas (aka "Mrs. Edgar Lucas," or "Mrs. E. V. Lucas") in approximately 1900. It's not necessarily the best or the most definitive translation, but it is the one I happen to own, and it's also in the public domain, so it's the one I'll be going with.

As one of Andersen's most highly regarded stories (as well as one of his longest), it's garnered quite a number of illustrations over the years. I'm going to go with those by Edmund Dulac, used in a 1911 collection of Andersen's works that used Mrs. Lucas's translation and which is available at Project Gutenberg.

1:31 - "One day he was in a high state of delight because he had invented a mirror with this
peculiarity, that every good and pretty thing reflected in it shrank away to almost nothing."

5:52 - "Many a winter's night she flies through the streets and peeps in at the windows,
and then the ice freezes on the panes into wonderful patterns like flowers."

16:57 - "Then an old, old woman came out of the house; she was leaning upon a big, hooked
stick, and she wore a big sun hat, which was covered with beautiful painted flowers."

A quick note about pronunciation, for those wondering: in most translations, the little boy's name is spelled "Kai," which is presumably pronounced to rhyme with "tie." Mrs. Lucas's translation, though, spells it "Kay," which I don't think I can make myself read in any other manner than to rhyme with "hay." So, sorry about that.

As it turns out, "The Snow Queen" is a rather long short story, so it will be broken up into two parts. The next one will go up tomorrow (a day early, to catch up on the days I missed recently, woo!)

Also, how's everyone like the new mic? Sexy, yeah? Or am I the only one who can hear a difference?


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!