Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: KELLSON'S NEMESIS. Take Sin's empty goblet, fling it Hurtling from some sheer cliff's height: Winds will bear it up and wing it Back to thee in devious flight. Smash it 'gainst the rocks—before thee Laming fragments strew thy path. Swamp it deep—the waves restore thee What thou gav'st them, brimmed with wrath. Shagbag's Soliloquy on the Boomerang. JlGHT had fallen, although the red glow had not yet quite faded out of the west, when John Jukes Kellson, the newly appointed Civil Commissioner and Resident Magistrate of Mar- sonton, drove down the hill into the village in which he would henceforth reside and exercise his official functions. The cart drawn by four horses, which conveyed him, had been hired at a town over ninety miles away, and Kellson had driven that distance in two broiling hot days. As the cart went slowly down the hill, the moon was rising over the eastern mountains, anda breathless stillness reigned, broken only by the rumble of the vehicle. How familiar it all was ; he knew every curve of the road and every ant-heap ; every bush looming in the twilight seemed like an old acquaintance. Nineteen years had passed since Kellson had last seen the village. A clerk in the local public offices, he had left it on promotion, and now he was returning as chief government functionary. How strange it seemed ! The cart reached the hotel and stopped before the front door. It was Sunday night. Having a constitutional distaste for public functions of all kinds outside the established official routine, Kellson had purposely left the inhabitants of the village and district in the dark as to the date of his intended arrival, so as to avoid the agonies of a public reception, involving an address and a reply, both couched in the irritating platitudinous phraseol...