Uncanny Tales (Illustrated)

Patents and the laws which regulate them are queer things to have to do with. No one who has not had personal experience of the complications that arise could believe how far these spread and how entangled they become. Great acuteness as well as caution is called for if you would guide your patent bark safely to port—and perhaps more than anything, a power of holding your tongue. I was no chatterbox, nor, when on a mission of importance, did I go about looking as if I were bursting with secrets, which is, in my opinion, almost as dangerous as revealing them. No one, to meet me on the journeys which it often fell to my lot to undertake, would have guessed that I had anything on my mind but an easy-going young fellow's natural interest in his surroundings, though many a time I have stayed awake through a whole night of railway travel if at all doubtful about my fellow-passengers, or not dared to go to sleep in a hotel without a ready-loaded revolver by my pillow.

About the Author

Mary Louisa Molesworth, née Stewart (29 May 1839 - 20 January 1921) was an English children's story writer who published under the pen name Mrs Molesworth. Her early adult novels, Lover and Husband (1869) to Cicely (1874), were published under the pen name Ennis Graham. Her name is sometimes spelled M. L. S. Molesworth. She was born in Rotterdam, the daughter of wealthy trader Charles Augustus Stewart (1809-1873) and his wife Agnes Janet Wilson (1810-1883). Mary was the youngest of four siblings. She was schooled in the United Kingdom and Switzerland, and spent much of her childhood in Manchester. She married Major R. Molesworth, nephew of Viscount Molesworth, in 1861; they divorced in 1879. She spent the first few years of her marriage in Tabley Grange, near Knutsford in Cheshire, which she rented from George, 2nd Lord de Tabley. Mrs. Molesworth is best known for her children's stories, including Tell Me a Story (1875), Carrots (1876), The Cuckoo Clock (1877), The Tapestry Room (1879), and A Christmas Child (1880). She's been dubbed "the Jane Austen of the nursery," and The Carved Lions (1895) is considered "her masterpiece." According to Roger Lancelyn Green.

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