September 2, 2025 • 11 mins
Discover the enchanting world of Day And Night Stories, featuring fifteen captivating short tales by Algernon Henry Blackwood, CBE (1869 ‚ì 1951). Renowned as one of the most prolific ghost story writers, Blackwoods work blends the supernatural with the ethereal, inviting readers into a realm of wonder and intrigue. A journalist and broadcasting narrator, he has been acclaimed for his consistently exceptional storytelling, with literary critic S. T. Joshi noting that his contributions stand among the finest in the genre. Immerse yourself in these timeless narratives that explore the mysteries of life and the unknown.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Story twelve of Day and Night Stories by Algernon Blackwood.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Story twelve
A bit of Wood. He found himself in Mirn with
some cousins who had various slight ailments, but being rich
and imaginative, had gone to a sanatorium to be cured.
(00:23):
But for its sanatoria, Miron might be a cheerful place.
Their ubiquity reminds a healthy man too often that the
air is really good. Being well enough himself except for
a few mental worries, he went to a gast house
in the neighborhood. In the sanatorium, his cousins complained bitterly
(00:44):
of the food, the ignorant sisters, the inattentive doctors, and
the idiotic regulations generally, which proves that people should not
go to a sanatorium unless they are really ill. However,
they paid heavily for being there, so feltelt that something
was being accomplished, and were annoyed when he called each
(01:04):
day for tea and told them cheerfully how much better
they looked, which proved again that their ailments were slight
and quite curable by the local doctor. At home with
one of the ailing cousins, a rich and pretty girl.
He believed himself in love. It was a three weeks business,
and he spent his mornings walking in the surrounding hills.
(01:27):
His mind reflective, analytical, and ambitious. As with a man
in love. He thought of thousands of things. He mooned Once.
For instance, he paused beside a rivulet to watch the
buttercuff's dip, and asked himself, will she be like this
when we're married, so anxious to be well that she
thinks fearfully all the time of getting ill? For if so,
(01:51):
he felt he would be bored. He knew himself accurately
enough to realize that he never could stand that. Yet
money was a wonderful thing to have, and he, already
thirty five, had little enough. Am I influenced by her money? Then,
he asked himself, and so went on to ask and
wonder about many things besides, For he was of a
(02:14):
reflective temperament, and his father had been a minor poet,
and doubt crept in. He felt a chill. He was
not much of a man, perhaps thin blooded and unsuccessful,
rather a dreamer too. Into the bargain, he had a
hundred pounds a year of his own and a position
in a philanthropic institution due to influence with a nominal
(02:39):
salary attached. He meant to keep the latter. After marriage,
he would work just the same. Nobody would ever say
that of him. And as he sat on the fallen
tree beside the rivulet, idly knocking stones into the rushing
water with his stick, he reflected upon those banaltruisms that
(02:59):
Epitomi eyes two thirds of life. The way little unimportant
things can change a person's whole existence was the one
his thought just now had fastened on his cousin's chill
and headache, for instance, caught at a gloomy picnic on
the Campagna three weeks before, had led to her going
into a sanatorium and being advised that her heart was weak,
(03:23):
that she had a tendency to asthma, that gout was
in her system, and that a treatment of X rays,
radium sun baths and light bas violet rays no meat.
Complete rest with big daily fees to experts with European
reputations were imperative. From the chill, sitting a moment too
(03:44):
long in the shadow of a forgotten patrician tomb, he reflected,
has come all this, all this, including his doubts as
to whether it was herself or her money that he loved,
whether he could stand living with her always, whether he
need really keep his work on after marriage, in a word,
(04:04):
his entire life and future, and her own as well,
all from that tiny chill three weeks ago, and he
knocked with his stick a little piece of sawn off
board that lay beside the rushing water. Upon that bit
of wood, his mind, his mood, then fastened itself. It
was triangular, a piece of sawn off wood, brown with
(04:28):
age and ragged. Once it had been part of a triumphant,
hopeful sapling on the mountains. Then, when thirty years of age,
the men had cut it down. The rest of it
stood somewhere now at this very moment, in the walls
of a house. This extra bit was cast away as useless.
It served no purpose anywhere. It was slowly rotting in
(04:50):
the sun. But each tap of the stick he noticed,
turned its sideways, without sending it over the edge into
the rushing water. It was obstinate. It doesn't want to
go in, he laughed, his father's little talent cropping up
in him. But by jove, it shall, and he pushed
it with his foot, but again it stopped, stuck endways
(05:13):
against a stone. He then stooped, picked it up and
threw it in It plopped and splashed, and went scurrying
away down hill with the bubbling water. Even that scrap
of useless wood, he reflected, rising to continue his aimless walk,
and still idly dreaming, even that bit of rubbish may
(05:34):
have a purpose and may change the life of someone somewhere,
And then went strolling through the fragrant pine woods, crossing
a dozen similar streams, and hitting scores of stones and
scraps and fur cones as he went, till he finally
reached his guest house an hour later and found a
(05:54):
note from her. We shall expect you about three o'clock.
We thought of going for ad. The others feel so
much better. It was a revealing touch, the way she
put it on the others. He made his mind up
then and there. Thus tiny things divide the course of life,
that he could never be happy with such an affected creature.
(06:18):
He went for that drive, sat next to her, consuming beauty,
proposed to her passionately on the way back, was accepted
before he could change his mind, and is now the
father of several healthy children, and just as much afraid
of getting ill or of their getting ill, as she
was fifteen years before the female, of course, matures long
(06:40):
long before the male. He reflected, thinking the matter over
in his study once, and that scrap of wood he
idly set in motion out of impulse, also went its
destined way upon the hurrying water that never dared to stop.
Proud of its new found motion, it ubbed down merrily,
(07:01):
spinning and turning for a mile or so, dancing gaily
over sunny meadows, brushing the dipping buttercups as it passed
through vineyards, woods, and under dusty roads, in neat cool gutters,
and tumbling headlong over little waterfalls until it neared the plain,
and so finally it came to a wooden trough that
(07:23):
led off some of the precious water to a sawmill,
where bare armed men did practical and necessary things. At
the parting of the ways, its angles delayed it for
a moment. Undecided which way to take, it wobbled, and
upon that moment's wobbling hung tragic issues, issues of life
(07:44):
and death, unknowing yet assuredly not unknown. It chose the trough.
It swung lightheartedly into the tearing sluice. It whirled with
the gush of water towards the wheel, banged, spun, trembled,
caught fast in the side where the cogs just chanced
to be, and abruptly stopped the wheel. At any other spot,
(08:08):
the pressure of the water must have smashed it into pulp,
and the wheel have continued as before. But it was
caught in the one place where the various tensions held
it fast immovably. It stopped the wheel, and so the
machinery of the entire mill. It jammed like iron. The
particular angle at which the double handed saw, held by
(08:31):
two weary and perspiring men, had cut it off a
year before, just enabled it to fit and wedge itself
with irresistible exactitude. The pressure of the tearing water combined
with the weight of the massive wheel to fix it
tight and rigid, and in due course a workman, it was,
(08:51):
the foreman of the mill, came from his post inside
to make investigations. He discovered the irritating item that caused
the trouble. He put his weight in a certain way,
he strained his hefty muscles, he swore, and the scrap
of wood was easily dislodged. He fished the morsel out
and tossed it on the bank and spat on it.
(09:14):
The great wheel started with a mighty groan, but it
started a fraction of a second before he expected it
would start. He overbalanced, clutching the revolving framework with a
frantic effort, shouted, swore, leaped at nothing, and fell into
the pouring flood. In an instant he was turned upside down,
(09:36):
sucked under, drowned. He was engaged to be married and
had put by a thousand cronan in the tiroller spot blank.
He was a sober and hard working man. There was
a paragraph in the local paper two days later. The
Englishman asking the porter of his gosthouse for something to
wrap up a present he was taking to his cousin
(09:58):
in the sanatorium. Used that very issue as he folded
its crumpled and recalcitrant sheets with sentimental care upon the
precious object. His eye fell carelessly upon the paragraph. Being
of an idle and reflective temperament, he stopped to read it.
It was headed Humblich's fall, and his poetic eye, inherited
(10:21):
from his foolish rhyming father, caught the pretty expression fleecind vaster.
He read the first few lines. Some fellow with a
picturesque tyrole's name had been drowned beneath a mill wheel.
He was popular in the neighborhood. It seemed he had
saved some money and was just going to be married.
(10:42):
It was very sad Our reader's sympathy was with him, and,
being of a reflective temperament, the Englishman thought for a
moment while he went on wrapping up the parcel. He
wondered if the man had really loved the girl, whether
she too had money, and whether they would have had
lots of children and been happy ever afterwards. And then
(11:04):
he hurried out towards the sanatorium. I shall be late,
he reflected, Such little, unimportant things delay one. End of
story twelve
Story twelve of Day and Night Stories by Algernon Blackwood.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Story twelve
A bit of Wood. He found himself in Mirn with
some cousins who had various slight ailments, but being rich
and imaginative, had gone to a sanatorium to be cured.
(00:23):
But for its sanatoria, Miron might be a cheerful place.
Their ubiquity reminds a healthy man too often that the
air is really good. Being well enough himself except for
a few mental worries, he went to a gast house
in the neighborhood. In the sanatorium, his cousins complained bitterly
(00:44):
of the food, the ignorant sisters, the inattentive doctors, and
the idiotic regulations generally, which proves that people should not
go to a sanatorium unless they are really ill. However,
they paid heavily for being there, so feltelt that something
was being accomplished, and were annoyed when he called each
(01:04):
day for tea and told them cheerfully how much better
they looked, which proved again that their ailments were slight
and quite curable by the local doctor. At home with
one of the ailing cousins, a rich and pretty girl.
He believed himself in love. It was a three weeks business,
and he spent his mornings walking in the surrounding hills.
(01:27):
His mind reflective, analytical, and ambitious. As with a man
in love. He thought of thousands of things. He mooned Once.
For instance, he paused beside a rivulet to watch the
buttercuff's dip, and asked himself, will she be like this
when we're married, so anxious to be well that she
thinks fearfully all the time of getting ill? For if so,
(01:51):
he felt he would be bored. He knew himself accurately
enough to realize that he never could stand that. Yet
money was a wonderful thing to have, and he, already
thirty five, had little enough. Am I influenced by her money? Then,
he asked himself, and so went on to ask and
wonder about many things besides, For he was of a
(02:14):
reflective temperament, and his father had been a minor poet,
and doubt crept in. He felt a chill. He was
not much of a man, perhaps thin blooded and unsuccessful,
rather a dreamer too. Into the bargain, he had a
hundred pounds a year of his own and a position
in a philanthropic institution due to influence with a nominal
(02:39):
salary attached. He meant to keep the latter. After marriage,
he would work just the same. Nobody would ever say
that of him. And as he sat on the fallen
tree beside the rivulet, idly knocking stones into the rushing
water with his stick, he reflected upon those banaltruisms that
(02:59):
Epitomi eyes two thirds of life. The way little unimportant
things can change a person's whole existence was the one
his thought just now had fastened on his cousin's chill
and headache, for instance, caught at a gloomy picnic on
the Campagna three weeks before, had led to her going
into a sanatorium and being advised that her heart was weak,
(03:23):
that she had a tendency to asthma, that gout was
in her system, and that a treatment of X rays,
radium sun baths and light bas violet rays no meat.
Complete rest with big daily fees to experts with European
reputations were imperative. From the chill, sitting a moment too
(03:44):
long in the shadow of a forgotten patrician tomb, he reflected,
has come all this, all this, including his doubts as
to whether it was herself or her money that he loved,
whether he could stand living with her always, whether he
need really keep his work on after marriage, in a word,
(04:04):
his entire life and future, and her own as well,
all from that tiny chill three weeks ago, and he
knocked with his stick a little piece of sawn off
board that lay beside the rushing water. Upon that bit
of wood, his mind, his mood, then fastened itself. It
was triangular, a piece of sawn off wood, brown with
(04:28):
age and ragged. Once it had been part of a triumphant,
hopeful sapling on the mountains. Then, when thirty years of age,
the men had cut it down. The rest of it
stood somewhere now at this very moment, in the walls
of a house. This extra bit was cast away as useless.
It served no purpose anywhere. It was slowly rotting in
(04:50):
the sun. But each tap of the stick he noticed,
turned its sideways, without sending it over the edge into
the rushing water. It was obstinate. It doesn't want to
go in, he laughed, his father's little talent cropping up
in him. But by jove, it shall, and he pushed
it with his foot, but again it stopped, stuck endways
(05:13):
against a stone. He then stooped, picked it up and
threw it in It plopped and splashed, and went scurrying
away down hill with the bubbling water. Even that scrap
of useless wood, he reflected, rising to continue his aimless walk,
and still idly dreaming, even that bit of rubbish may
(05:34):
have a purpose and may change the life of someone somewhere,
And then went strolling through the fragrant pine woods, crossing
a dozen similar streams, and hitting scores of stones and
scraps and fur cones as he went, till he finally
reached his guest house an hour later and found a
(05:54):
note from her. We shall expect you about three o'clock.
We thought of going for ad. The others feel so
much better. It was a revealing touch, the way she
put it on the others. He made his mind up
then and there. Thus tiny things divide the course of life,
that he could never be happy with such an affected creature.
(06:18):
He went for that drive, sat next to her, consuming beauty,
proposed to her passionately on the way back, was accepted
before he could change his mind, and is now the
father of several healthy children, and just as much afraid
of getting ill or of their getting ill, as she
was fifteen years before the female, of course, matures long
(06:40):
long before the male. He reflected, thinking the matter over
in his study once, and that scrap of wood he
idly set in motion out of impulse, also went its
destined way upon the hurrying water that never dared to stop.
Proud of its new found motion, it ubbed down merrily,
(07:01):
spinning and turning for a mile or so, dancing gaily
over sunny meadows, brushing the dipping buttercups as it passed
through vineyards, woods, and under dusty roads, in neat cool gutters,
and tumbling headlong over little waterfalls until it neared the plain,
and so finally it came to a wooden trough that
(07:23):
led off some of the precious water to a sawmill,
where bare armed men did practical and necessary things. At
the parting of the ways, its angles delayed it for
a moment. Undecided which way to take, it wobbled, and
upon that moment's wobbling hung tragic issues, issues of life
(07:44):
and death, unknowing yet assuredly not unknown. It chose the trough.
It swung lightheartedly into the tearing sluice. It whirled with
the gush of water towards the wheel, banged, spun, trembled,
caught fast in the side where the cogs just chanced
to be, and abruptly stopped the wheel. At any other spot,
(08:08):
the pressure of the water must have smashed it into pulp,
and the wheel have continued as before. But it was
caught in the one place where the various tensions held
it fast immovably. It stopped the wheel, and so the
machinery of the entire mill. It jammed like iron. The
particular angle at which the double handed saw, held by
(08:31):
two weary and perspiring men, had cut it off a
year before, just enabled it to fit and wedge itself
with irresistible exactitude. The pressure of the tearing water combined
with the weight of the massive wheel to fix it
tight and rigid, and in due course a workman, it was,
(08:51):
the foreman of the mill, came from his post inside
to make investigations. He discovered the irritating item that caused
the trouble. He put his weight in a certain way,
he strained his hefty muscles, he swore, and the scrap
of wood was easily dislodged. He fished the morsel out
and tossed it on the bank and spat on it.
(09:14):
The great wheel started with a mighty groan, but it
started a fraction of a second before he expected it
would start. He overbalanced, clutching the revolving framework with a
frantic effort, shouted, swore, leaped at nothing, and fell into
the pouring flood. In an instant he was turned upside down,
(09:36):
sucked under, drowned. He was engaged to be married and
had put by a thousand cronan in the tiroller spot blank.
He was a sober and hard working man. There was
a paragraph in the local paper two days later. The
Englishman asking the porter of his gosthouse for something to
wrap up a present he was taking to his cousin
(09:58):
in the sanatorium. Used that very issue as he folded
its crumpled and recalcitrant sheets with sentimental care upon the
precious object. His eye fell carelessly upon the paragraph. Being
of an idle and reflective temperament, he stopped to read it.
It was headed Humblich's fall, and his poetic eye, inherited
(10:21):
from his foolish rhyming father, caught the pretty expression fleecind vaster.
He read the first few lines. Some fellow with a
picturesque tyrole's name had been drowned beneath a mill wheel.
He was popular in the neighborhood. It seemed he had
saved some money and was just going to be married.
(10:42):
It was very sad Our reader's sympathy was with him, and,
being of a reflective temperament, the Englishman thought for a
moment while he went on wrapping up the parcel. He
wondered if the man had really loved the girl, whether
she too had money, and whether they would have had
lots of children and been happy ever afterwards. And then
(11:04):
he hurried out towards the sanatorium. I shall be late,
he reflected, Such little, unimportant things delay one. End of
story twelve
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