



STORIES
OF THE EAST

LEONARD WOOLF

PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY LEONARD AND VIRGINIA WOOLF
AT THE HOGARTH PRESS, HOGARTH HOUSE, RICHMOND.

1921




CONTENTS

A TALE TOLD BY MOONLIGHT.
PEARLS AND SWINE.
THE TWO BRAHMANS.




A TALE TOLD BY MOONLIGHT


Many people did not like Jessop. He had rather a brutal manner
sometimes of telling brutal things--the truth, he called it. "They
don't like it," he once said to me in a rare moment of confidence.
"But why the devil shouldn't they? They pretend these sorts of things,
battle, murder, and sudden death, are so real--more real than white
kid gloves and omnibuses and rose leaves--and yet when you give them
the real thing, they curl up like school girls. It does them good, you
know, does them a world of good."

They didn't like it and they didn't altogether like him. He was a
sturdy thick set man, very strong, a dark reserved man with black
eyebrows which met over his nose. He had knocked about the world a
good deal. He appealed to me in many w