

E-text prepared by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Jeannie Howse, and the
Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net)



AUSTIN AND HIS FRIENDS

by

FREDERIC H. BALFOUR

Author Of "The Expiation of Eugene," etc.

London
Greening & Co., Ltd.

1906







[Illustration: DAPHNIS AT THE FOUNTAIN]



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The old-fashioned ghost-story was always terrifying and ghastly;
something that made people afraid to go to bed, or to look over their
shoulders, or to enter a room in the dark. It dealt with apparitions
in a white sheet, and clanking chains, and dreadful faces that peered
out from behind the window curtains in a haunted chamber. And the more
blood-curdling it was, the more keenly people enjoyed it--until they
were left alone, and then they were apt to wish that they had been
reading Robinson Crusoe or Alison's History of Europe instead. Now the
present book embodies an attempt to write a _cheerful_ ghost-st