"The Cauldron: True Adventures of Terror"

Preston Langley Hickey (1900-1962) was just twenty-two years old when he began conducting a regular feature for Weird Tales called "The Cauldron: True Adventures of Terror," which had been announced in the issue of April 1923 (on page 184). Four installments of "The Cauldron" followed in the issues of June, July/August, September, and October of 1923. The idea behind "The Cauldron" is that readers would submit accounts of their own weird or presumably supernatural experiences for publication. Hickey must have served as reader of manuscripts and editor. He was known later as an author of "true" or confessional-type stories in other pulp magazines. I believe stories in "The Cauldron" were of the same type. The idea was revived in the Weird Tales feature "It Happened to Me," published in eleven installments in March 1940 through November 1941. Fate magazine published similar accounts.

The authors of the dozen stories or accounts in "The Cauldron" are lumped in indexes with the writers of letters published in "The Eyrie." I don't think they should be. Instead, I think they should be considered a separate category of authors, though certainly not on the same level as the poets or the authors of fiction and longer non-fiction articles. Nonetheless, they are authors. Their stories or accounts and their names are as follows:

June 1923

• "The Ghost of Death" by Owen King of North Lamoine, Maine.

• Untitled by Otis Trevor, a reporter for the Denver Times.

• "The Death Plunge" by John Burkholz.

July/August 1923

• "The Lesson in Anatomy" by John R. Palmer.

• "The Black Nun" by H.F.K., a woman.

• "The Phantom Train" by Charles White, who may have been the same Charles White of Quebec City, Canada, who had a letter in "The Eyrie" in September 1923.

• "A Strange Manifestation" by Matt. Byrne Ap'Rhys, C.E. In case you're wondering, Ap'Rhys is indeed a surname, I believe of Welsh origin.

September 1923

• "Pat McCloskey's Ghost" by J.P. Cronister.

• "The Velvet Death" by Henry Trefon, no doubt a pseudonym of Mary Sharon (née Henrietta Prouty, 1895-1962) or of Mary Sharon writing with her husband, Van Simon Trefon (1886-1971). Mary Sharon had a letter in "The Eyrie" in June 1923, and she would soon have a poem, "The Ghost," in Weird Tales (Feb. 1924), the first by a woman in the pages of "The Unique Magazine."

• "Arthur Armstrong's Predicament" by D.G. Prescott, Jr.

October 1923

• "After I Was Dead" by John W. Walton, age fourteen, of Pennsylvania.

• "Mysterious Radio" by Maxwell Levey.

Next: "The Eyrie" for June of 1923.

Weird Tales, April 1923, page 184, announcing "The Cauldron."

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales, June 1923

Like the first pair of issues of Weird Tales, the second pair--the issues of May and June--go together. Both have the same main title logo and each has 120 interior pages. William F. Heitman was the cover artist on both, and he drew all of the interior art in both. There are twenty-one stories in the May issue of 1923 but only seventeen in the one for June. The staff of the magazine made up for that with thirteen non-fiction fillers (all by an uncredited author or authors), plus a non-fiction article, plus two features, "The Eyrie" and a new feature called "The Cauldron: True Adventures of Terror," conducted by Preston Langley Hickey (1900-1962).

Firsts in Weird Tales for June 1923 include:

• The first story with a series character, Dr. Dorp in Otis Adelbert Kline's short story "The Phantom Wolfhound."

• The first reprint of a story by Edgar Allan Poe, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," from 1841.

• The first photograph, a picture of an electric chair, taken by Harry Hirschfield and used as an illustration for "The Chair," a non-fiction article by Dr. Harry E. Meerness.

• The first regular feature other than "The Eyrie," the aforementioned "The Cauldron: True Adventures of Terror," conducted by Preston Langley Hickey.

I haven't read most of the stories in that fourth issue. There may be other firsts hiding inside.

I have written before about eleven of the eighteen authors listed below. Click on their names for links.

• Paul Ellsworth Triem (1882-1976)

• Harold Freeman Miners (1890-1928)

• Hamilton Craigie (1880-1956)

• Edwin MacLaren (dates unknown)

• Adam Hull Shirk (1881-1931)

• Julian Kilman (1878-1954)--His story "The Well" was reprinted in The Best of Weird Tales: 1923, edited by John Gregory Betancourt and Marvin Kaye.

• Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946)

• Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1949)

• A. G. Birch (1883-1972)--His story was the second part of the two-part serial "The Moon Terror."

• Walter Noble Burns (1866-1932)--The title of his story "The Man the Law Forgot" is a variation of "The Man Who . . .".

• George Warburton Lewis (1878-1963)

• Loual B. Sugarman (1894-1965)--His story "The Gray Death" was reprinted in The Eighth Green Man and Other Strange Folk, edited by Robert Weinberg (Starmont House, 1989).

• Henry Leverage (1885-1931)

• Hugh Thomason (dates unknown)--This may have been Captain Hugh Thomason, a friend of and correspondent with Edgar Rice Burroughs. Captain Thomason also used the pen names Jack MacLeod and Captain John Graham. Hugh Thomason the author, if he was a different person, also used the pen name Rjinn Van Veldt.

• Helen Rowe Henze (1899-1973)--She was the only woman author in the fourth issue of Weird Tales.

• Tarleton Collier (1888 or 1889-1970)

• Herbert Hipwell (dates unknown)

• Dr. Harry E. Mereness (dates unknown; possibly a pseudonym)

Next: "The Cauldron: True Adventures of Terror."

Weird Tales, June 1923, with cover art by William F. Heitman illustrating Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." This is the first gorilla or ape cover in Weird Tales. Unfortunately, it's terribly inept. Heitman was a better artist than this. I wonder what happened.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Lady Gwendolen Cecil (1860-1945)

Lady Gwendolen Georgiana Gascoyne-Cecil
Author, Biographer
Born July 28, 1860, London, England
Died September 28, 1945, Hertfordshire, Hertford, England

Gwendolen Georgiana Gascoyne-Cecil was born on July 28, 1860, in London, England. She was the daughter of Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830-1903), and the former Georgina Charlotte Alderson (1827-1899). Gwendolen's father, the Marquess of Salisbury, also known as Lord Robert Cecil and Lord Salisbury, was a member of Parliament, secretary of state for India, British foreign secretary, and three-time prime minister of the United Kingdom. His wife was his literary assistant and the mother of his eight children. She also wrote political articles for publication in the Saturday Review and the Quarterly Review.

Lady Gwendolen Cecil was an author and her father's biographer. She wrote a short story called "The Little Ray," published in The Pall Mall Magazine in August 1894. She was also the anonymous author of "The Closed Cabinet," which was in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (Vol. CLVII, No. DCCCLI) in January 1895. Her major work was her four-volume biography of her father, entitled Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury (1921, 1932). "The Closed Cabinet" was her lone story in Weird Tales, and it was reprinted anonymously.

Lady Gwendolen died on September 28, 1945, in Hertfordshire, Hertford, England. She was eighty-five years old. She has a cultivar of the peony named after her, a distinction no doubt unique among contributors to "The Unique Magazine."

Lady Gwendolen Cecil's Story in Weird Tales
"The Closed Cabinet" as by _____ _____ (May 1923)

Further Reading
Not much that I have found or of note except in old newspaper articles, including a number that describe her being in an automobile accident in 1908. She was run over by her own electric vehicle after having gotten out to open a gate.

Gwendolen Gascoyne-Cecil (1860-1945) in a portrait drawn in 1895 by Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898).

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

"The Closed Cabinet" by _____ _____ & Sunday Swipes No. 3

"The Moon Terror" by A.G. Birch was the first story in the May 1923 issue of Weird Tales. "The Closed Cabinet" by _____ _____ was the last. _____ _____ was an anonymous author in the pages of "The Unique Magazine" and in the original. The original was Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (Vol. CLVII, No. DCCCLI), published in January 1895. The publication of "The Closed Cabinet" was announced in newspapers in December 1894. In its issue of January 21, 1895, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle called it "an old time Scotch story." (p. 12)

In an item called "Literary Gossip," the Bowling Green, Ohio, Daily Sentinel-Tribune (Mar. 7, 1895, p. 2) attributed authorship of the story to Lady Gwendolen Cecil, daughter of the Marquess of Salisbury. There isn't any source given for that bit of information. This was gossip after all. Her authorship was previously confirmed in The Author, Playwright and Composer, Volumes 5 and 6, page 246, also from 1895. Maybe that's the source of the item out of Bowling Green. By the way, The Collector's Index to Weird Tales by Sheldon R. Jaffery and Fred Cook, an indispensable source in my writing of this blog, was also published in Bowling Green.

I'm not the first person to track down authorship of "The Closed Cabinet" to Lady Gwendolen. Scottish editor Johnny Mains (b. 1976) did that before me for his collection A Suggestion of Ghosts: Supernatural Fiction by Women, 1854-1900 (2018). More than a hundred years before Mr. Mains published his book, Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934) included "The Closed Cabinet" in his series Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories (1907-1909?). It looks like this series was also called and/or reprinted as The Lock and Key Library. Lady Gwendolen's story is in the volume Old-Time English Stories (1909), the contents of which are as follows:

• "The Haunted House" by Charles Dickens (1859)
• "No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-Man" by Charles Dickens (1866)
• "The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1859)
• "The Incantation" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (date unknown)
• "The Avenger" by Thomas De Quincey (1838)
• "Melmoth the Wanderer" by Charles Maturin (1821)
• "A Mystery with a Moral" by Laurence Sterne (date unknown)
• "On Being Found Out" by William Makepeace Thackeray (1861)
• "The Notch on the Ax" by William Makepeace Thackeray (1862)
• "Bourgonef" by unknown
• "The Closed Cabinet" by unknown (Lady Gwendolen Cecil)

Only some of these are considered fantasy, ghost stories, or weird fiction. Not all are included in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

"The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton was the first reprint in Weird Tales, "The Closed Cabinet" now the second. It looks as though both came from the same source, namely, Julian Hawthorne's collection from earlier in the century. Charles Dickens' story "The Signal-Man" was also reprinted in Weird Tales, in the issue of April 1930. A second by-the-way: Julian Hawthorne was the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) and the father of Hildegarde Hawthorne (1871-1952), both of whom also had stories in Weird Tales, though both posthumously.

Next: Lady Gwendolen Cecil (1860-1945)

"Her Countenance Grew Fierce," an illustration by an unknown artist for "The Incantation" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the frontispiece for The Lock and Key Library: The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations, Old Time English, edited by Julian Hawthorne (New York: The Review of Reviews Co., 1915). I have altered this image from a photograph taken of the original.

The image shown above may seem familiar to you. Have a look at the cover illustration for the May 1923 issue of Weird Tales, made by William F. Heitman:

Now here they are side by side, with the Weird Tales cover flipped:

No wonder Heitman's cover was so uncharacteristic of his regular work, and no wonder that the male figure on the right doesn't match very well the female on the left in its treatment or technique.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Sunday Swipes No. 2

A few weeks ago, I discovered a blog entry called "Pulp Cover Swipes of the Golden Age," written by Yaniv Elancry and posted on the blog Streyflexin Collectibles on April 20 of some year. The article was originally on a website or app called Shortboxed. Mr. Elancry did a nice job of compiling swipes made by comic book artists from pulp magazines. One of those swipes is from a cover of Weird Tales:

On the left is cover art by Margaret Brundage for Weird Tales, March 1933. On the right is the cover of House of Mystery #1 by Win Mortimer and Charles Paris from 1951-1952. Margaret Brundage's cover is of course in the category of "Woman and Wolf," about which I wrote on January 27, 2014, here.

There are lots of other swipes and lots of good artwork in Yaniv Elancry's blog posting. You can read it and see it by clicking here.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Moon Terror (and other stories)

Published in 1927, The Moon Terror by A.G. Birch was the first Weird Tales book. The publisher was the Popular Fiction Publishing Company of Indianapolis. The uncredited editor was almost certainly Farnsworth Wright. You wouldn't know it by the cover, but there are actually four stories in The Moon Terror. They are:

• "The Moon Terror" by A.G. Birch, a novel of 130 pages, originally serialized in the May and June 1923 issues of Weird Tales.

• "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud, a novelette of 33 pages, originally the first cover story in Weird Tales, in the March issue of 1923.

• "Penelope" by Vincent Starrett, a comic short story of 16 pages, originally in Weird Tales, May 1923.

and

• "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" by Farnsworth Wright, another comic short story of just 9 pages, originally in Weird Tales in October 1923.

There are 192 pages in all in The Moon Terror, the same number of pages as in each of the first two issues of Weird Tales.

"The Moon Terror" is the cover story of The Moon Terror the book. The illustration on the cover, drawn by an unknown artist, is a version of the first illustration to appear in Weird Tales. It shows a human sacrificial ritual in the instant before the knife is plunged into the breast of a naked woman. It's not in the best taste. It's also not an especially good drawing. And that brings up an issue.

If it was published in 1927, then The Moon Terror had about four years' worth of stories on which to draw for its contents. "Ooze" is a good enough story I think. The others are passable, I guess. But there were better stories published in those first four years. Did we really need Starrett's or Wright's story reprinted in book form? Imagine instead The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories, published in 1927, with cover art and interior illustrations by Hugh Rankin! And as for the book itself, it's not an especially well-made volume. My copy is still in good condition (no dust jacket), but, again, it's not the most professional of printing and binding jobs, the paper and boards are not high in quality, and the design is pretty ho-hum.

"The Moon Terror" is a yellow-peril story. The threat emanates from China, and the man who wishes to control the world and every person in it is Chinese. He fancies himself, I think, as a kind of god-emperor. The American scientist Dr. Gresham stands in his way:

"Gentlemen," he said, "I did not come here to argue; I came to help! As surely as I am standing here, our world is upon the brink of dissolution! And I alone may be able to save it! But, if I am to do so, you must agree absolutely to the course of action I propose!" (p. 46)

Three and a half years ago, we experienced another threat emanating from China and its aspiring world-ruler. And we had an American scientist--not just a scientist but a man who went by the self-proclaimed title The Science--tell us that if we were to be saved, we must do whatever he commanded. He alone was able to save us. Call all of this a century-old prognostication made by A.G. Birch. In any case, if you would like to read "The Moon Terror," you should probably do so soon, before President Eleven requires that all traces of it be wiped out and our obeisant government, media, and corporations do as he commands.

I have already written at length about "Ooze" and a little about "Penelope." I'll close with a couple of quick comments on "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" by Farnsworth Wright. I don't think that Wright was an especially good writer. Editorship was his true calling (even if he made a few blunders in that department as well.) However, his story in The Moon Terror was an early exploration in Weird Tales of Einsteinian or relativistic physics. For that, Wright deserves some credit.

"An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" is told in the first person by a man in Chicago who picked up some French expressions while serving in the U.S. Army. As it so happens, Farnsworth Wright lived in Chicago (as well as in Indianapolis), and he was a translator in the Army during the Great War. There are aliens in his story. They arrive on Earth by falling out of the sky in a meteoric missile. You could say that the story is a UFO story before we had a name for these things. With its falling objects, it also has a hint of a Fortean tale. There is mention of transparent steel, which makes me think of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and its manufacture of transparent aluminum.

As they say, there is nothing new under the sun. Or under the moon.

The Moon Terror by A.G. Birch and others (1927), with a cover illustration by an unknown artist.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

A.G. Birch (1883-1972)

Albert George "Al" Birch
Newspaper Reporter, Photographer, Editor, Publicity Manager, Press Agent, Advertising Man, Traveler & Explorer, Cattle Rancher
Born July 15, 1883, Washington, D.C.
Died May 11, 1972, Denver, Colorado

Albert George "Al" Birch was born on July 15, 1883, in Washington, D.C., to George Albert Birch (1846-1899), an undertaker by trade, and Fannie (Balman) Birch (1856-1905). It looks as though Albert was an only child. After his parents were gone, maybe there was nothing to hold him in the city of his birth. He traveled extensively in his young life, in Canada, California, and Colorado, among other places. He found a place to stay in Estes Park and Denver, Colorado.

Birch was the president of his senior class at Business High School in the nation's capital. Graduating in 1901, he set of on his travels. Birch worked as a newspaperman in his native city, but he began working for the Denver Post soon after his high school graduation, perhaps as early as 1902. In 1905, with three partners, he leased the Estes Park property, known, I believe, as "the English Ranch," owned by Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin, 4th Earl of Dunraven (1841-1946). It looks as though cattle ranching was one of Birch's early endeavors.

A.G. Birch was not only a newspaper reporter but also a photographer, editor, and publicity manager. He participated in automobile tours, explored the Yampa River with his friends, organized a rodeo, ran the annual Denver Post Opera from 1934 to 1969, and pulled off publicity stunts, including one in which a barefoot young woman, nicknamed "the Eve of Estes" and dressed in a leopard-spot suit, was supposed to have lived as a cavewoman in the newly created Rocky Mountain National Park in 1917. It's worth noting that "The Cave Girl" and its sequel "The Cave Man" by Edgar Rice Burroughs had been published in The All-Story and All-Story Weekly in 1913 and 1917. Birch also built two houses in Estes Park, the first of which burned and the second of which is on the Colorado State Register of Historic Properties. Birch also worked in publicity in Hollywood and for the Orpheum Circuit vaudeville theater in Denver. Albert G. Birch was with the Denver Post for fifty-nine years and died on May 11, 1972, in Denver. He was eighty-nine years old.

A.G. Birch had just one story in Weird Tales. It's called "The Moon Terror," and it was the lead story in the May issue of 1923, with a conclusion in the issue of the following month. "The Moon Terror" wasn't the first serial in Weird Tales, but depending on how you define these things, it was the first novel. Reprinted in The Moon Terror by A.G. Birch (and others), it runs to 130 pages in all. Issued in 1927, The Moon Terror, published by The Popular Fiction Publishing Company, almost certainly with Farnsworth Wright as the uncredited editor, was the first Weird Tales book. And so Birch had to his credit the first novel and the first illustrated story in Weird Tales, the lead story in the third issue of the magazine, and the lead story in the first Weird Tales book. Not bad for an author of just one published genre story in his whole career.

"The Moon Terror" is like a Burroughs novel in its way, but it's also a yellow peril-type story with a Fu Manchu-like mastermind named Kwo at its center. Kwo is an aspiring totalitarian ruler of Earth who uses a kind of super-science indistinguishable from magic in his plot against its peoples and nations. In Birch's story, there are elements of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds (which preceded it), as well as of The Day the Earth Stood Still, "The Call of Cthulhu," Worlds in Collision, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (which followed).* Like many early science fiction stories, including stories by John W. Campbell, Jr., "The Moon Terror" is more plot than real human story. Thousands of people--whole cities and regions--are swept away and destroyed in the space of a paragraph or two. You could say that it's like a disaster movie except that in a disaster movie, things happen to characters instead of to abstractions or categories. In fact, the story in a disaster movie is about human characters, who have lives and pains and relationships and speak in dialogue with each other. I had never thought about this before, but only in fiction is it possible to tell a story without characters, without people. Movies are about people.

"The Moon Terror" becomes more specific in its later chapters. There are characters after all, and they actually do things and speak to each other. Unfortunately, they're like the characters of Edgar Rice Burroughs, meaning, not recognizably human and devoid of any genuine human feeling or emotion. (Burroughs must have been a cold and unlikable person if his work is any indication.) They're more like robots--plot-robots programmed by their author to carry out his wishes. I'll point out that the period or cycle of vibrations that Kwo has figured out can be used to destroy Earth is eleven minutes and six seconds long, in other words, 666 seconds. Whether that symbolism was intentional on Birch's part, I can't say. By the way, Kwo is a homophone of the Latin word quo, meaning, "where." And it is the question, "Where is Kwo?", that takes up a good part of "The Moon Terror."

A.G. Birch's Story in Weird Tales
"The Moon Terror" (two-part serial, May and June 1923)

Further Reading

• An entry on A.G. Birch and The Moon Terror on the website Internet Archive at the following URL: https://archive.org/details/BirchA.G.TheMoonTerrorAndOtherStories1927
• An article behind a paywall, "For 59 Years, No Stunt Was too Elaborate to Draw in Readers for This Publicity Manager" by Dave Kreck in the Denver Post, October 15, 2017.
• Other items linked within the text of my entry on Albert G. Birch above.

*In The Day the Earth Stood Still: a meeting of the world's scientists and a demonstration of power made by the outsider. In "The Call of Cthulhu": the upheaval of the seabed. From Worlds in Collision: a new moon torn from the earth. And from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: the human sacrifice with the heart torn from the breast of the sacrificed.

Next: The Moon Terror book.

A photograph of "Eve of Estes," subject of a publicity stunt by Albert G. Birch of the Denver Post in 1917.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Sunday Swipes No. 1

Thrilling Wonder Stories, November 1940, cover art by Earle Bergey.

Weird Tales (Canada), September 1942, cover artist unknown. 

Weird Tales, May 1923-Part Four: "The Eyrie"

The May 1923 issue of Weird Tales once again had nonfiction fillers. By my count, there are eleven of these. Nine out of the eleven have to do with Chicago or Evanston, Illinois. That leads me to think that their anonymous author was based in Chicago. I think Otis Adelbert Kline is still the best candidate for the author behind these anonymous works in early issues of "The Unique Magazine."

In the May installment of "The Eyrie," editor Edwin Baird opened with the same complaint that I have had about stories in those early issues of Weird Tales. Or I guess I should say I have the same complaint that he had one hundred years ago, long before I showed up:

These manuscripts come from all parts of the civilized world, and they come from all sorts of people--lawyers, truck drivers, doctors, farmers' wives, university professors, carpenters, high school girls, convicts, society women, drug fiends, ministers, policemen, novelists, hotel clerks and professional tramps--and one, therefore, would naturally expect their stories to possess a corresponding diversity. But not so. With rare exceptions, all these stories, written by all these different kinds of people, are almost exactly alike. (p. 113)

When would there be something different?

There are nineteen letters in the May 1923 installment of "The Eyrie." They were by:

• L. William Pitzer, director of the Girard Avenue Theatre Company of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
• Charles M. Boone, third officer of the steamship Yumuri, who wrote from Vera Cruz, Mexico. It was the first of his two letters in Weird Tales.
• George F. Morgan of Hazelton, Pennsylvania.
• James P. Marshall of Boston, Massachusetts, who went on to have stories in Argosy All-Story Weekly and Science Wonder Stories in the late 1920s.
• Earl Leaston Bell (1895-1972), a teller of weird tales from Augusta, Georgia.
• George W. Crane (1901-1995), also a teller of weird tales, then of the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University in Chicago.
• Edward Schultz of Buffalo, New York. It was the first of his four letters in Weird Tales.
• S.A.N., address not given.
• Richard P. Israel of New York, New York.
• A.L. Richard of Chicago, Illinois.
• Miss Violet Olive Johnson (1887-1960) of Portland, Oregon, who wrote the first letter known to have been by a woman printed in "The Eyrie." She also had a letter in Strange Stories, February 1941. Miss Johnson was an author. Her short story "The Last Lap" was in the Heppner, Oregon, Gazette-Times on March 2, 1916 (p. 3). Maybe there are other stories by her hiding in the online electrons of today. Miss Johnson was the granddaughter of Oregon pioneer Hezekiah Johnson, Sr. (1799-1866).
• F.L.K. of Indianapolis.
• Victor Wilson of Hazen, Pennsylvania. This was the second time he had written. His first letter was in the April issue.
• J.O. O'C. of Raleigh, North Carolina.
• R.M. of St. Petersburg, Florida.
• Harry M. Worth of Brooklyn, New York.
• Mrs. Glenn Thompson Cummings of Lansing, Michigan.
• Dean Smith, address not given.
• Private R.S. Bray of 133d Co. Detachment, Fort Terry, New York.

There may be other authors represented by the many initials shown above. For example, R.M. of St. Petersburg, Florida, may very well have been Roylston Markham (1885-1950). To learn who the others were would take some puzzling out.

Next: "The Moon Terror" by A.G. Birch

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley