but a little I demand of thee. Surely the superabundance of life can spare a little to one who is already dead.” As the boy lies wan and ill, the Count enters the room and presses a long feverish kiss upon his lips. Vardaleh rushes forth, and can never be traced again. Gabriel has expired in the agony of that embrace.
In a novel, The Vampire, by Reginald Hodder, a woman who is the leader of an occult society is forced to exercise her powers as a vampire to prevent the ebbing of her vitality. Here her ravages are pyschic rather than physical, albeit in fact the two so closely commingled that they are not to be separated. A curious feature in the tale is that this woman is represented as putting forth her energies through the medium of a metallic talisman, and various struggles to gain possession of the object form the theme of the story. It falls into the hands of persons who would employ it for evil purposes, when it constitutes a very formidable menace, but at the last after a number of extraordinary happenings it is happily recovered.
The traditional, but yet more horrible vampire is presented to us by F. Marion Crawford in For the Blood Is the Life. Here a young man, who has been loved by a girl whose affection he was unable to return, is after her death vampirised by her, and when his friends suspect the truth they determine to rescue him. They find him upon her grave, a thin stream of blood trickling from his throat. “And the flickering light of the lantern played upon another face that looked up from the feast,—upon two deep, dead eyes that saw in spite of death—upon parted lips redder than life itself—upon gleaming teeth on which glistened a rosy drop.” The situation is effectively dealt with according to the good old tradition. A hawthorn stake is driven through the heart of the vampire who emits a quantity of blood and with a despairing shriek dies the last death.
Almost equally vivid in its details must be accounted the tale, Four Wooden Stakes, by Victor Roman. The ghastly events in the lonely old house with its little grey crypt, some ten miles from the small town of Charing, a place of not more than fifteen hundred souls, are most vividly described. There lived the Holroyds, the grandfather, the father, and three brothers. Whilst in South America the grandfather “was
