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    To Be Read At Dusk: "If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
    To Be Read At Dusk: "If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
    To Be Read At Dusk: "If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
    Ebook26 pages25 minutes

    To Be Read At Dusk: "If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."

    By Charles Dickens

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    To Be Read at Dusk is a very short story by the celebrated Victorian novelist Charles Dickens. Amid the Swiss mountainous region of Saint Bernard, the first-person narrator starts to eavesdrop on a nearby group of men. The sun is setting, giving way to strange thoughts and memories. The group is composed of five couriers from different nationalities, including a stout and talkative German, a Swiss, a Genoese and a Neapolitan. It is the German courier who first makes a comment on the beautiful, yet eerie, scene of the setting sun and the blood-crimson horizon to start a conversation on weird happenings and apparitions. They talk about instances of déjà vu, of omens and visions that mysteriously come true. Other accounts follow telling about encounters with ghosts, revenants and various sorts of strange cases. When they all finish speaking and prepare themselves to depart in silence, a feeling of melancholy and fear prevails. The eavesdropping narrator “looked round, and the five couriers were gone: so noiselessly that the ghostly mountain might have absorbed them into its eternal snows.” By the very end of the narrative, the narrator admits to his readers that he has now become afraid of being left alone in such a place or in any other place.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherA Word To The Wise
    Release dateAug 20, 2013
    ISBN9781780006444
    To Be Read At Dusk: "If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
    Author

    Charles Dickens

    Charles Dickens was born in 1812 near Portsmouth, where his father worked as a clerk. Living in London in 1824, Dickens was sent by his family to work in a blacking-warehouse, and his father was arrested and imprisoned for debt. Fortunes improved and Dickens returned to school, eventually becoming a parliamentary reporter. His first piece of fiction was published by a magazine in December 1832, and by 1836 he had begun his first novel, The Pickwick Papers. He focused his career on writing, completing fourteen highly successful novels, as well as penning journalism, shorter fiction and travel books. He died in 1870.

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Three short ghost story from Charles Dickens. Not too scary by today's standards but an entertaining read nonetheless.
    • 4/5
      This was a short story that was kind of weird at first. It follows a guy who is sitting out alone but listening in on some mens conversation who is near by. They begin to tell a stories of something quite weird. You listen and they are kind of creepy and scary. It is descently written and is a neat little story. I gave it 3 stars because it was difficult to follow in some places but once I got to the end I was like: ooohhh I get it. It was a cool read and one I don't regret.

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    To Be Read At Dusk - Charles Dickens

    To Be Read At Dusk

    By Charles Dickens

    Index Of Contents

    To Be Read At Duck

    Charles Dickens – A Biography

    TO BE READ AT DUSK

    One, two, three, four, five.  There were five of them.

    Five couriers, sitting on a bench outside the convent on the summit of the Great St. Bernard in Switzerland, looking at the remote heights, stained by the setting sun as if a mighty quantity of red wine had been broached upon the mountain top, and had not yet had time to sink into the snow.

    This is not my simile.  It was made for the occasion by the stoutest courier, who was a German.  None of the others took any more notice of it than they took of me, sitting on another bench on the other side of the convent door, smoking my cigar, like them, and - also like them - looking at the reddened snow, and at the lonely shed hard by, where the bodies of belated travellers, dug out of it, slowly wither away, knowing no corruption in that cold region.

    The wine upon the mountain top soaked in as we looked; the mountain became white; the sky, a very dark blue; the wind rose; and the air turned piercing cold.  The five couriers buttoned their rough coats.  There being no safer man to imitate in all such proceedings than a courier, I buttoned mine.

    The mountain in the sunset had stopped the five couriers in a conversation.  It is a sublime sight, likely to stop conversation.  The mountain being now out of the sunset, they resumed.  Not that I had heard any part of their previous discourse; for indeed, I had not then broken away from the American gentleman, in the travellers’ parlour of the convent, who, sitting with his face to the fire, had undertaken to realise to

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