From "The Vengeance of the Dead" It is a bad thing for a man to die with an unsatisfied thirst for revenge parching his soul. David Allen died, cursing Bernard Heaton and lawyer Grey; hating the lawyer who had won the case even more than the man who was to gain by the winning. Yet if cursing were to be done, David should rather have cursed his own stubbornness and stupidity. * English novelist Robert Barr was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1850. He was educated at the Normal School of Toronto, Canada, and went on to become headmaster of the Central School of Windsor, Ontario. In 1876 he joined the staff of the Detroit Free Press, and wrote there under the pen name "Luke Sharp." Five years later, in 1881, he went to London to start a weekly English edition of the Free Press. In 1892 he and Jerome K. Jerome founded the Idler magazine, from whose coeditorship he retired in 1895 to spend the remaining seventeen years of his life writing delightful novels and tales like those in this volume, which includes "An Alpine Divorce," "Which Was the Murderer?, " "A Dynamite Explosion," "An Electrical Slip," "The Vengeance of the Dead," "Over the Stelvio Pass," "The Hour and the Man," "'And the Rigor of the Game'," "The Bromley Gibberts Story," "Not According to the Code," "A Modern Samson," "A Deal on 'Change," "Transformation," "The Shadow of the Greenback," "The Understudy," "'Out of Thun'," "A Dramatic Point," "Two Florentine Balconies," "The Exposure of Lord Stansford," and "Purification."