Gabriel Ernest Episode by Saki

Something is wrong in the woods.The artist notices him first — and says almost nothing. One remark, on the way to the station, barely above a murmur. Then the train comes, and he is gone.It falls to Van Cheele to find out what his friend meant. What he discovers, by the pool in the oak coppice, is a boy with light brown eyes that hold something tigerish in them, lying in the sun with an ease that belongs to no child he has ever met.The aunt will find him charming. The dog will not stay in the house.Saki understood that the old country — the country before the parishes and the property lines — was never entirely tamed. The animals there talk.

"Gabriel-Ernest" was first published in 1909 in the Westminster Gazette, and later collected in Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches (1910).

Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), a writer of savage wit and supernatural unease. He was killed on the Western Front in the closing months of the Somme campaign.

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