Penny Dreadfuls, 1923 · page 71 of 116
The Taking of Helen by John Masefield — page 71: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Page Analysis This is a page of running prose from "The Taking of Helen," page 59 of what appears to be a Victorian serialized fiction. An officer named Nireus and a woman named Myrtle inspect a bird cote (dovecote). The officer finds no birds present but notes the structure has been recently opened. While examining the crude larch-pole ceiling, Nireus spots gold cloth dangling between two poles—which he recognizes as the fringe of someone named Paris' mantle. The passage suggests a mystery or crime involving missing birds and concealed evidence.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
THE TAKING OF HELEN 59 “Fetch up the log there,”’ eve said. “Then I can stand to unlock it.”’ The log was a stump of uprooted tree; the men hove it up, Myrtle stood upon it, scraped some cobwebs from the door, opened it, flung the door wide and jumped down. “You can see for yourself, sir,”’ she said. _ The officer climbed up and looked in. ‘““Here’s a filthy place, in need of scraping,’’ he said. The birds fluttered and scrambled and knocked down the cloggings of months. “Are they not there, sir?”’ The officer leaped down from the log, dusted him- self with his fly-flap, and looked about the room. “No, they’re not there,’ he said. “But that doesn’t prove that they haven’t been there, or weren’t there this morning. ‘The cote has been opened recently.” “The man Steer was in it yesterday, catching squabs for the lady,’ Myrtle said. Nireus looked up at the ceiling of the room. It was a rude ceiling of larch-poles laid together in their bark, perhaps six feet above his head. The larch- poles were ill-laid, some had rotted and fallen and been taken for firewood, while the work had always been of the roughest. In a gap between two poles just over Nireus’ head a rag or end of gold cloth was dangling. Nireus recognized it at once as the fringe of Paris’ mantle. About four inches of it dangled down, and CcoOnnicaoolKs (C(O)