Welcome to Litsy!

Onto the next story, "Ancient Sorceries", a classic that includes cats?‍⬛, a psychic detective (Dr. John Silence), cats?‍⬛, an eldritch French village, cats?‍⬛, witches, and cats?‍⬛. Did I mention cats??‍⬛
I love the facing illustration and decorated title for this story.

"Here was a place unpolluted by men, kept clean by the winds from coarsening human influences, a place where spiritual agencies were within reach and aggressive. Never, before or since, have I been so attacked by indescribable suggestions of a "beyond region," of another scheme of life, another evolution not parallel to the human. And in the end our minds would succumb under the weight of the awful spell, and we would be drawn across the ⬇️

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

"After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Buda-Pesth, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes."
"The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood, illustration by Sidney Stanley

The tales are "queer" as in "peculiar", and with that wonderful name and that characterful face, what other kind of tale was Algernon going to write?
I've read the title story and "Ancient Sorceries" in a modern edition, the edition I'm reading now being the 1925 one shown in the image, though sadly my copy no longer has that excellent dust jacket. It is illustrated, though, and I'll post some of them as I go along ?