We who read them now know that he was both right and wrong. Liberty flourishes in modern France and Belgium and flowers bloom on what was once No Man's Land, but the dreams of old died a lasting death. The Europe that fed itself into the grinder of the War to End War could never be reconstituted. The Edwardian age, with its quaint faith that humanity and human civilization were perfectible, is now buried not only beneath the blood-drenched mud of Flanders but all the layers of the grim century since, laid down by Stalin, Hitler, Hiroshima, Pol Pot, the latest suicide bomber.

And yet that "other country" that is the dead past still speaks to us in the cadenced and sonorous voice of Lord Dunsany in this collection of his early tales, all dating from 1908 to 1916. These twenty-five short pieces, some of them vignettes only a few paragraphs long, carry about them a scent, an echo, of his now vanished world. It was a world of the comfortable drawing room, warmed by a banked fire, where one might settle snugly into a wing-backed chair and open a slim volume from which would rise the sharp tang of burning hashish in a Sultan's court, the heady scent of oriental spices piled on the docks of the fantastical River Yann, the dank reek of tidal mud settling on a sinner's scattered bones.

There is nothing in The Hashish Man and Other Stories to startle modern sensibilities, but there is a great deal to captivate what was once called the poetic imagination. The lure of golden cities, far; the sense that horror may lurk unseen among the reeds beside a stream or beneath the cobblestones of a London street; the realization that the shadowy dinner guest of a young gentleman in an ornate restaurant is indeed Death, or that a private club down a quiet street might be the final retreat of gods who have lost their last worshippers, waited upon by kings who have lost their thrones.

It is not so much the tales that captivate, but the manner of their telling. Some of us cannot resist opening lines such as, "I dreamt that I had done a horrible thing, so that burial was to be denied me either in soil or sea, neither could there be any hell for me. I waited for some hours, knowing this. Then my friends came for me, and slew me secretly and with ancient rite, and lit great tapers, and carried me away."

For those who possess, if only metaphorically, a hearth-warmed drawing room and an accommodating chair, this slim volume, edited by Jon Longhi, is a fine introduction to the lost worlds of Dunsany.