Noughts and Crosses

One morning, near the close of the last century, a small child came running down to the village with news that the cottage, which for ten years had stood empty, was let; there was smoke coming out at the chimney, and an outlandish lady walking in the garden.
From 'The Outlandish Ladies' in the collection Noughts and Crosses
grassy lane

This collection of short stories – and some of them are very short – was published in 1891. Many of the stories are based in Cornwall and they show the influence of the tradition of storytelling Q would have known from his childhood. These stories are bleaker than much of Q’s work and may reflect his unsettled state of mind at the time he wrote them.

This section contains information on each of the stories.

For more discussion of the collection, see ‘Noughts and Crosses: a study’.

You can read the stories for yourself on the Internet Archive site or download the text from Project Gutenberg.