Hello, gentle listener, and welcome to nocturnal transmissions, the fortnightly podcast that brings you dark tales both old and new, performed by voice artist Kristen Holland.

This episode, we're excited to be sharing with you another tale from the great American

wordsmith, Ambrose Beers. If you have not yet listened to episode 28, in which we featured his much-lawed,

an occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, seek it out, and you will hear his praises sung there.

In this instance, however, we shall not prevaricate.

Our excitement at the prospect of sharing with you more from this master of the short story will not permit us.

That and the fact that I waffled on for so long in the last episode that I think I should give you a break from my introductory meanderings this time around. Nocturnal transmissions is proud to present Ambrose Beasses's

The Bordered window.

In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost

unbroken forest. The whole region was sparsely settled by people of the frontier, restless souls

who no sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and attained to that degree

of prosperity,

which today we should call indigence, than impelled by some mysterious impulse in their nature.

They abandoned all, and pushed farther westward to encounter new perils and privations

in the effort to regain the meagre comforts which they had

voluntarily renounced. Many of them had already forsaken that region for the remoter settlements,

but among those remaining was one who had been of those first arriving.

He lived alone in a house of logs surrounded on all sides by the great forest,

of whose gloom and silence he seemed apart, for no one had ever known him to smile nor speak a needless

word. His simple wants were supplied by the sail or barter of skins of wild animals in the river town,

for not a thing did he grow upon the land which, if needfully, might have claimed by right of undisturbed possession.

There were evidences of improvement.

...