In the dark of night, one light still yet burns, frightened fingers tremble as brittle pages turn.

Fireside Mystery Theatre presents The Midnight Reading, a special summer series of dramatic recitations of dark masterpieces in miniature

by the masters of the macabre.

Hello, I'm Ali Silva.

Oh, the bitter sweet taste of summer's end.

Vacation time is over, school is back in session, and you can feel the

turn of the season in the air. We bid farewell to the hot and humid months when we hide in the

dark and cool of the studio to bring you the midnight reading, and we found the most appropriate

story to send us off. The Summer People by the great Shirley Jackson.

Here to read for us this deathly parting kiss

is our own Mary Murphy.

Music The Allison's Country Cottage, seven miles from the nearest town, was set prettily on a hill.

From three sides it looked down on soft trees and grass that seldom, even at midsummer, lay still and dry.

On the fourth side was a lake, which touched against a wooden pier the Allison's had to keep repairing, and which looked equally well from the Allison's front porch, their side porch, or any spot on the wooden staircase

leading from the porch down to the water. Although the Alisons loved their summer cottage,

looked forward to arriving in the early summer, and hated to leave in the fall.

They had not troubled themselves to put in any improvements, regarding the cottage itself and the lake as improvement enough for the life left to them.

The cottage had no heat, no running water except the precarious supply from the backyard pump,

and no electricity.

For 17 summers, Janet Allison had cooked on a kerosene stove, heating all their water.

Robert Allison had brought buckets full of water daily from the pump, and read his

paper by the kerosene light in the evenings, and they had both, sanitary city people, become stolid and

...