I liked how M. R. James left the entity in the story to the reader’s imagination. ( )

It became plain to me after a few minutes that this visitor of ours was in rather a state of fidgets or nerves, which communicated itself to me, and so I put away my writing and turned to at engaging him in talk.

After some remarks, which I forget, he became rather confidential. 'You'll think it very odd of me' (this was the sort of way he began), 'but the fact is I've had something of a shock.' Well, I recommended a drink of some cheering kind, and we had it. The waiter coming in made an interruption (and I thought our young man seemed very jumpy when the door opened), but after a while he got back to his woes again. There was nobody he knew in the place, and he did happen to know who we both were (it turned out there was some common acquaintance in town), and really he did want a word of advice, if we didn't mind. Of course we both said: 'By all means,' or 'Not at all,' and Long put away his cards. And we settled down to hear what his difficulty was.

The title of "A Warning to the Curious" could apply to many of M. R. James' stories, and it is quite a similar story to "Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad", with the protagonist stirring up trouble for himself by digging up an artifact and then trying to put things right be returning it to its resting place, although Paxton is searching for the object he digs up, rather than coming across it accidentally. One thing I really like about both stories is how the older men the protagonists ask for advice are so willing to help a young man in trouble, however unlikely the tale he tells.

The Haunted Dolls' House was one of the stories by famous authors that were written for Queen Mary's Dolls House, bound into tiny books and placed in bookcases in the dolls' house library and M. R. James comments at the end of the story that he is worried that it is too similar to his earlier story "The Mezzotint" so it must have worried him, but I don't think it is similar enough to be a problem. Hills feature prominently in several of these stories (whether haunted by something that screams, a viewpoint from which to view the countryside, the burial place of an ancient treasure or the site of a giant chalk figure cut into the turf). ( )