"But I remember when I was five or six I heard them talking about me when they thought I was not noticing. They were saying how queer I was a year or two before, and how nurse had called my mother to come and listen to me talking all to myself, and I was saying words that nobody could understand. I was speaking the Xu language, but I only remember a very few of the words, as it was about the little white faces that used to look at me when I was lying in my cradle." From The White People This volume contains two of Arthur Machen's best stories: The Red Hand, a murder mystery involving flint weapons, treasure, and the chalking of a red hand upon a wall; and The White People, a story thought by H.P. Lovecraft to be the second best horror tale ever written. It centers around a young girl's diary, relating her encounters with the deadly inhabitants of an alternate world.