The Ways

 

“To every man there openeth

A way and ways and a way

The high soul treads the high way,

And the low soul gropes the low,

And in between on the misty flats,

The rest drift to and fro.”

 

– John Oxenham

 

 

“John Oxenham” was the pen name of Englishman William Arthur Dunkerly (1852-1941). Among Dunkerly’s works of prose, poetry, and journalism, is the novel A Mystery of the Underground (1897), which has the distinction of being one of the first stories to feature a serial killer. The novel was so realistic that Londoners refused to ride the rails on Tuesdays, the day when the murders would regularly happen.