The author William Wymark Jacobs William Wymark Jacobs (1863-1943) a humorous writer, was born in 1863 and grew up in the docks of London where his father worked. This early experience produced a lifelong interest in wharves, ships, and the people who sailed them. As a young man, Jacobs worked for the government while also writing stories. These stories soon made Jacobs a popular and respected author. In fact, one critic defined Jacobs one of the most permanently delightful short story writers who ever lived and another one thought that Jacobs represented a wholly distinctive epoch of English humour and that he was a master of his craft. Other than for his stories of macabre invention, like The Monkey s Paw (which anyway brought him great success) Jacobs is best known for those of a humorous nature concerning seafaring men and particularly their misadventures on shore. In fact many of W. W. Jacobs s stories are about the ships he knew so well and his first collection of stories, Many Cargoes (1896), was about the sea. His stories were often published in magazines; this is the case of Keeping Watch, which was first published in the Strand Magazine in December 1913 and later, in 1914, in book form in Night Watches. Keeping Watch, written in dialect, is about a naive wharfman, employed by a skipper to prevent his daughter from meeting the man from whom she has been receiving letters; being tricked by the girl, he is attacked with a mop by the lover and locked in a cabin while she runs off to get married. Jacobs also wrote 18 more books of sea stories and horror stories. The Monkey s Paw, one of the most celebrated stories by William Wymark Jacobs, was written in 1902. It tells about a bewitched monkey s paw that carries three wishes. As in most wish stories, the owner first wishes for riches. When the son of the family is reported to have had a fatal accident, his mother wishes for his return home. When his feet are on the threshold, it is suddenly remembered that he has been gruesomely disfigured, and he is hastily wished back to the scene of his accident. The three wishes have thus been granted, the first in the shape k 109