The author Montague Rhodes James Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) was born in 1862 in Goodnestone Parsonage, Kent, where his father was the curate, and died in 1936. He developed a taste for old books from a precocious age and was fonder of reading dusty volumes in the library than playing with the other children. He studied at Eton and then at King s College, Cambridge, where he became assistant in Classical Archaeology at the Fitzwilliam Museum. He was elected a Fellow of King s after writing his dissertation The Apocalypse of St. Peter and after that, he lectured in divinity, eventually becoming dean of the college in 1889. He was a distinguished medievalist and wrote a large amount of reviews, translations, monographs, articles and works on bibliography, palaeography, antiquarian issues, and often edited volumes for specialized bibliographical and historical societies. He was a brilliant linguist and biblical scholar and was exceptionally gifted1, which, along with his unusually keen memory and hard work, enabled him to write many important studies. His translation of the Apocryphal New Testament in 1924 was one of these studies. He was made provost of King s College in 1905 and was later the vice-chancellor of the university from 1913 to 1915. His research often took him abroad, and he visited Cyprus, Denmark, Bavaria, Austria and Sweden. Even though he was a great scholar in his day, he is now most remembered for his ghost stories. Fascinated by the supernatural, he was an admirer of the Irish mystery-writer John Sheridan Le Fanu, whose ghost stories he edited. James s stories were usually first published in magazines such as the Cambridge Review, but some were written for special occasions. Wailing Well is one such stories, composed for the meeting of the Eton College boy-scouts in 1927. His first collection of stories (Ghost Stories of an Antiquary) appeared in 1904, followed by More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (in which The Rose Garden is included) in 1911, and others (A Thin Ghost and Others, A Warning to the Curious, and a somewhat spectral juvenile fantasy called The Five Jars) appeared in the 1931 edition of the Collected 1. gifted: dotato. 31