We present to the attention of readers a collection of stories by the English writer Hector Hugh Munro (1870), better known under the pseudonym Saki (which in Farsi means “cupbearer”, “cupbearer” and, apparently, borrowed from the poetry of Omar Khayyam). Edwardian England, in which the author happened to live, appears on the pages of his prose in the shell of an elusively subtle humor, every now and then revealing the grotesque, absurd, sometimes even mystical sides of an apparently ordinary and prosperous existence. Born in Burma and killed in France during the First World War, the writer had a special love for Russia, where he lived for about three years and which became the setting for many of his works.