Maurice Baring's Orpheus in Mayfair opens with Heraclius Themistocles Margaritis, a gifted but impoverished Greek singer and composer in London, struggling to support his Italian wife and children while dreaming of restoring the forgotten music of Greece. A rare invitation to perform in a fashionable house promises long-awaited success, but a sudden illness in the family sends him into despair and into contact with a radiant, mysterious figure who speaks to him in Greek and seems to take his place. Around him, Baring skewers Mayfair society as guests, critics, and hostesses turn Margaritis's songs into a battlefield of vanity, boredom, and fashionable opinion, unable to tell genius from nonsense even as the music opens into something ancient, uncanny, and transformative. The collection also ranges from eerie supernatural tales to schoolboy comedy and social satire. Boys at St. James's endure a humiliating cricket defeat, childish mischief, and a draconian headmaster's lecture on collective guilt, while other stories follow men whose practical wisdom repeatedly benefits everyone except themselves. One account recounts a haunted inn in Heidelberg and a lonely island overtaken by dreamlike terror and disappearance; another traces a boy and a man of uncommon good sense through school, university, politics, and finance, where clever advice brings success to others but only misfortune to its giver. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.