AMERICAN SHORT STORIES

PREFACE

CONTENTS

1

AMERICAN SHORT STORIES

INTRODUCTION

I. THE TALE IN AMERICA BEFORE 1835

How few years comprise the history of American literature is strikingly suggested by the fact that so much of it can be covered by the reminiscence of a single man of letters.1 A life beginning in the ’20’s had actual touch in boyhood with Irving, and seized fresh from the press the romances of Cooper. And if the history of American literature be read more exclusively as the history of literary development essentially American, its years are still fewer. “I perceive,” says a foreign visitor in Austin’s story of Joseph Natterstrom, “this is a very young country, but a very old people.”2 Some critics, indeed, have been so irritated by the spreading of the eagle in larger pretensions as to deprecate entirely the phrase “American literature.” Our literature, they retort, has shown no national, essential difference from the literature of the other peoples using the same language. How these carpers accommodate to their view Thoreau, for instance, is not clear. But waiving other claims, the case might almost be made out from2 the indigenous growth of one literary form. Our short story, at least, is definitely American.

The significance of the short story as a new form of fiction appears on comparison of the staple product of tales before 1835 with the staple product thereafter. 1835 is the date of Poe’s Berenice. Before it lies a period of experiment, of turning the accepted anecdotes, short romances, historical sketches, toward something vaguely felt after as more workmanlike. This is the period of precocious local magazines,3 and of that ornament of the marble-topped tables of our grandmothers, the annual. Various in name and in color, the annual gift-books are alike,—externally in profusion of design and gilding, internally in serving up, as staples of their miscellany, poems and tales. Keepsakes they were called generically in England, France, and America; their particular style might be Garland or Gem.4 The Atlantic Souvenir, earliest in this country, so throve during seven years (1826–1832) as to buy and unite with itself (1833) its chief rival, the Token. The utterly changed taste which smiles at these annuals, as at the clothes of their readers, obscures the fact that they were a medium, not only for the stories of writers forgotten long since, but also for the earlier work of Hawthorne. By 1835 the New England Magazine had survived its infancy, and the Southern Literary Messenger was born with promise. Since then—since the realisation of the definite form3 in Poe’s Berenice—the short story has been explored and tested to its utmost capacity by almost every American prose-writer of note, and by many without note, as the chief American form of fiction. The great purveyor has been the monthly magazine. Before 1835, then, is a period of experiment with tales; after 1835, a period of the manifold exercise of the short story. The tales of the former have much that is national in matter; the short stories of the latter show nationality also in form.

Nationality, even provinciality, in subject-matter has been too much in demand. The best modern literature knows best that it is heir of all the ages, and that its goal should be, not local peculiarity, but such humanity as passes place and time.5 Therefore we have heard too much, doubtless, of local color. At any rate, many purveyors of local color in fiction have given us documents rather than stories. Still there was some justice in asking of America the things of America. If the critics who begged us to be American have not always seemed to know clearly what they meant, still they may fairly be interpreted to mean in general something reasonable enough,—namely, that we ought to catch from the breadth and diversity of our new country new inspirations. The world, then, was looking to us, in so far as it looked at all, for the impulse from untrodden and picturesque ways, for a direct transmission of Indians, cataracts, prairies, bayous, and Sierras. Well and good. But, according to our abilities, we were giving the world just that. Years before England decided that our only American writers in this sense were Whitman,4 Mark Twain, and Bret Harte,—seventy years before the third of this perversely chosen group complacently informed the British public6 that he was a pioneer only in the sense of making the short story American in scenes and motives,—American writers were exploring their country for fiction north and south, east and west, up and down its history. What we lacked was, not appreciation of our material, but skill in expressing it; not inspiration, but art. We had to wait, not indeed for Bret Harte in the ’60’s, but for Poe in the ’30’s. The material was known and felt, and again and again attempted. Nothing could expose more vividly the fallacy that new material makes new literature. We were at school for our short story; but we had long known what stories we had to tell. In that sense American fiction has always been American.

For by 1830 the preference of native subjects for tales, to say nothing of novels, is plainly marked. The example of Irving in this direction could not fail of followers. From their beginning the early magazines and annuals essay in fiction the legends, the history, and even the local manners of the United States, in circles widening with the area of the country. Thus the Atlantic Souvenir for 1829, furnishing forth in its short fictions an historical romance of mediæval France, a moral tale in oriental setting, a melodrama of the Pacific Islands, and a lively farce on the revolution in Peru, presented also, with occasional attempt at native scenery, the following: The Methodist’s Story, a moral situation of the anger of father and son; Narantsauk, an historical tale of Baron Castine; The Catholic, weaving into King Philip’s attack on Springfield the hopeless affection of a5 Catholic girl and a Protestant youth—the very field of Hawthorne; and a melodramatic Emigrant’s Daughter. In the same year, 1829, James Hall, then fairly afloat on his vocation of law and his avocation of letters, compiled, indeed largely composed, the first Western Souvenir at Vandalia, Illinois. Its most significant tales are three of his own, set, with more careful locality than most of the seaboard attempts, in the frontier life along the Mississippi. The Indian Hater and Pete Featherton present backwoodsmen of Illinois and Ohio. The French Village is definitely a genre study. Loose enough in plot, it has in detail a delicacy and local truth not unworthy the material of Cable. That there was a definite tendency toward native themes is amply confirmed by the annuals of subsequent years before 1835. Besides Hawthorne’s earlier pieces in the Token, there had appeared by 1831 studies of the Natchez and of the Minnesota Indians, the Maryland Romanists, Shays’s Rebellion, the North-River Dutch, and the Quakers. And the same tendency appears in the early magazines. The Western Monthly Review, adventurously put forth by Timothy Flint in Cincinnati, had among its few tales before 1831 an Irish-Shawnee farce on the Big Miami, The Hermit of the Prairies, a romance of French Louisiana, a rather forcible study of Simon Girty and the attack on Bryant’s Station, and two local character sketches entitled Mike Shuck and Colonel Plug. To extend the period of consideration is to record the strengthening of the tendency established by Irving and Cooper. The books of John Pendleton Kennedy are collections of local sketches. Mrs. Hale, praised for her fidelity to local truth, was supported in the same ambition by Mrs. Gilman. Mrs. Kirkland’s6 sketches of early Michigan are as convincing as they are vivacious. Most of these studies emerge, if that can be said to emerge which is occasionally fished up by the antiquary, only by force of what we have been berated for lacking—local inspiration.

What were the forms of this evident endeavor to interpret American life in brief fictions; and, more important, what was the form toward which they were groping? For this inquiry the natural point of departure is the tales of Irving. Any reappreciation of Irving would now be officious. We know that classical serenity, alike of pathos and of humor; and we have heard often enough that he got his style of Addison. Indeed no attentive reader of English literature could well fail to discern either Irving’s schooling with the finest prose of the previous century—with Goldsmith, for instance, as well as Addison—or the essential originality of his own prose. He is a pupil of the Spectator.7 That is a momentous fact in the history of American literature. We know what it means in diction. What does it mean in form? That our first eminent short fictions were written by the pupil of a school of essayists vitally affected their structure. The matter of the Spectator suggested in England a certain type of novel;8 its manner was not the manner to suggest in America the short story, even to an author whose head was full of the proper material. For though it may be hard to prove in the face of certain novels that an7 essay is one thing and a story another, it is obvious to any craftsman, a priori, that the way of the essay will not lead to the short story. And in fact it did not lead to the short story. The tales of Irving need no praise. Composed in the manner typical of the short story, they might have been better or worse; but they are not so composed. It was not at random that Irving called his first collection of them (1819–20) The Sketch Book. The Wife, for instance, is a short-story plot; it is handled, precisely in the method of the British essay, as an illustrative anecdote. So The Widow and Her Son; so The Pride of the Village, most evidently in its expository introduction; so, in essence of method, many of the others. And Rip Van Winkle? Here, indeed, is a difference, but not, as may at first appear, a significant difference. True, the descriptive beginning is modern rather than Addisonian; romanticism had opened the eyes of the son of the classicals; but how far the typical looseness of romanticism is from the typical compactness of the short story may be seen in Irving’s German tale of the Spectre Bridegroom, and it may be seen here. True again, the characterisation, though often expository, is deliciously concrete; but it is not more so than the characterisation of Sir Roger de Coverley; nor is Rip’s conversation with his dog, for instance, in itself the way of the short story any more than Sir Roger’s counting of heads in church. Unity of tone there is, unity clearer than in Irving’s models, and therefore doubtless more conscious. But Irving did not go so far as to show his successors that the surer way to unity of tone is unity of narrative form. Still less did he display the value of unity of form for itself. His stories do not culminate. As there is8 little emphasis on any given incident, so there is no direction of incidents toward a single goal of action. Think of the Catskill legend done à la mode. Almost any clever writer for to-morrow’s magazines would begin with Rip’s awakening, keep the action within one day by letting the previous twenty years transpire through Rip’s own narrative at the new tavern, and culminate on the main disclosure. That he might easily thus spoil Rip Van Winkle is not in point. The point is that he would thus make a typical short story, and that the Sketch Book did not tend in that direction. Nor as a whole do the Tales of a Traveller. Not only is Buckthorne and His Friends avowedly a sketch for a novel, but the involved and somewhat laborious machinery of the whole collection will not serve to move any of its separable parts in the short-story manner. Even the German Student, which is potentially much nearer to narrative singleness, has an explanatory introduction and a blurred climax. Such few of the Italian bandit stories as show compression of time remain otherwise, like the rest, essentially the same in form as other romantic tales of the period. In narrative adjustment Irving did not choose to make experiments.9

It is not surprising, therefore, that Irving’s influence, so far at it is discernible in subsequent short fictions, seems rather to have retarded than to have furthered the development toward distinct form. Our native sense of form appears in that the short story emerged fifteen years after the Sketch Book; but where we feel Irving we feel a current from another source moving in another direction. The9 short descriptive sketches composing John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832) have so slight a sequence,10 and sometimes so clear a capacity for self-consistent form, that it is easy to imagine them as separate short stories of local manners; but, whether through Irving, or directly through the literary tradition of Virginia, they keep the way of the Spectator. James Hall, who had been still nearer to the short story of local manners in his French Village (1829), was poaching on Irving’s manor in his Village Musician (1831) with evident disintegration. In Hawthorne, who, of course, was nearest of all before Poe’s genius for form seized and fixed the short story, it is difficult to be sure of the influence of Irving. True, Hawthorne’s earlier historical tales, though they have far greater imaginative realisation, are not essentially different in method from Irving’s Philip of Pokanoket; but it was quite as likely Hawthorne’s natural bent toward the descriptive essay that made his earlier development in fiction tentative and vacillating, as any counsel from the happy, leisurely form of the elder master. Be that as it may, Irving’s influence in general, if not deterrent, seems at least not to have counted positively in the development of the short story.

Rather Irving left the writers for the annuals and abortive early magazines to feel after a form. What were the modes already accepted; and what were their several capacities for this shaping? The moral tale, of course, is obvious to any one who has glanced over the literary diversions of his forbears; and this, equally of course, had often its unity of purpose.10 But since the message, instead of permeating the tale by suggestion, was commonly formulated in expository introduction or hortatory conclusion, it did not suffice to keep the whole in unity of form. Indeed, the moral tale was hardly a form. It might be mere applied anecdote; it might be the bare skeleton of a story, as likely material for a novel as for a short story; it was often shapeless romance.11 But two tendencies are fairly distinct. Negatively there was a general avoidance, before Hawthorne, of allegory or symbolism. For a moral tale allegory seems an obvious method; but it is a method of suggestion, and these tales, with a few exceptions, such as Austin’s Peter Rugg, hardly rise above the method of formal propounding. Positively there was a natural use of oriental manner and setting, as in Austin’s Joseph Natterstrom and Paulding’s Ben Hadar.12

Another typical ingredient of the annual salad is the yarn or hoax-story. The significance of this as American has been often urged; and indeed it spread with little seeding, and, as orally spontaneous, has made a favorite diversion of the frontier. Its significance in form is that it absolutely demands an arrangement of incidents for suspense. The superiority of form, however, was associated, unfortunately for any influence, with triviality of matter. Again, the annuals are full of short historical sketches. Sometimes these are mere summary of facts or mere anecdote, to serve as explanatory text for the steel11 engravings then fashionable as “embellishments”; sometimes they are humorous renderings of recent events;13 more commonly they are painstaking studies,—Delia Bacon’s, for instance, or Charlotte Sedgwick’s, in the setting of American Colonial and Revolutionary history; most commonly of all, whether native or foreign, modern or mediæval, they are thorough-going romances, running often into swash-buckling and almost always into melodrama.14 The tendency to melodramatic variety, with the typical looseness of romanticism, then everywhere dominant in letters, held the historical sketches back from compactness, or even definiteness, of form.15 So clever a writer as Hall leaves many of his historical pieces with the ends loose, as mere sketches for novels. The theoretical difference between a novelette and a short story16 is thus practically evident throughout this phase of the annuals in lack of focus.

Still the studies of historical environment were more promising in themselves and also confirmed that attempt to realise the locality, as it were, of the present or the immediate past which emerges as genre or local color. The intention of Miss Sedgwick’s Reminiscence of Federalism (1835) is the same as that of Miss Wilkins’s stories of the same environment. Her Mary Dyre comes as near in form as12 Hawthorne’s Gentle Boy to extracting the essence of Quakerdom. Where her studies fail is in that vital intensity which depends most of all on compression of place and time. Now an easier way toward this was open through the more descriptive sketch of local manners. To realise the genius of a place is a single aim; to keep the tale on the one spot is almost a necessity; to keep it within a brief time by focusing on one significant situation is a further counsel of unity which, though it had not occurred to American writers often, could not be long delayed. Thus, before 1835, Albert Pike had so far focused his picturesque incidents of New Mexico as to burn an impression of that colored frontier life; and James Hall, in spite of the bungling, unnecessary time-lapse, had so turned his French Village (1829) as to give a single picture of French colonial manners.

Hawthorne, indeed, had gone further. His affecting Wives of the Dead (1832) is brought within the compass of a single night. If the significance of this experiment was clear to Hawthorne, then he must have abandoned deliberately what Poe seized as vital; for he recurred to the method but now and then. The trend of his work is quite different. But there is room to believe that the significance of the form escaped him; for as to literary method, as to form, Hawthorne seems not to see much farther than the forgotten writers whose tales stand beside his in the annuals. An obvious defect of these short fictions is in measure. The writers do not distinguish between what will make a good thirty-page story and what will make a good three-hundred-page story. They cannot gauge their material. Austin’s Peter Rugg is too long for its best effect; it is definitely a short-story plot. Many of13 the others are far too short for any clear effect; they are definitely not short-story plots, but novel plots; they demand development of character or revolution of incidents. Aristotle’s distinction between simple and complex plots17 underlies the difference between the two modern forms. Now even Hawthorne seems not quite aware of this difference. The conception of Roger Malvin’s Burial (1832) demands more development of character than is possible within its twenty-eight pages. The sense of artistic unity appears in the expiation at the scene of guilt; but the deficiency of form also appears in the long time-lapse. Alice Doane’s Appeal (1835) is the hint of a tragedy, a conception not far below that of the Scarlet Letter. For lack of scope the tragic import is obscured by trivial description; it cannot emerge from the awkward mechanism of a tale within a tale; it remains partial, not entire. Like Alice Doane, Ethan Brand is conceived as the culmination of a novel. To say that either might have taken form as a short story is not to belittle Hawthorne’s art, but to indicate his preference of method. Ethan Brand achieves a picturesqueness more vivid than is usual in Hawthorne’s shorter pieces. The action begins, as in Hawthorne it does not often begin, at once. The narrative skill appears in the delicate and thoroughly characteristic device of the little boy; but imagine the increase of purely narrative interest if Hawthorne had focused this tale as he focused The White Old Maid; and then imagine The White Old Maid itself composed without the superfluous lapse of time, like The Wives of the Dead. That Hawthorne seems not to have realised distinctly the proper scope of the short story, and further that he did not follow its typical mode when14 that mode seems most apt,—both these inferences are supported by the whole trend of his habit.

For Hawthorne’s genius was not bent in the direction of narrative form. Much of his characteristic work is rather descriptive,—Sunday at Home, Sights from a Steeple, Main Street, The Village Uncle,—to turn over the leaves of his collections is to be reminded how many of his short pieces are like these.18 Again, his habitual symbolism is handled quite unevenly, without narrative sureness. At its best it has a fine, permeating suggestiveness, as in The Ambitious Guest; at its worst, as in Fancy’s Show Box, it is moral allegory hardly above the children’s page of the religious weekly journal. Lying between these two extremes, a great bulk of his short fictions shows imperfect command of narrative adjustments. The delicate symbolism of David Swan is introduced, like fifty pieces in the annuals, whose authors were incapable of Hawthorne’s fancy, by formal exposition of the meaning. The poetry of the Snow Image is crudely embodied, and has also to be expounded after the tale is done. The lovely morality of the Great Stone Face has a form almost as for a sermon. The point for consideration is not the ultimate merit of Hawthorne’s tales, but simply the tendency of their habit of form. For this view it is important to remember also his bent toward essay. Description and essay, separately and together, sum up the character of much of his work that was evidently most spontaneous. Perhaps nothing that Hawthorne wrote is finer or more masterly than the introduction to the Scarlet Letter. For this one masterpiece who would15 not give volumes of formally perfect short stories? Yet if it is characteristic of his genius,—and few would deny that it is,—it suggests strongly why the development of a new form of narrative was not for him. This habit of mind explains why the Marble Faun, for all the beauty of its parts, fails to hold the impulse of its highly imaginative conception in singleness of artistic form. In his other long pieces Hawthorne did not so fail. The form of the novel he felt; and it gave him room for that discursiveness which is equally natural to him and delightful to his readers. But the form of the short story, though he achieved it now and again—as often in his early work as in his later—he seems not to have felt distinctly. And, whether he felt it or not, his bent and preference were not to carry it forward.

II. POE’S INVENTION OF THE SHORT STORY

For the realisation and development of the short-story form lying there in posse, the man of the hour was Poe. Poe could write trenchant essays; he turned sometimes to longer fictions; but he is above all, in his prose, a writer of short stories. For this work was he born. His artistic bent unconsciously, his artistic skill consciously, moved in this direction. In theory and in practice he displayed for America and for the world19 a substantially new literary form. What is there in the form, then, of Poe’s tales which, marking them off from the past, marks them as models16 for the future? Primarily Poe, as a literary artist, was preoccupied with problems of construction. More than any American before him he felt narrative as structure;—not as interpretation of life, for he lived within the walls of his own brain; not as presentation of character or of locality, for there is not in all his tales one man, one woman, and the stage is “out of space, out of time”; but as structure. His chief concern was how to reach an emotional effect by placing and building. When he talked of literary art, he talked habitually in terms of construction. When he worked, at least he planned an ingeniously suspended solution of incidents; for he was always pleased with mere solutions, and he was master of the detective story. At best he planned a rising edifice of emotional impressions, a work of creative, structural imagination.

This habit of mind, this artistic point of view, manifests itself most obviously in harmonisation. Every detail of setting and style is selected for its architectural fitness. The Poe scenery is remarkable not more for its original, phantasmal beauty or horror than for the strictness of its keeping. Like the landscape gardening of the Japanese, it is in each case very part of its castle of dreams. Its contrivance to further the mood may be seen in the use of a single physical detail as a recurring dominant,—most crudely in the dreadful teeth of Berenice, more surely in the horse of Metzengerstein and the sound of Morella’s name, most subtly in the wondrous eyes of Ligeia. These recurrences in his prose are like the refrain of which he was so fond in his verse. And the scheme of harmonisation includes every smallest detail of style. Poe’s vocabulary has not the amplitude of Hawthorne’s; but in color and in cadence,17 in suggestion alike of meaning and of sound, its smaller compass is made to yield fuller answer in declaring and sustaining and intensifying the required mood. Even in 1835, the first year of his conscious prose form, the harmonising of scene and of diction had reached this degree:—

It is almost the last word of adaptation.

Yet in all this Poe simply did better what his predecessors had done already. His harmonising of scene, of style, was no new thing. The narrative form itself needed more artistic adjustment. To begin with what now seems to us the commonest and most obvious defect, the narrative mood and the narrative progress must not be disturbed by introductory exposition. Not only the ruck of writers for the18 annuals, but even Irving, but even sometimes Hawthorne, seem unable to begin a story forthwith. They seem fatally constrained to lay down first a bit of essay. Whether it be an adjuration to the patient reader to mind the import, or a morsel of philosophy for a text, or a bridge from the general to the particular, or an historical summary, or a humorous intimation, it is like the juggler’s piece of carpet; it must be laid down first. Poe’s intolerance of anything extraneous demanded that this be cut off. And though since his time many worthy tales have managed to rise in spite of this inarticulate member, the best art of the short story, thanks to his surgery, has gained greatly in impulse. One can almost see Poe experimenting from tale to tale. In Berenice he charged the introduction with mysterious suggestion; that is, he used it like an overture; he made it integral. In Morella, the point of departure being similar, the theme is struck more swiftly and surely, and the action begins more promptly. In King Pest, working evidently for more rapid movement, he began with lively description. Metzengerstein recurs to the method of Berenice; but Ligeia and Usher, the summit of his achievement, have no introduction, nor have more than two or three of the typical tales that follow.

Every one feels the force for this tale of this method of beginning; and to many story-readers of to-day it19 may seem obvious; but it was Poe, more than any one else, who taught us to begin so.

The idea of this innovation was negatively to reject what is from the point of view of narrative form extraneous; positively it was to make the narrative progress more direct. And the evident care to simplify the narrative mechanism for directness of effect is the clue to Poe’s advance in form, and his most instructive contribution to technic. This principle explains more fully his method of setting the scene. The harmonisation is secured mainly by suppression. The tale is stripped of every least incongruity. In real life emotion is disturbed, confused, perhaps thwarted; in art it cannot be interpreted without arbitrary simplification; in Poe’s art the simplification brooks no intrusive fact. We are kept in a dreamland that knows no disturbing sound. The emotion has no more friction to overcome than a body in a vacuum. For Poe’s directness is not the directness of spontaneity; it has nothing conversational or “natural”; it is the directness of calculation. So he had little occasion to improve his skill in dialogue. Dialogue is the artistic imitation of real life. He had little use for it. His best tales are typically conducted by monologue in the first person. What he desired, what he achieved, what his example taught, was reduction to a straight, predetermined course. Everything that might hinder this consistency were best away. So, as he reduced his scene to proper symbols, he reduced it also, in his typical tales, to one place. Change of place, lapse of time, are either excluded as by the law of the classical unities,20 or, if they are admitted, are never evident20 enough to be remarked. What this meant as a lesson in form can be appreciated only by inspecting the heavy machinery that sank many good tales before him. What it means in ultimate import is the peculiar value and the peculiar limitation of the short story—in a word, its capacity as a literary form. The simplification that he set forth is the way to intensity; but perhaps Hawthorne saw that it might be the way to artificiality.

The history, then, of the short story—the feeling after the form, the final achievement, will yield the definition of the form. The practical process of defining by experiment compiles most surely the theoretical definition. And to complete this definition it is safe to scrutinise the art of Poe in still other aspects. His structure, appearing as harmonisation and as simplification, appears also as gradation. That the incidents of a tale should be arranged as progressive to a climax is an elementary narrative principle not so axiomatic in the practice, at least, of Poe’s time as to bind without the force of his example. Even his detective stories, in their ingenious suspense and their swift and steady mounting to climax, were a lesson in narrative. But this is the least of his skill. The emotional and spiritual effects that he sought as his artistic birthright could be achieved only by adjustments far more subtle. The progressive heightening of the style corresponds to a nice order of small details more and more significant up to the final intensity of revelation. Little suggestion is laid to suggestion until the great hypnotist has us in the mood to hear and feel what he will. It is a minute process, and it is unhurried;21 but it is not too slow to be accomplished within what before him would have seemed incredible brevity. The grading of everything to scale and perspective, that the little whole may be as complete, as satisfying, as any larger whole—nay, that any larger treatment may seem, for the time of comparison, too broad and coarse,—this is Poe’s finer architecture. But for him we should hardly have guessed what might be done in fifteen pages; but for him we should not know so clearly that the art of fifteen pages is not the art of a hundred and fifty.

Berenice casts a shadow first from the fatal library, chamber of doubtful lore, of death, of birth, of pre-natal recollection “like a shadow—vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady; and like a shadow, too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it while the sunlight of my reason shall exist.” The last words deepen the shadow. Then the “boyhood in books” turns vision into reality, reality into vision. Berenice flashes across the darkened stage, and pines, and falls into trances, “disturbing even the identity of her person.” While the light from her is thus turning to darkness, the visionary’s morbid attentiveness is warped toward a monomania of brooding over trivial single objects. For the sake of the past and visionary Berenice betrothed with horror to the decaying real Berenice, he is riveted in brooding upon her person—her emaciation—her face—her lips—her teeth. The teeth are his final curse. The rest is madness, realised too horribly, but with what final swiftness of force! No catalogue of details can convey the effect of this gradation of eight pages. Yet Berenice is Poe’s first and crudest elaboration. The same static art in the same year moves Morella more22 swiftly through finer and surer degrees to a perfectly modulated close in five pages. His next study, still of the same year, is in the grotesque. The freer and more active movement of King Pest shows his command of the kinetic short story of incident as well as of the static short story of intensifying emotion. By the next year he had contrived to unite in Metzengerstein the two processes, culminating intensity of feeling and culminating swiftness of action for a direct stroke of terror and retribution. By 1836 Poe knew his art; he had only to refine it. Continuing to apply his method of gradation in both modes, he gained his own peculiar triumphs in the static,—in a situation developed by exquisite gradation of such infinitesimal incidents as compose Berenice to an intense climax of emotional suggestion, rather than in a situation developed by gradation of events to a climax of action. But in both he disclosed the fine art of the short story in drawing down everything to a point.

For all this was comprehended in Poe’s conception of unity. All these points of technical skill are derived from what he showed to be the vital principle of the short story, its defining mark,—unity of impression through strict unity of form. “Totality of interest,” an idea caught from Schlegel, he laid down first as the principle of the short poem,21 and then as the principle of the tale.22 And what this theory of narrative should imply in practice is seen best in Poe.23 For Hawthorne, though he too achieves totality of interest, is not so surely a master of it precisely because he is not so sure of the technic. His symbolism is often unified, as it were, by logical summary; for Poe’s symbolism summary would be an impertinence. Poe’s harmonisation, not otherwise, perhaps, superior to Hawthorne’s, is more instructive as being more strictly the accord of every word with one constantly dominant impression. His simplification of narrative mechanism went in sheer technical skill beyond the skill of any previous writer in opening a direct course to a single revealing climax. His gradation, too, was a progressive heightening and a nice drawing to scale. All this means that he divined, realised, formulated the short story as a distinct form of art. Before him was the tale, which, though by chance it might attain self-consistency, was usually and typically incomplete, either a part or an outline sketch; from his brain was born the short story as a complete, finished, and self-sufficing whole.

III. A GLANCE AT DERIVATION
ANCIENT TALES, MEDIÆVAL TALES, THE MODERN FRENCH SHORT STORY

37

PART I
THE TENTATIVE PERIOD

WASHINGTON IRVING
1783–1859

For a discussion of Irving in general, and of Rip Van Winkle in particular, see pages 6–9 of the Introduction. The pseudo-documentary notes before and after the tale show incidentally the strong contemporary influence of Scott. The text is that of the first edition (1819).

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39

RIP VAN WINKLE
A POSTHUMOUS WRITING OF DIEDRICH KNICKERBOCKER

61

PETER RUGG, THE MISSING MAN

99

THE FRENCH VILLAGE

115

THE INROAD OF THE NABAJO

It was a keen, cold morning in the latter part of November, when I wound out of the narrow, rocky cañon or valley, in which I had for some time been travelling, and came in sight of the village of San Fernandez, in the valley of Taos. Above, below, and around me, lay the sheeted snow, till, as the eye glanced upward, it was lost among the dark pines which covered the upper part of the mountains, although at the very summit, where the pines were thinnest, it gleamed from among them like a white banner spread between them and heaven. Below me on the left, half open, half frozen, ran the little clear stream, which gave water to the inhabitants of the valley, and along the margin of which I had been travelling. On the right and left the ridges which formed the dark and precipitous sides of the cañon, sweeping apart, formed a spacious amphitheatre. Along their sides extended a belt of deep, dull blue mist, above and below which was to be seen the white snow, and the deep darkness of the pines. On the right, these mountains swelled to a greater and more precipitous height, till their tops gleamed in unsullied whiteness over the plain below. Still farther to the right was a broad opening, where the mountains seemed to sink into the plain; and afar off in front were the tall and stupendous mountains between me and the city of Santa Fé. Directly in front of me, with the dull color of its mud buildings contrasting with the dazzling whiteness of the snow, lay the little village, resembling an oriental town, with its low, square, mud-roofed116 houses and its two square church towers, also of mud. On the path to the village were a few Mexicans, wrapped in their striped blankets, and driving their jackasses heavily laden with wood towards the village. Such was the aspect of the place at a distance. On entering it, you found only a few dirty, irregular lanes, and a quantity of mud houses.

To an American the first sight of these New Mexican villages is novel and singular. He seems taken into a different world. Everything is new, strange, and quaint: the men with their pantalones of cloth, gaily ornamented with lace, split up on the outside of the leg to the knee, and covered at the bottom with a broad strip of morocco; the jacket of calico; the botas of stamped and embroidered leather; the zarape or blanket of striped red and white; the broad-brimmed hat, with a black silk handkerchief tied round it in a roll; or in the lower class, the simple attire of breeches of leather reaching only to the knees, a shirt and a zarape; the bonnetless women, with a silken scarf or a red shawl over their heads; and, added to all, the continual chatter of Spanish about him—all remind him that he is in a strange land.

On the evening after my arrival in the village I went to a fandango. I saw the men and women dancing waltzes and drinking whiskey together; and in another room I saw the monti-bank open. It is a strange sight, a Spanish fandango. Well dressed women—they call them ladies—priests, thieves, half-breed Indians—all spinning round together in a waltz. Here a filthy, ragged fellow with half a shirt, a pair of leather breeches, long, dirty woollen stockings, and Apache moccasins, was whirling round with the pretty wife of Pedro Vigil. I was soon disgusted; but among the graceless shapes and more graceless dresses at the fandango I saw one young woman who appeared to me exceedingly pretty. She was under the middle size, slightly formed; and, besides the delicate foot and ancle and the keen black eye common to all the women in that country, she possessed a clear and beautiful complexion,117 and a modest, downcast look not often to be met with among the New Mexican females.

I was informed to my surprise that she had been married several years before, and was now a widow. There was an air of gentle and deep melancholy in her face which drew my attention to her; but when one week afterward I left Taos, and went down to Santa Fé, the pretty widow was forgotten.

Among my acquaintances in Santa Fé was one American in particular by the name of L——. He had been in the country several years, had much influence there among the people, and was altogether a very talented man. Of his faults, whatever they were, I have nothing to say. It was from him, some time after my arrival, and when the widow had ceased almost to be a thing of memory, that I learned the following particulars respecting her former fortunes. I give them in L’s own words as nearly as I can, and can only say that for the truth of them he is my authority. True or not, such as I received them do I present them to my readers.

“You know,” said he, “that I have been in this country several years. Six or eight years ago I was at Taos, upon business, and was lodging in the house of an old acquaintance, Dick Taylor. Early the next morning I was suddenly awakened by Dick, who, shaking me roughly by the shoulder, exclaimed, ‘Get up, man—get up—if you wish to see sport, and dress yourself.’ Half awake and half asleep, I heard an immense clamor in the street. Cries, yells, oaths, and whoops resounded in every direction. I knew it would be useless to ask an explanation of the matter from the sententious Dick; and I therefore quietly finished dressing and, taking my rifle, followed him into the street. For a time I was at a loss to understand what was the matter. Men were running wildly about, some armed with fusees, with locks as big as a gunbrig, some with bows and arrows, and some with spears. Women were scudding hither and thither, with their black hair118 flying, and their naked feet shaming the ground by their superior filth. Indian girls were to be seen here and there, with suppressed smiles, and looks of triumph. Men, women, and children, however, seemed to trust less in their armor than in the arm of the Lord and of the saints. They were accordingly earnest in calling upon Tata Dios! Dios bendito! Virgen purisima! and all the saints of the calendar, and above all, upon Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, to aid, protect, and assist them. One cry, at last, explained the whole matter,—‘Los malditos y picaros que son los Nabajos.’ The Nabajos had been robbing them. They had entered the valley below, and were sweeping it of all the flocks and herds; and this produced the consternation. You have never seen any of these Nabajos. They approach much nearer in character to the Indians in the south of the Mexican Republic than any others in this province. They are whiter; they raise corn; they have vast flocks of sheep and large herds of horses; they make blankets, too, and sell them to the Spaniards. Their great men have a number of servants under them; and in fact their government is apparently patriarchal. Sometimes they choose a captain over the nation; but even then they obey him or not, just as they please. They live about three days’ journey west of this, and have about ten thousand souls in the tribe. Like most other Indians, they have their medicine men, who intercede for them with the Great Spirit by strange rites and ceremonies.

“Through the tumult we proceeded towards the outer edge of the town, whither all the armed men seemed to be hastening. On arriving in the street which goes out towards the cañon of the river, we found ourselves in the place of action. Nothing was yet to be seen out in the plain, which extends to the foot of the hills and to the cañon. Some fifty Mexicans had gathered there, mostly armed, and were pressing forward towards the extremity of the street. Behind them were a dozen Americans with their rifles, all as cool as might be; for the men that came119 through the prairie then were all braves. Sundry women were scudding about, exhorting their husbands to fight well, and praising ‘Los Señores Americanos.’ We had waited perhaps half an hour when the foe came in sight, sweeping in from the west, and bearing towards the cañon, driving before them numerous herds and flocks, and consisting apparently of about one hundred men. When they were within about half a mile of us, they separated. One portion of them remained with the booty, and the other, all mounted, came sweeping down upon us. The effect was instantaneous and almost magical. In a moment not a woman was to be seen far or near; and the heroes who had been chattering and boasting in front of the Americans, shrunk behind them, and left them to bear the brunt of the battle. We immediately extended ourselves across the street, and waited the charge. The Indians made a beautiful appearance as they came down upon us with their fine looking horses, and their shields ornamented with feathers and fur, and their dresses of unstained deer-skin. At that time they knew nothing about the Americans. They supposed that their good allies, the Spaniards, would run as they commonly do, that they should have the pleasure of frightening the village and shouting in it and going off safely. As they neared us, each of us raised his gun when he judged it proper, and fired. A dozen cracks of the rifle told them the difference. Five or six tumbled out of their saddles, and were immediately picked up by their comrades, who then turned their backs and retreated as swiftly as they had come. The Americans, who were, like myself, not very eager to fight the battles of the New Mexicans, loaded their guns with immense coolness; and we stood gazing at them as they again gathered their booty and prepared to move towards the cañon. The Mexicans tried to induce us to mount and follow; but we, or at least I, was perfectly contented. In fact, I did not care much which whipped. The Nabajos seemed thus in a very good way of going off with their booty unhindered,120 when suddenly the scene was altered. A considerable body, perhaps sixty, of the Pueblo of Taos, civilized Indians who are Catholics, and citizens of the Republic, appeared suddenly under the mountains, dashing at full speed towards the mouth of the cañon. They were all fine looking men, well mounted, large, and exceedingly brave.

“Upon seeing the Pueblo of Taos between them and the mouth of the cañon, the Nabajos uttered a shrill yell of defiance, and moved to meet them. Leaving a few men to guard the cattle, the remainder, diverging like the opening sticks of a fan, rushed to the attack. Each man shot his arrow as he approached, till he was within thirty or forty yards, and then wheeling, retreated, shooting as he went. They were steadily received by the Pueblo with a general discharge of fire-arms and arrows at every charge, and were frustrated in every attempt at routing them. Several were seen to fall at every charge; but they were always taken up and borne to those who were guarding the cattle. During the contest several Mexicans mounted and went out from the village to join the Pueblos, but only two or three ventured to do so; the others kept at a very respectful distance. At length, finding the matter grow desperate, more men were joined to those who guarded the cattle, and they then moved steadily towards the cañon. The others, again diverging, rushed on till they came within fifty yards, and then converging again, charged boldly upon one point; and as the Pueblo were unprepared for this manœuvre, they broke through and again charged back. Drawing them together in this way to oppose, they drove nearly two thirds of the cattle through the line, goaded by arrows and frightened by shouts. Many of the Nabajos, however, fell in the mêlée by the long spears and quick arrows of the Pueblo. In the mean time I had mounted, and approached within two hundred yards of the scene of contest. I observed one tall and121 good-looking Spaniard, of middle age, who was particularly active in the contest. He had slightly wounded a large, athletic Nabajo with his spear; and I observed that he was continually followed by him. When this large chief had concluded that the cattle were near enough to the mouth of the cañon to be out of danger, he gave a shrill cry; and his men, who were now reduced to about sixty, besides those with the cattle, gathered simultaneously between the Pueblo and the cañon. Only the chief remained behind; and rushing towards the Spaniard who had wounded him, he grasped him with one hand and raised him from the saddle as if he had been a boy. Taken by surprise, the man made no resistance for a moment or two, and that moment or two sufficed for the horse of the Nabajo—a slightly made, Arabian-looking animal—to place him, with two or three bounds, among his own men. Then his knife glittered in the air, and I saw the Spaniard’s limbs contract and then collapse. A moment more sufficed for him to tear the scalp from the head. He was then tumbled to the ground; and with a general yell the whole body rushed forward, closely pursued by the Pueblo. In hurrying to the cañon, the Nabajo lost several men and more of the cattle; but when they had once entered its rocky jaws, and the Pueblo turned back, still more than half the plunder remained with the robbers. Fifteen Nabajos only were left dead; and the remainder were borne off before their comrades. The Pueblos lost nearly one third of their number.

“It was this fight, sir, this inroad of the Nabajos, which brought me acquainted with the young widow of whom we have spoken before. She was then an unmarried girl of fourteen; and a very pretty girl too was La Señorita Ana Maria Ortega. I need not trouble you with descriptions of her; for she has saved me the trouble by appearing to your eyes in that sublime place, a fandango—when you first saw the charms of New Mexican beauty, and had your eyes ravished with the melody and harmony of a Spanish waltz—I beg Spain’s pardon—a New Mexican waltz.”

122

“Which waltz,” said I, “I heard the next morning played over a coffin at a funeral; and in the afternoon, in the procession of the Host.”

“Oh! that is common. Melody, harmony, fiddle, banjo, and all—all is common to all occasions. They have but little music, and they are right in being economical with it; and the presence of the priest sanctifies anything. You know the people of Taos?”

“Yes. The people were afraid to get drunk on my first fandango night. I was astonished to find them so sober. The priest was there; and they feared to get drunk until he had done so. That event took place about eleven at night, and then aguadiente was in demand.”

“Yes, I dare say. That same priest once asked me if England was a province or a state. I told him it was a province. He reads Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, and takes the old infidel to be an excellent christian. Ana Maria was his god-daughter, I think, or some such matter; and I became acquainted with her in that way. He wanted me to marry her. She knew nothing of it, though; but I backed out. I did not mind the marrying so much as the baptism and the citizenship. I don’t exchange my country for Mexico, or the name American for that of Mexican. Ana was in truth not a girl to be slighted. She was pretty and rich and sensible. Her room was the best furnished mud apartment in Taos. Her zarapes were of the best texture, some of them even from Chihuahua; and they were piled showily around the room. The roses skewered upon the wall were of red silk; and the santos and other images had been brought from Mexico. There were some half dozen of looking-glasses, too, all out of reach, and various other adornments common to great apartments. The medal which she wore round her neck, with a cross-looking San Pablo upon it, was of beaten gold, or some other kind of gold. She had various dresses of calico and silk, all bought at high prices of the new comers; and her little fairy feet were always adorned with shoes. That was a great extravagance123 in those days. Ana Maria had no mother when I first saw her; and she had transferred all her affection to her father. When the knife of the Nabajo made her an orphan, I suppose she felt as if her last hold upon life were gone. She appeared to, at least.

“Victorino Alasi had been her lover, and her favored one. He had never thought of any other than Ana Maria as his bride, and he had talked of his love to her a hundred times. But there came in a young trapper who gave him cause to tremble lest he should lose his treasure. Henry or, as he was most commonly called, Hentz Wilson, was a formidable rival. Ana knew not, herself, which to prefer. The long friendship and love of Victorino were almost balanced by the different style of beauty, the odd manners, and the name American, which recommended Hentz. Her vanity was flattered by the homage of an American, and Victorino was in danger of losing his bride. The bold, open bearing of Hentz, and his bravery, as well as his knowledge, which, though slight at home, was wondrous to the simple New Mexicans, had recommended him, likewise, to the father, whose death suspended, for a time, all operations. They had each of them made application by letter (the common custom) for the hand of Ana Maria. In the course of a fortnight after the inroad of the Nabajo, each of the lovers received, as answer, that she had determined to give her hand to either of them who should kill the murderer of her father. And with this they both were obliged to content themselves for the present.

“Directly after the inroad, I came down to Santa Fé. The Lieutenant Colonel of the Province, Viscara, was raising a body of men to go out against the Nabajo, and repay them for this and other depredations lately committed upon the people, and he was urgent for me to accompany him—so much so that I was obliged to comply with his requests, and promised to go. Troops were sent for from below; and in the course of four months, the expedition was ready, and we set out upon the Nabajo campaign. We124 were a motley set. First there was a body of regular troops, all armed with British muskets and with lances. Here was a grey coat and leathern pantaloons; there, no coat and short breeches. But you have seen the ragged, ununiformed troops here in the city, and I need not describe them to you. Next there was a parcel of militia, all mounted, some with lances, some with old fusees; and last, a body of Indians of the different Pueblos, with bows and shields—infinitely the best troops we had, as well as the bravest men. Among the militia of Taos I observed the young Victorino. Hentz had likewise volunteered to accompany the expedition, and lived with me in the General’s tent.

“It was in the driest part of the summer that we left Santa Fé, and marched towards the country of the Nabajo. We went out by the way of Xemes, and then, crossing the Rio Puerco, went into the mountains of the Nabajo. We came up with them, fought them, and they fled before us, driving their cattle and sheep with them into a wide sand desert; and we, being now out of provisions, were obliged to overtake them or starve. We were two days without a drop of water, and nearly all the animals gave out in consequence. On the third day Viscara, fifteen soldiers, and myself went ahead of the army (which, I forgot to say, was thirteen hundred strong). Viscara and his men were mounted. I was on foot, with no clothing except a cloth round my middle, with a lance in one hand, and a rifle in the other. That day I think I ran seventy-five miles, bare-footed, and through the burning sand.”

“Viscara tells me that you ran thirty leagues.”

“Viscara is mistaken, and overrates it. Just before night we came up with a large body of Nabajos, and attacked them. We took about two thousand sheep from them, and three hundred cattle, and drove them back that night to the army. The Nabajos supposed, when we rushed on them, that the whole of our force was at hand, and they were afraid to pursue us. But it is the battle in which you125 are most concerned. When we attacked the Nabajo, they were drawn up, partly on foot, and partly on horseback, in the bed of a little creek which was dry. It was the common way of fighting—charge, fire and retreat; and if you have seen one fight on horseback, you have seen all. I observed particularly one Nabajo, upon whom three Pueblos charged, all on foot. He shot two of them down before they reached him. Another arrow struck the remaining one in the belly. He still came on with only a tomahawk, and another arrow struck him in the forehead. Yet still he braved his foe and they were found lying dead together. I could have shot the Nabajo with great ease, at the time; for the whole of this took place within seventy yards of me.

“In the midst of the battle I observed Victorino and Hentz standing together in the front rank, seeming rather to be spectators than men interested in the fight. They were both handsome men, but entirely different in appearance. Victorino was a dark-eyed, slender, agile young Spaniard, with a tread like a tiger-cat, and with all his nerves indurate with toil. His face was oval, thin, and of a rich olive, through which the blood seemed ready to break; and you could hardly have chosen a better figure for a statuary as he stood, now and then discharging his fusee, but commonly glancing his eyes uneasily about from one part of the enemy to the other. Hentz, on the contrary, was a tall and well-proportioned young fellow, of immense strength and activity, but with little of the cat-like quickness of his rival. His skin was fair even to effeminacy, and his blue eyes were shaded by a profusion of chestnut hair. He, too, seemed expecting some one to appear amid the enemy; for though he now and then fired and reloaded, it was but seldom, and he spent more time in leaning on his long rifle, and gazing about among the Nabajos.

“On a sudden, a sharp yell was heard, and a party of Nabajos came dashing down the bank of the creek, all mounted, and headed by the big chief who had killed the126 father of Ana Maria. Then the apathy of the two rivals was at once thrown aside. Hentz quickly threw his gun into the hollow of his arm, examined the priming, and again stood quietly watching the motions of the chief; and Victorino did the same. Wheeling round several times, and discharging a flight of arrows continually upon us, this new body of Nabajo at length bore down directly toward Hentz and Victorino. As the chief came on, Victorino raised his gun, took a steady, long aim, and fired. Another moment, and the Nabajo were upon them, and then retreated again like a wave tossing back from the shore. The chief still sat on his horse as before; another yell, and they came down again. When they were within about a hundred yards, Hentz raised his rifle, took a steady, quick aim, and fired. Still they came on; the chief bent down over the saddle-bow, and his horse, seemingly frightened by the strange pressure of the rider, bore down directly towards Hentz, who sprang to meet him, and caught the bridle; the horse sprang to one side, and the wounded chief lost his balance, and fell upon the ground. The horse dashed away through friend and foe, and was out of sight in a moment. The Nabajo rallied to save the body of their chief, and Viscara himself rushed in with me to the rescue of Hentz. But the long barrel of Hentz’s rifle, which he swayed with a giant’s strength, the sword of Viscara, and the keen knife of Victorino, who generously sprang in the aid of his rival, would all have failed in saving the body, had not a band of the gallant Pueblo attacked them in the rear and routed them. Hentz immediately dispatched the chief, who was by this time half hidden by a dozen Nabajos, and immediately deprived his head of the hair, which is more valuable to an Indian than life.

“The Nabajos sued for peace, and we returned to Santa Fé. Poor Victorino, I observed, rode generally alone, and had not a word to say to any one. Although formerly he had been the most merry and humorous, now he seemed entirely buried in sorrow. He kept listlessly along, looking127 neither to the right hand nor to the left, with his bridle lying on the neck of his mule. I tried to comfort him; but he answered me gloomily, ‘Why should I cheer up? What have I to live for? Had I lost her by any fault of my own, I would not have thought so hardly of it; but by this cursed old fusee, and because another man can shoot better than I—Oh! sir, leave me to myself, I pray you, and make me no offers which do me no good. I think I shall be happy again, but it will be in my grave, and Dios me perdone! I care not how soon I am there.’

“As I fell back towards the rear, where I generally marched, Hentz rode up by me and inquired what the young Spaniard had said. I repeated it to him. ‘Do you think he is really that troubled?’ inquired he. ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘the poor fellow seems to feel all he says.’ Without a word, Hentz rode towards him, and reining up by him, tapped him on the shoulder. Victorino looked fiercely up, and seemed inclined to resent it; but Hentz, without regarding the glance, proceeded with a mass of immensely bad Spanish, which I know not how the poor fellow ever understood. ‘Here,’ said he, ‘you love Ana better than I do, I know—you have known her longer, and will feel her loss more; and after all, you would have killed the chief if you could have done it—and you did help me save the body. Take this bunch of stuff,’ holding out the hair, ‘and give me your hand.’ Victorino did so, and shook the offered hand heartily. Then taking the scalp, he deposited it in his shot-pouch, and dashing the tears from his eyes, rode off towards his comrades like a madman. So much for the inroad of the Nabajos.”

“But what became of Victorino?” inquired I.

“He married Ana Maria after she had laid aside the luto (mourning); and two years ago he died of the small-pox, in the Snake country. Poor fellow—he was almost an American.”

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131

THE WHITE OLD MAID

The moonbeams came through two deep and narrow windows, and showed a spacious chamber richly furnished in an antique fashion. From one lattice the shadow of the diamond panes was thrown upon the floor; the ghostly light through the other slept upon the bed, falling between the heavy silken curtains and illuminating the face of a young man. But how quietly the slumberer lay! how pale his features! And how like a shroud the sheet was wound about his frame! Yes, it was a corpse in its burial-clothes.

Suddenly the fixed features seemed to move with dark emotion. Strange fantasy! It was but the shadow of the fringed curtain waving betwixt the dead face and the moonlight as the door of the chamber opened and a girl stole softly to the bedside. Was there delusion in the moonbeams, or did her gesture and her eye betray a gleam of triumph as she bent over the pale corpse, pale as itself, and pressed her living lips to the cold ones of the dead? As she drew back from that long kiss her features writhed as if a proud heart were fighting with its anguish. Again it seemed that the features of the corpse had moved responsive to her own. Still an illusion. The silken curtains had waved a second time betwixt the dead face and the moonlight as another fair young girl unclosed the door and glided ghostlike to the bedside. There the two maidens stood, both beautiful, with the pale beauty of the dead between132 them. But she who had first entered was proud and stately, and the other a soft and fragile thing.

“Away!” cried the lofty one. “Thou hadst him living; the dead is mine.”

“Thine!” returned the other, shuddering. “Well hast thou spoken. The dead is thine.”

The proud girl started, and stared into her face with a ghastly look. But a wild and mournful expression passed across the features of the gentle one, and, weak and helpless, she sank down on the bed, her head pillowed beside that of the corpse and her hair mingling with his dark locks. A creature of hope and joy, the first draught of sorrow had bewildered her.

“Edith!”39 cried her rival.

Edith groaned as with a sudden compression of the heart; and removing her cheek from the dead youth’s pillow, she stood upright, fearfully encountering the eyes of the lofty girl.

“Wilt thou betray me?” said the latter, calmly.

“Till the dead bid me speak I will be silent,” answered Edith. “Leave us alone together. Go and live many years, and then return and tell me of thy life. He too will be here. Then, if thou tellest of sufferings more than death, we will both forgive thee.”

“And what shall be the token?” asked the proud girl, as if her heart acknowledged a meaning in these wild words.

“This lock of hair,” said Edith, lifting one of the dark, clustering curls that lay heavily on the dead man’s brow.

The two maidens joined their hands over the bosom of the corpse, and appointed a day and hour far, far in time to come for their next meeting in that chamber. The statelier girl gave one deep look at the motionless countenance and departed—yet turned again and trembled ere she closed the door, almost believing that her dead lover frowned upon her. And Edith, too! Was not her white133 form fading into the moonlight? Scorning her own weakness, she went forth and perceived that a negro slave was waiting in the passage with a wax-light, which he held between her face and his own, and regarded her, as she thought, with an ugly expression of merriment. Lifting his torch on high, the slave lighted her down the staircase and undid the portal of the mansion. The young clergyman of the town had just ascended the steps, and, bowing to the lady, passed in without a word.

Years, many years, rolled on. The world seemed new again, so much older was it grown since the night when those pale girls had clasped their hands across the bosom of the corpse. In the interval a lonely woman had passed from youth to extreme age, and was known by all the town as the “Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet.” A taint of insanity had affected her whole life, but so quiet, sad and gentle, so utterly free from violence, that she was suffered to pursue her harmless fantasies unmolested by the world, with whose business or pleasures she had naught to do. She dwelt alone, and never came into the daylight, except to follow funerals. Whenever a corpse was borne along the street, in sunshine, rain or snow, whether a pompous train of the rich and proud thronged after it or few and humble were the mourners, behind them came the lonely woman in a long white garment which the people called her shroud. She took no place among the kindred or the friends, but stood at the door to hear the funeral prayer, and walked in the rear of the procession as one whose earthly charge it was to haunt the house of mourning, and be the shadow of affliction, and see that the dead were duly buried. So long had this been her custom that the inhabitants of the town deemed her a part of every funeral, as much as the coffin-pall or the very corpse itself, and augured ill of the sinner’s destiny unless the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet came gliding like a ghost behind. Once, it is said, she affrighted a bridal party with her pale presence, appearing suddenly in the illuminated hall just as134 the priest was uniting a false maid to a wealthy man before her lover had been dead a year. Evil was the omen to that marriage! Sometimes she stole forth by moonlight and visited the graves of venerable integrity, and wedded love, and virgin innocence, and every spot where the ashes of a kind and faithful heart were mouldering. Over the hillocks of those favored dead would she stretch out her arms with a gesture as if she were scattering seeds, and many believed that she brought them from the garden of Paradise; for the graves which she had visited were green beneath the snow and covered with sweet flowers from April to November. Her blessing was better than a holy verse upon the tombstone. Thus wore away her long, sad, peaceful and fantastic life till few were so old as she, and the people of later generations wondered how the dead had ever been buried, or mourners had endured their grief, without the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet.

Still years went on, and still she followed funerals and was not yet summoned to her own festival of death. One afternoon the great street of the town was all alive with business and bustle, though the sun now gilded only the upper half of the church-spire, having left the house-tops and loftiest trees in shadow. The scene was cheerful and animated in spite of the somber shade between the high brick buildings. Here were pompous merchants in white wigs and laced velvet, the bronzed faces of sea-captains, the foreign garb and air of Spanish creoles, and the disdainful port of natives of Old England, all contrasted with the rough aspect of one or two back-settlers negociating sales of timber from forests where axe had never sounded. Sometimes a lady passed, swelling roundly forth in an embroidered petticoat, balancing her steps in high-heeled shoes, and courtesying with lofty grace to the punctilious obeisances of the gentlemen. The life of the town seemed to have its very centre not far from an old mansion that stood somewhat back from the pavement, surrounded by neglected grass, with a strange air of loneliness,135 rather deepened than dispelled by the throng so near it. Its site would have been suitably occupied by a magnificent Exchange or a brick block lettered all over with various signs; or the large house itself might have made a noble tavern with the “King’s Arms” swinging before it, and guests in every chamber, instead of the present solitude. But, owing to some dispute about the right of inheritance, the mansion had been long without a tenant, decaying from year to year and throwing the stately gloom of its shadow over the busiest part of the town. Such was the scene, and such the time, when a figure unlike any that have been described was observed at a distance down the street.

“I espy a strange sail yonder,” remarked a Liverpool captain; “that woman in the long white garment.”

The sailor seemed much struck by the object, as were several others who at the same moment caught a glimpse of the figure that had attracted his notice. Almost immediately the various topics of conversation gave place to speculations in an undertone on this unwonted occurrence.

“Can there be a funeral so late this afternoon?” inquired some.

They looked for the signs of death at every door—the sexton, the hearse, the assemblage of black-clad relatives—all that makes up the woeful pomp of funerals. They raised their eyes, also, to the sun-gilt spire of the church, and wondered that no clang proceeded from its bell, which had always tolled till now when this figure appeared in the light of day. But none had heard that a corpse was to be borne to its home that afternoon, nor was there any token of a funeral except the apparition of the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet.

“What may this portend?” asked each man of his neighbor.

All smiled as they put the question, yet with a certain trouble in their eyes, as if pestilence, or some other wide calamity, were prognosticated by the untimely intrusion136 among the living of one whose presence had always been associated with death and woe. What a comet is to the earth was that sad woman to the town. Still she moved on, while the hum of surprise was hushed at her approach, and the proud and the humble stood aside that her white garment might not wave against them. It was a long, loose robe of spotless purity. Its wearer appeared very old, pale, emaciated and feeble, yet glided onward without the unsteady pace of extreme age. At one point of her course a little rosy boy burst forth from a door and ran with open arms towards the ghostly woman, seeming to expect a kiss from her bloodless lips. She made a slight pause, fixing her eye upon him with an expression of no earthly sweetness, so that the child shivered and stood awe-struck rather than affrighted while the Old Maid passed on. Perhaps her garment might have been polluted even by an infant’s touch; perhaps her kiss would have been death to the sweet boy within the year.

“She is but a shadow,” whispered the superstitious. “The child put forth his arms and could not grasp her robe.”

The wonder was increased when the Old Maid passed beneath the porch of the deserted mansion, ascended the moss-covered steps, lifted the iron knocker and gave three raps. The people could only conjecture that some old remembrance, troubling her bewildered brain, had impelled the poor woman hither to visit the friends of her youth; all gone from their home long since and forever, unless their ghosts still haunted it—fit company for the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet. An elderly man approached the steps and, reverently uncovering his gray locks, essayed to explain the matter.

“None, madam,” said he, “have dwelt in this house these fifteen years agone—no, not since the death of old Colonel Fenwicke, whose funeral you may remember to have followed. His heirs, being ill-agreed among themselves, have let the mansion-house go to ruin.”

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The Old Maid looked slowly round with a slight gesture of one hand and a finger of the other upon her lip, appearing more shadow-like than ever in the obscurity of the porch. But again she lifted the hammer, and gave, this time, a single rap. Could it be that a footstep was now heard coming down the staircase of the old mansion which all conceived to have been so long untenanted? Slowly, feebly, yet heavily, like the pace of an aged and infirm person, the step approached, more distinct on every downward stair, till it reached the portal. The bar fell on the inside; the door was opened. One upward glance toward the church-spire, whence the sunshine had just faded, was the last that the people saw of the “Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet.”

“Who undid the door?” asked many.

This question, owing to the depth of shadow beneath the porch, no one could satisfactorily answer. Two or three aged men, while protesting against an inference which might be drawn, affirmed that the person within was a negro, and bore a singular resemblance to old Cæsar, formerly a slave in the house, but freed by death some thirty years before.

“Her summons has waked up a servant of the old family,” said one, half seriously.

“Let us wait here,” replied another. “More guests will knock at the door anon. But the gate of the grave-yard should be thrown open.”

Twilight had overspread the town before the crowd began to separate, or the comments on this incident were exhausted. One after another was wending his way homeward, when a coach—no common spectacle in those days—drove slowly into the street. It was an old-fashioned equipage, hanging close to the ground, with arms on the pannels, a footman behind, and a grave, corpulent coachman seated high in front—the whole giving an idea of solemn state and dignity. There was something awful in the heavy rumbling of the wheels. The coach rolled down138 the street, till, coming to the gateway of the deserted mansion, it drew up, and the footman sprang to the ground.

“Whose grand coach is this?” asked a very inquisitive body.

The footman made no reply, but ascended the steps of the old house, gave three taps with the iron hammer, and returned to open the coach door. An old man possessed of the heraldic lore so common in that day examined the shield of arms on the pannel.

“Azure, a lion’s head erased, between three flower de luces,” said he; then whispered the name of the family to whom these bearings belonged. The last inheritor of its honors was recently dead, after a long residence amid the splendor of the British court, where his birth and wealth had given him no mean station. “He left no child,” continued the herald, “and these arms, being in a lozenge, betoken that the coach appertains to his widow.”

Further disclosures, perhaps, might have been made, had not the speaker been suddenly struck dumb by the stern eye of an ancient lady who thrust forth her head from the coach, preparing to descend. As she emerged the people saw that her dress was magnificent, and her figure dignified in spite of age and infirmity—a stately ruin, but with a look at once of pride and wretchedness. Her strong and rigid features had an awe about them unlike that of the White Old Maid, but as of something evil. She passed up the steps, leaning on a gold-headed cane. The door swung open as she ascended—and the light of a torch glittered on the embroidery of her dress and gleamed on the pillars of the porch. After a momentary pause—a glance backwards—and then a desperate effort—she went in. The decypherer of the coat of arms had ventured up the lowest step, and, shrinking back immediately, pale and tremulous, affirmed that the torch was held by the very image of old Cæsar.

“But such a hideous grin,” added he, “was never seen139 on the face of mortal man, black or white! It will haunt me till my dying day.”

Meantime the coach had wheeled round, with a prodigious clatter on the pavement, and rumbled up the street, disappearing in the twilight, while the ear still tracked its course. Scarcely was it gone when the people began to question whether the coach and attendants, the ancient lady, the spectre of old Cæsar and the Old Maid herself, were not all a strangely combined delusion with some dark purport in its mystery. The whole town was astir, so that, instead of dispersing, the crowd continually increased, and stood gazing up at the windows of the mansion, now silvered by the brightening moon. The elders, glad to indulge the narrative propensity of age, told of the long-faded splendor of the family, the entertainments they had given and the guests, the greatest of the land, and even titled and noble ones from abroad, who had passed beneath that portal. These graphic reminiscences seemed to call up the ghosts of those to whom they referred. So strong was the impression on some of the more imaginative hearers that two or three were seized with trembling fits at one and the same moment, protesting that they had distinctly heard three other raps of the iron knocker.

“Impossible!” exclaimed others. “See! The moon shines beneath the porch, and shows every part of it, except in the narrow shade of that pillar. There is no one there.”

“Did not the door open?” whispered one of these fanciful persons.

“Didst thou see it too?” said his companion, in a startled tone.

But the general sentiment was opposed to the idea that a third visitant had made application at the door of the deserted house. A few, however, adhered to this new marvel, and even declared that a red gleam like that of a torch had shone through the great front window, as if the negro were lighting a guest up the staircase. This, too, was pronounced140 a mere fantasy. But at once the whole multitude started, and each man beheld his own terror painted in the faces of all the rest.

“What an awful thing is this!” cried they.

A shriek, too fearfully distinct for doubt, had been heard within the mansion, breaking forth suddenly and succeeded by a deep stillness, as if a heart had burst in giving it utterance. The people knew not whether to fly from the very sight of the house, or to rush trembling in and search out the strange mystery. Amid their confusion and affright, they were somewhat reassured by the appearance of their clergyman, a venerable patriarch, and equally a saint, who had taught them and their fathers the way to heaven for more than the space of an ordinary life-time. He was a reverend figure with long white hair upon his shoulders, a white beard upon his breast, and a back so bent over his staff that he seemed to be looking downward continually, as if to choose a proper grave for his weary frame. It was some time before the good old man, being deaf and of impaired intellect, could be made to comprehend such portions of the affair as were comprehensible at all. But, when possessed of the facts, his energies assumed unexpected vigor.

“Verily,” said the old gentleman, “it will be fitting that I enter the mansion-house of the worthy Colonel Fenwicke, lest any harm should have befallen that true Christian woman whom ye call the ‘Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet.’”

Behold, then, the venerable clergyman ascending the steps of the mansion with a torch-bearer behind him. It was the elderly man who had spoken to the Old Maid, and the same who had afterward explained the shield of arms and recognized the features of the negro. Like their predecessors, they gave three raps with the iron hammer.

“Old Cæsar cometh not,” observed the priest. “Well, I wot he no longer doth service in this mansion.”

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“Assuredly, then, it was something worse in old Cæsar’s likeness!” said the other adventurer.

“Be it as God wills,” answered the clergyman. “See! my strength, though it be much decayed, hath sufficed to open this heavy door. Let us enter and pass up the staircase.”

Here occurred a singular exemplification of the dreamy state of a very old man’s mind. As they ascended the wide flight of stairs, the aged clergyman appeared to move with caution, occasionally standing aside, and oftener bending his head, as it were in salutation, thus practicing all the gestures of one who makes his way through a throng. Reaching the head of the staircase, he looked around with sad and solemn benignity, laid aside his staff, bared his hoary locks, and was evidently on the point of commencing a prayer.

“Reverend Sir,” said his attendant, who conceived this a very suitable prelude to their further search, “would it not be well that the people join with us in prayer?”

“Well-a-day!” cried the old clergyman, staring strangely around him. “Art thou here with me, and none other? Verily, past times were present to me, and I deemed that I was to make a funeral prayer, as many a time heretofore, from the head of this staircase. Of a truth, I saw the shades of many that are gone. Yea, I have prayed at their burials, one after another, and the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet hath seen them to their graves!”

Being now more thoroughly awake to their present purpose, he took his staff and struck forcibly on the floor, till there came an echo from each deserted chamber, but no menial to answer their summons. They therefore walked along the passage, and again paused, opposite to the great front window, through which was seen the crowd in the shadow and partial moonlight of the street beneath. On their right hand was the open door of a chamber, and a closed one on their left. The clergyman pointed his cane to the carved oak pannel of the latter.

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“Within that chamber,” observed he, “a whole life-time since, did I sit by the death-bed of a goodly young man who, being now at the last gasp——”

Apparently, there was some powerful excitement in the ideas which had now flashed across his mind. He snatched the torch from his companion’s hand, and threw open the door with such sudden violence that the flame was extinguished, leaving them no other light than the moonbeams, which fell through two windows into the spacious chamber. It was sufficient to discover all that could be known. In a high-backed oaken arm-chair, upright, with her hands clasped across her breast, and her head thrown back, sat the “Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet.” The stately dame had fallen on her knees with her forehead on the holy knees of the Old Maid, one hand upon the floor and the other pressed convulsively against her heart. It clutched a lock of hair, once sable, now discolored with a greenish mould. As the priest and layman advanced into the chamber, the Old Maid’s features assumed such a semblance of shifting expression that they trusted to hear the whole mystery explained by a single word. But it was only the shadow of a tattered curtain waving betwixt the dead face and the moonlight.

“Both dead!” said the venerable man. “Then who shall divulge the secret? Methinks it glimmers to and fro in my mind like the light and shadow across the Old Maid’s face. And now ’tis gone!”

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145

THE NOTARY OF PÉRIGUEUX

[From “Outre-Mer,” 1835]

You must know, gentlemen, that there lived some years ago, in the city of Périgueux, an honest notary public, the descendant of a very ancient and broken-down family, and the occupant of one of those old weather-beaten tenements which remind you of the times of your great-grandfather. He was a man of an unoffending, quiet disposition; the father of a family, though not the head of it—for in that family “the hen overcrowed the cock,” and the neighbors, when they spake of the notary, shrugged their shoulders, and exclaimed, “Poor fellow! his spurs want sharpening.” In fine—you understand me, gentlemen—he was henpecked.

Well, finding no peace at home, he sought it elsewhere, as was very natural for him to do; and at length discovered a place of rest far beyond the cares and clamors of domestic life. This was a little café estaminet a short way out of the city, whither he repaired every evening to smoke his pipe, drink sugar-water, and play his favorite game of domino. There he met the boon companions he most loved, heard all the floating chitchat of the day, laughed when he was in merry mood, found consolation when he was sad, and at all times gave vent to his opinions without fear of being snubbed short by a flat contradiction.

Now the notary’s bosom friend was a dealer in claret and cognac, who lived about a league from the city, and always146 passed his evenings at the estaminet. He was a gross, corpulent fellow, raised from a full-blooded Gascon breed, and sired by a comic actor of some reputation in his way. He was remarkable for nothing but his good-humor, his love of cards, and a strong propensity to test the quality of his own liquors by comparing them with those sold at other places.

As evil communications corrupt good manners, the bad practices of the wine-dealer won insensibly upon the worthy notary; and before he was aware of it, he found himself weaned from domino and sugar-water, and addicted to piquet and spiced wine. Indeed, it not infrequently happened that, after a long session at the estaminet, the two friends grew so urbane that they would waste a full half-hour at the door in friendly dispute which should conduct the other home.

Though this course of life agreed well enough with the sluggish, phlegmatic temperament of the wine-dealer, it soon began to play the very deuce with the more sensitive organization of the notary, and finally put his nervous system completely out of tune. He lost his appetite, became gaunt and haggard, and could get no sleep. Legions of blue-devils haunted him by day; and by night strange faces peeped through his bed-curtains, and the nightmare snorted in his ear. The worse he grew, the more he smoked and tippled; and the more he smoked and tippled—why, as a matter of course, the worse he grew. His wife alternately stormed, remonstrated, entreated; but all in vain. She made the house too hot for him—he retreated to the tavern; she broke his long-stemmed pipes upon the andirons—he substituted a short-stemmed one, which, for safe keeping, he carried in his waistcoat-pocket.

Thus the unhappy notary ran gradually down at the heel. What with his bad habits and his domestic grievances, he became completely hipped. He imagined that he was going to die, and suffered in quick succession all the diseases that ever beset mortal man. Every shooting pain147 was an alarming symptom—every uneasy feeling after dinner a sure prognostic of some mortal disease. In vain did his friends endeavor to reason, and then to laugh him out of his strange whims; for when did ever jest or reason cure a sick imagination? His only answer was, “Do let me alone; I know better than you what ails me.”

Well, gentlemen, things were in this state when, one afternoon in December, as he sat moping in his office, wrapped in an overcoat, with a cap on his head and his feet thrust into a pair of furred slippers, a cabriolet stopped at the door, and a loud knocking without aroused him from his gloomy revery. It was a message from his friend the wine-dealer, who had been suddenly attacked with a violent fever, and, growing worse and worse, had now sent in the greatest haste for the notary to draw up his last will and testament. The case was urgent, and admitted neither excuse nor delay; and the notary, tying a handkerchief round his face, and buttoning up to the chin, jumped into the cabriolet, and suffered himself, though not without some dismal presentiments and misgivings of heart, to be driven to the wine-dealer’s house.

When he arrived he found everything in the greatest confusion. On entering the house he ran against the apothecary, who was coming down stairs, with a face as long as your arm; and a few steps farther he met the housekeeper—for the wine-dealer was an old bachelor—running up and down, and wringing her hands, for fear that the good man should die without making his will. He soon reached the chamber of his sick friend, and found him tossing about in a paroxysm of fever and calling aloud for a draught of cold water. The notary shook his head. He thought this a fatal symptom. For ten years back the wine-dealer had been suffering under a species of hydrophobia, which seemed suddenly to have left him.

When the sick man saw who stood by his bedside, he stretched out his hand and exclaimed:

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“Ah! my dear friend! have you come at last? You see it is all over with me. You have arrived just in time to draw up that—that passport of mine. Ah, grand diable! how hot it is here! Water—water—water! Will nobody give me a drop of cold water?”

As the case was an urgent one, the notary made no delay in getting his papers in readiness; and in a short time the last will and testament of the wine-dealer was drawn up in due form, the notary guiding the sick man’s hand as he scrawled his signature at the bottom.

As the evening wore away, the wine-dealer grew worse and worse, and at length became delirious, mingling in his incoherent ravings the phrases of the Credo and Paternoster with the shibboleth of the dram-shop and the card-table.

“Take care! take care! There, now—Credo in—pop! ting-a-ling-ling! give me some of that. Cent-é-dize! Why, you old publican, this wine is poisoned—I know your tricks!—Sanctam ecclesiam Catholicam—Well, well, we shall see. Imbecile! to have a tierce-major and a seven of hearts, and discard the seven! By St. Anthony, capot! You are lurched—ha! ha! I told you so. I knew very well—there—there—don’t interrupt me—Carnis resurrectionem et vitam eternam!”

With these words upon his lips the poor wine-dealer expired. Meanwhile the notary sat cowering over the fire, aghast at the fearful scene that was passing before him, and now and then striving to keep up his courage by a glass of cognac. Already his fears were on the alert, and the idea of contagion flitted to and fro through his mind. In order to quiet these thoughts of evil import, he lighted his pipe, and began to prepare for returning home. At that moment the apothecary turned round to him and said:

“Dreadful sickly time, this! The disorder seems to be spreading.”

“What disorder?” exclaimed the notary, with a movement of surprise.

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“Two died yesterday, and three to-day,” continued the apothecary, without answering the question. “Very sickly time, sir—very.”

“But what disorder is it? What disease has carried off my friend here so suddenly?”

“What disease? Why, scarlet fever, to be sure.”

“And is it contagious?”

“Certainly.”

“Then I am a dead man!” exclaimed the notary, putting his pipe into his waistcoat-pocket, and beginning to walk up and down the room in despair. “I am a dead man! Now don’t deceive me—don’t, will you? What—what are the symptoms?”

“A sharp burning pain in the right side,” said the apothecary.

“Oh, what a fool I was to come here!”

In vain did the housekeeper and the apothecary strive to pacify him. He was not a man to be reasoned with. He answered that he knew his own constitution better than they did, and insisted upon going home without delay. Unfortunately, the vehicle he came in had returned to the city; and the whole neighbourhood was abed and asleep. What was to be done? Nothing in the world but to take the apothecary’s horse, which stood hitched at the door, patiently waiting his master’s will.

Well, gentlemen, as there was no remedy, our notary mounted this raw-boned steed, and set forth upon his homeward journey. The night was cold and gusty, and the wind set right in his teeth. Overhead the leaden clouds were beating to and fro, and through them the newly-risen moon seemed to be tossing and drifting along like a cock-boat in the surf; now swallowed up in a huge billow of cloud, and now lifted upon its bosom and dashed with silvery spray. The trees by the roadside groaned with a sound of evil omen, and before him lay three mortal miles, beset with a thousand imaginary perils. Obedient to the whip and spur, the steed leaped forward by fits and150 starts, now dashing away in a tremendous gallop, and now relaxing into a long, hard trot; while the rider, filled with symptoms of disease and dire presentiments of death, urged him on, as if he were fleeing before the pestilence.

In this way, by dint of whistling and shouting, and beating right and left, one mile of the fatal three was safely passed. The apprehensions of the notary had so far subsided that he even suffered the poor horse to walk up-hill; but these apprehensions were suddenly revived again with tenfold violence by a sharp pain in the right side, which seemed to pierce him like a needle.

“It is upon me at last!” groaned the fear-stricken man. “Heaven be merciful to me, the greatest of sinners! And must I die in a ditch, after all? He! get up! get up!”

And away went horse and rider at full speed—hurry-scurry—up-hill and down—panting and blowing like a whirlwind. At every leap the pain in the rider’s side seemed to increase. At first it was a little point like the prick of a needle—then it spread to the size of a half-franc piece—then covered a piece as large as the palm of your hand. It gained upon him fast. The poor man groaned aloud in agony; faster and faster sped the horse over the frozen ground—farther and farther spread the pain over his side. To complete the dismal picture, the storm commenced—snow mingled with rain. But snow, and rain, and cold were naught to him; for, though his arms and legs were frozen to icicles, he felt it not. The fatal symptom was upon him; he was doomed to die—not of cold, but of scarlet fever!

At length, he knew not how, more dead than alive, he reached the gate of the city. A band of ill-bred dogs, that were serenading at a corner of the street, seeing the notary dash by, joined in the hue and cry, and ran barking and yelping at his heels. It was now late at night, and only here and there a solitary lamp twinkled from an upper story. But on went the notary, down this street and up that, till at last he reached his own door. There151 was a light in his wife’s bed chamber. The good woman came to the window, alarmed at such a knocking and howling and clattering at her door so late at night.

“Let me in! let me in! Quick! quick!” he exclaimed, almost breathless from terror and fatigue.

“Who are you, that come to disturb a lone woman at this hour of the night?” cried a sharp voice from above. “Begone about your business, and let quiet people sleep.”

“Oh, diable, diable! Come down and let me in! I am your husband. Don’t you know my voice? Quick, I beseech you; for I am dying here in the street!”

After a few moments of delay and a few more words of parley, the door was opened, and the notary stalked into his domicil, pale and haggard in aspect, and as stiff and straight as a ghost. Cased from head to heel in an armor of ice, as the glare of the lamp fell upon him he looked like a knight-errant mailed in steel. But in one place his armor was broken. On his right side was a circular spot as large as the crown of your hat, and about as black!

“My dear wife!” he exclaimed, with more tenderness than he had exhibited for many years, “reach me a chair. My hours are numbered. I am a dead man!”

Alarmed at these exclamations, his wife stripped off his overcoat. Something fell from beneath it, and was dashed to pieces on the hearth. It was the notary’s pipe! He placed his hand upon his side, and, lo! it was bare to the skin! Coat, waistcoat, and linen were burnt through and through, and there was a blister on his side as large over as your head!

The mystery was soon explained, symptom and all. The notary had put his pipe into his pocket without knocking out the ashes! And so my story ends.

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155

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was; but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination156 could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of the country—a letter from him—which, in its wildly importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness, of a mental disorder which oppressed him, and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this, and much more, was said—it was the apparent heart that went with his request—which allowed me no room for hesitation; and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular summons.

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Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent, yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognizable beauties, of musical science. I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other—it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the “House of Usher”—an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion.

I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment of looking down within the tarn had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition—for why should I not so term it?—served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house158 itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy—a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity—an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn—a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.

Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine, tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.

Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have159 already spoken. While the objects around me—while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy—while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this—I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up. On one of the staircases, I met the physician of the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with trepidation and passed on. The valet now threw open a door and ushered me into the presence of his master.

The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trelliced panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.

Upon my entrance, Usher arose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality—of the constrained effort of the ennuyé man of the world. A glance, however, at his countenance convinced me of his perfect sincerity. We sat down; and for some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had160 Roderick Usher! It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.

In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence—an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy, an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical conformation and temperament. His action was alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic concision—that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation—that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard,161 or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement.

It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy—a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps, the terms and the general manner of the narration had their weight. He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses. The most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.

To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. “I shall perish,” said he, “I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect—in terror. In this unnerved—in this pitiable condition—I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, Fear.”

I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never ventured forth—in regard to an influence whose supposititious force was162 conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be restated—an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit—an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought about upon the morale of his existence.

He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin—to the severe and long-continued illness—indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution—of a tenderly beloved sister, his sole companion for long years, his last and only relative on earth. “Her decease,” he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget, “would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers.” While he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread;40 and yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed her retreating steps. When a door, at length, closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the countenance of the brother; but he had buried his face in his hands, and I could only perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears.

The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character, were the unusual163 diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily borne up against the pressure of her malady, and had not betaken herself finally to bed; but, on the closing in of the evening of my arrival at the house, she succumbed (as her brother told me at night with inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the destroyer; and I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her person would thus probably be the last I should obtain—that the lady, at least while living, would be seen by me no more.

For several days ensuing her name was unmentioned by either Usher or myself; and during this period I was busied in earnest endeavors to alleviate the melancholy of my friend. We painted and read together; or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom.

I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations in which he involved me, or led me the way. An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphurous lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses at which I shuddered the more thrillingly because I shuddered knowing not why;—from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before me) I would in vain endeavor to educe more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his164 designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least, in the circumstances then surrounding me, there arose out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvas, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli.

One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be shadowed forth, although feebly, in words. A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor.

I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of his performances. But the fervid facility of his impromptus could not be so accounted for. They must have been, and were, in the notes, as well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of that intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I have previously alluded as observable only in particular moments of the highest artificial excitement. The words of one of these rhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more forcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the165 first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled “The Haunted Palace,” ran very nearly, if not accurately, thus:

I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad led us into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher’s which I mention not so much on account of its novelty (for other men41 I have thought thus) as on account of the pertinacity with which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization. I lack words to express the full extent or the earnest abandon of his persuasion. The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones—in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around—above all, in the long undisturbed endurance167 of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its evidence—the evidence of the sentience—was to be seen, he said, (and I here started as he spoke), in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him—what he was. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none.

Our books—the books, which, for years, had formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid—were, as might be supposed, in strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We pored together over such works as the Ververt et Chartreuse of Gresset; the Belphegor of Machiavelli; the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D’Indaginé, and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck; and the City of the Sun of Campanella. One favorite volume was a small octavo edition of the Directorium Inquisitorium, by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs and Œgipans, over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight, however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic—the manual of a forgotten church—the Vigiliæ Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiæ Maguntinæ.

I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of its probable influence upon the hypochondriac, when, one evening, having informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight (previously to its final interment) in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the building. The worldly reason, however, assigned for this singular proceeding was one which I did not feel at liberty to dispute. The brother had been led to his resolution, so168 he told me, by consideration of the unusual character of the malady of the deceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the burial-ground of the family. I will not deny that when I called to mind the sinister countenance of the person whom I met upon the staircase, on the day of my arrival at the house, I had no desire to oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, and by no means an unnatural, precaution.

At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements for the temporary entombment. The body having been encoffined, we two alone bore it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it (and which had been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light; lying, at great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment. It had been used, apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purposes of a donjon-keep, and, in later days, as a place of deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance, as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper. The door, of massive iron, had been, also, similarly protected. Its immense weight caused an unusually sharp grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges.

Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this region of horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them. Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead—for we could not regard her169 unawed. The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and, having secured the door of iron, made our way, with toil, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of the house.

And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue—but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage. At times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness; for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his condition terrified—that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influence of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.

It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep came not near my couch, while the hours waned and waned away. I struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me. I endeavored to believe that much, if not all of what I felt, was due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room—of170 the dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly within the intense darkness of the chamber, harkened—I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me—to certain low and indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw on my clothes with haste (for I felt that I should sleep no more during the night), and endeavored to arouse myself from the pitiable condition into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly to and fro through the apartment.

I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a light step on an adjoining staircase arrested my attention. I presently recognized it as that of Usher. In an instant afterward he rapped, with a gentle touch, at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan—but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes—and evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanor. His air appalled me—but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence as a relief.

“And you have not seen it?” he said abruptly, after having stared about him for some moments in silence—“you have not then seen it?—but stay! you shall.” Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded his lamp, he hurried to one of the casements, and threw it freely open to the storm.

The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular in its terror and its171 beauty. A whirlwind had apparently collected its force in our vicinity; for there were frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the life-like velocity with which they flew careering from all points against each other, without passing away into the distance. I say that even their exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this—yet we had no glimpse of the moon or stars—nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning. But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapor, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion.

“You must not—you shall not behold this!” said I, shudderingly, to Usher, as I led him, with a gentle violence, from the window to a seat. “These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena not uncommon—or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn. Let us close this casement—the air is chilling and dangerous to your frame. Here is one of your favorite romances. I will read, and you shall listen;—and so we will pass away this terrible night together.”

The antique volume which I had taken up was the Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning; but I had called it a favorite of Usher’s more in sad jest than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the only book immediately at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement which now agitated the hypochondriac, might find relief (for the history of mental disorder is full of similar anomalies) even in the extremeness of the folly which I should read. Could I have judged, indeed, by the wild, overstrained air of vivacity with which he harkened, or172 apparently harkened, to the words of the tale, I might well have congratulated myself upon the success of my design.

I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where Ethelred, the hero of the Trist, having sought in vain for peaceable admission into the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an entrance by force. Here, it will be remembered, the words of the narrative run thus:

“And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, and who was now mighty withal, on account of the powerfulness of the wine which he had drunken, waited no longer to hold parley with the hermit, who, in sooth, was of an obstinate and maliceful turn; but, feeling the rain upon his shoulders, and fearing the rising of the tempest, uplifted his mace outright, and, with blows, made quickly room in the plankings of the door for his gauntleted hand; and now pulling therewith sturdily, he so cracked, and ripped, and tore all asunder, that the noise of the dry and hollow-sounding wood alarummed and reverberated throughout the forest.”

At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment paused; for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my excited fancy had deceived me)—it appeared to me that, from some very remote portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly, to my ears what might have been, in its exact similarity of character, the echo (but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described. It was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my attention; for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and the ordinary commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or disturbed me. I continued the story:

“But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door, was sore enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful hermit; but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious demeanor, and of a fiery tongue,173 which sate in guard before a palace of gold, with a floor of silver; and upon the wall there hung a shield of shining brass with this legend enwritten—

And Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the head of the dragon, which fell before him, and gave up his pesty breath, with a shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had fain to close his ears with his hands against the dreadful noise of it, the like whereof was never before heard.”

Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild amazement—for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, I did actually hear (although from what direction it proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound—the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon’s unnatural shriek as described by the romancer.

Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of this second and most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations, in which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the sensitive nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that he had noticed the sounds in question; although, assuredly, a strange alteration had, during the last few minutes, taken place in his demeanor. From a position fronting my own, he had gradually brought round his chair, so as to sit with his face to the door of the chamber; and thus I could but partially perceive his features, although I saw that his lips trembled as if he were murmuring inaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast—yet I knew that he was not asleep, from the wide and rigid opening of the eye as I caught a glance of it in profile. The motion of his body, too, was at variance with this idea—for he rocked174 from side to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken notice of all this, I resumed the narrative of Sir Launcelot, which thus proceeded:

“And now the champion, having escaped from the terrible fury of the dragon, bethinking himself of the brazen shield, and of the breaking up of the enchantment which was upon it, removed the carcass from out of the way before him, and approached valorously over the silver pavement of the castle to where the shield was upon the wall; which in sooth tarried not for his full coming, but fell down at his feet upon the silver floor, with a mighty great and terrible ringing sound.”

No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than—as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver—I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words.

“Not hear it?—yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long—long—long—many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it—yet I dared not—oh pity me, miserable wretch that I am!—I dared not—I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them—many, many days ago—yet I dared not—I dared not speak! And now—to-night—Ethelred—ha! ha!—the breaking of the hermit’s door, and the death-cry of175 the dragon, and the clangor of the shield!—say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? Madman!”—here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul—“Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!”

As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell—the huge antique pannels to which the speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust—but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold—then, with a low, moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.

From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure, of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened—there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind—the entire orb of176 the satellite burst at once upon my sight—my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the “House of Usher.”

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179

THE INLET OF PEACH BLOSSOMS

The Emperor Yuentsoong, of the dynasty Chow, was the most magnificent of the long-descended succession of Chinese sovereigns. On his first accession to the throne, his character was so little understood, that a conspiracy was set on foot among the yellow-caps, or eunuchs, to put out his eyes, and place upon the throne the rebel Szema, in whose warlike hands, they asserted, the empire would more properly maintain its ancient glory. The gravity and reserve which these myrmidons of the palace had construed into stupidity and fear, soon assumed another complexion, however. The eunuchs silently disappeared; the mandarins and princes whom they had seduced from their allegiance were made loyal subjects by a generous pardon; and, in a few days after the period fixed upon for the consummation of the plot, Yuentsoong set forth in complete armor at the head of his troops to give battle to the rebel in the mountains.

In Chinese annals this first enterprise of the youthful Yuentsoong is recorded with great pomp and particularity. Szema was a Tartar prince of uncommon ability, young, like the emperor, and, during the few last imbecile years of the old sovereign, he had gathered strength in his rebellion, till now he was at the head of ninety thousand men, all soldiers of repute and tried valor. The historian has, unfortunately, dimmed the emperor’s fame to European eyes by attributing his wonderful achievements in this expedition to his superiority in arts of magic. As this account of his exploits is180 only prefatory to our tale, we will simply give the reader an idea of the style of the historian by translating literally a passage or two of his description of the battle:—

“Szema now took refuge within a cleft of the mountain, and Yuentsoong, upon his swift steed, outstripping the body-guard in his ardor, dashed amid the paralyzed troops with poised spear, his eyes fixed only on the rebel. There was a silence of an instant, broken only by the rattling hoofs of the intruder; and then, with dishevelled hair and waving sword, Szema uttered a fearful imprecation. In a moment the wind rushed, the air blackened, and, with the suddenness of a fallen rock, a large cloud enveloped the rebel, and innumerable men and horses issued out of it. Wings flapped against the eyes of the emperor’s horse, hellish noises screamed in his ears, and, completely beyond control, the animal turned and fled back through the narrow pass, bearing his imperial master safe into the heart of his army.

“Yuentsoong, that night, commanded some of his most expert soldiers to scale the beetling heights of the ravine, bearing upon their backs the blood of swine, sheep, and dogs, with other impure things, and these they were ordered to shower upon the combatants at the sound of the imperial clarion. On the following morning, Szema came forth again to offer battle, with flags displayed, drums beating, and shouts of triumph and defiance. As on the day previous, the bold emperor divided, in his impatience, rank after rank of his own soldiery, and, followed closely by his body-guard, drove the rebel army once more into their fastness. Szema sat upon his war-horse as before, intrenched amid his officers and ranks of the tallest Tartar spearmen; and, as the emperor contended hand to hand with one of the opposing rebels, the magic imprecation was again uttered, the air again filled with cloudy horsemen and chariots, and the mountain shaken with discordant thunder. Backing his willing steed, the emperor blew a long sharp note upon his silver clarion, and, in an instant, the sun broke through181 the darkness, and the air seemed filled with paper men, horses of straw, and phantoms dissolving into smoke. Yuentsoong and Szema now stood face to face, with only mortal aid and weapons.”

The historian goes on to record that the two armies suspended hostilities at the command of their leaders, and that, the emperor and his rebel subject having engaged in single combat, Yuentsoong was victorious, and returned to his capital with the formidable enemy whose life he had spared, riding beside him like a brother. The conqueror’s career, for several years after this, seems to have been a series of exploits of personal valor; and the Tartar prince shared in all his dangers and pleasures, his inseparable friend. It was during this period of romantic friendship that the events occurred which have made Yuentsoong one of the idols of Chinese poetry.

By the side of a lake in a distant province of the empire, stood one of the imperial palaces of pleasure, seldom visited, and almost in ruins. Hither, in one of his moody periods of repose from war, came the conqueror Yuentsoong, for the first time in years separated from his faithful Szema. In disguise, and with only one or two attendants, he established himself in the long silent halls of his ancestor Tsinchemong, and with his boat upon the lake, and his spear in the forest, seemed to find all the amusement of which his melancholy was susceptible. On a certain day in the latter part of April, the emperor had set his sail to a fragrant south wind, and, reclining on the cushions of his bark, watched the shore as it softly and silently glided past, and, the lake being entirely encircled by the imperial forest, he felt immersed in what he believed to be the solitude of a deserted paradise. After skirting the fringed sheet of water in this manner for several hours, he suddenly observed that he had shot through a streak of peach-blossoms floating from the shore, and at the same moment he became conscious that his boat was slightly headed off by a current setting outward. Putting up his helm, he returned to the spot, and beneath the drooping182 branches of some luxuriant willows, thus early in leaf, he discovered the mouth of an inlet, which, but for the floating blossoms it brought to the lake, would have escaped the notice of the closest observer. The emperor now lowered his sail, unshipped the slender mast, and betook him to the oars; and, as the current was gentle, and the inlet wider within the mouth, he sped rapidly on through what appeared to be but a lovely and luxuriant vale of the forest. Still, those blushing betrayers of some flowering spot beyond extended like a rosy clew before him; and with impulse of muscles swelled and indurated in warlike exercise, the swift keel divided the besprent mirror winding temptingly onward, and, for a long hour, the royal oarsman untiringly threaded this sweet vein of the wilderness.

Resting a moment on his oars while the slender bark still kept her way, he turned his head toward what seemed to be an opening in the forest on the left, and in the same instant the boat ran head on, to the shore, the inlet at this point almost doubling on its course. Beyond, by the humming of bees and the singing of birds, there should be a spot more open than the tangled wilderness he had passed; and, disengaging his prow from the alders, he shoved the boat again into the stream, and pulled round a high rock, by which the inlet seemed to have been compelled to curve its channel. The edge of a bright green meadow now stole into the perspective, and, still widening with his approach, disclosed a slightly rising terrace clustered with shrubs, and studded here and there with vases; and farther on, upon the same side of the stream, a skirting edge of peach-trees loaded with the gay blossoms which had guided him thither.

Astonished at these signs of habitation in what was well understood to be a privileged wilderness, Yuentsoong kept his boat in mid-stream, and with his eyes vigilantly on the alert, slowly made headway against the current. A few strokes with his oars, however, traced another curve of the inlet, and brought into view a grove of ancient trees scattered over a gently ascending lawn, beyond which, hidden183 from the river till now by the projecting shoulder of a mound, lay a small pavilion with gilded pillars glittering like fairy work in the sun. The emperor fastened his boat to a tree leaning over the water, and with his short spear in his hand, bounded upon the shore, and took his way toward the shining structure, his heart beating with a feeling of wonder and interest altogether new. On a nearer approach, the bases of the pillars seemed decayed by time, and the gilding weather-stained and tarnished; but the trellised porticoes on the southern aspect were laden with flowering shrubs in vases of porcelain, and caged birds sang between the pointed arches, and there were manifest signs of luxurious taste, elegance, and care.

A moment with an indefinable timidity the emperor paused before stepping from the greensward upon the marble floor of the pavilion, and in that moment a curtain was withdrawn from the door, and a female, with step suddenly arrested by the sight of the stranger, stood motionless before him. Ravished with her extraordinary beauty, and awe-struck with the suddenness of the apparition and the novelty of the adventure, the emperor’s tongue cleaved to his mouth, and ere he could summon resolution, even for a gesture of courtesy, the fair creature had fled within, and the curtain closed the entrance as before.

Wishing to recover his composure, so strangely troubled, and taking it for granted that some other inmate of the house would soon appear, Yuentsoong turned his steps aside to the grove; and with his head bowed, and his spear in the hollow of his arm, tried to recall more vividly the features of the vision he had seen. He had walked but a few paces when there came toward him from the upper skirt of the grove, a man of unusual stature and erectness, with white hair unbraided on his shoulders, and every sign of age except infirmity of step and mien. The emperor’s habitual dignity had now rallied, and on his first salutation the countenance of the old man softened, and he quickened his pace to meet and give him welcome.

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“You are noble?” he said with confident inquiry.

Yuentsoong colored slightly.

“I am,” he replied, “Lew-melin, a prince of the empire.”

“And by what accident here?”

Yuentsoong explained the clew of the peach-blossoms, and represented himself as exiled for a time to the deserted palace upon the lakes.

“I have a daughter,” said the old man abruptly, “who has never looked on human face save mine.”

“Pardon me,” replied his visitor, “I have thoughtlessly intruded on her sight, and a face more heavenly fair”—

The emperor hesitated, but the old man smiled encouragingly.

“It is time,” he said, “that I should provide a younger defender for my bright Teh-leen, and Heaven has sent you in the season of peach-blossoms with provident kindness.42 You have frankly revealed to me your name and rank. Before I offer you the hospitality of my roof, I must tell you mine. I am Choo-tseen, the outlaw, once of your own rank, and the general of the Celestial army.”

The emperor started, remembering that this celebrated rebel was the terror of his father’s throne.

“You have heard my history,” the old man continued. “I had been, before my rebellion, in charge of the imperial palace on the lake. Anticipating an evil day, I secretly prepared this retreat for my family; and when my soldiers deserted me at the battle of Ke-chow, and a price was set upon my head, hither I fled with my women and children; and the last alive is my beautiful Teh-leen. With this brief outline of my life, you are at liberty to leave me as you came, or to enter my house on the condition that you become the protector of my child.”

The emperor eagerly turned toward the pavilion, and, with a step as light as his own, the erect and stately outlaw hastened to lift the curtain before him. Leaving his guest for185 a moment in the outer apartment, he entered to an inner chamber in search of his daughter, whom he brought, panting with fear, and blushing with surprise and delight, to her future lover and protector. A portion of an historical tale so delicate as the description of the heroine is not work for imitators, however, and we must copy strictly the portrait of the matchless Teh-leen, as drawn by Le-pih, the Anacreon of Chinese poetry and the contemporary and favorite of Yuentsoong.

“Teh-leen was born while the morning star shone upon the bosom of her mother. Her eye was like the unblemished blue lily, and its light like the white gem unfractured. The plum-blossom is most fragrant when the cold has penetrated its stem, and the mother of Teh-leen had known sorrow. The head of her child drooped in thought, like a violet overladen with dew. Bewildering was Teh-leen. Her mouth’s corners were dimpled, yet pensive. The arch of her brows was like the vein in the tulip’s heart, and the lashes shaded the blushes on her cheek. With the delicacy of a pale rose, her complexion put to shame the floating light of day. Her waist, like a thread in fineness, seemed ready to break, yet was it straight and erect, and feared not the fanning breeze; and her shadowy grace was as difficult to delineate as the form of the white bird rising from the ground by moonlight. The natural gloss of her hair resembled the uncertain sheen of calm water, yet without the false aid of unguents. The native intelligence of her mind seemed to have gained strength by retirement; and he who beheld her thought not of her as human. Of rare beauty, of rarer intellect, was Teh-leen, and her heart responded to the poet’s lute.”

We have not space, nor could we, without copying directly from the admired Le-pih, venture to describe the bringing of Teh-leen to court, and her surprise at finding herself the favorite of the emperor. It is a romantic circumstance, besides, which has had its parallels in other countries. But the sad sequel to the loves of poor Teh-leen is but recorded in the cold page of history; and if the poet, who wound up186 the climax of her perfections with her susceptibility to his lute, embalmed her sorrows in verse, he was probably too politic to bring it ever to light. Pass we to these neglected and unadorned passages of her history.

Yuentsoong’s nature was passionately devoted and confiding; and, like two brothers with one favorite sister, lived together Teh-leen, Szema, and the emperor. The Tartar prince, if his heart knew a mistress before the arrival of Teh-leen at the palace, owned afterward no other than her; and, fearless of check or suspicion from the noble confidence and generous friendship of Yuentsoong, he seemed to live but for her service, and to have neither energies nor ambition except for the winning of her smiles. Szema was of great personal beauty, frank when it did not serve him to be wily, bold in his pleasures, and of manners almost femininely soft and voluptuous. He was renowned as a soldier, and, for Teh-leen, he became a poet and master of the lute; and, like all men formed for ensnaring the heart of women, he seemed to forget himself in the absorbing devotion of his idolatry. His friend the emperor was of another mould. Yuentsoong’s heart had three chambers,—love, friendship, and glory. Teh-leen was but a third in his existence, yet he loved her,—the sequel will show how well. In person, he was less beautiful than majestic, of large stature, and with a brow and lip naturally stern and lofty. He seldom smiled, even upon Teh-leen, whom he would watch for hours in pensive and absorbed delight; but his smile, when it did awake, broke over his sad countenance like morning. All men loved and honored Yuentsoong; and all men, except only the emperor, looked on Szema with antipathy. To such natures as the former, women give all honor and approbation; but, for such as the latter, they reserve their weakness!

Wrapt up in his friend and mistress, and reserved in his intercourse with his counsellors, Yuentsoong knew not that, throughout the imperial city, Szema was called “the kieu,” or robber-bird, and his fair Teh-leen openly charged with dishonor. Going out alone to hunt, as was his custom, and187 having left his signet with Szema, to pass and repass through the private apartments at his pleasure, his horse fell with him unaccountably in the open field. Somewhat superstitious, and remembering that good spirits sometimes “knit the grass” when other obstacles fail to bar our way into danger, the emperor drew rein, and returned to his palace. It was an hour after noon, and, having dismissed his attendants at the city gate, he entered by a postern to the imperial garden, and bethought himself of the concealed couch in a cool grot by a fountain (a favorite retreat, sacred to himself and Teh-leen), where he fancied it would be refreshing to sleep away the sultriness of the remaining hours till evening. Sitting down by the side of the murmuring fount, he bathed his feet, and left his slippers on the lip of the basin to be unencumbered in his repose within, and so, with unechoing step, entered the resounding grotto. Alas! there slumbered the faithless friend with the guilty Teh-leen upon his bosom!

Grief struck through the noble heart of the emperor like a sword in cold blood. With a word he could consign to torture and death the robber of his honor, but there was agony in his bosom deeper than revenge. He turned silently away, recalling his horse and huntsmen, and, outstripping all, plunged on through the forest till night gathered around him.

Yuentsoong had been absent many days from his capital, and his subjects were murmuring their fears for his safety, when a messenger arrived to the counsellors informing them of the appointment of the captive Tartar prince to the government of the province of Szechuen, the second honor of the Celestial empire. A private order accompanied the announcement, commanding the immediate departure of Szema for the scene of his new authority. Inexplicable as was this riddle to the multitude, there were those who read it truly by their knowledge of the magnanimous soul of the emperor; and among these was the crafty object of his generosity. Losing no time, he set forward with great pomp for Szechuen, and in their joy to see him no more in the palace, the slighted188 princes of the empire forgave his unmerited advancement. Yuentsoong returned to his capital; but to the terror of his counsellors and people, his hair was blanched white as the head of an old man! He was pale as well, but he was cheerful and kind beyond his wont, and to Teh-leen untiring in pensive and humble attentions. He pleaded only impaired health and restless slumbers as an apology for nights of solitude. Once Teh-leen penetrated to his lonely chamber, but by the dim night lamp she saw that the scroll over the window43 was changed, and instead of the stimulus to glory which formerly hung in golden letters before his eyes, there was a sentence written tremblingly in black:—

Six months from this period the capital was thrown into a tumult with the intelligence that the province of Szechuen was in rebellion, and Szema at the head of a numerous army on his way to seize the throne of Yuentsoong. This last sting betrayed the serpent even to the forgiving emperor, and tearing the reptile at last from his heart, he entered with the spirit of other times into the warlike preparations. The imperial army was in a few days on its march, and at Keo-yang the opposing forces met and prepared for encounter.

With a dread of the popular feeling toward Teh-leen, Yuentsoong had commanded for her a close litter, and she was borne after the imperial standard in the centre of the army. On the eve before the battle, ere the watch-fires were lit, the emperor came to her tent, set apart from his own, and with the delicate care and kind gentleness from189 which he never varied, inquired how her wants were supplied, and bade her thus early farewell for the night; his own custom of passing among his soldiers on the evening previous to an engagement, promising to interfere with what was usually his last duty before retiring to his couch. Teh-leen on this occasion seemed moved by some irrepressible emotion, and as he rose to depart, she fell forward upon her face, and bathed his feet with her tears. Attributing it to one of those excesses of feeling to which all, but especially hearts ill at ease, are liable, the noble monarch gently raised her, and with repeated efforts at re-assurance, committed her to the hands of her women. His own heart beat far from tranquilly, for, in the excess of his pity for her grief he had unguardedly called her by one of the sweet names of their early days of love,—strange word now upon his lip,—and it brought back, spite of memory and truth, happiness that would not be forgotten!

It was past midnight, and the moon was riding high in heaven, when the emperor, returning between the lengthening watch-fires, sought the small lamp which, suspended like a star above his own tent, guided him back from the irregular mazes of the camp. Paled by the intense radiance of the moonlight, the small globe of alabaster at length became apparent to his weary eye, and with one glance at the peaceful beauty of the heavens, he parted the curtained door beneath it, and stood within. The Chinese historian asserts that a bird, from whose wing Teh-leen had once plucked an arrow, restoring it to liberty and life, in grateful attachment to her destiny, removed the lamp from the imperial tent, and suspended it over hers. The emperor stood beside her couch. Startled at his inadvertent error, he turned to retire; but the lifted curtain let in a flood of moonlight upon the sleeping features of Teh-leen, and like dewdrops the undried tears glistened in her silken lashes. A lamp burned faintly in the inner apartment of the tent, and her attendants slept soundly. His soft heart gave way. Taking up the lamp, he held it over his beautiful mistress, and once190 more gazed passionately and unrestrainedly on her unparalleled beauty. The past—the early past—was alone before him. He forgave her,—there, as she slept, unconscious of the throbbing of his injured but noble heart so close beside her,—he forgave her in the long silent abysses of his soul! Unwilling to wake her from her tranquil slumber, but promising to himself, from that hour, such sweets of confiding love as had well-nigh been lost to him forever, he imprinted one kiss upon the parted lips of Teh-leen, and sought his couch for slumber.

Ere daybreak the emperor was aroused by one of his attendants with news too important for delay. Szema, the rebel, had been arrested in the imperial camp, disguised, and on his way back to his own forces; and like wildfire the information had spread among the soldiery, who, in a state of mutinous excitement, were with difficulty restrained from rushing upon the tent of Teh-leen. At the door of his tent, Yuentsoong found messengers from the alarmed princes and officers of the different commands, imploring immediate aid and the imperial presence to allay the excitement; and while the emperor prepared to mount his horse, the guard arrived with the Tartar prince, ignominiously tied, and bearing marks of rough usage from his indignant captors.

“Loose him!” cried the emperor, in a voice of thunder.

The cords were severed, and with a glance whose ferocity expressed no thanks, Szema reared himself up to his fullest height, and looked scornfully around him. Daylight had now broke, and as the group stood upon an eminence in sight of the whole army, shouts began to ascend, and the armed multitude, breaking through all restraint, rolled in toward the centre. Attracted by the commotion, Yuentsoong turned to give some orders to those near him, when Szema suddenly sprang upon an officer of the guard, wrenched his drawn sword from his grasp, and in an instant was lost to sight in the tent of Teh-leen. A sharp scream, a second of thought, and forth again rushed the desperate191 murderer, with his sword flinging drops of blood, and ere a foot stirred in the paralyzed group, the avenging cimeter of Yuentsoong had cleft him to the chin.

A hush, as if the whole army was struck dumb by a bolt from heaven, followed this rapid tragedy. Dropping the polluted sword from his hand, the emperor, with uncertain step, and the pallor of death upon his countenance, entered the fatal tent.

He came no more forth that day. The army was marshalled by the princes, and the rebels were routed with great slaughter; but Yuentsoong never more wielded sword. “He pined to death,” says the historian, “with the wane of the same moon that shone upon the forgiveness of Teh-leen.”

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THE BEE-TREE

It was on one of the lovely mornings of our ever lovely autumn, so early that the sun had scarcely touched the tops of the still verdant forest, that Silas Ashburn and his eldest son sallied forth for a day’s chopping on the newly-purchased land of a rich settler, who had been but a few months among us. The tall form of the father, lean and gaunt as the very image of Famine, derived little grace from the rags which streamed from the elbows of his almost sleeveless coat, or flapped round the tops of his heavy boots, as he strode across the long causeway that formed the communication from his house to the dry land. Poor Joe’s costume showed, if possible, a still greater need of the aid of that useful implement, the needle. His mother is one who thinks little of the ancient proverb that commends the stitch in time; and the clothing under her care sometimes falls in pieces, seam by seam. For want of this occasional aid is rendered more especially necessary by the slightness of the original sewing; so that the brisk breeze of the morning gave the poor boy no faint resemblance to a tall young aspen,

The little conversation which passed between the father and son was such as necessarily makes up much of the talk of the poor.

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“If we hadn’t had sich bad luck this summer,” said Mr. Ashburn, “losing that heifer, and the pony, and them three hogs,—all in that plaguy spring-hole, too,—I thought to have bought that timbered forty of Dean. It would have squared out my farm jist about right.”

“The pony didn’t die in the spring-hole, father,” said Joe.

“No, he did not, but he got his death there, for all. He never stopped shiverin’ from the time he fell in. You thought he had the agur, but I know’d well enough what ailded him; but I wasn’t agoin’ to let Dean know, because he’d ha’ thought himself so blam’d cunning, after all he’d said to me about that spring-hole. If the agur could kill, Joe, we’d all ha’ been dead long ago.”

Joe sighed,—a sigh of assent. They walked on musingly.

“This is going to be a good job of Keene’s,” continued Mr. Ashburn, turning to a brighter theme, as they crossed the road and struck into the “timbered land,” on their way to the scene of the day’s operations. “He has bought three eighties, all lying close together, and he’ll want as much as one forty cleared right off; and I’ve a good notion to take the fencin’ of it as well as the choppin’. He’s got plenty of money, and they say he don’t shave quite so close as some. But I tell you, Joe, if I do take the job, you must turn to like a catamount, for I ain’t a-going to make a nigger o’ myself, and let my children do nothing but eat.”

“Well, father,” responded Joe, whose pale face gave token of any thing but high living, “I’ll do what I can; but you know I never work two days at choppin’ but what I have the agur like sixty,—and a feller can’t work when he’s got the agur.”

“Not while the fit’s on, to be sure,” said the father, “but I’ve worked many an afternoon after my fit was over, when my head felt as big as a half-bushel, and my hands would ha’ sizzed if I had put ’em in water. Poor folks has got to work—but Joe! if there isn’t bees, by golley! I197 wonder if anybody’s been a baitin’ for ’em? Stop! hush! watch which way they go!”

And with breathless interest—forgetful of all troubles, past, present, and future—they paused to observe the capricious wheelings and flittings of the little cluster, as they tried every flower on which the sun shone, or returned again and again to such as suited best their discriminating taste. At length, after a weary while, one suddenly rose into the air with a loud whizz, and after balancing a moment on a level with the tree-tops, darted off, like a well-sent arrow, toward the east, followed instantly by the whole busy company, till not a loiterer remained.

“Well! if this isn’t luck!” exclaimed Ashburn, exultingly; “they make right for Keene’s land! We’ll have ’em! go ahead, Joe, and keep your eye on ’em!”

Joe obeyed so well in both points that he not only outran his father, but very soon turned a summerset over a gnarled root or grub which lay in his path. This faux pas nearly demolished one side of his face, and what remained of his jacket sleeve, while his father, not quite so heedless, escaped falling, but tore his boot almost off with what he called “a contwisted stub of the toe.”

But these were trifling inconveniences, and only taught them to use a little more caution in their eagerness. They followed on, unweariedly; crossed several fences, and threaded much of Mr. Keene’s tract of forest-land, scanning with practised eye every decayed tree, whether standing or prostrate, until at length, in the side of a gigantic but leafless oak, they espied, some forty feet from the ground, the “sweet home” of the immense swarm whose scouts had betrayed their hiding-place.

“The Indians have been here;” said Ashburn; “you see they’ve felled this saplin’ agin the bee-tree, so as they could climb up to the hole; but the red devils have been disturbed afore they had time to dig it out. If they’d had axes to cut down the big tree, they wouldn’t have left a smitchin o’ honey, they’re such tarnal thieves!”

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Mr. Ashburn’s ideas of morality were much shocked at the thought of the dishonesty of the Indians, who, as is well known, have no rights of any kind; but considering himself as first finder, the lawful proprietor of this much-coveted treasure, gained too without the trouble of a protracted search, or the usual amount of baiting, and burning of honeycombs, he lost no time in taking possession after the established mode.

To cut his initials with his axe on the trunk of the bee-tree, and to make blazes on several of the trees he had passed, detained him but a few minutes; and with many a cautious noting of the surrounding localities, and many a charge to Joe “not to say nothing to nobody,” Silas turned his steps homeward, musing on the important fact that he had had good luck for once, and planning important business quite foreign to the day’s chopping.

Now it so happened that Mr. Keene, who is a restless old gentleman, and, moreover, quite green in the dignity of a land-holder, thought proper to turn his horse’s head, for this particular morning ride, directly towards these same “three eighties,” on which he had engaged Ashburn and his son to commence the important work of clearing. Mr. Keene is low of stature, rather globular in contour, and exceedingly parrot-nosed; wearing, moreover, a face red enough to lead one to suppose he had made his money as a dealer in claret; but, in truth, one of the kindest of men, in spite of a little quickness of temper. He is profoundly versed in the art and mystery of store-keeping, and as profoundly ignorant of all that must sooner or later be learned by every resident land-owner of the western country.

Thus much being premised, we shall hardly wonder that our good old friend felt exceedingly aggrieved at meeting Silas Ashburn and the “lang-legged chiel” Joe, (who has grown longer with every shake of ague,) on the way from his tract, instead of to it.

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“What in the world’s the matter now!” began Mr. Keene, rather testily. “Are you never going to begin that work?”

“I don’t know but I shall;” was the cool reply of Ashburn; “I can’t begin it to-day, though.”

“And why not, pray, when I’ve been so long waiting?”

“Because, I’ve got something else that must be done first. You don’t think your work is all the work there is in the world, do you?”

Mr. Keene was almost too angry to reply, but he made an effort to say, “When am I to expect you, then?”

“Why, I guess we’ll come on in a day or two, and then I’ll bring both the boys.”

So saying, and not dreaming of having been guilty of an incivility, Mr. Ashburn passed on, intent only on his bee-tree.

Mr. Keene could not help looking after the ragged pair for a moment, and he muttered angrily as he turned away, “Aye! pride and beggary go together in this confounded new country! You feel very independent, no doubt, but I’ll try if I can’t find somebody that wants money.”

And Mr. Keene’s pony, as if sympathizing with his master’s vexation, started off at a sharp, passionate trot, which he has learned, no doubt, under the habitual influence of the spicy temper of his rider.

To find labourers who wanted money, or who would own that they wanted it, was at that time no easy task. Our poorer neighbours have been so little accustomed to value household comforts, that the opportunity to obtain them presents but feeble incitement to continuous industry. However, it happened in this case that Mr. Keene’s star was in the ascendant, and the woods resounded, ere long, under the sturdy strokes of several choppers.

The Ashburns, in the mean time, set themselves busily at work to make due preparations for the expedition which they had planned for the following night. They felt, as200 does every one who finds a bee-tree in this region, that the prize was their own—that nobody else had the slightest claim to its rich stores; yet the gathering in of the spoils was to be performed, according to the invariable custom where the country is much settled, in the silence of night, and with every precaution of secrecy. This seems inconsistent, yet such is the fact.

The remainder of the “lucky” day and the whole of the succeeding one passed in scooping troughs for the reception of the honey,—tedious work at best, but unusually so in this instance, because several of the family were prostrate with the ague. Ashburn’s anxiety lest some of his customary bad luck should intervene between discovery and possession, made him more impatient and harsh than usual; and the interior of that comfortless cabin would have presented to a chance visitor, who knew not of the golden hopes which cheered its inmates, an aspect of unmitigated wretchedness. Mrs. Ashburn sat almost in the fire, with a tattered hood on her head and the relics of a bed-quilt wrapped about her person; while the emaciated limbs of the baby on her lap,—two years old, yet unweaned,—seemed almost to reach the floor, so preternaturally were they lengthened by the stretches of a four months’ ague. Two of the boys lay in the trundle-bed, which was drawn as near to the fire as possible; and every spare article of clothing that the house afforded was thrown over them, in the vain attempt to warm their shivering frames. “Stop your whimperin’, can’t ye!” said Ashburn, as he hewed away with hatchet and jack-knife, “you’ll be hot enough before long.” And when the fever came his words were more than verified.

Two nights had passed before the preparations were completed. Ashburn and such of his boys as could work had laboured indefatigably at the troughs; and Mrs. Ashburn had thrown away the milk, and the few other stores which cumbered her small supply of household utensils, to free as many as possible for the grand occasion. This third day201 had been “well day” to most of the invalids, and after the moon had risen to light them through the dense wood, the family set off, in high spirits, on their long, dewy walk. They had passed the causeway and were turning from the highway into the skirts of the forest, when they were accosted by a stranger, a young man in a hunter’s dress, evidently a traveller, and one who knew nothing of the place or its inhabitants, as Mr. Ashburn ascertained, to his entire satisfaction, by the usual number of queries. The stranger, a handsome youth of one or two and twenty, had that frank, joyous air which takes so well with us Wolverines; and after he had fully satisfied our bee-hunter’s curiosity, he seemed disposed to ask some questions in his turn. One of the first of these related to the moving cause of the procession and their voluminous display of containers.

“Why, we’re goin’ straight to a bee-tree that I lit upon two or three days ago, and if you’ve a mind to, you may go ’long, and welcome. It’s a real peeler, I tell ye! There’s a hundred and fifty weight of honey in it, if there’s a pound.”

The young traveller waited no second invitation. His light knapsack being but small incumbrance, he took upon himself the weight of several troughs that seemed too heavy for the weaker members of the expedition. They walked on at a rapid and steady pace for a good half hour, over paths that were none of the smoothest, and only here and there lighted by the moonbeams. The mother and children were but ill fitted for the exertion, but Aladdin, on his midnight way to the wondrous vault of treasure, would as soon have thought of complaining of fatigue.

Who then shall describe the astonishment, the almost breathless rage of Silas Ashburn,—the bitter disappointment of the rest,—when they found, instead of the bee-tree, a great gap in the dense forest, and the bright moon shining on the shattered fragments of the immense oak that had contained their prize? The poor children, fainting202 with toil now that the stimulus was gone, threw themselves on the ground; and Mrs. Ashburn, seating her wasted form on a huge branch, burst into tears.

“It’s all one!” exclaimed Ashburn, when at length he could find words; “it’s all alike! this is just my luck! It ain’t none of my neighbour’s work, though! They know better than to be so mean! It’s the rich! Them that begrudges the poor man the breath of life!” And he cursed bitterly and with clenched teeth, whoever had robbed him of his right.

“Don’t cry, Betsey,” he continued; “let’s go home. I’ll find out who has done this, and I’ll let ’em know there’s law for the poor man as well as the rich. Come along, young ’uns, and stop your blubberin’, and let them splinters alone!” The poor little things were trying to gather up some of the fragments to which the honey still adhered, but their father was too angry to be kind.

“Was the tree on your own land?” now inquired the young stranger, who had stood by in sympathizing silence during this scene.

“No! but that don’t make any difference. The man that found it first, and marked it, had a right to it afore the President of the United States, and that I’ll let ’em know, if it costs me my farm. It’s on old Keene’s land, and I shouldn’t wonder if the old miser had done it himself,—but I’ll let him know what’s the law in Michigan!”

“Mr. Keene a miser!” exclaimed the young stranger, rather hastily.

“Why, what do you know about him?”

“O! nothing!—that is, nothing very particular—but I have heard him well spoken of. What I was going to say was, that I fear you will not find the law able to do anything for you. If the tree was on another person’s property—”

“Property! that’s just so much as you know about it!” replied Ashburn, angrily. “I tell ye I know the law well enough, and I know the honey was mine—and old Keene shall know it too, if he’s the man that stole it.”

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The stranger politely forbore further reply, and the whole party walked on in sad silence till they reached the village road, when the young stranger left them with a kindly “good night!”

It was soon after an early breakfast on the morning which succeeded poor Ashburn’s disappointment, that Mr. Keene, attended by his lovely orphan niece, Clarissa Bensley, was engaged in his little court-yard, tending with paternal care the brilliant array of autumnal flowers which graced its narrow limits. Beds in size and shape nearly resembling patty-pans, were filled to overflowing with dahlias, china-asters and marigolds, while the walks which surrounded them, daily “swept with a woman’s neatness,” set off to the best advantage these resplendent children of Flora. A vine-hung porch that opened upon the miniature Paradise was lined with bird-cages of all sizes, and on a yard-square grass-plot stood the tin cage of a squirrel, almost too fat to be lively.

After all was “perform’d to point,”—when no dahlia remained unsupported,—no cluster of many-hued asters without its neat hoop,—when no intrusive weed could be discerned, even through Mr. Keene’s spectacles,—Clarissa took the opportunity to ask if she might take the pony for a ride.

“To see those poor Ashburns, uncle.”

“They’re a lazy, impudent set, Clary.”

“But they are all sick, uncle; almost every one of the family down with ague. Do let me go and carry them something. I hear they are completely destitute of comforts.”

“And so they ought to be, my dear,” said Mr. Keene, who could not forget what he considered Ashburn’s impertinence.

But his habitual kindness prevailed, and he concluded his remonstrance by saddling the pony himself, arranging Clarissa’s riding-dress with all the assiduity of a gallant cavalier, and giving into her hand, with her neat silver-mounted whip, a little basket, well-crammed by his wife’s204 kind care with delicacies for the invalids. No wonder that he looked after her with pride as she rode off! There are few prettier girls than the bright-eyed Clarissa.

“How are you this morning, Mrs. Ashburn?” asked the young visitant as she entered the wretched den, her little basket on her arm, her sweet face all flushed, and her eyes more than half suffused with tears.

“Law sakes alive!” was the reply. “I ain’t no how. I’m clear tuckered out with these young ’uns. They’ve had the agur already this morning, and they’re as cross as bear-cubs.”

“Ma!” screamed one, as if in confirmation of the maternal remark, “I want some tea!”

“Tea! I ha’n’t got no tea, and you know that well enough!”

“Well, give me a piece o’ sweetcake then, and a pickle.”

“The sweetcake was gone long ago, and I ha’n’t nothing to make more—so shut your head!” And as Clarissa whispered to the poor pallid child that she would bring him some if he would be a good boy, and not tease his mother, Mrs. Ashburn produced, from a barrel of similar delicacies, a yellow cucumber, something less than a foot long, “pickled” in whiskey and water—and this the child began devouring eagerly.

Miss Bensley now set out upon the table the varied contents of her basket. “This honey,” she said, showing some as limpid as water, “was found a day or two ago in uncle’s woods—wild honey—isn’t it beautiful?”

Mrs. Ashburn fixed her eyes on it without speaking; but her husband, who just then came in, did not command himself so far. “Where did you say you got that honey?” he asked.

“In our woods,” repeated Clarissa; “I never saw such quantities; and a good deal of it as clear and beautiful as this.”

“I thought as much!” said Ashburn angrily: “and205 now, Clary Bensley,” he added, “you’ll just take that cursed honey back to your uncle, and tell him to keep it, and eat it, and I hope it will choke him! and if I live, I’ll make him rue the day he ever touched it.”

Miss Bensley gazed on him, lost in astonishment. She could think of nothing but that he must have gone suddenly mad; and the idea made her instinctively hasten her steps toward the pony.

“Well! if you won’t take it, I’ll send it after ye!” cried Ashburn, who had lashed himself into a rage; and he hurled the little jar, with all the force of his powerful arm, far down the path by which Clarissa was about to depart, while his poor wife tried to restrain him with a piteous “Oh, father! don’t! don’t!”

Then, recollecting himself a little,—for he is far from being habitually brutal,—he made an awkward apology to the frightened girl.

“I ha’n’t nothing agin you, Miss Bensley; you’ve always been kind to me and mine; but that old devil of an uncle of yours, that can’t bear to let a poor man live,—I’ll larn him who he’s got to deal with! Tell him to look out, for he’ll have reason!”

He held the pony while Clarissa mounted, as if to atone for his rudeness to herself; but he ceased not to repeat his denunciations against Mr. Keene as long as she was within hearing. As she paced over the logs, Ashburn, his rage much cooled by this ebullition, stood looking after her.

“I swan!” he exclaimed; “if there ain’t that very feller that went with us to the bee-tree, leading Clary Bensley’s horse over the cross-way!”

Clarissa felt obliged to repeat to her uncle the rude threats which had so much terrified her; and it needed but this to confirm Mr. Keene’s suspicious dislike of Ashburn, whom he had already learned to regard as one of the worst specimens of western character that had yet crossed his path. He had often felt the vexations of his new position206 to be almost intolerable, and was disposed to imagine himself the predestined victim of all the ill-will and all the impositions of the neighbourhood. It unfortunately happened, about this particular time, that he had been more than usually visited with disasters which are too common in a new country to be much regarded by those who know what they mean. His fences had been thrown down, his corn-field robbed, and even the lodging-place of the peacock forcibly attempted. But from the moment he discovered that Ashburn had a grudge against him, he thought neither of unruly oxen, mischievous boys, nor exasperated neighbours; but concluded that the one unlucky house in the swamp was the ever-welling foundation of all this bitterness. He had not yet been long enough among us to discern how much our “bark is waur than our bite.”

It was on a very raw and gusty evening, not long after, that Mr. Keene, with his handkerchief carefully wrapped around his chin, sallied forth after dark, on an expedition to the post-office. He was thinking how vexatious it was—how like everything else in this disorganized, or rather unorganized new country, that the weekly mail should not be obliged to arrive at regular hours, and those early enough to allow of one’s getting one’s letters before dark. As he proceeded he became aware of the approach of two persons, and though it was too dark to distinguish faces, he heard distinctly the dreaded tones of Silas Ashburn.

“No! I found you were right enough there! I couldn’t get at him that way; but I’ll pay him for it yet!”

He lost the reply of the other party in this iniquitous scheme, in the rushing of the wild wind which hurried him on his course; but he had heard enough! He made out to reach the office, and receiving his paper, and hastening desperately homeward, had scarcely spirits even to read the price-current, (though he did mechanically glance at the corner of the “Trumpet of Commerce,”) before he retired to bed in meditative sadness; feeling quite unable207 to await the striking of nine on the kitchen clock, which, in all ordinary circumstances, “toll’d the hour for retiring.”

Mr. Keene’s nerves had received a terrible shock on this fated evening, and it is certain that for a man of sober imagination, his dreams were terrific. He saw Ashburn, covered from crown to sole with a buzzing shroud of bees, trampling on his flower-beds, tearing up his honey-suckles root and branch, and letting his canaries and Java sparrows out of their cages; and, as his eyes recoiled from this horrible scene, they encountered the shambling form of Joe, who, besides aiding and abetting in these enormities, was making awful strides, axe in hand, toward the sanctuary of the pea-fowls.

He awoke with a cry of horror, and found his bed-room full of smoke. Starting up in agonized alarm, he awoke Mrs. Keene, and half-dressed, by the red light which glimmered around them, they rushed together to Clarissa’s chamber. It was empty. To find the stairs was the next thought; but at the very top they met the dreaded bee-finder armed with a prodigious club!

“Oh mercy! don’t murder us!” shrieked Mrs. Keene, falling on her knees; while her husband, whose capsicum was completely roused, began pummelling Ashburn as high as he could reach, bestowing on him at the same time, in no very choice terms, his candid opinion as to the propriety of setting people’s houses on fire, by way of revenge.

“Why, you’re both as crazy as loons!” was Mr. Ashburn’s polite exclamation, as he held off Mr. Keene at arm’s length. “I was comin’ up o’ purpose to tell you that you needn’t be frightened. It’s only the ruff o’ the shanty, there,—the kitchen, as you call it.”

“And what have you done with Clarissa?”—“Ay! where’s my niece?” cried the distracted pair.

“Where is she? why, down stairs to be sure, takin’ care o’ the traps they throw’d out o’ the shanty. I was out a ’coon-hunting, and see the light, but I was so far off that they’d got it pretty well down before I got here. That208 ’ere young spark of Clary’s worked like a beaver, I tell ye!”

“You need not attempt,” solemnly began Mr. Keene, “you need not think to make me believe, that you are not the man that set my house on fire. I know your revengeful temper; I have heard of your threats, and you shall answer for all, sir! before you’re a day older!”

Ashburn seemed struck dumb, between his involuntary respect for Mr. Keene’s age and character, and the contemptuous anger with which his accusations filled him. “Well! I swan!” said he after a pause; “but here comes Clary; she’s got common sense; ask her how the fire happened.”

“It’s all over now, uncle,” she exclaimed, almost breathless, “it has not done so very much damage.”

“Damage!” said Mrs. Keene, dolefully; “we shall never get things clean again while the world stands!”

“And where are my birds?” inquired the old gentleman.

“All safe—quite safe; we moved them into the parlour.”

“We! who, pray?”

“Oh! the neighbours came, you know, uncle; and—Mr. Ashburn—”

“Give the devil his due,” interposed Ashburn; “you know very well that the whole concern would have gone if it hadn’t been for that young feller.”

“What young fellow? where?”

“Why here,” said Silas, pulling forward our young stranger; “this here chap.”

“Young man,” began Mr. Keene,—but at the moment, up came somebody with a light, and while Clarissa retreated behind Mr. Ashburn, the stranger was recognised by her aunt and uncle as Charles Darwin.

“Charles! what on earth brought you here?”

“Ask Clary,” said Ashburn, with grim jocoseness.

Mr. Keene turned mechanically to obey; but Clarissa had disappeared.

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“Well! I guess I can tell you something about it, if nobody else won’t,” said Ashburn; “I’m something of a Yankee, and it’s my notion that there was some sparkin’ a goin’ on in your kitchin, and that somehow or other the young folks managed to set it a-fire.”

The old folks looked more puzzled than ever. “Do speak, Charles,” said Mr. Keene; “what does it all mean? Did you set my house on fire?”

“I’m afraid I must have had some hand in it, sir,” said Charles, whose self-possession seemed quite to have deserted him.

“You!” exclaimed Mr. Keene; “and I’ve been laying it to this man!”

“Yes! you know’d I owed you a spite, on account o’ that plaguy bee-tree,” said Ashburn; “a guilty conscience needs no accuser. But you was much mistaken if you thought I was sich a bloody-minded villain as to burn your gimcrackery for that! If I could have paid you for it, fair and even, I’d ha’ done it with all my heart and soul. But I don’t set men’s houses a-fire when I get mad at ’em.”

“But you threatened vengeance,” said Mr. Keene.

“So I did, but that was when I expected to get it by law, though; and this here young man knows that, if he’d only speak.”

Thus adjured, Charles did speak, and so much to the purpose that it did not take many minutes to convince Mr. Keene that Ashburn’s evil-mindedness was bounded by the limits of the law, that precious privilege of the Wolverine. But there was still the mystery of Charles’s apparition, and in order to its full unravelment, the blushing Clarissa had to be enticed from her hiding-place, and brought to confession. And then it was made clear that she, with all her innocent looks, was the moving cause of the mighty mischief. She it was who encouraged Charles to believe that her uncle’s anger would not last forever; and this had led Charles to venture into the neighbourhood; and it was while consulting together, (on this particular point, of210 course,) that they managed to set the kitchen curtain on fire.

These things occupied some time in explaining,—but they were at length, by the aid of words and more eloquent blushes, made so clear, that Mr. Keene concluded, not only to new roof the kitchen, but to add a very pretty wing to one side of the house. And at the present time, the steps of Charles Darwin, when he returns from a surveying tour, seek the little gate as naturally as if he had never lived anywhere else. And the sweet face of Clarissa is always there, ready to welcome him, though she still finds plenty of time to keep in order the complicated affairs of both uncle and aunt.

Mr. Keene has done his very best to atone for his injurious estimate of Wolverine honour, by giving constant employment to Ashburn and his sons, and owning himself always the obliged party, without which concession all he could do would avail nothing. And Mrs. Keene and Clarissa have been unwearied in their kind attentions to the family, supplying them with so many comforts that most of them have got rid of the ague, in spite of themselves. The house has assumed so cheerful an appearance that I could scarcely recognise it for the same squalid den it had often made my heart ache to look upon. As I was returning from my last visit there, I encountered Mr. Ashburn, and remarked to him how very comfortable they seemed.

“Yes,” he replied; “I’ve had pretty good luck lately; but I’m a goin’ to pull up stakes and move to Wisconsin. I think I can do better, further West.”

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213

WHAT WAS IT? A MYSTERY

It is, I confess, with considerable diffidence that I approach the strange narrative which I am about to relate. The events which I purpose detailing are of so extraordinary and unheard-of a character that I am quite prepared to meet with an unusual amount of incredulity and scorn. I accept all such beforehand. I have, I trust, the literary courage to face unbelief. I have, after mature consideration, resolved to narrate, in as simple and straightforward a manner as I can compass, some facts that passed under my observation in the month of July last, and which, in the annals of the mysteries of physical science, are wholly unparalleled.

I live at No. — Twenty-sixth Street, in this city. The house is in some respects a curious one. It has enjoyed for the last two years the reputation of being haunted. It is a large and stately residence, surrounded by what was once a garden, but which is now only a green enclosure used for bleaching clothes. The dry basin of what has been a fountain, and a few fruit-trees, ragged and unpruned, indicate that this spot, in past days, was a pleasant, shady retreat, filled with fruits and flowers and the sweet murmur of waters.

The house is very spacious. A hall of noble size leads to a vast spiral staircase winding through its centre, while the various apartments are of imposing dimensions. It was214 built some fifteen or twenty years since by Mr. A——, the well-known New York merchant, who five years ago threw the commercial world into convulsions by a stupendous bank fraud. Mr. A——, as every one knows, escaped to Europe, and died not long after of a broken heart. Almost immediately after the news of his decease reached this country, and was verified, the report spread in Twenty-sixth Street that No. — was haunted. Legal measures had dispossessed the widow of its former owner, and it was inhabited merely by a care-taker and his wife, placed there by the house-agent into whose hands it had passed for purposes of renting or sale. These people declared that they were troubled with unnatural noises. Doors were opened without any visible agency. The remnants of furniture scattered through the various rooms were, during the night, piled one upon the other by unknown hands. Invisible feet passed up and down the stairs in broad daylight, accompanied by the rustle of unseen silk dresses, and the gliding of viewless hands along the massive balusters. The care-taker and his wife declared they would live there no longer. The house-agent laughed, dismissed them, and put others in their place. The noises and supernatural manifestations continued. The neighborhood caught up the story, and the house remained untenanted for three years. Several persons negotiated for it; but somehow, always before the bargain was closed, they heard the unpleasant rumors, and declined to treat any further.

It was in this state of things that my landlady—who at that time kept a boarding-house in Bleecker Street, and who wished to move farther up town—conceived the bold idea of renting No. — Twenty-sixth Street. Happening to have in her house rather a plucky and philosophical set of boarders, she laid her scheme before us, stating candidly everything she had heard respecting the ghostly qualities of the establishment to which she wished to remove us. With the exception of two timid persons,—a sea-captain and a returned Californian, who immediately gave notice215 that they would leave,—all of Mrs. Moffat’s guests declared that they would accompany her in her chivalric incursion into the abode of spirits.

Our removal was effected in the month of May, and we were all charmed with our new residence. The portion of Twenty-sixth Street where our house is situated—between Seventh and Eighth Avenues—is one of the pleasantest localities in New York. The gardens back of the houses, running down nearly to the Hudson, form, in the summer time, a perfect avenue of verdure. The air is pure and invigorating, sweeping, as it does, straight across the river from the Weehawken heights, and even the ragged garden which surrounded the house on two sides, although displaying on washing days rather too much clothes-line, still gave us a piece of green sward to look at, and a cool retreat in the summer evenings, where we smoked our cigars in the dusk, and watched the fire-flies flashing their dark-lanterns in the long grass.

Of course we had no sooner established ourselves at No. — than we began to expect the ghosts. We absolutely awaited their advent with eagerness. Our dinner conversation was supernatural. One of the boarders, who had purchased Mrs. Crowe’s “Night Side of Nature” for his own private delectation, was regarded as a public enemy by the entire household for not having bought twenty copies. The man led a life of supreme wretchedness while he was reading this volume. A system of espionage was established, of which he was the victim. If he incautiously laid the book down for an instant and left the room, it was immediately seized and read aloud in secret places to a select few. I found myself a person of immense importance, it having leaked out that I was tolerably well versed in the history of supernaturalism, and had once written a story, entitled “The Pot of Tulips,” for Harper’s Monthly, the foundation of which was a ghost. If a table or a wainscot panel happened to warp when we were assembled in the large drawing-room, there was an instant silence, and every one216 was prepared for an immediate clanking of chains and a spectral form.

After a month of psychological excitement, it was with the utmost dissatisfaction that we were forced to acknowledge that nothing in the remotest degree approaching the supernatural had manifested itself. Once the black butler asseverated that his candle had been blown out by some invisible agency while he was undressing himself for the night; but as I had more than once discovered this colored gentleman in a condition when one candle must have appeared to him like two, I thought it possible that, by going a step farther in his potations, he might have reversed this phenomenon, and seen no candle at all where he ought to have beheld one.

Things were in this state when an incident took place so awful and inexplicable in its character that my reason fairly reels at the bare memory of the occurrence. It was the tenth of July. After dinner was over I repaired, with my friend Dr. Hammond, to the garden to smoke my evening pipe. Independent of certain mental sympathies which existed between the Doctor and myself, we were linked together by a secret vice. We both smoked opium. We knew each other’s secret, and respected it. We enjoyed together that wonderful expansion of thought, that marvellous intensifying of the perceptive faculties, that boundless feeling of existence when we seem to have points of contact with the whole universe,—in short, that unimaginable spiritual bliss, which I would not surrender for a throne, and which I hope you, reader, will never—never taste.

Those hours of opium happiness which the Doctor and I spent together in secret were regulated with a scientific accuracy. We did not blindly smoke the drug of Paradise, and leave our dreams to chance. While smoking, we carefully steered our conversation through the brightest and calmest channels of thought. We talked of the East, and endeavored to recall the magical panorama of its glowing scenery. We criticised the most sensuous poets, those217 who painted life ruddy with health, brimming with passion, happy in the possession of youth and strength and beauty. If we talked of Shakespeare’s “Tempest,” we lingered over Ariel, and avoided Caliban. Like the Gebers, we turned our faces to the east, and saw only the sunny side of the world.

This skilful coloring of our train of thought produced in our subsequent visions a corresponding tone. The splendors of Arabian fairy-land dyed our dreams. We paced that narrow strip of grass with the tread and port of kings. The song of the rana arborea, while he clung to the bark of the ragged plum-tree, sounded like the strains of divine orchestras. Houses, walls, and streets melted like rainclouds, and vistas of unimaginable glory stretched away before us. It was a rapturous companionship. We enjoyed the vast delight more perfectly because, even in our most ecstatic moments, we were conscious of each other’s presence. Our pleasures, while individual, were still twin, vibrating and moving in musical accord.

On the evening in question, the tenth of July, the Doctor and myself found ourselves in an unusually metaphysical mood. We lit our large meerschaums, filled with fine Turkish tobacco, in the core of which burned a little black nut of opium, that, like the nut in the fairy tale, held within its narrow limits wonders beyond the reach of kings; we paced to and fro, conversing. A strange perversity dominated the currents of our thought. They would not flow through the sun-lit channels into which we strove to divert them. For some unaccountable reason they constantly diverged into dark and lonesome beds, where a continual gloom brooded. It was in vain that, after our old fashion, we flung ourselves on the shores of the East, and talked of its gay bazaars, of the splendors of the time of Haroun, of harems and golden palaces. Black afreets continually arose from the depths of our talk, and expanded, like the one the fisherman released from the copper vessel, until they blotted everything bright from our vision. Insensibly, we yielded to the occult force218 that swayed us, and indulged in gloomy speculation. We had talked some time upon the proneness of the human mind to mysticism, and the almost universal love of the Terrible, when Hammond suddenly said to me, “What do you consider to be the greatest element of Terror?”

The question, I own, puzzled me. That many things were terrible, I knew. Stumbling over a corpse in the dark; beholding, as I once did, a woman floating down a deep and rapid river, with wildly-lifted arms, and awful, upturned face, uttering, as she sank, shrieks that rent one’s heart, while we, the spectators, stood frozen at a window which overhung the river at a height of sixty feet, unable to make the slightest effort to save her, but dumbly watching her last supreme agony and her disappearance. A shattered wreck, with no life visible, encountered floating listlessly on the ocean, is a terrible object, for it suggests a huge terror, the proportions of which are vailed. But it now struck me for the first time that there must be one great and ruling embodiment of fear, a King of Terrors to which all others must succumb. What might it be? To what train of circumstances would it owe its existence?

“I confess, Hammond,” I replied to my friend, “I never considered the subject before. That there must be one Something more terrible than any other thing, I feel. I cannot attempt, however, even the most vague definition.”

“I am somewhat like you, Harry,” he answered. “I feel my capacity to experience a terror greater than anything yet conceived by the human mind;—something combining in fearful and unnatural amalgamation hitherto supposed incompatible elements. The calling of the voices in Brockden Brown’s novel of ‘Wieland’ is awful; so is the picture of the Dweller of the Threshold, in Bulwer’s ‘Zanoni’; but,” he added, shaking his head gloomily, “there is something more horrible still than these.”

“Look here, Hammond,” I rejoined, “let us drop this kind of talk, for Heaven’s sake! We shall suffer for it, depend on it.”

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“I don’t know what’s the matter with me to-night,” he replied, “but my brain is running upon all sorts of weird and awful thoughts. I feel as if I could write a story like Hoffman, to-night, if I were only master of a literary style.”

“Well, if we are going to be Hoffmanesque in our talk, I’m off to bed. Opium and nightmares should never be brought together. How sultry it is! Good-night, Hammond.”

“Good-night, Harry. Pleasant dreams to you.”

“To you, gloomy wretch, afreets, ghouls, and enchanters.”

We parted, and each sought his respective chamber. I undressed quickly and got into bed, taking with me, according to my usual custom, a book, over which I generally read myself to sleep. I opened the volume as soon as I had laid my head upon the pillow, and instantly flung it to the other side of the room. It was Goudon’s “History of Monsters”—a curious French work, which I had lately imported from Paris, but which, in the state of mind I had then reached, was anything but an agreeable companion. I resolved to go to sleep at once; so, turning down my gas until nothing but a little blue point of light glimmered on the top of the tube, I composed myself to rest.

The room was in total darkness. The atom of gas that still remained lighted did not illuminate a distance of three inches round the burner. I desperately drew my arm across my eyes, as if to shut out even the darkness, and tried to think of nothing. It was in vain. The confounded themes touched on by Hammond in the garden kept obtruding themselves on my brain. I battled against them. I erected ramparts of would-be blankness of intellect to keep them out. They still crowded upon me. While I was lying still as a corpse, hoping that by a perfect physical inaction I should hasten mental repose, an awful incident occurred. A Something dropped, as it seemed, from the ceiling, plumb upon my chest, and the220 next instant I felt two bony hands encircling my throat, endeavoring to choke me.

I am no coward, and am possessed of considerable physical strength. The suddenness of the attack, instead of stunning me, strung every nerve to its highest tension. My body acted from instinct, before my brain had time to realize the terrors of my position. In an instant I wound two muscular arms around the creature, and squeezed it, with all the strength of despair, against my chest. In a few seconds the bony hands that had fastened on my throat loosened their hold, and I was free to breathe once more. Then commenced a struggle of awful intensity. Immersed in the most profound darkness, totally ignorant of the nature of the Thing by which I was so suddenly attacked, finding my grasp slipping every moment, by reason, it seemed to me, of the entire nakedness of my assailant, bitten with sharp teeth in the shoulder, neck, and chest, having every moment to protect my throat against a pair of sinewy, agile hands, which my utmost efforts could not confine—these were a combination of circumstances to combat which required all the strength and skill and courage that I possessed.

At last, after a silent, deadly, exhausting struggle, I got my assailant under by a series of incredible efforts of strength. Once pinned, with my knee on what I made out to be its chest, I knew that I was victor. I rested for a moment to breathe. I heard the creature beneath me panting in the darkness, and felt the violent throbbing of a heart. It was apparently as exhausted as I was; that was one comfort. At this moment I remembered that I usually placed under my pillow, before going to bed, a large yellow silk pocket-handkerchief, for use during the night. I felt for it instantly; it was there. In a few seconds more I had, after a fashion, pinioned the creature’s arms.

I now felt tolerably secure. There was nothing more to be done but to turn on the gas, and, having first seen what my midnight assailant was like, arouse the household. I221 will confess to being actuated by a certain pride in not giving the alarm before; I wished to make the capture alone and unaided.

Never losing my hold for an instant, I slipped from the bed to the floor, dragging my captive with me. I had but a few steps to make to reach the gas-burner; these I made with the greatest caution, holding the creature in a grip like a vice. At last I got within arm’s-length of the tiny speck of blue light which told me where the gas-burner lay. Quick as lightning I released my grasp with one hand and let on the full flood of light. Then I turned to look at my captive.

I cannot even attempt to give any definition of my sensations the instant after I turned on the gas. I suppose I must have shrieked with terror, for in less than a minute afterward my room was crowded with the inmates of the house. I shudder now as I think of that awful moment. I saw nothing! Yes; I had one arm firmly clasped round a breathing, panting, corporeal shape, my other hand gripped with all its strength a throat as warm, and apparently fleshly, as my own; and yet, with this living substance in my grasp, with its body pressed against my own, and all in the bright glare of a large jet of gas, I absolutely beheld nothing! Not even an outline,—a vapor!

I do not, even at this hour, realize the situation in which I found myself. I cannot recall the astounding incident thoroughly. Imagination in vain tries to compass the awful paradox.

It breathed. I felt its warm breath upon my cheek. It struggled fiercely. It had hands. They clutched me. Its skin was smooth, like my own. There it lay, pressed close up against me, solid as stone,—and yet utterly invisible!

I wonder that I did not faint or go mad on the instant. Some wonderful instinct must have sustained me; for, absolutely, in place of loosening my hold on the terrible Enigma, I seemed to gain an additional strength in my moment of horror, and tightened my grasp with such222 wonderful force that I felt the creature shivering with agony.

Just then Hammond entered my room at the head of the household. As soon as he beheld my face—which, I suppose, must have been an awful sight to look at—he hastened forward, crying, “Great heaven, Harry! what has happened?”

“Hammond! Hammond!” I cried, “come here. Oh! this is awful! I have been attacked in bed by something or other, which I have hold of; but I can’t see it—I can’t see it!”

Hammond, doubtless struck by the unfeigned horror expressed in my countenance, made one or two steps forward with an anxious yet puzzled expression. A very audible titter burst from the remainder of my visitors. This suppressed laughter made me furious. To laugh at a human being in my position! It was the worst species of cruelty. Now, I can understand why the appearance of a man struggling violently, as it would seem, with an airy nothing, and calling for assistance against a vision, should have appeared ludicrous. Then, so great was my rage against the mocking crowd that had I the power I would have stricken them dead where they stood.

“Hammond! Hammond!” I cried again, despairingly, “for God’s sake come to me. I can hold the—the Thing but a short while longer. It is overpowering me. Help me! Help me!”

“Harry,” whispered Hammond, approaching me, “you have been smoking too much opium.”

“I swear to you, Hammond, that this is no vision,” I answered, in the same low tone. “Don’t you see how it shakes my whole frame with its struggles? If you don’t believe me, convince yourself. Feel it,—touch it.”

Hammond advanced and laid his hand in the spot I indicated. A wild cry of horror burst from him. He had felt it!

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In a moment he had discovered somewhere in my room a long piece of cord, and was the next instant winding it and knotting it about the body of the unseen being that I clasped in my arms.

“Harry,” he said, in a hoarse, agitated voice, for, though he preserved his presence of mind, he was deeply moved, “Harry, it’s all safe now. You may let go, old fellow, if you’re tired. The Thing can’t move.”

I was utterly exhausted, and I gladly loosed my hold.

Hammond stood holding the ends of the cord that bound the Invisible, twisted round his hand, while before him, self-supporting as it were, he beheld a rope laced and interlaced, and stretching tightly round a vacant space. I never saw a man look so thoroughly stricken with awe. Nevertheless his face expressed all the courage and determination which I knew him to possess. His lips, although white, were set firmly, and one could perceive at a glance that, although stricken with fear, he was not daunted.

The confusion that ensued among the guests of the house who were witnesses of this extraordinary scene between Hammond and myself—who beheld the pantomime of binding this struggling Something,—who beheld me almost sinking from physical exhaustion when my task of jailer was over—the confusion and terror that took possession of the bystanders, when they saw all this, was beyond description. The weaker ones fled from the apartment. The few who remained clustered near the door, and could not be induced to approach Hammond and his Charge. Still incredulity broke out through their terror. They had not the courage to satisfy themselves, and yet they doubted. It was in vain that I begged of some of the men to come near and convince themselves by touch of the existence in that room of a living being which was invisible. They were incredulous, but did not dare to undeceive themselves. How could a solid, living, breathing body be invisible, they asked. My reply was this. I gave a sign to Hammond, and both of us—conquering224 our fearful repugnance to touch the invisible creature—lifted it from the ground, manacled as it was, and took it to my bed. Its weight was about that of a boy of fourteen.

“Now, my friends,” I said, as Hammond and myself held the creature suspended over the bed, “I can give you self-evident proof that here is a solid, ponderable body which, nevertheless, you cannot see. Be good enough to watch the surface of the bed attentively.”

I was astonished at my own courage in treating this strange event so calmly; but I had recovered from my first terror, and felt a sort of scientific pride in the affair which dominated every other feeling.

The eyes of the bystanders were immediately fixed on my bed. At a given signal Hammond and I let the creature fall. There was the dull sound of a heavy body alighting on a soft mass. The timbers of the bed creaked. A deep impression marked itself distinctly on the pillow, and on the bed itself. The crowd who witnessed this gave a sort of low, universal cry, and rushed from the room. Hammond and I were left alone with our Mystery.

We remained silent for some time, listening to the low, irregular breathing of the creature on the bed, and watching the rustle of the bed-clothes as it impotently struggled to free itself from confinement. Then Hammond spoke.

“Harry, this is awful.”

“Ay, awful.”

“But not unaccountable.”

“Not unaccountable! What do you mean? Such a thing has never occurred since the birth of the world. I know not what to think, Hammond. God grant that I am not mad, and that this is not an insane fantasy!”

“Let us reason a little, Harry. Here is a solid body which we touch, but which we cannot see. The fact is so unusual that it strikes us with terror. Is there no parallel, though, for such a phenomenon? Take a piece of pure glass. It is tangible and transparent. A certain chemical225 coarseness is all that prevents its being so entirely transparent as to be totally invisible. It is not theoretically impossible, mind you, to make a glass which shall not reflect a single ray of light—a glass so pure and homogeneous in its atoms that the rays from the sun shall pass through it as they do through the air, refracted but not reflected. We do not see the air, and yet we feel it.”

“That’s all very well, Hammond, but these are inanimate substances. Glass does not breathe, air does not breathe. This thing has a heart that palpitates,—a will that moves it,—lungs that play, and inspire and respire.”

“You forget the strange phenomena of which we have so often heard of late,” answered the Doctor, gravely. “At the meetings called ‘spirit circles,’ invisible hands have been thrust into the hands of those persons round the table—warm, fleshly hands that seemed to pulsate with mortal life.”

“What? Do you think, then, that this thing is—”

“I don’t know what it is,” was the solemn reply; “but please the gods I will, with your assistance, thoroughly investigate it.”

We watched together, smoking many pipes, all night long, by the bedside of the unearthly being that tossed and panted until it was apparently wearied out. Then we learned by the low, regular breathing that it slept.

The next morning the house was all astir. The boarders congregated on the landing outside my room, and Hammond and myself were lions. We had to answer a thousand questions as to the state of our extraordinary prisoner, for as yet not one person in the house except ourselves could be induced to set foot in the apartment.

The creature was awake. This was evidenced by the convulsive manner in which the bed-clothes were moved in its efforts to escape. There was something truly terrible in beholding, as it were, those second-hand indications of the terrible writhings and agonized struggles for liberty which themselves were invisible.

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Hammond and myself had racked our brains during the long night to discover some means by which we might realize the shape and general appearance of the Enigma. As well as we could make out by passing our hands over the creature’s form, its outlines and lineaments were human. There was a mouth; a round, smooth head without hair; a nose, which, however, was little elevated above the cheeks; and its hands and feet felt like those of a boy. At first we thought of placing the being on a smooth surface and tracing its outline with chalk, as shoemakers trace the outline of the foot. This plan was given up as being of no value. Such an outline would give not the slightest idea of its conformation.

A happy thought struck me. We would take a cast of it in plaster of Paris. This would give us the solid figure, and satisfy all our wishes. But how to do it? The movements of the creature would disturb the setting of the plastic covering, and distort the mould. Another thought. Why not give it chloroform? It had respiratory organs—that was evident by its breathing. Once reduced to a state of insensibility, we could do with it what we would. Doctor X—— was sent for; and after the worthy physician had recovered from the first shock of amazement, he proceeded to administer the chloroform. In three minutes afterward we were enabled to remove the fetters from the creature’s body, and a well-known modeler of this city was busily engaged in covering the invisible form with the moist clay. In five minutes more we had a mould, and before evening a rough fac-simile of the Mystery. It was shaped like a man,—distorted, uncouth, and horrible, but still a man. It was small, not over four feet and some inches in height, and its limbs revealed a muscular development that was unparalleled. Its face surpassed in hideousness anything I had ever seen. Gustave Doré, or Callot, or Tony Johannot, never conceived anything so horrible. There is a face in one of the latter’s illustrations to “Un Voyage où il vous plaira,” which somewhat approaches the countenance227 of this creature, but does not equal it. It was the physiognomy of what I should have fancied a ghoul to be. It looked as if it was capable of feeding on human flesh.

Having satisfied our curiosity, and bound every one in the house to secrecy, it became a question, what was to be done with our Enigma? It was impossible that we should keep such a horror in our house; it was equally impossible that such an awful being should be let loose upon the world. I confess that I would have gladly voted for the creature’s destruction. But who would shoulder the responsibility? Who would undertake the execution of this horrible semblance of a human being? Day after day this question was deliberated gravely. The boarders all left the house. Mrs. Moffat was in despair, and threatened Hammond and myself with all sorts of legal penalties if we did not remove the Horror. Our answer was, “We will go if you like, but we decline taking this creature with us. Remove it yourself if you please. It appeared in your house. On you the responsibility rests.” To this there was, of course, no answer. Mrs. Moffat could not obtain for love or money a person who would even approach the Mystery.

The most singular part of the transaction was that we were entirely ignorant of what the creature habitually fed on. Everything in the way of nutriment that we could think of was placed before it, but was never touched. It was awful to stand by, day after day, and see the clothes toss, and hear the hard breathing, and know that it was starving.

Ten, twelve days, a fortnight passed, and it still lived. The pulsations of the heart, however, were daily growing fainter, and had now nearly ceased altogether. It was evident that the creature was dying for want of sustenance. While this terrible life-struggle was going on, I felt miserable. I could not sleep of nights. Horrible as the creature was, it was pitiful to think of the pangs it was suffering.

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At last it died. Hammond and I found it cold and stiff one morning in the bed. The heart had ceased to beat, the lungs to inspire. We hastened to bury it in the garden. It was a strange funeral, the dropping of that viewless corpse into the damp hole. The cast of its form I gave to Doctor X——, who keeps it in his museum in Tenth Street.

As I am on the eve of a long journey from which I may not return, I have drawn up this narrative of an event the most singular that has ever come to my knowledge.

NOTE.

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231

THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT

As Mr. John Oakhurst, gambler, stepped into the main street of Poker Flat on the morning of the twenty-third of November, 1850, he was conscious of a change in its moral atmosphere since the preceding night. Two or three men, conversing earnestly together, ceased as he approached, and exchanged significant glances. There was a Sabbath lull in the air, which, in a settlement unused to Sabbath influences, looked ominous.

Mr. Oakhurst’s calm, handsome face betrayed small concern of these indications. Whether he was conscious of any predisposing cause, was another question. “I reckon they’re after somebody,” he reflected; “likely it’s me.” He returned to his pocket the handkerchief with which he had been whipping away the red dust of Poker Flat from his neat boots, and quietly discharged his mind of any further conjecture.

In point of fact, Poker Flat was “after somebody.” It had lately suffered the loss of several thousand dollars, two valuable horses, and a prominent citizen. It was experiencing a spasm of virtuous reaction, quite as lawless and ungovernable as any of the acts that had provoked it. A232 secret committee had determined to rid the town of all improper persons. This was done permanently in regard of two men who were then hanging from the boughs of a sycamore in the gulch, and temporarily in the banishment of certain other objectionable characters. I regret to say that some of these were ladies. It is but due to the sex, however, to state that their impropriety was professional, and it was only in such easily established standards of evil that Poker Flat ventured to sit in judgment.

Mr. Oakhurst was right in supposing that he was included in this category. A few of the committee had urged hanging him as a possible example, and a sure method of reimbursing themselves from his pockets of the sums he had won from them. “It’s agin justice,” said Jim Wheeler, “to let this yer young man from Roaring Camp—an entire stranger—carry away our money.” But a crude sentiment of equity residing in the breasts of those who had been fortunate enough to win from Mr. Oakhurst overruled this narrower local prejudice.

Mr. Oakhurst received his sentence with philosophic calmness, none the less coolly that he was aware of the hesitation of his judges. He was too much of a gambler not to accept Fate. With him life was at best an uncertain game, and he recognized the usual percentage in favor of the dealer.

A body of armed men accompanied the deported wickedness of Poker Flat to the outskirts of the settlement. Besides Mr. Oakhurst, who was known to be a coolly desperate man, and for whose intimidation the armed escort was intended, the expatriated party consisted of a young woman familiarly known as “The Duchess”; another, who had gained the infelicitous title of “Mother Shipton”; and “Uncle Billy,” a suspected sluice-robber and confirmed drunkard. The cavalcade provoked no comments from the spectators, nor was any word uttered by the escort. Only, when the gulch which marked the uttermost limit of Poker Flat was reached, the leader spoke briefly and to the233 point. The exiles were forbidden to return at the peril of their lives.

As the escort disappeared, their pent-up feelings found vent in a few hysterical tears from “The Duchess,” some bad language from Mother Shipton, and a Parthian volley of expletives from Uncle Billy. The philosophic Oakhurst alone remained silent. He listened calmly to Mother Shipton’s desire to cut somebody’s heart out, to the repeated statements of “The Duchess” that she would die in the road, and to the alarming oaths that seemed to be bumped out of Uncle Billy as he rode forward. With the easy good-humor characteristic of his class, he insisted upon exchanging his own riding-horse, “Five Spot,” for the sorry mule which the Duchess rode. But even this act did not draw the party into any closer sympathy. The young woman reädjusted her somewhat draggled plumes with a feeble, faded coquetry; Mother Shipton eyed the possessor of “Five Spot” with malevolence, and Uncle Billy included the whole party in one sweeping anathema.

The road to Sandy Bar—a camp that, not having as yet experienced the regenerating influences of Poker Flat, consequently seemed to offer some invitation to the emigrants—lay over a steep mountain range. It was distant a day’s severe journey. In that advanced season, the party soon passed out of the moist, temperate regions of the foot-hills into the dry, cold, bracing air of the Sierras. The trail was narrow and difficult. At noon the Duchess, rolling out of her saddle upon the ground, declared her intention of going no farther, and the party halted.

The spot was singularly wild and impressive. A wooded amphitheatre, surrounded on three sides by precipitous cliffs of naked granite, sloped gently toward the crest of another precipice that overlooked the valley. It was undoubtedly the most suitable spot for a camp, had camping been advisable. But Mr. Oakhurst knew that scarcely half the journey to Sandy Bar was accomplished, and the party were not equipped or provisioned for delay. This fact he234 pointed out to his companions curtly, with a philosophic commentary on the folly of “throwing up their hand before the game was played out.” But they were furnished with liquor, which in this emergency stood them in place of food, fuel, rest, and prescience. In spite of his remonstrances, it was not long before they were more or less under its influence. Uncle Billy passed rapidly from a bellicose state into one of stupor, the Duchess became maudlin, and Mother Shipton snored. Mr. Oakhurst alone remained erect, leaning against a rock, calmly surveying them.

Mr. Oakhurst did not drink. It interfered with a profession which required coolness, impassiveness, and presence of mind, and, in his own language, he “couldn’t afford it.” As he gazed at his recumbent fellow-exiles, the loneliness begotten of his pariah-trade, his habits of life, his very vices, for the first time seriously oppressed him. He bestirred himself in dusting his black clothes, washing his hands and face, and other acts characteristic of his studiously neat habits, and for a moment forgot his annoyance. The thought of deserting his weaker and more pitiable companions never perhaps occurred to him. Yet he could not help feeling the want of that excitement which, singularly enough, was most conducive to that calm equanimity for which he was notorious. He looked at the gloomy walls that rose a thousand feet sheer above the circling pines around him; at the sky, ominously clouded; at the valley below, already deepening into shadow. And, doing so, suddenly he heard his own name called.

A horseman slowly ascended the trail. In the fresh, open face of the new-comer Mr. Oakhurst recognized Tom Simson, otherwise known as “The Innocent” of Sandy Bar. He had met him some months before over a “little game,” and had, with perfect equanimity, won the entire fortune—amounting to some forty dollars—of that guileless youth. After the game was finished, Mr. Oakhurst drew the youthful speculator behind the door and thus addressed him:235 “Tommy, you’re a good little man, but you can’t gamble worth a cent. Don’t try it over again.” He then handed him his money back, pushed him gently from the room, and so made a devoted slave of Tom Simson.

There was a remembrance of this in his boyish and enthusiastic greeting of Mr. Oakhurst. He had started, he said, to go to Poker Flat to seek his fortune. “Alone?” No, not exactly alone; in fact—a giggle—he had run away with Piney Woods. Didn’t Mr. Oakhurst remember Piney? She that used to wait on the table at the Temperance House? They had been engaged a long time, but old Jake Woods had objected, and so they had run away, and were going to Poker Flat to be married, and here they were. And they were tired out, and how lucky it was they had found a place to camp and company. All this the Innocent delivered rapidly, while Piney—a stout, comely damsel of fifteen—emerged from behind the pine-tree, where she had been blushing unseen, and rode to the side of her lover.

Mr. Oakhurst seldom troubled himself with sentiment, still less with propriety; but he had a vague idea that the situation was not felicitous. He retained, however, his presence of mind sufficiently to kick Uncle Billy, who was about to say something, and Uncle Billy was sober enough to recognize in Mr. Oakhurst’s kick a superior power that would not bear trifling. He then endeavored to dissuade Tom Simson from delaying further, but in vain. He even pointed out the fact that there was no provision, nor means of making a camp. But, unluckily, “The Innocent” met this objection by assuring the party that he was provided with an extra mule loaded with provisions, and by the discovery of a rude attempt at a log-house near the trail. “Piney can stay with Mrs. Oakhurst,” said the Innocent, pointing to the Duchess, “and I can shift for myself.”

Nothing but Mr. Oakhurst’s admonishing foot saved Uncle Billy from bursting into a roar of laughter. As it was, he felt compelled to retire up the cañon until he could236 recover his gravity. There he confided the joke to the tall pine trees, with many slaps of his leg, contortions of his face, and the usual profanity. But when he returned to the party, he found them seated by a fire—for the air had grown strangely chill and the sky overcast—in apparently amicable conversation. Piney was actually talking in an impulsive, girlish fashion to the Duchess, who was listening with an interest and animation she had not shown for many days. The Innocent was holding forth, apparently with equal effect, to Mr. Oakhurst and Mother Shipton, who was actually relaxing into amiability. “Is this yer a d—d picnic?” said Uncle Billy, with inward scorn, as he surveyed the sylvan group, the glancing fire-light, and the tethered animals in the foreground. Suddenly an idea mingled with the alcoholic fumes that disturbed his brain. It was apparently of a jocular nature, for he felt impelled to slap his leg again and cram his fist into his mouth.

As the shadows crept slowly up the mountain, a slight breeze rocked the tops of the pine-trees, and moaned through their long and gloomy aisles. The ruined cabin, patched and covered with pine boughs, was set apart for the ladies. As the lovers parted, they unaffectedly exchanged a kiss, so honest and sincere that it might have been heard above the swaying pines. The frail Duchess and the malevolent Mother Shipton were probably too stunned to remark upon this last evidence of simplicity, and so turned without a word to the hut. The fire was replenished, the men lay down before the door, and in a few minutes were asleep.

Mr. Oakhurst was a light sleeper. Toward morning he awoke benumbed and cold. As he stirred the dying fire, the wind, which was now blowing strongly, brought to his cheek that which caused the blood to leave it,—snow!

He started to his feet with the intention of awakening the sleepers, for there was no time to lose. But turning to where Uncle Billy had been lying, he found him gone. A237 suspicion leaped to his brain and a curse to his lips. He ran to the spot where the mules had been tethered; they were no longer there. The tracks were already rapidly disappearing in the snow.

The momentary excitement brought Mr. Oakhurst back to the fire with his usual calm. He did not waken the sleepers. The Innocent slumbered peacefully, with a smile on his good-humored, freckled face; the virgin Piney slept beside her frailer sisters as sweetly as though attended by celestial guardians, and Mr. Oakhurst, drawing his blanket over his shoulders, stroked his mustachios and waited for the dawn. It came slowly in a whirling mist of snow-flakes, that dazzled and confused the eye. What could be seen of the landscape appeared magically changed. He looked over the valley, and summed up the present and future in two words,—“Snowed in!”

A careful inventory of the provisions, which, fortunately for the party, had been stored within the hut, and so escaped the felonious fingers of Uncle Billy, disclosed the fact that with care and prudence they might last ten days longer. “That is,” said Mr. Oakhurst, sotto voce to the Innocent, “if you’re willing to board us. If you ain’t—and perhaps you’d better not—you can wait till Uncle Billy gets back with provisions.” For some occult reason, Mr. Oakhurst could not bring himself to disclose Uncle Billy’s rascality, and so offered the hypothesis that he had wandered from the camp and had accidentally stampeded the animals. He dropped a warning to the Duchess and Mother Shipton, who of course knew the facts of their associate’s defection. “They’ll find out the truth about us all, when they find out anything,” he added, significantly, “and there’s no good frightening them now.”

Tom Simson not only put all his worldly store at the disposal of Mr. Oakhurst, but seemed to enjoy the prospect of their enforced seclusion. “We’ll have a good camp for a week, and then the snow’ll melt, and we’ll all go back together.” The cheerful gayety of the young man and Mr.238 Oakhurst’s calm infected the others. The Innocent, with the aid of pine boughs, extemporized a thatch for the roofless cabin, and the Duchess directed Piney in the reärrangement of the interior with a taste and tact that opened the blue eyes of that provincial maiden to their fullest extent. “I reckon now you’re used to fine things at Poker Flat,” said Piney. The Duchess turned away sharply to conceal something that reddened her cheek through its professional tint, and Mother Shipton requested Piney not to “chatter.” But when Mr. Oakhurst returned from a weary search for the trail, he heard the sound of happy laughter echoed from the rocks. He stopped in some alarm, and his thoughts first naturally reverted to the whiskey, which he had prudently cachéd. “And yet it don’t somehow sound like whiskey,” said the gambler. It was not until he caught sight of the blazing fire through the still blinding storm, and the group around it, that he settled to the conviction that it was “square fun.”

Whether Mr. Oakhurst had cachéd his cards with the whiskey as something debarred the free access of the community, I cannot say. It was certain that, in Mother Shipton’s words, he “didn’t say cards once” during that evening. Haply the time was beguiled by an accordeon, produced somewhat ostentatiously by Tom Simson, from his pack. Notwithstanding some difficulties attending the manipulation of this instrument, Piney Woods managed to pluck several reluctant melodies from its keys, to an accompaniment by the Innocent on a pair of bone castinets. But the crowning festivity of the evening was reached in a rude camp-meeting hymn, which the lovers, joining hands, sang with great earnestness and vociferation. I fear that a certain defiant tone and Covenanter’s swing to its chorus, rather than any devotional quality, caused it speedily to infect the others, who at last joined in the refrain:

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The pines rocked, the storm eddied and whirled above the miserable group, and the flames of their altar leaped heavenward, as if in token of the vow.

At midnight the storm abated, the rolling clouds parted, and the stars glittered keenly above the sleeping camp. Mr. Oakhurst, whose professional habits had enabled him to live on the smallest possible amount of sleep, in dividing the watch with Tom Simson, somehow managed to take upon himself the greater part of that duty. He excused himself to the Innocent, by saying that he had “often been a week without sleep.” “Doing what?” asked Tom. “Poker!” replied Oakhurst, sententiously; “when a man gets a streak of luck,—nigger-luck,—he don’t get tired. The luck gives in first. Luck,” continued the gambler, reflectively, “is a mighty queer thing. All you know about it for certain is that it’s bound to change. And it’s finding out when it’s going to change that makes you. We’ve had a streak of bad luck since we left Poker Flat—you come along, and slap you get into it, too. If you can hold your cards right along you’re all right. For,” added the gambler, with cheerful irrelevance,

The third day came, and the sun, looking through the white-curtained valley, saw the outcasts divide their slowly decreasing store of provisions for the morning meal. It was one of the peculiarities of that mountain climate that its rays diffused a kindly warmth over the wintry landscape, as if in regretful commiseration of the past. But it revealed drift on drift of snow piled high around the hut; a hopeless, uncharted, trackless sea of white lying below the rocky shores to which the castaways still clung. Through the marvellously clear air, the smoke of the pastoral village of Poker Flat rose miles away. Mother Shipton saw it, and from a remote pinnacle of her rocky fastness, hurled in that direction a final malediction. It was her last vituperative240 attempt, and perhaps for that reason was invested with a certain degree of sublimity. It did her good, she privately informed the Duchess. “Just you go out there and cuss, and see.” She then set herself to the task of amusing “the child,” as she and the Duchess were pleased to call Piney. Piney was no chicken, but it was a soothing and ingenious theory of the pair thus to account for the fact that she didn’t swear and wasn’t improper.

When night crept up again through the gorges, the reedy notes of the accordeon rose and fell in fitful spasms and long-drawn gasps by the flickering camp-fire. But music failed to fill entirely the aching void left by insufficient food, and a new diversion was proposed by Piney—story-telling. Neither Mr. Oakhurst nor his female companions caring to relate their personal experiences, this plan would have failed, too, but for The Innocent. Some months before he had chanced upon a stray copy of Mr. Pope’s ingenious translation of the Iliad. He now proposed to narrate the principal incidents of that poem—having thoroughly mastered the argument and fairly forgotten the words—in the current vernacular of Sandy Bar. And so for the rest of that night the Homeric demigods again walked the earth. Trojan bully and wily Greek wrestled in the winds, and the great pines in the cañon seemed to bow to the wrath of the son of Peleus. Mr. Oakhurst listened with quiet satisfaction. Most especially was he interested in the fate of “Ash-heels,” as the Innocent persisted in denominating the “swift-footed Achilles.”

So with small food and much of Homer and the accordeon, a week passed over the heads of the outcasts. The sun again forsook them, and again from leaden skies the snow-flakes were sifted over the land. Day by day closer around them drew the snowy circle, until at last they looked from their prison over drifted walls of dazzling white, that towered twenty feet above their heads. It became more and more difficult to replenish their fires,241 even from the fallen trees beside them, now half-hidden in the drifts. And yet no one complained. The lovers turned from the dreary prospect and looked into each other’s eyes, and were happy. Mr. Oakhurst settled himself coolly to the losing game before him. The Duchess, more cheerful than she had been, assumed the care of Piney. Only Mother Shipton—once the strongest of the party—seemed to sicken and fade. At midnight on the tenth day she called Oakhurst to her side. “I’m going,” she said, in a voice of querulous weakness, “but don’t say anything about it. Don’t waken the kids. Take the bundle from under my head and open it.” Mr. Oakhurst did so. It contained Mother Shipton’s rations for the last week, untouched. “Give ’em to the child,” she said, pointing to the sleeping Piney. “You’ve starved yourself,” said the gambler. “That’s what they call it,” said the woman, querulously, as she lay down again, and, turning her face to the wall, passed quietly away.

The accordeon and the bones were put aside that day, and Homer was forgotten. When the body of Mother Shipton had been committed to the snow, Mr. Oakhurst took The Innocent aside, and showed him a pair of snow-shoes, which he had fashioned from the old pack-saddle. “There’s one chance in a hundred to save her yet,” he said, pointing to Piney; “but it’s there,” he added, pointing toward Poker Flat. “If you can reach there in two days she’s safe.” “And you?” asked Tom Simson. “I’ll stay here,” was the curt reply.

The lovers parted with a long embrace. “You are not going, too?” said the Duchess, as she saw Mr. Oakhurst apparently waiting to accompany him. “As far as the cañon,” he replied. He turned suddenly, and kissed the Duchess, leaving her pallid face aflame, and her trembling limbs rigid with amazement.

Night came, but not Mr. Oakhurst. It brought the storm again and the whirling snow. Then the Duchess, feeding the fire, found that some one had quietly piled242 beside the hut enough fuel to last a few days longer. The tears rose to her eyes, but she hid them from Piney.

The women slept but little. In the morning, looking into each other’s faces, they read their fate. Neither spoke; but Piney, accepting the position of the stronger, drew near and placed her arm around the Duchess’s waist. They kept this attitude for the rest of the day. That night the storm reached its greatest fury, and, rending asunder the protecting pines, invaded the very hut.

Toward morning they found themselves unable to feed the fire, which gradually died away. As the embers slowly blackened, the Duchess crept closer to Piney, and broke the silence of many hours: “Piney, can you pray?” “No, dear,” said Piney, simply. The Duchess, without knowing exactly why, felt relieved, and, putting her head upon Piney’s shoulder, spoke no more. And so reclining, the younger and purer pillowing the head of her soiled sister upon her virgin breast, they fell asleep.

The wind lulled as if it feared to waken them. Feathery drifts of snow, shaken from the long pine boughs, flew like white-winged birds, and settled about them as they slept. The moon through the rifted clouds looked down upon what had been the camp. But all human stain, all trace of earthly travail, was hidden beneath the spotless mantle mercifully flung from above.

They slept all that day and the next, nor did they waken when voices and footsteps broke the silence of the camp. And when pitying fingers brushed the snow from their wan faces, you could scarcely have told from the equal peace that dwelt upon them, which was she that had sinned. Even the Law of Poker Flat recognized this, and turned away, leaving them still locked in each other’s arms.

But at the head of the gulch, on one of the largest pine trees, they found the deuce of clubs pinned to the bark with a bowie knife. It bore the following, written in pencil, in a firm hand:

243

†
BENEATH THIS TREE
LIES THE BODY
OF
JOHN OAKHURST,
WHO STRUCK A STREAK OF BAD LUCK
ON THE 23D OF NOVEMBER, 1850,
AND
HANDED IN HIS CHECKS
ON THE 7TH DECEMBER, 1850.
†

And pulseless and cold, with a Derringer by his side and a bullet in his heart, though still calm as in life, beneath the snow lay he who was at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker Flat.

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245

ALBERT FALVEY WEBSTER
1848–1876

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247

MISS EUNICE’S GLOVE

I

For a long time blithe and fragile Miss Eunice, demure, correct in deportment, and yet not wholly without enthusiasm, thought that day the unluckiest in her life on which she first took into her hands that unobtrusive yet dramatic book, “Miss Crofutt’s Missionary Labors in the English Prisons.”

It came to her notice by mere accident, not by favor of proselyting friends; and such was its singular material, that she at once devoured it with avidity. As its title suggests, it was the history of the ameliorating endeavors of a woman in criminal society, and it contained, perforce, a large amount of tragic and pathetic incident. But this last was so blended and involved with what Miss Eunice would have skipped as commonplace, that she was led to digest the whole volume,—statistics, philosophy, comments, and all. She studied the analysis of the atmosphere of cells, the properties and waste of wheaten flour, the cost of clothing to the general government, the whys and wherefores of crime and evil-doing; and it was not long before there was generated within her bosom a fine and healthy ardor to emulate this practical and courageous pattern.

She was profoundly moved by the tales of missionary labors proper. She was filled with joy to read that Miss Crofutt and her lieutenants sometimes cracked and broke away the formidable husks which enveloped divine kernels in the hearts of some of the wretches, and she frequently248 wept at the stories of victories gained over monsters whose defences of silence and stolidity had suddenly fallen into ruin above the slow but persistent sapping of constant kindness. Acute tinglings and chilling thrills would pervade her entire body when she read that on Christmas every wretch seemed to become for that day, at least, a gracious man; that the sight of a few penny tapers, or the possession of a handful of sweet stuff, or a spray of holly, or a hot-house bloom, would appear to convert the worst of them into children. Her heart would swell to learn how they acted during the one poor hour of yearly freedom in the prison-yards; that they swelled their chests; that they ran; that they took long strides; that the singers anxiously tried their voices, now grown husky; that the athletes wrestled only to find their limbs stiff and their arts forgotten; that the gentlest of them lifted their faces to the broad sky and spent the sixty minutes in a dreadful gazing at the clouds.

The pretty student gradually became possessed with a rage. She desired to convert some one, to recover some estray, to reform some wretch.

She regretted that she lived in America, and not in England, where the most perfect rascals were to be found; she was sorry that the gloomy, sin-saturated prisons which were the scenes of Miss Crofutt’s labors must always be beyond her ken.

There was no crime in the family or the neighborhood against which she might strive; no one whom she knew was even austere; she had never met a brute; all her rascals were newspaper rascals. For aught she knew, this tranquillity and good-will might go on forever, without affording her an opportunity. She must be denied the smallest contact with these frightful faces and figures, these bars and cages, these deformities of the mind and heart, these curiosities of conscience, shyness, skill, and daring; all these dramas of reclamation, all these scenes of fervent gratitude, thankfulness, and intoxicating liberty,—all or any of these249 things must never come to be the lot of her eyes; and she gave herself up to the most poignant regret.

But one day she was astonished to discover that all of these delights lay within half an hour’s journey of her home; and moreover, that there was approaching an hour which was annually set apart for the indulgence of the inmates of the prison in question. She did not stop to ask herself, as she might well have done, how it was that she had so completely ignored this particular institution, which was one of the largest and best conducted in the country, especially when her desire to visit one was so keen; but she straightway set about preparing for her intended visit in a manner which she fancied Miss Crofutt would have approved, had she been present.

She resolved, in the most radical sense of the word, to be alive. She jotted on some ivory tablets, with a gold pencil, a number of hints to assist her in her observations. For example: “Phrenological development; size of cells; ounces of solid and liquid; tissue-producing food; were mirrors allowed? if so, what was the effect? jimmy and skeleton-key, character of; canary birds: query, would not their admission into every cell animate in the human prisoners a similar buoyancy? to urge upon the turnkeys the use of the Spanish garrote in place of the present distressing gallows; to find the proportion of Orthodox and Unitarian prisoners to those of other persuasions.” But besides these and fifty other similar memoranda, the enthusiast cast about her for something practical to do.

She hit upon the capital idea of flowers. She at once ordered from a gardener of taste two hundred bouquets, or rather nosegays, which she intended for distribution among the prisoners she was about to visit, and she called upon her father for the money.

Then she began to prepare her mind. She wished to define the plan from which she was to make her contemplations. She settled that she would be grave and gentle. She would be exquisitely careful not to hold herself too250 much aloof, and yet not to step beyond the bounds of that sweet reserve that she conceived must have been at once Miss Crofutt’s sword and buckler.

Her object was to awaken in the most abandoned criminals a realization that the world, in its most benignant phase, was still open to them; that society, having obtained a requital for their wickedness, was ready to embrace them again on proof of their repentance.

She determined to select at the outset two or three of the most remarkable monsters, and turn the full head of her persuasions exclusively upon them, instead of sprinkling (as it were) the whole community with her grace. She would arouse at first a very few, and then a few more, and a few more, and so on ad infinitum.

It was on a hot July morning that she journeyed on foot over the bridge which led to the prison, and there walked a man behind her carrying the flowers.

Her eyes were cast down, this being the position most significant of her spirit. Her pace was equal, firm, and rapid; she made herself oblivious of the bustle of the streets, and she repented that her vanity had permitted her to wear white and lavender, these making a combination in her dress which she had been told became her well. She had no right to embellish herself. Was she going to the races, or a match, or a kettle-drum, that she must dandify herself with particular shades of color? She stopped short, blushing. Would Miss Cro——. But there was no help for it now. It was too late to turn back. She proceeded, feeling that the odds were against her.

She approached her destination in such a way that the prison came into view suddenly. She paused with a feeling of terror. The enormous gray building rose far above a lofty white wall of stone, and a sense of its prodigious strength and awful gloom overwhelmed her. On the top of the wall, holding by an iron railing, there stood a man with a rifle trailing behind him. He was looking down into the yard inside. His attitude of watchfulness, his weapon, the251 unseen thing that was being thus fiercely guarded, provoked in her such a revulsion that she came to a standstill.

What in the name of mercy had she come here for? She began to tremble. The man with the flowers came up to her and halted. From the prison there came at this instant the loud clang of a bell, and succeeding this a prolonged and resonant murmur which seemed to increase. Miss Eunice looked hastily around her. There were several people who must have heard the same sounds that reached her ears, but they were not alarmed. In fact, one or two of them seemed to be going to the prison direct. The courage of our philanthropist began to revive. A woman in a brick house opposite suddenly pulled up a window-curtain and fixed an amused and inquisitive look upon her.

This would have sent her into a thrice-heated furnace. “Come, if you please,” she commanded the man, and she marched upon the jail.

She entered at first a series of neat offices in a wing of the structure, and then she came to a small door made of black bars of iron. A man stood on the farther side of this, with a bunch of large keys. When he saw Miss Eunice he unlocked and opened the door, and she passed through.

She found that she had entered a vast, cool, and lofty cage, one hundred feet in diameter; it had an iron floor, and there were several people strolling about here and there. Through several grated apertures the sunlight streamed with strong effect, and a soft breeze swept around the cavernous apartment.

Without the cage, before her and on either hand, were three more wings of the building, and in these were the prisoners’ corridors.

At the moment she entered, the men were leaving their cells, and mounting the stone stairs in regular order, on their way to the chapel above. The noisy files went up and down and to the right and to the left, shuffling and scraping and making a great tumult. The men were dressed in blue, and were seen indistinctly through the lofty gratings.252 From above and below and all around her there came the metallic snapping of bolts and the rattle of moving bars; and so significant was everything of savage repression and impending violence, that Miss Eunice was compelled to say faintly to herself, “I am afraid it will take a little time to get used to all this.”

She rested upon one of the seats in the rotunda while the chapel services were being conducted, and she thus had an opportunity to regain a portion of her lost heart. She felt wonderfully dwarfed and belittled, and her plan of recovering souls had, in some way or other, lost much of its feasibility. A glance at her bright flowers revived her a little, as did also a surprising, long-drawn roar from over her head, to the tune of “America.” The prisoners were singing.

Miss Eunice was not alone in her intended work, for there were several other ladies, also with supplies of flowers, who with her awaited until the prisoners should descend into the yard and be let loose before presenting them with what they had brought. Their common purpose made them acquainted, and by the aid of chat and sympathy they fortified each other.

Half an hour later the five hundred men descended from the chapel to the yard, rushing out upon its bare broad surface as you have seen a burst of water suddenly irrigate a road-bed. A hoarse and tremendous shout at once filled the air, and echoed against the walls like the threat of a volcano. Some of the wretches waltzed and spun around like dervishes, some threw somersaults, some folded their arms gravely and marched up and down, some fraternized, some walked away pondering, some took off their tall caps and sat down in the shade, some looked towards the rotunda with expectation, and there were those who looked towards it with contempt.

There led from the rotunda to the yard a flight of steps. Miss Eunice descended these steps with a quaking heart, and a turnkey shouted to the prisoners over her head that she and others had flowers for them.

253

No sooner had the words left his lips, than the men rushed up pell-mell.

This was a crucial moment.

There thronged upon Miss Eunice an army of men who were being punished for all the crimes in the calendar. Each individual here had been caged because he was either a highwayman, or a forger, or a burglar, or a ruffian, or a thief, or a murderer. The unclean and frightful tide bore down upon our terrified missionary, shrieking and whooping. Every prisoner thrust out his hand over the head of the one in front of him, and the foremost plucked at her dress.

She had need of courage. A sense of danger and contamination impelled her to fly, but a gleam of reason in the midst of her distraction enabled her to stand her ground. She forced herself to smile, though she knew her face had grown pale.

She placed a bunch of flowers into an immense hand which projected from a coarse blue sleeve in front of her; the owner of the hand was pushed away so quickly by those who came after him that Miss Eunice failed to see his face. Her tortured ear caught a rough “Thank y’, miss!” The spirit of Miss Crofutt revived in a flash, and her disciple thereafter possessed no lack of nerve.

She plied the crowd with flowers as long as they lasted, and a jaunty self-possession enabled her finally to gaze without flinching at the mass of depraved and wicked faces with which she was surrounded. Instead of retaining her position upon the steps, she gradually descended into the yard, as did several other visitors. She began to feel at home; she found her tongue, and her color came back again. She felt a warm pride in noticing with what care and respect the prisoners treated her gifts; they carried them about with great tenderness, and some compared them with those of their friends.

Presently she began to recall her plans. It occurred to her to select her two or three villains. For one, she immediately254 pitched upon a lean-faced wretch in front of her. He seemed to be old, for his back was bent and he leaned upon a cane. His features were large, and they bore an expression of profound gloom. His head was sunk upon his breast, his lofty conical cap was pulled over his ears, and his shapeless uniform seemed to weigh him down, so infirm was he.

Miss Eunice spoke to him. He did not hear; she spoke again. He glanced at her like a flash, but without moving; this was at once followed by a scrutinizing look. He raised his head, and then he turned toward her gravely.

The solemnity of his demeanor nearly threw Miss Eunice off her balance, but she mastered herself by beginning to talk rapidly. The prisoner leaned over a little to hear better. Another came up, and two or three turned around to look. She bethought herself of an incident related in Miss Crofutt’s book, and she essayed its recital. It concerned a lawyer who was once pleading in a French criminal court in behalf of a man whose crime had been committed under the influence of dire want. In his plea he described the case of another whom he knew who had been punished with a just but short imprisonment instead of a long one, which the judge had been at liberty to impose, but from which he humanely refrained. Miss Eunice happily remembered the words of the lawyer: “That man suffered like the wrong-doer that he was. He knew his punishment was just. Therefore there lived perpetually in his breast an impulse toward a better life which was not suppressed and stifled by the five years he passed within the walls of the jail. He came forth and began to labor. He toiled hard. He struggled against averted faces and cold words, and he began to rise. He secreted nothing, faltered at nothing, and never stumbled. He succeeded; men took off their hats to him once more; he became wealthy, honorable, God-fearing. I, gentlemen, am that man, that criminal.” As she quoted this last declaration, Miss Eunice erected herself with burning eyes and touched herself proudly upon255 the breast. A flush crept into her cheeks, and her nostrils dilated, and she grew tall.

She came back to earth again, and found herself surrounded with the prisoners. She was a little startled.

“Ah, that was good!” ejaculated the old man upon whom she had fixed her eyes. Miss Eunice felt an inexpressible sense of delight.

Murmurs of approbation came from all of her listeners, especially from one on her right hand. She looked around at him pleasantly.

But the smile faded from her lips on beholding him. He was extremely tall and very powerful. He overshadowed her. His face was large, ugly, and forbidding; his gray hair and beard were cropped close, his eyebrows met at the bridge of his nose and overhung his large eyes like a screen. His lips were very wide, and, being turned downwards at the corners, they gave him a dolorous expression. His lower jaw was square and protruding, and a pair of prodigious white ears projected from beneath his sugar-loaf cap. He seemed to take his cue from the old man, for he repeated his sentiment.

“Yes,” said he, with a voice which broke alternately into a roar and a whisper, “that was a good story.”

“Y-yes,” faltered Miss Eunice, “and it has the merit of being t-rue.”

He replied with a nod, and looked absently over her head while he rubbed the nap upon his chin with his hand. Miss Eunice discovered that his knee touched the skirt of her dress, and she was about to move in order to destroy this contact, when she remembered that Miss Crofutt would probably have cherished the accident as a promoter of a valuable personal influence, so she allowed it to remain. The lean-faced man was not to be mentioned in the same breath with this one, therefore she adopted the superior villain out of hand.

She began to approach him. She asked him where he lived, meaning to discover whence he had come. He256 replied in the same mixture of roar and whisper, “Six undered un one, North Wing.”

Miss Eunice grew scarlet. Presently she recovered sufficiently to pursue some inquiries respecting the rules and customs of the prison. She did not feel that she was interesting her friend, yet it seemed clear that he did not wish to go away. His answers were curt, yet he swept his cap off his head, implying by the act a certain reverence, which Miss Eunice’s vanity permitted her to exult at. Therefore she became more loquacious than ever. Some men came up to speak with the prisoner, but he shook them off, and remained in an attitude of strict attention, with his chin on his hand, looking now at the sky, now at the ground, and now at Miss Eunice.

In handling the flowers her gloves had been stained, and she now held them in her fingers, nervously twisting them as she talked. In the course of time she grew short of subjects, and, as her listener suggested nothing, several lapses occurred; in one of them she absently spread her gloves out in her palms, meanwhile wondering how the English girl acted under similar circumstances.

Suddenly a large hand slowly interposed itself between her eyes and her gloves, and then withdrew, taking one of the soiled trifles with it.

She was surprised, but the surprise was pleasurable. She said nothing at first. The prisoner gravely spread his prize out upon his own palm, and after looking at it carefully, he rolled it up into a tight ball and thrust it deep in an inner pocket.

This act made the philanthropist aware that she had made progress. She rose insensibly to the elevation of patron, and she made promises to come frequently and visit her ward and to look in upon him when he was at work; while saying this she withdrew a little from the shade his huge figure had supplied her with.

He thrust his hands into his pockets, but he hastily took them out again. Still he said nothing and hung his head.257 It was while she was in the mood of a conqueror that Miss Eunice went away. She felt a touch of repugnance at stepping from before his eyes a free woman, therefore she took pains to go when she thought he was not looking.

She pointed him out to a turnkey, who told her he was expiating the sins of assault and burglarious entry. Outwardly Miss Eunice looked grieved, but within she exulted that he was so emphatically a rascal.

When she emerged from the cool, shadowy, and frowning prison into the gay sunlight, she experienced a sense of bewilderment. The significance of a lock and a bar seemed greater on quitting them than it had when she had perceived them first. The drama of imprisonment and punishment oppressed her spirit with tenfold gloom now that she gazed upon the brilliancy and freedom of the outer world. That she and everybody around her were permitted to walk here and there at will, without question and limit, generated within her an indefinite feeling of gratitude; and the noise, the colors, the creaking wagons, the myriad voices, the splendid variety and change of all things excited a profound but at the same time a mournful satisfaction.

Midway in her return journey she was shrieked at from a carriage, which at once approached the sidewalk. Within it were four gay maidens bound to the Navy-Yard, from whence they were to sail, with a large party of people of nice assortment, in an experimental steamer, which was to be made to go with kerosene lamps, in some way. They seized upon her hands and cajoled her. Wouldn’t she go? They were to sail down among the islands (provided the oil made the wheels and things go round), they were to lunch at Fort Warren, dine at Fort Independence, and dance at Fort Winthrop. Come, please go. Oh, do! The Germanians were to furnish the music.

Miss Eunice sighed, but shook her head. She had not yet got the air of the prison out of her lungs, nor the figure of her robber out of her eyes, nor the sense of horror and repulsion out of her sympathies.

258

At another time she would have gone to the ends of the earth with such a happy crew, but now she only shook her head again and was resolute. No one could wring a reason from her, and the wondering quartet drove away.

II

Before the day went, Miss Eunice awoke to the disagreeable fact that her plans had become shrunken and contracted, that a certain something had curdled her spontaneity, and that her ardor had flown out at some crevice and had left her with the dry husk of an intent.

She exerted herself to glow a little, but she failed. She talked well at the tea-table, but she did not tell about the glove. This matter plagued her. She ran over in her mind the various doings of Miss Crofutt, and she could not conceal from herself that that lady had never given a glove to one of her wretches; no, nor had she ever permitted the smallest approach to familiarity.

Miss Eunice wept a little. She was on the eve of despairing.

In the silence of the night the idea presented itself to her with a disagreeable baldness. There was a thief over yonder that possessed a confidence with her.

They had found it necessary to shut this man up in iron and stone, and to guard him with a rifle with a large leaden ball in it.

This villain was a convict. That was a terrible word, one that made her blood chill.

She, the admired of hundreds and the beloved of a family, had done a secret and shameful thing of which she dared not tell. In these solemn hours the madness of her act appalled her.

She asked herself what might not the fellow do with the glove? Surely he would exhibit it among his brutal companions, and perhaps allow it to pass to and fro among259 them. They would laugh and joke with him, and he would laugh and joke in return, and no doubt he would kiss it to their great delight. Again, he might go to her friends, and, by working upon their fears and by threatening an exposure of her, extort large sums of money from them. Again, might he not harass her by constantly appearing to her at all times and all places and making all sorts of claims and demands? Again, might he not, with terrible ingenuity, use it in connection with some false key or some jack-in-the-box, or some dark-lantern, or something, in order to effect his escape; or might he not tell the story times without count to some wretched curiosity-hunters who would advertise her folly all over the country, to her perpetual misery?

She became harnessed to this train of thought. She could not escape from it. She reversed the relation that she had hoped to hold toward such a man, and she stood in his shadow, and not he in hers.

In consequence of these ever-present fears and sensations, there was one day, not very far in the future, that she came to have an intolerable dread of. This day was the one on which the sentence of the man was to expire. She felt that he would surely search for her; and that he would find her there could be no manner of doubt, for, in her surplus of confidence, she had told him her full name, inasmuch as he had told her his.

When she contemplated this new source of terror, her peace of mind fled directly. So did her plans for philanthropic labor. Not a shred remained. The anxiety began to tell upon her, and she took to peering out of a certain shaded window that commanded the square in front of her house. It was not long before she remembered that for good behavior certain days were deducted from the convicts’ terms of imprisonment. Therefore, her ruffian might be released at a moment not anticipated by her. He might, in fact, be discharged on any day. He might be on his way towards her even now.

260

She was not very far from right, for suddenly the man did appear.

He one day turned the corner, as she was looking out at the window fearing that she should see him, and came in a diagonal direction across the hot, flagged square.

Miss Eunice’s pulse leaped into the hundreds. She glued her eyes upon him. There was no mistake. There was the red face, the evil eyes, the large mouth, the gray hair, and the massive frame.

What should she do? Should she hide? Should she raise the sash and shriek to the police? Should she arm herself with a knife? or—what? In the name of mercy, what? She glared into the street. He came on steadily, and she lost him, for he passed beneath her. In a moment she heard the jangle of the bell. She was petrified. She heard his heavy step below. He had gone into the little reception room beside the door. He crossed to a sofa opposite the mantel. She then heard him get up and go to a window, then he walked about, and then sat down; probably upon a red leather seat beside the window.

Meanwhile the servant was coming to announce him. From some impulse, which was a strange and sudden one, she eluded the maid, and rushed headlong upon her danger. She never remembered her descent of the stairs. She awoke to cool contemplation of matters only to find herself entering the room.

Had she made a mistake, after all? It was a question that was asked and answered in a flash. This man was pretty erect and self-assured, but she discerned in an instant that there was needed but the blue woollen jacket and the tall cap to make him the wretch of a month before.

He said nothing. Neither did she. He stood up and occupied himself by twisting a button upon his waistcoat. She, fearing a threat or a demand, stood bridling to receive it. She looked at him from top to toe with parted lips.

He glanced at her. She stepped back. He put the rim of his cap in his mouth and bit it once or twice, and then261 looked out at the window. Still neither spoke. A voice at this instant seemed impossible.

He glanced again like a flash. She shrank, and put her hands upon the bolt. Presently he began to stir. He put out one foot, and gradually moved forward. He made another step. He was going away. He had almost reached the door, when Miss Eunice articulated, in a confused whisper, “My—my glove; I wish you would give me my glove.”

He stopped, fixed his eyes upon her, and after passing his fingers up and down upon the outside of his coat, said, with deliberation, in a husky voice, “No, mum. I’m goin’ fur to keep it as long as I live, if it takes two thousand years.”

“Keep it!” she stammered.

“Keep it,” he replied.

He gave her an untranslatable look. It neither frightened her nor permitted her to demand the glove more emphatically. She felt her cheeks and temples and her hands grow cold, and midway in the process of fainting she saw him disappear. He vanquished quietly. Deliberation and respect characterized his movements, and there was not so much as a jar of the outer door.

Poor philanthropist!

This incident nearly sent her to a sick-bed. She fully expected that her secret would appear in the newspapers in full, and she lived in dread of the onslaught of an angry and outraged society.

The more she reflected upon what her possibilities had been and how she had misused them, the iller and the more distressed she got. She grew thin and spare of flesh. Her friends became frightened. They began to dose her and to coddle her. She looked at them with eyes full of supreme melancholy, and she frequently wept upon their shoulders.

In spite of her precautions, however, a thunderbolt slipped in.

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One day her father read at the table an item that met his eye. He repeated it aloud, on account of the peculiar statement in the last line:—

“Detained on suspicion.—A rough-looking fellow, who gave the name of Gorman, was arrested on the high-road to Tuxbridge Springs for suspected complicity in some recent robberies in the neighborhood. He was fortunately able to give a pretty clear account of his late whereabouts, and he was permitted to depart with a caution from the justice. Nothing was found upon him but a few coppers and an old kid glove wrapped in a bit of paper.”

Miss Eunice’s soup spilled. This was too much, and she fainted this time in right good earnest; and she straightway became an invalid of the settled type. They put her to bed. The doctor told her plainly that he knew she had a secret, but she looked at him so imploringly that he refrained from telling his fancies; but he ordered an immediate change of air. It was settled at once that she should go to the “Springs”—to Tuxbridge Springs. The doctor knew there were young people there, also plenty of dancing. So she journeyed thither with her pa and her ma and with pillows and servants.

They were shown to their rooms, and strong porters followed with the luggage. One of them had her huge trunk upon his shoulder. He put it carefully upon the floor, and by so doing he disclosed the ex-prisoner to Miss Eunice and Miss Eunice to himself. He was astonished, but he remained silent. But she must needs be frightened and fall into another fit of trembling. After an awkward moment he went away, while she called to her father and begged piteously to be taken away from Tuxbridge Springs instantly. There was no appeal. She hated, hated, HATED Tuxbridge Springs, and she should die if she were forced to remain. She rained tears. She would give no reason, but she could not stay. No, millions on millions could not persuade her; go she must. There was no alternative. The party quitted the place within the hour, bag and baggage. Miss Eunice’s263 father was perplexed and angry, and her mother would have been angry also if she had dared.

They went to other springs and stayed a month, but the patient’s fright increased each day, and so did her fever. She was full of distractions. In her dreams everybody laughed at her as the one who had flirted with a convict. She would ever be pursued with the tale of her foolishness and stupidity. Should she ever recover her self-respect and confidence?

She had become radically selfish. She forgot the old ideas of noble-heartedness and self-denial, and her temper had become weak and childish. She did not meet her puzzle face to face, but she ran away from it with her hands over her ears. Miss Crofutt stared at her, and therefore she threw Miss Crofutt’s book into the fire.

After two days of unceasing debate, she called her parents, and with the greatest agitation told them all.

It so happened, in this case, that events, to use a railroad phrase, made connection.

No sooner had Miss Eunice told her story than the man came again. This time he was accompanied by a woman.

“Only get my glove away from him,” sobbed the unhappy one, “that is all I ask!” This was a fine admission! It was thought proper to bring an officer, and so a strong one was sent for.

Meanwhile the couple had been admitted to the parlor. Miss Eunice’s father stationed the officer at one door, while he, with a pistol, stood at the other. Then Miss Eunice went into the apartment. She was wasted, weak, and nervous. The two villains got up as she came in, and bowed. She began to tremble as usual, and laid hold upon the mantelpiece. “How much do you want?” she gasped.

The man gave the woman a push with his forefinger. She stepped forward quickly with her crest up. Her eyes turned, and she fixed a vixenish look upon Miss Eunice. She suddenly shot her hand out from beneath her shawl and extended264 it at full length. Across it lay Miss Eunice’s glove, very much soiled.

“Was that thing ever yours?” demanded the woman, shrilly.

“Y-yes,” said Miss Eunice, faintly.

The woman seemed (if the apt word is to be excused) staggered. She withdrew her hand, and looked the glove over. The man shook his head, and began to laugh behind his hat.

“And did you ever give it to him?” pursued the woman, pointing over her shoulder with her thumb.

Miss Eunice nodded.

“Of your own free will?”

After a moment of silence she ejaculated, in a whisper, “Yes.”

“Now wait,” said the man, coming to the front; “’nough has been said by you.” He then addressed himself to Miss Eunice with the remains of his laugh still illuminating his face.

“This is my wife’s sister, and she’s one of the jealous kind. I love my wife” (here he became grave), “and I never showed her any kind of slight that I know of. I’ve always been fair to her, and she’s always been fair to me. Plain sailin’ so far; I never kep’ anything from her—but this.” He reached out and took the glove from the woman, and spread it out upon his own palm, as Miss Eunice had seen him do once before. He looked at it thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t tell her about this; no, never. She was never very particular to ask me; that’s where her trust in me came in. She knowed I was above doing anything out of the way—that is—I mean—” He stammered and blushed, and then rushed on volubly. “But her sister here thought I paid too much attention to it; she thought I looked at it too much, and kep’ it secret. So she nagged and nagged, and kept the pitch boilin’ until I had to let it out: I told ’em” (Miss Eunice shivered). “‘No,’ says she, my wife’s sister, ‘that won’t do, Gorman.265 That’s chaff, and I’m too old a bird.’ Ther’fore I fetched her straight to you, so she could put the question direct.”

He stopped a moment as if in doubt how to go on. Miss Eunice began to open her eyes, and she released the mantel. The man resumed with something like impressiveness:

“When you last held that,” said he, slowly, balancing the glove in his hand, “I was a wicked man with bad intentions through and through. When I first held it I became an honest man, with good intentions.”

A burning blush of shame covered Miss Eunice’s face and neck.

“An’ as I kep’ it my intentions went on improvin’ and improvin’, till I made up my mind to behave myself in future, forever. Do you understand?—forever. No backslidin’, no hitchin’, no slippin’-up. I take occasion to say, miss, that I was beset time and again; that the instant I set my foot outside them prison-gates, over there, my old chums got round me; but I shook my head. ‘No,’ says I, ‘I won’t go back on the glove.’”

Miss Eunice hung her head. The two had exchanged places, she thought; she was the criminal and he the judge.

“An’ what is more,” continued he, with the same weight in his tone, “I not only kep’ sight of the glove, but I kep’ sight of the generous sperrit that gave it. I didn’t let that go. I never forgot what you meant. I knowed—I knowed,” repeated he, lifting his forefinger,—“I knowed a time would come when there wouldn’t be any enthoosiasm, any ‘hurrah,’ and then perhaps you’d be sorry you was so kind to me; an’ the time did come.”

Miss Eunice buried her face in her hands and wept aloud.

“But did I quit the glove? No, mum. I held on to it. It was what I fought by. I wasn’t going to give it up, because it was asked for. All the police-officers in the city couldn’t have took it from me. I put it deep into my pocket and I walked out. It was differcult, miss. But I266 come through. The glove did it. It helped me stand out against temptation when it was strong. If I looked at it, I remembered that once there was a pure heart that pitied me. It cheered me up. After a while I kinder got out of the mud. Then I got work. The glove again. Then a girl that knowed me before I took to bad ways married me, and no questions asked. Then I just took the glove into a dark corner and blessed it.”

Miss Eunice was belittled.

A noise was heard in the hall-way. Miss Eunice’s father and the policeman were going away.

The awkwardness of the succeeding silence was relieved by the moving of the man and the woman. They had done their errand, and were going.

Said Miss Eunice, with the faint idea of making a practical apology to her visitor, “I shall go to the prison once a week after this, I think.”

“Then may God bless ye, miss,” said the man. He came back with tears in his eyes and took her proffered hand for an instant. Then he and his wife’s sister went away.

Miss Eunice’s remaining spark of charity at once crackled and burst into a flame. There is sure to be a little something that is bad in everybody’s philanthropy when it is first put to use; it requires to be filed down like a faulty casting before it will run without danger to anybody. Samaritanism that goes off with half a charge is sure to do great mischief somewhere; but Miss Eunice’s, now properly corrected, henceforth shot off at the proper end, and inevitably hit the mark. She purchased a new Crofutt.

---

269

WHO WAS SHE?

[From the “Atlantic Monthly” September, 1874]

Come, now, there may as well be an end of this! Every time I meet your eyes squarely, I detect the question just slipping out of them. If you had spoken it, or even boldly looked it; if you had shown in your motions the least sign of a fussy or fidgety concern on my account; if this were not the evening of my birthday, and you the only friend who remembered it; if confession were not good for the soul, though harder than sin to some people, of whom I am one,—well, if all reasons were not at this instant converged into a focus, and burning me rather violently, in that region where the seat of emotion is supposed to lie, I should keep my trouble to myself.

Yes, I have fifty times had it on my mind to tell you the whole story. But who can be certain that his best friend will not smile—or, what is worse, cherish a kind of charitable pity ever afterwards—when the external forms of a very serious kind of passion seem trivial, fantastic, foolish? And the worst of all is that the heroic part which I imagined I was playing proves to have been almost the reverse. The only comfort which I can find in my humiliation is that I am capable of feeling it. There isn’t a bit of a paradox in this, as you will see; but I only mention it, now, to prepare you for, maybe, a little morbid sensitiveness of my moral nerves.

The documents are all in this portfolio, under my elbow. I had just read them again completely through, when you were announced. You may examine them as you like, afterwards: for the present, fill your glass, take another Cabaña,270 and keep silent until my “ghastly tale” has reached its most lamentable conclusion.

The beginning of it was at Wampsocket Springs, three years ago last summer. I suppose most unmarried men who have reached, or passed, the age of thirty—and I was then thirty-three—experience a milder return of their adolescent warmth, a kind of fainter second spring, since the first has not fulfilled its promise. Of course, I wasn’t clearly conscious of this at the time: who is? But I had had my youthful passion and my tragic disappointment, as you know: I had looked far enough into what Thackeray used to call the cryptic mysteries, to save me from the Scylla of dissipation, and yet preserved enough of natural nature to keep me out of the Pharisaic Charybdis. My devotion to my legal studies had already brought me a mild distinction; the paternal legacy was a good nest-egg for the incubation of wealth,—in short, I was a fair, respectable “party,” desirable to the humbler mammas, and not to be despised by the haughty exclusives.

The fashionable hotel at the Springs holds three hundred, and it was packed. I had meant to lounge there for a fortnight and then finish my holidays at Long Branch; but eighty, at least, out of the three hundred, were young and moved lightly in muslin. With my years and experience I felt so safe, that to walk, talk, or dance with them became simply a luxury, such as I had never—at least so freely—possessed before. My name and standing, known to some families, were agreeably exaggerated to the others, and I enjoyed that supreme satisfaction which a man always feels when he discovers, or imagines, that he is popular in society. There is a kind of premonitory apology implied in my saying this, I am aware. You must remember that I am culprit, and culprit’s counsel, at the same time.

You have never been at Wampsocket? Well, the hills sweep around in a crescent, on the northern side, and four or five radiating glens, descending from them, unite just above the village. The central one, leading to a water-fall271 (called “Minne-hehe” by the irreverent young people, because there is so little of it), is the fashionable drive and promenade; but the second ravine on the left, steep, crooked, and cumbered with bowlders which have tumbled from somewhere and lodged in the most extraordinary groupings, became my favorite walk of a morning. There was a footpath in it, well-trodden at first, but gradually fading out as it became more like a ladder than a path, and I soon discovered that no other city feet than mine were likely to scale a certain rough slope which seemed the end of the ravine. With the aid of the tough laurel-stems I climbed to the top, passed through a cleft as narrow as a doorway, and presently found myself in a little upper dell, as wild and sweet and strange as one of the pictures that haunts us on the brink of sleep.

There was a pond—no, rather a bowl—of water in the centre; hardly twenty yards across, yet the sky in it was so pure and far down that the circle of rocks and summer foliage inclosing it seemed like a little planetary ring, floating off alone through space. I can’t explain the charm of the spot, nor the selfishness which instantly suggested that I should keep the discovery to myself. Ten years earlier, I should have looked around for some fair spirit to be my “minister,” but now—

One forenoon—I think it was the third or fourth time I had visited the place—I was startled to find the dint of a heel in the earth, half-way up the slope. There had been rain during the night and the earth was still moist and soft. It was the mark of a woman’s boot, only to be distinguished from that of a walking-stick by its semicircular form. A little higher, I found the outline of a foot, not so small as to awake an ecstasy, but with a suggestion of lightness, elasticity, and grace. If hands were thrust through holes in a board-fence, and nothing of the attached bodies seen, I can easily imagine that some would attract and others repel us: with footprints the impression is weaker, of course, but we cannot escape it. I am not sure whether I wanted to find272 the unknown wearer of the boot within my precious personal solitude: I was afraid I should see her, while passing through the rocky crevice, and yet was disappointed when I found no one.

But on the flat, warm rock overhanging the tarn—my special throne—lay some withering wild-flowers, and a book! I looked up and down, right and left: there was not the slightest sign of another human life than mine. Then I lay down for a quarter of an hour, and listened: there were only the noises of bird and squirrel, as before. At last, I took up the book, the flat breadth of which suggested only sketches. There were, indeed, some tolerable studies of rocks and trees on the first pages; a few not very striking caricatures, which seemed to have been commenced as portraits, but recalled no faces I knew; then a number of fragmentary notes, written in pencil. I found no name, from first to last; only, under the sketches, a monogram so complicated and laborious that the initials could hardly be discovered unless one already knew them.

The writing was a woman’s, but it had surely taken its character from certain features of her own: it was clear, firm, individual. It had nothing of that air of general debility which usually marks the manuscript of young ladies, yet its firmness was far removed from the stiff, conventional slope which all Englishwomen seem to acquire in youth and retain through life. I don’t see how any man in my situation could have helped reading a few lines—if only for the sake of restoring lost property. But I was drawn on, and on, and finished by reading all: thence, since no further harm could be done, I re-read, pondering over certain passages until they stayed with me. Here they are, as I set them down, that evening, on the back of a legal blank.

“It makes a great deal of difference whether we wear social forms as bracelets or handcuffs.”

“Can we not still be wholly our independent selves, even while doing, in the main, as others do? I know two who are so; but they are married.”

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“The men who admire these bold, dashing young girls treat them like weaker copies of themselves. And yet they boast of what they call ‘experience!’”

“I wonder if any one felt the exquisite beauty of the noon as I did, to-day? A faint appreciation of sunsets and storms is taught us in youth, and kept alive by novels and flirtations; but the broad, imperial splendor of this summer noon!—and myself standing alone in it,—yes, utterly alone!”

“The men I seek must exist: where are they? How make an acquaintance, when one obsequiously bows himself away, as I advance? The fault is surely not all on my side.”

There was much more, intimate enough to inspire me with a keen interest in the writer, yet not sufficiently so to make my perusal a painful indiscretion. I yielded to the impulse of the moment, took out my pencil, and wrote a dozen lines on one of the blank pages. They ran something in this wise:—

There was a frank advance, tempered by a proper caution, I fancied, in the words I wrote. It was evident that she was unmarried, but outside of that certainty there lay a vast range of possibilities, some of them alarming enough. However, if any nearer acquaintance should arise out of the incident, the next step must be taken by her. Was I one of the men she sought? I almost imagined so—certainly hoped so.

I laid the book on the rock, as I had found it, bestowed another keen scrutiny on the lonely landscape, and then descended the ravine. That evening, I went early to the274 ladies’ parlor, chatted more than usual with the various damsels whom I knew, and watched with a new interest those whom I knew not. My mind, involuntarily, had already created a picture of the unknown. She might be twenty-five, I thought: a reflective habit of mind would hardly be developed before that age. Tall and stately, of course; distinctly proud in her bearing, and somewhat reserved in her manners. Why she should have large dark eyes, with long dark lashes, I could not tell; but so I seemed to see her. Quite forgetting that I was (or had meant to be) Ignotus, I found myself staring rather significantly at one or the other of the young ladies, in whom I discovered some slight general resemblance to the imaginary character. My fancies, I must confess, played strange pranks with me. They had been kept in a coop so many years, that now, when I suddenly turned them loose, their rickety attempts at flight quite bewildered me.

No! there was no use in expecting a sudden discovery. I went to the glen betimes, next morning: the book was gone, and so were the faded flowers, but some of the latter were scattered over the top of another rock, a few yards from mine. Ha! this means that I am not to withdraw, I said to myself: she makes room for me! But how to surprise her?—for by this time I was fully resolved to make her acquaintance, even though she might turn out to be forty, scraggy and sandy-haired.

I knew no other way so likely as that of visiting the glen at all times of the day. I even went so far as to write a line of greeting, with a regret that our visits had not yet coincided, and laid it under a stone on the top of her rock. The note disappeared, but there was no answer in its place. Then I suddenly remembered her fondness for the noon hours, at which time she was “utterly alone.” The hotel table d’hôte was at one o’clock: her family, doubtless, dined later, in their own rooms. Why, this gave me, at least, her place in society! The question of age, to be sure, remained unsettled; but all else was safe.

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The next day I took a late and large breakfast, and sacrificed my dinner. Before noon the guests had all straggled back to the hotel from glen and grove and lane, so bright and hot was the sunshine. Indeed, I could hardly have supported the reverberation of heat from the sides of the ravine, but for a fixed belief that I should be successful. While crossing the narrow meadow upon which it opened, I caught a glimpse of something white among the thickets higher up. A moment later, it had vanished, and I quickened my pace, feeling the beginning of an absurd nervous excitement in my limbs. At the next turn, there it was again! but only for another moment. I paused, exulting, and wiped my drenched forehead. “She cannot escape me!” I murmured between the deep draughts of cooler air I inhaled in the shadow of a rock.

A few hundred steps more brought me to the foot of the steep ascent, where I had counted on overtaking her. I was too late for that, but the dry, baked soil had surely been crumbled and dislodged, here and there, by a rapid foot. I followed, in reckless haste, snatching at the laurel-branches right and left, and paying little heed to my footing. About one third of the way up I slipped, fell, caught a bush which snapped at the root, slid, whirled over, and before I fairly knew what had happened, I was lying doubled up at the bottom of the slope.

I rose, made two steps forward, and then sat down with a groan of pain; my left ankle was badly sprained, in addition to various minor scratches and bruises. There was a revulsion of feeling, of course,—instant, complete, and hideous. I fairly hated the Unknown. “Fool that I was!” I exclaimed, in the theatrical manner, dashing the palm of my hand softly against my brow: “lured to this by the fair traitress! But, no!—not fair: she shows the artfulness of faded, desperate spinsterhood; she is all compact of enamel, ‘liquid bloom of youth’ and hair-dye!”

There was a fierce comfort in this thought, but it couldn’t help me out of the scrape. I dared not sit still, lest a sunstroke276 should be added, and there was no resource but to hop or crawl down the rugged path, in the hope of finding a forked sapling from which I could extemporize a crutch. With endless pain and trouble I reached a thicket, and was feebly working on a branch with my pen-knife, when the sound of a heavy footstep surprised me.

A brown harvest-hand, in straw hat and shirt-sleeves, presently appeared. He grinned when he saw me, and the thick snub of his nose would have seemed like a sneer at any other time.

“Are you the gentleman that got hurt?” he asked. “Is it pretty tolerable bad?”

“Who said I was hurt?” I cried, in astonishment.

“One of your town-women from the hotel—I reckon she was. I was binding oats, in the field over the ridge; but I haven’t lost no time in comin’ here.”

While I was stupidly staring at this announcement, he whipped out a big clasp knife, and in a few minutes fashioned me a practicable crutch. Then, taking me by the other arm, he set me in motion towards the village.

Grateful as I was for the man’s help, he aggravated me by his ignorance. When I asked if he knew the lady, he answered: “It’s more’n likely you know her better.” But where did she come from? Down from the hill, he guessed, but it might ha’ been up the road. How did she look? was she old or young? what was the color of her eyes? of her hair? There, now, I was too much for him. When a woman kept one o’ them speckled veils over her face, turned her head away, and held her parasol between, how were you to know her from Adam? I declare to you, I couldn’t arrive at one positive particular. Even when he affirmed that she was tall, he added, the next instant: “Now I come to think on it, she stepped mighty quick; so I guess she must ha’ been short.”

By the time we reached the hotel, I was in a state of fever; opiates and lotions had their will of me for the rest of the day. I was glad to escape the worry of questions,277 and the conventional sympathy expressed in inflections of the voice which are meant to soothe, and only exasperate. The next morning, as I lay upon my sofa, restful, patient, and properly cheerful, the waiter entered with a bouquet of wild flowers.

“Who sent them?” I asked.

“I found them outside your door, sir. Maybe there’s a card; yes, here’s a bit o’ paper.”

I opened the twisted slip he handed me, and read: “From your dell—and mine.” I took the flowers; among them were two or three rare and beautiful varieties, which I had only found in that one spot. Fool, again! I noiselessly kissed, while pretending to smell them, had them placed on a stand within reach, and fell into a state of quiet and agreeable contemplation.

Tell me, yourself, whether any male human being is ever too old for sentiment, provided that it strikes him at the right time and in the right way! What did that bunch of wild flowers betoken? Knowledge, first; then, sympathy; and finally, encouragement, at least. Of course she had seen my accident, from above; of course she had sent the harvest laborer to aid me home. It was quite natural she should imagine some special, romantic interest in the lonely dell, on my part, and the gift took additional value from her conjecture.

Four days afterwards, there was a hop in the large dining-room of the hotel. Early in the morning, a fresh bouquet had been left at my door. I was tired of my enforced idleness, eager to discover the fair unknown, (she was again fair, to my fancy!) and I determined to go down, believing that a cane and a crimson velvet slipper on the left foot would provoke a glance of sympathy from certain eyes, and thus enable me to detect them.

The fact was, the sympathy was much too general and effusive. Everybody, it seemed, came to me with kindly greetings; seats were vacated at my approach, even fat Mrs. Huxter insisting on my taking her warm place, at the278 head of the room. But Bob Leroy,—you know him,—as gallant a gentleman as ever lived, put me down at the right point, and kept me there. He only meant to divert me, yet gave me the only place where I could quietly inspect all the younger ladies, as dance or supper brought them near.

One of the dances was an old-fashioned cotillon, and one of the figures, the “coquette,” brought every one, in turn, before me. I received a pleasant word or two from those whom I knew, and a long, kind, silent glance from Miss May Danvers. Where had been my eyes? She was tall, stately, twenty-five, had large dark eyes, and long dark lashes! Again the changes of the dance brought her near me; I threw (or strove to throw) unutterable meanings into my eyes, and cast them upon hers. She seemed startled, looked suddenly away, looked back to me, and—blushed. I knew her for what is called “a nice girl”—that is, tolerably frank, gently feminine, and not dangerously intelligent. Was it possible that I had overlooked so much character and intellect?

As the cotillon closed, she was again in my neighborhood, and her partner led her in my direction. I was rising painfully from my chair, when Bob Leroy pushed me down again, whisked another seat from somewhere, planted it at my side, and there she was!

She knew who was her neighbor, I plainly saw; but instead of turning towards me, she began to fan herself in a nervous way and to fidget with the buttons of her gloves. I grew impatient.

“Miss Danvers!” I said, at last.

“Oh!” was all her answer, as she looked at me for a moment.

“Where are your thoughts?” I asked.

Then she turned, with wide, astonished eyes, coloring softly up to the roots of her hair. My heart gave a sudden leap.

“How can you tell, if I cannot?” she asked.

“May I guess?”

279

She made a slight inclination of the head, saying nothing. I was then quite sure.

“The second ravine, to the left of the main drive?”

This time she actually started; her color became deeper, and a leaf of the ivory fan snapped between her fingers.

“Let there be no more a secret!” I exclaimed. “Your flowers have brought me your messages; I knew I should find you”—

Full of certainty, I was speaking in a low, impassioned voice. She cut me short by rising from her seat; I felt that she was both angry and alarmed. Fisher, of Philadelphia, jostling right and left in his haste, made his way towards her. She fairly snatched his arm, clung to it with a warmth I had never seen expressed in a ball-room, and began to whisper in his ear. It was not five minutes before he came to me, alone, with a very stern face, bent down, and said:—

“If you have discovered our secret, you will keep silent. You are certainly a gentleman.”

I bowed, coldly and savagely. There was a draft from the open window; my ankle became suddenly weary and painful, and I went to bed. Can you believe that I didn’t guess, immediately, what it all meant? In a vague way, I fancied that I had been premature in my attempt to drop our mutual incognito, and that Fisher, a rival lover, was jealous of me. This was rather flattering than otherwise; but when I limped down to the ladies’ parlor, the next day, no Miss Danvers was to be seen. I did not venture to ask for her; it might seem importunate, and a woman of so much hidden capacity was evidently not to be wooed in the ordinary way.

So another night passed by; and then, with the morning, came a letter which made me feel, at the same instant, like a fool and a hero. It had been dropped in the Wampsocket post-office, was legibly addressed to me and delivered with some other letters which had arrived by the night mail. Here it is; listen!

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I did discover my mistake, as the Unknown promised. There had been a secret betrothal between Fisher and Miss Danvers; and singularly enough, the momentous question and answer had been given in the very ravine leading to my upper dell! The two meant to keep the matter to themselves, but therein, it seems, I thwarted them; there was a little opposition on the part of their respective families, but all was amicably settled before I left Wampsocket.

The letter made a very deep impression upon me. What was the one way to find her? What could it be but the triumph that follows ambitious toil,—the manifestation of all my best qualities, as a man? Be she old or young, plain or beautiful, I reflected, hers is surely a nature worth knowing, and its candid intelligence conceals no hazards for me. I have sought her rashly, blundered, betrayed that I set her lower, in my thoughts, than her actual self: let me now adopt the opposite course, seek281 her openly no longer, go back to my tasks, and, following my own aims vigorously and cheerfully, restore that respect which she seemed to be on the point of losing. For, consciously or not, she had communicated to me a doubt, implied in the very expression of her own strength and pride. She had meant to address me as an equal, yet, despite herself, took a stand a little above that which she accorded to me.

I came back to New York earlier than usual, worked steadily at my profession and with increasing success, and began to accept opportunities (which I had previously declined) of making myself personally known to the great, impressible, fickle, tyrannical public. One or two of my speeches in the hall of the Cooper Institute, on various occasions—as you may perhaps remember—gave me a good headway with the party, and were the chief cause of my nomination for the State office which I still hold. (There, on the table, lies a resignation, written to-day, but not yet signed. We’ll talk of it, afterwards.) Several months passed by, and no further letter reached me. I gave up much of my time to society, moved familiarly in more than one province of the kingdom here, and vastly extended my acquaintance, especially among the women; but not one of them betrayed the mysterious something or other—really I can’t explain precisely what it was!—which I was looking for. In fact, the more I endeavored quietly to study the sex, the more confused I became.

At last, I was subjected to the usual onslaught from the strong-minded. A small but formidable committee entered my office one morning and demanded a categorical declaration of my principles. What my views on the subject were, I knew very well; they were clear and decided; and yet, I hesitated to declare them! It wasn’t a temptation of Saint Anthony—that is, turned the other way—and the belligerent attitude of the dames did not alarm me in the least; but she! What was her position? How could I best please her? It flashed upon my mind, while Mrs. —— was282 making her formal speech, that I had taken no step for months without a vague, secret reference to her. So, I strove to be courteous, friendly, and agreeably noncommittal; begged for further documents, and promised to reply by letter, in a few days.

I was hardly surprised to find the well-known hand on the envelope of a letter, shortly afterwards. I held it for a minute in my palm, with an absurd hope that I might sympathetically feel its character, before breaking the seal. Then I read it with a great sense of relief.

Yes! I felt that I had certainly drawn much nearer to her. And from this time on, her imaginary face and form became other than they were. She was twenty-eight—three years older; a very little above the middle height, but not tall; serene, rather than stately, in her movements; with a calm, almost grave face, relieved by the sweetness of the full, firm lips; and finally eyes of pure, limpid gray, such as we fancy belonged to the Venus of Milo. I found her, thus, much more attractive than with the dark eyes and lashes,—but she did not make her appearance in the circles which I frequented.

Another year slipped away. As an official personage, my importance increased, but I was careful not to exaggerate it to myself. Many have wondered (perhaps you283 among the rest) at my success, seeing that I possess no remarkable abilities. If I have any secret, it is simply this—doing faithfully, with all my might, whatever I undertake. Nine tenths of our politicians become inflated and careless, after the first few years, and are easily forgotten when they once lose place. I am a little surprised, now, that I had so much patience with the Unknown. I was too important, at least, to be played with; too mature to be subjected to a longer test; too earnest, as I had proved, to be doubted, or thrown aside without a further explanation.

Growing tired, at last, of silent waiting, I bethought me of advertising. A carefully-written “Personal,” in which Ignotus informed Ignota of the necessity of his communicating with her, appeared simultaneously in the Tribune, Herald, World, and Times. I renewed the advertisement as the time expired without an answer, and I think it was about the end of the third week before one came, through the post, as before.

Ah, yes! I had forgotten. See! my advertisement is pasted on the note, as a heading or motto for the manuscript lines. I don’t know why the printed slip should give me a particular feeling of humiliation as I look at it, but such is the fact. What she wrote is all I need read to you:—

You look puzzled, I see: you don’t catch the real drift of her words? Well,—that’s a melancholy encouragement. Neither did I, at the time: it was plain that I had disappointed her in some way, and my intercourse with, or manner towards, women, had something to do with it. In vain I ran over as much of my later social life as I could recall. There had been no special attention, nothing to mislead a susceptible heart; on the other side, certainly no rudeness, no want of “chivalrous” (she used the word!) respect and attention. What, in the name of all the gods, was the matter?

In spite of all my efforts to grow clearer, I was obliged to write my letter in a rather muddled state of mind. I had so much to say! sixteen folio pages, I was sure, would only suffice for an introduction to the case; yet, when the creamy vellum lay before me and the moist pen drew my fingers towards it, I sat stock dumb for half an hour. I wrote, finally, in a half-desperate mood, without regard to coherency or logic. Here’s a rough draft of a part of the letter, and a single passage from it will be enough:—

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Stay! here is another fragment, more reckless in tone:—

After I had written that, the pages filled rapidly. When the appointed hour arrived, a bulky epistle, in a strong linen envelope, sealed with five wax seals, was waiting on my table. Precisely at six there was an announcement: the door opened, and a little outside, in the shadow, I saw an old woman, in a threadbare dress of rusty black.

“Come in!” I said.

“The letter!” answered a husky voice. She stretched out a bony hand, without moving a step.

“It is for a lady—very important business,” said I, taking up the letter; “are you sure that there is no mistake?”

She drew her hand under the shawl, turned without a word, and moved towards the hall door.

“Stop!” I cried: “I beg a thousand pardons! Take it—take it! You are the right messenger!”

She clutched it, and was instantly gone.

Several days passed, and I gradually became so nervous and uneasy that I was on the point of inserting another “Personal” in the daily papers, when the answer arrived. It was brief and mysterious; you shall hear the whole of it.

You notice the change in her tone? The letter gave me the strongest impression of a new, warm, almost anxious interest on her part. My fancies, as first at Wampsocket, began to play all sorts of singular pranks: sometimes she was rich and of an old family, sometimes moderately poor and obscure, but always the same calm, reposeful face and clear gray eyes. I ceased looking for her in society, quite sure that I should not find her, and nursed a wild expectation of suddenly meeting her, face to face, in the most unlikely places and under startling circumstances. However, the end of it all was patience,—patience for six months.

There’s not much more to tell; but this last letter is hard for me to read. It came punctually, to a day. I knew it would, and at the last I began to dread the time, as if a heavy note were falling due, and I had no funds to meet it. My head was in a whirl when I broke the seal. The fact in it stared at me blankly, at once, but it was a long time before the words and sentences became intelligible.

There! Nothing could be kinder in tone, nothing more humiliating in substance. I was sore and offended for a few days; but I soon began to see, and ever more and more clearly, that she was wholly right. I was sure, also, that any further attempt to correspond with her would be vain. It all comes of taking society just as we find it, and supposing that conventional courtesy is the only safe ground on which men and women can meet.

The fact is—there’s no use in hiding it from myself (and I see, by your face, that the letter cuts into your own conscience)—she is a free, courageous, independent character, and—I am not.

But who was she?

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291

THE LOVE-LETTERS OF SMITH

When the little seamstress had climbed to her room in the story over the top story of the great brick tenement house in which she lived, she was quite tired out. If you do not understand what a story over a top story is, you must remember that there are no limits to human greed, and hardly any to the height of tenement houses. When the man who owned that seven-story tenement found that he could rent another floor, he found no difficulty in persuading the guardians of our building laws to let him clap another story on the roof, like a cabin on the deck of a ship; and in the southeasterly of the four apartments on this floor the little seamstress lived. You could just see the top of her window from the street—the huge cornice that had capped the original front, and that served as her window-sill now, quite hid all the lower part of the story on top of the top-story.

The little seamstress was scarcely thirty years old, but she was such an old-fashioned little body in so many of her looks and ways that I had almost spelled her sempstress, after the fashion of our grandmothers. She had been a comely body, too; and would have been still, if she had not been thin and pale and anxious-eyed.

She was tired out to-night because she had been working hard all day for a lady who lived far up in the “New Wards” beyond Harlem River, and after the long journey home, she had to climb seven flights of tenement-house stairs. She was too tired, both in body and in mind, to cook the two292 little chops she had brought home. She would save them for breakfast, she thought. So she made herself a cup of tea on the miniature stove, and ate a slice of dry bread with it. It was too much trouble to make toast.

But after dinner she watered her flowers. She was never too tired for that: and the six pots of geraniums that caught the south sun on the top of the cornice did their best to repay her. Then she sat down in her rocking-chair by the window and looked out. Her eyry was high above all the other buildings, and she could look across some low roofs opposite, and see the further end of Tompkins Square, with its sparse Spring green showing faintly through the dusk. The eternal roar of the city floated up to her and vaguely troubled her. She was a country girl, and although she had lived for ten years in New York, she had never grown used to that ceaseless murmur. To-night she felt the languor of the new season as well as the heaviness of physical exhaustion. She was almost too tired to go to bed.

She thought of the hard day done and the hard day to be begun after the night spent on the hard little bed. She thought of the peaceful days in the country, when she taught school in the Massachusetts village where she was born. She thought of a hundred small slights that she had to bear from people better fed than bred. She thought of the sweet green fields that she rarely saw nowadays. She thought of the long journey forth and back that must begin and end her morrow’s work, and she wondered if her employer would think to offer to pay her fare. Then she pulled herself together. She must think of more agreeable things, or she could not sleep. And as the only agreeable things she had to think about were her flowers, she looked at the garden on top of the cornice.

A peculiar gritting noise made her look down, and she saw a cylindrical object that glittered in the twilight, advancing in an irregular and uncertain manner toward her flower-pots. Looking closer, she saw that it was a pewter beer-mug, which somebody in the next apartment was pushing with a two-foot293 rule. On top of the beer-mug was a piece of paper, and on this paper was written, in a sprawling, half-formed hand:

The seamstress started up in terror, and shut the window. She remembered that there was a man in the next apartment. She had seen him on the stairs, on Sundays. He seemed a grave, decent person; but—he must be drunk. She sat down on her bed, all a-tremble. Then she reasoned with herself. The man was drunk, that was all. He probably would not annoy her further. And if he did, she had only to retreat to Mrs. Mulvaney’s apartment in the rear, and Mr. Mulvaney, who was a highly respectable man and worked in a boiler-shop, would protect her. So, being a poor woman who had already had occasion to excuse—and refuse—two or three “libberties” of like sort, she made up her mind to go to bed like a reasonable seamstress, and she did. She was rewarded, for when her light was out, she could see in the moonlight that the two-foot rule appeared again, with one joint bent back, hitched itself into the mug-handle, and withdrew the mug.

The next day was a hard one for the little seamstress, and she hardly thought of the affair of the night before until the same hour had come around again, and she sat once more by her window. Then she smiled at the remembrance. “Poor fellow,” she said in her charitable heart, “I’ve no doubt he’s awfully ashamed of it now. Perhaps he was never tipsy before. Perhaps he didn’t know there was a lone woman in here to be frightened.”

Just then she heard a gritting sound. She looked down. The pewter pot was in front of her, and the two-foot rule was slowly retiring. On the pot was a piece of paper, and on the paper was:

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This time the little seamstress shut her window with a bang of indignation. The color rose to her pale cheeks. She thought that she would go down to see the janitor at once. Then she remembered the seven flights of stairs; and she resolved to see the janitor in the morning. Then she went to bed and saw the mug drawn back just as it had been drawn back the night before.

The morning came, but, somehow, the seamstress did not care to complain to the janitor. She hated to make trouble—and the janitor might think—and—and—well, if the wretch did it again she would speak to him herself, and that would settle it.

And so, on the next night, which was a Thursday, the little seamstress sat down by her window, resolved to settle the matter. And she had not sat there long, rocking in the creaking little rocking-chair which she had brought with her from her old home, when the pewter pot hove in sight, with a piece of paper on the top.

This time the legend read:

The seamstress did not quite know whether to laugh or to cry. But she felt that the time had come for speech. She leaned out of her window and addressed the twilight heaven.

“Mr.—Mr.—sir—I—will you please put your head out of the window so that I can speak to you?”

The silence of the other room was undisturbed. The seamstress drew back, blushing. But before she could nerve herself for another attack, a piece of paper appeared on the end of the two-foot rule.

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What was the little seamstress to do? She stood by the window and thought hard about it. Should she complain to the janitor? But the creature was perfectly respectful. No doubt he meant to be kind. He certainly was kind, to waste these pots of porter on her. She remembered the last time—and the first—that she had drunk porter. It was at home, when she was a young girl, after she had had the diphtheria. She remembered how good it was, and how it had given her back her strength. And without one thought of what she was doing, she lifted the pot of porter and took one little reminiscent sip—two little reminiscent sips—and became aware of her utter fall and defeat. She blushed now as she had never blushed before, put the pot down, closed the window, and fled to her bed like a deer to the woods.

And when the porter arrived the next night, bearing the simple appeal:

the little seamstress arose and grasped the pot firmly by the handle, and poured its contents over the earth around her largest geranium. She poured the contents out to the last drop, and then she dropped the pot, and ran back and sat on her bed and cried, with her face hid in her hands.

“Now,” she said to herself, “you’ve done it! And you’re just as nasty and hard-hearted and suspicious and mean as—as pusley!”

And she wept to think of her hardness of heart. “He will never give me a chance to say I am sorry,” she thought. And, really, she might have spoken kindly to the poor man, and told him that she was much obliged to him, but that he really mustn’t ask her to drink porter with him.

“But it’s all over and done now,” she said to herself as she sat at her window on Saturday night. And then she looked at the cornice, and saw the faithful little pewter pot travelling slowly toward her.

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She was conquered. This act of Christian forbearance was too much for her kindly spirit. She read the inscription on the paper:

and she lifted the pot to her lips, which were not half so red as her cheeks, and took a good, hearty, grateful draught.

She sipped in thoughtful silence after this first plunge, and presently she was surprised to find the bottom of the pot in full view.

On the table at her side a few pearl buttons were screwed up in a bit of white paper. She untwisted the paper and smoothed it out, and wrote in a tremulous hand—she could write a very neat hand—

This she laid on the top of the pot, and in a moment the bent two-foot rule appeared and drew the mail-carriage home. Then she sat still, enjoying the warm glow of the porter, which seemed to have permeated her entire being with a heat that was not at all like the unpleasant and oppressive heat of the atmosphere, an atmosphere heavy with the Spring damp. A gritting on the tin aroused her. A piece of paper lay under her eyes.

it said.

Now it is unlikely that in the whole round and range of conversational commonplaces there was one other greeting that could have induced the seamstress to continue the exchange of communications. But this simple and homely phrase touched her country heart. What did “groing weather” matter to the toilers in this waste of brick and mortar? This stranger must be, like herself, a country-bred soul, longing for the new green and the upturned brown297 mould of the country fields. She took up the paper, and wrote under the first message:

But that seemed curt; for she added: “for” what? She did not know. At last in desperation she put down potatos. The piece of paper was withdrawn and came back with an addition:

And when the little seamstress had read this, and grasped the fact that m-i-s-t represented the writer’s pronunciation of “moist,” she laughed softly to herself. A man whose mind, at such a time, was seriously bent upon potatos, was not a man to be feared. She found a half-sheet of notepaper, and wrote:

The answer came:

As she read this, the seamstress heard a church clock strike nine.

“Bless me, is it so late?” she cried, and she hurriedly penciled Good Night, thrust the paper out, and closed the window. But a few minutes later, passing by, she saw yet another bit of paper on the cornice, fluttering in the evening breeze. It said only good nite, and after a moment’s hesitation, the little seamstress took it in and gave it shelter.

After this, they were the best of friends. Every evening the pot appeared, and while the seamstress drank from it at her window, Mr. Smith drank from its twin at his; and notes were exchanged as rapidly as Mr. Smith’s early education298 permitted. They told each other their histories, and Mr. Smith’s was one of travel and variety, which he seemed to consider quite a matter of course. He had followed the sea, he had farmed, he had been a logger and a hunter in the Maine woods. Now he was foreman of an East River lumber yard, and he was prospering. In a year or two he would have enough laid by to go home to Bucksport and buy a share in a ship-building business. All this dribbled out in the course of a jerky but variegated correspondence, in which autobiographic details were mixed with reflections, moral and philosophical.

A few samples will give an idea of Mr. Smith’s style:

To which the seamstress replied:

But Mr. Smith disposed of this subject very briefly:

Further he vouchsafed:

The seamstress had taught school one Winter, and she could not refrain from making an attempt to reform Mr.299 Smith’s orthography. One evening, in answer to this communication:

she wrote:

but she gave up the attempt when he responded:

The Spring wore on, and the Summer came, and still the evening drink and the evening correspondence brightened the close of each day for the little seamstress. And the draught of porter put her to sleep each night, giving her a calmer rest than she had ever known during her stay in the noisy city; and it began, moreover, to make a little “meet” for her. And then the thought that she was going to have an hour of pleasant companionship somehow gave her courage to cook and eat her little dinner, however tired she was. The seamstress’s cheeks began to blossom with the June roses.

And all this time Mr. Smith kept his vow of silence unbroken, though the seamstress sometimes tempted him with little ejaculations and exclamations to which he might have responded. He was silent and invisible. Only the smoke of his pipe, and the clink of his mug as he set it down on the cornice, told her that a living, material Smith was her correspondent. They never met on the stairs, for their hours of coming and going did not coincide. Once or twice they passed each other in the street—but Mr. Smith looked straight ahead of him, about a foot over her head. The little seamstress thought he was a very fine-looking man, with his six feet one and three-quarters and his thick brown beard. Most people would have called him plain.

Once she spoke to him. She was coming home one Summer evening, and a gang of corner-loafers stopped her and demanded money to buy beer, as is their custom.300 Before she had time to be frightened, Mr. Smith appeared—whence, she knew not—scattered the gang like chaff, and, collaring two of the human hyenas, kicked them, with deliberate, ponderous, alternate kicks, until they writhed in ineffable agony. When he let them crawl away, she turned to him and thanked him warmly, looking very pretty now, with the color in her cheeks. But Mr. Smith answered no word. He stared over her head, grew red in the face, fidgeted nervously, but held his peace until his eyes fell on a rotund Teuton, passing by.

“Say, Dutchy!” he roared.

The German stood aghast.

“I ain’t got nothing to write with!” thundered Mr. Smith, looking him in the eye. And then the man of his word passed on his way.

And so the Summer went on, and the two correspondents chatted silently from window to window, hid from sight of all the world below by the friendly cornice. And they looked out over the roof, and saw the green of Tompkins Square grow darker and dustier as the months went on.

Mr. Smith was given to Sunday trips into the suburbs, and he never came back without a bunch of daisies or black-eyed Susans or, later, asters or golden-rod for the little seamstress. Sometimes, with a sagacity rare in his sex, he brought her a whole plant, with fresh loam for potting.

He gave her also a reel in a bottle, which, he wrote, he had “maid” himself, and some coral, and a dried flying-fish, that was somewhat fearful to look upon, with its sword-like fins and its hollow eyes. At first, she could not go to sleep with that flying-fish hanging on the wall.

But he surprised the little seamstress very much one cool September evening, when he shoved this letter along the cornice:

The little seamstress gazed at this letter a long time. Perhaps she was wondering in what Ready Letter-Writer of the last century Mr. Smith had found his form. Perhaps she was amazed at the results of his first attempt at punctuation. Perhaps she was thinking of something else, for there were tears in her eyes and a smile on her small mouth.

But it must have been a long time, and Mr. Smith must have grown nervous, for presently another communication came along the line where the top of the cornice was worn smooth. It read:

The little seamstress seized a piece of paper and wrote:

Then she rose and passed it out to him, leaning out of the window, and their faces met.

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305

THE EVE OF THE FOURTH

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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

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INDEX

[Titles of books and periodicals are in quotation marks; titles of separate stories, in italics]