The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2
by Edgar Allan Poe · English · Gutenberg #2148 · 621,475 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Release date: April 1, 2000 [eBook #2148]
Most recently updated: May 17, 2026
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2148
Credits: David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORKS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE — VOLUME 2 ***
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe
by Edgar Allan Poe
The Raven Edition
VOLUME II.
Contents
THE PURLOINED LETTER
THE THOUSAND-AND-SECOND TALE OF SCHEHERAZADE
A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM.
VON KEMPELEN AND HIS DISCOVERY
MESMERIC REVELATION
THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF M. VALDEMAR
THE BLACK CAT.
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER
SILENCE—A FABLE
THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH.
THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO.
THE IMP OF THE PERVERSE
THE ISLAND OF THE FAY
THE ASSIGNATION
THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM
THE PREMATURE BURIAL
THE DOMAIN OF ARNHEIM
LANDOR’S COTTAGE
WILLIAM WILSO
THE TELL-TALE HEART.
BERENICE
ELEONORA
NOTES TO THE SECOND VOLUME
[Redactor’s Note—Some endnotes are by Poe and some were added by
Griswold. In this volume the notes are at the end.]
THE PURLOINED LETTER
Nil sapientiæ odiosius acumine nimio.—_Seneca_.
At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18-,
I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum,
in company with my friend C. Auguste Dupin, in his little back
library, or book-closet, _au troisième_, No. 33, _Rue Dunôt,
Faubourg St. Germain_. For one hour at least we had maintained a
profound silence; while each, to any casual observer, might have
seemed intently and exclusively occupied with the curling eddies
of smoke that oppressed the atmosphere of the chamber. For
myself, however, I was mentally discussing certain topics which
had formed matter for conversation between us at an earlier
period of the evening; I mean the affair of the Rue Morgue, and
the mystery attending the murder of Marie Rogêt. I looked upon
it, therefore, as something of a coincidence, when the door of
our apartment was thrown open and admitted our old acquaintance,
Monsieur G——, the Prefect of the Parisian police.
We gave him a hearty welcome; for there was nearly half as much
of the entertaining as of the contemptible about the man, and we
had not seen him for several years. We had been sitting in the
dark, and Dupin now arose for the purpose of lighting a lamp, but
sat down again, without doing so, upon G.‘s saying that he had
called to consult us, or rather to ask the opinion of my friend,
about some official business which had occasioned a great deal of
trouble.
“If it is any point requiring reflection,” observed Dupin, as he
forebore to enkindle the wick, “we shall examine it to better
purpose in the dark.”
“That is another of your odd notions,” said the Prefect, who had
a fashion of calling every thing “odd” that was beyond his
comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of
“oddities.”
“Very true,” said Dupin, as he supplied his visitor with a pipe,
and rolled towards him a comfortable chair.
“And what is the difficulty now?” I asked. “Nothing more in the
assassination way, I hope?”
“Oh no; nothing of that nature. The fact is, the business is very
simple indeed, and I make no doubt that we can manage it
sufficiently well ourselves; but then I thought Dupin would like
to hear the details of it, because it is so excessively odd.”
“Simple and odd,” said Dupin.
“Why, yes; and not exactly that, either. The fact is, we have all
been a good deal puzzled because the affair is so simple, and yet
baffles us altogether.”
“Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at
fault,” said my friend.
“What nonsense you do talk!” replied the Prefect, laughing
heartily.
“Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain,” said Dupin.
“Oh, good heavens! who ever heard of such an idea?”
“A little too self-evident.”
“Ha! ha! ha—ha! ha! ha!—ho! ho! ho!” roared our visitor,
profoundly amused, “oh, Dupin, you will be the death of me yet!”
“And what, after all, is the matter on hand?” I asked.
“Why, I will tell you,” replied the Prefect, as he gave a long,
steady and contemplative puff, and settled himself in his chair.
“I will tell you in a few words; but, before I begin, let me
caution you that this is an affair demanding the greatest
secrecy, and that I should most probably lose the position I now
hold, were it known that I confided it to any one.”
“Proceed,” said I.
“Or not,” said Dupin.
“Well, then; I have received personal information, from a very
high quarter, that a certain document of the last importance has
been purloined from the royal apartments. The individual who
purloined it is known; this beyond a doubt; he was seen to take
it. It is known, also, that it still remains in his possession.”
“How is this known?” asked Dupin.
“It is clearly inferred,” replied the Prefect, “from the nature
of the document, and from the non-appearance of certain results
which would at once arise from its passing out of the robber’s
possession; that is to say, from his employing it as he must
design in the end to employ it.”
“Be a little more explicit,” I said.
“Well, I may venture so far as to say that the paper gives its
holder a certain power in a certain quarter where such power is
immensely valuable.” The Prefect was fond of the cant of
diplomacy.
“Still I do not quite understand,” said Dupin.
“No? Well; the disclosure of the document to a third person, who
shall be nameless, would bring in question the honor of a
personage of most exalted station; and this fact gives the holder
of the document an ascendancy over the illustrious personage
whose honor and peace are so jeopardized.”
“But this ascendancy,” I interposed, “would depend upon the
robber’s knowledge of the loser’s knowledge of the robber. Who
would dare—”
“The thief,” said G., “is the Minister D——, who dares all things,
those unbecoming as well as those becoming a man. The method of
the theft was not less ingenious than bold. The document in
question—a letter, to be frank—had been received by the personage
robbed while alone in the royal boudoir. During its perusal she
was suddenly interrupted by the entrance of the other exalted
personage from whom especially it was her wish to conceal it.
After a hurried and vain endeavor to thrust it in a drawer, she
was forced to place it, open as it was, upon a table. The
address, however, was uppermost, and, the contents thus
unexposed, the letter escaped notice. At this juncture enters the
Minister D——. His lynx eye immediately perceives the paper,
recognises the handwriting of the address, observes the confusion
of the personage addressed, and fathoms her secret. After some
business transactions, hurried through in his ordinary manner, he
produces a letter somewhat similar to the one in question, opens
it, pretends to read it, and then places it in close
juxtaposition to the other. Again he converses, for some fifteen
minutes, upon the public affairs. At length, in taking leave, he
takes also from the table the letter to which he had no claim.
Its rightful owner saw, but, of course, dared not call attention
to the act, in the presence of the third personage who stood at
her elbow. The minister decamped; leaving his own letter—one of
no importance—upon the table.”
“Here, then,” said Dupin to me, “you have precisely what you
demand to make the ascendancy complete—the robber’s knowledge of
the loser’s knowledge of the robber.”
“Yes,” replied the Prefect; “and the power thus attained has, for
some months past, been wielded, for political purposes, to a very
dangerous extent. The personage robbed is more thoroughly
convinced, every day, of the necessity of reclaiming her letter.
But this, of course, cannot be done openly. In fine, driven to
despair, she has committed the matter to me.”
“Than whom,” said Dupin, amid a perfect whirlwind of smoke, “no
more sagacious agent could, I suppose, be desired, or even
imagined.”
“You flatter me,” replied the Prefect; “but it is possible that
some such opinion may have been entertained.”
“It is clear,” said I, “as you observe, that the letter is still
in possession of the minister; since it is this possession, and
not any employment of the letter, which bestows the power. With
the employment the power departs.”
“True,” said G.; “and upon this conviction I proceeded. My first
care was to make thorough search of the minister’s hotel; and
here my chief embarrassment lay in the necessity of searching
without his knowledge. Beyond all things, I have been warned of
the danger which would result from giving him reason to suspect
our design.”
“But,” said I, “you are quite au fait in these investigations.
The Parisian police have done this thing often before.”
“Oh, yes; and for this reason I did not despair. The habits of
the minister gave me, too, a great advantage. He is frequently
absent from home all night. His servants are by no means
numerous. They sleep at a distance from their master’s apartment,
and, being chiefly Neapolitans, are readily made drunk. I have
keys, as you know, with which I can open any chamber or cabinet
in Paris. For three months a night has not passed, during the
greater part of which I have not been engaged, personally, in
ransacking the D—— Hotel. My honor is interested, and, to mention
a great secret, the reward is enormous. So I did not abandon the
search until I had become fully satisfied that the thief is a
more astute man than myself. I fancy that I have investigated
every nook and corner of the premises in which it is possible
that the paper can be concealed.”
“But is it not possible,” I suggested, “that although the letter
may be in possession of the minister, as it unquestionably is, he
may have concealed it elsewhere than upon his own premises?”
“This is barely possible,” said Dupin. “The present peculiar
condition of affairs at court, and especially of those intrigues
in which D—— is known to be involved, would render the instant
availability of the document—its susceptibility of being produced
at a moment’s notice—a point of nearly equal importance with its
possession.”
“Its susceptibility of being produced?” said I.
“That is to say, of being destroyed,” said Dupin.
“True,” I observed; “the paper is clearly then upon the premises.
As for its being upon the person of the minister, we may consider
that as out of the question.”
“Entirely,” said the Prefect. “He has been twice waylaid, as if
by footpads, and his person rigorously searched under my own
inspection.”
“You might have spared yourself this trouble,” said Dupin. “D——,
I presume, is not altogether a fool, and, if not, must have
anticipated these waylayings, as a matter of course.”
“Not altogether a fool,” said G., “but then he’s a poet, which I
take to be only one remove from a fool.”
“True,” said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from his
meerschaum, “although I have been guilty of certain doggrel
myself.”
“Suppose you detail,” said I, “the particulars of your search.”
“Why the fact is, we took our time, and we searched _everywhere_.
I have had long experience in these affairs. I took the entire
building, room by room; devoting the nights of a whole week to
each. We examined, first, the furniture of each apartment. We
opened every possible drawer; and I presume you know that, to a
properly trained police agent, such a thing as a secret drawer is
impossible. Any man is a dolt who permits a ‘secret’ drawer to
escape him in a search of this kind. The thing is so plain. There
is a certain amount of bulk—of space—to be accounted for in every
cabinet. Then we have accurate rules. The fiftieth part of a line
could not escape us. After the cabinets we took the chairs. The
cushions we probed with the fine long needles you have seen me
employ. From the tables we removed the tops.”
“Why so?”
“Sometimes the top of a table, or other similarly arranged piece
of furniture, is removed by the person wishing to conceal an
article; then the leg is excavated, the article deposited within
the cavity, and the top replaced. The bottoms and tops of
bedposts are employed in the same way.”
“But could not the cavity be detected by sounding?” I asked.
“By no means, if, when the article is deposited, a sufficient
wadding of cotton be placed around it. Besides, in our case, we
were obliged to proceed without noise.”
“But you could not have removed—you could not have taken to
pieces all articles of furniture in which it would have been
possible to make a deposit in the manner you mention. A letter
may be compressed into a thin spiral roll, not differing much in
shape or bulk from a large knitting-needle, and in this form it
might be inserted into the rung of a chair, for example. You did
not take to pieces all the chairs?”
“Certainly not; but we did better—we examined the rungs of every
chair in the hotel, and, indeed the jointings of every
description of furniture, by the aid of a most powerful
microscope. Had there been any traces of recent disturbance we
should not have failed to detect it instantly. A single grain of
gimlet-dust, for example, would have been as obvious as an apple.
Any disorder in the glueing—any unusual gaping in the
joints—would have sufficed to insure detection.”
“I presume you looked to the mirrors, between the boards and the
plates, and you probed the beds and the bed-clothes, as well as
the curtains and carpets.”
“That of course; and when we had absolutely completed every
particle of the furniture in this way, then we examined the house
itself. We divided its entire surface into compartments, which we
numbered, so that none might be missed; then we scrutinized each
individual square inch throughout the premises, including the two
houses immediately adjoining, with the microscope, as before.”
“The two houses adjoining!” I exclaimed; “you must have had a
great deal of trouble.”
“We had; but the reward offered is prodigious!”
“You include the grounds about the houses?”
“All the grounds are paved with brick. They gave us comparatively
little trouble. We examined the moss between the bricks, and
found it undisturbed.”
“You looked among D——‘s papers, of course, and into the books of
the library?”
“Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only
opened every book, but we turned over every leaf in each volume,
not contenting ourselves with a mere shake, according to the
fashion of some of our police officers. We also measured the
thickness of every book-cover, with the most accurate
admeasurement, and applied to each the most jealous scrutiny of
the microscope. Had any of the bindings been recently meddled
with, it would have been utterly impossible that the fact should
have escaped observation. Some five or six volumes, just from the
hands of the binder, we carefully probed, longitudinally, with
the needles.”
“You explored the floors beneath the carpets?”
“Beyond doubt. We removed every carpet, and examined the boards
with the microscope.”
“And the paper on the walls?”
“Yes.”
“You looked into the cellars?”
“We did.”
“Then,” I said, “you have been making a miscalculation, and the
letter is not upon the premises, as you suppose.”
“I fear you are right there,” said the Prefect. “And now, Dupin,
what would you advise me to do?”
“To make a thorough re-search of the premises.”
“That is absolutely needless,” replied G——. “I am not more sure
that I breathe than I am that the letter is not at the Hotel.”
“I have no better advice to give you,” said Dupin. “You have, of
course, an accurate description of the letter?”
“Oh yes!”—And here the Prefect, producing a memorandum-book,
proceeded to read aloud a minute account of the internal, and
especially of the external appearance of the missing document.
Soon after finishing the perusal of this description, he took his
departure, more entirely depressed in spirits than I had ever
known the good gentleman before.
In about a month afterwards he paid us another visit, and found
us occupied very nearly as before. He took a pipe and a chair and
entered into some ordinary conversation. At length I said,—
“Well, but G——, what of the purloined letter? I presume you have
at last made up your mind that there is no such thing as
overreaching the Minister?”
“Confound him, say I—yes; I made the re-examination, however, as
Dupin suggested—but it was all labor lost, as I knew it would
be.”
“How much was the reward offered, did you say?” asked Dupin.
“Why, a very great deal—a very liberal reward—I don’t like to say
how much, precisely; but one thing I will say, that I wouldn’t
mind giving my individual check for fifty thousand francs to any
one who could obtain me that letter. The fact is, it is becoming
of more and more importance every day; and the reward has been
lately doubled. If it were trebled, however, I could do no more
than I have done.”
“Why, yes,” said Dupin, drawlingly, between the whiffs of his
meerschaum, “I really—think, G——, you have not exerted
yourself—to the utmost in this matter. You might—do a little
more, I think, eh?”
“How?—in what way?”
“Why—puff, puff—you might—puff, puff—employ counsel in the
matter, eh?—puff, puff, puff. Do you remember the story they tell
of Abernethy?”
“No; hang Abernethy!”
“To be sure! hang him and welcome. But, once upon a time, a
certain rich miser conceived the design of spunging upon this
Abernethy for a medical opinion. Getting up, for this purpose, an
ordinary conversation in a private company, he insinuated his
case to the physician, as that of an imaginary individual.
“‘We will suppose,’ said the miser, ‘that his symptoms are such
and such; now, doctor, what would you have directed him to take?’
“‘Take!’ said Abernethy, ‘why, take advice, to be sure.’”
“But,” said the Prefect, a little discomposed, “I am perfectly
willing to take advice, and to pay for it. I would really give
fifty thousand francs to any one who would aid me in the matter.”
“In that case,” replied Dupin, opening a drawer, and producing a
check-book, “you may as well fill me up a check for the amount
mentioned. When you have signed it, I will hand you the letter.”
I was astounded. The Prefect appeared absolutely
thunder-stricken. For some minutes he remained speechless and
motionless, looking incredulously at my friend with open mouth,
and eyes that seemed starting from their sockets; then,
apparently recovering himself in some measure, he seized a pen,
and after several pauses and vacant stares, finally filled up and
signed a check for fifty thousand francs, and handed it across
the table to Dupin. The latter examined it carefully and
deposited it in his pocket-book; then, unlocking an escritoire,
took thence a letter and gave it to the Prefect. This functionary
grasped it in a perfect agony of joy, opened it with a trembling
hand, cast a rapid glance at its contents, and then, scrambling
and struggling to the door, rushed at length unceremoniously from
the room and from the house, without having uttered a syllable
since Dupin had requested him to fill up the check.
When he had gone, my friend entered into some explanations.
“The Parisian police,” he said, “are exceedingly able in their
way. They are persevering, ingenious, cunning, and thoroughly
versed in the knowledge which their duties seem chiefly to
demand. Thus, when G—— detailed to us his mode of searching the
premises at the Hotel D——, I felt entire confidence in his having
made a satisfactory investigation—so far as his labors extended.”
“So far as his labors extended?” said I.
“Yes,” said Dupin. “The measures adopted were not only the best
of their kind, but carried out to absolute perfection. Had the
letter been deposited within the range of their search, these
fellows would, beyond a question, have found it.”
I merely laughed—but he seemed quite serious in all that he said.
“The measures, then,” he continued, “were good in their kind, and
well executed; their defect lay in their being inapplicable to
the case, and to the man. A certain set of highly ingenious
resources are, with the Prefect, a sort of Procrustean bed, to
which he forcibly adapts his designs. But he perpetually errs by
being too deep or too shallow for the matter in hand; and many a
schoolboy is a better reasoner than he. I knew one about eight
years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of ‘even and
odd’ attracted universal admiration. This game is simple, and is
played with marbles. One player holds in his hand a number of
these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or
odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he
loses one. The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the
school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and this lay
in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his
opponents. For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and,
holding up his closed hand, asks, ‘are they even or odd?’ Our
schoolboy replies, ‘odd,’ and loses; but upon the second trial he
wins, for he then says to himself, ‘the simpleton had them even
upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just
sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I will
therefore guess odd;’—he guesses odd, and wins. Now, with a
simpleton a degree above the first, he would have reasoned thus:
‘This fellow finds that in the first instance I guessed odd, and,
in the second, he will propose to himself, upon the first
impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first
simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is
too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting
it even as before. I will therefore guess even;’—he guesses even,
and wins. Now this mode of reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his
fellows termed ‘lucky,’—what, in its last analysis, is it?”
“It is merely,” I said, “an identification of the reasoner’s
intellect with that of his opponent.”
“It is,” said Dupin; “and, upon inquiring of the boy by what
means he effected the thorough identification in which his
success consisted, I received answer as follows: ‘When I wish to
find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is
any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the
expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance
with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or
sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or
correspond with the expression.’ This response of the schoolboy
lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been
attributed to Rochefoucault, to La Bougive, to Machiavelli, and
to Campanella.”
“And the identification,” I said, “of the reasoner’s intellect
with that of his opponent, depends, if I understand you aright,
upon the accuracy with which the opponent’s intellect is
admeasured.”
“For its practical value it depends upon this,” replied Dupin;
“and the Prefect and his cohort fail so frequently, first, by
default of this identification, and, secondly, by
ill-admeasurement, or rather through non-admeasurement, of the
intellect with which they are engaged. They consider only their
own ideas of ingenuity; and, in searching for anything hidden,
advert only to the modes in which they would have hidden it. They
are right in this much—that their own ingenuity is a faithful
representative of that of the mass; but when the cunning of the
individual felon is diverse in character from their own, the
felon foils them, of course. This always happens when it is above
their own, and very usually when it is below. They have no
variation of principle in their investigations; at best, when
urged by some unusual emergency—by some extraordinary reward—they
extend or exaggerate their old modes of practice, without
touching their principles. What, for example, in this case of
D——, has been done to vary the principle of action? What is all
this boring, and probing, and sounding, and scrutinizing with the
microscope and dividing the surface of the building into
registered square inches—what is it all but an exaggeration of
the application of the one principle or set of principles of
search, which are based upon the one set of notions regarding
human ingenuity, to which the Prefect, in the long routine of his
duty, has been accustomed? Do you not see he has taken it for
granted that all men proceed to conceal a letter,—not exactly in
a gimlet hole bored in a chair-leg—but, at least, in some
out-of-the-way hole or corner suggested by the same tenor of
thought which would urge a man to secrete a letter in a
gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg? And do you not see also, that
such recherchés nooks for concealment are adapted only for
ordinary occasions, and would be adopted only by ordinary
intellects; for, in all cases of concealment, a disposal of the
article concealed—a disposal of it in this recherché manner,—is,
in the very first instance, presumable and presumed; and thus its
discovery depends, not at all upon the acumen, but altogether
upon the mere care, patience, and determination of the seekers;
and where the case is of importance—or, what amounts to the same
thing in the political eyes, when the reward is of magnitude,—the
qualities in question have never been known to fail. You will now
understand what I meant in suggesting that, had the purloined
letter been hidden any where within the limits of the Prefect’s
examination—in other words, had the principle of its concealment
been comprehended within the principles of the Prefect—its
discovery would have been a matter altogether beyond question.
This functionary, however, has been thoroughly mystified; and the
remote source of his defeat lies in the supposition that the
Minister is a fool, because he has acquired renown as a poet. All
fools are poets; this the Prefect feels; and he is merely guilty
of a non distributio medii in thence inferring that all poets are
fools.”
“But is this really the poet?” I asked. “There are two brothers,
I know; and both have attained reputation in letters. The
Minister I believe has written learnedly on the Differential
Calculus. He is a mathematician, and no poet.”
“You are mistaken; I know him well; he is both. As poet and
mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician, he
could not have reasoned at all, and thus would have been at the
mercy of the Prefect.”
“You surprise me,” I said, “by these opinions, which have been
contradicted by the voice of the world. You do not mean to set at
naught the well-digested idea of centuries. The mathematical
reason has long been regarded as the reason par excellence.”
“‘Il y a à parièr,’” replied Dupin, quoting from Chamfort, “‘que
toute idée publique, toute convention reçue est une sottise, car
elle a convenue au plus grand nombre.’ The mathematicians, I
grant you, have done their best to promulgate the popular error
to which you allude, and which is none the less an error for its
promulgation as truth. With an art worthy a better cause, for
example, they have insinuated the term ‘analysis’ into
application to algebra. The French are the originators of this
particular deception; but if a term is of any importance—if words
derive any value from applicability—then ‘analysis’ conveys
‘algebra’ about as much as, in Latin, ‘ambitus’ implies
‘ambition,’ ‘_religio_’ ‘religion,’ or ‘_homines honesti_’ a set
of _honorable_ men.”
“You have a quarrel on hand, I see,” said I, “with some of the
algebraists of Paris; but proceed.”
“I dispute the availability, and thus the value, of that reason
which is cultivated in any especial form other than the
abstractly logical. I dispute, in particular, the reason educed
by mathematical study. The mathematics are the science of form
and quantity; mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied to
observation upon form and quantity. The great error lies in
supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra,
are abstract or general truths. And this error is so egregious
that I am confounded at the universality with which it has been
received. Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth.
What is true of relation—of form and quantity—is often grossly
false in regard to morals, for example. In this latter science it
is very usually untrue that the aggregated parts are equal to the
whole. In chemistry also the axiom fails. In the consideration of
motive it fails; for two motives, each of a given value, have
not, necessarily, a value when united, equal to the sum of their
values apart. There are numerous other mathematical truths which
are only truths within the limits of relation. But the
mathematician argues, from his finite truths, through habit, as
if they were of an absolutely general applicability—as the world
indeed imagines them to be. Bryant, in his very learned
‘Mythology,’ mentions an analogous source of error, when he says
that ‘although the Pagan fables are not believed, yet we forget
ourselves continually, and make inferences from them as existing
realities.’ With the algebraists, however, who are Pagans
themselves, the ‘Pagan fables’ are believed, and the inferences
are made, not so much through lapse of memory, as through an
unaccountable addling of the brains. In short, I never yet
encountered the mere mathematician who could be trusted out of
equal roots, or one who did not clandestinely hold it as a point
of his faith that x2+px was absolutely and unconditionally equal
to q. Say to one of these gentlemen, by way of experiment, if you
please, that you believe occasions may occur where x2+px is not
altogether equal to q, and, having made him understand what you
mean, get out of his reach as speedily as convenient, for, beyond
doubt, he will endeavor to knock you down.
“I mean to say,” continued Dupin, while I merely laughed at his
last observations, “that if the Minister had been no more than a
mathematician, the Prefect would have been under no necessity of
giving me this check. I know him, however, as both mathematician
and poet, and my measures were adapted to his capacity, with
reference to the circumstances by which he was surrounded. I knew
him as a courtier, too, and as a bold intriguant. Such a man, I
considered, could not fail to be aware of the ordinary policial
modes of action. He could not have failed to anticipate—and
events have proved that he did not fail to anticipate—the
waylayings to which he was subjected. He must have foreseen, I
reflected, the secret investigations of his premises. His
frequent absences from home at night, which were hailed by the
Prefect as certain aids to his success, I regarded only as ruses,
to afford opportunity for thorough search to the police, and thus
the sooner to impress them with the conviction to which G——, in
fact, did finally arrive—the conviction that the letter was not
upon the premises. I felt, also, that the whole train of thought,
which I was at some pains in detailing to you just now,
concerning the invariable principle of policial action in
searches for articles concealed—I felt that this whole train of
thought would necessarily pass through the mind of the Minister.
It would imperatively lead him to despise all the ordinary nooks
of concealment. He could not, I reflected, be so weak as not to
see that the most intricate and remote recess of his hotel would
be as open as his commonest closets to the eyes, to the probes,
to the gimlets, and to the microscopes of the Prefect. I saw, in
fine, that he would be driven, as a matter of course, to
simplicity, if not deliberately induced to it as a matter of
choice. You will remember, perhaps, how desperately the Prefect
laughed when I suggested, upon our first interview, that it was
just possible this mystery troubled him so much on account of its
being so very self-evident.”
“Yes,” said I, “I remember his merriment well. I really thought
he would have fallen into convulsions.”
“The material world,” continued Dupin, “abounds with very strict
analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color of truth has
been given to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor, or simile, may
be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a
description. The principle of the vis inertiæ, for example, seems
to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true
in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in
motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is
commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter,
that intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more
constant, and more eventful in their movements than those of
inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more
embarrassed and full of hesitation in the first few steps of
their progress. Again: have you ever noticed which of the street
signs, over the shop-doors, are the most attractive of
attention?”
“I have never given the matter a thought,” I said.
“There is a game of puzzles,” he resumed, “which is played upon a
map. One party playing requires another to find a given word—the
name of town, river, state or empire—any word, in short, upon the
motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the game
generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the
most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as
stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to the
other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards
of the street, escape observation by dint of being excessively
obvious; and here the physical oversight is precisely analogous
with the moral inapprehension by which the intellect suffers to
pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively and
too palpably self-evident. But this is a point, it appears,
somewhat above or beneath the understanding of the Prefect. He
never once thought it probable, or possible, that the Minister
had deposited the letter immediately beneath the nose of the
whole world, by way of best preventing any portion of that world
from perceiving it.
“But the more I reflected upon the daring, dashing, and
discriminating ingenuity of D——; upon the fact that the document
must always have been at hand, if he intended to use it to good
purpose; and upon the decisive evidence, obtained by the Prefect,
that it was not hidden within the limits of that dignitary’s
ordinary search—the more satisfied I became that, to conceal this
letter, the Minister had resorted to the comprehensive and
sagacious expedient of not attempting to conceal it at all.
“Full of these ideas, I prepared myself with a pair of green
spectacles, and called one fine morning, quite by accident, at
the Ministerial hotel. I found D—— at home, yawning, lounging,
and dawdling, as usual, and pretending to be in the last
extremity of ennui. He is, perhaps, the most really energetic
human being now alive—but that is only when nobody sees him.
“To be even with him, I complained of my weak eyes, and lamented
the necessity of the spectacles, under cover of which I
cautiously and thoroughly surveyed the whole apartment, while
seemingly intent only upon the conversation of my host.
“I paid especial attention to a large writing-table near which he
sat, and upon which lay confusedly, some miscellaneous letters
and other papers, with one or two musical instruments and a few
books. Here, however, after a long and very deliberate scrutiny,
I saw nothing to excite particular suspicion.
“At length my eyes, in going the circuit of the room, fell upon a
trumpery fillagree card-rack of pasteboard, that hung dangling by
a dirty blue ribbon, from a little brass knob just beneath the
middle of the mantel-piece. In this rack, which had three or four
compartments, were five or six visiting cards and a solitary
letter. This last was much soiled and crumpled. It was torn
nearly in two, across the middle—as if a design, in the first
instance, to tear it entirely up as worthless, had been altered,
or stayed, in the second. It had a large black seal, bearing the
D—— cipher _very_ conspicuously, and was addressed, in a
diminutive female hand, to D——, the minister, himself. It was
thrust carelessly, and even, as it seemed, contemptuously, into
one of the uppermost divisions of the rack.
“No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to
be that of which I was in search. To be sure, it was, to all
appearance, radically different from the one of which the Prefect
had read us so minute a description. Here the seal was large and
black, with the D—— cipher; there it was small and red, with the
ducal arms of the S—— family. Here, the address, to the Minister,
diminutive and feminine; there the superscription, to a certain
royal personage, was markedly bold and decided; the size alone
formed a point of correspondence. But, then, the radicalness of
these differences, which was excessive; the dirt; the soiled and
torn condition of the paper, so inconsistent with the true
methodical habits of D——, and so suggestive of a design to delude
the beholder into an idea of the worthlessness of the
document—these things, together with the hyper-obtrusive
situation of this document, full in the view of every visitor,
and thus exactly in accordance with the conclusions to which I
had previously arrived; these things, I say, were strongly
corroborative of suspicion, in one who came with the intention to
suspect.
“I protracted my visit as long as possible, and, while I
maintained a most animated discussion with the Minister upon a
topic which I knew well had never failed to interest and excite
him, I kept my attention really riveted upon the letter. In this
examination, I committed to memory its external appearance and
arrangement in the rack; and also fell, at length, upon a
discovery which set at rest whatever trivial doubt I might have
entertained. In scrutinizing the edges of the paper, I observed
them to be more chafed than seemed necessary. They presented the
broken appearance which is manifested when a stiff paper, having
been once folded and pressed with a folder, is refolded in a
reversed direction, in the same creases or edges which had formed
the original fold. This discovery was sufficient. It was clear to
me that the letter had been turned, as a glove, inside out,
re-directed, and re-sealed. I bade the Minister good morning, and
took my departure at once, leaving a gold snuff-box upon the
table.
“The next morning I called for the snuff-box, when we resumed,
quite eagerly, the conversation of the preceding day. While thus
engaged, however, a loud report, as if of a pistol, was heard
immediately beneath the windows of the hotel, and was succeeded
by a series of fearful screams, and the shoutings of a terrified
mob. D—— rushed to a casement, threw it open, and looked out. In
the meantime, I stepped to the card-rack, took the letter, put it
in my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile, (so far as regards
externals,) which I had carefully prepared at my
lodgings—imitating the D—— cipher, very readily, by means of a
seal formed of bread.
“The disturbance in the street had been occasioned by the frantic
behavior of a man with a musket. He had fired it among a crowd of
women and children. It proved, however, to have been without
ball, and the fellow was suffered to go his way as a lunatic or a
drunkard. When he had gone, D—— came from the window, whither I
had followed him immediately upon securing the object in view.
Soon afterwards I bade him farewell. The pretended lunatic was a
man in my own pay.”
“But what purpose had you,” I asked, “in replacing the letter by
a fac-simile? Would it not have been better, at the first visit,
to have seized it openly, and departed?”
“D——,” replied Dupin, “is a desperate man, and a man of nerve.
His hotel, too, is not without attendants devoted to his
interests. Had I made the wild attempt you suggest, I might never
have left the Ministerial presence alive. The good people of
Paris might have heard of me no more. But I had an object apart
from these considerations. You know my political prepossessions.
In this matter, I act as a partisan of the lady concerned. For
eighteen months the Minister has had her in his power. She has
now him in hers—since, being unaware that the letter is not in
his possession, he will proceed with his exactions as if it was.
Thus will he inevitably commit himself, at once, to his political
destruction. His downfall, too, will not be more precipitate than
awkward. It is all very well to talk about the facilis descensus
Averni; but in all kinds of climbing, as Catalani said of
singing, it is far more easy to get up than to come down. In the
present instance I have no sympathy—at least no pity—for him who
descends. He is that monstrum horrendum, an unprincipled man of
genius. I confess, however, that I should like very well to know
the precise character of his thoughts, when, being defied by her
whom the Prefect terms ‘a certain personage’ he is reduced to
opening the letter which I left for him in the card-rack.”
“How? did you put any thing particular in it?”
“Why—it did not seem altogether right to leave the interior
blank—that would have been insulting. D——, at Vienna once, did me
an evil turn, which I told him, quite good-humoredly, that I
should remember. So, as I knew he would feel some curiosity in
regard to the identity of the person who had outwitted him, I
thought it a pity not to give him a clue. He is well acquainted
with my MS., and I just copied into the middle of the blank sheet
the words—
“‘— — Un dessein si funeste,
S’il n’est digne d’Atrée, est digne de Thyeste.
They are to be found in Crébillon’s ‘Atrée.’”
THE THOUSAND-AND-SECOND TALE OF SCHEHERAZADE
Truth is stranger than fiction.—_Old Saying_
Having had occasion, lately, in the course of some Oriental
investigations, to consult the Tellmenow Isitsöornot, a work
which (like the Zohar of Simeon Jochaides) is scarcely known at
all, even in Europe; and which has never been quoted, to my
knowledge, by any American—if we except, perhaps, the author of
the “Curiosities of American Literature”;—having had occasion, I
say, to turn over some pages of the first-mentioned very
remarkable work, I was not a little astonished to discover that
the literary world has hitherto been strangely in error
respecting the fate of the vizier’s daughter, Scheherazade, as
that fate is depicted in the “Arabian Nights”; and that the
_dénouement_ there given, if not altogether inaccurate, as far as
it goes, is at least to blame in not having gone very much
farther.
For full information on this interesting topic, I must refer the
inquisitive reader to the “Isitsöornot” itself; but in the
meantime, I shall be pardoned for giving a summary of what I
there discovered.
It will be remembered, that, in the usual version of the tales, a
certain monarch having good cause to be jealous of his queen, not
only puts her to death, but makes a vow, by his beard and the
prophet, to espouse each night the most beautiful maiden in his
dominions, and the next morning to deliver her up to the
executioner.
Having fulfilled this vow for many years to the letter, and with
a religious punctuality and method that conferred great credit
upon him as a man of devout feeling and excellent sense, he was
interrupted one afternoon (no doubt at his prayers) by a visit
from his grand vizier, to whose daughter, it appears, there had
occurred an idea.
Her name was Scheherazade, and her idea was, that she would
either redeem the land from the depopulating tax upon its beauty,
or perish, after the approved fashion of all heroines, in the
attempt.
Accordingly, and although we do not find it to be leap-year
(which makes the sacrifice more meritorious), she deputes her
father, the grand vizier, to make an offer to the king of her
hand. This hand the king eagerly accepts—(he had intended to take
it at all events, and had put off the matter from day to day,
only through fear of the vizier),—but, in accepting it now, he
gives all parties very distinctly to understand, that, grand
vizier or no grand vizier, he has not the slightest design of
giving up one iota of his vow or of his privileges. When,
therefore, the fair Scheherazade insisted upon marrying the king,
and did actually marry him despite her father’s excellent advice
not to do any thing of the kind—when she would and did marry him,
I say, will I, nill I, it was with her beautiful black eyes as
thoroughly open as the nature of the case would allow.
It seems, however, that this politic damsel (who had been reading
Machiavelli, beyond doubt), had a very ingenious little plot in
her mind. On the night of the wedding, she contrived, upon I
forget what specious pretence, to have her sister occupy a couch
sufficiently near that of the royal pair to admit of easy
conversation from bed to bed; and, a little before cock-crowing,
she took care to awaken the good monarch, her husband (who bore
her none the worse will because he intended to wring her neck on
the morrow),—she managed to awaken him, I say, (although on
account of a capital conscience and an easy digestion, he slept
well) by the profound interest of a story (about a rat and a
black cat, I think) which she was narrating (all in an undertone,
of course) to her sister. When the day broke, it so happened that
this history was not altogether finished, and that Scheherazade,
in the nature of things could not finish it just then, since it
was high time for her to get up and be bowstrung—a thing very
little more pleasant than hanging, only a trifle more genteel!
The king’s curiosity, however, prevailing, I am sorry to say,
even over his sound religious principles, induced him for this
once to postpone the fulfilment of his vow until next morning,
for the purpose and with the hope of hearing that night how it
fared in the end with the black cat (a black cat, I think it was)
and the rat.
The night having arrived, however, the lady Scheherazade not only
put the finishing stroke to the black cat and the rat (the rat
was blue) but before she well knew what she was about, found
herself deep in the intricacies of a narration, having reference
(if I am not altogether mistaken) to a pink horse (with green
wings) that went, in a violent manner, by clockwork, and was
wound up with an indigo key. With this history the king was even
more profoundly interested than with the other—and, as the day
broke before its conclusion (notwithstanding all the queen’s
endeavors to get through with it in time for the bowstringing),
there was again no resource but to postpone that ceremony as
before, for twenty-four hours. The next night there happened a
similar accident with a similar result; and then the next—and
then again the next; so that, in the end, the good monarch,
having been unavoidably deprived of all opportunity to keep his
vow during a period of no less than one thousand and one nights,
either forgets it altogether by the expiration of this time, or
gets himself absolved of it in the regular way, or (what is more
probable) breaks it outright, as well as the head of his father
confessor. At all events, Scheherazade, who, being lineally
descended from Eve, fell heir, perhaps, to the whole seven
baskets of talk, which the latter lady, we all know, picked up
from under the trees in the garden of Eden; Scheherazade, I say,
finally triumphed, and the tariff upon beauty was repealed.
Now, this conclusion (which is that of the story as we have it
upon record) is, no doubt, excessively proper and pleasant—but
alas! like a great many pleasant things, is more pleasant than
true, and I am indebted altogether to the “Isitsöornot” for the
means of correcting the error. “Le mieux,” says a French proverb,
“est l’ennemi du bien,” and, in mentioning that Scheherazade had
inherited the seven baskets of talk, I should have added that she
put them out at compound interest until they amounted to
seventy-seven.
“My dear sister,” said she, on the thousand-and-second night, (I
quote the language of the “Isitsöornot” at this point, verbatim)
“my dear sister,” said she, “now that all this little difficulty
about the bowstring has blown over, and that this odious tax is
so happily repealed, I feel that I have been guilty of great
indiscretion in withholding from you and the king (who I am sorry
to say, snores—a thing no gentleman would do) the full conclusion
of Sinbad the sailor. This person went through numerous other and
more interesting adventures than those which I related; but the
truth is, I felt sleepy on the particular night of their
narration, and so was seduced into cutting them short—a grievous
piece of misconduct, for which I only trust that Allah will
forgive me. But even yet it is not too late to remedy my great
neglect—and as soon as I have given the king a pinch or two in
order to wake him up so far that he may stop making that horrible
noise, I will forthwith entertain you (and him if he pleases)
with the sequel of this very remarkable story.”
Hereupon the sister of Scheherazade, as I have it from the
“Isitsöornot,” expressed no very particular intensity of
gratification; but the king, having been sufficiently pinched, at
length ceased snoring, and finally said, “Hum!” and then “Hoo!”
when the queen, understanding these words (which are no doubt
Arabic) to signify that he was all attention, and would do his
best not to snore any more—the queen, I say, having arranged
these matters to her satisfaction, re-entered thus, at once, into
the history of Sinbad the sailor:
“‘At length, in my old age,’ [these are the words of Sinbad
himself, as retailed by Scheherazade]—‘at length, in my old age,
and after enjoying many years of tranquillity at home, I became
once more possessed of a desire of visiting foreign countries;
and one day, without acquainting any of my family with my design,
I packed up some bundles of such merchandise as was most precious
and least bulky, and, engaging a porter to carry them, went with
him down to the sea-shore, to await the arrival of any chance
vessel that might convey me out of the kingdom into some region
which I had not as yet explored.
“‘Having deposited the packages upon the sands, we sat down
beneath some trees, and looked out into the ocean in the hope of
perceiving a ship, but during several hours we saw none whatever.
At length I fancied that I could hear a singular buzzing or
humming sound; and the porter, after listening awhile, declared
that he also could distinguish it. Presently it grew louder, and
then still louder, so that we could have no doubt that the object
which caused it was approaching us. At length, on the edge of the
horizon, we discovered a black speck, which rapidly increased in
size until we made it out to be a vast monster, swimming with a
great part of its body above the surface of the sea. It came
toward us with inconceivable swiftness, throwing up huge waves of
foam around its breast, and illuminating all that part of the sea
through which it passed, with a long line of fire that extended
far off into the distance.
“‘As the thing drew near we saw it very distinctly. Its length
was equal to that of three of the loftiest trees that grow, and
it was as wide as the great hall of audience in your palace, O
most sublime and munificent of the Caliphs. Its body, which was
unlike that of ordinary fishes, was as solid as a rock, and of a
jetty blackness throughout all that portion of it which floated
above the water, with the exception of a narrow blood-red streak
that completely begirdled it. The belly, which floated beneath
the surface, and of which we could get only a glimpse now and
then as the monster rose and fell with the billows, was entirely
covered with metallic scales, of a color like that of the moon in
misty weather. The back was flat and nearly white, and from it
there extended upwards of six spines, about half the length of
the whole body.
“‘This horrible creature had no mouth that we could perceive;
but, as if to make up for this deficiency, it was provided with
at least four score of eyes, that protruded from their sockets
like those of the green dragon-fly, and were arranged all around
the body in two rows, one above the other, and parallel to the
blood-red streak, which seemed to answer the purpose of an
eyebrow. Two or three of these dreadful eyes were much larger
than the others, and had the appearance of solid gold.
“‘Although this beast approached us, as I have before said, with
the greatest rapidity, it must have been moved altogether by
necromancy—for it had neither fins like a fish nor web-feet like
a duck, nor wings like the seashell which is blown along in the
manner of a vessel; nor yet did it writhe itself forward as do
the eels. Its head and its tail were shaped precisely alike,
only, not far from the latter, were two small holes that served
for nostrils, and through which the monster puffed out its thick
breath with prodigious violence, and with a shrieking,
disagreeable noise.
“‘Our terror at beholding this hideous thing was very great, but
it was even surpassed by our astonishment, when upon getting a
nearer look, we perceived upon the creature’s back a vast number
of animals about the size and shape of men, and altogether much
resembling them, except that they wore no garments (as men do),
being supplied (by nature, no doubt) with an ugly uncomfortable
covering, a good deal like cloth, but fitting so tight to the
skin, as to render the poor wretches laughably awkward, and put
them apparently to severe pain. On the very tips of their heads
were certain square-looking boxes, which, at first sight, I
thought might have been intended to answer as turbans, but I soon
discovered that they were excessively heavy and solid, and I
therefore concluded they were contrivances designed, by their
great weight, to keep the heads of the animals steady and safe
upon their shoulders. Around the necks of the creatures were
fastened black collars, (badges of servitude, no doubt,) such as
we keep on our dogs, only much wider and infinitely stiffer, so
that it was quite impossible for these poor victims to move their
heads in any direction without moving the body at the same time;
and thus they were doomed to perpetual contemplation of their
noses—a view puggish and snubby in a wonderful, if not positively
in an awful degree.
“‘When the monster had nearly reached the shore where we stood,
it suddenly pushed out one of its eyes to a great extent, and
emitted from it a terrible flash of fire, accompanied by a dense
cloud of smoke, and a noise that I can compare to nothing but
thunder. As the smoke cleared away, we saw one of the odd
man-animals standing near the head of the large beast with a
trumpet in his hand, through which (putting it to his mouth) he
presently addressed us in loud, harsh, and disagreeable accents,
that, perhaps, we should have mistaken for language, had they not
come altogether through the nose.
“‘Being thus evidently spoken to, I was at a loss how to reply,
as I could in no manner understand what was said; and in this
difficulty I turned to the porter, who was near swooning through
affright, and demanded of him his opinion as to what species of
monster it was, what it wanted, and what kind of creatures those
were that so swarmed upon its back. To this the porter replied,
as well as he could for trepidation, that he had once before
heard of this sea-beast; that it was a cruel demon, with bowels
of sulphur and blood of fire, created by evil genii as the means
of inflicting misery upon mankind; that the things upon its back
were vermin, such as sometimes infest cats and dogs, only a
little larger and more savage; and that these vermin had their
uses, however evil—for, through the torture they caused the beast
by their nibbling and stingings, it was goaded into that degree
of wrath which was requisite to make it roar and commit ill, and
so fulfil the vengeful and malicious designs of the wicked genii.
“This account determined me to take to my heels, and, without
once even looking behind me, I ran at full speed up into the
hills, while the porter ran equally fast, although nearly in an
opposite direction, so that, by these means, he finally made his
escape with my bundles, of which I have no doubt he took
excellent care—although this is a point I cannot determine, as I
do not remember that I ever beheld him again.
“‘For myself, I was so hotly pursued by a swarm of the men-vermin
(who had come to the shore in boats) that I was very soon
overtaken, bound hand and foot, and conveyed to the beast, which
immediately swam out again into the middle of the sea.
“‘I now bitterly repented my folly in quitting a comfortable home
to peril my life in such adventures as this; but regret being
useless, I made the best of my condition, and exerted myself to
secure the goodwill of the man-animal that owned the trumpet, and
who appeared to exercise authority over his fellows. I succeeded
so well in this endeavor that, in a few days, the creature
bestowed upon me various tokens of his favor, and in the end even
went to the trouble of teaching me the rudiments of what it was
vain enough to denominate its language; so that, at length, I was
enabled to converse with it readily, and came to make it
comprehend the ardent desire I had of seeing the world.
“‘Washish squashish squeak, Sinbad, hey-diddle diddle, grunt unt
grumble, hiss, fiss, whiss,’ said he to me, one day after
dinner—but I beg a thousand pardons, I had forgotten that your
majesty is not conversant with the dialect of the Cock-neighs (so
the man-animals were called; I presume because their language
formed the connecting link between that of the horse and that of
the rooster). With your permission, I will translate. ‘Washish
squashish,’ and so forth:—that is to say, ‘I am happy to find, my
dear Sinbad, that you are really a very excellent fellow; we are
now about doing a thing which is called circumnavigating the
globe; and since you are so desirous of seeing the world, I will
strain a point and give you a free passage upon back of the
beast.’”
When the Lady Scheherazade had proceeded thus far, relates the
“Isitsöornot,” the king turned over from his left side to his
right, and said:
“It is, in fact, very surprising, my dear queen, that you
omitted, hitherto, these latter adventures of Sinbad. Do you know
I think them exceedingly entertaining and strange?”
The king having thus expressed himself, we are told, the fair
Scheherazade resumed her history in the following words:
“Sinbad went on in this manner with his narrative—‘I thanked the
man-animal for its kindness, and soon found myself very much at
home on the beast, which swam at a prodigious rate through the
ocean; although the surface of the latter is, in that part of the
world, by no means flat, but round like a pomegranate, so that we
went—so to say—either up hill or down hill all the time.’
“That I think, was very singular,” interrupted the king.
“Nevertheless, it is quite true,” replied Scheherazade.
“I have my doubts,” rejoined the king; “but, pray, be so good as
to go on with the story.”
“I will,” said the queen. “‘The beast,’ continued Sinbad to the
caliph, ‘swam, as I have related, up hill and down hill until, at
length, we arrived at an island, many hundreds of miles in
circumference, but which, nevertheless, had been built in the
middle of the sea by a colony of little things like
caterpillars.’” (*1)
“Hum!” said the king.
“‘Leaving this island,’ said Sinbad—(for Scheherazade, it must be
understood, took no notice of her husband’s ill-mannered
ejaculation) ‘leaving this island, we came to another where the
forests were of solid stone, and so hard that they shivered to
pieces the finest-tempered axes with which we endeavoured to cut
them down.’” (*2)
“Hum!” said the king, again; but Scheherazade, paying him no
attention, continued in the language of Sinbad.
“‘Passing beyond this last island, we reached a country where
there was a cave that ran to the distance of thirty or forty
miles within the bowels of the earth, and that contained a
greater number of far more spacious and more magnificent palaces
than are to be found in all Damascus and Bagdad. From the roofs
of these palaces there hung myriads of gems, like diamonds, but
larger than men; and in among the streets of towers and pyramids
and temples, there flowed immense rivers as black as ebony, and
swarming with fish that had no eyes.’” (*3)
“Hum!” said the king.
“‘We then swam into a region of the sea where we found a lofty
mountain, down whose sides there streamed torrents of melted
metal, some of which were twelve miles wide and sixty miles long
(*4); while from an abyss on the summit, issued so vast a
quantity of ashes that the sun was entirely blotted out from the
heavens, and it became darker than the darkest midnight; so that
when we were even at the distance of a hundred and fifty miles
from the mountain, it was impossible to see the whitest object,
however close we held it to our eyes.’” (*5)
“Hum!” said the king.
“‘After quitting this coast, the beast continued his voyage until
we met with a land in which the nature of things seemed
reversed—for we here saw a great lake, at the bottom of which,
more than a hundred feet beneath the surface of the water, there
flourished in full leaf a forest of tall and luxuriant trees.’”
(*6)
“Hoo!” said the king.
“Some hundred miles farther on brought us to a climate where the
atmosphere was so dense as to sustain iron or steel, just as our
own does feather.’” (*7)
“Fiddle de dee,” said the king.
“Proceeding still in the same direction, we presently arrived at
the most magnificent region in the whole world. Through it there
meandered a glorious river for several thousands of miles. This
river was of unspeakable depth, and of a transparency richer than
that of amber. It was from three to six miles in width; and its
banks which arose on either side to twelve hundred feet in
perpendicular height, were crowned with ever-blossoming trees and
perpetual sweet-scented flowers, that made the whole territory
one gorgeous garden; but the name of this luxuriant land was the
Kingdom of Horror, and to enter it was inevitable death.’” (*8)
“Humph!” said the king.
“‘We left this kingdom in great haste, and, after some days, came
to another, where we were astonished to perceive myriads of
monstrous animals with horns resembling scythes upon their heads.
These hideous beasts dig for themselves vast caverns in the soil,
of a funnel shape, and line the sides of them with rocks, so
disposed one upon the other that they fall instantly, when
trodden upon by other animals, thus precipitating them into the
monster’s dens, where their blood is immediately sucked, and
their carcasses afterwards hurled contemptuously out to an
immense distance from “the caverns of death."’” (*9)
“Pooh!” said the king.
“‘Continuing our progress, we perceived a district with
vegetables that grew not upon any soil but in the air. (*10)
There were others that sprang from the substance of other
vegetables; (*11) others that derived their substance from the
bodies of living animals; (*12) and then again, there were others
that glowed all over with intense fire; (*13) others that moved
from place to place at pleasure, (*14) and what was still more
wonderful, we discovered flowers that lived and breathed and
moved their limbs at will and had, moreover, the detestable
passion of mankind for enslaving other creatures, and confining
them in horrid and solitary prisons until the fulfillment of
appointed tasks.’” (*15)
“Pshaw!” said the king.
“‘Quitting this land, we soon arrived at another in which the
bees and the birds are mathematicians of such genius and
erudition, that they give daily instructions in the science of
geometry to the wise men of the empire. The king of the place
having offered a reward for the solution of two very difficult
problems, they were solved upon the spot—the one by the bees, and
the other by the birds; but the king keeping their solution a
secret, it was only after the most profound researches and labor,
and the writing of an infinity of big books, during a long series
of years, that the men-mathematicians at length arrived at the
identical solutions which had been given upon the spot by the
bees and by the birds.’” (*16)
“Oh my!” said the king.
“‘We had scarcely lost sight of this empire when we found
ourselves close upon another, from whose shores there flew over
our heads a flock of fowls a mile in breadth, and two hundred and
forty miles long; so that, although they flew a mile during every
minute, it required no less than four hours for the whole flock
to pass over us—in which there were several millions of millions
of fowl.’” (*17)
“Oh fy!” said the king.
“‘No sooner had we got rid of these birds, which occasioned us
great annoyance, than we were terrified by the appearance of a
fowl of another kind, and infinitely larger than even the rocs
which I met in my former voyages; for it was bigger than the
biggest of the domes on your seraglio, oh, most Munificent of
Caliphs. This terrible fowl had no head that we could perceive,
but was fashioned entirely of belly, which was of a prodigious
fatness and roundness, of a soft-looking substance, smooth,
shining and striped with various colors. In its talons, the
monster was bearing away to his eyrie in the heavens, a house
from which it had knocked off the roof, and in the interior of
which we distinctly saw human beings, who, beyond doubt, were in
a state of frightful despair at the horrible fate which awaited
them. We shouted with all our might, in the hope of frightening
the bird into letting go of its prey, but it merely gave a snort
or puff, as if of rage and then let fall upon our heads a heavy
sack which proved to be filled with sand!’”
“Stuff!” said the king.
“‘It was just after this adventure that we encountered a
continent of immense extent and prodigious solidity, but which,
nevertheless, was supported entirely upon the back of a sky-blue
cow that had no fewer than four hundred horns.’” (*18)
“That, now, I believe,” said the king, “because I have read
something of the kind before, in a book.”
“‘We passed immediately beneath this continent, (swimming in
between the legs of the cow), and, after some hours, found
ourselves in a wonderful country indeed, which, I was informed by
the man-animal, was his own native land, inhabited by things of
his own species. This elevated the man-animal very much in my
esteem, and in fact, I now began to feel ashamed of the
contemptuous familiarity with which I had treated him; for I
found that the man-animals in general were a nation of the most
powerful magicians, who lived with worms in their brain, (*19)
which, no doubt, served to stimulate them by their painful
writhings and wrigglings to the most miraculous efforts of
imagination!’”
“Nonsense!” said the king.
“‘Among the magicians, were domesticated several animals of very
singular kinds; for example, there was a huge horse whose bones
were iron and whose blood was boiling water. In place of corn, he
had black stones for his usual food; and yet, in spite of so hard
a diet, he was so strong and swift that he would drag a load more
weighty than the grandest temple in this city, at a rate
surpassing that of the flight of most birds.’” (*20)
“Twattle!” said the king.
“‘I saw, also, among these people a hen without feathers, but
bigger than a camel; instead of flesh and bone she had iron and
brick; her blood, like that of the horse, (to whom, in fact, she
was nearly related,) was boiling water; and like him she ate
nothing but wood or black stones. This hen brought forth very
frequently, a hundred chickens in the day; and, after birth, they
took up their residence for several weeks within the stomach of
their mother.’” (*21)
“Fal lal!” said the king.
“‘One of this nation of mighty conjurors created a man out of
brass and wood, and leather, and endowed him with such ingenuity
that he would have beaten at chess, all the race of mankind with
the exception of the great Caliph, Haroun Alraschid. (*22)
Another of these magi constructed (of like material) a creature
that put to shame even the genius of him who made it; for so
great were its reasoning powers that, in a second, it performed
calculations of so vast an extent that they would have required
the united labor of fifty thousand fleshy men for a year. (*23)
But a still more wonderful conjuror fashioned for himself a
mighty thing that was neither man nor beast, but which had brains
of lead, intermixed with a black matter like pitch, and fingers
that it employed with such incredible speed and dexterity that it
would have had no trouble in writing out twenty thousand copies
of the Koran in an hour, and this with so exquisite a precision,
that in all the copies there should not be found one to vary from
another by the breadth of the finest hair. This thing was of
prodigious strength, so that it erected or overthrew the
mightiest empires at a breath; but its powers were exercised
equally for evil and for good.’”
“Ridiculous!” said the king.
“‘Among this nation of necromancers there was also one who had in
his veins the blood of the salamanders; for he made no scruple of
sitting down to smoke his chibouc in a red-hot oven until his
dinner was thoroughly roasted upon its floor. (*24) Another had
the faculty of converting the common metals into gold, without
even looking at them during the process. (*25) Another had such a
delicacy of touch that he made a wire so fine as to be invisible.
(*26) Another had such quickness of perception that he counted
all the separate motions of an elastic body, while it was
springing backward and forward at the rate of nine hundred
millions of times in a second.’” (*27)
“Absurd!” said the king.
“‘Another of these magicians, by means of a fluid that nobody
ever yet saw, could make the corpses of his friends brandish
their arms, kick out their legs, fight, or even get up and dance
at his will. (*28) Another had cultivated his voice to so great
an extent that he could have made himself heard from one end of
the world to the other. (*29) Another had so long an arm that he
could sit down in Damascus and indite a letter at Bagdad—or
indeed at any distance whatsoever. (*30) Another commanded the
lightning to come down to him out of the heavens, and it came at
his call; and served him for a plaything when it came. Another
took two loud sounds and out of them made a silence. Another
constructed a deep darkness out of two brilliant lights. (*31)
Another made ice in a red-hot furnace. (*32) Another directed the
sun to paint his portrait, and the sun did. (*33) Another took
this luminary with the moon and the planets, and having first
weighed them with scrupulous accuracy, probed into their depths
and found out the solidity of the substance of which they were
made. But the whole nation is, indeed, of so surprising a
necromantic ability, that not even their infants, nor their
commonest cats and dogs have any difficulty in seeing objects
that do not exist at all, or that for twenty millions of years
before the birth of the nation itself had been blotted out from
the face of creation.’” (*34)
“Preposterous!” said the king.
“‘The wives and daughters of these incomparably great and wise
magi,’” continued Scheherazade, without being in any manner
disturbed by these frequent and most ungentlemanly interruptions
on the part of her husband—“‘the wives and daughters of these
eminent conjurers are every thing that is accomplished and
refined; and would be every thing that is interesting and
beautiful, but for an unhappy fatality that besets them, and from
which not even the miraculous powers of their husbands and
fathers has, hitherto, been adequate to save. Some fatalities
come in certain shapes, and some in others—but this of which I
speak has come in the shape of a crotchet.’”
“A what?” said the king.
“‘A crotchet’” said Scheherazade. “‘One of the evil genii, who
are perpetually upon the watch to inflict ill, has put it into
the heads of these accomplished ladies that the thing which we
describe as personal beauty consists altogether in the
protuberance of the region which lies not very far below the
small of the back. Perfection of loveliness, they say, is in the
direct ratio of the extent of this lump. Having been long
possessed of this idea, and bolsters being cheap in that country,
the days have long gone by since it was possible to distinguish a
woman from a dromedary—’”
“Stop!” said the king—“I can’t stand that, and I won’t. You have
already given me a dreadful headache with your lies. The day,
too, I perceive, is beginning to break. How long have we been
married?—my conscience is getting to be troublesome again. And
then that dromedary touch—do you take me for a fool? Upon the
whole, you might as well get up and be throttled.”
These words, as I learn from the “Isitsöornot,” both grieved and
astonished Scheherazade; but, as she knew the king to be a man of
scrupulous integrity, and quite unlikely to forfeit his word, she
submitted to her fate with a good grace. She derived, however,
great consolation, (during the tightening of the bowstring,) from
the reflection that much of the history remained still untold,
and that the petulance of her brute of a husband had reaped for
him a most righteous reward, in depriving him of many
inconceivable adventures.
A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM.
The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways;
nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the
vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, _which have
a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus_.
—_Joseph Glanville_.
We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag. For some
minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak.
“Not long ago,” said he at length, “and I could have guided you
on this route as well as the youngest of my sons; but, about
three years past, there happened to me an event such as never
happened to mortal man—or at least such as no man ever survived
to tell of—and the six hours of deadly terror which I then
endured have broken me up body and soul. You suppose me a _very_
old man—but I am not. It took less than a single day to change
these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs, and
to unstring my nerves, so that I tremble at the least exertion,
and am frightened at a shadow. Do you know I can scarcely look
over this little cliff without getting giddy?”
The “little cliff,” upon whose edge he had so carelessly thrown
himself down to rest that the weightier portion of his body hung
over it, while he was only kept from falling by the tenure of his
elbow on its extreme and slippery edge—this “little cliff” arose,
a sheer unobstructed precipice of black shining rock, some
fifteen or sixteen hundred feet from the world of crags beneath
us. Nothing would have tempted me to within half a dozen yards of
its brink. In truth so deeply was I excited by the perilous
position of my companion, that I fell at full length upon the
ground, clung to the shrubs around me, and dared not even glance
upward at the sky—while I struggled in vain to divest myself of
the idea that the very foundations of the mountain were in danger
from the fury of the winds. It was long before I could reason
myself into sufficient courage to sit up and look out into the
distance.
“You must get over these fancies,” said the guide, “for I have
brought you here that you might have the best possible view of
the scene of that event I mentioned—and to tell you the whole
story with the spot just under your eye.”
“We are now,” he continued, in that particularizing manner which
distinguished him—“we are now close upon the Norwegian coast—in
the sixty-eighth degree of latitude—in the great province of
Nordland—and in the dreary district of Lofoden. The mountain upon
whose top we sit is Helseggen, the Cloudy. Now raise yourself up
a little higher—hold on to the grass if you feel giddy—so—and
look out, beyond the belt of vapor beneath us, into the sea.”
I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose
waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the
Nubian geographer’s account of the _Mare Tenebrarum_. A panorama
more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive. To
the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay
outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horridly black
and beetling cliff, whose character of gloom was but the more
forcibly illustrated by the surf which reared high up against its
white and ghastly crest, howling and shrieking forever. Just
opposite the promontory upon whose apex we were placed, and at a
distance of some five or six miles out at sea, there was visible
a small, bleak-looking island; or, more properly, its position
was discernible through the wilderness of surge in which it was
enveloped. About two miles nearer the land, arose another of
smaller size, hideously craggy and barren, and encompassed at
various intervals by a cluster of dark rocks.
The appearance of the ocean, in the space between the more
distant island and the shore, had something very unusual about
it. Although, at the time, so strong a gale was blowing landward
that a brig in the remote offing lay to under a double-reefed
trysail, and constantly plunged her whole hull out of sight,
still there was here nothing like a regular swell, but only a
short, quick, angry cross dashing of water in every direction—as
well in the teeth of the wind as otherwise. Of foam there was
little except in the immediate vicinity of the rocks.
“The island in the distance,” resumed the old man, “is called by
the Norwegians Vurrgh. The one midway is Moskoe. That a mile to
the northward is Ambaaren. Yonder are Islesen, Hotholm,
Keildhelm, Suarven, and Buckholm. Farther off—between Moskoe and
Vurrgh—are Otterholm, Flimen, Sandflesen, and Stockholm. These
are the true names of the places—but why it has been thought
necessary to name them at all, is more than either you or I can
understand. Do you hear anything? Do you see any change in the
water?”
We had now been about ten minutes upon the top of Helseggen, to
which we had ascended from the interior of Lofoden, so that we
had caught no glimpse of the sea until it had burst upon us from
the summit. As the old man spoke, I became aware of a loud and
gradually increasing sound, like the moaning of a vast herd of
buffaloes upon an American prairie; and at the same moment I
perceived that what seamen term the _chopping_ character of the
ocean beneath us, was rapidly changing into a current which set
to the eastward. Even while I gazed, this current acquired a
monstrous velocity. Each moment added to its speed—to its
headlong impetuosity. In five minutes the whole sea, as far as
Vurrgh, was lashed into ungovernable fury; but it was between
Moskoe and the coast that the main uproar held its sway. Here the
vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand
conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied
convulsion—heaving, boiling, hissing—gyrating in gigantic and
innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the
eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes
except in precipitous descents.
In a few minutes more, there came over the scene another radical
alteration. The general surface grew somewhat more smooth, and
the whirlpools, one by one, disappeared, while prodigious streaks
of foam became apparent where none had been seen before. These
streaks, at length, spreading out to a great distance, and
entering into combination, took unto themselves the gyratory
motion of the subsided vortices, and seemed to form the germ of
another more vast. Suddenly—very suddenly—this assumed a distinct
and definite existence, in a circle of more than a mile in
diameter. The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt
of gleaming spray; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth
of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could
fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water,
inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees,
speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering
motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half
shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of
Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven.
The mountain trembled to its very base, and the rock rocked. I
threw myself upon my face, and clung to the scant herbage in an
excess of nervous agitation.
“This,” said I at length, to the old man—“this _can_ be nothing
else than the great whirlpool of the Maelström.”
“So it is sometimes termed,” said he. “We Norwegians call it the
Moskoe-ström, from the island of Moskoe in the midway.”
The ordinary accounts of this vortex had by no means prepared me
for what I saw. That of Jonas Ramus, which is perhaps the most
circumstantial of any, cannot impart the faintest conception
either of the magnificence, or of the horror of the scene—or of
the wild bewildering sense of _the novel_ which confounds the
beholder. I am not sure from what point of view the writer in
question surveyed it, nor at what time; but it could neither have
been from the summit of Helseggen, nor during a storm. There are
some passages of his description, nevertheless, which may be
quoted for their details, although their effect is exceedingly
feeble in conveying an impression of the spectacle.
“Between Lofoden and Moskoe,” he says, “the depth of the water is
between thirty-six and forty fathoms; but on the other side,
toward Ver (Vurrgh) this depth decreases so as not to afford a
convenient passage for a vessel, without the risk of splitting on
the rocks, which happens even in the calmest weather. When it is
flood, the stream runs up the country between Lofoden and Moskoe
with a boisterous rapidity; but the roar of its impetuous ebb to
the sea is scarce equalled by the loudest and most dreadful
cataracts; the noise being heard several leagues off, and the
vortices or pits are of such an extent and depth, that if a ship
comes within its attraction, it is inevitably absorbed and
carried down to the bottom, and there beat to pieces against the
rocks; and when the water relaxes, the fragments thereof are
thrown up again. But these intervals of tranquility are only at
the turn of the ebb and flood, and in calm weather, and last but
a quarter of an hour, its violence gradually returning. When the
stream is most boisterous, and its fury heightened by a storm, it
is dangerous to come within a Norway mile of it. Boats, yachts,
and ships have been carried away by not guarding against it
before they were within its reach. It likewise happens
frequently, that whales come too near the stream, and are
overpowered by its violence; and then it is impossible to
describe their howlings and bellowings in their fruitless
struggles to disengage themselves. A bear once, attempting to
swim from Lofoden to Moskoe, was caught by the stream and borne
down, while he roared terribly, so as to be heard on shore. Large
stocks of firs and pine trees, after being absorbed by the
current, rise again broken and torn to such a degree as if
bristles grew upon them. This plainly shows the bottom to consist
of craggy rocks, among which they are whirled to and fro. This
stream is regulated by the flux and reflux of the sea—it being
constantly high and low water every six hours. In the year 1645,
early in the morning of Sexagesima Sunday, it raged with such
noise and impetuosity that the very stones of the houses on the
coast fell to the ground.”
In regard to the depth of the water, I could not see how this
could have been ascertained at all in the immediate vicinity of
the vortex. The “forty fathoms” must have reference only to
portions of the channel close upon the shore either of Moskoe or
Lofoden. The depth in the centre of the Moskoe-ström must be
immeasurably greater; and no better proof of this fact is
necessary than can be obtained from even the sidelong glance into
the abyss of the whirl which may be had from the highest crag of
Helseggen. Looking down from this pinnacle upon the howling
Phlegethon below, I could not help smiling at the simplicity with
which the honest Jonas Ramus records, as a matter difficult of
belief, the anecdotes of the whales and the bears; for it
appeared to me, in fact, a self-evident thing, that the largest
ship of the line in existence, coming within the influence of
that deadly attraction, could resist it as little as a feather
the hurricane, and must disappear bodily and at once.
The attempts to account for the phenomenon—some of which, I
remember, seemed to me sufficiently plausible in perusal—now wore
a very different and unsatisfactory aspect. The idea generally
received is that this, as well as three smaller vortices among
the Ferroe islands, “have no other cause than the collision of
waves rising and falling, at flux and reflux, against a ridge of
rocks and shelves, which confines the water so that it
precipitates itself like a cataract; and thus the higher the
flood rises, the deeper must the fall be, and the natural result
of all is a whirlpool or vortex, the prodigious suction of which
is sufficiently known by lesser experiments.”—These are the words
of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Kircher and others imagine that
in the centre of the channel of the Maelström is an abyss
penetrating the globe, and issuing in some very remote part—the
Gulf of Bothnia being somewhat decidedly named in one instance.
This opinion, idle in itself, was the one to which, as I gazed,
my imagination most readily assented; and, mentioning it to the
guide, I was rather surprised to hear him say that, although it
was the view almost universally entertained of the subject by the
Norwegians, it nevertheless was not his own. As to the former
notion he confessed his inability to comprehend it; and here I
agreed with him—for, however conclusive on paper, it becomes
altogether unintelligible, and even absurd, amid the thunder of
the abyss.
“You have had a good look at the whirl now,” said the old man,
“and if you will creep round this crag, so as to get in its lee,
and deaden the roar of the water, I will tell you a story that
will convince you I ought to know something of the Moskoe-ström.”
I placed myself as desired, and he proceeded.
“Myself and my two brothers once owned a schooner-rigged smack of
about seventy tons burthen, with which we were in the habit of
fishing among the islands beyond Moskoe, nearly to Vurrgh. In all
violent eddies at sea there is good fishing, at proper
opportunities, if one has only the courage to attempt it; but
among the whole of the Lofoden coastmen, we three were the only
ones who made a regular business of going out to the islands, as
I tell you. The usual grounds are a great way lower down to the
southward. There fish can be got at all hours, without much risk,
and therefore these places are preferred. The choice spots over
here among the rocks, however, not only yield the finest variety,
but in far greater abundance; so that we often got in a single
day, what the more timid of the craft could not scrape together
in a week. In fact, we made it a matter of desperate
speculation—the risk of life standing instead of labor, and
courage answering for capital.
“We kept the smack in a cove about five miles higher up the coast
than this; and it was our practice, in fine weather, to take
advantage of the fifteen minutes’ slack to push across the main
channel of the Moskoe-ström, far above the pool, and then drop
down upon anchorage somewhere near Otterholm, or Sandflesen,
where the eddies are not so violent as elsewhere. Here we used to
remain until nearly time for slack-water again, when we weighed
and made for home. We never set out upon this expedition without
a steady side wind for going and coming—one that we felt sure
would not fail us before our return—and we seldom made a
mis-calculation upon this point. Twice, during six years, we were
forced to stay all night at anchor on account of a dead calm,
which is a rare thing indeed just about here; and once we had to
remain on the grounds nearly a week, starving to death, owing to
a gale which blew up shortly after our arrival, and made the
channel too boisterous to be thought of. Upon this occasion we
should have been driven out to sea in spite of everything, (for
the whirlpools threw us round and round so violently, that, at
length, we fouled our anchor and dragged it) if it had not been
that we drifted into one of the innumerable cross currents—here
to-day and gone to-morrow—which drove us under the lee of Flimen,
where, by good luck, we brought up.
“I could not tell you the twentieth part of the difficulties we
encountered ‘on the grounds’—it is a bad spot to be in, even in
good weather—but we made shift always to run the gauntlet of the
Moskoe-ström itself without accident; although at times my heart
has been in my mouth when we happened to be a minute or so behind
or before the slack. The wind sometimes was not as strong as we
thought it at starting, and then we made rather less way than we
could wish, while the current rendered the smack unmanageable. My
eldest brother had a son eighteen years old, and I had two stout
boys of my own. These would have been of great assistance at such
times, in using the sweeps, as well as afterward in fishing—but,
somehow, although we ran the risk ourselves, we had not the heart
to let the young ones get into the danger—for, after all is said
and done, it _was_ a horrible danger, and that is the truth.
“It is now within a few days of three years since what I am going
to tell you occurred. It was on the tenth day of July, 18—, a day
which the people of this part of the world will never forget—for
it was one in which blew the most terrible hurricane that ever
came out of the heavens. And yet all the morning, and indeed
until late in the afternoon, there was a gentle and steady breeze
from the south-west, while the sun shone brightly, so that the
oldest seaman among us could not have foreseen what was to
follow.
“The three of us—my two brothers and myself—had crossed over to
the islands about two o’clock P. M., and had soon nearly loaded
the smack with fine fish, which, we all remarked, were more
plenty that day than we had ever known them. It was just seven,
_by my watch_, when we weighed and started for home, so as to
make the worst of the Ström at slack water, which we knew would
be at eight.
“We set out with a fresh wind on our starboard quarter, and for
some time spanked along at a great rate, never dreaming of
danger, for indeed we saw not the slightest reason to apprehend
it. All at once we were taken aback by a breeze from over
Helseggen. This was most unusual—something that had never
happened to us before—and I began to feel a little uneasy,
without exactly knowing why. We put the boat on the wind, but
could make no headway at all for the eddies, and I was upon the
point of proposing to return to the anchorage, when, looking
astern, we saw the whole horizon covered with a singular
copper-colored cloud that rose with the most amazing velocity.
“In the meantime the breeze that had headed us off fell away, and
we were dead becalmed, drifting about in every direction. This
state of things, however, did not last long enough to give us
time to think about it. In less than a minute the storm was upon
us—in less than two the sky was entirely overcast—and what with
this and the driving spray, it became suddenly so dark that we
could not see each other in the smack.
“Such a hurricane as then blew it is folly to attempt describing.
The oldest seaman in Norway never experienced any thing like it.
We had let our sails go by the run before it cleverly took us;
but, at the first puff, both our masts went by the board as if
they had been sawed off—the mainmast taking with it my youngest
brother, who had lashed himself to it for safety.
“Our boat was the lightest feather of a thing that ever sat upon
water. It had a complete flush deck, with only a small hatch near
the bow, and this hatch it had always been our custom to batten
down when about to cross the Ström, by way of precaution against
the chopping seas. But for this circumstance we should have
foundered at once—for we lay entirely buried for some moments.
How my elder brother escaped destruction I cannot say, for I
never had an opportunity of ascertaining. For my part, as soon as
I had let the foresail run, I threw myself flat on deck, with my
feet against the narrow gunwale of the bow, and with my hands
grasping a ring-bolt near the foot of the fore-mast. It was mere
instinct that prompted me to do this—which was undoubtedly the
very best thing I could have done—for I was too much flurried to
think.
“For some moments we were completely deluged, as I say, and all
this time I held my breath, and clung to the bolt. When I could
stand it no longer I raised myself upon my knees, still keeping
hold with my hands, and thus got my head clear. Presently our
little boat gave herself a shake, just as a dog does in coming
out of the water, and thus rid herself, in some measure, of the
seas. I was now trying to get the better of the stupor that had
come over me, and to collect my senses so as to see what was to
be done, when I felt somebody grasp my arm. It was my elder
brother, and my heart leaped for joy, for I had made sure that he
was overboard—but the next moment all this joy was turned into
horror—for he put his mouth close to my ear, and screamed out the
word ‘_Moskoe-ström!_’
“No one ever will know what my feelings were at that moment. I
shook from head to foot as if I had had the most violent fit of
the ague. I knew what he meant by that one word well enough—I
knew what he wished to make me understand. With the wind that now
drove us on, we were bound for the whirl of the Ström, and
nothing could save us!
“You perceive that in crossing the Ström _channel_, we always
went a long way up above the whirl, even in the calmest weather,
and then had to wait and watch carefully for the slack—but now we
were driving right upon the pool itself, and in such a hurricane
as this! ‘To be sure,’ I thought, ‘we shall get there just about
the slack—there is some little hope in that’—but in the next
moment I cursed myself for being so great a fool as to dream of
hope at all. I knew very well that we were doomed, had we been
ten times a ninety-gun ship.
“By this time the first fury of the tempest had spent itself, or
perhaps we did not feel it so much, as we scudded before it, but
at all events the seas, which at first had been kept down by the
wind, and lay flat and frothing, now got up into absolute
mountains. A singular change, too, had come over the heavens.
Around in every direction it was still as black as pitch, but
nearly overhead there burst out, all at once, a circular rift of
clear sky—as clear as I ever saw—and of a deep bright blue—and
through it there blazed forth the full moon with a lustre that I
never before knew her to wear. She lit up every thing about us
with the greatest distinctness—but, oh God, what a scene it was
to light up!
“I now made one or two attempts to speak to my brother—but, in
some manner which I could not understand, the din had so
increased that I could not make him hear a single word, although
I screamed at the top of my voice in his ear. Presently he shook
his head, looking as pale as death, and held up one of his
fingers, as if to say _‘listen! ‘_
“At first I could not make out what he meant—but soon a hideous
thought flashed upon me. I dragged my watch from its fob. It was
not going. I glanced at its face by the moonlight, and then burst
into tears as I flung it far away into the ocean. _It had run
down at seven o’clock! We were behind the time of the slack, and
the whirl of the Ström was in full fury!_
“When a boat is well built, properly trimmed, and not deep laden,
the waves in a strong gale, when she is going large, seem always
to slip from beneath her—which appears very strange to a
landsman—and this is what is called _riding_, in sea phrase.
“Well, so far we had ridden the swells very cleverly; but
presently a gigantic sea happened to take us right under the
counter, and bore us with it as it rose—up—up—as if into the sky.
I would not have believed that any wave could rise so high. And
then down we came with a sweep, a slide, and a plunge, that made
me feel sick and dizzy, as if I was falling from some lofty
mountain-top in a dream. But while we were up I had thrown a
quick glance around—and that one glance was all sufficient. I saw
our exact position in an instant. The Moskoe-Ström whirlpool was
about a quarter of a mile dead ahead—but no more like the
every-day Moskoe-Ström than the whirl as you now see it, is like
a mill-race. If I had not known where we were, and what we had to
expect, I should not have recognised the place at all. As it was,
I involuntarily closed my eyes in horror. The lids clenched
themselves together as if in a spasm.
“It could not have been more than two minutes afterward until we
suddenly felt the waves subside, and were enveloped in foam. The
boat made a sharp half turn to larboard, and then shot off in its
new direction like a thunderbolt. At the same moment the roaring
noise of the water was completely drowned in a kind of shrill
shriek—such a sound as you might imagine given out by the
waste-pipes of many thousand steam-vessels, letting off their
steam all together. We were now in the belt of surf that always
surrounds the whirl; and I thought, of course, that another
moment would plunge us into the abyss, down which we could only
see indistinctly on account of the amazing velocity with which we
wore borne along. The boat did not seem to sink into the water at
all, but to skim like an air-bubble upon the surface of the
surge. Her starboard side was next the whirl, and on the larboard
arose the world of ocean we had left. It stood like a huge
writhing wall between us and the horizon.
“It may appear strange, but now, when we were in the very jaws of
the gulf, I felt more composed than when we were only approaching
it. Having made up my mind to hope no more, I got rid of a great
deal of that terror which unmanned me at first. I suppose it was
despair that strung my nerves.
“It may look like boasting—but what I tell you is truth—I began
to reflect how magnificent a thing it was to die in such a
manner, and how foolish it was in me to think of so paltry a
consideration as my own individual life, in view of so wonderful
a manifestation of God’s power. I do believe that I blushed with
shame when this idea crossed my mind. After a little while I
became possessed with the keenest curiosity about the whirl
itself. I positively felt a _wish_ to explore its depths, even at
the sacrifice I was going to make; and my principal grief was
that I should never be able to tell my old companions on shore
about the mysteries I should see. These, no doubt, were singular
fancies to occupy a man’s mind in such extremity—and I have often
thought since, that the revolutions of the boat around the pool
might have rendered me a little light-headed.
“There was another circumstance which tended to restore my
self-possession; and this was the cessation of the wind, which
could not reach us in our present situation—for, as you saw
yourself, the belt of surf is considerably lower than the general
bed of the ocean, and this latter now towered above us, a high,
black, mountainous ridge. If you have never been at sea in a
heavy gale, you can form no idea of the confusion of mind
occasioned by the wind and spray together. They blind, deafen,
and strangle you, and take away all power of action or
reflection. But we were now, in a great measure, rid of these
annoyances—just as death-condemned felons in prison are allowed
petty indulgences, forbidden them while their doom is yet
uncertain.
“How often we made the circuit of the belt it is impossible to
say. We careered round and round for perhaps an hour, flying
rather than floating, getting gradually more and more into the
middle of the surge, and then nearer and nearer to its horrible
inner edge. All this time I had never let go of the ring-bolt. My
brother was at the stern, holding on to a small empty water-cask
which had been securely lashed under the coop of the counter, and
was the only thing on deck that had not been swept overboard when
the gale first took us. As we approached the brink of the pit he
let go his hold upon this, and made for the ring, from which, in
the agony of his terror, he endeavored to force my hands, as it
was not large enough to afford us both a secure grasp. I never
felt deeper grief than when I saw him attempt this act—although I
knew he was a madman when he did it—a raving maniac through sheer
fright. I did not care, however, to contest the point with him. I
knew it could make no difference whether either of us held on at
all; so I let him have the bolt, and went astern to the cask.
This there was no great difficulty in doing; for the smack flew
round steadily enough, and upon an even keel—only swaying to and
fro, with the immense sweeps and swelters of the whirl. Scarcely
had I secured myself in my new position, when we gave a wild
lurch to starboard, and rushed headlong into the abyss. I
muttered a hurried prayer to God, and thought all was over.
“As I felt the sickening sweep of the descent, I had
instinctively tightened my hold upon the barrel, and closed my
eyes. For some seconds I dared not open them—while I expected
instant destruction, and wondered that I was not already in my
death-struggles with the water. But moment after moment elapsed.
I still lived. The sense of falling had ceased; and the motion of
the vessel seemed much as it had been before, while in the belt
of foam, with the exception that she now lay more along. I took
courage, and looked once again upon the scene.
“Never shall I forget the sensations of awe, horror, and
admiration with which I gazed about me. The boat appeared to be
hanging, as if by magic, midway down, upon the interior surface
of a funnel vast in circumference, prodigious in depth, and whose
perfectly smooth sides might have been mistaken for ebony, but
for the bewildering rapidity with which they spun around, and for
the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shot forth, as the rays of
the full moon, from that circular rift amid the clouds which I
have already described, streamed in a flood of golden glory along
the black walls, and far away down into the inmost recesses of
the abyss.
“At first I was too much confused to observe anything accurately.
The general burst of terrific grandeur was all that I beheld.
When I recovered myself a little, however, my gaze fell
instinctively downward. In this direction I was able to obtain an
unobstructed view, from the manner in which the smack hung on the
inclined surface of the pool. She was quite upon an even
keel—that is to say, her deck lay in a plane parallel with that
of the water—but this latter sloped at an angle of more than
forty-five degrees, so that we seemed to be lying upon our
beam-ends. I could not help observing, nevertheless, that I had
scarcely more difficulty in maintaining my hold and footing in
this situation, than if we had been upon a dead level; and this,
I suppose, was owing to the speed at which we revolved.
“The rays of the moon seemed to search the very bottom of the
profound gulf; but still I could make out nothing distinctly, on
account of a thick mist in which everything there was enveloped,
and over which there hung a magnificent rainbow, like that narrow
and tottering bridge which Mussulmen say is the only pathway
between Time and Eternity. This mist, or spray, was no doubt
occasioned by the clashing of the great walls of the funnel, as
they all met together at the bottom—but the yell that went up to
the Heavens from out of that mist, I dare not attempt to
describe.
“Our first slide into the abyss itself, from the belt of foam
above, had carried us a great distance down the slope; but our
farther descent was by no means proportionate. Round and round we
swept—not with any uniform movement—but in dizzying swings and
jerks, that sent us sometimes only a few hundred yards—sometimes
nearly the complete circuit of the whirl. Our progress downward,
at each revolution, was slow, but very perceptible.
“Looking about me upon the wide waste of liquid ebony on which we
were thus borne, I perceived that our boat was not the only
object in the embrace of the whirl. Both above and below us were
visible fragments of vessels, large masses of building timber and
trunks of trees, with many smaller articles, such as pieces of
house furniture, broken boxes, barrels and staves. I have already
described the unnatural curiosity which had taken the place of my
original terrors. It appeared to grow upon me as I drew nearer
and nearer to my dreadful doom. I now began to watch, with a
strange interest, the numerous things that floated in our
company. I _must_ have been delirious, for I even sought
_amusement_ in speculating upon the relative velocities of their
several descents toward the foam below. ‘This fir tree,’ I found
myself at one time saying, ‘will certainly be the next thing that
takes the awful plunge and disappears,’—and then I was
disappointed to find that the wreck of a Dutch merchant ship
overtook it and went down before. At length, after making several
guesses of this nature, and being deceived in all—this fact—the
fact of my invariable miscalculation, set me upon a train of
reflection that made my limbs again tremble, and my heart beat
heavily once more.
“It was not a new terror that thus affected me, but the dawn of a
more exciting _hope_. This hope arose partly from memory, and
partly from present observation. I called to mind the great
variety of buoyant matter that strewed the coast of Lofoden,
having been absorbed and then thrown forth by the Moskoe-ström.
By far the greater number of the articles were shattered in the
most extraordinary way—so chafed and roughened as to have the
appearance of being stuck full of splinters—but then I distinctly
recollected that there were _some_ of them which were not
disfigured at all. Now I could not account for this difference
except by supposing that the roughened fragments were the only
ones which had been _completely absorbed_—that the others had
entered the whirl at so late a period of the tide, or, for some
reason, had descended so slowly after entering, that they did not
reach the bottom before the turn of the flood came, or of the
ebb, as the case might be. I conceived it possible, in either
instance, that they might thus be whirled up again to the level
of the ocean, without undergoing the fate of those which had been
drawn in more early, or absorbed more rapidly. I made, also,
three important observations. The first was, that, as a general
rule, the larger the bodies were, the more rapid their
descent—the second, that, between two masses of equal extent, the
one spherical, and the other _of any other shape_, the
superiority in speed of descent was with the sphere—the third,
that, between two masses of equal size, the one cylindrical, and
the other of any other shape, the cylinder was absorbed the more
slowly. Since my escape, I have had several conversations on this
subject with an old school-master of the district; and it was
from him that I learned the use of the words ‘cylinder’ and
‘sphere.’ He explained to me—although I have forgotten the
explanation—how what I observed was, in fact, the natural
consequence of the forms of the floating fragments—and showed me
how it happened that a cylinder, swimming in a vortex, offered
more resistance to its suction, and was drawn in with greater
difficulty than an equally bulky body, of any form whatever. (*1)
“There was one startling circumstance which went a great way in
enforcing these observations, and rendering me anxious to turn
them to account, and this was that, at every revolution, we
passed something like a barrel, or else the yard or the mast of a
vessel, while many of these things, which had been on our level
when I first opened my eyes upon the wonders of the whirlpool,
were now high up above us, and seemed to have moved but little
from their original station.
“I no longer hesitated what to do. I resolved to lash myself
securely to the water cask upon which I now held, to cut it loose
from the counter, and to throw myself with it into the water. I
attracted my brother’s attention by signs, pointed to the
floating barrels that came near us, and did everything in my
power to make him understand what I was about to do. I thought at
length that he comprehended my design—but, whether this was the
case or not, he shook his head despairingly, and refused to move
from his station by the ring-bolt. It was impossible to reach
him; the emergency admitted of no delay; and so, with a bitter
struggle, I resigned him to his fate, fastened myself to the cask
by means of the lashings which secured it to the counter, and
precipitated myself with it into the sea, without another
moment’s hesitation.
“The result was precisely what I had hoped it might be. As it is
myself who now tell you this tale—as you see that I _did_
escape—and as you are already in possession of the mode in which
this escape was effected, and must therefore anticipate all that
I have farther to say—I will bring my story quickly to
conclusion. It might have been an hour, or thereabout, after my
quitting the smack, when, having descended to a vast distance
beneath me, it made three or four wild gyrations in rapid
succession, and, bearing my loved brother with it, plunged
headlong, at once and forever, into the chaos of foam below. The
barrel to which I was attached sunk very little farther than half
the distance between the bottom of the gulf and the spot at which
I leaped overboard, before a great change took place in the
character of the whirlpool. The slope of the sides of the vast
funnel became momently less and less steep. The gyrations of the
whirl grew, gradually, less and less violent. By degrees, the
froth and the rainbow disappeared, and the bottom of the gulf
seemed slowly to uprise. The sky was clear, the winds had gone
down, and the full moon was setting radiantly in the west, when I
found myself on the surface of the ocean, in full view of the
shores of Lofoden, and above the spot where the pool of the
Moskoe-ström _had been_. It was the hour of the slack—but the sea
still heaved in mountainous waves from the effects of the
hurricane. I was borne violently into the channel of the Ström,
and in a few minutes was hurried down the coast into the
‘grounds’ of the fishermen. A boat picked me up—exhausted from
fatigue—and (now that the danger was removed) speechless from the
memory of its horror. Those who drew me on board were my old
mates and daily companions—but they knew me no more than they
would have known a traveller from the spirit-land. My hair which
had been raven-black the day before, was as white as you see it
now. They say too that the whole expression of my countenance had
changed. I told them my story—they did not believe it. I now tell
it to _you_—and I can scarcely expect you to put more faith in it
than did the merry fishermen of Lofoden.”
VON KEMPELEN AND HIS DISCOVERY
After the very minute and elaborate paper by Arago, to say
nothing of the summary in ‘Silliman’s Journal,’ with the detailed
statement just published by Lieutenant Maury, it will not be
supposed, of course, that in offering a few hurried remarks in
reference to Von Kempelen’s discovery, I have any design to look
at the subject in a scientific point of view. My object is
simply, in the first place, to say a few words of Von Kempelen
himself (with whom, some years ago, I had the honor of a slight
personal acquaintance), since every thing which concerns him must
necessarily, at this moment, be of interest; and, in the second
place, to look in a general way, and speculatively, at the
results of the discovery.
It may be as well, however, to premise the cursory observations
which I have to offer, by denying, very decidedly, what seems to
be a general impression (gleaned, as usual in a case of this
kind, from the newspapers), viz.: that this discovery, astounding
as it unquestionably is, is unanticipated.
By reference to the ‘Diary of Sir Humphrey Davy’ (Cottle and
Munroe, London, pp. 150), it will be seen at pp. 53 and 82, that
this illustrious chemist had not only conceived the idea now in
question, but had actually made no inconsiderable progress,
experimentally, in the very identical analysis now so
triumphantly brought to an issue by Von Kempelen, who although he
makes not the slightest allusion to it, is, without doubt (I say
it unhesitatingly, and can prove it, if required), indebted to
the ‘Diary’ for at least the first hint of his own undertaking.
The paragraph from the ‘Courier and Enquirer,’ which is now going
the rounds of the press, and which purports to claim the
invention for a Mr. Kissam, of Brunswick, Maine, appears to me, I
confess, a little apocryphal, for several reasons; although there
is nothing either impossible or very improbable in the statement
made. I need not go into details. My opinion of the paragraph is
founded principally upon its manner. It does not look true.
Persons who are narrating facts, are seldom so particular as Mr.
Kissam seems to be, about day and date and precise location.
Besides, if Mr. Kissam actually did come upon the discovery he
says he did, at the period designated—nearly eight years ago—how
happens it that he took no steps, on the instant, to reap the
immense benefits which the merest bumpkin must have known would
have resulted to him individually, if not to the world at large,
from the discovery? It seems to me quite incredible that any man
of common understanding could have discovered what Mr. Kissam
says he did, and yet have subsequently acted so like a baby—so
like an owl—as Mr. Kissam admits that he did. By-the-way, who is
Mr. Kissam? and is not the whole paragraph in the ‘Courier and
Enquirer’ a fabrication got up to ‘make a talk’? It must be
confessed that it has an amazingly moon-hoaxy-air. Very little
dependence is to be placed upon it, in my humble opinion; and if
I were not well aware, from experience, how very easily men of
science are mystified, on points out of their usual range of
inquiry, I should be profoundly astonished at finding so eminent
a chemist as Professor Draper, discussing Mr. Kissam’s (or is it
Mr. Quizzem’s?) pretensions to the discovery, in so serious a
tone.
But to return to the ‘Diary’ of Sir Humphrey Davy. This pamphlet
was not designed for the public eye, even upon the decease of the
writer, as any person at all conversant with authorship may
satisfy himself at once by the slightest inspection of the style.
At page 13, for example, near the middle, we read, in reference
to his researches about the protoxide of azote: ‘In less than
half a minute the respiration being continued, diminished
gradually and were succeeded by analogous to gentle pressure on
all the muscles.’ That the respiration was not ‘diminished,’ is
not only clear by the subsequent context, but by the use of the
plural, ‘were.’ The sentence, no doubt, was thus intended: ‘In
less than half a minute, the respiration [being continued, these
feelings] diminished gradually, and were succeeded by [a
sensation] analogous to gentle pressure on all the muscles.’ A
hundred similar instances go to show that the MS. so
inconsiderately published, was merely a rough note-book, meant
only for the writer’s own eye, but an inspection of the pamphlet
will convince almost any thinking person of the truth of my
suggestion. The fact is, Sir Humphrey Davy was about the last man
in the world to commit himself on scientific topics. Not only had
he a more than ordinary dislike to quackery, but he was morbidly
afraid of appearing empirical; so that, however fully he might
have been convinced that he was on the right track in the matter
now in question, he would never have spoken out, until he had
every thing ready for the most practical demonstration. I verily
believe that his last moments would have been rendered wretched,
could he have suspected that his wishes in regard to burning this
‘Diary’ (full of crude speculations) would have been unattended
to; as, it seems, they were. I say ‘his wishes,’ for that he
meant to include this note-book among the miscellaneous papers
directed ‘to be burnt,’ I think there can be no manner of doubt.
Whether it escaped the flames by good fortune or by bad, yet
remains to be seen. That the passages quoted above, with the
other similar ones referred to, gave Von Kempelen the hint, I do
not in the slightest degree question; but I repeat, it yet
remains to be seen whether this momentous discovery itself
(momentous under any circumstances) will be of service or
disservice to mankind at large. That Von Kempelen and his
immediate friends will reap a rich harvest, it would be folly to
doubt for a moment. They will scarcely be so weak as not to
‘realize,’ in time, by large purchases of houses and land, with
other property of intrinsic value.
In the brief account of Von Kempelen which appeared in the ‘Home
Journal,’ and has since been extensively copied, several
misapprehensions of the German original seem to have been made by
the translator, who professes to have taken the passage from a
late number of the Presburg ‘Schnellpost.’ ‘Viele’ has evidently
been misconceived (as it often is), and what the translator
renders by ‘sorrows,’ is probably ‘lieden,’ which, in its true
version, ‘sufferings,’ would give a totally different complexion
to the whole account; but, of course, much of this is merely
guess, on my part.
Von Kempelen, however, is by no means ‘a misanthrope,’ in
appearance, at least, whatever he may be in fact. My acquaintance
with him was casual altogether; and I am scarcely warranted in
saying that I know him at all; but to have seen and conversed
with a man of so _prodigious_ a notoriety as he has attained, or
_will_ attain in a few days, is not a small matter, as times go.
“The Literary World” speaks of him, confidently, as a native of
Presburg (misled, perhaps, by the account in “The Home Journal”)
but I am pleased in being able to state _positively_, since I
have it from his own lips, that he was born in Utica, in the
State of New York, although both his parents, I believe, are of
Presburg descent. The family is connected, in some way, with
Mäelzel, of Automaton-chess-player memory. In person, he is short
and stout, with large, _fat_, blue eyes, sandy hair and whiskers,
a wide but pleasing mouth, fine teeth, and I think a Roman nose.
There is some defect in one of his feet. His address is frank,
and his whole manner noticeable for bonhomie. Altogether, he
looks, speaks, and acts as little like ‘a misanthrope’ as any man
I ever saw. We were fellow-sojourners for a week about six years
ago, at Earl’s Hotel, in Providence, Rhode Island; and I presume
that I conversed with him, at various times, for some three or
four hours altogether. His principal topics were those of the
day; and nothing that fell from him led me to suspect his
scientific attainments. He left the hotel before me, intending to
go to New York, and thence to Bremen; it was in the latter city
that his great discovery was first made public; or, rather, it
was there that he was first suspected of having made it. This is
about all that I personally know of the now immortal Von
Kempelen; but I have thought that even these few details would
have interest for the public.
There can be little question that most of the marvellous rumors
afloat about this affair are pure inventions, entitled to about
as much credit as the story of Aladdin’s lamp; and yet, in a case
of this kind, as in the case of the discoveries in California, it
is clear that the truth may be stranger than fiction. The
following anecdote, at least, is so well authenticated, that we
may receive it implicitly.
Von Kempelen had never been even tolerably well off during his
residence at Bremen; and often, it was well known, he had been
put to extreme shifts in order to raise trifling sums. When the
great excitement occurred about the forgery on the house of
Gutsmuth & Co., suspicion was directed toward Von Kempelen, on
account of his having purchased a considerable property in
Gasperitch Lane, and his refusing, when questioned, to explain
how he became possessed of the purchase money. He was at length
arrested, but nothing decisive appearing against him, was in the
end set at liberty. The police, however, kept a strict watch upon
his movements, and thus discovered that he left home frequently,
taking always the same road, and invariably giving his watchers
the slip in the neighborhood of that labyrinth of narrow and
crooked passages known by the flash name of the ‘Dondergat.’
Finally, by dint of great perseverance, they traced him to a
garret in an old house of seven stories, in an alley called
Flatzplatz,—and, coming upon him suddenly, found him, as they
imagined, in the midst of his counterfeiting operations. His
agitation is represented as so excessive that the officers had
not the slightest doubt of his guilt. After hand-cuffing him,
they searched his room, or rather rooms, for it appears he
occupied all the mansarde.
Opening into the garret where they caught him, was a closet, ten
feet by eight, fitted up with some chemical apparatus, of which
the object has not yet been ascertained. In one corner of the
closet was a very small furnace, with a glowing fire in it, and
on the fire a kind of duplicate crucible—two crucibles connected
by a tube. One of these crucibles was nearly full of lead in a
state of fusion, but not reaching up to the aperture of the tube,
which was close to the brim. The other crucible had some liquid
in it, which, as the officers entered, seemed to be furiously
dissipating in vapor. They relate that, on finding himself taken,
Kempelen seized the crucibles with both hands (which were encased
in gloves that afterwards turned out to be asbestic), and threw
the contents on the tiled floor. It was now that they hand-cuffed
him; and before proceeding to ransack the premises they searched
his person, but nothing unusual was found about him, excepting a
paper parcel, in his coat-pocket, containing what was afterward
ascertained to be a mixture of antimony and some unknown
substance, in nearly, but not quite, equal proportions. All
attempts at analyzing the unknown substance have, so far, failed,
but that it will ultimately be analyzed, is not to be doubted.
Passing out of the closet with their prisoner, the officers went
through a sort of ante-chamber, in which nothing material was
found, to the chemist’s sleeping-room. They here rummaged some
drawers and boxes, but discovered only a few papers, of no
importance, and some good coin, silver and gold. At length,
looking under the bed, they saw a large, common hair trunk,
without hinges, hasp, or lock, and with the top lying carelessly
across the bottom portion. Upon attempting to draw this trunk out
from under the bed, they found that, with their united strength
(there were three of them, all powerful men), they ‘could not
stir it one inch.’ Much astonished at this, one of them crawled
under the bed, and looking into the trunk, said:
‘No wonder we couldn’t move it—why it’s full to the brim of old
bits of brass!’
Putting his feet, now, against the wall so as to get a good
purchase, and pushing with all his force, while his companions
pulled with all theirs, the trunk, with much difficulty, was slid
out from under the bed, and its contents examined. The supposed
brass with which it was filled was all in small, smooth pieces,
varying from the size of a pea to that of a dollar; but the
pieces were irregular in shape, although more or less
flat-looking, upon the whole, “very much as lead looks when
thrown upon the ground in a molten state, and there suffered to
grow cool.” Now, not one of these officers for a moment suspected
this metal to be anything _but_ brass. The idea of its being
_gold_ never entered their brains, of course; how _could_ such a
wild fancy have entered it? And their astonishment may be well
conceived, when the next day it became known, all over Bremen,
that the “lot of brass” which they had carted so contemptuously
to the police office, without putting themselves to the trouble
of pocketing the smallest scrap, was not only gold—real gold—but
gold far finer than any employed in coinage—gold, in fact,
absolutely pure, virgin, without the slightest appreciable alloy.
I need not go over the details of Von Kempelen’s confession (as
far as it went) and release, for these are familiar to the
public. That he has actually realized, in spirit and in effect,
if not to the letter, the old chimaera of the philosopher’s
stone, no sane person is at liberty to doubt. The opinions of
Arago are, of course, entitled to the greatest consideration; but
he is by no means infallible; and what he says of bismuth, in his
report to the Academy, must be taken _cum grano salis_. The
simple truth is, that up to this period all analysis has failed;
and until Von Kempelen chooses to let us have the key to his own
published enigma, it is more than probable that the matter will
remain, for years, in statu quo. All that as yet can fairly be
said to be known is, that ‘Pure gold can be made at will, and
very readily from lead in connection with certain other
substances, in kind and in proportions, unknown.’
Speculation, of course, is busy as to the immediate and ultimate
results of this discovery—a discovery which few thinking persons
will hesitate in referring to an increased interest in the matter
of gold generally, by the late developments in California; and
this reflection brings us inevitably to another—the exceeding
inopportuneness of Von Kempelen’s analysis. If many were
prevented from adventuring to California, by the mere
apprehension that gold would so materially diminish in value, on
account of its plentifulness in the mines there, as to render the
speculation of going so far in search of it a doubtful one—what
impression will be wrought now, upon the minds of those about to
emigrate, and especially upon the minds of those actually in the
mineral region, by the announcement of this astounding discovery
of Von Kempelen? a discovery which declares, in so many words,
that beyond its intrinsic worth for manufacturing purposes
(whatever that worth may be), gold now is, or at least soon will
be (for it cannot be supposed that Von Kempelen can long retain
his secret), of no greater value than lead, and of far inferior
value to silver. It is, indeed, exceedingly difficult to
speculate prospectively upon the consequences of the discovery,
but one thing may be positively maintained—that the announcement
of the discovery six months ago would have had material influence
in regard to the settlement of California.
In Europe, as yet, the most noticeable results have been a rise
of two hundred per cent. in the price of lead, and nearly
twenty-five per cent. that of silver.
MESMERIC REVELATION
Whatever doubt may still envelop the _rationale_ of mesmerism, its
startling _facts_ are now almost universally admitted. Of these latter,
those who doubt, are your mere doubters by profession—an unprofitable
and disreputable tribe. There can be no more absolute waste of time
than the attempt to _prove_, at the present day, that man, by mere
exercise of will, can so impress his fellow, as to cast him into an
abnormal condition, of which the phenomena resemble very closely those
of _death_, or at least resemble them more nearly than they do the
phenomena of any other normal condition within our cognizance; that,
while in this state, the person so impressed employs only with effort,
and then feebly, the external organs of sense, yet perceives, with
keenly refined perception, and through channels supposed unknown,
matters beyond the scope of the physical organs; that, moreover, his
intellectual faculties are wonderfully exalted and invigorated; that
his sympathies with the person so impressing him are profound; and,
finally, that his susceptibility to the impression increases with its
frequency, while, in the same proportion, the peculiar phenomena
elicited are more extended and more _pronounced_.
I say that these—which are the laws of mesmerism in its general
features—it would be supererogation to demonstrate; nor shall I inflict
upon my readers so needless a demonstration; to-day. My purpose at
present is a very different one indeed. I am impelled, even in the
teeth of a world of prejudice, to detail without comment the very
remarkable substance of a colloquy, occurring between a sleep-waker and
myself.
I had been long in the habit of mesmerizing the person in question (Mr.
Vankirk), and the usual acute susceptibility and exaltation of the
mesmeric perception had supervened. For many months he had been
laboring under confirmed phthisis, the more distressing effects of
which had been relieved by my manipulations; and on the night of
Wednesday, the fifteenth instant, I was summoned to his bedside.
The invalid was suffering with acute pain in the region of the heart,
and breathed with great difficulty, having all the ordinary symptoms of
asthma. In spasms such as these he had usually found relief from the
application of mustard to the nervous centres, but to-night this had
been attempted in vain.
As I entered his room he greeted me with a cheerful smile, and although
evidently in much bodily pain, appeared to be, mentally, quite at ease.
“I sent for you to-night,” he said, “not so much to administer to my
bodily ailment, as to satisfy me concerning certain psychal impressions
which, of late, have occasioned me much anxiety and surprise. I need
not tell you how sceptical I have hitherto been on the topic of the
soul’s immortality. I cannot deny that there has always existed, as if
in that very soul which I have been denying, a vague half-sentiment of
its own existence. But this half-sentiment at no time amounted to
conviction. With it my reason had nothing to do. All attempts at
logical inquiry resulted, indeed, in leaving me more sceptical than
before. I had been advised to study Cousin. I studied him in his own
works as well as in those of his European and American echoes. The
‘Charles Elwood’ of Mr. Brownson, for example, was placed in my hands.
I read it with profound attention. Throughout I found it logical, but
the portions which were not _merely_ logical were unhappily the initial
arguments of the disbelieving hero of the book. In his summing up it
seemed evident to me that the reasoner had not even succeeded in
convincing himself. His end had plainly forgotten his beginning, like
the government of Trinculo. In short, I was not long in perceiving that
if man is to be intellectually convinced of his own immortality, he
will never be so convinced by the mere abstractions which have been so
long the fashion of the moralists of England, of France, and of
Germany. Abstractions may amuse and exercise, but take no hold on the
mind. Here upon earth, at least, philosophy, I am persuaded, will
always in vain call upon us to look upon qualities as things. The will
may assent—the soul—the intellect, never.
“I repeat, then, that I only half felt, and never intellectually
believed. But latterly there has been a certain deepening of the
feeling, until it has come so nearly to resemble the acquiescence of
reason, that I find it difficult to distinguish between the two. I am
enabled, too, plainly to trace this effect to the mesmeric influence. I
cannot better explain my meaning than by the hypothesis that the
mesmeric exaltation enables me to perceive a train of ratiocination
which, in my abnormal existence, convinces, but which, in full
accordance with the mesmeric phenomena, does not extend, except through
its _effect_, into my normal condition. In sleep-waking, the reasoning
and its conclusion—the cause and its effect—are present together. In my
natural state, the cause vanishing, the effect only, and perhaps only
partially, remains.
“These considerations have led me to think that some good results might
ensue from a series of well-directed questions propounded to me while
mesmerized. You have often observed the profound self-cognizance
evinced by the sleep-waker—the extensive knowledge he displays upon all
points relating to the mesmeric condition itself; and from this
self-cognizance may be deduced hints for the proper conduct of a
catechism.”
I consented of course to make this experiment. A few passes threw Mr.
Vankirk into the mesmeric sleep. His breathing became immediately more
easy, and he seemed to suffer no physical uneasiness. The following
conversation then ensued:—V. in the dialogue representing the patient,
and P. myself.
_P._ Are you asleep?
_V._ Yes—no; I would rather sleep more soundly.
_P._ [_After a few more passes._] Do you sleep now?
_V._ Yes.
_P._ How do you think your present illness will result?
_V._ [_After a long hesitation and speaking as if with effort_.]
I must die.
_P._ Does the idea of death afflict you?
_V._ [_Very quickly_.] No—no!
_P._ Are you pleased with the prospect?
_V._ If I were awake I should like to die, but now it is no
matter. The mesmeric condition is so near death as to content me.
_P._ I wish you would explain yourself, Mr. Vankirk.
_V._ I am willing to do so, but it requires more effort than I
feel able to make. You do not question me properly.
_P._ What then shall I ask?
_V._ You must begin at the beginning.
_P._ The beginning! But where is the beginning?
_V._ You know that the beginning is GOD. [_This was said in a
low, fluctuating tone, and with every sign of the most profound
veneration_.]
_P._ What then, is God?
_V._ [_Hesitating for many minutes._] I cannot tell.
_P._ Is not God spirit?
_V._ While I was awake I knew what you meant by “spirit,” but now
it seems only a word—such, for instance, as truth, beauty—a
quality, I mean.
_P._ Is not God immaterial?
_V._ There is no immateriality—it is a mere word. That which is
not matter, is not at all—unless qualities are things.
_P._ Is God, then, material?
_V._ No. [_This reply startled me very much._]
_P._ What, then, is he?
_V._ [_After a long pause, and mutteringly._] I see—but it is a
thing difficult to tell. [_Another long pause._] He is not
spirit, for he exists. Nor is he matter, as _you understand it_.
But there are _gradations_ of matter of which man knows nothing;
the grosser impelling the finer, the finer pervading the grosser.
The atmosphere, for example, impels the electric principle, while
the electric principle permeates the atmosphere. These gradations
of matter increase in rarity or fineness, until we arrive at a
matter _unparticled_—without particles—indivisible—_one;_ and
here the law of impulsion and permeation is modified. The
ultimate, or unparticled matter, not only permeates all things
but impels all things; and thus _is_ all things within itself.
This matter is God. What men attempt to embody in the word
“thought,” is this matter in motion.
_P._ The metaphysicians maintain that all action is reducible to
motion and thinking, and that the latter is the origin of the
former.
_V._ Yes; and I now see the confusion of idea. Motion is the
action of _mind_, not of _thinking_. The unparticled matter, or
God, in quiescence, is (as nearly as we can conceive it) what men
call mind. And the power of self-movement (equivalent in effect
to human volition) is, in the unparticled matter, the result of
its unity and omniprevalence; _how_ I know not, and now clearly
see that I shall never know. But the unparticled matter, set in
motion by a law, or quality, existing within itself, is thinking.
_P._ Can you give me no more precise idea of what you term the
unparticled matter?
_V._ The matters of which man is cognizant escape the senses in
gradation. We have, for example, a metal, a piece of wood, a drop
of water, the atmosphere, a gas, caloric, electricity, the
luminiferous ether. Now we call all these things matter, and
embrace all matter in one general definition; but in spite of
this, there can be no two ideas more essentially distinct than
that which we attach to a metal, and that which we attach to the
luminiferous ether. When we reach the latter, we feel an almost
irresistible inclination to class it with spirit, or with
nihility. The only consideration which restrains us is our
conception of its atomic constitution; and here, even, we have to
seek aid from our notion of an atom, as something possessing in
infinite minuteness, solidity, palpability, weight. Destroy the
idea of the atomic constitution and we should no longer be able
to regard the ether as an entity, or at least as matter. For want
of a better word we might term it spirit. Take, now, a step
beyond the luminiferous ether—conceive a matter as much more rare
than the ether, as this ether is more rare than the metal, and we
arrive at once (in spite of all the school dogmas) at a unique
mass—an unparticled matter. For although we may admit infinite
littleness in the atoms themselves, the infinitude of littleness
in the spaces between them is an absurdity. There will be a
point—there will be a degree of rarity, at which, if the atoms
are sufficiently numerous, the interspaces must vanish, and the
mass absolutely coalesce. But the consideration of the atomic
constitution being now taken away, the nature of the mass
inevitably glides into what we conceive of spirit. It is clear,
however, that it is as fully matter as before. The truth is, it
is impossible to conceive spirit, since it is impossible to
imagine what is not. When we flatter ourselves that we have
formed its conception, we have merely deceived our understanding
by the consideration of infinitely rarified matter.
_P._ There seems to me an insurmountable objection to the idea of
absolute coalescence;—and that is the very slight resistance
experienced by the heavenly bodies in their revolutions through
space—a resistance now ascertained, it is true, to exist in
_some_ degree, but which is, nevertheless, so slight as to have
been quite overlooked by the sagacity even of Newton. We know
that the resistance of bodies is, chiefly, in proportion to their
density. Absolute coalescence is absolute density. Where there
are no interspaces, there can be no yielding. An ether,
absolutely dense, would put an infinitely more effectual stop to
the progress of a star than would an ether of adamant or of iron.
_V._ Your objection is answered with an ease which is nearly in
the ratio of its apparent unanswerability.—As regards the
progress of the star, it can make no difference whether the star
passes through the ether _or the ether through it_. There is no
astronomical error more unaccountable than that which reconciles
the known retardation of the comets with the idea of their
passage through an ether: for, however rare this ether be
supposed, it would put a stop to all sidereal revolution in a
very far briefer period than has been admitted by those
astronomers who have endeavored to slur over a point which they
found it impossible to comprehend. The retardation actually
experienced is, on the other hand, about that which might be
expected from the _friction_ of the ether in the instantaneous
passage through the orb. In the one case, the retarding force is
momentary and complete within itself—in the other it is endlessly
accumulative.
_P._ But in all this—in this identification of mere matter with
God—is there nothing of irreverence? [_I was forced to repeat
this question before the sleep-waker fully comprehended my
meaning_.]
_V._ Can you say _why_ matter should be less reverenced than
mind? But you forget that the matter of which I speak is, in all
respects, the very “mind” or “spirit” of the schools, so far as
regards its high capacities, and is, moreover, the “matter” of
these schools at the same time. God, with all the powers
attributed to spirit, is but the perfection of matter.
_P._ You assert, then, that the unparticled matter, in motion, is
thought?
_V._ In general, this motion is the universal thought of the
universal mind. This thought creates. All created things are but
the thoughts of God.
_P._ You say, “in general.”
_V._ Yes. The universal mind is God. For new individualities,
_matter_ is necessary.
_P._ But you now speak of “mind” and “matter” as do the
metaphysicians.
_V._ Yes—to avoid confusion. When I say “mind,” I mean the
unparticled or ultimate matter; by “matter,” I intend all else.
_P._ You were saying that “for new individualities matter is
necessary.”
_V._ Yes; for mind, existing unincorporate, is merely God. To
create individual, thinking beings, it was necessary to incarnate
portions of the divine mind. Thus man is individualized. Divested
of corporate investiture, he were God. Now, the particular motion
of the incarnated portions of the unparticled matter is the
thought of man; as the motion of the whole is that of God.
_P._ You say that divested of the body man will be God?
_V._ [_After much hesitation._] I could not have said this; it is
an absurdity.
_P._ [_Referring to my notes._] You _did_ say that “divested of
corporate investiture man were God.”
_V._ And this is true. Man thus divested _would be_ God—would be
unindividualized. But he can never be thus divested—at least
never _will be_—else we must imagine an action of God returning
upon itself—a purposeless and futile action. Man is a creature.
Creatures are thoughts of God. It is the nature of thought to be
irrevocable.
_P._ I do not comprehend. You say that man will never put off the
body?
_V._ I say that he will never be bodiless.
_P._ Explain.
_V._ There are two bodies—the rudimental and the complete;
corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the
butterfly. What we call “death,” is but the painful
metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive,
preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate,
immortal. The ultimate life is the full design.
_P._ But of the worm’s metamorphosis we are palpably cognizant.
_V._ _We_, certainly—but not the worm. The matter of which our
rudimental body is composed, is within the ken of the organs of
that body; or, more distinctly, our rudimental organs are adapted
to the matter of which is formed the rudimental body; but not to
that of which the ultimate is composed. The ultimate body thus
escapes our rudimental senses, and we perceive only the shell
which falls, in decaying, from the inner form; not that inner
form itself; but this inner form, as well as the shell, is
appreciable by those who have already acquired the ultimate life.
_P._ You have often said that the mesmeric state very nearly
resembles death. How is this?
_V._ When I say that it resembles death, I mean that it resembles
the ultimate life; for when I am entranced the senses of my
rudimental life are in abeyance, and I perceive external things
directly, without organs, through a medium which I shall employ
in the ultimate, unorganized life.
_P._ Unorganized?
_V._ Yes; organs are contrivances by which the individual is
brought into sensible relation with particular classes and forms
of matter, to the exclusion of other classes and forms. The
organs of man are adapted to his rudimental condition, and to
that only; his ultimate condition, being unorganized, is of
unlimited comprehension in all points but one—the nature of the
volition of God—that is to say, the motion of the unparticled
matter. You will have a distinct idea of the ultimate body by
conceiving it to be entire brain. This it is _not_; but a
conception of this nature will bring you near a comprehension of
what it _is_. A luminous body imparts vibration to the
luminiferous ether. The vibrations generate similar ones within
the retina; these again communicate similar ones to the optic
nerve. The nerve conveys similar ones to the brain; the brain,
also, similar ones to the unparticled matter which permeates it.
The motion of this latter is thought, of which perception is the
first undulation. This is the mode by which the mind of the
rudimental life communicates with the external world; and this
external world is, to the rudimental life, limited, through the
idiosyncrasy of its organs. But in the ultimate, unorganized
life, the external world reaches the whole body, (which is of a
substance having affinity to brain, as I have said,) with no
other intervention than that of an infinitely rarer ether than
even the luminiferous; and to this ether—in unison with it—the
whole body vibrates, setting in motion the unparticled matter
which permeates it. It is to the absence of idiosyncratic organs,
therefore, that we must attribute the nearly unlimited perception
of the ultimate life. To rudimental beings, organs are the cages
necessary to confine them until fledged.
_P._ You speak of rudimental “beings.” Are there other rudimental
thinking beings than man?
_V._ The multitudinous conglomeration of rare matter into nebulæ,
planets, suns, and other bodies which are neither nebulæ, suns,
nor planets, is for the sole purpose of supplying _pabulum_ for
the idiosyncrasy of the organs of an infinity of rudimental
beings. But for the necessity of the rudimental, prior to the
ultimate life, there would have been no bodies such as these.
Each of these is tenanted by a distinct variety of organic,
rudimental, thinking creatures. In all, the organs vary with the
features of the place tenanted. At death, or metamorphosis, these
creatures, enjoying the ultimate life—immortality—and cognizant
of all secrets but _the one_, act all things and pass everywhere
by mere volition:—indwelling, not the stars, which to us seem the
sole palpabilities, and for the accommodation of which we blindly
deem space created—but that SPACE itself—that infinity of which
the truly substantive vastness swallows up the
star-shadows—blotting them out as non-entities from the
perception of the angels.
_P._ You say that “but for the _necessity_ of the rudimental
life” there would have been no stars. But why this necessity?
_V._ In the inorganic life, as well as in the inorganic matter
generally, there is nothing to impede the action of one simple
_unique_ law—the Divine Volition. With the view of producing
impediment, the organic life and matter, (complex, substantial,
and law-encumbered,) were contrived.
_P._ But again—why need this impediment have been produced?
_V._ The result of law inviolate is perfection—right—negative
happiness. The result of law violate is imperfection, wrong,
positive pain. Through the impediments afforded by the number,
complexity, and substantiality of the laws of organic life and
matter, the violation of law is rendered, to a certain extent,
practicable. Thus pain, which in the inorganic life is
impossible, is possible in the organic.
_P._ But to what good end is pain thus rendered possible?
_V._ All things are either good or bad by comparison. A
sufficient analysis will show that pleasure, in all cases, is but
the contrast of pain. _Positive_ pleasure is a mere idea. To be
happy at any one point we must have suffered at the same. Never
to suffer would have been never to have been blessed. But it has
been shown that, in the inorganic life, pain cannot be thus the
necessity for the organic. The pain of the primitive life of
Earth, is the sole basis of the bliss of the ultimate life in
Heaven.
_P._ Still, there is one of your expressions which I find it
impossible to comprehend—“the truly _substantive_ vastness of
infinity.”
_V._ This, probably, is because you have no sufficiently generic
conception of the term “_substance_” itself. We must not regard
it as a quality, but as a sentiment:—it is the perception, in
thinking beings, of the adaptation of matter to their
organization. There are many things on the Earth, which would be
nihility to the inhabitants of Venus—many things visible and
tangible in Venus, which we could not be brought to appreciate as
existing at all. But to the inorganic beings—to the angels—the
whole of the unparticled matter is substance—that is to say, the
whole of what we term “space” is to them the truest
substantiality;—the stars, meantime, through what we consider
their materiality, escaping the angelic sense, just in proportion
as the unparticled matter, through what we consider its
immateriality, eludes the organic.
As the sleep-waker pronounced these latter words, in a feeble
tone, I observed on his countenance a singular expression, which
somewhat alarmed me, and induced me to awake him at once. No
sooner had I done this, than, with a bright smile irradiating all
his features, he fell back upon his pillow and expired. I noticed
that in less than a minute afterward his corpse had all the stern
rigidity of stone. His brow was of the coldness of ice. Thus,
ordinarily, should it have appeared, only after long pressure
from Azrael’s hand. Had the sleep-waker, indeed, during the
latter portion of his discourse, been addressing me from out the
region of the shadows?
THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF M. VALDEMAR
Of course I shall not pretend to consider it any matter for
wonder, that the extraordinary case of M. Valdemar has excited
discussion. It would have been a miracle had it not—especially
under the circumstances. Through the desire of all parties
concerned, to keep the affair from the public, at least for the
present, or until we had farther opportunities for
investigation—through our endeavors to effect this—a garbled or
exaggerated account made its way into society, and became the
source of many unpleasant misrepresentations; and, very
naturally, of a great deal of disbelief.
It is now rendered necessary that I give the facts—as far as I
comprehend them myself. They are, succinctly, these:
My attention, for the last three years, had been repeatedly drawn
to the subject of Mesmerism; and, about nine months ago it
occurred to me, quite suddenly, that in the series of experiments
made hitherto, there had been a very remarkable and most
unaccountable omission:—no person had as yet been mesmerized in
articulo mortis. It remained to be seen, first, whether, in such
condition, there existed in the patient any susceptibility to the
magnetic influence; secondly, whether, if any existed, it was
impaired or increased by the condition; thirdly, to what extent,
or for how long a period, the encroachments of Death might be
arrested by the process. There were other points to be
ascertained, but these most excited my curiosity—the last in
especial, from the immensely important character of its
consequences.
In looking around me for some subject by whose means I might test
these particulars, I was brought to think of my friend, M. Ernest
Valdemar, the well-known compiler of the “Bibliotheca Forensica,”
and author (under the nom de plume of Issachar Marx) of the
Polish versions of “Wallenstein” and “Gargantua.” M. Valdemar,
who has resided principally at Harlem, N.Y., since the year 1839,
is (or was) particularly noticeable for the extreme spareness of
his person—his lower limbs much resembling those of John
Randolph; and, also, for the whiteness of his whiskers, in
violent contrast to the blackness of his hair—the latter, in
consequence, being very generally mistaken for a wig. His
temperament was markedly nervous, and rendered him a good subject
for mesmeric experiment. On two or three occasions I had put him
to sleep with little difficulty, but was disappointed in other
results which his peculiar constitution had naturally led me to
anticipate. His will was at no period positively, or thoroughly,
under my control, and in regard to clairvoyance, I could
accomplish with him nothing to be relied upon. I always
attributed my failure at these points to the disordered state of
his health. For some months previous to my becoming acquainted
with him, his physicians had declared him in a confirmed
phthisis. It was his custom, indeed, to speak calmly of his
approaching dissolution, as of a matter neither to be avoided nor
regretted.
When the ideas to which I have alluded first occurred to me, it
was of course very natural that I should think of M. Valdemar. I
knew the steady philosophy of the man too well to apprehend any
scruples from him; and he had no relatives in America who would
be likely to interfere. I spoke to him frankly upon the subject;
and, to my surprise, his interest seemed vividly excited. I say
to my surprise, for, although he had always yielded his person
freely to my experiments, he had never before given me any tokens
of sympathy with what I did. His disease was of that character
which would admit of exact calculation in respect to the epoch of
its termination in death; and it was finally arranged between us
that he would send for me about twenty-four hours before the
period announced by his physicians as that of his decease.
It is now rather more than seven months since I received, from M.
Valdemar himself, the subjoined note:
MY DEAR P——,
You may as well come now. D—— and F—— are agreed that I cannot
hold out beyond to-morrow midnight; and I think they have hit the
time very nearly.
VALDEMAR
I received this note within half an hour after it was written,
and in fifteen minutes more I was in the dying man’s chamber. I
had not seen him for ten days, and was appalled by the fearful
alteration which the brief interval had wrought in him. His face
wore a leaden hue; the eyes were utterly lustreless; and the
emaciation was so extreme that the skin had been broken through
by the cheek-bones. His expectoration was excessive. The pulse
was barely perceptible. He retained, nevertheless, in a very
remarkable manner, both his mental power and a certain degree of
physical strength. He spoke with distinctness—took some
palliative medicines without aid—and, when I entered the room,
was occupied in penciling memoranda in a pocket-book. He was
propped up in the bed by pillows. Doctors D—— and F—— were in
attendance.
After pressing Valdemar’s hand, I took these gentlemen aside, and
obtained from them a minute account of the patient’s condition.
The left lung had been for eighteen months in a semi-osseous or
cartilaginous state, and was, of course, entirely useless for all
purposes of vitality. The right, in its upper portion, was also
partially, if not thoroughly, ossified, while the lower region
was merely a mass of purulent tubercles, running one into
another. Several extensive perforations existed; and, at one
point, permanent adhesion to the ribs had taken place. These
appearances in the right lobe were of comparatively recent date.
The ossification had proceeded with very unusual rapidity; no
sign of it had been discovered a month before, and the adhesion
had only been observed during the three previous days.
Independently of the phthisis, the patient was suspected of
aneurism of the aorta; but on this point the osseous symptoms
rendered an exact diagnosis impossible. It was the opinion of
both physicians that M. Valdemar would die about midnight on the
morrow (Sunday). It was then seven o’clock on Saturday evening.
On quitting the invalid’s bed-side to hold conversation with
myself, Doctors D—— and F—— had bidden him a final farewell. It
had not been their intention to return; but, at my request, they
agreed to look in upon the patient about ten the next night.
When they had gone, I spoke freely with M. Valdemar on the
subject of his approaching dissolution, as well as, more
particularly, of the experiment proposed. He still professed
himself quite willing and even anxious to have it made, and urged
me to commence it at once. A male and a female nurse were in
attendance; but I did not feel myself altogether at liberty to
engage in a task of this character with no more reliable
witnesses than these people, in case of sudden accident, might
prove. I therefore postponed operations until about eight the
next night, when the arrival of a medical student with whom I had
some acquaintance, (Mr. Theodore L—l,) relieved me from farther
embarrassment. It had been my design, originally, to wait for the
physicians; but I was induced to proceed, first, by the urgent
entreaties of M. Valdemar, and secondly, by my conviction that I
had not a moment to lose, as he was evidently sinking fast.
Mr. L—l was so kind as to accede to my desire that he would take
notes of all that occurred, and it is from his memoranda that
what I now have to relate is, for the most part, either condensed
or copied verbatim.
It wanted about five minutes of eight when, taking the patient’s
hand, I begged him to state, as distinctly as he could, to Mr.
L—l, whether he (M. Valdemar) was entirely willing that I should
make the experiment of mesmerizing him in his then condition.
He replied feebly, yet quite audibly, “Yes, I wish to be. I fear
you have mesmerized”—adding immediately afterwards: “I fear you
have deferred it too long.”
While he spoke thus, I commenced the passes which I had already
found most effectual in subduing him. He was evidently influenced
with the first lateral stroke of my hand across his forehead; but
although I exerted all my powers, no further perceptible effect
was induced until some minutes after ten o’clock, when Doctors
D—— and F—— called, according to appointment. I explained to
them, in a few words, what I designed, and as they opposed no
objection, saying that the patient was already in the death
agony, I proceeded without hesitation—exchanging, however, the
lateral passes for downward ones, and directing my gaze entirely
into the right eye of the sufferer.
By this time his pulse was imperceptible and his breathing was
stertorous, and at intervals of half a minute.
This condition was nearly unaltered for a quarter of an hour. At
the expiration of this period, however, a natural although a very
deep sigh escaped the bosom of the dying man, and the stertorous
breathing ceased—that is to say, its stertorousness was no longer
apparent; the intervals were undiminished. The patient’s
extremities were of an icy coldness.
At five minutes before eleven I perceived unequivocal signs of
the mesmeric influence. The glassy roll of the eye was changed
for that expression of uneasy inward examination which is never
seen except in cases of sleep-waking, and which it is quite
impossible to mistake. With a few rapid lateral passes I made the
lids quiver, as in incipient sleep, and with a few more I closed
them altogether. I was not satisfied, however, with this, but
continued the manipulations vigorously, and with the fullest
exertion of the will, until I had completely stiffened the limbs
of the slumberer, after placing them in a seemingly easy
position. The legs were at full length; the arms were nearly so,
and reposed on the bed at a moderate distance from the loin. The
head was very slightly elevated.
When I had accomplished this, it was fully midnight, and I
requested the gentlemen present to examine M. Valdemar’s
condition. After a few experiments, they admitted him to be an
unusually perfect state of mesmeric trance. The curiosity of both
the physicians was greatly excited. Dr. D—— resolved at once to
remain with the patient all night, while Dr. F—— took leave with
a promise to return at daybreak. Mr. L—l and the nurses remained.
We left M. Valdemar entirely undisturbed until about three
o’clock in the morning, when I approached him and found him in
precisely the same condition as when Dr. F—— went away—that is to
say, he lay in the same position; the pulse was imperceptible;
the breathing was gentle (scarcely noticeable, unless through the
application of a mirror to the lips); the eyes were closed
naturally; and the limbs were as rigid and as cold as marble.
Still, the general appearance was certainly not that of death.
As I approached M. Valdemar I made a kind of half effort to
influence his right arm into pursuit of my own, as I passed the
latter gently to and fro above his person. In such experiments
with this patient, I had never perfectly succeeded before, and
assuredly I had little thought of succeeding now; but to my
astonishment, his arm very readily, although feebly, followed
every direction I assigned it with mine. I determined to hazard a
few words of conversation.
“M. Valdemar,” I said, “are you asleep?” He made no answer, but I
perceived a tremor about the lips, and was thus induced to repeat
the question, again and again. At its third repetition, his whole
frame was agitated by a very slight shivering; the eyelids
unclosed themselves so far as to display a white line of the
ball; the lips moved sluggishly, and from between them, in a
barely audible whisper, issued the words:
“Yes;—asleep now. Do not wake me!—let me die so!”
I here felt the limbs and found them as rigid as ever. The right
arm, as before, obeyed the direction of my hand. I questioned the
sleep-waker again:
“Do you still feel pain in the breast, M. Valdemar?”
The answer now was immediate, but even less audible than before:
“No pain—I am dying.”
I did not think it advisable to disturb him farther just then,
and nothing more was said or done until the arrival of Dr. F——,
who came a little before sunrise, and expressed unbounded
astonishment at finding the patient still alive. After feeling
the pulse and applying a mirror to the lips, he requested me to
speak to the sleep-waker again. I did so, saying:
“M. Valdemar, do you still sleep?”
As before, some minutes elapsed ere a reply was made; and during
the interval the dying man seemed to be collecting his energies
to speak. At my fourth repetition of the question, he said very
faintly, almost inaudibly:
“Yes; still asleep—dying.”
It was now the opinion, or rather the wish, of the physicians,
that M. Valdemar should be suffered to remain undisturbed in his
present apparently tranquil condition, until death should
supervene—and this, it was generally agreed, must now take place
within a few minutes. I concluded, however, to speak to him once
more, and merely repeated my previous question.
While I spoke, there came a marked change over the countenance of
the sleep-waker. The eyes rolled themselves slowly open, the
pupils disappearing upwardly; the skin generally assumed a
cadaverous hue, resembling not so much parchment as white paper;
and the circular hectic spots which, hitherto, had been strongly
defined in the centre of each cheek, went out at once. I use this
expression, because the suddenness of their departure put me in
mind of nothing so much as the extinguishment of a candle by a
puff of the breath. The upper lip, at the same time, writhed
itself away from the teeth, which it had previously covered
completely; while the lower jaw fell with an audible jerk,
leaving the mouth widely extended, and disclosing in full view
the swollen and blackened tongue. I presume that no member of the
party then present had been unaccustomed to death-bed horrors;
but so hideous beyond conception was the appearance of M.
Valdemar at this moment, that there was a general shrinking back
from the region of the bed.
I now feel that I have reached a point of this narrative at which
every reader will be startled into positive disbelief. It is my
business, however, simply to proceed.
There was no longer the faintest sign of vitality in M. Valdemar;
and concluding him to be dead, we were consigning him to the
charge of the nurses, when a strong vibratory motion was
observable in the tongue. This continued for perhaps a minute. At
the expiration of this period, there issued from the distended
and motionless jaws a voice—such as it would be madness in me to
attempt describing. There are, indeed, two or three epithets
which might be considered as applicable to it in part; I might
say, for example, that the sound was harsh, and broken and
hollow; but the hideous whole is indescribable, for the simple
reason that no similar sounds have ever jarred upon the ear of
humanity. There were two particulars, nevertheless, which I
thought then, and still think, might fairly be stated as
characteristic of the intonation—as well adapted to convey some
idea of its unearthly peculiarity. In the first place, the voice
seemed to reach our ears—at least mine—from a vast distance, or
from some deep cavern within the earth. In the second place, it
impressed me (I fear, indeed, that it will be impossible to make
myself comprehended) as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress
the sense of touch.
I have spoken both of “sound” and of “voice.” I mean to say that
the sound was one of distinct—of even wonderfully, thrillingly
distinct—syllabification. M. Valdemar spoke—obviously in reply to
the question I had propounded to him a few minutes before. I had
asked him, it will be remembered, if he still slept. He now said:
“Yes;—no;—I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead.”
No person present even affected to deny, or attempted to repress,
the unutterable, shuddering horror which these few words, thus
uttered, were so well calculated to convey. Mr. L—l (the student)
swooned. The nurses immediately left the chamber, and could not
be induced to return. My own impressions I would not pretend to
render intelligible to the reader. For nearly an hour, we busied
ourselves, silently—without the utterance of a word—in endeavors
to revive Mr. L—l. When he came to himself, we addressed
ourselves again to an investigation of M. Valdemar’s condition.
It remained in all respects as I have last described it, with the
exception that the mirror no longer afforded evidence of
respiration. An attempt to draw blood from the arm failed. I
should mention, too, that this limb was no farther subject to my
will. I endeavored in vain to make it follow the direction of my
hand. The only real indication, indeed, of the mesmeric
influence, was now found in the vibratory movement of the tongue,
whenever I addressed M. Valdemar a question. He seemed to be
making an effort to reply, but had no longer sufficient volition.
To queries put to him by any other person than myself he seemed
utterly insensible—although I endeavored to place each member of
the company in mesmeric rapport with him. I believe that I have
now related all that is necessary to an understanding of the
sleep-waker’s state at this epoch. Other nurses were procured;
and at ten o’clock I left the house in company with the two
physicians and Mr. L—l.
In the afternoon we all called again to see the patient. His
condition remained precisely the same. We had now some discussion
as to the propriety and feasibility of awakening him; but we had
little difficulty in agreeing that no good purpose would be
served by so doing. It was evident that, so far, death (or what
is usually termed death) had been arrested by the mesmeric
process. It seemed clear to us all that to awaken M. Valdemar
would be merely to insure his instant, or at least his speedy,
dissolution.
From this period until the close of last week—an interval of
nearly seven months—we continued to make daily calls at M.
Valdemar’s house, accompanied, now and then, by medical and other
friends. All this time the sleeper-waker remained _exactly_ as I
have last described him. The nurses’ attentions were continual.
It was on Friday last that we finally resolved to make the
experiment of awakening, or attempting to awaken him; and it is
the (perhaps) unfortunate result of this latter experiment which
has given rise to so much discussion in private circles—to so
much of what I cannot help thinking unwarranted popular feeling.
For the purpose of relieving M. Valdemar from the mesmeric
trance, I made use of the customary passes. These, for a time,
were unsuccessful. The first indication of revival was afforded
by a partial descent of the iris. It was observed, as especially
remarkable, that this lowering of the pupil was accompanied by
the profuse out-flowing of a yellowish ichor (from beneath the
lids) of a pungent and highly offensive odor.
It was now suggested that I should attempt to influence the
patient’s arm, as heretofore. I made the attempt and failed. Dr.
F—— then intimated a desire to have me put a question. I did so,
as follows:
“M. Valdemar, can you explain to us what are your feelings or
wishes now?”
There was an instant return of the hectic circles on the cheeks;
the tongue quivered, or rather rolled violently in the mouth
(although the jaws and lips remained rigid as before), and at
length the same hideous voice which I have already described,
broke forth:
“For God’s sake!—quick!—quick!—put me to sleep—or, quick!—waken
me!—quick!—I say to you that I am dead!”
I was thoroughly unnerved, and for an instant remained undecided
what to do. At first I made an endeavor to recompose the patient;
but, failing in this through total abeyance of the will, I
retraced my steps and as earnestly struggled to awaken him. In
this attempt I soon saw that I should be successful—or at least I
soon fancied that my success would be complete—and I am sure that
all in the room were prepared to see the patient awaken.
For what really occurred, however, it is quite impossible that
any human being could have been prepared.
As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of
“dead! dead!” absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from
the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once—within the
space of a single minute, or even less,
shrunk—crumbled—absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the
bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of
loathsome—of detestable putrescence.
THE BLACK CAT.
For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to
pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be
to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own
evidence. Yet, mad am I not—and very surely do I not dream. But
to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul. My
immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly,
succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household
events. In their consequences, these events have terrified—have
tortured—have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound
them. To me, they have presented little but horror—to many they
will seem less terrible than _barroques_. Hereafter, perhaps,
some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the
common-place—some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less
excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances
I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of
very natural causes and effects.
From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my
disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to
make me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond of
animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of
pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy
as when feeding and caressing them. This peculiarity of character
grew with my growth, and in my manhood, I derived from it one of
my principal sources of pleasure. To those who have cherished an
affection for a faithful and sagacious dog, I need hardly be at
the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the
gratification thus derivable. There is something in the unselfish
and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the
heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry
friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere _Man_.
I married early, and was happy to find in my wife a disposition
not uncongenial with my own. Observing my partiality for domestic
pets, she lost no opportunity of procuring those of the most
agreeable kind. We had birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a
small monkey, and _a cat_.
This latter was a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely
black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree. In speaking of his
intelligence, my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured
with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular
notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise. Not
that she was ever _serious_ upon this point—and I mention the
matter at all for no better reason than that it happens, just
now, to be remembered.
Pluto—this was the cat’s name—was my favorite pet and playmate. I
alone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about the
house. It was even with difficulty that I could prevent him from
following me through the streets.
Our friendship lasted, in this manner, for several years, during
which my general temperament and character—through the
instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance—had (I blush to confess
it) experienced a radical alteration for the worse. I grew, day
by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the
feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language
to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence. My
pets, of course, were made to feel the change in my disposition.
I not only neglected, but ill-used them. For Pluto, however, I
still retained sufficient regard to restrain me from maltreating
him, as I made no scruple of maltreating the rabbits, the monkey,
or even the dog, when by accident, or through affection, they
came in my way. But my disease grew upon me—for what disease is
like Alcohol!—and at length even Pluto, who was now becoming old,
and consequently somewhat peevish—even Pluto began to experience
the effects of my ill temper.
One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my
haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I
seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a
slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon
instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul
seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body and a more than
fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my
frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it,
grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of
its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen
the damnable atrocity.
When reason returned with the morning—when I had slept off the
fumes of the night’s debauch—I experienced a sentiment half of
horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been
guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and
the soul remained untouched. I again plunged into excess, and
soon drowned in wine all memory of the deed.
In the meantime the cat slowly recovered. The socket of the lost
eye presented, it is true, a frightful appearance, but he no
longer appeared to suffer any pain. He went about the house as
usual, but, as might be expected, fled in extreme terror at my
approach. I had so much of my old heart left, as to be at first
grieved by this evident dislike on the part of a creature which
had once so loved me. But this feeling soon gave place to
irritation. And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable
overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy
takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than
I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the
human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or
sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has
not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly
action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?
Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best
judgment, to violate that which is _Law_, merely because we
understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say,
came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of
the soul _to vex itself_—to offer violence to its own nature—to
do wrong for the wrong’s sake only—that urged me to continue and
finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the
unoffending brute. One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose
about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree;—hung it with
the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse
at my heart;—hung it _because_ I knew that it had loved me, and
_because_ I felt it had given me no reason of offence;—hung it
_because_ I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin—a deadly
sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it—if
such a thing were possible—even beyond the reach of the infinite
mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.
On the night of the day on which this cruel deed was done, I was
aroused from sleep by the cry of fire. The curtains of my bed
were in flames. The whole house was blazing. It was with great
difficulty that my wife, a servant, and myself, made our escape
from the conflagration. The destruction was complete. My entire
worldly wealth was swallowed up, and I resigned myself
thenceforward to despair.
I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of
cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity. But I am
detailing a chain of facts—and wish not to leave even a possible
link imperfect. On the day succeeding the fire, I visited the
ruins. The walls, with one exception, had fallen in. This
exception was found in a compartment wall, not very thick, which
stood about the middle of the house, and against which had rested
the head of my bed. The plastering had here, in great measure,
resisted the action of the fire—a fact which I attributed to its
having been recently spread. About this wall a dense crowd were
collected, and many persons seemed to be examining a particular
portion of it with very minute and eager attention. The words
“strange!” “singular!” and other similar expressions, excited my
curiosity. I approached and saw, as if graven in _bas relief_
upon the white surface, the figure of a gigantic _cat_. The
impression was given with an accuracy truly marvellous. There was
a rope about the animal’s neck.
When I first beheld this apparition—for I could scarcely regard
it as less—my wonder and my terror were extreme. But at length
reflection came to my aid. The cat, I remembered, had been hung
in a garden adjacent to the house. Upon the alarm of fire, this
garden had been immediately filled by the crowd—by some one of
whom the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown,
through an open window, into my chamber. This had probably been
done with the view of arousing me from sleep. The falling of
other walls had compressed the victim of my cruelty into the
substance of the freshly-spread plaster; the lime of which, with
the flames, and the _ammonia_ from the carcass, had then
accomplished the portraiture as I saw it.
Although I thus readily accounted to my reason, if not altogether
to my conscience, for the startling fact just detailed, it did
not the less fail to make a deep impression upon my fancy. For
months I could not rid myself of the phantasm of the cat; and,
during this period, there came back into my spirit a
half-sentiment that seemed, but was not, remorse. I went so far
as to regret the loss of the animal, and to look about me, among
the vile haunts which I now habitually frequented, for another
pet of the same species, and of somewhat similar appearance, with
which to supply its place.
One night as I sat, half stupefied, in a den of more than infamy,
my attention was suddenly drawn to some black object, reposing
upon the head of one of the immense hogsheads of gin, or of rum,
which constituted the chief furniture of the apartment. I had
been looking steadily at the top of this hogshead for some
minutes, and what now caused me surprise was the fact that I had
not sooner perceived the object thereupon. I approached it, and
touched it with my hand. It was a black cat—a very large
one—fully as large as Pluto, and closely resembling him in every
respect but one. Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of
his body; but this cat had a large, although indefinite splotch
of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast. Upon my
touching him, he immediately arose, purred loudly, rubbed against
my hand, and appeared delighted with my notice. This, then, was
the very creature of which I was in search. I at once offered to
purchase it of the landlord; but this person made no claim to
it—knew nothing of it—had never seen it before.
I continued my caresses, and, when I prepared to go home, the
animal evinced a disposition to accompany me. I permitted it to
do so; occasionally stooping and patting it as I proceeded. When
it reached the house it domesticated itself at once, and became
immediately a great favorite with my wife.
For my own part, I soon found a dislike to it arising within me.
This was just the reverse of what I had anticipated; but—I know
not how or why it was—its evident fondness for myself rather
disgusted and annoyed. By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust
and annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred. I avoided the
creature; a certain sense of shame, and the remembrance of my
former deed of cruelty, preventing me from physically abusing it.
I did not, for some weeks, strike, or otherwise violently ill use
it; but gradually—very gradually—I came to look upon it with
unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odious
presence, as from the breath of a pestilence.
What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast, was the
discovery, on the morning after I brought it home, that, like
Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its eyes. This
circumstance, however, only end
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