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She entreated his protection, should Verezzi make this requisite; and Ludovico offered to pass the night in an old chamber, adjoining, that opened from the gallery, and, on the first alarm, to come to their defence. Emily was much soothed by this proposal; and Ludovico, having lighted his lamp, went to his station, while she, once more, endeavoured to repose on her mattress. But a variety of interests pressed upon her attention, and prevented sleep. She thought much on what Annette had told her of the dissolute manners of Montoni and his associates, and more of his present conduct towards herself, and of the danger, from which she had just escaped. From the view of her present situation she shrunk, as from a new picture of terror. She saw herself in a castle, inhabited by vice and violence, seated beyond the reach of law or justice, and in the power of a man, whose perseverance was equal to every occasion, and in whom passions, of which revenge was not the weakest, entirely supplied the place of principles. She was compelled, once more, to acknowledge, that it would be folly, and not fortitude, any longer to dare his power; and, resigning all hopes of future happiness with Valancourt, she determined, that, on the following morning, she would compromise with Montoni, and give up her estates, on condition, that he would permit her immediate return to France. Such considerations kept her waking for many hours; but, the night passed, without further alarm from Verezzi. On the next morning, Emily had a long conversation with Ludovico, in which she heard circumstances concerning the castle, and received hints of the designs of Montoni, that considerably increased her alarms. On expressing her surprise, that Ludovico, who seemed to be so sensible of the evils of his situation, should continue in it, he informed her, that it was not his intention to do so, and she then ventured to ask him, if he would assist her to escape from the castle. Ludovico assured her of his readiness to attempt this, but strongly represented the difficulty of the enterprise, and the certain destruction which must ensue, should Montoni overtake them, before they had passed the mountains; he, however, promised to be watchful of every circumstance, that might contribute to the success of the attempt, and to think upon some plan of departure. Emily now confided to him the name of Valancourt, and begged he would enquire for such a person among the prisoners in the castle; for the faint hope, which this conversation awakened, made her now recede from her resolution of an immediate compromise with Montoni. She determined, if possible, to delay this, till she heard further from Ludovico, and, if his designs were found to be impracticable, to resign the estates at once. Her thoughts were on this subject, when Montoni, who was now recovered from the intoxication of the preceding night, sent for her, and she immediately obeyed the summons. He was alone. 'I find,' said he, 'that you were not in your chamber, last night; where were you?' Emily related to him some circumstances of her alarm, and entreated his protection from a repetition of them. 'You know the terms of my protection,' said he; 'if you really value this, you will secure it.' His open declaration, that he would only conditionally protect her, while she remained a prisoner in the castle, shewed Emily the necessity of an immediate compliance with his terms; but she first demanded, whether he would permit her immediately to depart, if she gave up her claim to the contested estates. In a very solemn manner he then assured her, that he would, and immediately laid before her a paper, which was to transfer the right of those estates to himself. She was, for a considerable time, unable to sign it, and her heart was torn with contending interests, for she was about to resign the happiness of all her future yearsthe hope, which had sustained her in so many hours of adversity. After hearing from Montoni a recapitulation of the conditions of her compliance, and a remonstrance, that his time was valuable, she put her hand to the paper; when she had done which, she fell back in her chair, but soon recovered, and desired, that he would give orders for her departure, and that he would allow Annette to accompany her. Montoni smiled. 'It was necessary to deceive you,' said he,'there was no other way of making you act reasonably; you shall go, but it must not be at present. I must first secure these estates by possession when that is done, you may return to France if you will.' The deliberate villany, with which he violated the solemn engagement he had just entered into, shocked Emily as much, as the certainty, that she had made a fruitless sacrifice, and must still remain his prisoner. She had no words to express what she felt, and knew, that it would have been useless, if she had. As she looked piteously at Montoni, he turned away, and at the same time desired she would withdraw to her apartment; but, unable to leave the room, she sat down in a chair near the door, and sighed heavily. She had neither words nor tears. 'Why will you indulge this childish grief?' said he. 'Endeavour to strengthen your mind, to bear patiently what cannot now be avoided; you have no real evil to lament; be patient, and you will be sent back to France. At present retire to your apartment.' 'I dare not go, sir,' said she, 'where I shall be liable to the intrusion of Signor Verezzi.' 'Have I not promised to protect you?' said Montoni. 'You have promised, sir,'replied Emily, after some hesitation. 'And is not my promise sufficient?' added he sternly. 'You will recollect your former promise, Signor,' said Emily, trembling, 'and may determine for me, whether I ought to rely upon this.' 'Will you provoke me to declare to you, that I will not protect you then?' said Montoni, in a tone of haughty displeasure. 'If that will satisfy you, I will do it immediately. Withdraw to your chamber, before I retract my promise; you have nothing to fear there.' Emily left the room, and moved slowly into the hall, where the fear of meeting Verezzi, or Bertolini, made her quicken her steps, though she could scarcely support herself; and soon after she reached once more her own apartment. Having looked fearfully round her, to examine if any person was there, and having searched every part of it, she fastened the door, and sat down by one of the casements. Here, while she looked out for some hope to support her fainting spirits, which had been so long harassed and oppressed, that, if she had not now struggled much against misfortune, they would have left her, perhaps, for ever, she endeavoured to believe, that Montoni did really intend to permit her return to France as soon as he had secured her property, and that he would, in the mean time, protect her from insult; but her chief hope rested with Ludovico, who, she doubted not, would be zealous in her cause, though he seemed almost to despair of success in it. One circumstance, however, she had to rejoice in. Her prudence, or rather her fears, had saved her from mentioning the name of Valancourt to Montoni, which she was several times on the point of doing, before she signed the paper, and of stipulating for his release, if he should be really a prisoner in the castle. Had she done this, Montoni's jealous fears would now probably have loaded Valancourt with new severities, and have suggested the advantage of holding him a captive for life. Thus passed the melancholy day, as she had before passed many in this same chamber. When night drew on, she would have withdrawn herself to Annette's bed, had not a particular interest inclined her to remain in this chamber, in spite of her fears; for, when the castle should be still, and the customary hour arrived, she determined to watch for the music, which she had formerly heard. Though its sounds might not enable her positively to determine, whether Valancourt was there, they would perhaps strengthen her opinion that he was, and impart the comfort, so necessary to her present support.But, on the other hand, if all should be silent! She hardly dared to suffer her thoughts to glance that way, but waited, with impatient expectation, the approaching hour. The night was stormy; the battlements of the castle appeared to rock in the wind, and, at intervals, long groans seemed to pass on the air, such as those, which often deceive the melancholy mind, in tempests, and amidst scenes of desolation. Emily heard, as formerly, the sentinels pass along the terrace to their posts, and, looking out from her casement, observed, that the watch was doubled; a precaution, which appeared necessary enough, when she threw her eyes on the walls, and saw their shattered condition. The wellknown sounds of the soldiers' march, and of their distant voices, which passed her in the wind, and were lost again, recalled to her memory the melancholy sensation she had suffered, when she formerly heard the same sounds; and occasioned almost involuntary comparisons between her present, and her late situation. But this was no subject for congratulations, and she wisely checked the course of her thoughts, while, as the hour was not yet come, in which she had been accustomed to hear the music, she closed the casement, and endeavoured to await it in patience. The door of the staircase she tried to secure, as usual, with some of the furniture of the room; but this expedient her fears now represented to her to be very inadequate to the power and perseverance of Verezzi; and she often looked at a large and heavy chest, that stood in the chamber, with wishes that she and Annette had strength enough to move it. While she blamed the long stay of this girl, who was still with Ludovico and some other of the servants, she trimmed her wood fire, to make the room appear less desolate, and sat down beside it with a book, which her eyes perused, while her thoughts wandered to Valancourt, and her own misfortunes. As she sat thus, she thought, in a pause of the wind, she distinguished music, and went to the casement to listen, but the loud swell of the gust overcame every other sound. When the wind sunk again, she heard distinctly, in the deep pause that succeeded, the sweet strings of a lute; but again the rising tempest bore away the notes, and again was succeeded by a solemn pause. Emily, trembling with hope and fear, opened her casement to listen, and to try whether her own voice could be heard by the musician; for to endure any longer this state of torturing suspense concerning Valancourt, seemed to be utterly impossible. There was a kind of breathless stillness in the chambers, that permitted her to distinguish from below the tender notes of the very lute she had formerly heard, and with it, a plaintive voice, made sweeter by the low rustling sound, that now began to creep along the woodtops, till it was lost in the rising wind. Their tall heads then began to wave, while, through a forest of pine, on the left, the wind, groaning heavily, rolled onward over the woods below, bending them almost to their roots; and, as the longresounding gale swept away, other woods, on the right, seemed to answer the 'loud lament;' then, others, further still, softened it into a murmur, that died into silence. Emily listened, with mingled awe and expectation, hope and fear; and again the melting sweetness of the lute was heard, and the same solemnbreathing voice. Convinced that these came from an apartment underneath, she leaned far out of her window, that she might discover whether any light was there; but the casements below, as well as those above, were sunk so deep in the thick walls of the castle, that she could not see them, or even the faint ray, that probably glimmered through their bars. She then ventured to call; but the wind bore her voice to the other end of the terrace, and then the music was heard as before, in the pause of the gust. Suddenly, she thought she heard a noise in her chamber, and she drew herself within the casement; but, in a moment after, distinguishing Annette's voice at the door, she concluded it was her she had heard before, and she let her in. 'Move softly, Annette, to the casement,' said she, 'and listen with me; the music is returned.' They were silent till, the measure changing, Annette exclaimed, 'Holy Virgin! I know that song well; it is a French song, one of the favourite songs of my dear country.' This was the ballad Emily had heard on a former night, though not the one she had first listened to from the fishinghouse in Gascony. 'O! it is a Frenchman, that sings,' said Annette 'it must be Monsieur Valancourt.' 'Hark! Annette, do not speak so loud,' said Emily, 'we may be overheard.' 'What! by the Chevalier?' said Annette. 'No,' replied Emily mournfully, 'but by somebody, who may report us to the Signor. What reason have you to think it is Monsieur Valancourt, who sings? But hark! now the voice swells louder! Do you recollect those tones? I fear to trust my own judgment.' 'I never happened to hear the Chevalier sing, Mademoiselle,' replied Annette, who, as Emily was disappointed to perceive, had no stronger reason for concluding this to be Valancourt, than that the musician must be a Frenchman. Soon after, she heard the song of the fishinghouse, and distinguished her own name, which was repeated so distinctly, that Annette had heard it also. She trembled, sunk into a chair by the window, and Annette called aloud, 'Monsieur Valancourt! Monsieur Valancourt!' while Emily endeavoured to check her, but she repeated the call more loudly than before, and the lute and the voice suddenly stopped. Emily listened, for some time, in a state of intolerable suspense; but, no answer being returned, 'It does not signify, Mademoiselle,' said Annette; 'it is the Chevalier, and I will speak to him.' 'No, Annette,' said Emily, 'I think I will speak myself; if it is he, he will know my voice, and speak again.' 'Who is it,' said she, 'that sings at this late hour?' A long silence ensued, and, having repeated the question, she perceived some faint accents, mingling in the blast, that swept by; but the sounds were so distant, and passed so suddenly, that she could scarcely hear them, much less distinguish the words they uttered, or recognise the voice. After another pause, Emily called again; and again they heard a voice, but as faintly as before; and they perceived, that there were other circumstances, besides the strength, and direction of the wind, to content with; for the great depth, at which the casements were fixed in the castle walls, contributed, still more than the distance, to prevent articulated sounds from being understood, though general ones were easily heard. Emily, however, ventured to believe, from the circumstance of her voice alone having been answered, that the stranger was Valancourt, as well as that he knew her, and she gave herself up to speechless joy. Annette, however, was not speechless.She renewed her calls, but received no answer; and Emily, fearing, that a further attempt, which certainly was, as present, highly dangerous, might expose them to the guards of the castle, while it could not perhaps terminate her suspense, insisted on Annette's dropping the enquiry for this night; though she determined herself to question Ludovico, on the subject, in the morning, more urgently than she had yet done. She was now enabled to say, that the stranger, whom she had formerly heard, was still in the castle, and to direct Ludovico to that part of it, in which he was confined. Emily, attended by Annette, continued at the casement, for some time, but all remained still; they heard neither lute or voice again, and Emily was now as much oppressed by anxious joy, as she lately was by a sense of her misfortunes. With hasty steps she paced the room, now half calling on Valancourt's name, then suddenly stopping, and now going to the casement and listening, where, however, she heard nothing but the solemn waving of the woods. Sometimes her impatience to speak to Ludovico prompted her to send Annette to call him; but a sense of the impropriety of this at midnight restrained her. Annette, meanwhile, as impatient as her mistress, went as often to the casement to listen, and returned almost as much disappointed. She, at length, mentioned Signor Verezzi, and her fear, lest he should enter the chamber by the staircase, door. 'But the night is now almost past, Mademoiselle,' said she, recollecting herself; 'there is the morning light, beginning to peep over those mountains yonder in the east.' Emily had forgotten, till this moment, that such a person existed as Verezzi, and all the danger that had appeared to threaten her; but the mention of his name renewed her alarm, and she remembered the old chest, that she had wished to place against the door, which she now, with Annette, attempted to move, but it was so heavy, that they could not lift it from the floor. 'What is in this great old chest, Mademoiselle,' said Annette, 'that makes it so weighty?' Emily having replied, 'that she found it in the chamber, when she first came to the castle, and had never examined it.''Then I will, ma'amselle,' said Annette, and she tried to lift the lid; but this was held by a lock, for which she had no key, and which, indeed, appeared, from its peculiar construction, to open with a spring. The morning now glimmered through the casements, and the wind had sunk into a calm. Emily looked out upon the dusky woods, and on the twilight mountains, just stealing in the eye, and saw the whole scene, after the storm, lying in profound stillness, the woods motionless, and the clouds above, through which the dawn trembled, scarcely appearing to move along the heavens. One soldier was pacing the terrace beneath, with measured steps; and two, more distant, were sunk asleep on the walls, wearied with the night's watch. Having inhaled, for a while, the pure spirit of the air, and of vegetation, which the late rains had called forth; and having listened, once more, for a note of music, she now closed the casement, and retired to rest. Chapter 9 Thus on the chill Lapponian's dreary land, For many a long month lost in snow profound, When Sol from Cancer sends the seasons bland, And in their northern cave the storms hath bound; From silent mountains, straight, with startling sound, Torrents are hurl'd, green hills emerge, and lo, The trees with foliage, cliffs with flow'rs are crown'd; Pure rills through vales of verdure warbling go; And wonder, love, and joy, the peasant's heart o'erflow. BEATTIE Several of her succeeding days passed in suspense, for Ludovico could only learn from the soldiers, that there was a prisoner in the apartment, described to him by Emily, and that he was a Frenchman, whom they had taken in one of their skirmishes, with a party of his countrymen. During this interval, Emily escaped the persecutions of Bertolini, and Verezzi, by confining herself to her apartment; except that sometimes, in an evening, she ventured to walk in the adjoining corridor. Montoni appeared to respect his last promise, though he had prophaned his first; for to his protection only could she attribute her present repose; and in this she was now so secure, that she did not wish to leave the castle, till she could obtain some certainty concerning Valancourt; for which she waited, indeed, without any sacrifice of her own comfort, since no circumstance had occurred to make her escape probable. On the fourth day, Ludovico informed her, that he had hopes of being admitted to the presence of the prisoner; it being the turn of a soldier, with whom he had been for some time familiar, to attend him on the following night. He was not deceived in his hope; for, under pretence of carrying in a pitcher of water, he entered the prison, though, his prudence having prevented him from telling the sentinel the real motive of his visit, he was obliged to make his conference with the prisoner a very short one. Emily awaited the result in her own apartment, Ludovico having promised to accompany Annette to the corridor, in the evening; where, after several hours impatiently counted, he arrived. Emily, having then uttered the name of Valancourt, could articulate no more, but hesitated in trembling expectation. 'The Chevalier would not entrust me with his name, Signora,' replied Ludovico; 'but, when I just mentioned yours, he seemed overwhelmed with joy, though he was not so much surprised as I expected.' 'Does he then remember me?' she exclaimed. 'O! it is Mons. Valancourt,' said Annette, and looked impatiently at Ludovico, who understood her look, and replied to Emily 'Yes, lady, the Chevalier does, indeed, remember you, and, I am sure, has a very great regard for you, and I made bold to say you had for him. He then enquired how you came to know he was in the castle, and whether you ordered me to speak to him. The first question I could not answer, but the second I did; and then he went off into his ecstasies again. I was afraid his joy would have betrayed him to the sentinel at the door.' 'But how does he look, Ludovico?' interrupted Emily 'is he not melancholy and ill with this long confinement?''Why, as to melancholy, I saw no symptom of that, lady, while I was with him, for he seemed in the finest spirits I ever saw any body in, in all my life. His countenance was all joy, and, if one may judge from that, he was very well; but I did not ask him.' 'Did he send me no message?' said Emily. 'O yes, Signora, and something besides,' replied Ludovico, who searched his pockets. 'Surely, I have not lost it,' added he. 'The Chevalier said, he would have written, madam, if he had had pen and ink, and was going to have sent a very long message, when the sentinel entered the room, but not before he had give me this.' Ludovico then drew forth a miniature from his bosom, which Emily received with a trembling hand, and perceived to be a portrait of herselfthe very picture, which her mother had lost so strangely in the fishinghouse at La Vallee. Tears of mingled joy and tenderness flowed to her eyes, while Ludovico proceeded'"Tell your lady," said the Chevalier, as he gave me the picture, "that this has been my companion, and only solace in all my misfortunes. Tell her, that I have worn it next my heart, and that I sent it her as the pledge of an affection, which can never die; that I would not part with it, but to her, for the wealth of worlds, and that I now part with it, only in the hope of soon receiving it from her hands. Tell her"Just then, Signora, the sentinel came in, and the Chevalier said no more; but he had before asked me to contrive an interview for him with you; and when I told him, how little hope I had of prevailing with the guard to assist me, he said, that was not, perhaps, of so much consequence as I imagined, and bade me contrive to bring back your answer, and he would inform me of more than he chose to do then. So this, I think, lady, is the whole of what passed.' 'How, Ludovico, shall I reward you for your zeal?' said Emily 'but, indeed, I do not now possess the means. When can you see the Chevalier again?' 'That is uncertain, Signora,' replied he. 'It depends upon who stands guard next there are not more than one or two among them, from whom I would dare to ask admittance to the prisonchamber.' 'I need not bid you remember, Ludovico,' resumed Emily, 'how very much interested I am in your seeing the Chevalier soon; and, when you do so, tell him, that I have received the picture, and, with the sentiments he wished. Tell him I have suffered much, and still suffer' She paused. 'But shall I tell him you will see him, lady?' said Ludovico. 'Most certainly I will,' replied Emily. 'But when, Signora, and where?' 'That must depend upon circumstances,' returned Emily. 'The place, and the hour, must be regulated by his opportunities.' 'As to the place, mademoiselle,' said Annette, 'there is no other place in the castle, besides this corridor, where WE can see him in safety, you know; and, as for the hour,it must be when all the Signors are asleep, if that ever happens!' 'You may mention these circumstances to the Chevalier, Ludovico,' said she, checking the flippancy of Annette, 'and leave them to his judgment and opportunity. Tell him, my heart is unchanged. But, above all, let him see you again as soon as possible; and, Ludovico, I think it is needless to tell you I shall very anxiously look for you.' Having then wished her good night, Ludovico descended the staircase, and Emily retired to rest, but not to sleep, for joy now rendered her as wakeful, as she had ever been from grief. Montoni and his castle had all vanished from her mind, like the frightful vision of a necromancer, and she wandered, once more, in fairy scenes of unfading happiness As when, beneath the beam Of summer moons, the distant woods among, Or by some flood, all silver'd with the gleam, The soft embodied Fays thro' airy portals stream. A week elapsed, before Ludovico again visited the prison; for the sentinels, during that period, were men, in whom he could not confide, and he feared to awaken curiosity, by asking to see their prisoner. In this interval, he communicated to Emily terrific reports of what was passing in the castle; of riots, quarrels, and of carousals more alarming than either; while from some circumstances, which he mentioned, she not only doubted, whether Montoni meant ever to release her, but greatly feared, that he had designs, concerning her,such as she had formerly dreaded. Her name was frequently mentioned in the conversations, which Bertolini and Verezzi held together, and, at those times, they were frequently in contention. Montoni had lost large sums to Verezzi, so that there was a dreadful possibility of his designing her to be a substitute for the debt; but, as she was ignorant, that he had formerly encouraged the hopes of Bertolini also, concerning herself, after the latter had done him some signal service, she knew not how to account for these contentions between Bertolini and Verezzi. The cause of them, however, appeared to be of little consequence, for she thought she saw destruction approaching in many forms, and her entreaties to Ludovico to contrive an escape and to see the prisoner again, were more urgent than ever. At length, he informed her, that he had again visited the Chevalier, who had directed him to confide in the guard of the prison, from whom he had already received some instances of kindness, and who had promised to permit his going into the castle for half an hour, on the ensuing night, when Montoni and his companions should be engaged at their carousals. 'This was kind, to be sure,' added Ludovico 'but Sebastian knows he runs no risque in letting the Chevalier out, for, if he can get beyond the bars and iron doors of the castle, he must be cunning indeed. But the Chevalier desired me, Signora, to go to you immediately, and to beg you would allow him to visit you, this night, if it was only for a moment, for that he could no longer live under the same roof, without seeing you; the hour, he said, he could not mention, for it must depend on circumstances (just as you said, Signora); and the place he desired you would appoint, as knowing which was best for your own safety.' Emily was now so much agitated by the near prospect of meeting Valancourt, that it was some time, before she could give any answer to Ludovico, or consider of the place of meeting; when she did, she saw none, that promised so much security, as the corridor, near her own apartment, which she was checked from leaving, by the apprehension of meeting any of Montoni's guests, on their way to their rooms; and she dismissed the scruples, which delicacy opposed, now that a serious danger was to be avoided by encountering them. It was settled, therefore, that the Chevalier should meet her in the corridor, at that hour of the night, which Ludovico, who was to be upon the watch, should judge safest and Emily, as may be imagined, passed this interval in a tumult of hope and joy, anxiety and impatience. Never, since her residence in the castle, had she watched, with so much pleasure, the sun set behind the mountains, and twilight shade, and darkness veil the scene, as on this evening. She counted the notes of the great clock, and listened to the steps of the sentinels, as they changed the watch, only to rejoice, that another hour was gone. 'O, Valancourt!' said she, 'after all I have suffered; after our long, long separation, when I thought I should nevernever see you morewe are still to meet again! O! I have endured grief, and anxiety, and terror, and let me, then, not sink beneath this joy!' These were moments, when it was impossible for her to feel emotions of regret, or melancholy, for any ordinary interests;even the reflection, that she had resigned the estates, which would have been a provision for herself and Valancourt for life, threw only a light and transient shade upon her spirits. The idea of Valancourt, and that she should see him so soon, alone occupied her heart. At length the clock struck twelve; she opened the door to listen, if any noise was in the castle, and heard only distant shouts of riot and laughter, echoed feebly along the gallery. She guessed, that the Signor and his guests were at the banquet. 'They are now engaged for the night,' said she; 'and Valancourt will soon be here.' Having softly closed the door, she paced the room with impatient steps, and often went to the casement to listen for the lute; but all was silent, and, her agitation every moment increasing, she was at length unable to support herself, and sat down by the window. Annette, whom she detained, was, in the meantime, as loquacious as usual; but Emily heard scarcely any thing she said, and having at length risen to the casement, she distinguished the chords of the lute, struck with an expressive hand, and then the voice, she had formerly listened to, accompanied it. Now rising love they fann'd, now pleasing dole They breath'd in tender musings through the heart; And now a graver, sacred strain they stole, As when seraphic hands an hymn impart! Emily wept in doubtful joy and tenderness; and, when the strain ceased, she considered it as a signal, that Valancourt was about to leave the prison. Soon after, she heard steps in the corridor;they were the light, quick steps of hope; she could scarcely support herself, as they approached, but opening the door of the apartment, she advanced to meet Valancourt, and, in the next moment, sunk in the arms of a stranger. His voicehis countenance instantly convinced her, and she fainted away. On reviving, she found herself supported by the stranger, who was watching over her recovery, with a countenance of ineffable tenderness and anxiety. She had no spirits for reply, or enquiry; she asked no questions, but burst into tears, and disengaged herself from his arms; when the expression of his countenance changed to surprise and disappointment, and he turned to Ludovico, for an explanation; Annette soon gave the information, which Ludovico could not. 'O, sir!' said she, in a voice, interrupted with sobs; 'O, sir! you are not the other Chevalier. We expected Monsieur Valancourt, but you are not he! O Ludovico! how could you deceive us so? my poor lady will never recover itnever!' The stranger, who now appeared much agitated, attempted to speak, but his words faltered; and then striking his hand against his forehead, as if in sudden despair, he walked abruptly to the other end of the corridor. Suddenly, Annette dried her tears, and spoke to Ludovico. 'But, perhaps,' said she, 'after all, the other Chevalier is not this perhaps the Chevalier Valancourt is still below.' Emily raised her head. 'No,' replied Ludovico, 'Monsieur Valancourt never was below, if this gentleman is not he.

' 'If you, sir,' said Ludovico, addressing the stranger, 'would but have had the goodness to trust me with your name, this mistake had been avoided.' 'Most true,' replied the stranger, speaking in broken Italian, 'but it was of the utmost consequence to me, that my name should be concealed from Montoni. Madam,' added he then, addressing Emily in French, 'will you permit me to apologize for the pain I have occasioned you, and to explain to you alone my name, and the circumstance, which has led me into this error? I am of France;I am your countryman;we are met in a foreign land.' Emily tried to compose her spirits; yet she hesitated to grant his request. At length, desiring, that Ludovico would wait on the staircase, and detaining Annette, she told the stranger, that her woman understood very little Italian, and begged he would communicate what he wished to say, in that language.Having withdrawn to a distant part of the corridor, he said, with a longdrawn sigh, 'You, madam, are no stranger to me, though I am so unhappy as to be unknown to you.My name is Du Pont; I am of France, of Gascony, your native province, and have long admired,and, why should I affect to disguise it?have long loved you.' He paused, but, in the next moment, proceeded. 'My family, madam, is probably not unknown to you, for we lived within a few miles of La Vallee, and I have, sometimes, had the happiness of meeting you, on visits in the neighbourhood. I will not offend you by repeating how much you interested me; how much I loved to wander in the scenes you frequented; how often I visited your favourite fishinghouse, and lamented the circumstance, which, at that time, forbade me to reveal my passion. I will not explain how I surrendered to temptation, and became possessed of a treasure, which was to me inestimable; a treasure, which I committed to your messenger, a few days ago, with expectations very different from my present ones. I will say nothing of these circumstances, for I know they will avail me little; let me only supplicate from you forgiveness, and the picture, which I so unwarily returned. Your generosity will pardon the theft, and restore the prize. My crime has been my punishment; for the portrait I stole has contributed to nourish a passion, which must still be my torment.' Emily now interrupted him. 'I think, sir, I may leave it to your integrity to determine, whether, after what has just appeared, concerning Mons. Valancourt, I ought to return the picture. I think you will acknowledge, that this would not be generosity; and you will allow me to add, that it would be doing myself an injustice. I must consider myself honoured by your good opinion, but'and she hesitated,'the mistake of this evening makes it unnecessary for me to say more.' 'It does, madam,alas! it does!' said the stranger, who, after a long pause, proceeded.'But you will allow me to shew my disinterestedness, though not my love, and will accept the services I offer. Yet, alas! what services can I offer? I am myself a prisoner, a sufferer, like you. But, dear as liberty is to me, I would not seek it through half the hazards I would encounter to deliver you from this recess of vice. Accept the offered services of a friend; do not refuse me the reward of having, at least, attempted to deserve your thanks.' 'You deserve them already, sir,' said Emily; 'the wish deserves my warmest thanks. But you will excuse me for reminding you of the danger you incur by prolonging this interview. It will be a great consolation to me to remember, whether your friendly attempts to release me succeed or not, that I have a countryman, who would so generously protect me.'Monsieur Du Pont took her hand, which she but feebly attempted to withdraw, and pressed it respectfully to his lips. 'Allow me to breathe another fervent sigh for your happiness,' said he, 'and to applaud myself for an affection, which I cannot conquer.' As he said this, Emily heard a noise from her apartment, and, turning round, saw the door from the staircase open, and a man rush into her chamber. 'I will teach you to conquer it,' cried he, as he advanced into the corridor, and drew a stiletto, which he aimed at Du Pont, who was unarmed, but who, stepping back, avoided the blow, and then sprung upon Verezzi, from whom he wrenched the stiletto. While they struggled in each other's grasp, Emily, followed by Annette, ran further into the corridor, calling on Ludovico, who was, however, gone from the staircase, and, as she advanced, terrified and uncertain what to do, a distant noise, that seemed to arise from the hall, reminded her of the danger she was incurring; and, sending Annette forward in search of Ludovico, she returned to the spot where Du Pont and Verezzi were still struggling for victory. It was her own cause which was to be decided with that of the former, whose conduct, independently of this circumstance, would, however, have interested her in his success, even had she not disliked and dreaded Verezzi. She threw herself in a chair, and supplicated them to desist from further violence, till, at length, Du Pont forced Verezzi to the floor, where he lay stunned by the violence of his fall; and she then entreated Du Pont to escape from the room, before Montoni, or his party, should appear; but he still refused to leave her unprotected; and, while Emily, now more terrified for him, than for herself, enforced the entreaty, they heard steps ascending the private staircase. 'O you are lost!' cried she, 'these are Montoni's people.' Du Pont made no reply, but supported Emily, while, with a steady, though eager, countenance, he awaited their appearance, and, in the next moment, Ludovico, alone, mounted the landingplace. Throwing an hasty glance round the chamber, 'Follow me,' said he, 'as you value your lives; we have not an instant to lose!' Emily enquired what had occurred, and whither they were to go? 'I cannot stay to tell you now, Signora,' replied Ludovico 'fly! fly!' She immediately followed him, accompanied by Mons. Du Pont, down the staircase, and along a vaulted passage, when suddenly she recollected Annette, and enquired for her. 'She awaits us further on, Signora,' said Ludovico, almost breathless with haste; 'the gates were open, a moment since, to a party just come in from the mountains they will be shut, I fear, before we can reach them! Through this door, Signora,' added Ludovico, holding down the lamp, 'take care, here are two steps.' Emily followed, trembling still more, than before she had understood, that her escape from the castle, depended upon the present moment; while Du Pont supported her, and endeavoured, as they passed along, to cheer her spirits. 'Speak low, Signor,' said Ludovico, 'these passages send echoes all round the castle.' 'Take care of the light,' cried Emily, 'you go so fast, that the air will extinguish it.' Ludovico now opened another door, where they found Annette, and the party then descended a short flight of steps into a passage, which, Ludovico said, led round the inner court of the castle, and opened into the outer one. As they advanced, confused and tumultuous sounds, that seemed to come from the inner court, alarmed Emily. 'Nay, Signora,' said Ludovico, 'our only hope is in that tumult; while the Signor's people are busied about the men, who are just arrived, we may, perhaps, pass unnoticed through the gates. But hush!' he added, as they approached the small door, that opened into the outer court, 'if you will remain here a moment, I will go to see whether the gates are open, and any body is in the way. Pray extinguish the light, Signor, if you hear me talking,' continued Ludovico, delivering the lamp to Du Pont, 'and remain quite still.' Saying this, he stepped out upon the court, and they closed the door, listening anxiously to his departing steps. No voice, however, was heard in the court, which he was crossing, though a confusion of many voices yet issued from the inner one. 'We shall soon be beyond the walls,' said Du Pont softly to Emily, 'support yourself a little longer, Madam, and all will be well.' But soon they heard Ludovico speaking loud, and the voice also of some other person, and Du Pont immediately extinguished the lamp. 'Ah! it is too late!' exclaimed Emily, 'what is to become of us?' They listened again, and then perceived, that Ludovico was talking with a sentinel, whose voices were heard also by Emily's favourite dog, that had followed her from the chamber, and now barked loudly. 'This dog will betray us!' said Du Pont, 'I will hold him.' 'I fear he has already betrayed us!' replied Emily. Du Pont, however, caught him up, and, again listening to what was going on without, they heard Ludovico say, 'I'll watch the gates the while.' 'Stay a minute,' replied the sentinel, 'and you need not have the trouble, for the horses will be sent round to the outer stables, then the gates will be shut, and I can leave my post.' 'I don't mind the trouble, comrade,' said Ludovico, 'you will do such another good turn for me, some time. Gogo, and fetch the wine; the rogues, that are just come in, will drink it all else.' The soldier hesitated, and then called aloud to the people in the second court, to know why they did not send out the horses, that the gates might be shut; but they were too much engaged, to attend to him, even if they had heard his voice. 'Ayeaye,' said Ludovico, 'they know better than that; they are sharing it all among them; if you wait till the horses come out, you must wait till the wine is drunk. I have had my share already, but, since you do not care about yours, I see no reason why I should not have that too.' 'Hold, hold, not so fast,' cried the sentinel, 'do watch then, for a moment I'll be with you presently.' 'Don't hurry yourself,' said Ludovico, coolly, 'I have kept guard before now. But you may leave me your trombone, that, if the castle should be attacked, you know, I may be able to defend the pass, like a hero.' ( A kind of blunderbuss. [A. R.]) 'There, my good fellow,' returned the soldier, 'there, take itit has seen service, though it could do little in defending the castle. I'll tell you a good story, though, about this same trombone.' 'You'll tell it better when you have had the wine,' said Ludovico. 'There! they are coming out from the court already.' 'I'll have the wine, though,' said the sentinel, running off. 'I won't keep you a minute.' 'Take your time, I am in no haste,' replied Ludovico, who was already hurrying across the court, when the soldier came back. 'Whither so fast, friendwhither so fast?' said the latter. 'What! is this the way you keep watch! I must stand to my post myself, I see.' 'Aye, well,' replied Ludovico, 'you have saved me the trouble of following you further, for I wanted to tell you, if you have a mind to drink the Tuscany wine, you must go to Sebastian, he is dealing it out; the other that Federico has, is not worth having. But you are not likely to have any, I see, for they are all coming out.' 'By St. Peter! so they are,' said the soldier, and again ran off, while Ludovico, once more at liberty, hastened to the door of the passage, where Emily was sinking under the anxiety this long discourse had occasioned; but, on his telling them the court was clear, they followed him to the gates, without waiting another instant, yet not before he had seized two horses, that had strayed from the second court, and were picking a scanty meal among the grass, which grew between the pavement of the first. They passed, without interruption, the dreadful gates, and took the road that led down among the woods, Emily, Monsieur Du Pont and Annette on foot, and Ludovico, who was mounted on one horse, leading the other. Having reached them, they stopped, while Emily and Annette were placed on horseback with their two protectors, when, Ludovico leading the way, they set off as fast as the broken road, and the feeble light, which a rising moon threw among the foliage, would permit. Emily was so much astonished by this sudden departure, that she scarcely dared to believe herself awake; and she yet much doubted whether this adventure would terminate in escape,a doubt, which had too much probability to justify it; for, before they quitted the woods, they heard shouts in the wind, and, on emerging from them, saw lights moving quickly near the castle above. Du Pont whipped his horse, and with some difficulty compelled him to go faster. 'Ah! poor beast,' said Ludovico, 'he is weary enough;he has been out all day; but, Signor, we must fly for it, now; for yonder are lights coming this way.' Having given his own horse a lash, they now both set off on a full gallop; and, when they again looked back, the lights were so distant as scarcely to be discerned, and the voices were sunk into silence. The travellers then abated their pace, and, consulting whither they should direct their course, it was determined they should descend into Tuscany, and endeavour to reach the Mediterranean, where they could readily embark for France. Thither Du Pont meant to attend Emily, if he should learn, that the regiment he had accompanied into Italy, was returned to his native country. They were now in the road, which Emily had travelled with Ugo and Bertrand; but Ludovico, who was the only one of the party, acquainted with the passes of these mountains, said, that, a little further on, a byeroad, branching from this, would lead them down into Tuscany with very little difficulty; and that, at a few leagues distance, was a small town, where necessaries could be procured for their journey. 'But, I hope,' added he, 'we shall meet with no straggling parties of banditti; some of them are abroad, I know. However, I have got a good trombone, which will be of some service, if we should encounter any of those brave spirits. You have no arms, Signor?' 'Yes,' replied Du Pont, 'I have the villain's stilletto, who would have stabbed mebut let us rejoice in our escape from Udolpho, nor torment ourselves with looking out for dangers, that may never arrive.' The moon was now risen high over the woods, that hung upon the sides of the narrow glen, through which they wandered, and afforded them light sufficient to distinguish their way, and to avoid the loose and broken stones, that frequently crossed it. They now travelled leisurely, and in profound silence; for they had scarcely yet recovered from the astonishment, into which this sudden escape had thrown them.Emily's mind, especially, was sunk, after the various emotions it had suffered, into a kind of musing stillness, which the reposing beauty of the surrounding scene and the creeping murmur of the nightbreeze among the foliage above contributed to prolong. She thought of Valancourt and of France, with hope, and she would have thought of them with joy, had not the first events of this evening harassed her spirits too much, to permit her now to feel so lively a sensation. Meanwhile, Emily was alone the object of Du Pont's melancholy consideration; yet, with the despondency he suffered, as he mused on his recent disappointment, was mingled a sweet pleasure, occasioned by her presence, though they did not now exchange a single word. Annette thought of this wonderful escape, of the bustle in which Montoni and his people must be, now that their flight was discovered; of her native country, whither she hoped she was returning, and of her marriage with Ludovico, to which there no longer appeared any impediment, for poverty she did not consider such. Ludovico, on his part, congratulated himself, on having rescued his Annette and Signora Emily from the danger, that had surrounded them; on his own liberation from people, whose manners he had long detested; on the freedom he had given to Monsieur Du Pont; on his prospect of happiness with the object of his affections, and not a little on the address, with which he had deceived the sentinel, and conducted the whole of this affair. Thus variously engaged in thought, the travellers passed on silently, for above an hour, a question only being, now and then, asked by Du Pont, concerning the road, or a remark uttered by Annette, respecting objects, seen imperfectly in the twilight. At length, lights were perceived twinkling on the side of a mountain, and Ludovico had no doubt, that they proceeded from the town he had mentioned, while his companions, satisfied by this assurance, sunk again into silence. Annette was the first who interrupted this. 'Holy Peter!' said she, 'What shall we do for money on our journey? for I know neither I, or my lady, have a single sequin; the Signor took care of that!' This remark produced a serious enquiry, which ended in as serious an embarrassment, for Du Pont had been rifled of nearly all his money, when he was taken prisoner; the remainder he had given to the sentinel, who had enabled him occasionally to leave his prisonchamber; and Ludovico, who had for some time found a difficulty, in procuring any part of the wages due to him, had now scarcely cash sufficient to procure necessary refreshment at the first town, in which they should arrive. Their poverty was the more distressing, since it would detain them among the mountains, where, even in a town, they could scarcely consider themselves safe from Montoni. The travellers, however, had only to proceed and dare the future; and they continued their way through lonely wilds and dusky vallies, where the overhanging foliage now admitted, and then excluded the moonlight;wilds so desolate, that they appeared, on the first glance, as if no human being had ever trode them before. Even the road, in which the party were, did but slightly contradict this error, for the high grass and other luxuriant vegetation, with which it was overgrown, told how very seldom the foot of a traveller had passed it. At length, from a distance, was heard the faint tinkling of a sheepbell; and, soon after, the bleat of flocks, and the party then knew, that they were near some human habitation, for the light, which Ludovico had fancied to proceed from a town, had long been concealed by intervening mountains. Cheered by this hope, they quickened their pace along the narrow pass they were winding, and it opened upon one of those pastoral vallies of the Apennines, which might be painted for a scene of Arcadia, and whose beauty and simplicity are finely contrasted by the grandeur of the snowtopt mountains above. The morning light, now glimmering in the horizon, shewed faintly, at a little distance, upon the brow of a hill, which seemed to peep from 'under the opening eyelids of the morn,' the town they were in search of, and which they soon after reached. It was not without some difficulty, that they there found a house, which could afford shelter for themselves and their horses; and Emily desired they might not rest longer than was necessary for refreshment. Her appearance excited some surprise, for she was without a hat, having had time only to throw on her veil before she left the castle, a circumstance, that compelled her to regret again the want of money, without which it was impossible to procure this necessary article of dress. Ludovico, on examining his purse, found it even insufficient to supply present refreshment, and Du Pont, at length, ventured to inform the landlord, whose countenance was simple and honest, of their exact situation, and requested, that he would assist them to pursue their journey; a purpose, which he promised to comply with, as far as he was able, when he learned that they were prisoners escaping from Montoni, whom he had too much reason to hate. But, though he consented to lend them fresh horses to carry them to the next town, he was too poor himself to trust them with money, and they were again lamenting their poverty, when Ludovico, who had been with his tired horses to the hovel, which served for a stable, entered the room, half frantic with joy, in which his auditors soon participated. On removing the saddle from one of the horses, he had found beneath it a small bag, containing, no doubt, the booty of one of the condottieri, who had returned from a plundering excursion, just before Ludovico left the castle, and whose horse having strayed from the inner court, while his master was engaged in drinking, had brought away the treasure, which the ruffian had considered the reward of his exploit. On counting over this, Du Pont found, that it would be more than sufficient to carry them all to France, where he now determined to accompany Emily, whether he should obtain intelligence of his regiment, or not; for, though he had as much confidence in the integrity of Ludovico, as his small knowledge of him allowed, he could not endure the thought of committing her to his care for the voyage; nor, perhaps, had he resolution enough to deny himself the dangerous pleasure, which he might derive from her presence. He now consulted them, concerning the seaport, to which they should direct their way, and Ludovico, better informed of the geography of the country, said, that Leghorn was the nearest port of consequence, which Du Pont knew also to be the most likely of any in Italy to assist their plan, since from thence vessels of all nations were continually departing. Thither, therefore, it was determined, that they should proceed. Emily, having purchased a little straw hat, such as was worn by the peasant girls of Tuscany, and some other little necessary equipments for the journey, and the travellers, having exchanged their tired horses for others better able to carry them, recommenced their joyous way, as the sun was rising over the mountains, and, after travelling through this romantic country, for several hours, began to descend into the vale of Arno. And here Emily beheld all the charms of sylvan and pastoral landscape united, adorned with the elegant villas of the Florentine nobles, and diversified with the various riches of cultivation. How vivid the shrubs, that embowered the slopes, with the woods, that stretched amphitheatrically along the mountains! and, above all, how elegant the outline of these waving Apennines, now softening from the wildness, which their interior regions exhibited! At a distance, in the east, Emily discovered Florence, with its towers rising on the brilliant horizon, and its luxuriant plain, spreading to the feet of the Apennines, speckled with gardens and magnificent villas, or coloured with groves of orange and lemon, with vines, corn, and plantations of olives and mulberry; while, to the west, the vale opened to the waters of the Mediterranean, so distant, that they were known only by a blueish line, that appeared upon the horizon, and by the light marine vapour, which just stained the aether above. With a full heart, Emily hailed the waves, that were to bear her back to her native country, the remembrance of which, however, brought with it a pang; for she had there no home to receive, no parents to welcome her, but was going, like a forlorn pilgrim, to weep over the sad spot, where he, who WAS her father, lay interred. Nor were her spirits cheered, when she considered how long it would probably be before she should see Valancourt, who might be stationed with his regiment in a distant part of France, and that, when they did meet, it would be only to lament the successful villany of Montoni; yet, still she would have felt inexpressible delight at the thought of being once more in the same country with Valancourt, had it even been certain, that she could not see him. The intense heat, for it was now noon, obliged the travellers to look out for a shady recess, where they might rest, for a few hours, and the neighbouring thickets, abounding with wild grapes, raspberries, and figs, promised them grateful refreshment. Soon after, they turned from the road into a grove, whose thick foliage entirely excluded the sunbeams, and where a spring, gushing from the rock, gave coolness to the air; and, having alighted and turned the horses to graze, Annette and Ludovico ran to gather fruit from the surrounding thickets, of which they soon returned with an abundance. The travellers, seated under the shade of a pine and cypress grove and on turf, enriched with such a profusion of fragrant flowers, as Emily had scarcely ever seen, even among the Pyrenees, took their simple repast, and viewed, with new delight, beneath the dark umbrage of gigantic pines, the glowing landscape stretching to the sea. Emily and Du Pont gradually became thoughtful and silent; but Annette was all joy and loquacity, and Ludovico was gay, without forgetting the respectful distance, which was due to his companions. The repast being over, Du Pont recommended Emily to endeavour to sleep, during these sultry hours, and, desiring the servants would do the same, said he would watch the while; but Ludovico wished to spare him this trouble; and Emily and Annette, wearied with travelling, tried to repose, while he stood guard with his trombone. When Emily, refreshed by slumber, awoke, she found the sentinel asleep on his post and Du Pont awake, but lost in melancholy thought. As the sun was yet too high to allow them to continue their journey, and as it was necessary, that Ludovico, after the toils and trouble he had suffered, should finish his sleep, Emily took this opportunity of enquiring by what accident Du Pont became Montoni's prisoner, and he, pleased with the interest this enquiry expressed and with the excuse it gave him for talking to her of himself, immediately answered her curiosity. 'I came into Italy, madam,' said Du Pont, 'in the service of my country. In an adventure among the mountains our party, engaging with the bands of Montoni, was routed, and I, with a few of my comrades, was taken prisoner. When they told me, whose captive I was, the name of Montoni struck me, for I remembered, that Madame Cheron, your aunt, had married an Italian of that name, and that you had accompanied them into Italy. It was not, however, till some time after, that I became convinced this was the same Montoni, or learned that you, madam, was under the same roof with myself. I will not pain you by describing what were my emotions upon this discovery, which I owed to a sentinel, whom I had so far won to my interest, that he granted me many indulgences, one of which was very important to me, and somewhat dangerous to himself; but he persisted in refusing to convey any letter, or notice of my situation to you, for he justly dreaded a discovery and the consequent vengeance of Montoni. He however enabled me to see you more than once. You are surprised, madam, and I will explain myself. My health and spirits suffered extremely from want of air and exercise, and, at length, I gained so far upon the pity, or the avarice of the man, that he gave me the means of walking on the terrace.' Emily now listened, with very anxious attention, to the narrative of Du Pont, who proceeded 'In granting this indulgence, he knew, that he had nothing to apprehend from a chance of my escaping from a castle, which was vigilantly guarded, and the nearest terrace of which rose over a perpendicular rock; he shewed me also,' continued Du Pont, 'a door concealed in the cedar wainscot of the apartment where I was confined, which he instructed me how to open; and which, leading into a passage, formed within the thickness of the wall, that extended far along the castle, finally opened in an obscure corner of the eastern rampart. I have since been informed, that there are many passages of the same kind concealed within the prodigious walls of that edifice, and which were, undoubtedly, contrived for the purpose of facilitating escapes in time of war. Through this avenue, at the dead of night, I often stole to the terrace, where I walked with the utmost caution, lest my steps should betray me to the sentinels on duty in distant parts; for this end of it, being guarded by high buildings, was not watched by soldiers. In one of these midnight wanderings, I saw light in a casement that overlooked the rampart, and which, I observed, was immediately over my prisonchamber. It occurred to me, that you might be in that apartment, and, with the hope of seeing you, I placed myself opposite to the window.' Emily, remembering the figure that had formerly appeared on the terrace, and which had occasioned her so much anxiety, exclaimed, 'It was you then, Monsieur Du Pont, who occasioned me much foolish terror; my spirits were, at that time, so much weakened by long suffering, that they took alarm at every hint.' Du Pont, after lamenting, that he had occasioned her any apprehension, added, 'As I rested on the wall, opposite to your casement, the consideration of your melancholy situation and of my own called from me involuntary sounds of lamentation, which drew you, I fancy, to the casement; I saw there a person, whom I believed to be you. O! I will say nothing of my emotion at that moment; I wished to speak, but prudence restrained me, till the distant footstep of a sentinel compelled me suddenly to quit my station. 'It was some time, before I had another opportunity of walking, for I could only leave my prison, when it happened to be the turn of one man to guard me; meanwhile I became convinced from some circumstances related by him, that your apartment was over mine, and, when again I ventured forth, I returned to your casement, where again I saw you, but without daring to speak. I waved my hand, and you suddenly disappeared; then it was, that I forgot my prudence, and yielded to lamentation; again you appearedyou spokeI heard the wellknown accent of your voice! and, at that moment, my discretion would have forsaken me again, had I not heard also the approaching steps of a soldier, when I instantly quitted the place, though not before the man had seen me. He followed down the terrace and gained so fast upon me, that I was compelled to make use of a stratagem, ridiculous enough, to save myself. I had heard of the superstition of many of these men, and I uttered a strange noise, with a hope, that my pursuer would mistake it for something supernatural, and desist from pursuit. Luckily for myself I succeeded; the man, it seems, was subject to fits, and the terror he suffered threw him into one, by which accident I secured my retreat. A sense of the danger I had escaped, and the increased watchfulness, which my appearance had occasioned among the sentinels, deterred me ever after from walking on the terrace; but, in the stillness of night, I frequently beguiled myself with an old lute, procured for me by a soldier, which I sometimes accompanied with my voice, and sometimes, I will acknowledge, with a hope of making myself heard by you; but it was only a few evenings ago, that this hope was answered. I then thought I heard a voice in the wind, calling me; yet, even then I feared to reply, lest the sentinel at the prison door should hear me. Was I right, madam, in this conjecturewas it you who spoke?' 'Yes,' said Emily, with an involuntary sigh, 'you was right indeed.' Du Pont, observing the painful emotions, which this question revived, now changed the subject. 'In one of my excursions through the passage, which I have mentioned, I overheard a singular conversation,' said he. 'In the passage!' said Emily, with surprise. 'I heard it in the passage,' said Du Pont, 'but it proceeded from an apartment, adjoining the wall, within which the passage wound, and the shell of the wall was there so thin, and was also somewhat decayed, that I could distinctly hear every word, spoken on the other side. It happened that Montoni and his companions were assembled in the room, and Montoni began to relate the extraordinary history of the lady, his predecessor, in the castle. He did, indeed, mention some very surprising circumstances, and whether they were strictly true, his conscience must decide; I fear it will determine against him.

But you, madam, have doubtless heard the report, which he designs should circulate, on the subject of that lady's mysterious fate.' 'I have, sir,' replied Emily, 'and I perceive, that you doubt it.' 'I doubted it before the period I am speaking of,' rejoined Du Pont;'but some circumstances, mentioned by Montoni, greatly contributed to my suspicions. The account I then heard, almost convinced me, that he was a murderer. I trembled for you;the more so that I had heard the guests mention your name in a manner, that threatened your repose; and, knowing, that the most impious men are often the most superstitious, I determined to try whether I could not awaken their consciences, and awe them from the commission of the crime I dreaded. I listened closely to Montoni, and, in the most striking passages of his story, I joined my voice, and repeated his last words, in a disguised and hollow tone.' 'But was you not afraid of being discovered?' said Emily. 'I was not,' replied Du Pont; 'for I knew, that, if Montoni had been acquainted with the secret of this passage, he would not have confined me in the apartment, to which it led. I knew also, from better authority, that he was ignorant of it. The party, for some time, appeared inattentive to my voice; but, at length, were so much alarmed, that they quitted the apartment; and, having heard Montoni order his servants to search it, I returned to my prison, which was very distant from this part of the passage.' 'I remember perfectly to have heard of the conversation you mention,' said Emily; 'it spread a general alarm among Montoni's people, and I will own I was weak enough to partake of it.' Monsieur Du Pont and Emily thus continued to converse of Montoni, and then of France, and of the plan of their voyage; when Emily told him, that it was her intention to retire to a convent in Languedoc, where she had been formerly treated with much kindness, and from thence to write to her relation Monsieur Quesnel, and inform him of her conduct. There, she designed to wait, till La Vallee should again be her own, whither she hoped her income would some time permit her to return; for Du Pont now taught her to expect, that the estate, of which Montoni had attempted to defraud her, was not irrecoverably lost, and he again congratulated her on her escape from Montoni, who, he had not a doubt, meant to have detained her for life. The possibility of recovering her aunt's estates for Valancourt and herself lighted up a joy in Emily's heart, such as she had not known for many months; but she endeavoured to conceal this from Monsieur Du Pont, lest it should lead him to a painful remembrance of his rival. They continued to converse, till the sun was declining in the west, when Du Pont awoke Ludovico, and they set forward on their journey. Gradually descending the lower slopes of the valley, they reached the Arno, and wound along its pastoral margin, for many miles, delighted with the scenery around them, and with the remembrances, which its classic waves revived. At a distance, they heard the gay song of the peasants among the vineyards, and observed the setting sun tint the waves with yellow lustre, and twilight draw a dusky purple over the mountains, which, at length, deepened into night. Then the LUCCIOLA, the firefly of Tuscany, was seen to flash its sudden sparks among the foliage, while the cicala, with its shrill note, became more clamorous than even during the noonday heat, loving best the hour when the English beetle, with less offensive sound, winds His small but sullen horn, As oft he rises 'midst the twilight path, Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum. ( Collins. [A. R.]) The travellers crossed the Arno by moonlight, at a ferry, and, learning that Pisa was distant only a few miles down the river, they wished to have proceeded thither in a boat, but, as none could be procured, they set out on their wearied horses for that city. As they approached it, the vale expanded into a plain, variegated with vineyards, corn, olives and mulberry groves; but it was late, before they reached its gates, where Emily was surprised to hear the busy sound of footsteps and the tones of musical instruments, as well as to see the lively groups, that filled the streets, and she almost fancied herself again at Venice; but here was no moonlight seano gay gondolas, dashing the waves,no PALLADIAN palaces, to throw enchantment over the fancy and lead it into the wilds of fairy story. The Arno rolled through the town, but no music trembled from balconies over its waters; it gave only the busy voices of sailors on board vessels just arrived from the Mediterranean; the melancholy heaving of the anchor, and the shrill boatswain's whistle;sounds, which, since that period, have there sunk almost into silence. They then served to remind Du Pont, that it was probable he might hear of a vessel, sailing soon to France from this port, and thus be spared the trouble of going to Leghorn. As soon as Emily had reached the inn, he went therefore to the quay, to make his enquiries; but, after all the endeavours of himself and Ludovico, they could hear of no bark, destined immediately for France, and the travellers returned to their restingplace. Here also, Du Pont endeavoured to learn where his regiment then lay, but could acquire no information concerning it. The travellers retired early to rest, after the fatigues of this day; and, on the following, rose early, and, without pausing to view the celebrated antiquities of the place, or the wonders of its hanging tower, pursued their journey in the cooler hours, through a charming country, rich with wine, and corn and oil. The Apennines, no longer awful, or even grand, here softened into the beauty of sylvan and pastoral landscape; and Emily, as she descended them, looked down delighted on Leghorn, and its spacious bay, filled with vessels, and crowned with these beautiful hills. She was no less surprised and amused, on entering this town, to find it crowded with persons in the dresses of all nations; a scene, which reminded her of a Venetian masquerade, such as she had witnessed at the time of the Carnival; but here, was bustle, without gaiety, and noise instead of music, while elegance was to be looked for only in the waving outlines of the surrounding hills. Monsieur Du Pont, immediately on their arrival, went down to the quay, where he heard of several French vessels, and of one, that was to sail, in a few days, for Marseilles, from whence another vessel could be procured, without difficulty, to take them across the gulf of Lyons towards Narbonne, on the coast not many leagues from which city he understood the convent was seated, to which Emily wished to retire. He, therefore, immediately engaged with the captain to take them to Marseilles, and Emily was delighted to hear, that her passage to France was secured. Her mind was now relieved from the terror of pursuit, and the pleasing hope of soon seeing her native countrythat country which held Valancourt, restored to her spirits a degree of cheerfulness, such as she had scarcely known, since the death of her father. At Leghorn also, Du Pont heard of his regiment, and that it had embarked for France; a circumstance, which gave him great satisfaction, for he could now accompany Emily thither, without reproach to his conscience, or apprehension of displeasure from his commander. During these days, he scrupulously forbore to distress her by a mention of his passion, and she was compelled to esteem and pity, though she could not love him. He endeavoured to amuse her by shewing the environs of the town, and they often walked together on the seashore, and on the busy quays, where Emily was frequently interested by the arrival and departure of vessels, participating in the joy of meeting friends, and, sometimes, shedding a sympathetic tear to the sorrow of those, that were separating. It was after having witnessed a scene of the latter kind, that she arranged the following stanzas THE MARINER Soft came the breath of spring; smooth flow'd the tide; And blue the heaven in its mirror smil'd; The white sail trembled, swell'd, expanded wide, The busy sailors at the anchor toil'd. With anxious friends, that shed the parting tear, The deck was throng'dhow swift the moments fly! The vessel heaves, the farewel signs appear; Mute is each tongue, and eloquent each eye! The last dread moment comes!The sailoryouth Hides the big drop, then smiles amid his pain, Sooths his sad bride, and vows eternal truth, 'Farewel, my lovewe shallshall meet again!' Long on the stern, with waving hand, he stood; The crowded shore sinks, lessening, from his view, As gradual glides the bark along the flood; His bride is seen no more'Adieu!adieu!' The breeze of Eve moans low, her smile is o'er, Dim steals her twilight down the crimson'd west, He climbs the topmost mast, to seek once more The farseen coast, where all his wishes rest. He views its dark line on the distant sky, And Fancy leads him to his little home, He sees his weeping love, he hears her sigh, He sooths her griefs, and tells of joys to come. Eve yields to night, the breeze to wintry gales, In one vast shade the seas and shores repose; He turns his aching eyes,his spirit fails, The chill tear falls;sad to the deck he goes! The storm of midnight swells, the sails are furl'd, Deep sounds the lead, but finds no friendly shore, Fast o'er the waves the wretched bark is hurl'd, 'O Ellen, Ellen! we must meet no more!' Lightnings, that shew the vast and foamy deep, The rending thunders, as they onward roll, The loud, loud winds, that o'er the billows sweep Shake the firm nerve, appall the bravest soul! Ah! what avails the seamen's toiling care! The straining cordage bursts, the mast is riv'n; The sounds of terror groan along the air, Then sink afar;the bark on rocks is driv'n! Fierce o'er the wreck the whelming waters pass'd, The helpless crew sunk in the roaring main! Henry's faint accents trembled in the blast 'Farewel, my love!we ne'er shall meet again!' Oft, at the calm and silent evening hour, When summerbreezes linger on the wave, A melancholy voice is heard to pour Its lonely sweetness o'er poor Henry's grave! And oft, at midnight, airy strains are heard Around the grove, where Ellen's form is laid; Nor is the dirge by villagemaidens fear'd, For lovers' spirits guard the holy shade! Chapter 10 Oh! the joy Of young ideas, painted on the mind In the warm glowing colours fancy spreads On objects not yet known, when all is new, And all is lovely! SACRED DRAMAS We now return to Languedoc and to the mention of Count De Villefort, the nobleman, who succeeded to an estate of the Marquis De Villeroi situated near the monastery of St. Claire. It may be recollected, that this chateau was uninhabited, when St. Aubert and his daughter were in the neighbourhood, and that the former was much affected on discovering himself to be so near ChateauleBlanc, a place, concerning which the good old La Voisin afterwards dropped some hints, that had alarmed Emily's curiosity. It was in the year 1584, the beginning of that, in which St. Aubert died, that Francis Beauveau, Count De Villefort, came into possession of the mansion and extensive domain called ChateauleBlanc, situated in the province of Languedoc, on the shore of the Mediterranean. This estate, which, during some centuries, had belonged to his family, now descended to him, on the decease of his relative, the Marquis De Villeroi, who had been latterly a man of reserved manners and austere character; circumstances, which, together with the duties of his profession, that often called him into the field, had prevented any degree of intimacy with his cousin, the Count De Villefort. For many years, they had known little of each other, and the Count received the first intelligence of his death, which happened in a distant part of France, together with the instruments, that gave him possession of the domain ChateauleBlanc; but it was not till the following year, that he determined to visit that estate, when he designed to pass the autumn there. The scenes of ChateauleBlanc often came to his remembrance, heightened by the touches, which a warm imagination gives to the recollection of early pleasures; for, many years before, in the lifetime of the Marchioness, and at that age when the mind is particularly sensible to impressions of gaiety and delight, he had once visited this spot, and, though he had passed a long intervening period amidst the vexations and tumults of public affairs, which too frequently corrode the heart, and vitiate the taste, the shades of Languedoc and the grandeur of its distant scenery had never been remembered by him with indifference. During many years, the chateau had been abandoned by the late Marquis, and, being inhabited only by an old steward and his wife, had been suffered to fall much into decay. To superintend the repairs, that would be requisite to make it a comfortable residence, had been a principal motive with the Count for passing the autumnal months in Languedoc; and neither the remonstrances, or the tears of the Countess, for, on urgent occasions, she could weep, were powerful enough to overcome his determination. She prepared, therefore, to obey the command, which she could not conquer, and to resign the gay assemblies of Paris,where her beauty was generally unrivalled and won the applause, to which her wit had but feeble claimfor the twilight canopy of woods, the lonely grandeur of mountains and the solemnity of gothic halls and of long, long galleries, which echoed only the solitary step of a domestic, or the measured clink, that ascended from the great clockthe ancient monitor of the hall below. From these melancholy expectations she endeavoured to relieve her spirits by recollecting all that she had ever heard, concerning the joyous vintage of the plains of Languedoc; but there, alas! no airy forms would bound to the gay melody of Parisian dances, and a view of the rustic festivities of peasants could afford little pleasure to a heart, in which even the feelings of ordinary benevolence had long since decayed under the corruptions of luxury. The Count had a son and a daughter, the children of a former marriage, who, he designed, should accompany him to the south of France; Henri, who was in his twentieth year, was in the French service; and Blanche, who was not yet eighteen, had been hitherto confined to the convent, where she had been placed immediately on her father's second marriage. The present Countess, who had neither sufficient ability, or inclination, to superintend the education of her daughterinlaw, had advised this step, and the dread of superior beauty had since urged her to employ every art, that might prevail on the Count to prolong the period of Blanche's seclusion; it was, therefore, with extreme mortification, that she now understood he would no longer submit on this subject, yet it afforded her some consolation to consider, that, though the Lady Blanche would emerge from her convent, the shades of the country would, for some time, veil her beauty from the public eye. On the morning, which commenced the journey, the postillions stopped at the convent, by the Count's order, to take up Blanche, whose heart beat with delight, at the prospect of novelty and freedom now before her. As the time of her departure drew nigh, her impatience had increased, and the last night, during which she counted every note of every hour, had appeared the most tedious of any she had ever known. The morning light, at length, dawned; the matinbell rang; she heard the nuns descending from their chambers, and she started from a sleepless pillow to welcome the day, which was to emancipate her from the severities of a cloister, and introduce her to a world, where pleasure was ever smiling, and goodness ever blessedwhere, in short, nothing but pleasure and goodness reigned! When the bell of the great gate rang, and the sound was followed by that of carriage wheels, she ran, with a palpitating heart, to her lattice, and, perceiving her father's carriage in the court below, danced, with airy steps, along the gallery, where she was met by a nun with a summons from the abbess. In the next moment, she was in the parlour, and in the presence of the Countess who now appeared to her as an angel, that was to lead her into happiness. But the emotions of the Countess, on beholding her, were not in unison with those of Blanche, who had never appeared so lovely as at this moment, when her countenance, animated by the lightning smile of joy, glowed with the beauty of happy innocence. After conversing for a few minutes with the abbess, the Countess rose to go. This was the moment, which Blanche had anticipated with such eager expectation, the summit from which she looked down upon the fairyland of happiness, and surveyed all its enchantment; was it a moment, then, for tears of regret? Yet it was so. She turned, with an altered and dejected countenance, to her young companions, who were come to bid her farewell, and wept! Even my lady abbess, so stately and so solemn, she saluted with a degree of sorrow, which, an hour before, she would have believed it impossible to feel, and which may be accounted for by considering how reluctantly we all part, even with unpleasing objects, when the separation is consciously for ever. Again, she kissed the poor nuns and then followed the Countess from that spot with tears, which she expected to leave only with smiles. But the presence of her father and the variety of objects, on the road, soon engaged her attention, and dissipated the shade, which tender regret had thrown upon her spirits. Inattentive to a conversation, which was passing between the Countess and a Mademoiselle Bearn, her friend, Blanche sat, lost in pleasing reverie, as she watched the clouds floating silently along the blue expanse, now veiling the sun and stretching their shadows along the distant scene, and then disclosing all his brightness. The journey continued to give Blanche inexpressible delight, for new scenes of nature were every instant opening to her view, and her fancy became stored with gay and beautiful imagery. It was on the evening of the seventh day, that the travellers came within view of ChateauleBlanc, the romantic beauty of whose situation strongly impressed the imagination of Blanche, who observed, with sublime astonishment, the Pyrenean mountains, which had been seen only at a distance during the day, now rising within a few leagues, with their wild cliffs and immense precipices, which the evening clouds, floating round them, now disclosed, and again veiled. The setting rays, that tinged their snowy summits with a roseate hue, touched their lower points with various colouring, while the blueish tint, that pervaded their shadowy recesses, gave the strength of contrast to the splendour of light. The plains of Languedoc, blushing with the purple vine and diversified with groves of mulberry, almond and olives, spread far to the north and the east; to the south, appeared the Mediterranean, clear as crystal, and blue as the heavens it reflected, bearing on its bosom vessels, whose white sails caught the sunbeams, and gave animation to the scene. On a high promontory, washed by the waters of the Mediterranean, stood her father's mansion, almost secluded from the eye by woods of intermingled pine, oak and chesnut, which crowned the eminence, and sloped towards the plains, on one side; while, on the other, they extended to a considerable distance along the seashores. As Blanche drew nearer, the gothic features of this antient mansion successively appearedfirst an embattled turret, rising above the treesthen the broken arch of an immense gateway, retiring beyond them; and she almost fancied herself approaching a castle, such as is often celebrated in early story, where the knights look out from the battlements on some champion below, who, clothed in black armour, comes, with his companions, to rescue the fair lady of his love from the oppression of his rival; a sort of legends, to which she had once or twice obtained access in the library of her convent, that, like many others, belonging to the monks, was stored with these reliques of romantic fiction. The carriages stopped at a gate, which led into the domain of the chateau, but which was now fastened; and the great bell, that had formerly served to announce the arrival of strangers, having long since fallen from its station, a servant climbed over a ruined part of the adjoining wall, to give notice to those within of the arrival of their lord. As Blanche leaned from the coach window, she resigned herself to the sweet and gentle emotions, which the hour and the scenery awakened. The sun had now left the earth, and twilight began to darken the mountains; while the distant waters, reflecting the blush that still glowed in the west, appeared like a line of light, skirting the horizon. The low murmur of waves, breaking on the shore, came in the breeze, and, now and then, the melancholy dashing of oars was feebly heard from a distance. She was suffered to indulge her pensive mood, for the thoughts of the rest of the party were silently engaged upon the subjects of their several interests. Meanwhile, the Countess, reflecting, with regret, upon the gay parties she had left at Paris, surveyed, with disgust, what she thought the gloomy woods and solitary wildness of the scene; and, shrinking from the prospect of being shut up in an old castle, was prepared to meet every object with displeasure. The feelings of Henri were somewhat similar to those of the Countess; he gave a mournful sigh to the delights of the capital, and to the remembrance of a lady, who, he believed, had engaged his affections, and who had certainly fascinated his imagination; but the surrounding country, and the mode of life, on which he was entering, had, for him, at least, the charm of novelty, and his regret was softened by the gay expectations of youth. The gates being at length unbarred, the carriage moved slowly on, under spreading chesnuts, that almost excluded the remains of day, following what had been formerly a road, but which now, overgrown with luxuriant vegetation, could be traced only by the boundary, formed by trees, on either side, and which wound for near half a mile among the woods, before it reached the chateau. This was the very avenue that St. Aubert and Emily had formerly entered, on their first arrival in the neighbourhood, with the hope of finding a house, that would receive them, for the night, and had so abruptly quitted, on perceiving the wildness of the place, and a figure, which the postillion had fancied was a robber. 'What a dismal place is this!' exclaimed the Countess, as the carriage penetrated the deeper recesses of the woods. 'Surely, my lord, you do not mean to pass all the autumn in this barbarous spot! One ought to bring hither a cup of the waters of Lethe, that the remembrance of pleasanter scenes may not heighten, at least, the natural dreariness of these.' 'I shall be governed by circumstances, madam,' said the Count, 'this barbarous spot was inhabited by my ancestors.' The carriage now stopped at the chateau, where, at the door of the great hall, appeared the old steward and the Parisian servants, who had been sent to prepare the chateau, waiting to receive their lord. Lady Blanche now perceived, that the edifice was not built entirely in the gothic style, but that it had additions of a more modern date; the large and gloomy hall, however, into which she now entered, was entirely gothic, and sumptuous tapestry, which it was now too dark to distinguish, hung upon the walls, and depictured scenes from some of the antient Provencal romances. A vast gothic window, embroidered with CLEMATIS and eglantine, that ascended to the south, led the eye, now that the casements were thrown open, through this verdant shade, over a sloping lawn, to the tops of dark woods, that hung upon the brow of the promontory. Beyond, appeared the waters of the Mediterranean, stretching far to the south, and to the east, where they were lost in the horizon; while, to the northeast, they were bounded by the luxuriant shores of Languedoc and Provence, enriched with wood, and gay with vines and sloping pastures; and, to the southwest, by the majestic Pyrenees, now fading from the eye, beneath the gradual gloom. Blanche, as she crossed the hall, stopped a moment to observe this lovely prospect, which the evening twilight obscured, yet did not conceal. But she was quickly awakened from the complacent delight, which this scene had diffused upon her mind, by the Countess, who, discontented with every object around, and impatient for refreshment and repose, hastened forward to a large parlour, whose cedar wainscot, narrow, pointed casements, and dark ceiling of carved cypress wood, gave it an aspect of peculiar gloom, which the dingy green velvet of the chairs and couches, fringed with tarnished gold, had once been designed to enliven. While the Countess enquired for refreshment, the Count, attended by his son, went to look over some part of the chateau, and Lady Blanche reluctantly remained to witness the discontent and illhumour of her stepmother. 'How long have you lived in this desolate place?' said her ladyship, to the old house keeper, who came to pay her duty. 'Above twenty years, your ladyship, on the next feast of St. Jerome.' 'How happened it, that you have lived here so long, and almost alone, too? I understood, that the chateau had been shut up for some years?' 'Yes, madam, it was for many years after my late lord, the Count, went to the wars; but it is above twenty years, since I and my husband came into his service. The place is so large, and has of late been so lonely, that we were lost in it, and, after some time, we went to live in a cottage at the end of the woods, near some of the tenants, and came to look after the chateau, every now and then. When my lord returned to France from the wars, he took a dislike to the place, and never came to live here again, and so he was satisfied with our remaining at the cottage. Alasalas! how the chateau is changed from what it once was! What delight my late lady used to take in it! I well remember when she came here a bride, and how fine it was. Now, it has been neglected so long, and is gone into such decay! I shall never see those days again!' The Countess appearing to be somewhat offended by the thoughtless simplicity, with which the old woman regretted former times, Dorothee added'But the chateau will now be inhabited, and cheerful again; not all the world could tempt me to live in it alone.' 'Well, the experiment will not be made, I believe,' said the Countess, displeased that her own silence had been unable to awe the loquacity of this rustic old housekeeper, now spared from further attendance by the entrance of the Count, who said he had been viewing part of the chateau, and found, that it would require considerable repairs and some alterations, before it would be perfectly comfortable, as a place of residence. 'I am sorry to hear it, my lord,' replied the Countess. 'And why sorry, madam?' 'Because the place will ill repay your trouble; and were it even a paradise, it would be insufferable at such a distance from Paris.' The Count made no reply, but walked abruptly to a window. 'There are windows, my lord, but they neither admit entertainment, or light; they shew only a scene of savage nature.' 'I am at a loss, madam,' said the Count, 'to conjecture what you mean by savage nature. Do those plains, or those woods, or that fine expanse of water, deserve the name?' 'Those mountains certainly do, my lord,' rejoined the Countess, pointing to the Pyrenees, 'and this chateau, though not a work of rude nature, is, to my taste, at least, one of savage art.' The Count coloured highly. 'This place, madam, was the work of my ancestors,' said he, 'and you must allow me to say, that your present conversation discovers neither good taste, or good manners.' Blanche, now shocked at an altercation, which appeared to be increasing to a serious disagreement, rose to leave the room, when her mother's woman entered it; and the Countess, immediately desiring to be shewn to her own apartment, withdrew, attended by Mademoiselle Bearn. Lady Blanche, it being not yet dark, took this opportunity of exploring new scenes, and, leaving the parlour, she passed from the hall into a wide gallery, whose walls were decorated by marble pilasters, which supported an arched roof, composed of a rich mosaic work. Through a distant window, that seemed to terminate the gallery, were seen the purple clouds of evening and a landscape, whose features, thinly veiled in twilight, no longer appeared distinctly, but, blended into one grand mass, stretched to the horizon, coloured only with a tint of solemn grey. The gallery terminated in a saloon, to which the window she had seen through an open door, belonged; but the increasing dusk permitted her only an imperfect view of this apartment, which seemed to be magnificent and of modern architecture; though it had been either suffered to fall into decay, or had never been properly finished. The windows, which were numerous and large, descended low, and afforded a very extensive, and what Blanche's fancy represented to be, a very lovely prospect; and she stood for some time, surveying the grey obscurity and depicturing imaginary woods and mountains, vallies and rivers, on this scene of night; her solemn sensations rather assisted, than interrupted, by the distant bark of a watchdog, and by the breeze, as it trembled upon the light foliage of the shrubs. Now and then, appeared for a moment, among the woods, a cottage light; and, at length, was heard, afar off, the evening bell of a convent, dying on the air. When she withdrew her thoughts from these subjects of fanciful delight, the gloom and silence of the saloon somewhat awed her; and, having sought the door of the gallery, and pursued, for a considerable time, a dark passage, she came to a hall, but one totally different from that she had formerly seen. By the twilight, admitted through an open portico, she could just distinguish this apartment to be of very light and airy architecture, and that it was paved with white marble, pillars of which supported the roof, that rose into arches built in the Moorish style. While Blanche stood on the steps of this portico, the moon rose over the sea, and gradually disclosed, in partial light, the beauties of the eminence, on which she stood, whence a lawn, now rude and overgrown with high grass, sloped to the woods, that, almost surrounding the chateau, extended in a grand sweep down the southern sides of the promontory to the very margin of the ocean. Beyond the woods, on the northside, appeared a long tract of the plains of Languedoc; and, to the east, the landscape she had before dimly seen, with the towers of a monastery, illumined by the moon, rising over dark groves. The soft and shadowy tint, that overspread the scene, the waves, undulating in the moonlight, and their low and measured murmurs on the beach, were circumstances, that united to elevate the unaccustomed mind of Blanche to enthusiasm. 'And have I lived in this glorious world so long,' said she, 'and never till now beheld such a prospectnever experienced these delights! Every peasant girl, on my father's domain, has viewed from her infancy the face of nature; has ranged, at liberty, her romantic wilds, while I have been shut in a cloister from the view of these beautiful appearances, which were designed to enchant all eyes, and awaken all hearts.

How can the poor nuns and friars feel the full fervour of devotion, if they never see the sun rise, or set? Never, till this evening, did I know what true devotion is; for, never before did I see the sun sink below the vast earth! Tomorrow, for the first time in my life, I will see it rise. O, who would live in Paris, to look upon black walls and dirty streets, when, in the country, they might gaze on the blue heavens, and all the green earth!' This enthusiastic soliloquy was interrupted by a rustling noise in the hall; and, while the loneliness of the place made her sensible to fear, she thought she perceived something moving between the pillars. For a moment, she continued silently observing it, till, ashamed of her ridiculous apprehensions, she recollected courage enough to demand who was there. 'O my young lady, is it you?' said the old housekeeper, who was come to shut the windows, 'I am glad it is you.' The manner, in which she spoke this, with a faint breath, rather surprised Blanche, who said, 'You seemed frightened, Dorothee, what is the matter?' 'No, not frightened, ma'amselle,' replied Dorothee, hesitating and trying to appear composed, 'but I am old, anda little matter startles me.' The Lady Blanche smiled at the distinction. 'I am glad, that my lord the Count is come to live at the chateau, ma'amselle,' continued Dorothee, 'for it has been many a year deserted, and dreary enough; now, the place will look a little as it used to do, when my poor lady was alive.' Blanche enquired how long it was, since the Marchioness died? 'Alas! my lady,' replied Dorothee, 'so longthat I have ceased to count the years! The place, to my mind, has mourned ever since, and I am sure my lord's vassals have! But you have lost yourself, ma'amselle,shall I shew you to the other side of the chateau?' Blanche enquired how long this part of the edifice had been built. 'Soon after my lord's marriage, ma'am,' replied Dorothee. 'The place was large enough without this addition, for many rooms of the old building were even then never made use of, and my lord had a princely household too; but he thought the antient mansion gloomy, and gloomy enough it is!' Lady Blanche now desired to be shewn to the inhabited part of the chateau; and, as the passages were entirely dark, Dorothee conducted her along the edge of the lawn to the opposite side of the edifice, where, a door opening into the great hall, she was met by Mademoiselle Bearn. 'Where have you been so long?' said she, 'I had begun to think some wonderful adventure had befallen you, and that the giant of this enchanted castle, or the ghost, which, no doubt, haunts it, had conveyed you through a trapdoor into some subterranean vault, whence you was never to return.' 'No,' replied Blanche, laughingly, 'you seem to love adventures so well, that I leave them for you to achieve.' 'Well, I am willing to achieve them, provided I am allowed to describe them.' 'My dear Mademoiselle Bearn,' said Henri, as he met her at the door of the parlour, 'no ghost of these days would be so savage as to impose silence on you. Our ghosts are more civilized than to condemn a lady to a purgatory severer even, than their own, be it what it may.' Mademoiselle Bearn replied only by a laugh; and, the Count now entering the room, supper was served, during which he spoke little, frequently appeared to be abstracted from the company, and more than once remarked, that the place was greatly altered, since he had last seen it. 'Many years have intervened since that period,' said he; 'and, though the grand features of the scenery admit of no change, they impress me with sensations very different from those I formerly experienced.' 'Did these scenes, sir,' said Blanche, 'ever appear more lovely, than they do now? To me this seems hardly possible.' The Count, regarding her with a melancholy smile, said, 'They once were as delightful to me, as they are now to you; the landscape is not changed, but time has changed me; from my mind the illusion, which gave spirit to the colouring of nature, is fading fast! If you live, my dear Blanche, to revisit this spot, at the distance of many years, you will, perhaps, remember and understand the feelings of your father.' Lady Blanche, affected by these words, remained silent; she looked forward to the period, which the Count anticipated, and considering, that he, who now spoke, would then probably be no more, her eyes, bent to the ground, were filed with tears. She gave her hand to her father, who, smiling affectionately, rose from his chair, and went to a window to conceal his emotion. The fatigues of the day made the party separate at an early hour, when Blanche retired through a long oak gallery to her chamber, whose spacious and lofty walls, high antiquated casements, and, what was the effect of these, its gloomy air, did not reconcile her to its remote situation, in this antient building. The furniture, also, was of antient date; the bed was of blue damask, trimmed with tarnished gold lace, and its lofty tester rose in the form of a canopy, whence the curtains descended, like those of such tents as are sometimes represented in old pictures, and, indeed, much resembling those, exhibited on the faded tapestry, with which the chamber was hung. To Blanche, every object here was matter of curiosity; and, taking the light from her woman to examine the tapestry, she perceived, that it represented scenes from the wars of Troy, though the almost colourless worsted now mocked the glowing actions they once had painted. She laughed at the ludicrous absurdity she observed, till, recollecting, that the hands, which had wove it, were, like the poet, whose thoughts of fire they had attempted to express, long since mouldered into dust, a train of melancholy ideas passed over her mind, and she almost wept. Having given her woman a strict injunction to awaken her, before sunrise, she dismissed her; and then, to dissipate the gloom, which reflection had cast upon her spirits, opened one of the high casements, and was again cheered by the face of living nature. The shadowy earth, the air, and oceanall was still. Along the deep serene of the heavens, a few light clouds floated slowly, through whose skirts the stars now seemed to tremble, and now to emerge with purer splendour. Blanche's thoughts arose involuntarily to the Great Author of the sublime objects she contemplated, and she breathed a prayer of finer devotion, than any she had ever uttered beneath the vaulted roof of a cloister. At this casement, she remained till the glooms of midnight were stretched over the prospect. She then retired to her pillow, and, 'with gay visions of tomorrow,' to those sweet slumbers, which health and happy innocence only know. Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new. Chapter 11 What transport to retrace our early plays, Our easy bliss, when each thing joy supplied The woods, the mountains and the warbling maze Of the wild brooks! THOMSON Blanche's slumbers continued, till long after the hour, which she had so impatiently anticipated, for her woman, fatigued with travelling, did not call her, till breakfast was nearly ready. Her disappointment, however, was instantly forgotten, when, on opening the casement, she saw, on one hand, the wide sea sparkling in the morning rays, with its stealing sails and glancing oars; and, on the other, the fresh woods, the plains farstretching and the blue mountains, all glowing with the splendour of day. As she inspired the pure breeze, health spread a deeper blush upon her countenance, and pleasure danced in her eyes. 'Who could first invent convents!' said she, 'and who could first persuade people to go into them? and to make religion a pretence, too, where all that should inspire it, is so carefully shut out! God is best pleased with the homage of a grateful heart, and, when we view his glories, we feel most grateful. I never felt so much devotion, during the many dull years I was in the convent, as I have done in the few hours, that I have been here, where I need only look on all around meto adore God in my inmost heart!' Saying this, she left the window, bounded along the gallery, and, in the next moment, was in the breakfast room, where the Count was already seated. The cheerfulness of a bright sunshine had dispersed the melancholy glooms of his reflections, a pleasant smile was on his countenance, and he spoke in an enlivening voice to Blanche, whose heart echoed back the tones. Henri and, soon after, the Countess with Mademoiselle Bearn appeared, and the whole party seemed to acknowledge the influence of the scene; even the Countess was so much reanimated as to receive the civilities of her husband with complacency, and but once forgot her goodhumour, which was when she asked whether they had any neighbours, who were likely to make THIS BARBAROUS SPOT more tolerable, and whether the Count believed it possible for her to exist here, without some amusement? Soon after breakfast the party dispersed; the Count, ordering his steward to attend him in the library, went to survey the condition of his premises, and to visit some of his tenants; Henri hastened with alacrity to the shore to examine a boat, that was to bear them on a little voyage in the evening and to superintend the adjustment of a silk awning; while the Countess, attended by Mademoiselle Bearn, retired to an apartment on the modern side of the chateau, which was fitted up with airy elegance; and, as the windows opened upon balconies, that fronted the sea, she was there saved from a view of the HORRID Pyrenees. Here, while she reclined on a sofa, and, casting her languid eyes over the ocean, which appeared beyond the woodtops, indulged in the luxuries of ENNUI, her companion read aloud a sentimental novel, on some fashionable system of philosophy, for the Countess was herself somewhat of a PHILOSOPHER, especially as to INFIDELITY, and among a certain circle her opinions were waited for with impatience, and received as doctrines. The Lady Blanche, meanwhile, hastened to indulge, amidst the wild woodwalks around the chateau, her new enthusiasm, where, as she wandered under the shades, her gay spirits gradually yielded to pensive complacency. Now, she moved with solemn steps, beneath the gloom of thickly interwoven branches, where the fresh dew still hung upon every flower, that peeped from among the grass; and now tripped sportively along the path, on which the sunbeams darted and the checquered foliage trembledwhere the tender greens of the beech, the acacia and the mountainash, mingling with the solemn tints of the cedar, the pine and cypress, exhibited as fine a contrast of colouring, as the majestic oak and oriental plane did of form, to the feathery lightness of the cork tree and the waving grace of the poplar. Having reached a rustic seat, within a deep recess of the woods, she rested awhile, and, as her eyes caught, through a distant opening, a glimpse of the blue waters of the Mediterranean, with the white sail, gliding on its bosom, or of the broad mountain, glowing beneath the midday sun, her mind experienced somewhat of that exquisite delight, which awakens the fancy, and leads to poetry. The hum of bees alone broke the stillness around her, as, with other insects of various hues, they sported gaily in the shade, or sipped sweets from the fresh flowers and, while Blanche watched a butterfly, flitting from bud to bud, she indulged herself in imagining the pleasures of its short day, till she had composed the following stanzas. THE BUTTERFLY TO HIS LOVE What bowery dell, with fragrant breath, Courts thee to stay thy airy flight; Nor seek again the purple heath, So oft the scene of gay delight? Long I've watch'd i' the lily's bell, Whose whiteness stole the morning's beam; No fluttering sounds thy coming tell, No waving wings, at distance, gleam. But fountain fresh, nor breathing grove, Nor sunny mead, nor blossom'd tree, So sweet as lily's cell shall prove, The bower of constant love and me. When April buds begin to blow, The primrose, and the harebell blue, That on the verdant moss bank grow, With violet cups, that weep in dew; When wanton gales breathe through the shade, And shake the blooms, and steal their sweets, And swell the song of ev'ry glade, I range the forest's green retreats There, through the tangled woodwalks play, Where no rude urchin paces near, Where sparely peeps the sultry day, And light dews freshen all the air. High on a sunbeam oft I sport O'er bower and fountain, vale and hill; Oft ev'ry blushing flow'ret court, That hangs its head o'er winding rill. But these I'll leave to be thy guide, And shew thee, where the jasmine spreads Her snowy leaf, where mayflow'rs hide, And rosebuds rear their peeping heads. With me the mountain's summit scale, And taste the wildthyme's honied bloom, Whose fragrance, floating on the gale, Oft leads me to the cedar's gloom. Yet, yet, no sound comes in the breeze! What shade thus dares to tempt thy stay? Once, me alone thou wish'd to please, And with me only thou wouldst stray. But, while thy long delay I mourn, And chide the sweet shades for their guile, Thou may'st be true, and they forlorn, And fairy favours court thy smile. The tiny queen of fairyland, Who knows thy speed, hath sent thee far, To bring, or ere the nightwatch stand, Rich essence for her shadowy car Perchance her acorncups to fill With nectar from the Indian rose, Or gather, near some haunted rill, Maydews, that lull to sleep Love's woes Or, o'er the mountains, bade thee fly, To tell her fairy love to speed, When ev'ning steals upon the sky, To dance along the twilight mead. But now I see thee sailing low, Gay as the brightest flow'rs of spring, Thy coat of blue and jet I know, And well thy gold and purple wing. Borne on the gale, thou com'st to me; O! welcome, welcome to my home! In lily's cell we'll live in glee, Together o'er the mountains roam! When Lady Blanche returned to the chateau, instead of going to the apartment of the Countess, she amused herself with wandering over that part of the edifice, which she had not yet examined, of which the most antient first attracted her curiosity; for, though what she had seen of the modern was gay and elegant, there was something in the former more interesting to her imagination. Having passed up the great staircase, and through the oak gallery, she entered upon a long suite of chambers, whose walls were either hung with tapestry, or wainscoted with cedar, the furniture of which looked almost as antient as the rooms themselves; the spacious fireplaces, where no mark of social cheer remained, presented an image of cold desolation; and the whole suite had so much the air of neglect and desertion, that it seemed, as if the venerable persons, whose portraits hung upon the walls, had been the last to inhabit them. On leaving these rooms, she found herself in another gallery, one end of which was terminated by a back staircase, and the other by a door, that seemed to communicate with the northside of the chateau, but which being fastened, she descended the staircase, and, opening a door in the wall, a few steps down, found herself in a small square room, that formed part of the west turret of the castle. Three windows presented each a separate and beautiful prospect; that to the north, overlooking Languedoc; another to the west, the hills ascending towards the Pyrenees, whose awful summits crowned the landscape; and a third, fronting the south, gave the Mediterranean, and a part of the wild shores of Rousillon, to the eye. Having left the turret, and descended the narrow staircase, she found herself in a dusky passage, where she wandered, unable to find her way, till impatience yielded to apprehension, and she called for assistance. Presently steps approached, and light glimmered through a door at the other extremity of the passage, which was opened with caution by some person, who did not venture beyond it, and whom Blanche observed in silence, till the door was closing, when she called aloud, and, hastening towards it, perceived the old housekeeper. 'Dear ma'amselle! is it you?' said Dorothee, 'How could you find your way hither?' Had Blanche been less occupied by her own fears, she would probably have observed the strong expressions of terror and surprise on Dorothee's countenance, who now led her through a long succession of passages and rooms, that looked as if they had been uninhabited for a century, till they reached that appropriated to the housekeeper, where Dorothee entreated she would sit down and take refreshment. Blanche accepted the sweet meats, offered to her, mentioned her discovery of the pleasant turret, and her wish to appropriate it to her own use. Whether Dorothee's taste was not so sensible to the beauties of landscape as her young lady's, or that the constant view of lovely scenery had deadened it, she forbore to praise the subject of Blanche's enthusiasm, which, however, her silence did not repress. To Lady Blanche's enquiry of whither the door she had found fastened at the end of the gallery led, she replied, that it opened to a suite of rooms, which had not been entered, during many years, 'For,' added she, 'my late lady died in one of them, and I could never find in my heart to go into them since.' Blanche, though she wished to see these chambers, forbore, on observing that Dorothee's eyes were filled with tears, to ask her to unlock them, and, soon after, went to dress for dinner, at which the whole party met in good spirits and good humour, except the Countess, whose vacant mind, overcome by the languor of idleness, would neither suffer her to be happy herself, or to contribute to the happiness of others. Mademoiselle Bearn, attempting to be witty, directed her badinage against Henri, who answered, because he could not well avoid it, rather than from any inclination to notice her, whose liveliness sometimes amused, but whose conceit and insensibility often disgusted him. The cheerfulness, with which Blanche rejoined the party, vanished, on her reaching the margin of the sea; she gazed with apprehension upon the immense expanse of waters, which, at a distance, she had beheld only with delight and astonishment, and it was by a strong effort, that she so far overcame her fears as to follow her father into the boat. As she silently surveyed the vast horizon, bending round the distant verge of the ocean, an emotion of sublimest rapture struggled to overcome a sense of personal danger. A light breeze played on the water, and on the silk awning of the boat, and waved the foliage of the receding woods, that crowned the cliffs, for many miles, and which the Count surveyed with the pride of conscious property, as well as with the eye of taste. At some distance, among these woods, stood a pavilion, which had once been the scene of social gaiety, and which its situation still made one of romantic beauty. Thither, the Count had ordered coffee and other refreshment to be carried, and thither the sailors now steered their course, following the windings of the shore round many a woody promontory and circling bay; while the pensive tones of horns and other wind instruments, played by the attendants in a distant boat, echoed among the rocks, and died along the waves. Blanche had now subdued her fears; a delightful tranquillity stole over her mind, and held her in silence; and she was too happy even to remember the convent, or her former sorrows, as subjects of comparison with her present felicity. The Countess felt less unhappy than she had done, since the moment of her leaving Paris; for her mind was now under some degree of restraint; she feared to indulge its wayward humours, and even wished to recover the Count's good opinion. On his family, and on the surrounding scene, he looked with tempered pleasure and benevolent satisfaction, while his son exhibited the gay spirits of youth, anticipating new delights, and regretless of those, that were passed. After near an hour's rowing, the party landed, and ascended a little path, overgrown with vegetation. At a little distance from the point of the eminence, within the shadowy recess of the woods, appeared the pavilion, which Blanche perceived, as she caught a glimpse of its portico between the trees, to be built of variegated marble. As she followed the Countess, she often turned her eyes with rapture towards the ocean, seen beneath the dark foliage, far below, and from thence upon the deep woods, whose silence and impenetrable gloom awakened emotions more solemn, but scarcely less delightful. The pavilion had been prepared, as far as was possible, on a very short notice, for the reception of its visitors; but the faded colours of its painted walls and ceiling, and the decayed drapery of its once magnificent furniture, declared how long it had been neglected, and abandoned to the empire of the changing seasons. While the party partook of a collation of fruit and coffee, the horns, placed in a distant part of the woods, where an echo sweetened and prolonged their melancholy tones, broke softly on the stillness of the scene. This spot seemed to attract even the admiration of the Countess, or, perhaps, it was merely the pleasure of planning furniture and decorations, that made her dwell so long on the necessity of repairing and adorning it; while the Count, never happier than when he saw her mind engaged by natural and simple objects, acquiesced in all her designs, concerning the pavilion. The paintings on the walls and coved ceiling were to be renewed, the canopies and sofas were to be of light green damask; marble statues of woodnymphs, bearing on their heads baskets of living flowers, were to adorn the recesses between the windows, which, descending to the ground, were to admit to every part of the room, and it was of octagonal form, the various landscape. One window opened upon a romantic glade, where the eye roved among the woody recesses, and the scene was bounded only by a lengthened pomp of groves; from another, the woods receding disclosed the distant summits of the Pyrenees; a third fronted an avenue, beyond which the grey towers of ChateauleBlanc, and a picturesque part of its ruin were seen partially among the foliage; while a fourth gave, between the trees, a glimpse of the green pastures and villages, that diversify the banks of the Aude. The Mediterranean, with the bold cliffs, that overlooked its shores, were the grand objects of a fifth window, and the others gave, in different points of view, the wild scenery of the woods. After wandering, for some time, in these, the party returned to the shore and embarked; and, the beauty of the evening tempting them to extend their excursion, they proceeded further up the bay. A dead calm had succeeded the light breeze, that wafted them hither, and the men took to their oars. Around, the waters were spread into one vast expanse of polished mirror, reflecting the grey cliffs and feathery woods, that overhung its surface, the glow of the western horizon and the dark clouds, that came slowly from the east. Blanche loved to see the dipping oars imprint the water, and to watch the spreading circles they left, which gave a tremulous motion to the reflected landscape, without destroying the harmony of its features. Above the darkness of the woods, her eye now caught a cluster of high towers, touched with the splendour of the setting rays; and, soon after, the horns being then silent, she heard the faint swell of choral voices from a distance. 'What voices are those, upon the air?' said the Count, looking round, and listening; but the strain had ceased. 'It seemed to be a vesperhymn, which I have often heard in my convent,' said Blanche. 'We are near the monastery, then,' observed the Count; and, the boat soon after doubling a lofty headland, the monastery of St. Claire appeared, seated near the margin of the sea, where the cliffs, suddenly sinking, formed a low shore within a small bay, almost encircled with woods, among which partial features of the edifice were seen;the great gate and gothic window of the hall, the cloisters and the side of a chapel more remote; while a venerable arch, which had once led to a part of the fabric, now demolished, stood a majestic ruin detached from the main building, beyond which appeared a grand perspective of the woods. On the grey walls, the moss had fastened, and, round the pointed windows of the chapel, the ivy and the briony hung in many a fantastic wreath. All without was silent and forsaken; but, while Blanche gazed with admiration on this venerable pile, whose effect was heightened by the strong lights and shadows thrown athwart it by a cloudy sunset, a sound of many voices, slowly chanting, arose from within. The Count bade his men rest on their oars. The monks were singing the hymn of vespers, and some female voices mingled with the strain, which rose by soft degrees, till the high organ and the choral sounds swelled into full and solemn harmony. The strain, soon after, dropped into sudden silence, and was renewed in a low and still more solemn key, till, at length, the holy chorus died away, and was heard no more.Blanche sighed, tears trembled in her eyes, and her thoughts seemed wafted with the sounds to heaven. While a rapt stillness prevailed in the boat, a train of friars, and then of nuns, veiled in white, issued from the cloisters, and passed, under the shade of the woods, to the main body of the edifice. The Countess was the first of her party to awaken from this pause of silence. 'These dismal hymns and friars make one quite melancholy,' said she; 'twilight is coming on; pray let us return, or it will be dark before we get home.' The count, looking up, now perceived, that the twilight of evening was anticipated by an approaching storm. In the east a tempest was collecting; a heavy gloom came on, opposing and contrasting the glowing splendour of the setting sun. The clamorous seafowl skimmed in fleet circles upon the surface of the sea, dipping their light pinions in the wave, as they fled away in search of shelter. The boatmen pulled hard at their oars; but the thunder, that now muttered at a distance, and the heavy drops, that began to dimple the water, made the Count determine to put back to the monastery for shelter, and the course of the boat was immediately changed. As the clouds approached the west, their lurid darkness changed to a deep ruddy glow, which, by reflection, seemed to fire the tops of the woods and the shattered towers of the monastery. The appearance of the heavens alarmed the Countess and Mademoiselle Bearn, whose expressions of apprehension distressed the Count, and perplexed his men; while Blanche continued silent, now agitated with fear, and now with admiration, as she viewed the grandeur of the clouds, and their effect on the scenery, and listened to the long, long peals of thunder, that rolled through the air. The boat having reached the lawn before the monastery, the Count sent a servant to announce his arrival, and to entreat shelter of the Superior, who, soon after, appeared at the great gate, attended by several monks, while the servant returned with a message, expressive at once of hospitality and pride, but of pride disguised in submission. The party immediately disembarked, and, having hastily crossed the lawnfor the shower was now heavywere received at the gate by the Superior, who, as they entered, stretched forth his hands and gave his blessing; and they passed into the great hall, where the lady abbess waited, attended by several nuns, clothed, like herself, in black, and veiled in white. The veil of the abbess was, however, thrown half back, and discovered a countenance, whose chaste dignity was sweetened by the smile of welcome, with which she addressed the Countess, whom she led, with Blanche and Mademoiselle Bearn, into the convent parlour, while the Count and Henri were conducted by the Superior to the refectory. The Countess, fatigued and discontented, received the politeness of the abbess with careless haughtiness, and had followed her, with indolent steps, to the parlour, over which the painted casements and wainscot of larchwood threw, at all times, a melancholy shade, and where the gloom of evening now loured almost to darkness. While the lady abbess ordered refreshment, and conversed with the Countess, Blanche withdrew to a window, the lower panes of which, being without painting, allowed her to observe the progress of the storm over the Mediterranean, whose dark waves, that had so lately slept, now came boldly swelling, in long succession, to the shore, where they burst in white foam, and threw up a high spray over the rocks. A red sulphureous tint overspread the long line of clouds, that hung above the western horizon, beneath whose dark skirts the sun looking out, illumined the distant shores of Languedoc, as well as the tufted summits of the nearer woods, and shed a partial gleam on the western waves. The rest of the scene was in deep gloom, except where a sunbeam, darting between the clouds, glanced on the white wings of the seafowl, that circled high among them, or touched the swelling sail of a vessel, which was seen labouring in the storm. Blanche, for some time, anxiously watched the progress of the bark, as it threw the waves in foam around it, and, as the lightnings flashed, looked to the opening heavens, with many a sigh for the fate of the poor mariners. The sun, at length, set, and the heavy clouds, which had long impended, dropped over the splendour of his course; the vessel, however, was yet dimly seen, and Blanche continued to observe it, till the quick succession of flashes, lighting up the gloom of the whole horizon, warned her to retire from the window, and she joined the Abbess, who, having exhausted all her topics of conversation with the Countess, had now leisure to notice her. But their discourse was interrupted by tremendous peals of thunder; and the bell of the monastery soon after ringing out, summoned the inhabitants to prayer. As Blanche passed the window, she gave another look to the ocean, where, by the momentary flash, that illumined the vast body of the waters, she distinguished the vessel she had observed before, amidst a sea of foam, breaking the billows, the mast now bowing to the waves, and then rising high in air. She sighed fervently as she gazed, and then followed the Lady Abbess and the Countess to the chapel. Meanwhile, some of the Count's servants, having gone by land to the chateau for carriages, returned soon after vespers had concluded, when, the storm being somewhat abated, the Count and his family returned home. Blanche was surprised to discover how much the windings of the shore had deceived her, concerning the distance of the chateau from the monastery, whose vesper bell she had heard, on the preceding evening, from the windows of the west saloon, and whose towers she would also have seen from thence, had not twilight veiled them. On their arrival at the chateau, the Countess, affecting more fatigue, than she really felt, withdrew to her apartment, and the Count, with his daughter and Henri, went to the supperroom, where they had not been long, when they heard, in a pause of the gust, a firing of guns, which the Count understanding to be signals of distress from some vessel in the storm, went to a window, that opened towards the Mediterranean, to observe further; but the sea was now involved in utter darkness, and the loud howlings of the tempest had again overcome every other sound. Blanche, remembering the bark, which she had before seen, now joined her father, with trembling anxiety.

In a few moments, the report of guns was again borne along the wind, and as suddenly wafted away; a tremendous burst of thunder followed, and, in the flash, that had preceded it, and which seemed to quiver over the whole surface of the waters, a vessel was discovered, tossing amidst the white foam of the waves at some distance from the shore. Impenetrable darkness again involved the scene, but soon a second flash shewed the bark, with one sail unfurled, driving towards the coast. Blanche hung upon her father's arm, with looks full of the agony of united terror and pity, which were unnecessary to awaken the heart of the Count, who gazed upon the sea with a piteous expression, and, perceiving, that no boat could live in the storm, forbore to send one; but he gave orders to his people to carry torches out upon the cliffs, hoping they might prove a kind of beacon to the vessel, or, at least, warn the crew of the rocks they were approaching. While Henri went out to direct on what part of the cliffs the lights should appear, Blanche remained with her father, at the window, catching, every now and then, as the lightnings flashed, a glimpse of the vessel; and she soon saw, with reviving hope, the torches flaming on the blackness of night, and, as they waved over the cliffs, casting a red gleam on the gasping billows. When the firing of guns was repeated, the torches were tossed high in the air, as if answering the signal, and the firing was then redoubled; but, though the wind bore the sound away, she fancied, as the lightnings glanced, that the vessel was much nearer the shore. The Count's servants were now seen, running to and fro, on the rocks; some venturing almost to the point of the crags, and bending over, held out their torches fastened to long poles; while others, whose steps could be traced only by the course of the lights, descended the steep and dangerous path, that wound to the margin of the sea, and, with loud halloos, hailed the mariners, whose shrill whistle, and then feeble voices, were heard, at intervals, mingling with the storm. Sudden shouts from the people on the rocks increased the anxiety of Blanche to an almost intolerable degree but her suspense, concerning the fate of the mariners, was soon over, when Henri, running breathless into the room, told that the vessel was anchored in the bay below, but in so shattered a condition, that it was feared she would part before the crew could disembark. The Count immediately gave orders for his own boats to assist in bringing them to shore, and that such of these unfortunate strangers as could not be accommodated in the adjacent hamlet should be entertained at the chateau. Among the latter, were Emily St. Aubert, Monsieur Du Pont, Ludovico and Annette, who, having embarked at Leghorn and reached Marseilles, were from thence crossing the Gulf of Lyons, when this storm overtook them. They were received by the Count with his usual benignity, who, though Emily wished to have proceeded immediately to the monastery of St. Claire, would not allow her to leave the chateau, that night; and, indeed, the terror and fatigue she had suffered would scarcely have permitted her to go farther. In Monsieur Du Pont the Count discovered an old acquaintance, and much joy and congratulation passed between them, after which Emily was introduced by name to the Count's family, whose hospitable benevolence dissipated the little embarrassment, which her situation had occasioned her, and the party were soon seated at the suppertable. The unaffected kindness of Blanche and the lively joy she expressed on the escape of the strangers, for whom her pity had been so much interested, gradually revived Emily's languid spirits; and Du Pont, relieved from his terrors for her and for himself, felt the full contrast, between his late situation on a dark and tremendous ocean, and his present one, in a cheerful mansion, where he was surrounded with plenty, elegance and smiles of welcome. Annette, meanwhile, in the servants' hall, was telling of all the dangers she had encountered, and congratulating herself so heartily upon her own and Ludovico's escape, and on her present comforts, that she often made all that part of the chateau ring with merriment and laughter. Ludovico's spirits were as gay as her own, but he had discretion enough to restrain them, and tried to check hers, though in vain, till her laughter, at length, ascended to MY LADY'S chamber, who sent to enquire what occasioned so much uproar in the chateau, and to command silence. Emily withdrew early to seek the repose she so much required, but her pillow was long a sleepless one. On this her return to her native country, many interesting remembrances were awakened; all the events and sufferings she had experienced, since she quitted it, came in long succession to her fancy, and were chased only by the image of Valancourt, with whom to believe herself once more in the same land, after they had been so long, and so distantly separated, gave her emotions of indescribable joy, but which afterwards yielded to anxiety and apprehension, when she considered the long period, that had elapsed, since any letter had passed between them, and how much might have happened in this interval to affect her future peace. But the thought, that Valancourt might be now no more, or, if living, might have forgotten her, was so very terrible to her heart, that she would scarcely suffer herself to pause upon the possibility. She determined to inform him, on the following day, of her arrival in France, which it was scarcely possible he could know but by a letter from herself, and, after soothing her spirits with the hope of soon hearing, that he was well, and unchanged in his affections, she, at length, sunk to repose. Chapter 12 Oft woo'd the gleam of Cynthia, silverbright, In cloisters dim, far from the haunts of folly, With freedom by my side, and softey'd melancholy. GRAY The Lady Blanche was so much interested for Emily, that, upon hearing she was going to reside in the neighbouring convent, she requested the Count would invite her to lengthen her stay at the chateau. 'And you know, my dear sir,' added Blanche, 'how delighted I shall be with such a companion; for, at present, I have no friend to walk, or to read with, since Mademoiselle Bearn is my mamma's friend only.' The Count smiled at the youthful simplicity, with which his daughter yielded to first impressions; and, though he chose to warn her of their danger, he silently applauded the benevolence, that could thus readily expand in confidence to a stranger. He had observed Emily, with attention, on the preceding evening, and was as much pleased with her, as it was possible he could be with any person, on so short an acquaintance. The mention, made of her by Mons. Du Pont, had also given him a favourable impression of Emily; but, extremely cautious as to those, whom he introduced to the intimacy of his daughter, he determined, on hearing that the former was no stranger at the convent of St. Claire, to visit the abbess, and, if her account corresponded with his wish, to invite Emily to pass some time at the chateau. On this subject, he was influenced by a consideration of the Lady Blanche's welfare, still more than by either a wish to oblige her, or to befriend the orphan Emily, for whom, however, he felt considerably interested. On the following morning, Emily was too much fatigued to appear; but Mons. Du Pont was at the breakfasttable, when the Count entered the room, who pressed him, as his former acquaintance, and the son of a very old friend, to prolong his stay at the chateau; an invitation, which Du Pont willingly accepted, since it would allow him to be near Emily; and, though he was not conscious of encouraging a hope, that she would ever return his affection, he had not fortitude enough to attempt, at present, to overcome it. Emily, when she was somewhat recovered, wandered with her new friend over the grounds belonging to the chateau, as much delighted with the surrounding views, as Blanche, in the benevolence of her heart, had wished; from thence she perceived, beyond the woods, the towers of the monastery, and remarked, that it was to this convent she designed to go. 'Ah!' said Blanche with surprise, 'I am but just released from a convent, and would you go into one? If you could know what pleasure I feel in wandering here, at liberty,and in seeing the sky and the fields, and the woods all round me, I think you would not.' Emily, smiling at the warmth, with which the Lady Blanche spoke, observed, that she did not mean to confine herself to a convent for life. 'No, you may not intend it now,' said Blanche; 'but you do not know to what the nuns may persuade you to consent I know how kind they will appear, and how happy, for I have seen too much of their art.' When they returned to the chateau, Lady Blanche conducted Emily to her favourite turret, and from thence they rambled through the ancient chambers, which Blanche had visited before. Emily was amused by observing the structure of these apartments, and the fashion of their old but still magnificent furniture, and by comparing them with those of the castle of Udolpho, which were yet more antique and grotesque. She was also interested by Dorothee the housekeeper, who attended them, whose appearance was almost as antique as the objects around her, and who seemed no less interested by Emily, on whom she frequently gazed with so much deep attention, as scarcely to hear what was said to her. While Emily looked from one of the casements, she perceived, with surprise, some objects, that were familiar to her memory;the fields and woods, with the gleaming brook, which she had passed with La Voisin, one evening, soon after the death of Monsieur St. Aubert, in her way from the monastery to her cottage; and she now knew this to be the chateau, which he had then avoided, and concerning which he had dropped some remarkable hints. Shocked by this discovery, yet scarcely knowing why, she mused for some time in silence, and remembered the emotion, which her father had betrayed on finding himself so near this mansion, and some other circumstances of his conduct, that now greatly interested her. The music, too, which she had formerly heard, and, respecting which La Voisin had given such an odd account, occurred to her, and, desirous of knowing more concerning it, she asked Dorothee whether it returned at midnight, as usual, and whether the musician had yet been discovered. 'Yes, ma'amselle,' replied Dorothee, 'that music is still heard, but the musician has never been found out, nor ever will, I believe; though there are some people, who can guess.' 'Indeed!' said Emily, 'then why do they not pursue the enquiry?' 'Ah, young lady! enquiry enough has been madebut who can pursue a spirit?' Emily smiled, and, remembering how lately she had suffered herself to be led away by superstition, determined now to resist its contagion; yet, in spite of her efforts, she felt awe mingle with her curiosity, on this subject; and Blanche, who had hitherto listened in silence, now enquired what this music was, and how long it had been heard. 'Ever since the death of my lady, madam,' replied Dorothee. 'Why, the place is not haunted, surely?' said Blanche, between jesting and seriousness. 'I have heard that music almost ever since my dear lady died,' continued Dorothee, 'and never before then. But that is nothing to some things I could tell of.' 'Do, pray, tell them, then,' said Lady Blanche, now more in earnest than in jest. 'I am much interested, for I have heard sister Henriette, and sister Sophie, in the convent, tell of such strange appearances, which they themselves had witnessed!' 'You never heard, my lady, I suppose, what made us leave the chateau, and go and live in a cottage,' said Dorothee. 'Never!' replied Blanche with impatience. 'Nor the reason, that my lord, the Marquis'Dorothee checked herself, hesitated, and then endeavoured to change the topic; but the curiosity of Blanche was too much awakened to suffer the subject thus easily to escape her, and she pressed the old housekeeper to proceed with her account, upon whom, however, no entreaties could prevail; and it was evident, that she was alarmed for the imprudence, into which she had already betrayed herself. 'I perceive,' said Emily, smiling, 'that all old mansions are haunted; I am lately come from a place of wonders; but unluckily, since I left it, I have heard almost all of them explained.' Blanche was silent; Dorothee looked grave, and sighed; and Emily felt herself still inclined to believe more of the wonderful, than she chose to acknowledge. Just then, she remembered the spectacle she had witnessed in a chamber of Udolpho, and, by an odd kind of coincidence, the alarming words, that had accidentally met her eye in the MS. papers, which she had destroyed, in obedience to the command of her father; and she shuddered at the meaning they seemed to impart, almost as much as at the horrible appearance, disclosed by the black veil. The Lady Blanche, meanwhile, unable to prevail with Dorothee to explain the subject of her late hints, had desired, on reaching the door, that terminated the gallery, and which she found fastened on the preceding day, to see the suite of rooms beyond. 'Dear young lady,' said the housekeeper, 'I have told you my reason for not opening them; I have never seen them, since my dear lady died; and it would go hard with me to see them now. Pray, madam, do not ask me again.' 'Certainly I will not,' replied Blanche, 'if that is really your objection.' 'Alas! it is,' said the old woman 'we all loved her well, and I shall always grieve for her. Time runs round! it is now many years, since she died; but I remember every thing, that happened then, as if it was but yesterday. Many things, that have passed of late years, are gone quite from my memory, while those so long ago, I can see as if in a glass.' She paused, but afterwards, as they walked up the gallery, added to Emily, 'this young lady sometimes brings the late Marchioness to my mind; I can remember, when she looked just as blooming, and very like her, when she smiles. Poor lady! how gay she was, when she first came to the chateau!' 'And was she not gay, afterwards?' said Blanche. Dorothee shook her head; and Emily observed her, with eyes strongly expressive of the interest she now felt. 'Let us sit down in this window,' said the Lady Blanche, on reaching the opposite end of the gallery 'and pray, Dorothee, if it is not painful to you, tell us something more about the Marchioness. I should like to look into the glass you spoke of just now, and see a few of the circumstances, which you say often pass over it.' 'No, my lady,' replied Dorothee; 'if you knew as much as I do, you would not, for you would find there a dismal train of them; I often wish I could shut them out, but they will rise to my mind. I see my dear lady on her deathbed,her very look,and remember all she saidit was a terrible scene!' 'Why was it so terrible?' said Emily with emotion. 'Ah, dear young lady! is not death always terrible?' replied Dorothee. To some further enquiries of Blanche Dorothee was silent; and Emily, observing the tears in her eyes, forbore to urge the subject, and endeavoured to withdraw the attention of her young friend to some object in the gardens, where the Count, with the Countess and Monsieur Du Pont, appearing, they went down to join them. When he perceived Emily, he advanced to meet her, and presented her to the Countess, in a manner so benign, that it recalled most powerfully to her mind the idea of her late father, and she felt more gratitude to him, than embarrassment towards the Countess, who, however, received her with one of those fascinating smiles, which her caprice sometimes allowed her to assume, and which was now the result of a conversation the Count had held with her, concerning Emily. Whatever this might be, or whatever had passed in his conversation with the lady abbess, whom he had just visited, esteem and kindness were strongly apparent in his manner, when he addressed Emily, who experienced that sweet emotion, which arises from the consciousness of possessing the approbation of the good; for to the Count's worth she had been inclined to yield her confidence almost from the first moment, in which she had seen him. Before she could finish her acknowledgments for the hospitality she had received, and mention of her design of going immediately to the convent, she was interrupted by an invitation to lengthen her stay at the chateau, which was pressed by the Count and the Countess, with an appearance of such friendly sincerity, that, though she much wished to see her old friends at the monastery, and to sigh, once more, over her father's grave, she consented to remain a few days at the chateau. To the abbess, however, she immediately wrote, mentioning her arrival in Languedoc and her wish to be received into the convent, as a boarder; she also sent letters to Monsieur Quesnel and to Valancourt, whom she merely informed of her arrival in France; and, as she knew not where the latter might be stationed, she directed her letter to his brother's seat in Gascony. In the evening, Lady Blanche and Mons. Du Pont walked with Emily to the cottage of La Voisin, which she had now a melancholy pleasure in approaching, for time had softened her grief for the loss of St. Aubert, though it could not annihilate it, and she felt a soothing sadness in indulging the recollections, which this scene recalled. La Voisin was still living, and seemed to enjoy, as much as formerly, the tranquil evening of a blameless life. He was sitting at the door of his cottage, watching some of his grandchildren, playing on the grass before him, and, now and then, with a laugh, or a commendation, encouraging their sports. He immediately recollected Emily, whom he was much pleased to see, and she was as rejoiced to hear, that he had not lost one of his family, since her departure. 'Yes, ma'amselle,' said the old man, 'we all live merrily together still, thank God! and I believe there is not a happier family to be found in Languedoc, than ours.' Emily did not trust herself in the chamber, where St. Aubert died; and, after half an hour's conversation with La Voisin and his family, she left the cottage. During these the first days of her stay at ChateauleBlanc, she was often affected, by observing the deep, but silent melancholy, which, at times, stole over Du Pont; and Emily, pitying the selfdelusion, which disarmed him of the will to depart, determined to withdraw herself as soon as the respect she owed the Count and Countess De Villefort would permit. The dejection of his friend soon alarmed the anxiety of the Count, to whom Du Pont, at length, confided the secret of his hopeless affection, which, however, the former could only commiserate, though he secretly determined to befriend his suit, if an opportunity of doing so should ever occur. Considering the dangerous situation of Du Pont, he but feebly opposed his intention of leaving ChateauleBlanc, on the following day, but drew from him a promise of a longer visit, when he could return with safety to his peace. Emily herself, though she could not encourage his affection, esteemed him both for the many virtues he possessed, and for the services she had received from him; and it was not without tender emotions of gratitude and pity, that she now saw him depart for his family seat in Gascony; while he took leave of her with a countenance so expressive of love and grief, as to interest the Count more warmly in his cause than before. In a few days, Emily also left the chateau, but not before the Count and Countess had received her promise to repeat her visit very soon; and she was welcomed by the abbess, with the same maternal kindness she had formerly experienced, and by the nuns, with much expression of regard. The wellknown scenes of the convent occasioned her many melancholy recollections, but with these were mingled others, that inspired gratitude for having escaped the various dangers, that had pursued her, since she quitted it, and for the good, which she yet possessed; and, though she once more wept over her father's grave, with tears of tender affection, her grief was softened from its former acuteness. Some time after her return to the monastery, she received a letter from her uncle, Mons. Quesnel, in answer to information that she had arrived in France, and to her enquiries, concerning such of her affairs as he had undertaken to conduct during her absence, especially as to the period for which La Vallee had been let, whither it was her wish to return, if it should appear, that her income would permit her to do so. The reply of Mons. Quesnel was cold and formal, as she expected, expressing neither concern for the evils she suffered, nor pleasure, that she was now removed from them; nor did he allow the opportunity to pass, of reproving her for her rejection of Count Morano, whom he affected still to believe a man of honour and fortune; nor of vehemently declaiming against Montoni, to whom he had always, till now, felt himself to be inferior. On Emily's pecuniary concerns, he was not very explicit; he informed her, however, that the term, for which La Vallee had been engaged, was nearly expired; but, without inviting her to his own house, added, that her circumstances would by no means allow her to reside there, and earnestly advised her to remain, for the present, in the convent of St. Claire. To her enquiries respecting poor old Theresa, her late father's servant, he gave no answer. In the postscript to his letter, Monsieur Quesnel mentioned M. Motteville, in whose hands the late St. Aubert had placed the chief of his personal property, as being likely to arrange his affairs nearly to the satisfaction of his creditors, and that Emily would recover much more of her fortune, than she had formerly reason to expect. The letter also inclosed to Emily an order upon a merchant at Narbonne, for a small sum of money. The tranquillity of the monastery, and the liberty she was suffered to enjoy, in wandering among the woods and shores of this delightful province, gradually restored her spirits to their natural tone, except that anxiety would sometimes intrude, concerning Valancourt, as the time approached, when it was possible that she might receive an answer to her letter. Chapter 13 As when a wave, that from a cloud impends, And, swell'd with tempests, on the ship descends, White are the decks with foam; the winds aloud, Howl o'er the masts, and sing through ev'ry shroud Pale, trembling, tir'd, the sailors freeze with fears, And instant death on ev'ry wave appears. POPE'S HOMER The Lady Blanche, meanwhile, who was left much alone, became impatient for the company of her new friend, whom she wished to observe sharing in the delight she received from the beautiful scenery around. She had now no person, to whom she could express her admiration and communicate her pleasures, no eye, that sparkled to her smile, or countenance, that reflected her happiness; and she became spiritless and pensive. The Count, observing her dissatisfaction, readily yielded to her entreaties, and reminded Emily of her promised visit; but the silence of Valancourt, which was now prolonged far beyond the period, when a letter might have arrived from Estuviere, oppressed Emily with severe anxiety, and, rendering her averse to society, she would willingly have deferred her acceptance of this invitation, till her spirits should be relieved. The Count and his family, however, pressed to see her; and, as the circumstances, that prompted her wish for solitude, could not be explained, there was an appearance of caprice in her refusal, which she could not persevere in, without offending the friends, whose esteem she valued. At length, therefore, she returned upon a second visit to ChateauleBlanc. Here the friendly manner of Count De Villefort encouraged Emily to mention to him her situation, respecting the estates of her late aunt, and to consult him on the means of recovering them. He had little doubt, that the law would decide in her favour, and, advising her to apply to it, offered first to write to an advocate at Avignon, on whose opinion he thought he could rely. His kindness was gratefully accepted by Emily, who, soothed by the courtesy she daily experienced, would have been once more happy, could she have been assured of Valancourt's welfare and unaltered affection. She had now been above a week at the chateau, without receiving intelligence of him, and, though she knew, that, if he was absent from his brother's residence, it was scarcely probable her letter had yet reached him, she could not forbear to admit doubts and fears, that destroyed her peace. Again she would consider of all, that might have happened in the long period, since her first seclusion at Udolpho, and her mind was sometimes so overwhelmed with an apprehension, that Valancourt was no more, or that he lived no longer for her, that the company even of Blanche became intolerably oppressive, and she would sit alone in her apartment for hours together, when the engagements of the family allowed her to do so, without incivility. In one of these solitary hours, she unlocked a little box, which contained some letters of Valancourt, with some drawings she had sketched, during her stay in Tuscany, the latter of which were no longer interesting to her; but, in the letters, she now, with melancholy indulgence, meant to retrace the tenderness, that had so often soothed her, and rendered her, for a moment, insensible of the distance, which separated her from the writer. But their effect was now changed; the affection they expressed appealed so forcibly to her heart, when she considered that it had, perhaps, yielded to the powers of time and absence, and even the view of the handwriting recalled so many painful recollections, that she found herself unable to go through the first she had opened, and sat musing, with her cheek resting on her arm, and tears stealing from her eyes, when old Dorothee entered the room to inform her, that dinner would be ready, an hour before the usual time. Emily started on perceiving her, and hastily put up the papers, but not before Dorothee had observed both her agitation and her tears. 'Ah, ma'amselle!' said she, 'you, who are so young,have you reason for sorrow?' Emily tried to smile, but was unable to speak. 'Alas! dear young lady, when you come to my age, you will not weep at trifles; and surely you have nothing serious, to grieve you.' 'No, Dorothee, nothing of any consequence,' replied Emily. Dorothee, now stooping to pick up something, that had dropped from among the papers, suddenly exclaimed, 'Holy Mary! what is it I see?' and then, trembling, sat down in a chair, that stood by the table. 'What is it you do see?' said Emily, alarmed by her manner, and looking round the room. 'It is herself,' said Dorothee, 'her very self! just as she looked a little before she died!' Emily, still more alarmed, began now to fear, that Dorothee was seized with sudden phrensy, but entreated her to explain herself. 'That picture!' said she, 'where did you find it, lady? it is my blessed mistress herself!' She laid on the table the miniature, which Emily had long ago found among the papers her father had enjoined her to destroy, and over which she had once seen him shed such tender and affecting tears; and, recollecting all the various circumstances of his conduct, that had long perplexed her, her emotions increased to an excess, which deprived her of all power to ask the questions she trembled to have answered, and she could only enquire, whether Dorothee was certain the picture resembled the late marchioness. 'O, ma'amselle!' said she, 'how came it to strike me so, the instant I saw it, if it was not my lady's likeness? Ah!' added she, taking up the miniature, 'these are her own blue eyeslooking so sweet and so mild; and there is her very look, such as I have often seen it, when she had sat thinking for a long while, and then, the tears would often steal down her cheeksbut she never would complain! It was that look so meek, as it were, and resigned, that used to break my heart and make me love her so!' 'Dorothee!' said Emily solemnly, 'I am interested in the cause of that grief, more so, perhaps, than you may imagine; and I entreat, that you will no longer refuse to indulge my curiosity;it is not a common one.' As Emily said this, she remembered the papers, with which the picture had been found, and had scarcely a doubt, that they had concerned the Marchioness de Villeroi; but with this supposition came a scruple, whether she ought to enquire further on a subject, which might prove to be the same, that her father had so carefully endeavoured to conceal. Her curiosity, concerning the Marchioness, powerful as it was, it is probable she would now have resisted, as she had formerly done, on unwarily observing the few terrible words in the papers, which had never since been erased from her memory, had she been certain that the history of that lady was the subject of those papers, or, that such simple particulars only as it was probable Dorothee could relate were included in her father's command. What was known to her could be no secret to many other persons; and, since it appeared very unlikely, that St. Aubert should attempt to conceal what Emily might learn by ordinary means, she at length concluded, that, if the papers had related to the story of the Marchioness, it was not those circumstances of it, which Dorothee could disclose, that he had thought sufficiently important to wish to have concealed. She, therefore, no longer hesitated to make the enquiries, that might lead to the gratification of her curiosity. 'Ah, ma'amselle!' said Dorothee, 'it is a sad story, and cannot be told now but what am I saying? I never will tell it. Many years have passed, since it happened; and I never loved to talk of the Marchioness to any body, but my husband. He lived in the family, at that time, as well as myself, and he knew many particulars from me, which nobody else did; for I was about the person of my lady in her last illness, and saw and heard as much, or more than my lord himself. Sweet saint! how patient she was! When she died, I thought I could have died with her!' 'Dorothee,' said Emily, interrupting her, 'what you shall tell, you may depend upon it, shall never be disclosed by me. I have, I repeat it, particular reasons for wishing to be informed on this subject, and am willing to bind myself, in the most solemn manner, never to mention what you shall wish me to conceal.' Dorothee seemed surprised at the earnestness of Emily's manner, and, after regarding her for some moments, in silence, said, 'Young lady! that look of yours pleads for youit is so like my dear mistress's, that I can almost fancy I see her before me; if you were her daughter, you could not remind me of her more. But dinner will be readyhad you not better go down?' 'You will first promise to grant my request,' said Emily. 'And ought not you first to tell me, ma'amselle, how this picture fell into your hands, and the reasons you say you have for curiosity about my lady?' 'Why, no, Dorothee,' replied Emily, recollecting herself, 'I have also particular reasons for observing silence, on these subjects, at least, till I know further; and, remember, I do not promise ever to speak upon them; therefore, do not let me induce you to satisfy my curiosity, from an expectation, that I shall gratify yours. What I may judge proper to conceal, does not concern myself alone, or I should have less scruple in revealing it let a confidence in my honour alone persuade you to disclose what I request.

' 'Well, lady!' replied Dorothee, after a long pause, during which her eyes were fixed upon Emily, 'you seem so much interested,and this picture and that face of yours make me think you have some reason to be so,that I will trust youand tell some things, that I never told before to any body, but my husband, though there are people, who have suspected as much. I will tell you the particulars of my lady's death, too, and some of my own suspicions; but you must first promise me by all the saints' Emily, interrupting her, solemnly promised never to reveal what should be confided to her, without Dorothee's consent. 'But there is the horn, ma'amselle, sounding for dinner,' said Dorothee; 'I must be gone.' 'When shall I see you again?' enquired Emily. Dorothee mused, and then replied, 'Why, madam, it may make people curious, if it is known I am so much in your apartment, and that I should be sorry for; so I will come when I am least likely to be observed. I have little leisure in the day, and I shall have a good deal to say; so, if you please, ma'am, I will come, when the family are all in bed.' 'That will suit me very well,' replied Emily 'Remember, then, tonight' 'Aye, that is well remembered,' said Dorothee, 'I fear I cannot come tonight, madam, for there will be the dance of the vintage, and it will be late, before the servants go to rest; for, when they once set in to dance, they will keep it up, in the cool of the air, till morning; at least, it used to be so in my time.' 'Ah! is it the dance of the vintage?' said Emily, with a deep sigh, remembering, that it was on the evening of this festival, in the preceding year, that St. Aubert and herself had arrived in the neighbourhood of ChateauleBlanc. She paused a moment, overcome by the sudden recollection, and then, recovering herself, added'But this dance is in the open woods; you, therefore, will not be wanted, and can easily come to me.' Dorothee replied, that she had been accustomed to be present at the dance of the vintage, and she did not wish to be absent now; 'but if I can get away, madam, I will,' said she. Emily then hastened to the diningroom, where the Count conducted himself with the courtesy, which is inseparable from true dignity, and of which the Countess frequently practised little, though her manner to Emily was an exception to her usual habit. But, if she retained few of the ornamental virtues, she cherished other qualities, which she seemed to consider invaluable. She had dismissed the grace of modesty, but then she knew perfectly well how to manage the stare of assurance; her manners had little of the tempered sweetness, which is necessary to render the female character interesting, but she could occasionally throw into them an affectation of spirits, which seemed to triumph over every person, who approached her. In the country, however, she generally affected an elegant languor, that persuaded her almost to faint, when her favourite read to her a story of fictitious sorrow; but her countenance suffered no change, when living objects of distress solicited her charity, and her heart beat with no transport to the thought of giving them instant relief;she was a stranger to the highest luxury, of which, perhaps, the human mind can be sensible, for her benevolence had never yet called smiles upon the face of misery. In the evening, the Count, with all his family, except the Countess and Mademoiselle Bearn, went to the woods to witness the festivity of the peasants. The scene was in a glade, where the trees, opening, formed a circle round the turf they highly overshadowed; between their branches, vines, loaded with ripe clusters, were hung in gay festoons; and, beneath, were tables, with fruit, wine, cheese and other rural fare,and seats for the Count and his family. At a little distance, were benches for the elder peasants, few of whom, however, could forbear to join the jocund dance, which began soon after sunset, when several of sixty tripped it with almost as much glee and airy lightness, as those of sixteen. The musicians, who sat carelessly on the grass, at the foot of a tree, seemed inspired by the sound of their own instruments, which were chiefly flutes and a kind of long guitar. Behind, stood a boy, flourishing a tamborine, and dancing a solo, except that, as he sometimes gaily tossed the instrument, he tripped among the other dancers, when his antic gestures called forth a broader laugh, and heightened the rustic spirit of the scene. The Count was highly delighted with the happiness he witnessed, to which his bounty had largely contributed, and the Lady Blanche joined the dance with a young gentleman of her father's party. Du Pont requested Emily's hand, but her spirits were too much depressed, to permit her to engage in the present festivity, which called to her remembrance that of the preceding year, when St. Aubert was living, and of the melancholy scenes, which had immediately followed it. Overcome by these recollections, she, at length, left the spot, and walked slowly into the woods, where the softened music, floating at a distance, soothed her melancholy mind. The moon threw a mellow light among the foliage; the air was balmy and cool, and Emily, lost in thought, strolled on, without observing whither, till she perceived the sounds sinking afar off, and an awful stillness round her, except that, sometimes, the nightingale beguiled the silence with Liquid notes, that close the eye of day. At length, she found herself near the avenue, which, on the night of her father's arrival, Michael had attempted to pass in search of a house, which was still nearly as wild and desolate as it had then appeared; for the Count had been so much engaged in directing other improvements, that he had neglected to give orders, concerning this extensive approach, and the road was yet broken, and the trees overloaded with their own luxuriance. As she stood surveying it, and remembering the emotions, which she had formerly suffered there, she suddenly recollected the figure, that had been seen stealing among the trees, and which had returned no answer to Michael's repeated calls; and she experienced somewhat of the fear, that had then assailed her, for it did not appear improbable, that these deep woods were occasionally the haunt of banditti. She, therefore, turned back, and was hastily pursuing her way to the dancers, when she heard steps approaching from the avenue; and, being still beyond the call of the peasants on the green, for she could neither hear their voices, or their music, she quickened her pace; but the persons following gained fast upon her, and, at length, distinguishing the voice of Henri, she walked leisurely, till he came up. He expressed some surprise at meeting her so far from the company; and, on her saying, that the pleasant moonlight had beguiled her to walk farther than she intended, an exclamation burst from the lips of his companion, and she thought she heard Valancourt speak! It was, indeed, he! and the meeting was such as may be imagined, between persons so affectionate, and so long separated as they had been. In the joy of these moments, Emily forgot all her past sufferings, and Valancourt seemed to have forgotten, that any person but Emily existed; while Henri was a silent and astonished spectator of the scene. Valancourt asked a thousand questions, concerning herself and Montoni, which there was now no time to answer; but she learned, that her letter had been forwarded to him, at Paris, which he had previously quitted, and was returning to Gascony, whither the letter also returned, which, at length, informed him of Emily's arrival, and on the receipt of which he had immediately set out for Languedoc. On reaching the monastery, whence she had dated her letter, he found, to his extreme disappointment, that the gates were already closed for the night; and believing, that he should not see Emily, till the morrow, he was returning to his little inn, with the intention of writing to her, when he was overtaken by Henri, with whom he had been intimate at Paris, and was led to her, whom he was secretly lamenting that he should not see, till the following day. Emily, with Valancourt and Henri, now returned to the green, where the latter presented Valancourt to the Count, who, she fancied, received him with less than his usual benignity, though it appeared, that they were not strangers to each other. He was invited, however, to partake of the diversions of the evening; and, when he had paid his respects to the Count, and while the dancers continued their festivity, he seated himself by Emily, and conversed, without restraint. The lights, which were hung among the trees, under which they sat, allowed her a more perfect view of the countenance she had so frequently in absence endeavoured to recollect, and she perceived, with some regret, that it was not the same as when last she saw it. There was all its wonted intelligence and fire; but it had lost much of the simplicity, and somewhat of the open benevolence, that used to characterise it. Still, however, it was an interesting countenance; but Emily thought she perceived, at intervals, anxiety contract, and melancholy fix the features of Valancourt; sometimes, too, he fell into a momentary musing, and then appeared anxious to dissipate thought; while, at others, as he fixed his eyes on Emily, a kind of sudden distraction seemed to cross his mind. In her he perceived the same goodness and beautiful simplicity, that had charmed him, on their first acquaintance. The bloom of her countenance was somewhat faded, but all its sweetness remained, and it was rendered more interesting, than ever, by the faint expression of melancholy, that sometimes mingled with her smile. At his request, she related the most important circumstances, that had occurred to her, since she left France, and emotions of pity and indignation alternately prevailed in his mind, when he heard how much she had suffered from the villany of Montoni. More than once, when she was speaking of his conduct, of which the guilt was rather softened, than exaggerated, by her representation, he started from his seat, and walked away, apparently overcome as much by self accusation as by resentment. Her sufferings alone were mentioned in the few words, which he could address to her, and he listened not to the account, which she was careful to give as distinctly as possible, of the present loss of Madame Montoni's estates, and of the little reason there was to expect their restoration. At length, Valancourt remained lost in thought, and then some secret cause seemed to overcome him with anguish. Again he abruptly left her. When he returned, she perceived, that he had been weeping, and tenderly begged, that he would compose himself. 'My sufferings are all passed now,' said she, 'for I have escaped from the tyranny of Montoni, and I see you welllet me also see you happy.' Valancourt was more agitated, than before. 'I am unworthy of you, Emily,' said he, 'I am unworthy of you;'words, by his manner of uttering which Emily was then more shocked than by their import. She fixed on him a mournful and enquiring eye. 'Do not look thus on me,' said he, turning away and pressing her hand; 'I cannot bear those looks.' 'I would ask,' said Emily, in a gentle, but agitated voice, 'the meaning of your words; but I perceive, that the question would distress you now. Let us talk on other subjects. Tomorrow, perhaps, you may be more composed. Observe those moon light woods, and the towers, which appear obscurely in the perspective. You used to be a great admirer of landscape, and I have heard you say, that the faculty of deriving consolation, under misfortune, from the sublime prospects, which neither oppression, or poverty withhold from us, was the peculiar blessing of the innocent.' Valancourt was deeply affected. 'Yes,' replied he, 'I had once a taste for innocent and elegant delightsI had once an uncorrupted heart.' Then, checking himself, he added, 'Do you remember our journey together in the Pyrenees?' 'Can I forget it?' said Emily.'Would that I could!' he replied;'that was the happiest period of my life. I then loved, with enthusiasm, whatever was truly great, or good.' It was some time before Emily could repress her tears, and try to command her emotions. 'If you wish to forget that journey,' said she, 'it must certainly be my wish to forget it also.' She paused, and then added, 'You make me very uneasy; but this is not the time for further enquiry;yet, how can I bear to believe, even for a moment, that you are less worthy of my esteem than formerly? I have still sufficient confidence in your candour, to believe, that, when I shall ask for an explanation, you will give it me.''Yes,' said Valancourt, 'yes, Emily I have not yet lost my candour if I had, I could better have disguised my emotions, on learning what were your sufferingsyour virtues, while IIbut I will say no more. I did not mean to have said even so muchI have been surprised into the selfaccusation. Tell me, Emily, that you will not forget that journeywill not wish to forget it, and I will be calm. I would not lose the remembrance of it for the whole earth.' 'How contradictory is this!' said Emily;'but we may be overheard. My recollection of it shall depend upon yours; I will endeavour to forget, or to recollect it, as you may do. Let us join the Count.''Tell me first,' said Valancourt, 'that you forgive the uneasiness I have occasioned you, this evening, and that you will still love me.''I sincerely forgive you,' replied Emily. 'You best know whether I shall continue to love you, for you know whether you deserve my esteem. At present, I will believe that you do. It is unnecessary to say,' added she, observing his dejection, 'how much pain it would give me to believe otherwise.The young lady, who approaches, is the Count's daughter.' Valancourt and Emily now joined the Lady Blanche; and the party, soon after, sat down with the Count, his son, and the Chevalier Du Pont, at a banquet, spread under a gay awning, beneath the trees. At the table also were seated several of the most venerable of the Count's tenants, and it was a festive repast to all but Valancourt and Emily. When the Count retired to the chateau, he did not invite Valancourt to accompany him, who, therefore, took leave of Emily, and retired to his solitary inn for the night meanwhile, she soon withdrew to her own apartment, where she mused, with deep anxiety and concern, on his behaviour, and on the Count's reception of him. Her attention was thus so wholly engaged, that she forgot Dorothee and her appointment, till morning was far advanced, when, knowing that the good old woman would not come, she retired, for a few hours, to repose. On the following day, when the Count had accidentally joined Emily in one of the walks, they talked of the festival of the preceding evening, and this led him to a mention of Valancourt. 'That is a young man of talents,' said he; 'you were formerly acquainted with him, I perceive.' Emily said, that she was. 'He was introduced to me, at Paris,' said the Count, 'and I was much pleased with him, on our first acquaintance.' He paused, and Emily trembled, between the desire of hearing more and the fear of shewing the Count, that she felt an interest on the subject. 'May I ask,' said he, at length, 'how long you have known Monsieur Valancourt?''Will you allow me to ask your reason for the question, sir?' said she; 'and I will answer it immediately.''Certainly,' said the Count, 'that is but just. I will tell you my reason. I cannot but perceive, that Monsieur Valancourt admires you; in that, however, there is nothing extraordinary; every person, who sees you, must do the same. I am above using commonplace compliments; I speak with sincerity. What I fear, is, that he is a favoured admirer.''Why do you fear it, sir?' said Emily, endeavouring to conceal her emotion.'Because,' replied the Count, 'I think him not worthy of your favour.' Emily, greatly agitated, entreated further explanation. 'I will give it,' said he, 'if you will believe, that nothing but a strong interest in your welfare could induce me to hazard that assertion.''I must believe so, sir,' replied Emily. 'But let us rest under these trees,' said the Count, observing the paleness of her countenance; 'here is a seatyou are fatigued.' They sat down, and the Count proceeded. 'Many young ladies, circumstanced as you are, would think my conduct, on this occasion, and on so short an acquaintance, impertinent, instead of friendly; from what I have observed of your temper and understanding, I do not fear such a return from you. Our acquaintance has been short, but long enough to make me esteem you, and feel a lively interest in your happiness. You deserve to be very happy, and I trust that you will be so.' Emily sighed softly, and bowed her thanks. The Count paused again. 'I am unpleasantly circumstanced,' said he; 'but an opportunity of rendering you important service shall overcome inferior considerations. Will you inform me of the manner of your first acquaintance with the Chevalier Valancourt, if the subject is not too painful?' Emily briefly related the accident of their meeting in the presence of her father, and then so earnestly entreated the Count not to hesitate in declaring what he knew, that he perceived the violent emotion, against which she was contending, and, regarding her with a look of tender compassion, considered how he might communicate his information with least pain to his anxious auditor. 'The Chevalier and my son,' said he, 'were introduced to each other, at the table of a brother officer, at whose house I also met him, and invited him to my own, whenever he should be disengaged. I did not then know, that he had formed an acquaintance with a set of men, a disgrace to their species, who live by plunder and pass their lives in continual debauchery. I knew several of the Chevalier's family, resident at Paris, and considered them as sufficient pledges for his introduction to my own. But you are ill; I will leave the subject.''No, sir,' said Emily, 'I beg you will proceed I am only distressed.''ONLY!' said the Count, with emphasis; 'however, I will proceed. I soon learned, that these, his associates, had drawn him into a course of dissipation, from which he appeared to have neither the power, nor the inclination, to extricate himself. He lost large sums at the gamingtable; he became infatuated with play; and was ruined. I spoke tenderly of this to his friends, who assured me, that they had remonstrated with him, till they were weary. I afterwards learned, that, in consideration of his talents for play, which were generally successful, when unopposed by the tricks of villany,that in consideration of these, the party had initiated him into the secrets of their trade, and allotted him a share of their profits.' 'Impossible!' said Emily suddenly; 'butpardon me, sir, I scarcely know what I say; allow for the distress of my mind. I must, indeed, I must believe, that you have not been truly informed. The Chevalier had, doubtless, enemies, who misrepresented him.''I should be most happy to believe so,' replied the Count, 'but I cannot. Nothing short of conviction, and a regard for your happiness, could have urged me to repeat these unpleasant reports.' Emily was silent. She recollected Valancourt's sayings, on the preceding evening, which discovered the pangs of selfreproach, and seemed to confirm all that the Count had related. Yet she had not fortitude enough to dare conviction. Her heart was overwhelmed with anguish at the mere suspicion of his guilt, and she could not endure a belief of it. After a silence, the Count said, 'I perceive, and can allow for, your want of conviction. It is necessary I should give some proof of what I have asserted; but this I cannot do, without subjecting one, who is very dear to me, to danger.''What is the danger you apprehend, sir?' said Emily; 'if I can prevent it, you may safely confide in my honour.''On your honour I am certain I can rely,' said the Count; 'but can I trust your fortitude? Do you think you can resist the solicitation of a favoured admirer, when he pleads, in affliction, for the name of one, who has robbed him of a blessing?''I shall not be exposed to such a temptation, sir,' said Emily, with modest pride, 'for I cannot favour one, whom I must no longer esteem. I, however, readily give my word.' Tears, in the mean time, contradicted her first assertion; and she felt, that time and effort only could eradicate an affection, which had been formed on virtuous esteem, and cherished by habit and difficulty. 'I will trust you then,' said the Count, 'for conviction is necessary to your peace, and cannot, I perceive, be obtained, without this confidence. My son has too often been an eyewitness of the Chevalier's ill conduct; he was very near being drawn in by it; he was, indeed, drawn in to the commission of many follies, but I rescued him from guilt and destruction. Judge then, Mademoiselle St. Aubert, whether a father, who had nearly lost his only son by the example of the Chevalier, has not, from conviction, reason to warn those, whom he esteems, against trusting their happiness in such hands. I have myself seen the Chevalier engaged in deep play with men, whom I almost shuddered to look upon. If you still doubt, I will refer you to my son.' 'I must not doubt what you have yourself witnessed,' replied Emily, sinking with grief, 'or what you assert. But the Chevalier has, perhaps, been drawn only into a transient folly, which he may never repeat. If you had known the justness of his former principles, you would allow for my present incredulity.' 'Alas!' observed the Count, 'it is difficult to believe that, which will make us wretched. But I will not sooth you by flattering and false hopes. We all know how fascinating the vice of gaming is, and how difficult it is, also, to conquer habits; the Chevalier might, perhaps, reform for a while, but he would soon relapse into dissipationfor I fear, not only the bonds of habit would be powerful, but that his morals are corrupted. Andwhy should I conceal from you, that play is not his only vice? he appears to have a taste for every vicious pleasure.' The Count hesitated and paused; while Emily endeavoured to support herself, as, with increasing perturbation, she expected what he might further say. A long pause of silence ensued, during which he was visibly agitated; at length, he said, 'It would be a cruel delicacy, that could prevail with me to be silentand I will inform you, that the Chevalier's extravagance has brought him twice into the prisons of Paris, from whence he was last extricated, as I was told upon authority, which I cannot doubt, by a wellknown Parisian Countess, with whom he continued to reside, when I left Paris.' He paused again; and, looking at Emily, perceived her countenance change, and that she was falling from the seat; he caught her, but she had fainted, and he called loudly for assistance. They were, however, beyond the hearing of his servants at the chateau, and he feared to leave her while he went thither for assistance, yet knew not how otherwise to obtain it; till a fountain at no great distance caught his eye, and he endeavoured to support Emily against the tree, under which she had been sitting, while he went thither for water. But again he was perplexed, for he had nothing near him, in which water could be brought; but while, with increased anxiety, he watched her, he thought he perceived in her countenance symptoms of returning life. It was long, however, before she revived, and then she found herself supportednot by the Count, but by Valancourt, who was observing her with looks of earnest apprehension, and who now spoke to her in a tone, tremulous with his anxiety. At the sound of his wellknown voice, she raised her eyes, but presently closed them, and a faintness again came over her. The Count, with a look somewhat stern, waved him to withdraw; but he only sighed heavily, and called on the name of Emily, as he again held the water, that had been brought, to her lips. On the Count's repeating his action, and accompanying it with words, Valancourt answered him with a look of deep resentment, and refused to leave the place, till she should revive, or to resign her for a moment to the care of any person. In the next instant, his conscience seemed to inform him of what had been the subject of the Count's conversation with Emily, and indignation flashed in his eyes; but it was quickly repressed, and succeeded by an expression of serious anguish, that induced the Count to regard him with more pity than resentment, and the view of which so much affected Emily, when she again revived, that she yielded to the weakness of tears. But she soon restrained them, and, exerting her resolution to appear recovered, she rose, thanked the Count and Henri, with whom Valancourt had entered the garden, for their care, and moved towards the chateau, without noticing Valancourt, who, heartstruck by her manner, exclaimed in a low voice'Good God! how have I deserved this?what has been said, to occasion this change?' Emily, without replying, but with increased emotion, quickened her steps. 'What has thus disordered you, Emily?' said he, as he still walked by her side 'give me a few moments' conversation, I entreat you;I am very miserable!' Though this was spoken in a low voice, it was overheard by the Count, who immediately replied, that Mademoiselle St. Aubert was then too much indisposed, to attend to any conversation, but that he would venture to promise she would see Monsieur Valancourt on the morrow, if she was better. Valancourt's cheek was crimsoned he looked haughtily at the Count, and then at Emily, with successive expressions of surprise, grief and supplication, which she could neither misunderstand, or resist, and she said languidly'I shall be better tomorrow, and if you wish to accept the Count's permission, I will see you then.' 'See me!' exclaimed Valancourt, as he threw a glance of mingled pride and resentment upon the Count; and then, seeming to recollect himself, he added'But I will come, madam; I will accept the Count's PERMISSION.' When they reached the door of the chateau, he lingered a moment, for his resentment was now fled; and then, with a look so expressive of tenderness and grief, that Emily's heart was not proof against it, he bade her good morning, and, bowing slightly to the Count, disappeared. Emily withdrew to her own apartment, under such oppression of heart as she had seldom known, when she endeavoured to recollect all that the Count had told, to examine the probability of the circumstances he himself believed, and to consider of her future conduct towards Valancourt. But, when she attempted to think, her mind refused controul, and she could only feel that she was miserable. One moment, she sunk under the conviction, that Valancourt was no longer the same, whom she had so tenderly loved, the idea of whom had hitherto supported her under affliction, and cheered her with the hope of happier days,but a fallen, a worthless character, whom she must teach herself to despiseif she could not forget. Then, unable to endure this terrible supposition, she rejected it, and disdained to believe him capable of conduct, such as the Count had described, to whom she believed he had been misrepresented by some artful enemy; and there were moments, when she even ventured to doubt the integrity of the Count himself, and to suspect, that he was influenced by some selfish motive, to break her connection with Valancourt. But this was the error of an instant, only; the Count's character, which she had heard spoken of by Du Pont and many other persons, and had herself observed, enabled her to judge, and forbade the supposition; had her confidence, indeed, been less, there appeared to be no temptation to betray him into conduct so treacherous, and so cruel. Nor did reflection suffer her to preserve the hope, that Valancourt had been misrepresented to the Count, who had said, that he spoke chiefly from his own observation, and from his son's experience. She must part from Valancourt, therefore, for everfor what of either happiness or tranquillity could she expect with a man, whose tastes were degenerated into low inclinations, and to whom vice was become habitual? whom she must no longer esteem, though the remembrance of what he once was, and the long habit of loving him, would render it very difficult for her to despise him. 'O Valancourt!' she would exclaim, 'having been separated so longdo we meet, only to be miserableonly to part for ever?' Amidst all the tumult of her mind, she remembered pertinaciously the seeming candour and simplicity of his conduct, on the preceding night; and, had she dared to trust her own heart, it would have led her to hope much from this. Still she could not resolve to dismiss him for ever, without obtaining further proof of his ill conduct; yet she saw no probability of procuring it, if, indeed, proof more positive was possible. Something, however, it was necessary to decide upon, and she almost determined to be guided in her opinion solely by the manner, with which Valancourt should receive her hints concerning his late conduct. Thus passed the hours till dinnertime, when Emily, struggling against the pressure of her grief, dried her tears, and joined the family at table, where the Count preserved towards her the most delicate attention; but the Countess and Mademoiselle Bearn, having looked, for a moment, with surprise, on her dejected countenance, began, as usual, to talk of trifles, while the eyes of Lady Blanche asked much of her friend, who could only reply by a mournful smile. Emily withdrew as soon after dinner as possible, and was followed by the Lady Blanche, whose anxious enquiries, however, she found herself quite unequal to answer, and whom she entreated to spare her on the subject of her distress. To converse on any topic, was now, indeed, so extremely painful to her, that she soon gave up the attempt, and Blanche left her, with pity of the sorrow, which she perceived she had no power to assuage. Emily secretly determined to go to her convent in a day or two; for company, especially that of the Countess and Mademoiselle Bearn, was intolerable to her, in the present state of her spirits; and, in the retirement of the convent, as well as the kindness of the abbess, she hoped to recover the command of her mind, and to teach it resignation to the event, which, she too plainly perceived, was approaching. To have lost Valancourt by death, or to have seen him married to a rival, would, she thought, have given her less anguish, than a conviction of his unworthiness, which must terminate in misery to himself, and which robbed her even of the solitary image her heart so long had cherished. These painful reflections were interrupted, for a moment, by a note from Valancourt, written in evident distraction of mind, entreating, that she would permit him to see her on the approaching evening, instead of the following morning; a request, which occasioned her so much agitation, that she was unable to answer it. She wished to see him, and to terminate her present state of suspense, yet shrunk from the interview, and, incapable of deciding for herself, she, at length, sent to beg a few moments' conversation with the Count in his library, where she delivered to him the note, and requested his advice. After reading it, he said, that, if she believed herself well enough to support the interview, his opinion was, that, for the relief of both parties, it ought to take place, that evening.

'His affection for you is, undoubtedly, a very sincere one,' added the Count; 'and he appears so much distressed, and you, my amiable friend, are so ill at easethat the sooner the affair is decided, the better.' Emily replied, therefore, to Valancourt, that she would see him, and then exerted herself in endeavours to attain fortitude and composure, to bear her through the approaching scenea scene so afflictingly the reverse of any, to which she had looked forward! VOLUME 4 Chapter 1 Is all the council that we two have shared, the hours that we have spent, When we have chid the hastyfooted time For parting usOh! and is all forgot? And will you rend our ancient love asunder? MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM In the evening, when Emily was at length informed, that Count De Villefort requested to see her, she guessed that Valancourt was below, and, endeavouring to assume composure and to recollect all her spirits, she rose and left the apartment; but on reaching the door of the library, where she imagined him to be, her emotion returned with such energy, that, fearing to trust herself in the room, she returned into the hall, where she continued for a considerable time, unable to command her agitated spirits. When she could recall them, she found in the library Valancourt, seated with the Count, who both rose on her entrance; but she did not dare to look at Valancourt, and the Count, having led her to a chair, immediately withdrew. Emily remained with her eyes fixed on the floor, under such oppression of heart, that she could not speak, and with difficulty breathed; while Valancourt threw himself into a chair beside her, and, sighing heavily, continued silent, when, had she raised her eyes, she would have perceived the violent emotions, with which he was agitated. At length, in a tremulous voice, he said, 'I have solicited to see you this evening, that I might, at least, be spared the further torture of suspense, which your altered manner had occasioned me, and which the hints I have just received from the Count have in part explained. I perceive I have enemies, Emily, who envied me my late happiness, and who have been busy in searching out the means to destroy it I perceive, too, that time and absence have weakened the affection you once felt for me, and that you can now easily be taught to forget me.' His last words faltered, and Emily, less able to speak than before, continued silent. 'O what a meeting is this!' exclaimed Valancourt, starting from his seat, and pacing the room with hurried steps, 'what a meeting is this, after our longlong separation!' Again he sat down, and, after the struggle of a moment, he added in a firm but despairing tone, 'This is too muchI cannot bear it! Emily, will you not speak to me?' He covered his face with his hand, as if to conceal his emotion, and took Emily's, which she did not withdraw. Her tears could no longer be restrained; and, when he raised his eyes and perceived that she was weeping, all his tenderness returned, and a gleam of hope appeared to cross his mind, for he exclaimed, 'O! you do pity me, then, you do love me! Yes, you are still my own Emilylet me believe those tears, that tell me so!' Emily now made an effort to recover her firmness, and, hastily drying them, 'Yes,' said she, 'I do pity youI weep for youbut, ought I to think of you with affection? You may remember, that yesterevening I said, I had still sufficient confidence in your candour to believe, that, when I should request an explanation of your words, you would give it. This explanation is now unnecessary, I understand them too well; but prove, at least, that your candour is deserving of the confidence I give it, when I ask you, whether you are conscious of being the same estimable Valancourtwhom I once loved.' 'Once loved!' cried he,'the samethe same!' He paused in extreme emotion, and then added, in a voice at once solemn, and dejected,'NoI am not the same!I am lostI am no longer worthy of you!' He again concealed his face. Emily was too much affected by this honest confession to reply immediately, and, while she struggled to overcome the pleadings of her heart, and to act with the decisive firmness, which was necessary for her future peace, she perceived all the danger of trusting long to her resolution, in the presence of Valancourt, and was anxious to conclude an interview, that tortured them both; yet, when she considered, that this was probably their last meeting, her fortitude sunk at once, and she experienced only emotions of tenderness and of despondency. Valancourt, meanwhile, lost in emotions of remorse and grief, which he had neither the power, or the will to express, sat insensible almost of the presence of Emily, his features still concealed, and his breast agitated by convulsive sighs. 'Spare me the necessity,' said Emily, recollecting her fortitude, 'spare me the necessity of mentioning those circumstances of your conduct, which oblige me to break our connection forever.We must part, I now see you for the last time.' 'Impossible!' cried Valancourt, roused from his deep silence, 'You cannot mean what you say!you cannot mean to throw me from you forever!' 'We must part,' repeated Emily, with emphasis,'and that forever! Your own conduct has made this necessary.' 'This is the Count's determination,' said he haughtily, 'not yours, and I shall enquire by what authority he interferes between us.' He now rose, and walked about the room in great emotion. 'Let me save you from this error,' said Emily, not less agitated'it is my determination, and, if you reflect a moment on your late conduct, you will perceive, that my future peace requires it.' 'Your future peace requires, that we should partpart forever!' said Valancourt, 'How little did I ever expect to hear you say so!' 'And how little did I expect, that it would be necessary for me to say so!' rejoined Emily, while her voice softened into tenderness, and her tears flowed again.'That youyou, Valancourt, would ever fall from my esteem!' He was silent a moment, as if overwhelmed by the consciousness of no longer deserving this esteem, as well as the certainty of having lost it, and then, with impassioned grief, lamented the criminality of his late conduct and the misery to which it had reduced him, till, overcome by a recollection of the past and a conviction of the future, he burst into tears, and uttered only deep and broken sighs. The remorse he had expressed, and the distress he suffered could not be witnessed by Emily with indifference, and, had she not called to her recollection all the circumstances, of which Count De Villefort had informed her, and all he had said of the danger of confiding in repentance, formed under the influence of passion, she might perhaps have trusted to the assurances of her heart, and have forgotten his misconduct in the tenderness, which that repentance excited. Valancourt, returning to the chair beside her, at length, said, in a calm voice, ''Tis true, I am fallenfallen from my own esteem! but could you, Emily, so soon, so suddenly resign, if you had not before ceased to love me, or, if your conduct was not governed by the designs, I will say, the selfish designs of another person! Would you not otherwise be willing to hope for my reformationand could you bear, by estranging me from you, to abandon me to miseryto myself!'Emily wept aloud.'No, Emilynoyou would not do this, if you still loved me. You would find your own happiness in saving mine.' 'There are too many probabilities against that hope,' said Emily, 'to justify me in trusting the comfort of my whole life to it. May I not also ask, whether you could wish me to do this, if you really loved me?' 'Really loved you!' exclaimed Valancourt'is it possible you can doubt my love! Yet it is reasonable, that you should do so, since you see, that I am less ready to suffer the horror of parting with you, than that of involving you in my ruin. Yes, EmilyI am ruinedirreparably ruinedI am involved in debts, which I can never discharge!' Valancourt's look, which was wild, as he spoke this, soon settled into an expression of gloomy despair; and Emily, while she was compelled to admire his sincerity, saw, with unutterable anguish, new reasons for fear in the suddenness of his feelings and the extent of the misery, in which they might involve him. After some minutes, she seemed to contend against her grief and to struggle for fortitude to conclude the interview. 'I will not prolong these moments,' said she, 'by a conversation, which can answer no good purpose. Valancourt, farewell!' 'You are not going?' said he, wildly interrupting her'You will not leave me thusyou will not abandon me even before my mind has suggested any possibility of compromise between the last indulgence of my despair and the endurance of my loss!' Emily was terrified by the sternness of his look, and said, in a soothing voice, 'You have yourself acknowledged, that it is necessary we should part;if you wish, that I should believe you love me, you will repeat the acknowledgment.''Nevernever,' cried he'I was distracted when I made it. O! Emilythis is too much;though you are not deceived as to my faults, you must be deluded into this exasperation against them. The Count is the barrier between us; but he shall not long remain so.' 'You are, indeed, distracted,' said Emily, 'the Count is not your enemy; on the contrary, he is my friend, and that might, in some degree, induce you to consider him as yours.''Your friend!' said Valancourt, hastily, 'how long has he been your friend, that he can so easily make you forget your lover? Was it he, who recommended to your favour the Monsieur Du Pont, who, you say, accompanied you from Italy, and who, I say, has stolen your affections? But I have no right to question you;you are your own mistress. Du Pont, perhaps, may not long triumph over my fallen fortunes!' Emily, more frightened than before by the frantic looks of Valancourt, said, in a tone scarcely audible, 'For heaven's sake be reasonablebe composed. Monsieur Du Pont is not your rival, nor is the Count his advocate. You have no rival; nor, except yourself, an enemy. My heart is wrung with anguish, which must increase while your frantic behaviour shews me, more than ever, that you are no longer the Valancourt I have been accustomed to love.' He made no reply, but sat with his arms rested on the table and his face concealed by his hands; while Emily stood, silent and trembling, wretched for herself and dreading to leave him in this state of mind. 'O excess of misery!' he suddenly exclaimed, 'that I can never lament my sufferings, without accusing myself, nor remember you, without recollecting the folly and the vice, by which I have lost you! Why was I forced to Paris, and why did I yield to allurements, which were to make me despicable for ever! O! why cannot I look back, without interruption, to those days of innocence and peace, the days of our early love!'The recollection seemed to melt his heart, and the frenzy of despair yielded to tears. After a long pause, turning towards her and taking her hand, he said, in a softened voice, 'Emily, can you bear that we should partcan you resolve to give up an heart, that loves you like minean heart, which, though it has erredwidely erred, is not irretrievable from error, as, you well know, it never can be retrievable from love?' Emily made no reply, but with her tears. 'Can you,' continued he, 'can you forget all our former days of happiness and confidencewhen I had not a thought, that I might wish to conceal from youwhen I had no tasteno pleasures, in which you did not participate?' 'O do not lead me to the remembrance of those days,' said Emily, 'unless you can teach me to forget the present; I do not mean to reproach you; if I did, I should be spared these tears; but why will you render your present sufferings more conspicuous, by contrasting them with your former virtues?' 'Those virtues,' said Valancourt, 'might, perhaps, again be mine, if your affection, which nurtured them, was unchanged;but I fear, indeed, I see, that you can no longer love me; else the happy hours, which we have passed together, would plead for me, and you could not look back upon them unmoved. Yet, why should I torture myself with the remembrancewhy do I linger here? Am I not ruinedwould it not be madness to involve you in my misfortunes, even if your heart was still my own? I will not distress you further. Yet, before I go,' added he, in a solemn voice, 'let me repeat, that, whatever may be my destinywhatever I may be doomed to suffer, I must always love youmost fondly love you! I am going, Emily, I am going to leave youto leave you, forever!' As he spoke the last words, his voice trembled, and he threw himself again into the chair, from which he had risen. Emily was utterly unable to leave the room, or to say farewell. All impression of his criminal conduct and almost of his follies was obliterated from her mind, and she was sensible only of pity and grief. 'My fortitude is gone,' said Valancourt at length; 'I can no longer even struggle to recall it. I cannot now leave youI cannot bid you an eternal farewell; say, at least, that you will see me once again.' Emily's heart was somewhat relieved by the request, and she endeavoured to believe, that she ought not to refuse it. Yet she was embarrassed by recollecting, that she was a visitor in the house of the Count, who could not be pleased by the return of Valancourt. Other considerations, however, soon overcame this, and she granted his request, on the condition, that he would neither think of the Count, as his enemy, nor Du Pont as his rival. He then left her, with a heart, so much lightened by this short respite, that he almost lost every former sense of misfortune. Emily withdrew to her own room, that she might compose her spirits and remove the traces of her tears, which would encourage the censorious remarks of the Countess and her favourite, as well as excite the curiosity of the rest of the family. She found it, however, impossible to tranquillize her mind, from which she could not expel the remembrance of the late scene with Valancourt, or the consciousness, that she was to see him again, on the morrow. This meeting now appeared more terrible to her than the last, for the ingenuous confession he had made of his ill conduct and his embarrassed circumstances, with the strength and tenderness of affection, which this confession discovered, had deeply impressed her, and, in spite of all she had heard and believed to his disadvantage, her esteem began to return. It frequently appeared to her impossible, that he could have been guilty of the depravities, reported of him, which, if not inconsistent with his warmth and impetuosity, were entirely so with his candour and sensibility. Whatever was the criminality, which had given rise to the reports, she could not now believe them to be wholly true, nor that his heart was finally closed against the charms of virtue. The deep consciousness, which he felt as well as expressed of his errors, seemed to justify the opinion; and, as she understood not the instability of youthful dispositions, when opposed by habit, and that professions frequently deceive those, who make, as well as those, who hear them, she might have yielded to the flattering persuasions of her own heart and the pleadings of Valancourt, had she not been guided by the superior prudence of the Count. He represented to her, in a clear light, the danger of her present situation, that of listening to promises of amendment, made under the influence of strong passion, and the slight hope, which could attach to a connection, whose chance of happiness rested upon the retrieval of ruined circumstances and the reform of corrupted habits. On these accounts, he lamented, that Emily had consented to a second interview, for he saw how much it would shake her resolution and increase the difficulty of her conquest. Her mind was now so entirely occupied by nearer interests, that she forgot the old housekeeper and the promised history, which so lately had excited her curiosity, but which Dorothee was probably not very anxious to disclose, for night came; the hours passed; and she did not appear in Emily's chamber. With the latter it was a sleepless and dismal night; the more she suffered her memory to dwell on the late scenes with Valancourt, the more her resolution declined, and she was obliged to recollect all the arguments, which the Count had made use of to strengthen it, and all the precepts, which she had received from her deceased father, on the subject of selfcommand, to enable her to act, with prudence and dignity, on this the most severe occasion of her life. There were moments, when all her fortitude forsook her, and when, remembering the confidence of former times, she thought it impossible, that she could renounce Valancourt. His reformation then appeared certain; the arguments of Count De Villefort were forgotten; she readily believed all she wished, and was willing to encounter any evil, rather than that of an immediate separation. Thus passed the night in ineffectual struggles between affection and reason, and she rose, in the morning, with a mind, weakened and irresolute, and a frame, trembling with illness. Chapter 2 Come, weep with me;past hope, past cure, past help! ROMEO AND JULIET Valancourt, meanwhile, suffered the tortures of remorse and despair. The sight of Emily had renewed all the ardour, with which he first loved her, and which had suffered a temporary abatement from absence and the passing scenes of busy life. When, on the receipt of her letter, he set out for Languedoc, he then knew, that his own folly had involved him in ruin, and it was no part of his design to conceal this from her. But he lamented only the delay which his illconduct must give to their marriage, and did not foresee, that the information could induce her to break their connection forever. While the prospect of this separation overwhelmed his mind, before stung with selfreproach, he awaited their second interview, in a state little short of distraction, yet was still inclined to hope, that his pleadings might prevail upon her not to exact it. In the morning, he sent to know at what hour she would see him; and his note arrived, when she was with the Count, who had sought an opportunity of again conversing with her of Valancourt; for he perceived the extreme distress of her mind, and feared, more than ever, that her fortitude would desert her. Emily having dismissed the messenger, the Count returned to the subject of their late conversation, urging his fear of Valancourt's entreaties, and again pointing out to her the lengthened misery, that must ensue, if she should refuse to encounter some present uneasiness. His repeated arguments could, indeed, alone have protected her from the affection she still felt for Valancourt, and she resolved to be governed by them. The hour of interview, at length, arrived. Emily went to it, at least, with composure of manner, but Valancourt was so much agitated, that he could not speak, for several minutes, and his first words were alternately those of lamentation, entreaty, and selfreproach. Afterward, he said, 'Emily, I have loved youI do love you, better than my life; but I am ruined by my own conduct. Yet I would seek to entangle you in a connection, that must be miserable for you, rather than subject myself to the punishment, which is my due, the loss of you. I am a wretch, but I will be a villain no longer.I will not endeavour to shake your resolution by the pleadings of a selfish passion. I resign you, Emily, and will endeavour to find consolation in considering, that, though I am miserable, you, at least, may be happy. The merit of the sacrifice is, indeed, not my own, for I should never have attained strength of mind to surrender you, if your prudence had not demanded it.' He paused a moment, while Emily attempted to conceal the tears, which came to her eyes. She would have said, 'You speak now, as you were wont to do,' but she checked herself.'Forgive me, Emily,' said he, 'all the sufferings I have occasioned you, and, sometimes, when you think of the wretched Valancourt, remember, that his only consolation would be to believe, that you are no longer unhappy by his folly.' The tears now fell fast upon her cheek, and he was relapsing into the phrensy of despair, when Emily endeavoured to recall her fortitude and to terminate an interview, which only seemed to increase the distress of both. Perceiving her tears and that she was rising to go, Valancourt struggled, once more, to overcome his own feelings and to sooth hers. 'The remembrance of this sorrow,' said he, 'shall in future be my protection. O! never again will example, or temptation have power to seduce me to evil, exalted as I shall be by the recollection of your grief for me.' Emily was somewhat comforted by this assurance. 'We are now parting for ever,' said she; 'but, if my happiness is dear to you, you will always remember, that nothing can contribute to it more, than to believe, that you have recovered your own esteem.' Valancourt took her hand;his eyes were covered with tears, and the farewell he would have spoken was lost in sighs. After a few moments, Emily said, with difficulty and emotion, 'Farewell, Valancourt, may you be happy!' She repeated her 'farewell,' and attempted to withdraw her hand, but he still held it and bathed it with his tears. 'Why prolong these moments?' said Emily, in a voice scarcely audible, 'they are too painful to us both.' 'This is tootoo much,' exclaimed Valancourt, resigning her hand and throwing himself into a chair, where he covered his face with his hands and was overcome, for some moments, by convulsive sighs. After a long pause, during which Emily wept in silence, and Valancourt seemed struggling with his grief, she again rose to take leave of him. Then, endeavouring to recover his composure, 'I am again afflicting you,' said he, 'but let the anguish I suffer plead for me.' He then added, in a solemn voice, which frequently trembled with the agitation of his heart, 'Farewell, Emily, you will always be the only object of my tenderness. Sometimes you will think of the unhappy Valancourt, and it will be with pity, though it may not be with esteem. O! what is the whole world to me, without youwithout your esteem!' He checked himself'I am falling again into the error I have just lamented. I must not intrude longer upon your patience, or I shall relapse into despair.' He once more bade Emily adieu, pressed her hand to his lips, looked at her, for the last time, and hurried out of the room. Emily remained in the chair, where he had left her, oppressed with a pain at her heart, which scarcely permitted her to breathe, and listening to his departing steps, sinking fainter and fainter, as he crossed the hall. She was, at length, roused by the voice of the Countess in the garden, and, her attention being then awakened, the first object, which struck her sight, was the vacant chair, where Valancourt had sat. The tears, which had been, for some time, repressed by the kind of astonishment, that followed his departure, now came to her relief, and she was, at length, sufficiently composed to return to her own room. Chapter 3 This is no mortal business, nor no sound That the earth owes! SHAKESPEARE We now return to the mention of Montoni, whose rage and disappointment were soon lost in nearer interests, than any, which the unhappy Emily had awakened. His depredations having exceeded their usual limits, and reached an extent, at which neither the timidity of the then commercial senate of Venice, nor their hope of his occasional assistance would permit them to connive, the same effort, it was resolved, should complete the suppression of his power and the correction of his outrages. While a corps of considerable strength was upon the point of receiving orders to march for Udolpho, a young officer, prompted partly by resentment, for some injury, received from Montoni, and partly by the hope of distinction, solicited an interview with the Minister, who directed the enterprise. To him he represented, that the situation of Udolpho rendered it too strong to be taken by open force, except after some tedious operations; that Montoni had lately shewn how capable he was of adding to its strength all the advantages, which could be derived from the skill of a commander; that so considerable a body of troops, as that allotted to the expedition, could not approach Udolpho without his knowledge, and that it was not for the honour of the republic to have a large part of its regular force employed, for such a time as the siege of Udolpho would require, upon the attack of a handful of banditti. The object of the expedition, he thought, might be accomplished much more safely and speedily by mingling contrivance with force. It was possible to meet Montoni and his party, without their walls, and to attack them then; or, by approaching the fortress, with the secrecy, consistent with the march of smaller bodies of troops, to take advantage either of the treachery, or negligence of some of his party, and to rush unexpectedly upon the whole even in the castle of Udolpho. This advice was seriously attended to, and the officer, who gave it, received the command of the troops, demanded for his purpose. His first efforts were accordingly those of contrivance alone. In the neighbourhood of Udolpho, he waited, till he had secured the assistance of several of the condottieri, of whom he found none, that he addressed, unwilling to punish their imperious master and to secure their own pardon from the senate. He learned also the number of Montoni's troops, and that it had been much increased, since his late successes. The conclusion of his plan was soon effected. Having returned with his party, who received the watchword and other assistance from their friends within, Montoni and his officers were surprised by one division, who had been directed to their apartment, while the other maintained the slight combat, which preceded the surrender of the whole garrison. Among the persons, seized with Montoni, was Orsino, the assassin, who had joined him on his first arrival at Udolpho, and whose concealment had been made known to the senate by Count Morano, after the unsuccessful attempt of the latter to carry off Emily. It was, indeed, partly for the purpose of capturing this man, by whom one of the senate had been murdered, that the expedition was undertaken, and its success was so acceptable to them, that Morano was instantly released, notwithstanding the political suspicions, which Montoni, by his secret accusation, had excited against him. The celerity and ease, with which this whole transaction was completed, prevented it from attracting curiosity, or even from obtaining a place in any of the published records of that time; so that Emily, who remained in Languedoc, was ignorant of the defeat and signal humiliation of her late persecutor. Her mind was now occupied with sufferings, which no effort of reason had yet been able to controul. Count De Villefort, who sincerely attempted whatever benevolence could suggest for softening them, sometimes allowed her the solitude she wished for, sometimes led her into friendly parties, and constantly protected her, as much as possible, from the shrewd enquiries and critical conversation of the Countess. He often invited her to make excursions, with him and his daughter, during which he conversed entirely on questions, suitable to her taste, without appearing to consult it, and thus endeavoured gradually to withdraw her from the subject of her grief, and to awake other interests in her mind. Emily, to whom he appeared as the enlightened friend and protector of her youth, soon felt for him the tender affection of a daughter, and her heart expanded to her young friend Blanche, as to a sister, whose kindness and simplicity compensated for the want of more brilliant qualities. It was long before she could sufficiently abstract her mind from Valancourt to listen to the story, promised by old Dorothee, concerning which her curiosity had once been so deeply interested; but Dorothee, at length, reminded her of it, and Emily desired, that she would come, that night, to her chamber. Still her thoughts were employed by considerations, which weakened her curiosity, and Dorothee's tap at the door, soon after twelve, surprised her almost as much as if it had not been appointed. 'I am come, at last, lady,' said she; 'I wonder what it is makes my old limbs shake so, tonight. I thought, once or twice, I should have dropped, as I was acoming.' Emily seated her in a chair, and desired, that she would compose her spirits, before she entered upon the subject, that had brought her thither. 'Alas,' said Dorothee, 'it is thinking of that, I believe, which has disturbed me so. In my way hither too, I passed the chamber, where my dear lady died, and every thing was so still and gloomy about me, that I almost fancied I saw her, as she appeared upon her deathbed.' Emily now drew her chair near to Dorothee, who went on. 'It is about twenty years since my lady Marchioness came a bride to the chateau. O! I well remember how she looked, when she came into the great hall, where we servants were all assembled to welcome her, and how happy my lord the Marquis seemed. Ah! who would have thought then!But, as I was saying, ma'amselle, I thought the Marchioness, with all her sweet looks, did not look happy at heart, and so I told my husband, and he said it was all fancy; so I said no more, but I made my remarks, for all that. My lady Marchioness was then about your age, and, as I have often thought, very like you. Well! my lord the Marquis kept open house, for a long time, and gave such entertainments and there were such gay doings as have never been in the chateau since. I was younger, ma'amselle, then, than I am now, and was as gay at the best of them. I remember I danced with Philip, the butler, in a pink gown, with yellow ribbons, and a coif, not such as they wear now, but plaited high, with ribbons all about it. It was very becoming truly;my lord, the Marquis, noticed me. Ah! he was a goodnatured gentleman thenwho would have thought that he!' 'But the Marchioness, Dorothee,' said Emily, 'you was telling me of her.' 'O yes, my lady Marchioness, I thought she did not seem happy at heart, and once, soon after the marriage, I caught her crying in her chamber; but, when she saw me, she dried her eyes, and pretended to smile. I did not dare then to ask what was the matter; but, the next time I saw her crying, I did, and she seemed displeased;so I said no more. I found out, some time after, how it was. Her father, it seems, had commanded her to marry my lord, the Marquis, for his money, and there was another nobleman, or else a chevalier, that she liked better and that was very fond of her, and she fretted for the loss of him, I fancy, but she never told me so. My lady always tried to conceal her tears from the Marquis, for I have often seen her, after she has been so sorrowful, look so calm and sweet, when he came into the room! But my lord, all of a sudden, grew gloomy and fretful, and very unkind sometimes to my lady. This afflicted her very much, as I saw, for she never complained, and she used to try so sweetly to oblige him and to bring him into a good humour, that my heart has often ached to see it. But he used to be stubborn, and give her harsh answers, and then, when she found it all in vain, she would go to her own room, and cry so! I used to hear her in the antiroom, poor dear lady! but I seldom ventured to go to her. I used, sometimes, to think my lord was jealous. To be sure my lady was greatly admired, but she was too good to deserve suspicion.

Among the many chevaliers, that visited at the chateau, there was one, that I always thought seemed just suited for my lady; he was so courteous, yet so spirited, and there was such a grace, as it were, in all he did, or said. I always observed, that, whenever he had been there, the Marquis was more gloomy and my lady more thoughtful, and it came into my head, that this was the chevalier she ought to have married, but I never could learn for certain.' 'What was the chevalier's name, Dorothee?' said Emily. 'Why that I will not tell even to you, ma'amselle, for evil may come of it. I once heard from a person, who is since dead, that the Marchioness was not in law the wife of the Marquis, for that she had before been privately married to the gentleman she was so much attached to, and was afterwards afraid to own it to her father, who was a very stern man; but this seems very unlikely, and I never gave much faith to it. As I was saying, the Marquis was most out of humour, as I thought, when the chevalier I spoke of had been at the chateau, and, at last, his ill treatment of my lady made her quite miserable. He would see hardly any visitors at the castle, and made her live almost by herself. I was her constant attendant, and saw all she suffered, but still she never complained. 'After matters had gone on thus, for near a year, my lady was taken ill, and I thought her long fretting had made her so,but, alas! I fear it was worse than that.' 'Worse! Dorothee,' said Emily, 'can that be possible?' 'I fear it was so, madam, there were strange appearances. But I will only tell what happened. My lord, the Marquis' 'Hush, Dorothee, what sounds were those?' said Emily. Dorothee changed countenance, and, while they both listened, they heard, on the stillness of the night, music of uncommon sweetness. 'I have surely heard that voice before!' said Emily, at length. 'I have often heard it, and at this same hour,' said Dorothee, solemnly, 'and, if spirits ever bring musicthat is surely the music of one!' Emily, as the sounds drew nearer, knew them to be the same she had formerly heard at the time of her father's death, and, whether it was the remembrance they now revived of that melancholy event, or that she was struck with superstitious awe, it is certain she was so much affected, that she had nearly fainted. 'I think I once told you, madam,' said Dorothee, 'that I first heard this music, soon after my lady's death! I well remember the night!' 'Hark! it comes again!' said Emily, 'let us open the window, and listen.' They did so; but, soon, the sounds floated gradually away into distance, and all was again still; they seemed to have sunk among the woods, whose tufted tops were visible upon the clear horizon, while every other feature of the scene was involved in the nightshade, which, however, allowed the eye an indistinct view of some objects in the garden below. As Emily leaned on the window, gazing with a kind of thrilling awe upon the obscurity beneath, and then upon the cloudless arch above, enlightened only by the stars, Dorothee, in a low voice, resumed her narrative. 'I was saying, ma'amselle, that I well remember when first I heard that music. It was one night, soon after my lady's death, that I had sat up later than usual, and I don't know how it was, but I had been thinking a great deal about my poor mistress, and of the sad scene I had lately witnessed. The chateau was quite still, and I was in the chamber at a good distance from the rest of the servants, and this, with the mournful things I had been thinking of, I suppose, made me low spirited, for I felt very lonely and forlorn, as it were, and listened often, wishing to hear a sound in the chateau, for you know, ma'amselle, when one can hear people moving, one does not so much mind, about one's fears. But all the servants were gone to bed, and I sat, thinking and thinking, till I was almost afraid to look round the room, and my poor lady's countenance often came to my mind, such as I had seen her when she was dying, and, once or twice, I almost thought I saw her before me,when suddenly I heard such sweet music! It seemed just at my window, and I shall never forget what I felt. I had not power to move from my chair, but then, when I thought it was my dear lady's voice, the tears came to my eyes. I had often heard her sing, in her lifetime, and to be sure she had a very fine voice; it had made me cry to hear her, many a time, when she has sat in her oriel, of an evening, playing upon her lute such sad songs, and singing so. O! it went to one's heart! I have listened in the antichamber, for the hour together, and she would sometimes sit playing, with the window open, when it was summer time, till it was quite dark, and when I have gone in, to shut it, she has hardly seemed to know what hour it was. But, as I said, madam,' continued Dorothee, 'when first I heard the music, that came just now, I thought it was my late lady's, and I have often thought so again, when I have heard it, as I have done at intervals, ever since. Sometimes, many months have gone by, but still it has returned.' 'It is extraordinary,' observed Emily, 'that no person has yet discovered the musician.' 'Aye, ma'amselle, if it had been any thing earthly it would have been discovered long ago, but who could have courage to follow a spirit, and if they had, what good could it do?for spirits, YOU KNOW, ma'am, can take any shape, or no shape, and they will be here, one minute, and, the next perhaps, in a quite different place!' 'Pray resume your story of the Marchioness,' said Emily, 'and acquaint me with the manner of her death.' 'I will, ma'am,' said Dorothee, 'but shall we leave the window?' 'This cool air refreshes me,' replied Emily, 'and I love to hear it creep along the woods, and to look upon this dusky landscape. You was speaking of my lord, the Marquis, when the music interrupted us.' 'Yes, madam, my lord, the Marquis, became more and more gloomy; and my lady grew worse and worse, till, one night, she was taken very ill, indeed. I was called up, and, when I came to her bedside, I was shocked to see her countenanceit was so changed! She looked piteously up at me, and desired I would call the Marquis again, for he was not yet come, and tell him she had something particular to say to him. At last, he came, and he did, to be sure, seem very sorry to see her, but he said very little. My lady told him she felt herself to be dying, and wished to speak with him alone, and then I left the room, but I shall never forget his look as I went.' 'When I returned, I ventured to remind my lord about sending for a doctor, for I supposed he had forgot to do so, in his grief; but my lady said it was then too late; but my lord, so far from thinking so, seemed to think light of her disordertill she was seized with such terrible pains! O, I never shall forget her shriek! My lord then sent off a man and horse for the doctor, and walked about the room and all over the chateau in the greatest distress; and I staid by my dear lady, and did what I could to ease her sufferings. She had intervals of ease, and in one of these she sent for my lord again; when he came, I was going, but she desired I would not leave her. O! I shall never forget what a scene passedI can hardly bear to think of it now! My lord was almost distracted, for my lady behaved with so much goodness, and took such pains to comfort him, that, if he ever had suffered a suspicion to enter his head, he must now have been convinced he was wrong. And to be sure he did seem to be overwhelmed with the thought of his treatment of her, and this affected her so much, that she fainted away. 'We then got my lord out of the room; he went into his library, and threw himself on the floor, and there he staid, and would hear no reason, that was talked to him. When my lady recovered, she enquired for him, but, afterwards, said she could not bear to see his grief, and desired we would let her die quietly. She died in my arms, ma'amselle, and she went off as peacefully as a child, for all the violence of her disorder was passed.' Dorothee paused, and wept, and Emily wept with her; for she was much affected by the goodness of the late Marchioness, and by the meek patience, with which she had suffered. 'When the doctor came,' resumed Dorothee, 'alas! he came too late; he appeared greatly shocked to see her, for soon after her death a frightful blackness spread all over her face. When he had sent the attendants out of the room, he asked me several odd questions about the Marchioness, particularly concerning the manner, in which she had been seized, and he often shook his head at my answers, and seemed to mean more, than he chose to say. But I understood him too well. However, I kept my remarks to myself, and only told them to my husband, who bade me hold my tongue. Some of the other servants, however, suspected what I did, and strange reports were whispered about the neighbourhood, but nobody dared to make any stir about them. When my lord heard that my lady was dead, he shut himself up, and would see nobody but the doctor, who used to be with him alone, sometimes for an hour together; and, after that, the doctor never talked with me again about my lady. When she was buried in the church of the convent, at a little distance yonder, if the moon was up you might see the towers here, ma'amselle, all my lord's vassals followed the funeral, and there was not a dry eye among them, for she had done a deal of good among the poor. My lord, the Marquis, I never saw any body so melancholy as he was afterwards, and sometimes he would be in such fits of violence, that we almost thought he had lost his senses. He did not stay long at the chateau, but joined his regiment, and, soon after, all the servants, except my husband and I, received notice to go, for my lord went to the wars. I never saw him after, for he would not return to the chateau, though it is such a fine place, and never finished those fine rooms he was building on the west side of it, and it has, in a manner, been shut up ever since, till my lord the Count came here.' 'The death of the Marchioness appears extraordinary,' said Emily, who was anxious to know more than she dared to ask. 'Yes, madam,' replied Dorothee, 'it was extraordinary; I have told you all I saw, and you may easily guess what I think, I cannot say more, because I would not spread reports, that might offend my lord the Count.' 'You are very right,' said Emily;'where did the Marquis die?''In the north of France, I believe, ma'amselle,' replied Dorothee. 'I was very glad, when I heard my lord the Count was coming, for this had been a sad desolate place, these many years, and we heard such strange noises, sometimes, after my lady's death, that, as I told you before, my husband and I left it for a neighbouring cottage. And now, lady, I have told you all this sad history, and all my thoughts, and you have promised, you know, never to give the least hint about it.''I have,' said Emily, 'and I will be faithful to my promise, Dorothee;what you have told has interested me more than you can imagine. I only wish I could prevail upon you to tell the name of the chevalier, whom you thought so deserving of the Marchioness.' Dorothee, however, steadily refused to do this, and then returned to the notice of Emily's likeness to the late Marchioness. 'There is another picture of her,' added she, 'hanging in a room of the suite, which was shut up. It was drawn, as I have heard, before she was married, and is much more like you than the miniature.' When Emily expressed a strong desire to see this, Dorothee replied, that she did not like to open those rooms; but Emily reminded her, that the Count had talked the other day of ordering them to be opened; of which Dorothee seemed to consider much, and then she owned, that she should feel less, if she went into them with Emily first, than otherwise, and at length promised to shew the picture. The night was too far advanced and Emily was too much affected by the narrative of the scenes, which had passed in those apartments, to wish to visit them at this hour, but she requested that Dorothee would return on the following night, when they were not likely to be observed, and conduct her thither. Besides her wish to examine the portrait, she felt a thrilling curiosity to see the chamber, in which the Marchioness had died, and which Dorothee had said remained, with the bed and furniture, just as when the corpse was removed for interment. The solemn emotions, which the expectation of viewing such a scene had awakened, were in unison with the present tone of her mind, depressed by severe disappointment. Cheerful objects rather added to, than removed this depression; but, perhaps, she yielded too much to her melancholy inclination, and imprudently lamented the misfortune, which no virtue of her own could have taught her to avoid, though no effort of reason could make her look unmoved upon the selfdegradation of him, whom she had once esteemed and loved. Dorothee promised to return, on the following night, with the keys of the chambers, and then wished Emily good repose, and departed. Emily, however, continued at the window, musing upon the melancholy fate of the Marchioness and listening, in awful expectation, for a return of the music. But the stillness of the night remained long unbroken, except by the murmuring sounds of the woods, as they waved in the breeze, and then by the distant bell of the convent, striking one. She now withdrew from the window, and, as she sat at her bedside, indulging melancholy reveries, which the loneliness of the hour assisted, the stillness was suddenly interrupted not by music, but by very uncommon sounds, that seemed to come either from the room, adjoining her own, or from one below. The terrible catastrophe, that had been related to her, together with the mysterious circumstances, said to have since occurred in the chateau, had so much shocked her spirits, that she now sunk, for a moment, under the weakness of superstition. The sounds, however, did not return, and she retired, to forget in sleep the disastrous story she had heard. Chapter 4 Now it is the time of night, That, the graves all gaping wide, Every one lets forth his spite, In the churchway path to glide. SHAKESPEARE On the next night, about the same hour as before, Dorothee came to Emily's chamber, with the keys of that suite of rooms, which had been particularly appropriated to the late Marchioness. These extended along the north side of the chateau, forming part of the old building; and, as Emily's room was in the south, they had to pass over a great extent of the castle, and by the chambers of several of the family, whose observations Dorothee was anxious to avoid, since it might excite enquiry, and raise reports, such as would displease the Count. She, therefore, requested, that Emily would wait half an hour, before they ventured forth, that they might be certain all the servants were gone to bed. It was nearly one, before the chateau was perfectly still, or Dorothee thought it prudent to leave the chamber. In this interval, her spirits seemed to be greatly affected by the remembrance of past events, and by the prospect of entering again upon places, where these had occurred, and in which she had not been for so many years. Emily too was affected, but her feelings had more of solemnity, and less of fear. From the silence, into which reflection and expectation had thrown them, they, at length, roused themselves, and left the chamber. Dorothee, at first, carried the lamp, but her hand trembled so much with infirmity and alarm, that Emily took it from her, and offered her arm, to support her feeble steps. They had to descend the great staircase, and, after passing over a wide extent of the chateau, to ascend another, which led to the suite of rooms they were in quest of. They stepped cautiously along the open corridor, that ran round the great hall, and into which the chambers of the Count, Countess, and the Lady Blanche, opened, and, from thence, descending the chief staircase, they crossed the hall itself. Proceeding through the servants hall, where the dying embers of a wood fire still glimmered on the hearth, and the supper table was surrounded by chairs, that obstructed their passage, they came to the foot of the back staircase. Old Dorothee here paused, and looked around; 'Let us listen,' said she, 'if any thing is stirring; Ma'amselle, do you hear any voice?' 'None,' said Emily, 'there certainly is no person up in the chateau, besides ourselves.''No, ma'amselle,' said Dorothee, 'but I have never been here at this hour before, and, after what I know, my fears are not wonderful.''What do you know?' said Emily.'O, ma'amselle, we have no time for talking now; let us go on. That door on the left is the one we must open.' They proceeded, and, having reached the top of the staircase, Dorothee applied the key to the lock. 'Ah,' said she, as she endeavoured to turn it, 'so many years have passed since this was opened, that I fear it will not move.' Emily was more successful, and they presently entered a spacious and ancient chamber. 'Alas!' exclaimed Dorothee, as she entered, 'the last time I passed through this doorI followed my poor lady's corpse!' Emily, struck with the circumstance, and affected by the dusky and solemn air of the apartment, remained silent, and they passed on through a long suite of rooms, till they came to one more spacious than the rest, and rich in the remains of faded magnificence. 'Let us rest here awhile, madam,' said Dorothee faintly, 'we are going into the chamber, where my lady died! that door opens into it. Ah, ma'amselle! why did you persuade me to come?' Emily drew one of the massy armchairs, with which the apartment was furnished, and begged Dorothee would sit down, and try to compose her spirits. 'How the sight of this place brings all that passed formerly to my mind!' said Dorothee; 'it seems as if it was but yesterday since all that sad affair happened!' 'Hark! what noise is that?' said Emily. Dorothee, half starting from her chair, looked round the apartment, and they listenedbut, every thing remaining still, the old woman spoke again upon the subject of her sorrow. 'This saloon, ma'amselle, was in my lady's time the finest apartment in the chateau, and it was fitted up according to her own taste. All this grand furniture, but you can now hardly see what it is for the dust, and our light is none of the bestah! how I have seen this room lighted up in my lady's time!all this grand furniture came from Paris, and was made after the fashion of some in the Louvre there, except those large glasses, and they came from some outlandish place, and that rich tapestry. How the colours are faded already!since I saw it last!' 'I understood, that was twenty years ago,' observed Emily. 'Thereabout, madam,' said Dorothee, 'and well remembered, but all the time between then and now seems as nothing. That tapestry used to be greatly admired at, it tells the stories out of some famous book, or other, but I have forgot the name.' Emily now rose to examine the figures it exhibited, and discovered, by verses in the Provencal tongue, wrought underneath each scene, that it exhibited stories from some of the most celebrated ancient romances. Dorothee's spirits being now more composed, she rose, and unlocked the door that led into the late Marchioness's apartment, and Emily passed into a lofty chamber, hung round with dark arras, and so spacious, that the lamp she held up did not shew its extent; while Dorothee, when she entered, had dropped into a chair, where, sighing deeply, she scarcely trusted herself with the view of a scene so affecting to her. It was some time before Emily perceived, through the dusk, the bed on which the Marchioness was said to have died; when, advancing to the upper end of the room, she discovered the high canopied tester of dark green damask, with the curtains descending to the floor in the fashion of a tent, half drawn, and remaining apparently, as they had been left twenty years before; and over the whole bedding was thrown a counterpane, or pall, of black velvet, that hung down to the floor. Emily shuddered, as she held the lamp over it, and looked within the dark curtains, where she almost expected to have seen a human face, and, suddenly remembering the horror she had suffered upon discovering the dying Madame Montoni in the turretchamber of Udolpho, her spirits fainted, and she was turning from the bed, when Dorothee, who had now reached it, exclaimed, 'Holy Virgin! methinks I see my lady stretched upon that pallas when last I saw her!' Emily, shocked by this exclamation, looked involuntarily again within the curtains, but the blackness of the pall only appeared; while Dorothee was compelled to support herself upon the side of the bed, and presently tears brought her some relief. 'Ah!' said she, after she had wept awhile, 'it was here I sat on that terrible night, and held my lady's hand, and heard her last words, and saw all her sufferingsHERE she died in my arms!' 'Do not indulge these painful recollections,' said Emily, 'let us go. Shew me the picture you mentioned, if it will not too much affect you.' 'It hangs in the oriel,' said Dorothee rising, and going towards a small door near the bed's head, which she opened, and Emily followed with the light, into the closet of the late Marchioness. 'Alas! there she is, ma'amselle,' said Dorothee, pointing to a portrait of a lady, 'there is her very self! just as she looked when she came first to the chateau. You see, madam, she was all blooming like you, thenand so soon to be cut off!' While Dorothee spoke, Emily was attentively examining the picture, which bore a strong resemblance to the miniature, though the expression of the countenance in each was somewhat different; but still she thought she perceived something of that pensive melancholy in the portrait, which so strongly characterised the miniature. 'Pray, ma'amselle, stand beside the picture, that I may look at you together,' said Dorothee, who, when the request was complied with, exclaimed again at the resemblance. Emily also, as she gazed upon it, thought that she had somewhere seen a person very like it, though she could not now recollect who this was. In this closet were many memorials of the departed Marchioness; a robe and several articles of her dress were scattered upon the chairs, as if they had just been thrown off. On the floor were a pair of black satin slippers, and, on the dressingtable, a pair of gloves and a long black veil, which, as Emily took it up to examine, she perceived was dropping to pieces with age. 'Ah!' said Dorothee, observing the veil, 'my lady's hand laid it there; it has never been moved since!' Emily, shuddering, immediately laid it down again. 'I well remember seeing her take it off,' continued Dorothee, 'it was on the night before her death, when she had returned from a little walk I had persuaded her to take in the gardens, and she seemed refreshed by it. I told her how much better she looked, and I remember what a languid smile she gave me; but, alas! she little thought, or I either, that she was to die, that night.' Dorothee wept again, and then, taking up the veil, threw it suddenly over Emily, who shuddered to find it wrapped round her, descending even to her feet, and, as she endeavoured to throw it off, Dorothee intreated that she would keep it on for one moment. 'I thought,' added she, 'how like you would look to my dear mistress in that veil;may your life, ma'amselle, be a happier one than hers!' Emily, having disengaged herself from the veil, laid it again on the dressingtable, and surveyed the closet, where every object, on which her eye fixed, seemed to speak of the Marchioness. In a large oriel window of painted glass, stood a table, with a silver crucifix, and a prayerbook open; and Emily remembered with emotion what Dorothee had mentioned concerning her custom of playing on her lute in this window, before she observed the lute itself, lying on a corner of the table, as if it had been carelessly placed there by the hand, that had so often awakened it. 'This is a sad forlorn place!' said Dorothee, 'for, when my dear lady died, I had no heart to put it to rights, or the chamber either; and my lord never came into the rooms after, so they remain just as they did when my lady was removed for interment.' While Dorothee spoke, Emily was still looking on the lute, which was a Spanish one, and remarkably large; and then, with a hesitating hand, she took it up, and passed her fingers over the chords. They were out of tune, but uttered a deep and full sound. Dorothee started at their wellknown tones, and, seeing the lute in Emily's hand, said, 'This is the lute my lady Marchioness loved so! I remember when last she played upon itit was on the night that she died. I came as usual to undress her, and, as I entered the bedchamber, I heard the sound of music from the oriel, and perceiving it was my lady's, who was sitting there, I stepped softly to the door, which stood a little open, to listen; for the musicthough it was mournfulwas so sweet! There I saw her, with the lute in her hand, looking upwards, and the tears fell upon her cheeks, while she sung a vesper hymn, so soft, and so solemn! and her voice trembled, as it were, and then she would stop for a moment, and wipe away her tears, and go on again, lower than before. O! I had often listened to my lady, but never heard any thing so sweet as this; it made me cry, almost, to hear it. She had been at prayers, I fancy, for there was the book open on the table beside heraye, and there it lies open still! Pray, let us leave the oriel, ma'amselle,' added Dorothee, 'this is a heartbreaking place!' Having returned into the chamber, she desired to look once more upon the bed, when, as they came opposite to the open door, leading into the saloon, Emily, in the partial gleam, which the lamp threw into it, thought she saw something glide along into the obscurer part of the room. Her spirits had been much affected by the surrounding scene, or it is probable this circumstance, whether real or imaginary, would not have affected her in the degree it did; but she endeavoured to conceal her emotion from Dorothee, who, however, observing her countenance change, enquired if she was ill. 'Let us go,' said Emily, faintly, 'the air of these rooms is unwholesome;' but, when she attempted to do so, considering that she must pass through the apartment where the phantom of her terror had appeared, this terror increased, and, too faint to support herself, she sat down on the side of the bed. Dorothee, believing that she was only affected by a consideration of the melancholy catastrophe, which had happened on this spot, endeavoured to cheer her; and then, as they sat together on the bed, she began to relate other particulars concerning it, and this without reflecting, that it might increase Emily's emotion, but because they were particularly interesting to herself. 'A little before my lady's death,' said she, 'when the pains were gone off, she called me to her, and stretching out her hand to me, I sat down just therewhere the curtain falls upon the bed. How well I remember her look at the timedeath was in it!I can almost fancy I see her now.There she lay, ma'amselleher face was upon the pillow there! This black counterpane was not upon the bed then; it was laid on, after her death, and she was laid out upon it.' Emily turned to look within the dusky curtains, as if she could have seen the countenance of which Dorothee spoke. The edge of the white pillow only appeared above the blackness of the pall, but, as her eyes wandered over the pall itself, she fancied she saw it move. Without speaking, she caught Dorothee's arm, who, surprised by the action, and by the look of terror that accompanied it, turned her eyes from Emily to the bed, where, in the next moment she, too, saw the pall slowly lifted, and fall again. Emily attempted to go, but Dorothee stood fixed and gazing upon the bed; and, at length, said'It is only the wind, that waves it, ma'amselle; we have left all the doors open see how the air waves the lamp, too.It is only the wind.' She had scarcely uttered these words, when the pall was more violently agitated than before; but Emily, somewhat ashamed of her terrors, stepped back to the bed, willing to be convinced that the wind only had occasioned her alarm; when, as she gazed within the curtains, the pall moved again, and, in the next moment, the apparition of a human countenance rose above it. Screaming with terror, they both fled, and got out of the chamber as fast as their trembling limbs would bear them, leaving open the doors of all the rooms, through which they passed. When they reached the staircase, Dorothee threw open a chamber door, where some of the female servants slept, and sunk breathless on the bed; while Emily, deprived of all presence of mind, made only a feeble attempt to conceal the occasion of her terror from the astonished servants; and, though Dorothee, when she could speak, endeavoured to laugh at her own fright, and was joined by Emily, no remonstrances could prevail with the servants, who had quickly taken the alarm, to pass even the remainder of the night in a room so near to these terrific chambers. Dorothee having accompanied Emily to her own apartment, they then began to talk over, with some degree of coolness, the strange circumstance, that had just occurred; and Emily would almost have doubted her own perceptions, had not those of Dorothee attested their truth. Having now mentioned what she had observed in the outer chamber, she asked the housekeeper, whether she was certain no door had been left unfastened, by which a person might secretly have entered the apartments? Dorothee replied, that she had constantly kept the keys of the several doors in her own possession; that, when she had gone her rounds through the castle, as she frequently did, to examine if all was safe, she had tried these doors among the rest, and had always found them fastened. It was, therefore, impossible, she added, that any person could have got admittance into the apartments; and, if they couldit was very improbable they should have chose to sleep in a place so cold and forlorn. Emily observed, that their visit to these chambers had, perhaps, been watched, and that some person, for a frolic, had followed them into the rooms, with a design to frighten them, and, while they were in the oriel, had taken the opportunity of concealing himself in the bed. Dorothee allowed, that this was possible, till she recollected, that, on entering the apartments, she had turned the key of the outer door, and this, which had been done to prevent their visit being noticed by any of the family, who might happen to be up, must effectually have excluded every person, except themselves, from the chambers; and she now persisted in affirming, that the ghastly countenance she had seen was nothing human, but some dreadful apparition. Emily was very solemnly affected. Of whatever nature might be the appearance she had witnessed, whether human or supernatural, the fate of the deceased Marchioness was a truth not to be doubted; and this unaccountable circumstance, occurring in the very scene of her sufferings, affected Emily's imagination with a superstitious awe, to which, after having detected the fallacies at Udolpho, she might not have yielded, had she been ignorant of the unhappy story, related by the housekeeper. Her she now solemnly conjured to conceal the occurrence of this night, and to make light of the terror she had already betrayed, that the Count might not be distressed by reports, which would certainly spread alarm and confusion among his family.

'Time,' she added, 'may explain this mysterious affair; meanwhile let us watch the event in silence.' Dorothee readily acquiesced; but she now recollected that she had left all the doors of the north suite of rooms open, and, not having courage to return alone to lock even the outer one, Emily, after some effort, so far conquered her own fears, that she offered to accompany her to the foot of the back staircase, and to wait there while Dorothee ascended, whose resolution being reassured by this circumstance, she consented to go, and they left Emily's apartment together. No sound disturbed the stillness, as they passed along the halls and galleries; but, on reaching the foot of the back staircase, Dorothee's resolution failed again; having, however, paused a moment to listen, and no sound being heard above, she ascended, leaving Emily below, and, scarcely suffering her eye to glance within the first chamber, she fastened the door, which shut up the whole suite of apartments, and returned to Emily. As they stepped along the passage, leading into the great hall, a sound of lamentation was heard, which seemed to come from the hall itself, and they stopped in new alarm to listen, when Emily presently distinguished the voice of Annette, whom she found crossing the hall, with another female servant, and so terrified by the report, which the other maids had spread, that, believing she could be safe only where her lady was, she was going for refuge to her apartment. Emily's endeavours to laugh, or to argue her out of these terrors, were equally vain, and, in compassion to her distress, she consented that she should remain in her room during the night. Chapter 5 Hail, mildlypleasing Solitude! Companion of the wise and good This is the balmy breath of morn, Just as the dewbent rose is born. But chief when evening scenes decay And the faint landscape swims away, Thine is the doubtful, soft decline, And that best hour of musing thine. THOMSON Emily's injunctions to Annette to be silent on the subject of her terror were ineffectual, and the occurrence of the preceding night spread such alarm among the servants, who now all affirmed, that they had frequently heard unaccountable noises in the chateau, that a report soon reached the Count of the north side of the castle being haunted. He treated this, at first, with ridicule, but, perceiving, that it was productive of serious evil, in the confusion it occasioned among his household, he forbade any person to repeat it, on pain of punishment. The arrival of a party of his friends soon withdrew his thoughts entirely from this subject, and his servants had now little leisure to brood over it, except, indeed, in the evenings after supper, when they all assembled in their hall, and related stories of ghosts, till they feared to look round the room; started, if the echo of a closing door murmured along the passage, and refused to go singly to any part of the castle. On these occasions Annette made a distinguished figure. When she told not only of all the wonders she had witnessed, but of all that she had imagined, in the castle of Udolpho, with the story of the strange disappearance of Signora Laurentini, she made no trifling impression on the mind of her attentive auditors. Her suspicions, concerning Montoni, she would also have freely disclosed, had not Ludovico, who was now in the service of the Count, prudently checked her loquacity, whenever it pointed to that subject. Among the visitors at the chateau was the Baron de Saint Foix, an old friend of the Count, and his son, the Chevalier St. Foix, a sensible and amiable young man, who, having in the preceding year seen the Lady Blanche, at Paris, had become her declared admirer. The friendship, which the Count had long entertained for his father, and the equality of their circumstances made him secretly approve of the connection; but, thinking his daughter at this time too young to fix her choice for life, and wishing to prove the sincerity and strength of the Chevalier's attachment, he then rejected his suit, though without forbidding his future hope. This young man now came, with the Baron, his father, to claim the reward of a steady affection, a claim, which the Count admitted and which Blanche did not reject. While these visitors were at the chateau, it became a scene of gaiety and splendour. The pavilion in the woods was fitted up and frequented, in the fine evenings, as a supperroom, when the hour usually concluded with a concert, at which the Count and Countess, who were scientific performers, and the Chevaliers Henri and St. Foix, with the Lady Blanche and Emily, whose voices and fine taste compensated for the want of more skilful execution, usually assisted. Several of the Count's servants performed on horns and other instruments, some of which, placed at a little distance among the woods, spoke, in sweet response, to the harmony, that proceeded from the pavilion. At any other period, these parties would have been delightful to Emily; but her spirits were now oppressed with a melancholy, which she perceived that no kind of what is called amusement had power to dissipate, and which the tender and, frequently, pathetic, melody of these concerts sometimes increased to a very painful degree. She was particularly fond of walking in the woods, that hung on a promontory, overlooking the sea. Their luxuriant shade was soothing to her pensive mind, and, in the partial views, which they afforded of the Mediterranean, with its winding shores and passing sails, tranquil beauty was united with grandeur. The paths were rude and frequently overgrown with vegetation, but their tasteful owner would suffer little to be done to them, and scarcely a single branch to be lopped from the venerable trees. On an eminence, in one of the most sequestered parts of these woods, was a rustic seat, formed of the trunk of a decayed oak, which had once been a noble tree, and of which many lofty branches still flourishing united with beech and pines to overcanopy the spot. Beneath their deep umbrage, the eye passed over the tops of other woods, to the Mediterranean, and, to the left, through an opening, was seen a ruined watchtower, standing on a point of rock, near the sea, and rising from among the tufted foliage. Hither Emily often came alone in the silence of evening, and, soothed by the scenery and by the faint murmur, that rose from the waves, would sit, till darkness obliged her to return to the chateau. Frequently, also, she visited the watchtower, which commanded the entire prospect, and, when she leaned against its broken walls, and thought of Valancourt, she not once imagined, what was so true, that this tower had been almost as frequently his resort, as her own, since his estrangement from the neighbouring chateau. One evening, she lingered here to a late hour. She had sat on the steps of the building, watching, in tranquil melancholy, the gradual effect of evening over the extensive prospect, till the gray waters of the Mediterranean and the massy woods were almost the only features of the scene, that remained visible; when, as she gazed alternately on these, and on the mild blue of the heavens, where the first pale star of evening appeared, she personified the hour in the following lines SONG OF THE EVENING HOUR Last of the Hours, that track the fading Day, I move along the realms of twilight air, And hear, remote, the choral song decay Of sisternymphs, who dance around his car. Then, as I follow through the azure void, His partial splendour from my straining eye Sinks in the depth of space; my only guide His faint ray dawning on the farthest sky; Save that sweet, lingering strain of gayer Hours, Whose close my voice prolongs in dying notes, While mortals on the green earth own its pow'rs, As downward on the evening gale it floats. When fades along the West the Sun's last beam, As, weary, to the nether world he goes, And mountainsummits catch the purple gleam, And slumbering ocean faint and fainter glows, Silent upon the globe's broad shade I steal, And o'er its dry turf shed the cooling dews, And ev'ry fever'd herb and flow'ret heal, And all their fragrance on the air diffuse. Where'er I move, a tranquil pleasure reigns; O'er all the scene the dusky tints I send, That forests wild and mountains, stretching plains And peopled towns, in soft confusion blend. Wide o'er the world I waft the fresh'ning wind, Low breathing through the woods and twilight vale, In whispers soft, that woo the pensive mind Of him, who loves my lonely steps to hail. His tender oaten reed I watch to hear, Stealing its sweetness o'er some plaining rill, Or soothing ocean's wave, when storms are near, Or swelling in the breeze from distant hill! I wake the fairy elves, who shun the light; When, from their blossom'd beds, they slily peep, And spy my pale star, leading on the night, Forth to their games and revelry they leap; Send all the prison'd sweets abroad in air, That with them slumber'd in the flow'ret's cell; Then to the shores and moonlight brooks repair, Till the high larks their matincarol swell. The woodnymphs hail my airs and temper'd shade, With ditties soft and lightly sportive dance, On river margin of some bow'ry glade, And strew their fresh buds as my steps advance But, swift I pass, and distant regions trace, For moonbeams silver all the eastern cloud, And Day's last crimson vestige fades apace; Down the steep west I fly from Midnight's shroud. The moon was now rising out of the sea. She watched its gradual progress, the extending line of radiance it threw upon the waters, the sparkling oars, the sail faintly silvered, and the woodtops and the battlements of the watchtower, at whose foot she was sitting, just tinted with the rays. Emily's spirits were in harmony with this scene. As she sat meditating, sounds stole by her on the air, which she immediately knew to be the music and the voice she had formerly heard at midnight, and the emotion of awe, which she felt, was not unmixed with terror, when she considered her remote and lonely situation. The sounds drew nearer. She would have risen to leave the place, but they seemed to come from the way she must have taken towards the chateau, and she awaited the event in trembling expectation. The sounds continued to approach, for some time, and then ceased. Emily sat listening, gazing and unable to move, when she saw a figure emerge from the shade of the woods and pass along the bank, at some little distance before her. It went swiftly, and her spirits were so overcome with awe, that, though she saw, she did not much observe it. Having left the spot, with a resolution never again to visit it alone, at so late an hour, she began to approach the chateau, when she heard voices calling her from the part of the wood, which was nearest to it. They were the shouts of the Count's servants, who were sent to search for her; and when she entered the supperroom, where he sat with Henri and Blanche, he gently reproached her with a look, which she blushed to have deserved. This little occurrence deeply impressed her mind, and, when she withdrew to her own room, it recalled so forcibly the circumstances she had witnessed, a few nights before, that she had scarcely courage to remain alone. She watched to a late hour, when, no sound having renewed her fears, she, at length, sunk to repose. But this was of short continuance, for she was disturbed by a loud and unusual noise, that seemed to come from the gallery, into which her chamber opened. Groans were distinctly heard, and, immediately after, a dead weight fell against the door, with a violence, that threatened to burst it open. She called loudly to know who was there, but received no answer, though, at intervals, she still thought she heard something like a low moaning. Fear deprived her of the power to move. Soon after, she heard footsteps in a remote part of the gallery, and, as they approached, she called more loudly than before, till the steps paused at her door. She then distinguished the voices of several of the servants, who seemed too much engaged by some circumstance without, to attend to her calls; but, Annette soon after entering the room for water, Emily understood, that one of the maids had fainted, whom she immediately desired them to bring into her room, where she assisted to restore her. When this girl had recovered her speech, she affirmed, that, as she was passing up the back staircase, in the way to her chamber, she had seen an apparition on the second landingplace; she held the lamp low, she said, that she might pick her way, several of the stairs being infirm and even decayed, and it was upon raising her eyes, that she saw this appearance. It stood for a moment in the corner of the landingplace, which she was approaching, and then, gliding up the stairs, vanished at the door of the apartment, that had been lately opened. She heard afterwards a hollow sound. 'Then the devil has got a key to that apartment,' said Dorothee, 'for it could be nobody but he; I locked the door myself!' The girl, springing down the stairs and passing up the great staircase, had run, with a faint scream, till she reached the gallery, where she fell, groaning, at Emily's door. Gently chiding her for the alarm she had occasioned, Emily tried to make her ashamed of her fears; but the girl persisted in saying, that she had seen an apparition, till she went to her own room, whither she was accompanied by all the servants present, except Dorothee, who, at Emily's request, remained with her during the night. Emily was perplexed, and Dorothee was terrified, and mentioned many occurrences of former times, which had long since confirmed her superstitions; among these, according to her belief, she had once witnessed an appearance, like that just described, and on the very same spot, and it was the remembrance of it, that had made her pause, when she was going to ascend the stairs with Emily, and which had increased her reluctance to open the north apartments. Whatever might be Emily's opinions, she did not disclose them, but listened attentively to all that Dorothee communicated, which occasioned her much thought and perplexity. From this night the terror of the servants increased to such an excess, that several of them determined to leave the chateau, and requested their discharge of the Count, who, if he had any faith in the subject of their alarm, thought proper to dissemble it, and, anxious to avoid the inconvenience that threatened him, employed ridicule and then argument to convince them they had nothing to apprehend from supernatural agency. But fear had rendered their minds inaccessible to reason; and it was now, that Ludovico proved at once his courage and his gratitude for the kindness he had received from the Count, by offering to watch, during a night, in the suite of rooms, reputed to be haunted. He feared, he said, no spirits, and, if any thing of human form appearedhe would prove that he dreaded that as little. The Count paused upon the offer, while the servants, who heard it, looked upon one another in doubt and amazement, and Annette, terrified for the safety of Ludovico, employed tears and entreaties to dissuade him from his purpose. 'You are a bold fellow,' said the Count, smiling, 'Think well of what you are going to encounter, before you finally determine upon it. However, if you persevere in your resolution, I will accept your offer, and your intrepidity shall not go unrewarded.' 'I desire no reward, your excellenza,' replied Ludovico, 'but your approbation. Your excellenza has been sufficiently good to me already; but I wish to have arms, that I may be equal to my enemy, if he should appear.' 'Your sword cannot defend you against a ghost,' replied the Count, throwing a glance of irony upon the other servants, 'neither can bars, or bolts; for a spirit, you know, can glide through a keyhole as easily as through a door.' 'Give me a sword, my lord Count,' said Ludovico, 'and I will lay all the spirits, that shall attack me, in the red sea.' 'Well,' said the Count, 'you shall have a sword, and good cheer, too; and your brave comrades here will, perhaps, have courage enough to remain another night in the chateau, since your boldness will certainly, for this night, at least, confine all the malice of the spectre to yourself.' Curiosity now struggled with fear in the minds of several of his fellow servants, and, at length, they resolved to await the event of Ludovico's rashness. Emily was surprised and concerned, when she heard of his intention, and was frequently inclined to mention what she had witnessed in the north apartments to the Count, for she could not entirely divest herself of fears for Ludovico's safety, though her reason represented these to be absurd. The necessity, however, of concealing the secret, with which Dorothee had entrusted her, and which must have been mentioned, with the late occurrence, in excuse for her having so privately visited the north apartments, kept her entirely silent on the subject of her apprehension; and she tried only to sooth Annette, who held, that Ludovico was certainly to be destroyed; and who was much less affected by Emily's consolatory efforts, than by the manner of old Dorothee, who often, as she exclaimed Ludovico, sighed, and threw up her eyes to heaven. Chapter 6 Ye gods of quiet, and of sleep profound! Whose soft dominion o'er this castle sways, And all the widelysilent places round, Forgive me, if my trembling pen displays What never yet was sung in mortal lays. THOMSON The Count gave orders for the north apartments to be opened and prepared for the reception of Ludovico; but Dorothee, remembering what she had lately witnessed there, feared to obey, and, not one of the other servants daring to venture thither, the rooms remained shut up till the time when Ludovico was to retire thither for the night, an hour, for which the whole household waited with impatience. After supper, Ludovico, by the order of the Count, attended him in his closet, where they remained alone for near half an hour, and, on leaving which, his Lord delivered to him a sword. 'It has seen service in mortal quarrels,' said the Count, jocosely, 'you will use it honourably, no doubt, in a spiritual one. Tomorrow, let me hear that there is not one ghost remaining in the chateau.' Ludovico received it with a respectful bow. 'You shall be obeyed, my Lord,' said he; 'I will engage, that no spectre shall disturb the peace of the chateau after this night.' They now returned to the supperroom, where the Count's guests awaited to accompany him and Ludovico to the door of the north apartments, and Dorothee, being summoned for the keys, delivered them to Ludovico, who then led the way, followed by most of the inhabitants of the chateau. Having reached the back staircase, several of the servants shrunk back, and refused to go further, but the rest followed him to the top of the staircase, where a broad landingplace allowed them to flock round him, while he applied the key to the door, during which they watched him with as much eager curiosity as if he had been performing some magical rite. Ludovico, unaccustomed to the lock, could not turn it, and Dorothee, who had lingered far behind, was called forward, under whose hand the door opened slowly, and, her eye glancing within the dusky chamber, she uttered a sudden shriek, and retreated. At this signal of alarm, the greater part of the crowd hurried down the stairs, and the Count, Henri and Ludovico were left alone to pursue the enquiry, who instantly rushed into the apartment, Ludovico with a drawn sword, which he had just time to draw from the scabbard, the Count with the lamp in his hand, and Henri carrying a basket, containing provisions for the courageous adventurer. Having looked hastily round the first room, where nothing appeared to justify alarm, they passed on to the second; and, here too all being quiet, they proceeded to a third with a more tempered step. The Count had now leisure to smile at the discomposure, into which he had been surprised, and to ask Ludovico in which room he designed to pass the night. 'There are several chambers beyond these, your excellenza,' said Ludovico, pointing to a door, 'and in one of them is a bed, they say. I will pass the night there, and when I am weary of watching, I can lie down.' 'Good;' said the Count; 'let us go on. You see these rooms shew nothing, but damp walls and decaying furniture. I have been so much engaged since I came to the chateau, that I have not looked into them till now. Remember, Ludovico, to tell the housekeeper, tomorrow, to throw open these windows. The damask hangings are dropping to pieces, I will have them taken down, and this antique furniture removed.' 'Dear sir!' said Henri, 'here is an armchair so massy with gilding, that it resembles one of the state chairs at the Louvre, more then any thing else.' 'Yes,' said the Count, stopping a moment to survey it, 'there is a history belonging to that chair, but I have not time to tell it.Let us pass on. This suite runs to a greater extent than I had imagined; it is many years since I was in them. But where is the bedroom you speak of, Ludovico?these are only antichambers to the great drawingroom. I remember them in their splendour!' 'The bed, my Lord,' replied Ludovico, 'they told me, was in a room that opens beyond the saloon, and terminates the suite.' 'O, here is the saloon,' said the Count, as they entered the spacious apartment, in which Emily and Dorothee had rested. He here stood for a moment, surveying the reliques of faded grandeur, which it exhibitedthe sumptuous tapestrythe long and low sophas of velvet, with frames heavily carved and gildedthe floor inlaid with small squares of fine marble, and covered in the centre with a piece of very rich tapestryworkthe casements of painted glass, and the large Venetian mirrors, of a size and quality, such as at that period France could not make, which reflected, on every side, the spacious apartment. These had formerly also reflected a gay and brilliant scene, for this had been the stateroom of the chateau, and here the Marchioness had held the assemblies, that made part of the festivities of her nuptials. If the wand of a magician could have recalled the vanished groups, many of them vanished even from the earth! that once had passed over these polished mirrors, what a varied and contrasted picture would they have exhibited with the present! Now, instead of a blaze of lights, and a splendid and busy crowd, they reflected only the rays of the one glimmering lamp, which the Count held up, and which scarcely served to shew the three forlorn figures, that stood surveying the room, and the spacious and dusky walls around them. 'Ah!' said the Count to Henri, awaking from his deep reverie, 'how the scene is changed since last I saw it! I was a young man, then, and the Marchioness was alive and in her bloom; many other persons were here, too, who are now no more! There stood the orchestra; here we tripped in many a sprightly mazethe walls echoing to the dance! Now, they resound only one feeble voiceand even that will, ere long, be heard no more! My son, remember, that I was once as young as yourself, and that you must pass away like those, who have preceded youlike those, who, as they sung and danced in this once gay apartment, forgot, that years are made up of moments, and that every step they took carried them nearer to their graves. But such reflections are useless, I had almost said criminal, unless they teach us to prepare for eternity, since, otherwise, they cloud our present happiness, without guiding us to a future one. But enough of this; let us go on.' Ludovico now opened the door of the bedroom, and the Count, as he entered, was struck with the funereal appearance, which the dark arras gave to it. He approached the bed, with an emotion of solemnity, and, perceiving it to be covered with the pall of black velvet, paused; 'What can this mean?' said he, as he gazed upon it. 'I have heard, my Lord,' said Ludovico, as he stood at the feet, looking within the canopied curtains, 'that the Lady Marchioness de Villeroi died in this chamber, and remained here till she was removed to be buried; and this, perhaps, Signor, may account for the pall.' The Count made no reply, but stood for a few moments engaged in thought, and evidently much affected. Then, turning to Ludovico, he asked him with a serious air, whether he thought his courage would support him through the night? 'If you doubt this,' added the Count, 'do not be ashamed to own it; I will release you from your engagement, without exposing you to the triumphs of your fellowservants.' Ludovico paused; pride, and something very like fear, seemed struggling in his breast; pride, however, was victorious;he blushed, and his hesitation ceased. 'No, my Lord,' said he, 'I will go through with what I have begun; and I am grateful for your consideration. On that hearth I will make a fire, and, with the good cheer in this basket, I doubt not I shall do well.' 'Be it so,' said the Count; 'but how will you beguile the tediousness of the night, if you do not sleep?' 'When I am weary, my Lord,' replied Ludovico, 'I shall not fear to sleep; in the meanwhile, I have a book, that will entertain me.' 'Well,' said the Count, 'I hope nothing will disturb you; but if you should be seriously alarmed in the night, come to my apartment. I have too much confidence in your good sense and courage, to believe you will be alarmed on slight grounds; or suffer the gloom of this chamber, or its remote situation, to overcome you with ideal terrors. Tomorrow, I shall have to thank you for an important service; these rooms shall then be thrown open, and my people will be convinced of their error. Good night, Ludovico; let me see you early in the morning, and remember what I lately said to you.' 'I will, my Lord; good night to your excellenza; let me attend you with the light.' He lighted the Count and Henri through the chambers to the outer door; on the landingplace stood a lamp, which one of the affrighted servants had left, and Henri, as he took it up, again bade Ludovico good night, who, having respectfully returned the wish, closed the door upon them, and fastened it. Then, as he retired to the bedchamber, he examined the rooms, through which he passed, with more minuteness than he had done before, for he apprehended, that some person might have concealed himself in them, for the purpose of frightening him. No one, however, but himself, was in these chambers, and, leaving open the doors, through which he passed, he came again to the great drawingroom, whose spaciousness and silent gloom somewhat awed him. For a moment he stood, looking back through the long suite of rooms he had quitted, and, as he turned, perceiving a light and his own figure, reflected in one of the large mirrors, he started. Other objects too were seen obscurely on its dark surface, but he paused not to examine them, and returned hastily into the bedroom, as he surveyed which, he observed the door of the oriel, and opened it. All within was still. On looking round, his eye was arrested by the portrait of the deceased Marchioness, upon which he gazed, for a considerable time, with great attention and some surprise; and then, having examined the closet, he returned into the bedroom, where he kindled a wood fire, the bright blaze of which revived his spirits, which had begun to yield to the gloom and silence of the place, for gusts of wind alone broke at intervals this silence. He now drew a small table and a chair near the fire, took a bottle of wine, and some cold provision out of his basket, and regaled himself. When he had finished his repast, he laid his sword upon the table, and, not feeling disposed to sleep, drew from his pocket the book he had spoken of.It was a volume of old Provencal tales. Having stirred the fire upon the hearth, he began to read, and his attention was soon wholly occupied by the scenes, which the page disclosed. The Count, meanwhile, had returned to the supperroom, whither those of the party, who had attended him to the north apartment, had retreated, upon hearing Dorothee's scream, and who were now earnest in their enquiries concerning those chambers. The Count rallied his guests on their precipitate retreat, and on the superstitious inclination which had occasioned it, and this led to the question, Whether the spirit, after it has quitted the body, is ever permitted to revisit the earth; and if it is, whether it was possible for spirits to become visible to the sense. The Baron was of opinion, that the first was probable, and the last was possible, and he endeavoured to justify this opinion by respectable authorities, both ancient and modern, which he quoted. The Count, however, was decidedly against him, and a long conversation ensued, in which the usual arguments on these subjects were on both sides brought forward with skill, and discussed with candour, but without converting either party to the opinion of his opponent. The effect of their conversation on their auditors was various. Though the Count had much the superiority of the Baron in point of argument, he had considerably fewer adherents; for that love, so natural to the human mind, of whatever is able to distend its faculties with wonder and astonishment, attached the majority of the company to the side of the Baron; and, though many of the Count's propositions were unanswerable, his opponents were inclined to believe this the consequence of their own want of knowledge, on so abstracted a subject, rather than that arguments did not exist, which were forcible enough to conquer his. Blanche was pale with attention, till the ridicule in her father's glance called a blush upon her countenance, and she then endeavoured to forget the superstitious tales she had been told in her convent. Meanwhile, Emily had been listening with deep attention to the discussion of what was to her a very interesting question, and, remembering the appearance she had witnessed in the apartment of the late Marchioness, she was frequently chilled with awe. Several times she was on the point of mentioning what she had seen, but the fear of giving pain to the Count, and the dread of his ridicule, restrained her; and, awaiting in anxious expectation the event of Ludovico's intrepidity, she determined that her future silence should depend upon it. When the party had separated for the night, and the Count retired to his dressingroom, the remembrance of the desolate scenes he had lately witnessed in his own mansion deeply affected him, but at length he was aroused from his reverie and his silence. 'What music is that I hear?'said he suddenly to his valet, 'Who plays at this late hour?' The man made no reply, and the Count continued to listen, and then added, 'That is no common musician; he touches the instrument with a delicate hand; who is it, Pierre?' 'My lord!' said the man, hesitatingly. 'Who plays that instrument?' repeated the Count. 'Does not your lordship know, then?' said the valet. 'What mean you?' said the Count, somewhat sternly. 'Nothing, my Lord, I meant nothing,' rejoined the man submissively'Onlythat musicgoes about the house at midnight often, and I thought your lordship might have heard it before.' 'Music goes about the house at midnight! Poor fellow!does nobody dance to the music, too?' 'It is not in the chateau, I believe, my Lord; the sounds come from the woods, they say, though they seem so near;but then a spirit can do any thing!' 'Ah, poor fellow!' said the Count, 'I perceive you are as silly as the rest of them; tomorrow, you will be convinced of your ridiculous error. But hark!what voice is that?' 'O my Lord! that is the voice we often hear with the music.' 'Often!' said the Count, 'How often, pray? It is a very fine one.

' 'Why, my Lord, I myself have not heard it more than two or three times, but there are those who have lived here longer, that have heard it often enough.' 'What a swell was that!' exclaimed the Count, as he still listened, 'And now, what a dying cadence! This is surely something more than mortal!' 'That is what they say, my Lord,' said the valet; 'they say it is nothing mortal, that utters it; and if I might say my thoughts' 'Peace!' said the Count, and he listened till the strain died away. 'This is strange!' said he, as he turned from the window, 'Close the casements, Pierre.' Pierre obeyed, and the Count soon after dismissed him, but did not so soon lose the remembrance of the music, which long vibrated in his fancy in tones of melting sweetness, while surprise and perplexity engaged his thoughts. Ludovico, meanwhile, in his remote chamber, heard, now and then, the faint echo of a closing door, as the family retired to rest, and then the hall clock, at a great distance, strike twelve. 'It is midnight,' said he, and he looked suspiciously round the spacious chamber. The fire on the hearth was now nearly expiring, for his attention having been engaged by the book before him, he had forgotten every thing besides; but he soon added fresh wood, not because he was cold, though the night was stormy, but because he was cheerless; and, having again trimmed his lamp, he poured out a glass of wine, drew his chair nearer to the crackling blaze, tried to be deaf to the wind, that howled mournfully at the casements, endeavoured to abstract his mind from the melancholy, that was stealing upon him, and again took up his book. It had been lent to him by Dorothee, who had formerly picked it up in an obscure corner of the Marquis's library, and who, having opened it and perceived some of the marvels it related, had carefully preserved it for her own entertainment, its condition giving her some excuse for detaining it from its proper station. The damp corner into which it had fallen, had caused the cover to be disfigured and mouldy, and the leaves to be so discoloured with spots, that it was not without difficulty the letters could be traced. The fictions of the Provencal writers, whether drawn from the Arabian legends, brought by the Saracens into Spain, or recounting the chivalric exploits performed by the crusaders, whom the Troubadors accompanied to the east, were generally splendid and always marvellous, both in scenery and incident; and it is not wonderful, that Dorothee and Ludovico should be fascinated by inventions, which had captivated the careless imagination in every rank of society, in a former age. Some of the tales, however, in the book now before Ludovico, were of simple structure, and exhibited nothing of the magnificent machinery and heroic manners, which usually characterized the fables of the twelfth century, and of this description was the one he now happened to open, which, in its original style, was of great length, but which may be thus shortly related. The reader will perceive, that it is strongly tinctured with the superstition of the times. THE PROVENCAL TALE 'There lived, in the province of Bretagne, a noble Baron, famous for his magnificence and courtly hospitalities. His castle was graced with ladies of exquisite beauty, and thronged with illustrious knights; for the honour he paid to feats of chivalry invited the brave of distant countries to enter his lists, and his court was more splendid than those of many princes. Eight minstrels were retained in his service, who used to sing to their harps romantic fictions, taken from the Arabians, or adventures of chivalry, that befel knights during the crusades, or the martial deeds of the Baron, their lord;while he, surrounded by his knights and ladies, banqueted in the great hall of his castle, where the costly tapestry, that adorned the walls with pictured exploits of his ancestors, the casements of painted glass, enriched with armorial bearings, the gorgeous banners, that waved along the roof, the sumptuous canopies, the profusion of gold and silver, that glittered on the sideboards, the numerous dishes, that covered the tables, the number and gay liveries of the attendants, with the chivalric and splendid attire of the guests, united to form a scene of magnificence, such as we may not hope to see in these DEGENERATE DAYS. 'Of the Baron, the following adventure is related. One night, having retired late from the banquet to his chamber, and dismissed his attendants, he was surprised by the appearance of a stranger of a noble air, but of a sorrowful and dejected countenance. Believing, that this person had been secreted in the apartment, since it appeared impossible he could have lately passed the antiroom, unobserved by the pages in waiting, who would have prevented this intrusion on their lord, the Baron, calling loudly for his people, drew his sword, which he had not yet taken from his side, and stood upon his defence. The stranger slowly advancing, told him, that there was nothing to fear; that he came with no hostile design, but to communicate to him a terrible secret, which it was necessary for him to know. 'The Baron, appeased by the courteous manners of the stranger, after surveying him, for some time, in silence, returned his sword into the scabbard, and desired him to explain the means, by which he had obtained access to the chamber, and the purpose of this extraordinary visit. 'Without answering either of these enquiries, the stranger said, that he could not then explain himself, but that, if the Baron would follow him to the edge of the forest, at a short distance from the castle walls, he would there convince him, that he had something of importance to disclose. 'This proposal again alarmed the Baron, who could scarcely believe, that the stranger meant to draw him to so solitary a spot, at this hour of the night, without harbouring a design against his life, and he refused to go, observing, at the same time, that, if the stranger's purpose was an honourable one, he would not persist in refusing to reveal the occasion of his visit, in the apartment where they were. 'While he spoke this, he viewed the stranger still more attentively than before, but observed no change in his countenance, or any symptom, that might intimate a consciousness of evil design. He was habited like a knight, was of a tall and majestic stature, and of dignified and courteous manners. Still, however, he refused to communicate the subject of his errand in any place, but that he had mentioned, and, at the same time, gave hints concerning the secret he would disclose, that awakened a degree of solemn curiosity in the Baron, which, at length, induced him to consent to follow the stranger, on certain conditions. '"Sir knight," said he, "I will attend you to the forest, and will take with me only four of my people, who shall witness our conference." 'To this, however, the Knight objected. '"What I would disclose," said he, with solemnity, "is to you alone. There are only three living persons, to whom the circumstance is known; it is of more consequence to you and your house, than I shall now explain. In future years, you will look back to this night with satisfaction or repentance, accordingly as you now determine. As you would hereafter prosperfollow me; I pledge you the honour of a knight, that no evil shall befall you;if you are contented to dare futurityremain in your chamber, and I will depart as I came." '"Sir knight," replied the Baron, "how is it possible, that my future peace can depend upon my present determination?" '"That is not now to be told," said the stranger, "I have explained myself to the utmost. It is late; if you follow me it must be quickly;you will do well to consider the alternative." 'The Baron mused, and, as he looked upon the knight, he perceived his countenance assume a singular solemnity.' [Here Ludovico thought he heard a noise, and he threw a glance round the chamber, and then held up the lamp to assist his observation; but, not perceiving any thing to confirm his alarm, he took up the book again and pursued the story.] 'The Baron paced his apartment, for some time, in silence, impressed by the last words of the stranger, whose extraordinary request he feared to grant, and feared, also, to refuse. At length, he said, "Sir knight, you are utterly unknown to me; tell me yourself,is it reasonable, that I should trust myself alone with a stranger, at this hour, in a solitary forest? Tell me, at least, who you are, and who assisted to secrete you in this chamber." 'The knight frowned at these latter words, and was a moment silent; then, with a countenance somewhat stern, he said, '"I am an English knight; I am called Sir Bevys of Lancaster,and my deeds are not unknown at the Holy City, whence I was returning to my native land, when I was benighted in the neighbouring forest." '"Your name is not unknown to fame," said the Baron, "I have heard of it." (The Knight looked haughtily.) "But why, since my castle is known to entertain all true knights, did not your herald announce you? Why did you not appear at the banquet, where your presence would have been welcomed, instead of hiding yourself in my castle, and stealing to my chamber, at midnight?" 'The stranger frowned, and turned away in silence; but the Baron repeated the questions. '"I come not," said the Knight, "to answer enquiries, but to reveal facts. If you would know more, follow me, and again I pledge the honour of a Knight, that you shall return in safety.Be quick in your determinationI must be gone." 'After some further hesitation, the Baron determined to follow the stranger, and to see the result of his extraordinary request; he, therefore, again drew forth his sword, and, taking up a lamp, bade the Knight lead on. The latter obeyed, and, opening the door of the chamber, they passed into the antiroom, where the Baron, surprised to find all his pages asleep, stopped, and, with hasty violence, was going to reprimand them for their carelessness, when the Knight waved his hand, and looked so expressively upon the Baron, that the latter restrained his resentment, and passed on. 'The Knight, having descended a staircase, opened a secret door, which the Baron had believed was known only to himself, and, proceeding through several narrow and winding passages, came, at length, to a small gate, that opened beyond the walls of the castle. Meanwhile, the Baron followed in silence and amazement, on perceiving that these secret passages were so well known to a stranger, and felt inclined to return from an adventure, that appeared to partake of treachery, as well as danger. Then, considering that he was armed, and observing the courteous and noble air of his conductor, his courage returned, he blushed, that it had failed him for a moment, and he resolved to trace the mystery to its source. 'He now found himself on the heathy platform, before the great gates of his castle, where, on looking up, he perceived lights glimmering in the different casements of the guests, who were retiring to sleep; and, while he shivered in the blast, and looked on the dark and desolate scene around him, he thought of the comforts of his warm chamber, rendered cheerful by the blaze of wood, and felt, for a moment, the full contrast of his present situation.' [Here Ludovico paused a moment, and, looking at his own fire, gave it a brightening stir.] 'The wind was strong, and the Baron watched his lamp with anxiety, expecting every moment to see it extinguished; but, though the flame wavered, it did not expire, and he still followed the stranger, who often sighed as he went, but did not speak. 'When they reached the borders of the forest, the Knight turned, and raised his head, as if he meant to address the Baron, but then, closing his lips in silence, he walked on. 'As they entered, beneath the dark and spreading boughs, the Baron, affected by the solemnity of the scene, hesitated whether to proceed, and demanded how much further they were to go. The Knight replied only by a gesture, and the Baron, with hesitating steps and a suspicious eye, followed through an obscure and intricate path, till, having proceeded a considerable way, he again demanded whither they were going, and refused to proceed unless he was informed. 'As he said this, he looked at his own sword, and at the Knight alternately, who shook his head, and whose dejected countenance disarmed the Baron, for a moment, of suspicion. '"A little further is the place, whither I would lead you," said the stranger; "no evil shall befall youI have sworn it on the honour of a knight." 'The Baron, reassured, again followed in silence, and they soon arrived at a deep recess of the forest, where the dark and lofty chesnuts entirely excluded the sky, and which was so overgrown with underwood, that they proceeded with difficulty. The Knight sighed deeply as he passed, and sometimes paused; and having, at length, reached a spot, where the trees crowded into a knot, he turned, and, with a terrific look, pointing to the ground, the Baron saw there the body of a man, stretched at its length, and weltering in blood; a ghastly wound was on the forehead, and death appeared already to have contracted the features. 'The Baron, on perceiving the spectacle, started in horror, looked at the Knight for explanation, and was then going to raise the body and examine if there were yet any remains of life; but the stranger, waving his hand, fixed upon him a look so earnest and mournful, as not only much surprised him, but made him desist. 'But, what were the Baron's emotions, when, on holding the lamp near the features of the corpse, he discovered the exact resemblance of the stranger his conductor, to whom he now looked up in astonishment and enquiry? As he gazed, he perceived the countenance of the Knight change, and begin to fade, till his whole form gradually vanished from his astonished sense! While the Baron stood, fixed to the spot, a voice was heard to utter these words' [Ludovico started, and laid down the book, for he thought he heard a voice in the chamber, and he looked toward the bed, where, however, he saw only the dark curtains and the pall. He listened, scarcely daring to draw his breath, but heard only the distant roaring of the sea in the storm, and the blast, that rushed by the casements; when, concluding, that he had been deceived by its sighings, he took up his book to finish the story.] 'While the Baron stood, fixed to the spot, a voice was heard to utter these words ( This repetition seems to be intentional. Ludovico is picking up the thread.) 'The body of Sir Bevys of Lancaster, a noble knight of England, lies before you. He was, this night, waylaid and murdered, as he journeyed from the Holy City towards his native land. Respect the honour of knighthood and the law of humanity; inter the body in christian ground, and cause his murderers to be punished. As ye observe, or neglect this, shall peace and happiness, or war and misery, light upon you and your house for ever!' 'The Baron, when he recovered from the awe and astonishment, into which this adventure had thrown him, returned to his castle, whither he caused the body of Sir Bevys to be removed; and, on the following day, it was interred, with the honours of knighthood, in the chapel of the castle, attended by all the noble knights and ladies, who graced the court of Baron de Brunne.' Ludovico, having finished this story, laid aside the book, for he felt drowsy, and, after putting more wood on the fire and taking another glass of wine, he reposed himself in the armchair on the hearth. In his dream he still beheld the chamber where he really was, and, once or twice, started from imperfect slumbers, imagining he saw a man's face, looking over the high back of his armchair. This idea had so strongly impressed him, that, when he raised his eyes, he almost expected to meet other eyes, fixed upon his own, and he quitted his seat and looked behind the chair, before he felt perfectly convinced, that no person was there. Thus closed the hour. Chapter 7 Enjoy the honeyheavy dew of slumber; Thou hast no figures, nor no fantasies, Which busy care draws in the brains of men; Therefore thou sleep'st so sound. SHAKESPEARE The Count, who had slept little during the night, rose early, and, anxious to speak with Ludovico, went to the north apartment; but, the outer door having been fastened, on the preceding night, he was obliged to knock loudly for admittance. Neither the knocking, or his voice was heard; but, considering the distance of this door from the bedroom, and that Ludovico, wearied with watching, had probably fallen into a deep sleep, the Count was not surprised on receiving no answer, and, leaving the door, he went down to walk in his grounds. It was a gray autumnal morning. The sun, rising over Provence, gave only a feeble light, as his rays struggled through the vapours that ascended from the sea, and floated heavily over the woodtops, which were now varied with many a mellow tint of autumn. The storm was passed, but the waves were yet violently agitated, and their course was traced by long lines of foam, while not a breeze fluttered in the sails of the vessels, near the shore, that were weighing anchor to depart. The still gloom of the hour was pleasing to the Count, and he pursued his way through the woods, sunk in deep thought. Emily also rose at an early hour, and took her customary walk along the brow of the promontory, that overhung the Mediterranean. Her mind was now not occupied with the occurrences of the chateau, and Valancourt was the subject of her mournful thoughts; whom she had not yet taught herself to consider with indifference, though her judgment constantly reproached her for the affection, that lingered in her heart, after her esteem for him was departed. Remembrance frequently gave her his parting look and the tones of his voice, when he had bade her a last farewel; and, some accidental associations now recalling these circumstances to her fancy, with peculiar energy, she shed bitter tears to the recollection. Having reached the watchtower, she seated herself on the broken steps, and, in melancholy dejection, watched the waves, half hid in vapour, as they came rolling towards the shore, and threw up their light spray round the rocks below. Their hollow murmur and the obscuring mists, that came in wreaths up the cliffs, gave a solemnity to the scene, which was in harmony with the temper of her mind, and she sat, given up to the remembrance of past times, till this became too painful, and she abruptly quitted the place. On passing the little gate of the watchtower, she observed letters, engraved on the stone postern, which she paused to examine, and, though they appeared to have been rudely cut with a penknife, the characters were familiar to her; at length, recognizing the handwriting of Valancourt, she read, with trembling anxiety the following lines, entitled SHIPWRECK 'Til solemn midnight! On this lonely steep, Beneath this watchtow'r's desolated wall, Where mystic shapes the wonderer appall, I rest; and view below the desert deep, As through tempestuous clouds the moon's cold light Gleams on the wave. Viewless, the winds of night With loud mysterious force the billows sweep, And sullen roar the surges, far below. In the still pauses of the gust I hear The voice of spirits, rising sweet and slow, And oft among the clouds their forms appear. But hark! what shriek of death comes in the gale, And in the distant ray what glimmering sail Bends to the storm?Now sinks the note of fear! Ah! wretched mariners!no more shall day Unclose his cheering eye to light ye on your way! From these lines it appeared, that Valancourt had visited the tower; that he had probably been here on the preceding night, for it was such an one as they described, and that he had left the building very lately, since it had not long been light, and without light it was impossible these letters could have been cut. It was thus even probable, that he might be yet in the gardens. As these reflections passed rapidly over the mind of Emily, they called up a variety of contending emotions, that almost overcame her spirits; but her first impulse was to avoid him, and, immediately leaving the tower, she returned, with hasty steps, towards the chateau. As she passed along, she remembered the music she had lately heard near the tower, with the figure, which had appeared, and, in this moment of agitation, she was inclined to believe, that she had then heard and seen Valancourt; but other recollections soon convinced her of her error. On turning into a thicker part of the woods, she perceived a person, walking slowly in the gloom at some little distance, and, her mind engaged by the idea of him, she started and paused, imagining this to be Valancourt. The person advanced with quicker steps, and, before she could recover recollection enough to avoid him, he spoke, and she then knew the voice of the Count, who expressed some surprise, on finding her walking at so early an hour, and made a feeble effort to rally her on her love of solitude. But he soon perceived this to be more a subject of concern than of light laughter, and, changing his manner, affectionately expostulated with Emily, on thus indulging unavailing regret; who, though she acknowledged the justness of all he said, could not restrain her tears, while she did so, and he presently quitted the topic. Expressing surprise at not having yet heard from his friend, the Advocate at Avignon, in answer to the questions proposed to him, respecting the estates of the late Madame Montoni, he, with friendly zeal, endeavoured to cheer Emily with hopes of establishing her claim to them; while she felt, that the estates could now contribute little to the happiness of a life, in which Valancourt had no longer an interest. When they returned to the chateau, Emily retired to her apartment, and Count De Villefort to the door of the north chambers. This was still fastened, but, being now determined to arouse Ludovico, he renewed his calls more loudly than before, after which a total silence ensued, and the Count, finding all his efforts to be heard ineffectual, at length began to fear, that some accident had befallen Ludovico, whom terror of an imaginary being might have deprived of his senses. He, therefore, left the door with an intention of summoning his servants to force it open, some of whom he now heard moving in the lower part of the chateau. To the Count's enquiries, whether they had seen or heard Ludovico, they replied in affright, that not one of them had ventured on the north side of the chateau, since the preceding night. 'He sleeps soundly then,' said the Count, 'and is at such a distance from the outer door, which is fastened, that to gain admittance to the chambers it will be necessary to force it. Bring an instrument, and follow me.' The servants stood mute and dejected, and it was not till nearly all the household were assembled, that the Count's orders were obeyed. In the mean time, Dorothee was telling of a door, that opened from a gallery, leading from the great staircase into the last antiroom of the saloon, and, this being much nearer to the bedchamber, it appeared probable, that Ludovico might be easily awakened by an attempt to open it. Thither, therefore, the Count went, but his voice was as ineffectual at this door as it had proved at the remoter one; and now, seriously interested for Ludovico, he was himself going to strike upon the door with the instrument, when he observed its singular beauty, and withheld the blow. It appeared, on the first glance, to be of ebony, so dark and close was its grain and so high its polish; but it proved to be only of larch wood, of the growth of Provence, then famous for its forests of larch. The beauty of its polished hue and of its delicate carvings determined the Count to spare this door, and he returned to that leading from the back staircase, which being, at length, forced, he entered the first antiroom, followed by Henri and a few of the most courageous of his servants, the rest awaiting the event of the enquiry on the stairs and landingplace. All was silent in the chambers, through which the Count passed, and, having reached the saloon, he called loudly upon Ludovico; after which, still receiving no answer, he threw open the door of the bedroom, and entered. The profound stillness within confirmed his apprehensions for Ludovico, for not even the breathings of a person in sleep were heard; and his uncertainty was not soon terminated, since the shutters being all closed, the chamber was too dark for any object to be distinguished in it. The Count bade a servant open them, who, as he crossed the room to do so, stumbled over something, and fell to the floor, when his cry occasioned such panic among the few of his fellows, who had ventured thus far, that they instantly fled, and the Count and Henri were left to finish the adventure. Henri then sprung across the room, and, opening a windowshutter, they perceived, that the man had fallen over a chair near the hearth, in which Ludovico had been sitting;for he sat there no longer, nor could any where be seen by the imperfect light, that was admitted into the apartment. The Count, seriously alarmed, now opened other shutters, that he might be enabled to examine further, and, Ludovico not yet appearing, he stood for a moment, suspended in astonishment and scarcely trusting his senses, till, his eyes glancing on the bed, he advanced to examine whether he was there asleep. No person, however, was in it, and he proceeded to the oriel, where every thing remained as on the preceding night, but Ludovico was no where to be found. The Count now checked his amazement, considering, that Ludovico might have left the chambers, during the night, overcome by the terrors, which their lonely desolation and the recollected reports, concerning them, had inspired. Yet, if this had been the fact, the man would naturally have sought society, and his fellow servants had all declared they had not seen him; the door of the outer room also had been found fastened, with the key on the inside; it was impossible, therefore, for him to have passed through that, and all the outer doors of this suite were found, on examination, to be bolted and locked, with the keys also within them. The Count, being then compelled to believe, that the lad had escaped through the casements, next examined them, but such as opened wide enough to admit the body of a man were found to be carefully secured either by iron bars, or by shutters, and no vestige appeared of any person having attempted to pass them; neither was it probable, that Ludovico would have incurred the risque of breaking his neck, by leaping from a window, when he might have walked safely through a door. The Count's amazement did not admit of words; but he returned once more to examine the bedroom, where was no appearance of disorder, except that occasioned by the late overthrow of the chair, near which had stood a small table, and on this Ludovico's sword, his lamp, the book he had been reading, and the remnant of his flask of wine still remained. At the foot of the table, too, was the basket with some fragments of provision and wood. Henri and the servant now uttered their astonishment without reserve, and, though the Count said little, there was a seriousness in his manner, that expressed much. It appeared, that Ludovico must have quitted these rooms by some concealed passage, for the Count could not believe, that any supernatural means had occasioned this event, yet, if there was any such passage, it seemed inexplicable why he should retreat through it, and it was equally surprising, that not even the smallest vestige should appear, by which his progress could be traced. In the rooms every thing remained as much in order as if he had just walked out by the common way. The Count himself assisted in lifting the arras, with which the bedchamber, saloon and one of the antirooms were hung, that he might discover if any door had been concealed behind it; but, after a laborious search, none was found, and he, at length, quitted the apartments, having secured the door of the last antichamber, the key of which he took into his own possession. He then gave orders, that strict search should be made for Ludovico not only in the chateau, but in the neighbourhood, and, retiring with Henri to his closet, they remained there in conversation for a considerable time, and whatever was the subject of it, Henri from this hour lost much of his vivacity, and his manners were particularly grave and reserved, whenever the topic, which now agitated the Count's family with wonder and alarm, was introduced. On the disappearing of Ludovico, Baron St. Foix seemed strengthened in all his former opinions concerning the probability of apparitions, though it was difficult to discover what connection there could possibly be between the two subjects, or to account for this effect otherwise than by supposing, that the mystery attending Ludovico, by exciting awe and curiosity, reduced the mind to a state of sensibility, which rendered it more liable to the influence of superstition in general. It is, however, certain, that from this period the Baron and his adherents became more bigoted to their own systems than before, while the terrors of the Count's servants increased to an excess, that occasioned many of them to quit the mansion immediately, and the rest remained only till others could be procured to supply their places. The most strenuous search after Ludovico proved unsuccessful, and, after several days of indefatigable enquiry, poor Annette gave herself up to despair, and the other inhabitants of the chateau to amazement. Emily, whose mind had been deeply affected by the disastrous fate of the late Marchioness and with the mysterious connection, which she fancied had existed between her and St. Aubert, was particularly impressed by the late extraordinary event, and much concerned for the loss of Ludovico, whose integrity and faithful services claimed both her esteem and gratitude. She was now very desirous to return to the quiet retirement of her convent, but every hint of this was received with real sorrow by the Lady Blanche, and affectionately set aside by the Count, for whom she felt much of the respectful love and admiration of a daughter, and to whom, by Dorothee's consent, she, at length, mentioned the appearance, which they had witnessed in the chamber of the deceased Marchioness. At any other period, he would have smiled at such a relation, and have believed, that its object had existed only in the distempered fancy of the relater; but he now attended to Emily with seriousness, and, when she concluded, requested of her a promise, that this occurrence should rest in silence. 'Whatever may be the cause and the import of these extraordinary occurrences,' added the Count, 'time only can explain them. I shall keep a wary eye upon all that passes in the chateau, and shall pursue every possible means of discovering the fate of Ludovico. Meanwhile, we must be prudent and be silent. I will myself watch in the north chambers, but of this we will say nothing, till the night arrives, when I purpose doing so.' The Count then sent for Dorothee, and required of her also a promise of silence, concerning what she had already, or might in future witness of an extraordinary nature; and this ancient servant now related to him the particulars of the Marchioness de Villeroi's death, with some of which he appeared to be already acquainted, while by others he was evidently surprised and agitated.

After listening to this narrative, the Count retired to his closet, where he remained alone for several hours; and, when he again appeared, the solemnity of his manner surprised and alarmed Emily, but she gave no utterance to her thoughts. On the week following the disappearance of Ludovico, all the Count's guests took leave of him, except the Baron, his son Mons. St. Foix, and Emily; the latter of whom was soon after embarrassed and distressed by the arrival of another visitor, Mons. Du Pont, which made her determine upon withdrawing to her convent immediately. The delight, that appeared in his countenance, when he met her, told that he brought back the same ardour of passion, which had formerly banished him from ChateauleBlanc. He was received with reserve by Emily, and with pleasure by the Count, who presented him to her with a smile, that seemed intended to plead his cause, and who did not hope the less for his friend, from the embarrassment she betrayed. But M. Du Pont, with truer sympathy, seemed to understand her manner, and his countenance quickly lost its vivacity, and sunk into the languor of despondency. On the following day, however, he sought an opportunity of declaring the purport of his visit, and renewed his suit; a declaration, which was received with real concern by Emily, who endeavoured to lessen the pain she might inflict by a second rejection, with assurances of esteem and friendship; yet she left him in a state of mind, that claimed and excited her tenderest compassion; and, being more sensible than ever of the impropriety of remaining longer at the chateau, she immediately sought the Count, and communicated to him her intention of returning to the convent. 'My dear Emily,' said he 'I observe, with extreme concern, the illusion you are encouragingan illusion common to young and sensible minds. Your heart has received a severe shock; you believe you can never entirely recover it, and you will encourage this belief, till the habit of indulging sorrow will subdue the strength of your mind, and discolour your future views with melancholy and regret. Let me dissipate this illusion, and awaken you to a sense of your danger.' Emily smiled mournfully, 'I know what you would say, my dear sir,' said she, 'and am prepared to answer you. I feel, that my heart can never know a second affection; and that I must never hope even to recover its tranquillityif I suffer myself to enter into a second engagement.' 'I know, that you feel all this,' replied the Count; 'and I know, also, that time will overcome these feelings, unless you cherish them in solitude, and, pardon me, with romantic tenderness. Then, indeed, time will only confirm habit. I am particularly empowered to speak on this subject, and to sympathize in your sufferings,' added the Count, with an air of solemnity, 'for I have known what it is to love, and to lament the object of my love. Yes,' continued he, while his eyes filled with tears, 'I have suffered!but those times have passed awaylong passed! and I can now look back upon them without emotion.' 'My dear sir,' said Emily, timidly, 'what mean those tears?they speak, I fear, another languagethey plead for me.' 'They are weak tears, for they are useless ones,' replied the Count, drying them, 'I would have you superior to such weakness. These, however, are only faint traces of a grief, which, if it had not been opposed by long continued effort, might have led me to the verge of madness! Judge, then, whether I have not cause to warn you of an indulgence, which may produce so terrible an effect, and which must certainly, if not opposed, overcloud the years, that otherwise might be happy. M. Du Pont is a sensible and amiable man, who has long been tenderly attached to you; his family and fortune are unexceptionable;after what I have said, it is unnecessary to add, that I should rejoice in your felicity, and that I think M. Du Pont would promote it. Do not weep, Emily,' continued the Count, taking her hand, 'there IS happiness reserved for you.' He was silent a moment; and then added, in a firmer voice, 'I do not wish, that you should make a violent effort to overcome your feelings; all I, at present, ask, is, that you will check the thoughts, that would lead you to a remembrance of the past; that you will suffer your mind to be engaged by present objects; that you will allow yourself to believe it possible you may yet be happy; and that you will sometimes think with complacency of poor Du Pont, and not condemn him to the state of despondency, from which, my dear Emily, I am endeavouring to withdraw you.' 'Ah! my dear sir,' said Emily, while her tears still fell, 'do not suffer the benevolence of your wishes to mislead Mons. Du Pont with an expectation that I can ever accept his hand. If I understand my own heart, this never can be; your instruction I can obey in almost every other particular, than that of adopting a contrary belief.' 'Leave me to understand your heart,' replied the Count, with a faint smile. 'If you pay me the compliment to be guided by my advice in other instances, I will pardon your incredulity, respecting your future conduct towards Mons. Du Pont. I will not even press you to remain longer at the chateau than your own satisfaction will permit; but though I forbear to oppose your present retirement, I shall urge the claims of friendship for your future visits.' Tears of gratitude mingled with those of tender regret, while Emily thanked the Count for the many instances of friendship she had received from him; promised to be directed by his advice upon every subject but one, and assured him of the pleasure, with which she should, at some future period, accept the invitation of the Countess and himselfIf Mons. Du Pont was not at the chateau. The Count smiled at this condition. 'Be it so,' said he, 'meanwhile the convent is so near the chateau, that my daughter and I shall often visit you; and if, sometimes, we should dare to bring you another visitorwill you forgive us?' Emily looked distressed, and remained silent. 'Well,' rejoined the Count, 'I will pursue this subject no further, and must now entreat your forgiveness for having pressed it thus far. You will, however, do me the justice to believe, that I have been urged only by a sincere regard for your happiness, and that of my amiable friend Mons. Du Pont.' Emily, when she left the Count, went to mention her intended departure to the Countess, who opposed it with polite expressions of regret; after which, she sent a note to acquaint the lady abbess, that she should return to the convent; and thither she withdrew on the evening of the following day. M. Du Pont, in extreme regret, saw her depart, while the Count endeavoured to cheer him with a hope, that Emily would sometimes regard him with a more favourable eye. She was pleased to find herself once more in the tranquil retirement of the convent, where she experienced a renewal of all the maternal kindness of the abbess, and of the sisterly attentions of the nuns. A report of the late extraordinary occurrence at the chateau had already reached them, and, after supper, on the evening of her arrival, it was the subject of conversation in the convent parlour, where she was requested to mention some particulars of that unaccountable event. Emily was guarded in her conversation on this subject, and briefly related a few circumstances concerning Ludovico, whose disappearance, her auditors almost unanimously agreed, had been effected by supernatural means. 'A belief had so long prevailed,' said a nun, who was called sister Frances, 'that the chateau was haunted, that I was surprised, when I heard the Count had the temerity to inhabit it. Its former possessor, I fear, had some deed of conscience to atone for; let us hope, that the virtues of its present owner will preserve him from the punishment due to the errors of the last, if, indeed, he was a criminal.' 'Of what crime, then, was he suspected?' said a Mademoiselle Feydeau, a boarder at the convent. 'Let us pray for his soul!' said a nun, who had till now sat in silent attention. 'If he was criminal, his punishment in this world was sufficient.' There was a mixture of wildness and solemnity in her manner of delivering this, which struck Emily exceedingly; but Mademoiselle repeated her question, without noticing the solemn eagerness of the nun. 'I dare not presume to say what was his crime,' replied sister Frances; 'but I have heard many reports of an extraordinary nature, respecting the late Marquis de Villeroi, and among others, that, soon after the death of his lady, he quitted ChateauleBlanc, and never afterwards returned to it. I was not here at the time, so I can only mention it from report, and so many years have passed since the Marchioness died, that few of our sisterhood, I believe, can do more.' 'But I can,' said the nun, who had before spoke, and whom they called sister Agnes. 'You then,' said Mademoiselle Feydeau, 'are possibly acquainted with circumstances, that enable you to judge, whether he was criminal or not, and what was the crime imputed to him.' 'I am,' replied the nun; 'but who shall dare to scrutinize my thoughtswho shall dare to pluck out my opinion? God only is his judge, and to that judge he is gone!' Emily looked with surprise at sister Frances, who returned her a significant glance. 'I only requested your opinion,' said Mademoiselle Feydeau, mildly; 'if the subject is displeasing to you, I will drop it.' 'Displeasing!'said the nun, with emphasis.'We are idle talkers; we do not weigh the meaning of the words we use; DISPLEASING is a poor word. I will go pray.' As she said this she rose from her seat, and with a profound sigh quitted the room. 'What can be the meaning of this?' said Emily, when she was gone. 'It is nothing extraordinary,' replied sister Frances, 'she is often thus; but she had no meaning in what she says. Her intellects are at times deranged. Did you never see her thus before?' 'Never,' said Emily. 'I have, indeed, sometimes, thought, that there was the melancholy of madness in her look, but never before perceived it in her speech. Poor soul, I will pray for her!' 'Your prayers then, my daughter, will unite with ours,' observed the lady abbess, 'she has need of them.' 'Dear lady,' said Mademoiselle Feydeau, addressing the abbess, 'what is your opinion of the late Marquis? The strange circumstances, that have occurred at the chateau, have so much awakened my curiosity, that I shall be pardoned the question. What was his imputed crime, and what the punishment, to which sister Agnes alluded?' 'We must be cautious of advancing our opinion,' said the abbess, with an air of reserve, mingled with solemnity, 'we must be cautious of advancing our opinion on so delicate a subject. I will not take upon me to pronounce, that the late Marquis was criminal, or to say what was the crime of which he was suspected; but, concerning the punishment our daughter Agnes hinted, I know of none he suffered. She probably alluded to the severe one, which an exasperated conscience can inflict. Beware, my children, of incurring so terrible a punishmentit is the purgatory of this life! The late Marchioness I knew well; she was a pattern to such as live in the world; nay, our sacred order need not have blushed to copy her virtues! Our holy convent received her mortal part; her heavenly spirit, I doubt not, ascended to its sanctuary!' As the abbess spoke this, the last bell of vespers struck up, and she rose. 'Let us go, my children,' said she, 'and intercede for the wretched; let us go and confess our sins, and endeavour to purify our souls for the heaven, to which SHE is gone!' Emily was affected by the solemnity of this exhortation, and, remembering her father, 'The heaven, to which HE, too, is gone!' said she, faintly, as she suppressed her sighs, and followed the abbess and the nuns to the chapel. Chapter 8 Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damn'd, Bring with thee airs from heaven, or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked, or charitable, I will speak to thee. HAMLET Count de Villefort, at length, received a letter from the advocate at Avignon, encouraging Emily to assert her claim to the estates of the late Madame Montoni; and, about the same time, a messenger arrived from Monsieur Quesnel with intelligence, that made an appeal to the law on this subject unnecessary, since it appeared, that the only person, who could have opposed her claim, was now no more. A friend of Monsieur Quesnel, who resided at Venice, had sent him an account of the death of Montoni who had been brought to trial with Orsino, as his supposed accomplice in the murder of the Venetian nobleman. Orsino was found guilty, condemned and executed upon the wheel, but, nothing being discovered to criminate Montoni, and his colleagues, on this charge, they were all released, except Montoni, who, being considered by the senate as a very dangerous person, was, for other reasons, ordered again into confinement, where, it was said, he had died in a doubtful and mysterious manner, and not without suspicion of having been poisoned. The authority, from which M. Quesnel had received this information, would not allow him to doubt its truth, and he told Emily, that she had now only to lay claim to the estates of her late aunt, to secure them, and added, that he would himself assist in the necessary forms of this business. The term, for which La Vallee had been let being now also nearly expired, he acquainted her with the circumstance, and advised her to take the road thither, through Tholouse, where he promised to meet her, and where it would be proper for her to take possession of the estates of the late Madame Montoni; adding, that he would spare her any difficulties, that might occur on that occasion from the want of knowledge on the subject, and that he believed it would be necessary for her to be at Tholouse, in about three weeks from the present time. An increase of fortune seemed to have awakened this sudden kindness in M. Quesnel towards his niece, and it appeared, that he entertained more respect for the rich heiress, than he had ever felt compassion for the poor and unfriended orphan. The pleasure, with which she received this intelligence, was clouded when she considered, that he, for whose sake she had once regretted the want of fortune, was no longer worthy of sharing it with her; but, remembering the friendly admonition of the Count, she checked this melancholy reflection, and endeavoured to feel only gratitude for the unexpected good, that now attended her; while it formed no inconsiderable part of her satisfaction to know, that La Vallee, her native home, which was endeared to her by it's having been the residence of her parents, would soon be restored to her possession. There she meant to fix her future residence, for, though it could not be compared with the chateau at Tholouse, either for extent, or magnificence, its pleasant scenes and the tender remembrances, that haunted them, had claims upon her heart, which she was not inclined to sacrifice to ostentation. She wrote immediately to thank M. Quesnel for the active interest he took in her concerns, and to say, that she would meet him at Tholouse at the appointed time. When Count de Villefort, with Blanche, came to the convent to give Emily the advice of the advocate, he was informed of the contents of M. Quesnel's letter, and gave her his sincere congratulations, on the occasion; but she observed, that, when the first expression of satisfaction had faded from his countenance, an unusual gravity succeeded, and she scarcely hesitated to enquire its cause. 'It has no new occasion,' replied the Count; 'I am harassed and perplexed by the confusion, into which my family is thrown by their foolish superstition. Idle reports are floating round me, which I can neither admit to be true, or prove to be false; and I am, also, very anxious about the poor fellow, Ludovico, concerning whom I have not been able to obtain information. Every part of the chateau and every part of the neighbourhood, too, has, I believe, been searched, and I know not what further can be done, since I have already offered large rewards for the discovery of him. The keys of the north apartment I have not suffered to be out of my possession, since he disappeared, and I mean to watch in those chambers, myself, this very night.' Emily, seriously alarmed for the Count, united her entreaties with those of the Lady Blanche, to dissuade him from his purpose. 'What should I fear?' said he. 'I have no faith in supernatural combats, and for human opposition I shall be prepared; nay, I will even promise not to watch alone.' 'But who, dear sir, will have courage enough to watch with you?' said Emily. 'My son,' replied the Count. 'If I am not carried off in the night,' added he, smiling, 'you shall hear the result of my adventure, tomorrow.' The Count and Lady Blanche, shortly afterwards, took leave of Emily, and returned to the chateau, where he informed Henri of his intention, who, not without some secret reluctance, consented to be the partner of his watch; and, when the design was mentioned after supper, the Countess was terrified, and the Baron, and M. Du Pont joined with her in entreating, that he would not tempt his fate, as Ludovico had done. 'We know not,' added the Baron, 'the nature, or the power of an evil spirit; and that such a spirit haunts those chambers can now, I think, scarcely be doubted. Beware, my lord, how you provoke its vengeance, since it has already given us one terrible example of its malice. I allow it may be probable, that the spirits of the dead are permitted to return to the earth only on occasions of high import; but the present import may be your destruction.' The Count could not forbear smiling; 'Do you think then, Baron,' said he, 'that my destruction is of sufficient importance to draw back to earth the soul of the departed? Alas! my good friend, there is no occasion for such means to accomplish the destruction of any individual. Wherever the mystery rests, I trust I shall, this night, be able to detect it. You know I am not superstitious.' 'I know that you are incredulous,' interrupted the Baron. 'Well, call it what you will, I mean to say, that, though you know I am free from superstitionif any thing supernatural has appeared, I doubt not it will appear to me, and if any strange event hangs over my house, or if any extraordinary transaction has formerly been connected with it, I shall probably be made acquainted with it. At all events I will invite discovery; and, that I may be equal to a mortal attack, which in good truth, my friend, is what I most expect, I shall take care to be well armed.' The Count took leave of his family, for the night, with an assumed gaiety, which but ill concealed the anxiety, that depressed his spirits, and retired to the north apartments, accompanied by his son and followed by the Baron, M. Du Pont and some of the domestics, who all bade him good night at the outer door. In these chambers every thing appeared as when he had last been here; even in the bedroom no alteration was visible, where he lighted his own fire, for none of the domestics could be prevailed upon to venture thither. After carefully examining the chamber and the oriel, the Count and Henri drew their chairs upon the hearth, set a bottle of wine and a lamp before them, laid their swords upon the table, and, stirring the wood into a blaze, began to converse on indifferent topics. But Henri was often silent and abstracted, and sometimes threw a glance of mingled awe and curiosity round the gloomy apartment; while the Count gradually ceased to converse, and sat either lost in thought, or reading a volume of Tacitus, which he had brought to beguile the tediousness of the night. Chapter 9 Give thy thoughts no tongue. SHAKESPEARE The Baron St. Foix, whom anxiety for his friend had kept awake, rose early to enquire the event of the night, when, as he passed the Count's closet, hearing steps within, he knocked at the door, and it was opened by his friend himself. Rejoicing to see him in safety, and curious to learn the occurrences of the night, he had not immediately leisure to observe the unusual gravity, that overspread the features of the Count, whose reserved answers first occasioned him to notice it. The Count, then smiling, endeavoured to treat the subject of his curiosity with levity, but the Baron was serious, and pursued his enquiries so closely, that the Count, at length, resuming his gravity, said, 'Well, my friend, press the subject no further, I entreat you; and let me request also, that you will hereafter be silent upon any thing you may think extraordinary in my future conduct. I do not scruple to tell you, that I am unhappy, and that the watch of the last night has not assisted me to discover Ludovico; upon every occurrence of the night you must excuse my reserve.' 'But where is Henri?' said the Baron, with surprise and disappointment at this denial. 'He is well in his own apartment,' replied the Count. 'You will not question him on this topic, my friend, since you know my wish.' 'Certainly not,' said the Baron, somewhat chagrined, 'since it would be displeasing to you; but methinks, my friend, you might rely on my discretion, and drop this unusual reserve. However, you must allow me to suspect, that you have seen reason to become a convert to my system, and are no longer the incredulous knight you lately appeared to be.' 'Let us talk no more upon this subject,' said the Count; 'you may be assured, that no ordinary circumstance has imposed this silence upon me towards a friend, whom I have called so for near thirty years; and my present reserve cannot make you question either my esteem, or the sincerity of my friendship.' 'I will not doubt either,' said the Baron, 'though you must allow me to express my surprise, at this silence.' 'To me I will allow it,' replied the Count, 'but I earnestly entreat that you will forbear to notice it to my family, as well as every thing remarkable you may observe in my conduct towards them.' The Baron readily promised this, and, after conversing for some time on general topics, they descended to the breakfastroom, where the Count met his family with a cheerful countenance, and evaded their enquiries by employing light ridicule, and assuming an air of uncommon gaiety, while he assured them, that they need not apprehend any evil from the north chambers, since Henri and himself had been permitted to return from them in safety. Henri, however, was less successful in disguising his feelings. From his countenance an expression of terror was not entirely faded; he was often silent and thoughtful, and when he attempted to laugh at the eager enquiries of Mademoiselle Bearn, it was evidently only an attempt. In the evening, the Count called, as he had promised, at the convent, and Emily was surprised to perceive a mixture of playful ridicule and of reserve in his mention of the north apartment. Of what had occurred there, however, he said nothing, and, when she ventured to remind him of his promise to tell her the result of his enquiries, and to ask if he had received any proof, that those chambers were haunted, his look became solemn, for a moment, then, seeming to recollect himself, he smiled, and said, 'My dear Emily, do not suffer my lady abbess to infect your good understanding with these fancies; she will teach you to expect a ghost in every dark room. But believe me,' added he, with a profound sigh, 'the apparition of the dead comes not on light, or sportive errands, to terrify, or to surprise the timid.' He paused, and fell into a momentary thoughtfulness, and then added, 'We will say no more on this subject.' Soon after, he took leave, and, when Emily joined some of the nuns, she was surprised to find them acquainted with a circumstance, which she had carefully avoided to mention, and expressing their admiration of his intrepidity in having dared to pass a night in the apartment, whence Ludovico had disappeared; for she had not considered with what rapidity a tale of wonder circulates. The nuns had acquired their information from peasants, who brought fruit to the monastery, and whose whole attention had been fixed, since the disappearance of Ludovico, on what was passing in the castle. Emily listened in silence to the various opinions of the nuns, concerning the conduct of the Count, most of whom condemned it as rash and presumptuous, affirming, that it was provoking the vengeance of an evil spirit, thus to intrude upon its haunts. Sister Frances contended, that the Count had acted with the bravery of a virtuous mind. He knew himself guiltless of aught, that should provoke a good spirit, and did not fear the spells of an evil one, since he could claim the protection of an higher Power, of Him, who can command the wicked, and will protect the innocent. 'The guilty cannot claim that protection!' said sister Agnes, 'let the Count look to his conduct, that he do not forfeit his claim! Yet who is he, that shall dare to call himself innocent!all earthly innocence is but comparative. Yet still how wide asunder are the extremes of guilt, and to what an horrible depth may we fall! Oh!' The nun, as she concluded, uttered a shuddering sigh, that startled Emily, who, looking up, perceived the eyes of Agnes fixed on hers, after which the sister rose, took her hand, gazed earnestly upon her countenance, for some moments, in silence, and then said, 'You are youngyou are innocent! I mean you are yet innocent of any great crime!But you have passions in your heart,scorpions; they sleep nowbeware how you awaken them!they will sting you, even unto death!' Emily, affected by these words and by the solemnity, with which they were delivered, could not suppress her tears. 'Ah! is it so?' exclaimed Agnes, her countenance softening from its sternness'so young, and so unfortunate! We are sisters, then indeed. Yet, there is no bond of kindness among the guilty,' she added, while her eyes resumed their wild expression, 'no gentleness,no peace, no hope! I knew them all oncemy eyes could weepbut now they burn, for now, my soul is fixed, and fearless!I lament no more!' 'Rather let us repent, and pray,' said another nun. 'We are taught to hope, that prayer and penitence will work our salvation. There is hope for all who repent!' 'Who repent and turn to the true faith,' observed sister Frances. 'For all but me!' replied Agnes solemnly, who paused, and then abruptly added, 'My head burns, I believe I am not well. O! could I strike from my memory all former scenesthe figures, that rise up, like furies, to torment me!I see them, when I sleep, and, when I am awake, they are still before my eyes! I see them nownow!' She stood in a fixed attitude of horror, her straining eyes moving slowly round the room, as if they followed something. One of the nuns gently took her hand, to lead her from the parlour. Agnes became calm, drew her other hand across her eyes, looked again, and, sighing deeply, said, 'They are gonethey are gone! I am feverish, I know not what I say. I am thus, sometimes, but it will go off again, I shall soon be better. Was not that the vesperbell?' 'No,' replied Frances, 'the evening service is passed. Let Margaret lead you to your cell.' 'You are right,' replied sister Agnes, 'I shall be better there. Good night, my sisters, remember me in your orisons.' When they had withdrawn, Frances, observing Emily's emotion, said, 'Do not be alarmed, our sister is often thus deranged, though I have not lately seen her so frantic; her usual mood is melancholy. This fit has been coming on, for several days; seclusion and the customary treatment will restore her.' 'But how rationally she conversed, at first!' observed Emily, 'her ideas followed each other in perfect order.' 'Yes,' replied the nun, 'this is nothing new; nay, I have sometimes known her argue not only with method, but with acuteness, and then, in a moment, start off into madness.' 'Her conscience seems afflicted,' said Emily, 'did you ever hear what circumstance reduced her to this deplorable condition?' 'I have,' replied the nun, who said no more till Emily repeated the question, when she added in a low voice, and looking significantly towards the other boarders, 'I cannot tell you now, but, if you think it worth your while, come to my cell, tonight, when our sisterhood are at rest, and you shall hear more; but remember we rise to midnight prayers, and come either before, or after midnight.' Emily promised to remember, and, the abbess soon after appearing, they spoke no more of the unhappy nun. The Count meanwhile, on his return home, had found M. Du Pont in one of those fits of despondency, which his attachment to Emily frequently occasioned him, an attachment, that had subsisted too long to be easily subdued, and which had already outlived the opposition of his friends. M. Du Pont had first seen Emily in Gascony, during the lifetime of his parent, who, on discovering his son's partiality for Mademoiselle St. Aubert, his inferior in point of fortune, forbade him to declare it to her family, or to think of her more. During the life of his father, he had observed the first command, but had found it impracticable to obey the second, and had, sometimes, soothed his passion by visiting her favourite haunts, among which was the fishinghouse, where, once or twice, he addressed her in verse, concealing his name, in obedience to the promise he had given his father. There too he played the pathetic air, to which she had listened with such surprise and admiration; and there he found the miniature, that had since cherished a passion fatal to his repose. During his expedition into Italy, his father died; but he received his liberty at a moment, when he was the least enabled to profit by it, since the object, that rendered it most valuable, was no longer within the reach of his vows. By what accident he discovered Emily, and assisted to release her from a terrible imprisonment, has already appeared, and also the unavailing hope, with which he then encouraged his love, and the fruitless efforts, that he had since made to overcome it. The Count still endeavoured, with friendly zeal, to sooth him with a belief, that patience, perseverance and prudence would finally obtain for him happiness and Emily 'Time,' said he, 'will wear away the melancholy impression, which disappointment has left on her mind, and she will be sensible of your merit. Your services have already awakened her gratitude, and your sufferings her pity; and trust me, my friend, in a heart so sensible as hers, gratitude and pity lead to love. When her imagination is rescued from its present delusion, she will readily accept the homage of a mind like yours.' Du Pont sighed, while he listened to these words; and, endeavouring to hope what his friend believed, he willingly yielded to an invitation to prolong his visit at the chateau, which we now leave for the monastery of St. Claire. When the nuns had retired to rest, Emily stole to her appointment with sister Frances, whom she found in her cell, engaged in prayer, before a little table, where appeared the image she was addressing, and, above, the dim lamp that gave light to the place. Turning her eyes, as the door opened, she beckoned to Emily to come in, who, having done so, seated herself in silence beside the nun's little mattress of straw, till her orisons should conclude.

The latter soon rose from her knees, and, taking down the lamp and placing it on the table, Emily perceived there a human scull and bones, lying beside an hourglass; but the nun, without observing her emotion, sat down on the mattress by her, saying, 'Your curiosity, sister, has made you punctual, but you have nothing remarkable to hear in the history of poor Agnes, of whom I avoided to speak in the presence of my laysisters, only because I would not publish her crime to them.' 'I shall consider your confidence in me as a favour,' said Emily, 'and will not misuse it.' 'Sister Agnes,' resumed the nun, 'is of a noble family, as the dignity of her air must already have informed you, but I will not dishonour their name so much as to reveal it. Love was the occasion of her crime and of her madness. She was beloved by a gentleman of inferior fortune, and her father, as I have heard, bestowing her on a nobleman, whom she disliked, an illgoverned passion proved her destruction.Every obligation of virtue and of duty was forgotten, and she prophaned her marriage vows; but her guilt was soon detected, and she would have fallen a sacrifice to the vengeance of her husband, had not her father contrived to convey her from his power. By what means he did this, I never could learn; but he secreted her in this convent, where he afterwards prevailed with her to take the veil, while a report was circulated in the world, that she was dead, and the father, to save his daughter, assisted the rumour, and employed such means as induced her husband to believe she had become a victim to his jealousy. You look surprised,' added the nun, observing Emily's countenance; 'I allow the story is uncommon, but not, I believe, without a parallel.' 'Pray proceed,' said Emily, 'I am interested.' 'The story is already told,' resumed the nun, 'I have only to mention, that the long struggle, which Agnes suffered, between love, remorse and a sense of the duties she had taken upon herself in becoming of our order, at length unsettled her reason. At first, she was frantic and melancholy by quick alternatives; then, she sunk into a deep and settled melancholy, which still, however, has, at times, been interrupted by fits of wildness, and, of late, these have again been frequent.' Emily was affected by the history of the sister, some parts of whose story brought to her remembrance that of the Marchioness de Villeroi, who had also been compelled by her father to forsake the object of her affections, for a nobleman of his choice; but, from what Dorothee had related, there appeared no reason to suppose, that she had escaped the vengeance of a jealous husband, or to doubt for a moment the innocence of her conduct. But Emily, while she sighed over the misery of the nun, could not forbear shedding a few tears to the misfortunes of the Marchioness; and, when she returned to the mention of sister Agnes, she asked Frances if she remembered her in her youth, and whether she was then beautiful. 'I was not here at the time, when she took the vows,' replied Frances, 'which is so long ago, that few of the present sisterhood, I believe, were witnesses of the ceremony; nay, ever our lady mother did not then preside over the convent but I can remember, when sister Agnes was a very beautiful woman. She retains that air of high rank, which always distinguished her, but her beauty, you must perceive, is fled; I can scarcely discover even a vestige of the loveliness, that once animated her features.' 'It is strange,' said Emily, 'but there are moments, when her countenance has appeared familiar to my memory! You will think me fanciful, and I think myself so, for I certainly never saw sister Agnes, before I came to this convent, and I must, therefore, have seen some person, whom she strongly resembles, though of this I have no recollection.' 'You have been interested by the deep melancholy of her countenance,' said Frances, 'and its impression has probably deluded your imagination; for I might as reasonably think I perceive a likeness between you and Agnes, as you, that you have seen her any where but in this convent, since this has been her place of refuge, for nearly as many years as make your age.' 'Indeed!' said Emily. 'Yes,' rejoined Frances, 'and why does that circumstance excite your surprise?' Emily did not appear to notice this question, but remained thoughtful, for a few moments, and then said, 'It was about that same period that the Marchioness de Villeroi expired.' 'That is an odd remark,' said Frances. Emily, recalled from her reverie, smiled, and gave the conversation another turn, but it soon came back to the subject of the unhappy nun, and Emily remained in the cell of sister Frances, till the midnight bell aroused her; when, apologizing for having interrupted the sister's repose, till this late hour, they quitted the cell together. Emily returned to her chamber, and the nun, bearing a glimmering taper, went to her devotion in the chapel. Several days followed, during which Emily saw neither the Count, or any of his family; and, when, at length, he appeared, she remarked, with concern, that his air was unusually disturbed. 'My spirits are harassed,' said he, in answer to her anxious enquiries, 'and I mean to change my residence, for a little while, an experiment, which, I hope, will restore my mind to its usual tranquillity. My daughter and myself will accompany the Baron St. Foix to his chateau. It lies in a valley of the Pyrenees, that opens towards Gascony, and I have been thinking, Emily, that, when you set out for La Vallee, we may go part of the way together; it would be a satisfaction to me to guard you towards your home.' She thanked the Count for his friendly consideration, and lamented, that the necessity for her going first to Tholouse would render this plan impracticable. 'But, when you are at the Baron's residence,' she added, 'you will be only a short journey from La Vallee, and I think, sir, you will not leave the country without visiting me; it is unnecessary to say with what pleasure I should receive you and the Lady Blanche.' 'I do not doubt it,' replied the Count, 'and I will not deny myself and Blanche the pleasure of visiting you, if your affairs should allow you to be at La Vallee, about the time when we can meet you there.' When Emily said that she should hope to see the Countess also, she was not sorry to learn that this lady was going, accompanied by Mademoiselle Bearn, to pay a visit, for a few weeks, to a family in lower Languedoc. The Count, after some further conversation on his intended journey and on the arrangement of Emily's, took leave; and many days did not succeed this visit, before a second letter from M. Quesnel informed her, that he was then at Tholouse, that La Vallee was at liberty, and that he wished her to set off for the former place, where he awaited her arrival, with all possible dispatch, since his own affairs pressed him to return to Gascony. Emily did not hesitate to obey him, and, having taken an affecting leave of the Count's family, in which M. Du Pont was still included, and of her friends at the convent, she set out for Tholouse, attended by the unhappy Annette, and guarded by a steady servant of the Count. Chapter 10 Lull'd in the countless chambers of the brain, Our thoughts are link'd by many a hidden chain Awake but one, and lo! what myriads rise! Each stamps its image as the other flies! PLEASURES OF MEMORY Emily pursued her journey, without any accident, along the plains of Languedoc towards the northwest; and, on this her return to Tholouse, which she had last left with Madame Montoni, she thought much on the melancholy fate of her aunt, who, but for her own imprudence, might now have been living in happiness there! Montoni, too, often rose to her fancy, such as she had seen him in his days of triumph, bold, spirited and commanding; such also as she had since beheld him in his days of vengeance; and now, only a few short months had passedand he had no longer the power, or the will to afflict;he had become a clod of earth, and his life was vanished like a shadow! Emily could have wept at his fate, had she not remembered his crimes; for that of her unfortunate aunt she did weep, and all sense of her errors was overcome by the recollection of her misfortunes. Other thoughts and other emotions succeeded, as Emily drew near the wellknown scenes of her early love, and considered, that Valancourt was lost to her and to himself, for ever. At length, she came to the brow of the hill, whence, on her departure for Italy, she had given a farewell look to this beloved landscape, amongst whose woods and fields she had so often walked with Valancourt, and where he was then to inhabit, when she would be far, far away! She saw, once more, that chain of the Pyrenees, which overlooked La Vallee, rising, like faint clouds, on the horizon. 'There, too, is Gascony, extended at their feet!' said she, 'O my father,my mother! And there, too, is the Garonne!' she added, drying the tears, that obscured her sight,'and Tholouse, and my aunt's mansionand the groves in her garden!O my friends! are ye all lost to memust I never, never see ye more!' Tears rushed again to her eyes, and she continued to weep, till an abrupt turn in the road had nearly occasioned the carriage to overset, when, looking up, she perceived another part of the wellknown scene around Tholouse, and all the reflections and anticipations, which she had suffered, at the moment, when she bade it last adieu, came with recollected force to her heart. She remembered how anxiously she had looked forward to the futurity, which was to decide her happiness concerning Valancourt, and what depressing fears had assailed her; the very words she had uttered, as she withdrew her last look from the prospect, came to her memory. 'Could I but be certain,' she had then said, 'that I should ever return, and that Valancourt would still live for meI should go in peace!' Now, that futurity, so anxiously anticipated, was arrived, she was returnedbut what a dreary blank appeared!Valancourt no longer lived for her! She had no longer even the melancholy satisfaction of contemplating his image in her heart, for he was no longer the same Valancourt she had cherished therethe solace of many a mournful hour, the animating friend, that had enabled her to bear up against the oppression of Montonithe distant hope, that had beamed over her gloomy prospect! On perceiving this beloved idea to be an illusion of her own creation, Valancourt seemed to be annihilated, and her soul sickened at the blank, that remained. His marriage with a rival, even his death, she thought she could have endured with more fortitude, than this discovery; for then, amidst all her grief, she could have looked in secret upon the image of goodness, which her fancy had drawn of him, and comfort would have mingled with her suffering! Drying her tears, she looked, once more, upon the landscape, which had excited them, and perceived, that she was passing the very bank, where she had taken leave of Valancourt, on the morning of her departure from Tholouse, and she now saw him, through her returning tears, such as he had appeared, when she looked from the carriage to give him a last adieusaw him leaning mournfully against the high trees, and remembered the fixed look of mingled tenderness and anguish, with which he had then regarded her. This recollection was too much for her heart, and she sunk back in the carriage, nor once looked up, till it stopped at the gates of what was now her own mansion. These being opened, and by the servant, to whose care the chateau had been entrusted, the carriage drove into the court, where, alighting, she hastily passed through the great hall, now silent and solitary, to a large oak parlour, the common sitting room of the late Madame Montoni, where, instead of being received by M. Quesnel, she found a letter from him, informing her that business of consequence had obliged him to leave Tholouse two days before. Emily was, upon the whole, not sorry to be spared his presence, since his abrupt departure appeared to indicate the same indifference, with which he had formerly regarded her. This letter informed her, also, of the progress he had made in the settlement of her affairs, and concluded with directions, concerning the forms of some business, which remained for her to transact. But M. Quesnel's unkindness did not long occupy her thoughts, which returned the remembrance of the persons she had been accustomed to see in this mansion, and chiefly of the illguided and unfortunate Madame Montoni. In the room, where she now sat, she had breakfasted with her on the morning of their departure for Italy; and the view of it brought most forcibly to her recollection all she had herself suffered, at that time, and the many gay expectations, which her aunt had formed, respecting the journey before her. While Emily's mind was thus engaged, her eyes wandered unconsciously to a large window, that looked upon the garden, and here new memorials of the past spoke to her heart, for she saw extended before her the very avenue, in which she had parted with Valancourt, on the eve of her journey; and all the anxiety, the tender interest he had shewn, concerning her future happiness, his earnest remonstrances against her committing herself to the power of Montoni, and the truth of his affection, came afresh to her memory. At this moment, it appeared almost impossible, that Valancourt could have become unworthy of her regard, and she doubted all that she had lately heard to his disadvantage, and even his own words, which had confirmed Count De Villefort's report of him. Overcome by the recollections, which the view of this avenue occasioned, she turned abruptly from the window, and sunk into a chair beside it, where she sat, given up to grief, till the entrance of Annette, with coffee, aroused her. 'Dear madam, how melancholy this place looks now,' said Annette, 'to what it used to do! It is dismal coming home, when there is nobody to welcome one!' This was not the moment, in which Emily could bear the remark; her tears fell again, and, as soon as she had taken the coffee, she retired to her apartment, where she endeavoured to repose her fatigued spirits. But busy memory would still supply her with the visions of former times she saw Valancourt interesting and benevolent, as he had been wont to appear in the days of their early love, and, amidst the scenes, where she had believed that they should sometimes pass their years together!but, at length, sleep closed these afflicting scenes from her view. On the following morning, serious occupation recovered her from such melancholy reflections; for, being desirous of quitting Tholouse, and of hastening on to La Vallee, she made some enquiries into the condition of the estate, and immediately dispatched a part of the necessary business concerning it, according to the directions of Mons. Quesnel. It required a strong effort to abstract her thoughts from other interests sufficiently to attend to this, but she was rewarded for her exertions by again experiencing, that employment is the surest antidote to sorrow. This day was devoted entirely to business; and, among other concerns, she employed means to learn the situation of all her poor tenants, that she might relieve their wants, or confirm their comforts. In the evening, her spirits were so much strengthened, that she thought she could bear to visit the gardens, where she had so often walked with Valancourt; and, knowing, that, if she delayed to do so, their scenes would only affect her the more, whenever they should be viewed, she took advantage of the present state of her mind, and entered them. Passing hastily the gate leading from the court into the gardens, she hurried up the great avenue, scarcely permitting her memory to dwell for a moment on the circumstance of her having here parted with Valancourt, and soon quitted this for other walks less interesting to her heart. These brought her, at length, to the flight of steps, that led from the lower garden to the terrace, on seeing which, she became agitated, and hesitated whether to ascend, but, her resolution returning, she proceeded. 'Ah!' said Emily, as she ascended, 'these are the same high trees, that used to wave over the terrace, and these the same flowery thicketsthe liburnum, the wild rose, and the cerinthewhich were wont to grow beneath them! Ah! and there, too, on that bank, are the very plants, which Valancourt so carefully reared!O, when last I saw them!'she checked the thought, but could not restrain her tears, and, after walking slowly on for a few moments, her agitation, upon the view of this wellknown scene, increased so much, that she was obliged to stop, and lean upon the wall of the terrace. It was a mild, and beautiful evening. The sun was setting over the extensive landscape, to which his beams, sloping from beneath a dark cloud, that overhung the west, gave rich and partial colouring, and touched the tufted summits of the groves, that rose from the garden below, with a yellow gleam. Emily and Valancourt had often admired together this scene, at the same hour; and it was exactly on this spot, that, on the night preceding her departure for Italy, she had listened to his remonstrances against the journey, and to the pleadings of passionate affection. Some observations, which she made on the landscape, brought this to her remembrance, and with it all the minute particulars of that conversation;the alarming doubts he had expressed concerning Montoni, doubts, which had since been fatally confirmed; the reasons and entreaties he had employed to prevail with her to consent to an immediate marriage; the tenderness of his love, the paroxysms of this grief, and the conviction that he had repeatedly expressed, that they should never meet again in happiness! All these circumstances rose afresh to her mind, and awakened the various emotions she had then suffered. Her tenderness for Valancourt became as powerful as in the moments, when she thought, that she was parting with him and happiness together, and when the strength of her mind had enabled her to triumph over present suffering, rather than to deserve the reproach of her conscience by engaging in a clandestine marriage.'Alas!' said Emily, as these recollections came to her mind, 'and what have I gained by the fortitude I then practised?am I happy now?He said, we should meet no more in happiness; but, O! he little thought his own misconduct would separate us, and lead to the very evil he then dreaded!' Her reflections increased her anguish, while she was compelled to acknowledge, that the fortitude she had formerly exerted, if it had not conducted her to happiness, had saved her from irretrievable misfortunefrom Valancourt himself! But in these moments she could not congratulate herself on the prudence, that had saved her; she could only lament, with bitterest anguish, the circumstances, which had conspired to betray Valancourt into a course of life so different from that, which the virtues, the tastes, and the pursuits of his early years had promised; but she still loved him too well to believe, that his heart was even now depraved, though his conduct had been criminal. An observation, which had fallen from M. St. Aubert more than once, now occurred to her. 'This young man,' said he, speaking of Valancourt, 'has never been at Paris;' a remark, that had surprised her at the time it was uttered, but which she now understood, and she exclaimed sorrowfully, 'O Valancourt! if such a friend as my father had been with you at Parisyour noble, ingenuous nature would not have fallen!' The sun was now set, and, recalling her thoughts from their melancholy subject, she continued her walk; for the pensive shade of twilight was pleasing to her, and the nightingales from the surrounding groves began to answer each other in the longdrawn, plaintive note, which always touched her heart; while all the fragrance of the flowery thickets, that bounded the terrace, was awakened by the cool evening air, which floated so lightly among their leaves, that they scarcely trembled as it passed. Emily came, at length, to the steps of the pavilion, that terminated the terrace, and where her last interview with Valancourt, before her departure from Tholouse, had so unexpectedly taken place. The door was now shut, and she trembled, while she hesitated whether to open it; but her wish to see again a place, which had been the chief scene of her former happiness, at length overcoming her reluctance to encounter the painful regret it would renew, she entered. The room was obscured by a melancholy shade; but through the open lattices, darkened by the hanging foliage of the vines, appeared the dusky landscape, the Garonne reflecting the evening light, and the west still glowing. A chair was placed near one of the balconies, as if some person had been sitting there, but the other furniture of the pavilion remained exactly as usual, and Emily thought it looked as if it had not once been moved since she set out for Italy. The silent and deserted air of the place added solemnity to her emotions, for she heard only the low whisper of the breeze, as it shook the leaves of the vines, and the very faint murmur of the Garonne. She seated herself in a chair, near the lattice, and yielded to the sadness of her heart, while she recollected the circumstances of her parting interview with Valancourt, on this spot. It was here too, that she had passed some of the happiest hours of her life with him, when her aunt favoured the connection, for here she had often sat and worked, while he conversed, or read; and she now well remembered with what discriminating judgment, with what tempered energy, he used to repeat some of the sublimest passages of their favourite authors; how often he would pause to admire with her their excellence, and with what tender delight he would listen to her remarks, and correct her taste. 'And is it possible,' said Emily, as these recollections returned'is it possible, that a mind, so susceptible of whatever is grand and beautiful, could stoop to low pursuits, and be subdued by frivolous temptations?' She remembered how often she had seen the sudden tear start in his eye, and had heard his voice tremble with emotion, while he related any great or benevolent action, or repeated a sentiment of the same character. 'And such a mind,' said she, 'such a heart, were to be sacrificed to the habits of a great city!' These recollections becoming too painful to be endured, she abruptly left the pavilion, and, anxious to escape from the memorials of her departed happiness, returned towards the chateau. As she passed along the terrace, she perceived a person, walking, with a slow step, and a dejected air, under the trees, at some distance. The twilight, which was now deep, would not allow her to distinguish who it was, and she imagined it to be one of the servants, till, the sound of her steps seeming to reach him, he turned half round, and she thought she saw Valancourt! Whoever it was, he instantly struck among the thickets on the left, and disappeared, while Emily, her eyes fixed on the place, whence he had vanished, and her frame trembling so excessively, that she could scarcely support herself, remained, for some moments, unable to quit the spot, and scarcely conscious of existence. With her recollection, her strength returned, and she hurried toward the house, where she did not venture to enquire who had been in the gardens, lest she should betray her emotion; and she sat down alone, endeavouring to recollect the figure, air and features of the person she had just seen. Her view of him, however, had been so transient, and the gloom had rendered it so imperfect, that she could remember nothing with exactness; yet the general appearance of his figure, and his abrupt departure, made her still believe, that this person was Valancourt. Sometimes, indeed, she thought, that her fancy, which had been occupied by the idea of him, had suggested his image to her uncertain sight but this conjecture was fleeting. If it was himself whom she had seen, she wondered much, that he should be at Tholouse, and more, how he had gained admittance into the garden; but as often as her impatience prompted her to enquire whether any stranger had been admitted, she was restrained by an unwillingness to betray her doubts; and the evening was passed in anxious conjecture, and in efforts to dismiss the subject from her thoughts. But, these endeavours were ineffectual, and a thousand inconsistent emotions assailed her, whenever she fancied that Valancourt might be near her; now, she dreaded it to be true, and now she feared it to be false; and, while she constantly tried to persuade herself, that she wished the person, whom she had seen, might not be Valancourt, her heart as constantly contradicted her reason. The following day was occupied by the visits of several neighbouring families, formerly intimate with Madame Montoni, who came to condole with Emily on her death, to congratulate her upon the acquisition of these estates, and to enquire about Montoni, and concerning the strange reports they had heard of her own situation; all which was done with the utmost decorum, and the visitors departed with as much composure as they had arrived. Emily was wearied by these formalities, and disgusted by the subservient manners of many persons, who had thought her scarcely worthy of common attention, while she was believed to be a dependant on Madame Montoni. 'Surely,' said she, 'there is some magic in wealth, which can thus make persons pay their court to it, when it does not even benefit themselves. How strange it is, that a fool or a knave, with riches, should be treated with more respect by the world, than a good man, or a wise man in poverty!' It was evening, before she was left alone, and she then wished to have refreshed her spirits in the free air of her garden; but she feared to go thither, lest she should meet again the person, whom she had seen on the preceding night, and he should prove to be Valancourt. The suspense and anxiety she suffered, on this subject, she found all her efforts unable to controul, and her secret wish to see Valancourt once more, though unseen by him, powerfully prompted her to go, but prudence and a delicate pride restrained her, and she determined to avoid the possibility of throwing herself in his way, by forbearing to visit the gardens, for several days. When, after near a week, she again ventured thither, she made Annette her companion, and confined her walk to the lower grounds, but often started as the leaves rustled in the breeze, imagining, that some person was among the thickets; and, at the turn of every alley, she looked forward with apprehensive expectation. She pursued her walk thoughtfully and silently, for her agitation would not suffer her to converse with Annette, to whom, however, thought and silence were so intolerable, that she did not scruple at length to talk to her mistress. 'Dear madam,' said she, 'why do you start so? one would think you knew what has happened.' 'What has happened?' said Emily, in a faltering voice, and trying to command her emotion. 'The night before last, you know, madam' 'I know nothing, Annette,' replied her lady in a more hurried voice. 'The night before last, madam, there was a robber in the garden.' 'A robber!' said Emily, in an eager, yet doubting tone. 'I suppose he was a robber, madam. What else could he be?' 'Where did you see him, Annette?' rejoined Emily, looking round her, and turning back towards the chateau. 'It was not I that saw him, madam, it was Jean the gardener. It was twelve o'clock at night, and, as he was coming across the court to go the back way into the house, what should he seebut somebody walking in the avenue, that fronts the garden gate! So, with that, Jean guessed how it was, and he went into the house for his gun.' 'His gun!' exclaimed Emily. 'Yes, madam, his gun; and then he came out into the court to watch him. Presently, he sees him come slowly down the avenue, and lean over the garden gate, and look up at the house for a long time; and I warrant he examined it well, and settled what window he should break in at.' 'But the gun,' said Emily'the gun!' 'Yes, madam, all in good time. Presently, Jean says, the robber opened the gate, and was coming into the court, and then he thought proper to ask him his business so he called out again, and bade him say who he was, and what he wanted. But the man would do neither; but turned upon his heel, and passed into the garden again. Jean knew then well enough how it was, and so he fired after him.' 'Fired!' exclaimed Emily. 'Yes, madam, fired off his gun; but, Holy Virgin! what makes you look so pale, madam? The man was not killed,I dare say; but if he was, his comrades carried him off for, when Jean went in the morning, to look for the body, it was gone, and nothing to be seen but a track of blood on the ground. Jean followed it, that he might find out where the man got into the garden, but it was lost in the grass, and' Annette was interrupted for Emily's spirits died away, and she would have fallen to the ground, if the girl had not caught her, and supported her to a bench, close to them. When, after a long absence, her senses returned, Emily desired to be led to her apartment; and, though she trembled with anxiety to enquire further on the subject of her alarm, she found herself too ill at present, to dare the intelligence which it was possible she might receive of Valancourt. Having dismissed Annette, that she might weep and think at liberty, she endeavoured to recollect the exact air of the person, whom she had seen on the terrace, and still her fancy gave her the figure of Valancourt. She had, indeed, scarcely a doubt, that it was he whom she had seen, and at whom the gardener had fired for the manner of the latter person, as described by Annette, was not that of a robber; nor did it appear probable, that a robber would have come alone, to break into a house so spacious as this. When Emily thought herself sufficiently recovered, to listen to what Jean might have to relate, she sent for him; but he could inform her of no circumstance, that might lead to a knowledge of the person, who had been shot, or of the consequence of the wound; and, after severely reprimanding him, for having fired with bullets, and ordering diligent enquiry to be made in the neighbourhood for the discovery of the wounded person, she dismissed him, and herself remained in the same state of terrible suspense. All the tenderness she had ever felt for Valancourt, was recalled by the sense of his danger; and the more she considered the subject, the more her conviction strengthened, that it was he, who had visited the gardens, for the purpose of soothing the misery of disappointed affection, amidst the scenes of his former happiness. 'Dear madam,' said Annette, when she returned, 'I never saw you so affected before! I dare say the man is not killed.' Emily shuddered, and lamented bitterly the rashness of the gardener in having fired. 'I knew you would be angry enough about that, madam, or I should have told you before; and he knew so too; for, says he, "Annette, say nothing about this to my lady. She lies on the other side of the house, so did not hear the gun, perhaps; but she would be angry with me, if she knew, seeing there is blood. But then," says he, "how is one to keep the garden clear, if one is afraid to fire at a robber, when one sees him?"' 'No more of this,' said Emily, 'pray leave me.' Annette obeyed, and Emily returned to the agonizing considerations, that had assailed her before, but which she, at length, endeavoured to sooth by a new remark.

If the stranger was Valancourt, it was certain he had come alone, and it appeared, therefore, that he had been able to quit the gardens, without assistance; a circumstance which did not seem probable, had his wound been dangerous. With this consideration, she endeavoured to support herself, during the enquiries, that were making by her servants in the neighbourhood; but day after day came, and still closed in uncertainty, concerning this affair and Emily, suffering in silence, at length, drooped, and sunk under the pressure of her anxiety. She was attacked by a slow fever, and when she yielded to the persuasion of Annette to send for medical advice, the physicians prescribed little beside air, gentle exercise and amusement but how was this last to be obtained? She, however, endeavoured to abstract her thoughts from the subject of her anxiety, by employing them in promoting that happiness in others, which she had lost herself; and, when the evening was fine, she usually took an airing, including in her ride the cottages of some of her tenants, on whose condition she made such observations, as often enabled her, unasked, to fulfil their wishes. Her indisposition and the business she engaged in, relative to this estate, had already protracted her stay at Tholouse, beyond the period she had formerly fixed for her departure to La Vallee; and now she was unwilling to leave the only place, where it seemed possible, that certainty could be obtained on the subject of her distress. But the time was come, when her presence was necessary at La Vallee, a letter from the Lady Blanche now informing her, that the Count and herself, being then at the chateau of the Baron St. Foix, purposed to visit her at La Vallee, on their way home, as soon as they should be informed of her arrival there. Blanche added, that they made this visit, with the hope of inducing her to return with them to ChateauleBlanc. Emily, having replied to the letter of her friend, and said that she should be at La Vallee in a few days, made hasty preparations for the journey; and, in thus leaving Tholouse, endeavoured to support herself with a belief, that, if any fatal accident had happened to Valancourt, she must in this interval have heard of it. On the evening before her departure, she went to take leave of the terrace and the pavilion. The day had been sultry, but a light shower, that fell just before sunset, had cooled the air, and given that soft verdure to the woods and pastures, which is so refreshing to the eye; while the rain drops, still trembling on the shrubs, glittered in the last yellow gleam, that lighted up the scene, and the air was filled with fragrance, exhaled by the late shower, from herbs and flowers and from the earth itself. But the lovely prospect, which Emily beheld from the terrace, was no longer viewed by her with delight; she sighed deeply as her eye wandered over it, and her spirits were in a state of such dejection, that she could not think of her approaching return to La Vallee, without tears, and seemed to mourn again the death of her father, as if it had been an event of yesterday. Having reached the pavilion, she seated herself at the open lattice, and, while her eyes settled on the distant mountains, that overlooked Gascony, still gleaming on the horizon, though the sun had now left the plains below, 'Alas!' said she, 'I return to your longlost scenes, but shall meet no more the parents, that were wont to render them delightful!no more shall see the smile of welcome, or hear the wellknown voice of fondnessall will now be cold and silent in what was once my happy home.' Tears stole down her cheek, as the remembrance of what that home had been, returned to her; but, after indulging her sorrow for some time, she checked it, accusing herself of ingratitude in forgetting the friends, that she possessed, while she lamented those that were departed; and she, at length, left the pavilion and the terrace, without having observed a shadow of Valancourt or of any other person. Chapter 11 Ah happy hills! ah pleasing shade! Ah fields belov'd in vain! Where once my careless childhood stray'd, A stranger yet to pain! I feel the gales, that from ye blow, A momentary bliss bestow, As waving fresh their gladsome wing, My weary soul they seem to sooth. GRAY On the following morning, Emily left Tholouse at an early hour, and reached La Vallee about sunset. With the melancholy she experienced on the review of a place which had been the residence of her parents, and the scene of her earliest delight, was mingled, after the first shock had subsided, a tender and undescribable pleasure. For time had so far blunted the acuteness of her grief, that she now courted every scene, that awakened the memory of her friends; in every room, where she had been accustomed to see them, they almost seemed to live again; and she felt that La Vallee was still her happiest home. One of the first apartments she visited, was that, which had been her father's library, and here she seated herself in his armchair, and, while she contemplated, with tempered resignation, the picture of past times, which her memory gave, the tears she shed could scarcely be called those of grief. Soon after her arrival, she was surprised by a visit from the venerable M. Barreaux, who came impatiently to welcome the daughter of his late respected neighbour, to her longdeserted home. Emily was comforted by the presence of an old friend, and they passed an interesting hour in conversing of former times, and in relating some of the circumstances, that had occurred to each, since they parted. The evening was so far advanced, when M. Barreaux left Emily, that she could not visit the garden that night; but, on the following morning, she traced its longregretted scenes with fond impatience; and, as she walked beneath the groves, which her father had planted, and where she had so often sauntered in affectionate conversation with him, his countenance, his smile, even the accents of his voice, returned with exactness to her fancy, and her heart melted to the tender recollections. This, too, was his favourite season of the year, at which they had often together admired the rich and variegated tints of these woods and the magical effect of autumnal lights upon the mountains; and now, the view of these circumstances made memory eloquent. As she wandered pensively on, she fancied the following address TO AUTUMN Sweet Autumn! how thy melancholy grace Steals on my heart, as through these shades I wind! Sooth'd by thy breathing sigh, I fondly trace Each lonely image of the pensive mind! Lov'd scenes, lov'd friendslong lost! around me rise, And wake the melting thought, the tender tear! That tear, that thought, which more than mirth I prize Sweet as the gradual tint, that paints thy year! Thy farewel smile, with fond regret, I view, Thy beaming lights, soft gliding o'er the woods; Thy distant landscape, touch'd with yellow hue While falls the lengthen'd gleam; thy winding floods, Now veil'd in shade, save where the skiff's white sails Swell to the breeze, and catch thy streaming ray. But now, e'en now!the partial vision fails, And the wave smiles, as sweeps the cloud away! Emblem of life!Thus checquer'd is its plan, Thus joy succeeds to griefthus smiles the varied man! One of Emily's earliest enquiries, after her arrival at La Vallee, was concerning Theresa, her father's old servant, whom it may be remembered that M. Quesnel had turned from the house when it was let, without any provision. Understanding that she lived in a cottage at no great distance, Emily walked thither, and, on approaching, was pleased to see, that her habitation was pleasantly situated on a green slope, sheltered by a tuft of oaks, and had an appearance of comfort and extreme neatness. She found the old woman within, picking vinestalks, who, on perceiving her young mistress, was nearly overcome with joy. 'Ah! my dear young lady!' said she, 'I thought I should never see you again in this world, when I heard you was gone to that outlandish country. I have been hardly used, since you went; I little thought they would have turned me out of my old master's family in my old age!' Emily lamented the circumstance, and then assured her, that she would make her latter days comfortable, and expressed satisfaction, on seeing her in so pleasant an habitation. Theresa thanked her with tears, adding, 'Yes, mademoiselle, it is a very comfortable home, thanks to the kind friend, who took me out of my distress, when you was too far off to help me, and placed me here! I little thought!but no more of that' 'And who was this kind friend?' said Emily 'whoever it was, I shall consider him as mine also.' 'Ah, mademoiselle! that friend forbad me to blazon the good deedI must not say, who it was. But how you are altered since I saw you last! You look so pale now, and so thin, too; but then, there is my old master's smile! Yes, that will never leave you, any more than the goodness, that used to make him smile. Alasaday! the poor lost a friend indeed, when he died!' Emily was affected by this mention of her father, which Theresa observing, changed the subject. 'I heard, mademoiselle,' said she, 'that Madame Cheron married a foreign gentleman, after all, and took you abroad; how does she do?' Emily now mentioned her death. 'Alas!' said Theresa, 'if she had not been my master's sister, I should never have loved her; she was always so cross. But how does that dear young gentleman do, M. Valancourt? he was an handsome youth, and a good one; is he well, mademoiselle?' Emily was much agitated. 'A blessing on him!' continued Theresa. 'Ah, my dear young lady, you need not look so shy; I know all about it. Do you think I do not know, that he loves you? Why, when you was away, mademoiselle, he used to come to the chateau and walk about it, so disconsolate! He would go into every room in the lower part of the house, and, sometimes, he would sit himself down in a chair, with his arms across, and his eyes on the floor, and there he would sit, and think, and think, for the hour together. He used to be very fond of the south parlour, because I told him it used to be yours; and there he would stay, looking at the pictures, which I said you drew, and playing upon your lute, that hung up by the window, and reading in your books, till sunset, and then he must go back to his brother's chateau. And then' 'It is enough, Theresa,' said Emily.'How long have you lived in this cottageand how can I serve you? Will you remain here, or return and live with me?' 'Nay, mademoiselle,' said Theresa, 'do not be so shy to your poor old servant. I am sure it is no disgrace to like such a good young gentleman.' A deep sigh escaped from Emily. 'Ah! how he did love to talk of you! I loved him for that. Nay, for that matter, he liked to hear me talk, for he did not say much himself. But I soon found out what he came to the chateau about. Then, he would go into the garden, and down to the terrace, and sit under that great tree there, for the day together, with one of your books in his hand; but he did not read much, I fancy; for one day I happened to go that way, and I heard somebody talking. Who can be here? says I I am sure I let nobody into the garden, but the Chevalier. So I walked softly, to see who it could be; and behold! it was the Chevalier himself, talking to himself about you. And he repeated your name, and sighed so! and said he had lost you for ever, for that you would never return for him. I thought he was out in his reckoning there, but I said nothing, and stole away.' 'No more of this trifling,' said Emily, awakening from her reverie 'it displeases me.' 'But, when M. Quesnel let the chateau, I thought it would have broke the Chevalier's heart.' 'Theresa,' said Emily seriously, 'you must name the Chevalier no more!' 'Not name him, mademoiselle!' cried Theresa 'what times are come up now? Why, I love the Chevalier next to my old master and you, mademoiselle.' 'Perhaps your love was not well bestowed, then,' replied Emily, trying to conceal her tears; 'but, however that might be, we shall meet no more.' 'Meet no more!not well bestowed!' exclaimed Theresa. 'What do I hear? No, mademoiselle, my love was well bestowed, for it was the Chevalier Valancourt, who gave me this cottage, and has supported me in my old age, ever since M. Quesnel turned me from my master's house.' 'The Chevalier Valancourt!' said Emily, trembling extremely. 'Yes, mademoiselle, he himself, though he made me promise not to tell; but how could one help, when one heard him ill spoken of? Ah! dear young lady, you may well weep, if you have behaved unkindly to him, for a more tender heart than his never young gentleman had. He found me out in my distress, when you was too far off to help me; and M. Quesnel refused to do so, and bade me go to service againAlas! I was too old for that!The Chevalier found me, and bought me this cottage, and gave me money to furnish it, and bade me seek out another poor woman to live with me; and he ordered his brother's steward to pay me, every quarter, that which has supported me in comfort. Think then, mademoiselle, whether I have not reason to speak well of the Chevalier. And there are others, who could have afforded it better than he and I am afraid he has hurt himself by his generosity, for quarter day is gone by long since, and no money for me! But do not weep so, mademoiselle you are not sorry surely to hear of the poor Chevalier's goodness?' 'Sorry!' said Emily, and wept the more. 'But how long is it since you have seen him?' 'Not this many a day, mademoiselle.' 'When did you hear of him?' enquired Emily, with increased emotion. 'Alas! never since he went away so suddenly into Languedoc; and he was but just come from Paris then, or I should have seen him, I am sure. Quarter day is gone by long since, and, as I said, no money for me; and I begin to fear some harm has happened to him and if I was not so far from Estuviere and so lame, I should have gone to enquire before this time; and I have nobody to send so far.' Emily's anxiety, as to the fate of Valancourt, was now scarcely endurable, and, since propriety would not suffer her to send to the chateau of his brother, she requested that Theresa would immediately hire some person to go to his steward from herself, and, when he asked for the quarterage due to her, to make enquiries concerning Valancourt. But she first made Theresa promise never to mention her name in this affair, or ever with that of the Chevalier Valancourt; and her former faithfulness to M. St. Aubert induced Emily to confide in her assurances. Theresa now joyfully undertook to procure a person for this errand, and then Emily, after giving her a sum of money to supply her with present comforts, returned, with spirits heavily oppressed, to her home, lamenting, more than ever, that an heart, possessed of so much benevolence as Valancourt's, should have been contaminated by the vices of the world, but affected by the delicate affection, which his kindness to her old servant expressed for herself. Chapter 12 Light thickens, and the crow Makes wing to the rooky wood Good things of day begin to droop, and drowze; While night's black agents to their preys do rouze. MACBETH Meanwhile Count De Villefort and Lady Blanche had passed a pleasant fortnight at the chateau de St. Foix, with the Baron and Baroness, during which they made frequent excursions among the mountains, and were delighted with the romantic wildness of Pyrenean scenery. It was with regret, that the Count bade adieu to his old friends, although with the hope of being soon united with them in one family; for it was settled that M. St. Foix, who now attended them into Gascony, should receive the hand of the Lady Blanche, upon their arrival at ChateauleBlanc. As the road, from the Baron's residence to La Vallee, was over some of the wildest tract of the Pyrenees, and where a carriagewheel had never passed, the Count hired mules for himself and his family, as well as a couple of stout guides, who were well armed, informed of all the passes of the mountains, and who boasted, too, that they were acquainted with every brake and dingle in the way, could tell the names of all the highest points of this chain of Alps, knew every forest, that spread along their narrow vallies, the shallowest part of every torrent they must cross, and the exact distance of every goatherd's and hunter's cabin they should have occasion to pass,which last article of learning required no very capacious memory, for even such simple inhabitants were but thinly scattered over these wilds. The Count left the chateau de St. Foix, early in the morning, with an intention of passing the night at a little inn upon the mountains, about half way to La Vallee, of which his guides had informed him; and, though this was frequented chiefly by Spanish muleteers, on their route into France, and, of course, would afford only sorry accommodation, the Count had no alternative, for it was the only place like an inn, on the road. After a day of admiration and fatigue, the travellers found themselves, about sunset, in a woody valley, overlooked, on every side, by abrupt heights. They had proceeded for many leagues, without seeing a human habitation, and had only heard, now and then, at a distance, the melancholy tinkling of a sheepbell; but now they caught the notes of merry music, and presently saw, within a little green recess among the rocks, a group of mountaineers, tripping through a dance. The Count, who could not look upon the happiness, any more than on the misery of others, with indifference, halted to enjoy this scene of simple pleasure. The group before him consisted of French and Spanish peasants, the inhabitants of a neighbouring hamlet, some of whom were performing a sprightly dance, the women with castanets in their hands, to the sounds of a lute and a tamborine, till, from the brisk melody of France, the music softened into a slow movement, to which two female peasants danced a Spanish Pavan. The Count, comparing this with the scenes of such gaiety as he had witnessed at Paris, where false taste painted the features, and, while it vainly tried to supply the glow of nature, concealed the charms of animationwhere affectation so often distorted the air, and vice perverted the mannerssighed to think, that natural graces and innocent pleasures flourished in the wilds of solitude, while they drooped amidst the concourse of polished society. But the lengthening shadows reminded the travellers, that they had no time to lose; and, leaving this joyous group, they pursued their way towards the little inn, which was to shelter them from the night. The rays of the setting sun now threw a yellow gleam upon the forests of pine and chesnut, that swept down the lower region of the mountains, and gave resplendent tints to the snowy points above. But soon, even this light faded fast, and the scenery assumed a more tremendous appearance, invested with the obscurity of twilight. Where the torrent had been seen, it was now only heard; where the wild cliffs had displayed every variety of form and attitude, a dark mass of mountains now alone appeared; and the vale, which far, far below had opened its dreadful chasm, the eye could no longer fathom. A melancholy gleam still lingered on the summits of the highest Alps, overlooking the deep repose of evening, and seeming to make the stillness of the hour more awful. Blanche viewed the scene in silence, and listened with enthusiasm to the murmur of the pines, that extended in dark lines along the mountains, and to the faint voice of the izard, among the rocks, that came at intervals on the air. But her enthusiasm sunk into apprehension, when, as the shadows deepened, she looked upon the doubtful precipice, that bordered the road, as well as on the various fantastic forms of danger, that glimmered through the obscurity beyond it; and she asked her father, how far they were from the inn, and whether he did not consider the road to be dangerous at this late hour. The Count repeated the first question to the guides, who returned a doubtful answer, adding, that, when it was darker, it would be safest to rest, till the moon rose. 'It is scarcely safe to proceed now,' said the Count; but the guides, assuring him that there was no danger, went on. Blanche, revived by this assurance, again indulged a pensive pleasure, as she watched the progress of twilight gradually spreading its tints over the woods and mountains, and stealing from the eye every minuter feature of the scene, till the grand outlines of nature alone remained. Then fell the silent dews, and every wild flower, and aromatic plant, that bloomed among the cliffs, breathed forth its sweetness; then, too, when the mountainbee had crept into its blossomed bed, and the hum of every little insect, that had floated gaily in the sunbeam, was hushed, the sound of many streams, not heard till now, murmured at a distance.The bats alone, of all the animals inhabiting this region, seemed awake; and, while they flitted across the silent path, which Blanche was pursuing, she remembered the following lines, which Emily had given her TO THE BAT From haunt of man, from day's obtrusive glare, Thou shroud'st thee in the ruin's ivy'd tow'r. Or in some shadowy glen's romantic bow'r, Where wizard forms their mystic charms prepare, Where Horror lurks, and everboding Care! But, at the sweet and silent ev'ning hour, When clos'd in sleep is ev'ry languid flow'r, Thou lov'st to sport upon the twilight air, Mocking the eye, that would thy course pursue, In many a wantonround, elastic, gay, Thou flit'st athwart the pensive wand'rer's way, As his lone footsteps print the mountaindew. From Indian isles thou com'st, with Summer's car, Twilight thy lovethy guide her beaming star! To a warm imagination, the dubious forms, that float, half veiled in darkness, afford a higher delight, than the most distinct scenery, that the sun can shew. While the fancy thus wanders over landscapes partly of its own creation, a sweet complacency steals upon the mind, and Refines it all to subtlest feeling, Bids the tear of rapture roll. The distant note of a torrent, the weak trembling of the breeze among the woods, or the faroff sound of a human voice, now lost and heard again, are circumstances, which wonderfully heighten the enthusiastic tone of the mind. The young St. Foix, who saw the presentations of a fervid fancy, and felt whatever enthusiasm could suggest, sometimes interrupted the silence, which the rest of the party seemed by mutual consent to preserve, remarking and pointing out to Blanche the most striking effect of the hour upon the scenery; while Blanche, whose apprehensions were beguiled by the conversation of her lover, yielded to the taste so congenial to his, and they conversed in a low restrained voice, the effect of the pensive tranquillity, which twilight and the scene inspired, rather than of any fear, that they should be heard. But, while the heart was thus soothed to tenderness, St. Foix gradually mingled, with his admiration of the country, a mention of his affection; and he continued to speak, and Blanche to listen, till the mountains, the woods, and the magical illusions of twilight, were remembered no more. The shadows of evening soon shifted to the gloom of night, which was somewhat anticipated by the vapours, that, gathering fast round the mountains, rolled in dark wreaths along their sides; and the guides proposed to rest, till the moon should rise, adding, that they thought a storm was coming on. As they looked round for a spot, that might afford some kind of shelter, an object was perceived obscurely through the dusk, on a point of rock, a little way down the mountain, which they imagined to be a hunter's or a shepherd's cabin, and the party, with cautious steps, proceeded towards it. Their labour, however, was not rewarded, or their apprehensions soothed; for, on reaching the object of their search, they discovered a monumental cross, which marked the spot to have been polluted by murder. The darkness would not permit them to read the inscription; but the guides knew this to be a cross, raised to the memory of a Count de Beliard, who had been murdered here by a horde of banditti, that had infested this part of the Pyrenees, a few years before; and the uncommon size of the monument seemed to justify the supposition, that it was erected for a person of some distinction. Blanche shuddered, as she listened to some horrid particulars of the Count's fate, which one of the guides related in a low, restrained tone, as if the sound of his own voice frightened him; but, while they lingered at the cross, attending to his narrative, a flash of lightning glanced upon the rocks, thunder muttered at a distance, and the travellers, now alarmed, quitted this scene of solitary horror, in search of shelter. Having regained their former track, the guides, as they passed on, endeavoured to interest the Count by various stories of robbery, and even of murder, which had been perpetrated in the very places they must unavoidably pass, with accounts of their own dauntless courage and wonderful escapes. The chief guide, or rather he, who was the most completely armed, drawing forth one of the four pistols, that were tucked into his belt, swore, that it had shot three robbers within the year. He then brandished a claspknife of enormous length, and was going to recount the wonderful execution it had done, when St. Foix, perceiving, that Blanche was terrified, interrupted him. The Count, meanwhile, secretly laughing at the terrible histories and extravagant boastings of the man, resolved to humour him, and, telling Blanche in a whisper, his design, began to recount some exploits of his own, which infinitely exceeded any related by the guide. To these surprising circumstances he so artfully gave the colouring of truth, that the courage of the guides was visibly affected by them, who continued silent, long after the Count had ceased to speak. The loquacity of the chief hero thus laid asleep, the vigilance of his eyes and ears seemed more thoroughly awakened, for he listened, with much appearance of anxiety, to the deep thunder, which murmured at intervals, and often paused, as the breeze, that was now rising, rushed among the pines. But, when he made a sudden halt before a tuft of cork trees, that projected over the road, and drew forth a pistol, before he would venture to brave the banditti which might lurk behind it, the Count could no longer refrain from laughter. Having now, however, arrived at a level spot, somewhat sheltered from the air, by overhanging cliffs and by a wood of larch, that rose over the precipice on the left, and the guides being yet ignorant how far they were from the inn, the travellers determined to rest, till the moon should rise, or the storm disperse. Blanche, recalled to a sense of the present moment, looked on the surrounding gloom, with terror; but giving her hand to St. Foix, she alighted, and the whole party entered a kind of cave, if such it could be called, which was only a shallow cavity, formed by the curve of impending rocks. A light being struck, a fire was kindled, whose blaze afforded some degree of cheerfulness, and no small comfort, for, though the day had been hot, the night air of this mountainous region was chilling; a fire was partly necessary also to keep off the wolves, with which those wilds were infested. Provisions being spread upon a projection of the rock, the Count and his family partook of a supper, which, in a scene less rude, would certainly have been thought less excellent. When the repast was finished, St. Foix, impatient for the moon, sauntered along the precipice, to a point, that fronted the east; but all was yet wrapt in gloom, and the silence of night was broken only by the murmuring of woods, that waved far below, or by distant thunder, and, now and then, by the faint voices of the party he had quitted. He viewed, with emotions of awful sublimity, the long volumes of sulphureous clouds, that floated along the upper and middle regions of the air, and the lightnings that flashed from them, sometimes silently, and, at others, followed by sullen peals of thunder, which the mountains feebly prolonged, while the whole horizon, and the abyss, on which he stood, were discovered in the momentary light. Upon the succeeding darkness, the fire, which had been kindled in the cave, threw a partial gleam, illumining some points of the opposite rocks, and the summits of pinewoods, that hung beetling on the cliffs below, while their recesses seemed to frown in deeper shade. St. Foix stopped to observe the picture, which the party in the cave presented, where the elegant form of Blanche was finely contrasted by the majestic figure of the Count, who was seated by her on a rude stone, and each was rendered more impressive by the grotesque habits and strong features of the guides and other attendants, who were in the back ground of the piece. The effect of the light, too, was interesting; on the surrounding figures it threw a strong, though pale gleam, and glittered on their bright arms; while upon the foliage of a gigantic larch, that impended its shade over the cliff above, appeared a red, dusky tint, deepening almost imperceptibly into the blackness of night. While St. Foix contemplated the scene, the moon, broad and yellow, rose over the eastern summits, from among embattled clouds, and shewed dimly the grandeur of the heavens, the mass of vapours, that rolled half way down the precipice beneath, and the doubtful mountains. What dreadful pleasure! there to stand sublime, Like shipwreck'd mariner on desert coast, And view th'enormous waste of vapour, tost In billows length'ning to th'horizon round! THE MINSTREL From this romantic reverie he was awakened by the voices of the guides, repeating his name, which was reverbed from cliff to cliff, till an hundred tongues seemed to call him; when he soon quieted the fears of the Count and the Lady Blanche, by returning to the cave. As the storm, however, seemed approaching, they did not quit their place of shelter; and the Count, seated between his daughter and St. Foix, endeavoured to divert the fears of the former, and conversed on subjects, relating to the natural history of the scene, among which they wandered. He spoke of the mineral and fossile substances, found in the depths of these mountains,the veins of marble and granite, with which they abounded, the strata of shells, discovered near their summits, many thousand fathom above the level of the sea, and at a vast distance from its present shore;of the tremendous chasms and caverns of the rocks, the grotesque form of the mountains, and the various phaenomena, that seem to stamp upon the world the history of the deluge. From the natural history he descended to the mention of events and circumstances, connected with the civil story of the Pyrenees; named some of the most remarkable fortresses, which France and Spain had erected in the passes of these mountains; and gave a brief account of some celebrated sieges and encounters in early times, when Ambition first frightened Solitude from these her deep recesses, made her mountains, which before had echoed only to the torrent's roar, tremble with the clang of arms, and, when man's first footsteps in her sacred haunts had left the print of blood! As Blanche sat, attentive to the narrative, that rendered the scenes doubly interesting, and resigned to solemn emotion, while she considered, that she was on the very ground, once polluted by these events, her reverie was suddenly interrupted by a sound, that came in the wind.It was the distant bark of a watchdog.

The travellers listened with eager hope, and, as the wind blew stronger, fancied, that the sound came from no great distance; and, the guides having little doubt, that it proceeded from the inn they were in search of, the Count determined to pursue his way. The moon now afforded a stronger, though still an uncertain light, as she moved among broken clouds; and the travellers, led by the sound, recommenced their journey along the brow of the precipice, preceded by a single torch, that now contended with the moonlight; for the guides, believing they should reach the inn soon after sunset, had neglected to provide more. In silent caution they followed the sound, which was heard but at intervals, and which, after some time entirely ceased. The guides endeavoured, however, to point their course to the quarter, whence it had issued, but the deep roaring of a torrent soon seized their attention, and presently they came to a tremendous chasm of the mountain, which seemed to forbid all further progress. Blanche alighted from her mule, as did the Count and St. Foix, while the guides traversed the edge in search of a bridge, which, however rude, might convey them to the opposite side, and they, at length, confessed, what the Count had begun to suspect, that they had been, for some time, doubtful of their way, and were now certain only, that they had lost it. At a little distance, was discovered a rude and dangerous passage, formed by an enormous pine, which, thrown across the chasm, united the opposite precipices, and which had been felled probably by the hunter, to facilitate his chace of the izard, or the wolf. The whole party, the guides excepted, shuddered at the prospect of crossing this alpine bridge, whose sides afforded no kind of defence, and from which to fall was to die. The guides, however, prepared to lead over the mules, while Blanche stood trembling on the brink, and listening to the roar of the waters, which were seen descending from rocks above, overhung with lofty pines, and thence precipitating themselves into the deep abyss, where their white surges gleamed faintly in the moonlight. The poor animals proceeded over this perilous bridge with instinctive caution, neither frightened by the noise of the cataract, or deceived by the gloom, which the impending foliage threw athwart their way. It was now, that the solitary torch, which had been hitherto of little service, was found to be an inestimable treasure; and Blanche, terrified, shrinking, but endeavouring to recollect all her firmness and presence of mind, preceded by her lover and supported by her father, followed the red gleam of the torch, in safety, to the opposite cliff. As they went on, the heights contracted, and formed a narrow pass, at the bottom of which, the torrent they had just crossed, was heard to thunder. But they were again cheered by the bark of a dog, keeping watch, perhaps, over the flocks of the mountains, to protect them from the nightly descent of the wolves. The sound was much nearer than before, and, while they rejoiced in the hope of soon reaching a place of repose, a light was seen to glimmer at a distance. It appeared at a height considerably above the level of their path, and was lost and seen again, as if the waving branches of trees sometimes excluded and then admitted its rays. The guides hallooed with all their strength, but the sound of no human voice was heard in return, and, at length, as a more effectual means of making themselves known, they fired a pistol. But, while they listened in anxious expectation, the noise of the explosion was alone heard, echoing among the rocks, and it gradually sunk into silence, which no friendly hint of man disturbed. The light, however, that had been seen before, now became plainer, and, soon after, voices were heard indistinctly on the wind; but, upon the guides repeating the call, the voices suddenly ceased, and the light disappeared. The Lady Blanche was now almost sinking beneath the pressure of anxiety, fatigue and apprehension, and the united efforts of the Count and St. Foix could scarcely support her spirits. As they continued to advance, an object was perceived on a point of rock above, which, the strong rays of the moon then falling on it, appeared to be a watchtower. The Count, from its situation and some other circumstances, had little doubt, that it was such, and believing, that the light had proceeded from thence, he endeavoured to reanimate his daughter's spirits by the near prospect of shelter and repose, which, however rude the accommodation, a ruined watchtower might afford. 'Numerous watchtowers have been erected among the Pyrenees,' said the Count, anxious only to call Blanche's attention from the subject of her fears; 'and the method, by which they give intelligence of the approach of the enemy, is, you know, by fires, kindled on the summits of these edifices. Signals have thus, sometimes, been communicated from post to post, along a frontier line of several hundred miles in length. Then, as occasion may require, the lurking armies emerge from their fortresses and the forests, and march forth, to defend, perhaps, the entrance of some grand pass, where, planting themselves on the heights, they assail their astonished enemies, who wind along the glen below, with fragments of the shattered cliff, and pour death and defeat upon them. The ancient forts, and watchtowers, overlooking the grand passes of the Pyrenees, are carefully preserved; but some of those in inferior stations have been suffered to fall into decay, and are now frequently converted into the more peaceful habitation of the hunter, or the shepherd, who, after a day of toil, retires hither, and, with his faithful dogs, forgets, near a cheerful blaze, the labour of the chace, or the anxiety of collecting his wandering flocks, while he is sheltered from the nightly storm.' 'But are they always thus peacefully inhabited?' said the Lady Blanche. 'No,' replied the Count, 'they are sometimes the asylum of French and Spanish smugglers, who cross the mountains with contraband goods from their respective countries, and the latter are particularly numerous, against whom strong parties of the king's troops are sometimes sent. But the desperate resolution of these adventurers, who, knowing, that, if they are taken, they must expiate the breach of the law by the most cruel death, travel in large parties, well armed, often daunts the courage of the soldiers. The smugglers, who seek only safety, never engage, when they can possibly avoid it; the military, also, who know, that in these encounters, danger is certain, and glory almost unattainable, are equally reluctant to fight; an engagement, therefore, very seldom happens, but, when it does, it never concludes till after the most desperate and bloody conflict. You are inattentive, Blanche,' added the Count 'I have wearied you with a dull subject; but see, yonder, in the moonlight, is the edifice we have been in search of, and we are fortunate to be so near it, before the storm bursts.' Blanche, looking up, perceived, that they were at the foot of the cliff, on whose summit the building stood, but no light now issued from it; the barking of the dog too had, for some time, ceased, and the guides began to doubt, whether this was really the object of their search. From the distance, at which they surveyed it, shewn imperfectly by a cloudy moon, it appeared to be of more extent than a single watchtower; but the difficulty was how to ascend the height, whose abrupt declivities seemed to afford no kind of pathway. While the guides carried forward the torch to examine the cliff, the Count, remaining with Blanche and St. Foix at its foot, under the shadow of the woods, endeavoured again to beguile the time by conversation, but again anxiety abstracted the mind of Blanche; and he then consulted, apart with St. Foix, whether it would be advisable, should a path be found, to venture to an edifice, which might possibly harbour banditti. They considered, that their own party was not small, and that several of them were well armed; and, after enumerating the dangers, to be incurred by passing the night in the open wild, exposed, perhaps, to the effects of a thunderstorm, there remained not a doubt, that they ought to endeavour to obtain admittance to the edifice above, at any hazard respecting the inhabitants it might harbour; but the darkness, and the dead silence, that surrounded it, appeared to contradict the probability of its being inhabited at all. A shout from the guides aroused their attention, after which, in a few minutes, one of the Count's servants returned with intelligence, that a path was found, and they immediately hastened to join the guides, when they all ascended a little winding way cut in the rock among thickets of dwarf wood, and, after much toil and some danger, reached the summit, where several ruined towers, surrounded by a massy wall, rose to their view, partially illumined by the moonlight. The space around the building was silent, and apparently forsaken, but the Count was cautious; 'Step softly,' said he, in a low voice, 'while we reconnoitre the edifice.' Having proceeded silently along for some paces, they stopped at a gate, whose portals were terrible even in ruins, and, after a moment's hesitation, passed on to the court of entrance, but paused again at the head of a terrace, which, branching from it, ran along the brow of a precipice. Over this, rose the main body of the edifice, which was now seen to be, not a watchtower, but one of those ancient fortresses, that, from age and neglect, had fallen to decay. Many parts of it, however, appeared to be still entire; it was built of grey stone, in the heavy Saxongothic style, with enormous round towers, buttresses of proportionable strength, and the arch of the large gate, which seemed to open into the hall of the fabric, was round, as was that of a window above. The air of solemnity, which must so strongly have characterized the pile even in the days of its early strength, was now considerably heightened by its shattered battlements and halfdemolished walls, and by the huge masses of ruin, scattered in its wide area, now silent and grass grown. In this court of entrance stood the gigantic remains of an oak, that seemed to have flourished and decayed with the building, which it still appeared frowningly to protect by the few remaining branches, leafless and mossgrown, that crowned its trunk, and whose wide extent told how enormous the tree had been in a former age. This fortress was evidently once of great strength, and, from its situation on a point of rock, impending over a deep glen, had been of great power to annoy, as well as to resist; the Count, therefore, as he stood surveying it, was somewhat surprised, that it had been suffered, ancient as it was, to sink into ruins, and its present lonely and deserted air excited in his breast emotions of melancholy awe. While he indulged, for a moment, these emotions, he thought he heard a sound of remote voices steal upon the stillness, from within the building, the front of which he again surveyed with scrutinizing eyes, but yet no light was visible. He now determined to walk round the fort, to that remote part of it, whence he thought the voices had arisen, that he might examine whether any light could be discerned there, before he ventured to knock at the gate; for this purpose, he entered upon the terrace, where the remains of cannon were yet apparent in the thick walls, but he had not proceeded many paces, when his steps were suddenly arrested by the loud barking of a dog within, and which he fancied to be the same, whose voice had been the means of bringing the travellers thither. It now appeared certain, that the place was inhabited, and the Count returned to consult again with St. Foix, whether he should try to obtain admittance, for its wild aspect had somewhat shaken his former resolution; but, after a second consultation, he submitted to the considerations, which before determined him, and which were strengthened by the discovery of the dog, that guarded the fort, as well as by the stillness that pervaded it. He, therefore, ordered one of his servants to knock at the gate, who was advancing to obey him, when a light appeared through the loophole of one of the towers, and the Count called loudly, but, receiving no answer, he went up to the gate himself, and struck upon it with an ironpointed pole, which had assisted him to climb the steep. When the echoes had ceased, that this blow had awakened, the renewed barking,and there were now more than one dog,was the only sound, that was heard. The Count stepped back, a few paces, to observe whether the light was in the tower, and, perceiving, that it was gone, he returned to the portal, and had lifted the pole to strike again, when again he fancied he heard the murmur of voices within, and paused to listen. He was confirmed in the supposition, but they were too remote, to be heard otherwise than in a murmur, and the Count now let the pole fall heavily upon the gate; when almost immediately a profound silence followed. It was apparent, that the people within had heard the sound, and their caution in admitting strangers gave him a favourable opinion of them. 'They are either hunters or shepherds,' said he, 'who, like ourselves, have probably sought shelter from the night within these walls, and are fearful of admitting strangers, lest they should prove robbers. I will endeavour to remove their fears.' So saying, he called aloud, 'We are friends, who ask shelter from the night.' In a few moments, steps were heard within, which approached, and a voice then enquired'Who calls?' 'Friends,' repeated the Count; 'open the gates, and you shall know more.'Strong bolts were now heard to be undrawn, and a man, armed with a hunting spear, appeared. 'What is it you want at this hour?' said he. The Count beckoned his attendants, and then answered, that he wished to enquire the way to the nearest cabin. 'Are you so little acquainted with these mountains,' said the man, 'as not to know, that there is none, within several leagues? I cannot shew you the way; you must seek itthere's a moon.' Saying this, he was closing the gate, and the Count was turning away, half disappointed and half afraid, when another voice was heard from above, and, on looking up, he saw a light, and a man's face, at the grate of the portal. 'Stay, friend, you have lost your way?' said the voice. 'You are hunters, I suppose, like ourselves I will be with you presently.' The voice ceased, and the light disappeared. Blanche had been alarmed by the appearance of the man, who had opened the gate, and she now entreated her father to quit the place; but the Count had observed the hunter's spear, which he carried; and the words from the tower encouraged him to await the event. The gate was soon opened, and several men in hunters' habits, who had heard above what had passed below, appeared, and, having listened some time to the Count, told him he was welcome to rest there for the night. They then pressed him, with much courtesy, to enter, and to partake of such fare as they were about to sit down to. The Count, who had observed them attentively while they spoke, was cautious, and somewhat suspicious; but he was also weary, fearful of the approaching storm, and of encountering alpine heights in the obscurity of night; being likewise somewhat confident in the strength and number of his attendants, he, after some further consideration, determined to accept the invitation. With this resolution he called his servants, who, advancing round the tower, behind which some of them had silently listened to this conference, followed their Lord, the Lady Blanche, and St. Foix into the fortress. The strangers led them on to a large and rude hall, partially seen by a fire that blazed at its extremity, round which four men, in the hunter's dress, were seated, and on the hearth were several dogs stretched in sleep. In the middle of the hall stood a large table, and over the fire some part of an animal was boiling. As the Count approached, the men arose, and the dogs, half raising themselves, looked fiercely at the strangers, but, on hearing their masters' voices, kept their postures on the hearth. Blanche looked round this gloomy and spacious hall; then at the men, and to her father, who, smiling cheerfully at her, addressed himself to the hunters. 'This is an hospitable hearth,' said he, 'the blaze of a fire is reviving after having wandered so long in these dreary wilds. Your dogs are tired; what success have you had?' 'Such as we usually have,' replied one of the men, who had been seated in the hall, 'we kill our game with tolerable certainty.' 'These are fellow hunters,' said one of the men who had brought the Count hither, 'that have lost their way, and I have told them there is room enough in the fort for us all.' 'Very true, very true,' replied his companion, 'What luck have you had in the chace, brothers? We have killed two izards, and that, you will say, is pretty well.' 'You mistake, friend,' said the Count, 'we are not hunters, but travellers; but, if you will admit us to hunters' fare, we shall be well contented, and will repay your kindness.' 'Sit down then, brother,' said one of the men 'Jacques, lay more fuel on the fire, the kid will soon be ready; bring a seat for the lady too. Ma'amselle, will you taste our brandy? it is true Barcelona, and as bright as ever flowed from a keg.' Blanche timidly smiled, and was going to refuse, when her father prevented her, by taking, with a good humoured air, the glass offered to his daughter; and Mons. St. Foix, who was seated next her, pressed her hand, and gave her an encouraging look, but her attention was engaged by a man, who sat silently by the fire, observing St. Foix, with a steady and earnest eye. 'You lead a jolly life here,' said the Count. 'The life of a hunter is a pleasant and a healthy one; and the repose is sweet, which succeeds to your labour.' 'Yes,' replied one of his hosts, 'our life is pleasant enough. We live here only during the summer, and autumnal months; in winter, the place is dreary, and the swoln torrents, that descend from the heights, put a stop to the chace.' ''Tis a life of liberty and enjoyment,' said the Count 'I should like to pass a month in your way very well.' 'We find employment for our guns too,' said a man who stood behind the Count 'here are plenty of birds, of delicious flavour, that feed upon the wild thyme and herbs, that grow in the vallies. Now I think of it, there is a brace of birds hung up in the stone gallery; go fetch them, Jacques, we will have them dressed.' The Count now made enquiry, concerning the method of pursuing the chace among the rocks and precipices of these romantic regions, and was listening to a curious detail, when a horn was sounded at the gate. Blanche looked timidly at her father, who continued to converse on the subject of the chace, but whose countenance was somewhat expressive of anxiety, and who often turned his eyes towards that part of the hall nearest the gate. The horn sounded again, and a loud halloo succeeded. 'These are some of our companions, returned from their day's labour,' said a man, going lazily from his seat towards the gate; and in a few minutes, two men appeared, each with a gun over his shoulder, and pistols in his belt. 'What cheer, my lads? what cheer?' said they, as they approached. 'What luck?' returned their companions 'have you brought home your supper? You shall have none else.' 'Hah! who the devil have you brought home?' said they in bad Spanish, on perceiving the Count's party, 'are they from France, or Spain?where did you meet with them?' 'They met with us, and a merry meeting too,' replied his companion aloud in good French. 'This chevalier, and his party, had lost their way, and asked a night's lodging in the fort.' The others made no reply, but threw down a kind of knapsack, and drew forth several brace of birds. The bag sounded heavily as it fell to the ground, and the glitter of some bright metal within glanced on the eye of the Count, who now surveyed, with a more enquiring look, the man, that held the knapsack. He was a tall robust figure, of a hard countenance, and had short black hair, curling in his neck. Instead of the hunter's dress, he wore a faded military uniform; sandals were laced on his broad legs, and a kind of short trowsers hung from his waist. On his head he wore a leathern cap, somewhat resembling in shape an ancient Roman helmet; but the brows that scowled beneath it, would have characterized those of the barbarians, who conquered Rome, rather than those of a Roman soldier. The Count, at length, turned away his eyes, and remained silent and thoughtful, till, again raising them, he perceived a figure standing in an obscure part of the hall, fixed in attentive gaze on St. Foix, who was conversing with Blanche, and did not observe this; but the Count, soon after, saw the same man looking over the shoulder of the soldier as attentively at himself. He withdrew his eye, when that of the Count met it, who felt mistrust gathering fast upon his mind, but feared to betray it in his countenance, and, forcing his features to assume a smile, addressed Blanche on some indifferent subject. When he again looked round, he perceived, that the soldier and his companion were gone. The man, who was called Jacques, now returned from the stone gallery. 'A fire is lighted there,' said he, 'and the birds are dressing; the table too is spread there, for that place is warmer than this.' His companions approved of the removal, and invited their guests to follow to the gallery, of whom Blanche appeared distressed, and remained seated, and St. Foix looked at the Count, who said, he preferred the comfortable blaze of the fire he was then near. The hunters, however, commended the warmth of the other apartment, and pressed his removal with such seeming courtesy, that the Count, half doubting, and half fearful of betraying his doubts, consented to go. The long and ruinous passages, through which they went, somewhat daunted him, but the thunder, which now burst in loud peals above, made it dangerous to quit this place of shelter, and he forbore to provoke his conductors by shewing that he distrusted them. The hunters led the way, with a lamp; the Count and St. Foix, who wished to please their hosts by some instances of familiarity, carried each a seat, and Blanche followed, with faltering steps. As she passed on, part of her dress caught on a nail in the wall, and, while she stopped, somewhat too scrupulously, to disengage it, the Count, who was talking to St. Foix, and neither of whom observed the circumstance, followed their conductor round an abrupt angle of the passage, and Blanche was left behind in darkness. The thunder prevented them from hearing her call but, having disengaged her dress, she quickly followed, as she thought, the way they had taken. A light, that glimmered at a distance, confirmed this belief, and she proceeded towards an open door, whence it issued, conjecturing the room beyond to be the stone gallery the men had spoken of. Hearing voices as she advanced, she paused within a few paces of the chamber, that she might be certain whether she was right, and from thence, by the light of a lamp, that hung from the ceiling, observed four men, seated round a table, over which they leaned in apparent consultation. In one of them she distinguished the features of him, whom she had observed, gazing at St. Foix, with such deep attention; and who was now speaking in an earnest, though restrained voice, till, one of his companions seeming to oppose him, they spoke together in a loud and harsher tone. Blanche, alarmed by perceiving that neither her father, or St. Foix were there, and terrified at the fierce countenances and manners of these men, was turning hastily from the chamber, to pursue her search of the gallery, when she heard one of the men say 'Let all dispute end here. Who talks of danger? Follow my advice, and there will be nonesecure THEM, and the rest are an easy prey.' Blanche, struck with these words, paused a moment, to hear more. 'There is nothing to be got by the rest,' said one of his companions, 'I am never for blood when I can help itdispatch the two others, and our business is done; the rest may go.' 'May they so?' exclaimed the first ruffian, with a tremendous oath'What! to tell how we have disposed of their masters, and to send the king's troops to drag us to the wheel! You was always a choice adviserI warrant we have not yet forgot St. Thomas's eve last year.' Blanche's heart now sunk with horror. Her first impulse was to retreat from the door, but, when she would have gone, her trembling frame refused to support her, and, having tottered a few paces, to a more obscure part of the passage, she was compelled to listen to the dreadful councils of those, who, she was no longer suffered to doubt, were banditti. In the next moment, she heard the following words, 'Why you would not murder the whole GANG?' 'I warrant our lives are as good as theirs,' replied his comrade. 'If we don't kill them, they will hang us better they should die than we be hanged.' 'Better, better,' cried his comrades. 'To commit murder, is a hopeful way of escaping the gallows!' said the first ruffian'many an honest fellow has run his head into the noose that way, though.' There was a pause of some moments, during which they appeared to be considering. 'Confound those fellows,' exclaimed one of the robbers impatiently, 'they ought to have been here by this time; they will come back presently with the old story, and no booty if they were here, our business would be plain and easy. I see we shall not be able to do the business tonight, for our numbers are not equal to the enemy, and in the morning they will be for marching off, and how can we detain them without force?' 'I have been thinking of a scheme, that will do,' said one of his comrades 'if we can dispatch the two chevaliers silently, it will be easy to master the rest.' 'That's a plausible scheme, in good faith,' said another with a smile of scorn'If I can eat my way through the prison wall, I shall be at liberty!How can we dispatch them SILENTLY?' 'By poison,' replied his companions. 'Well said! that will do,' said the second ruffian, 'that will give a lingering death too, and satisfy my revenge. These barons shall take care how they again tempt our vengeance.' 'I knew the son, the moment I saw him,' said the man, whom Blanche had observed gazing on St. Foix, 'though he does not know me; the father I had almost forgotten.' 'Well, you may say what you will,' said the third ruffian, 'but I don't believe he is the Baron, and I am as likely to know as any of you, for I was one of them, that attacked him, with our brave lads, that suffered.' 'And was not I another?' said the first ruffian, 'I tell you he is the Baron; but what does it signify whether he is or not?shall we let all this booty go out of our hands? It is not often we have such luck at this. While we run the chance of the wheel for smuggling a few pounds of tobacco, to cheat the king's manufactory, and of breaking our necks down the precipices in the chace of our food; and, now and then, rob a brother smuggler, or a straggling pilgrim, of what scarcely repays us the powder we fire at them, shall we let such a prize as this go? Why they have enough about them to keep us for' 'I am not for that, I am not for that,' replied the third robber, 'let us make the most of them only, if this is the Baron, I should like to have a flash the more at him, for the sake of our brave comrades, that he brought to the gallows.' 'Aye, aye, flash as much as you will,' rejoined the first man, 'but I tell you the Baron is a taller man.' 'Confound your quibbling,' said the second ruffian, 'shall we let them go or not? If we stay here much longer, they will take the hint, and march off without our leave. Let them be who they will, they are rich, or why all those servants? Did you see the ring, he, you call the Baron, had on his finger?it was a diamond; but he has not got it on now he saw me looking at it, I warrant, and took it off.' 'Aye, and then there is the picture; did you see that? She has not taken that off,' observed the first ruffian, 'it hangs at her neck; if it had not sparkled so, I should not have found it out, for it was almost hid by her dress; those are diamonds too, and a rare many of them there must be, to go round such a large picture.' 'But how are we to manage this business?' said the second ruffian 'let us talk of that, there is no fear of there being booty enough, but how are we to secure it?' 'Aye, aye,' said his comrades, 'let us talk of that, and remember no time is to be lost.' 'I am still for poison,' observed the third, 'but consider their number; why there are nine or ten of them, and armed too; when I saw so many at the gate, I was not for letting them in, you know, nor you either.' 'I thought they might be some of our enemies,' replied the second, 'I did not so much mind numbers.' 'But you must mind them now,' rejoined his comrade, 'or it will be worse for you. We are not more than six, and how can we master ten by open force? I tell you we must give some of them a dose, and the rest may then be managed.' 'I'll tell you a better way,' rejoined the other impatiently, 'draw closer.' Blanche, who had listened to this conversation, in an agony, which it would be impossible to describe, could no longer distinguish what was said, for the ruffians now spoke in lowered voices; but the hope, that she might save her friends from the plot, if she could find her way quickly to them, suddenly reanimated her spirits, and lent her strength enough to turn her steps in search of the gallery. Terror, however, and darkness conspired against her, and, having moved a few yards, the feeble light, that issued from the chamber, no longer even contended with the gloom, and, her foot stumbling over a step that crossed the passage, she fell to the ground. The noise startled the banditti, who became suddenly silent, and then all rushed to the passage, to examine whether any person was there, who might have overheard their councils. Blanche saw them approaching, and perceived their fierce and eager looks but, before she could raise herself, they discovered and seized her, and, as they dragged her towards the chamber they had quitted, her screams drew from them horrible threatenings. Having reached the room, they began to consult what they should do with her. 'Let us first know what she had heard,' said the chief robber. 'How long have you been in the passage, lady, and what brought you there?' 'Let us first secure that picture,' said one of his comrades, approaching the trembling Blanche. 'Fair lady, by your leave that picture is mine; come, surrender it, or I shall seize it.' Blanche, entreating their mercy, immediately gave up the miniature, while another of the ruffians fiercely interrogated her, concerning what she had overheard of their conversation, when, her confusion and terror too plainly telling what her tongue feared to confess, the ruffians looked expressively upon one another, and two of them withdrew to a remote part of the room, as if to consult further. 'These are diamonds, by St. Peter!' exclaimed the fellow, who had been examining the miniature, 'and here is a very pretty picture too, 'faith; as handsome a young chevalier, as you would wish to see by a summer's sun. Lady, this is your spouse, I warrant, for it is the spark, that was in your company just now.' Blanche, sinking with terror, conjured him to have pity on her, and, delivering him her purse, promised to say nothing of what had passed, if he would suffer her to return to her friends.

He smiled ironically, and was going to reply, when his attention was called off by a distant noise; and, while he listened, he grasped the arm of Blanche more firmly, as if he feared she would escape from him, and she again shrieked for help. The approaching sounds called the ruffians from the other part of the chamber. 'We are betrayed,' said they; 'but let us listen a moment, perhaps it is only our comrades come in from the mountains, and if so, our work is sure; listen!' A distant discharge of shot confirmed this supposition for a moment, but, in the next, the former sounds drawing nearer, the clashing of swords, mingled with the voices of loud contention and with heavy groans, were distinguished in the avenue leading to the chamber. While the ruffians prepared their arms, they heard themselves called by some of their comrades afar off, and then a shrill horn was sounded without the fortress, a signal, it appeared, they too well understood; for three of them, leaving the Lady Blanche to the care of the fourth, instantly rushed from the chamber. While Blanche, trembling, and nearly fainting, was supplicating for release, she heard amid the tumult, that approached, the voice of St. Foix, and she had scarcely renewed her shriek, when the door of the room was thrown open, and he appeared, much disfigured with blood, and pursued by several ruffians. Blanche neither saw, or heard any more; her head swam, her sight failed, and she became senseless in the arms of the robber, who had detained her. When she recovered, she perceived, by the gloomy light, that trembled round her, that she was in the same chamber, but neither the Count, St. Foix, or any other person appeared, and she continued, for some time, entirely still, and nearly in a state of stupefaction. But, the dreadful images of the past returning, she endeavoured to raise herself, that she might seek her friends, when a sullen groan, at a little distance, reminded her of St. Foix, and of the condition, in which she had seen him enter this room; then, starting from the floor, by a sudden effort of horror, she advanced to the place whence the sound had proceeded, where a body was lying stretched upon the pavement, and where, by the glimmering light of a lamp, she discovered the pale and disfigured countenance of St. Foix. Her horrors, at that moment, may be easily imagined. He was speechless; his eyes were half closed, and, on the hand, which she grasped in the agony of despair, cold damps had settled. While she vainly repeated his name, and called for assistance, steps approached, and a person entered the chamber, who, she soon perceived, was not the Count, her father; but, what was her astonishment, when, supplicating him to give his assistance to St. Foix, she discovered Ludovico! He scarcely paused to recognise her, but immediately bound up the wounds of the Chevalier, and, perceiving, that he had fainted probably from loss of blood, ran for water; but he had been absent only a few moments, when Blanche heard other steps approaching, and, while she was almost frantic with apprehension of the ruffians, the light of a torch flashed upon the walls, and then Count De Villefort appeared, with an affrighted countenance, and breathless with impatience, calling upon his daughter. At the sound of his voice, she rose, and ran to his arms, while he, letting fall the bloody sword he held, pressed her to his bosom in a transport of gratitude and joy, and then hastily enquired for St. Foix, who now gave some signs of life. Ludovico soon after returning with water and brandy, the former was applied to his lips, and the latter to his temples and hands, and Blanche, at length, saw him unclose his eyes, and then heard him enquire for her; but the joy she felt, on this occasion, was interrupted by new alarms, when Ludovico said it would be necessary to remove Mons. St. Foix immediately, and added, 'The banditti, that are out, my Lord, were expected home, an hour ago, and they will certainly find us, if we delay. That shrill horn, they know, is never sounded by their comrades but on most desperate occasions, and it echoes among the mountains for many leagues round. I have known them brought home by its sound even from the Pied de Melicant. Is any body standing watch at the great gate, my Lord?' 'Nobody,' replied the Count; 'the rest of my people are now scattered about, I scarcely know where. Go, Ludovico, collect them together, and look out yourself, and listen if you hear the feet of mules.' Ludovico then hurried away, and the Count consulted as to the means of removing St. Foix, who could not have borne the motion of a mule, even if his strength would have supported him in the saddle. While the Count was telling, that the banditti, whom they had found in the fort, were secured in the dungeon, Blanche observed that he was himself wounded, and that his left arm was entirely useless; but he smiled at her anxiety, assuring her the wound was trifling. The Count's servants, except two who kept watch at the gate, now appeared, and, soon after, Ludovico. 'I think I hear mules coming along the glen, my Lord,' said he, 'but the roaring of the torrent below will not let me be certain; however, I have brought what will serve the Chevalier,' he added, shewing a bear's skin, fastened to a couple of long poles, which had been adapted for the purpose of bringing home such of the banditti as happened to be wounded in their encounters. Ludovico spread it on the ground, and, placing the skins of several goats upon it, made a kind of bed, into which the Chevalier, who was however now much revived, was gently lifted; and, the poles being raised upon the shoulders of the guides, whose footing among these steeps could best be depended upon, he was borne along with an easy motion. Some of the Count's servants were also woundedbut not materially, and, their wounds being bound up, they now followed to the great gate. As they passed along the hall, a loud tumult was heard at some distance, and Blanche was terrified. 'It is only those villains in the dungeon, my Lady,' said Ludovico. 'They seem to be bursting it open,' said the Count. 'No, my Lord,' replied Ludovico, 'it has an iron door; we have nothing to fear from them; but let me go first, and look out from the rampart.' They quickly followed him, and found their mules browsing before the gates, where the party listened anxiously, but heard no sound, except that of the torrent below and of the early breeze, sighing among the branches of the old oak, that grew in the court; and they were now glad to perceive the first tints of dawn over the mountaintops. When they had mounted their mules, Ludovico, undertaking to be their guide, led them by an easier path, than that by which they had formerly ascended, into the glen. 'We must avoid that valley to the east, my Lord,' said he, 'or we may meet the banditti; they went out that way in the morning.' The travellers, soon after, quitted this glen, and found themselves in a narrow valley that stretched towards the northwest. The morning light upon the mountains now strengthened fast, and gradually discovered the green hillocks, that skirted the winding feet of the cliffs, tufted with cork tree, and evergreen oak. The thunderclouds being dispersed, had left the sky perfectly serene, and Blanche was revived by the fresh breeze, and by the view of verdure, which the late rain had brightened. Soon after, the sun arose, when the dripping rocks, with the shrubs that fringed their summits, and many a turfy slope below, sparkled in his rays. A wreath of mist was seen, floating along the extremity of the valley, but the gale bore it before the travellers, and the sunbeams gradually drew it up towards the summit of the mountains. They had proceeded about a league, when, St. Foix having complained of extreme faintness, they stopped to give him refreshment, and, that the men, who bore him, might rest. Ludovico had brought from the fort some flasks of rich Spanish wine, which now proved a reviving cordial not only to St. Foix but to the whole party, though to him it gave only temporary relief, for it fed the fever, that burned in his veins, and he could neither disguise in his countenance the anguish he suffered, or suppress the wish, that he was arrived at the inn, where they had designed to pass the preceding night. While they thus reposed themselves under the shade of the dark green pines, the Count desired Ludovico to explain shortly, by what means he had disappeared from the north apartment, how he came into the hands of the banditti, and how he had contributed so essentially to serve him and his family, for to him he justly attributed their present deliverance. Ludovico was going to obey him, when suddenly they heard the echo of a pistolshot, from the way they had passed, and they rose in alarm, hastily to pursue their route. Chapter 13 Ah why did Fate his steps decoy In stormy paths to roam, Remote from all congenial joy! BEATTIE Emily, mean while, was still suffering anxiety as to the fate of Valancourt; but Theresa, having, at length, found a person, whom she could entrust on her errand to the steward, informed her, that the messenger would return on the following day; and Emily promised to be at the cottage, Theresa being too lame to attend her. In the evening, therefore, Emily set out alone for the cottage, with a melancholy foreboding, concerning Valancourt, while, perhaps, the gloom of the hour might contribute to depress her spirits. It was a grey autumnal evening towards the close of the season; heavy mists partially obscured the mountains, and a chilling breeze, that sighed among the beech woods, strewed her path with some of their last yellow leaves. These, circling in the blast and foretelling the death of the year, gave an image of desolation to her mind, and, in her fancy, seemed to announce the death of Valancourt. Of this she had, indeed, more than once so strong a presentiment, that she was on the point of returning home, feeling herself unequal to an encounter with the certainty she anticipated, but, contending with her emotions, she so far commanded them, as to be able to proceed. While she walked mournfully on, gazing on the long volumes of vapour, that poured upon the sky, and watching the swallows, tossed along the wind, now disappearing among tempestuous clouds, and then emerging, for a moment, in circles upon the calmer air, the afflictions and vicissitudes of her late life seemed pourtrayed in these fleeting images;thus had she been tossed upon the stormy sea of misfortune for the last year, with but short intervals of peace, if peace that could be called, which was only the delay of evils. And now, when she had escaped from so many dangers, was become independent of the will of those, who had oppressed her, and found herself mistress of a large fortune, now, when she might reasonably have expected happiness, she perceived that she was as distant from it as ever. She would have accused herself of weakness and ingratitude in thus suffering a sense of the various blessings she possessed to be overcome by that of a single misfortune, had this misfortune affected herself alone; but, when she had wept for Valancourt even as living, tears of compassion had mingled with those of regret, and while she lamented a human being degraded to vice, and consequently to misery, reason and humanity claimed these tears, and fortitude had not yet taught her to separate them from those of love; in the present moments, however, it was not the certainty of his guilt, but the apprehension of his death (of a death also, to which she herself, however innocently, appeared to have been in some degree instrumental) that oppressed her. This fear increased, as the means of certainty concerning it approached; and, when she came within view of Theresa's cottage, she was so much disordered, and her resolution failed her so entirely, that, unable to proceed, she rested on a bank, beside her path; where, as she sat, the wind that groaned sullenly among the lofty branches above, seemed to her melancholy imagination to bear the sounds of distant lamentation, and, in the pauses of the gust, she still fancied she heard the feeble and faroff notes of distress. Attention convinced her, that this was no more than fancy; but the increasing gloom, which seemed the sudden close of day, soon warned her to depart, and, with faltering steps, she again moved toward the cottage. Through the casement appeared the cheerful blaze of a wood fire, and Theresa, who had observed Emily approaching, was already at the door to receive her. 'It is a cold evening, madam,' said she, 'storms are coming on, and I thought you would like a fire. Do take this chair by the hearth.' Emily, thanking her for this consideration, sat down, and then, looking in her face, on which the wood fire threw a gleam, she was struck with its expression, and, unable to speak, sunk back in her chair with a countenance so full of woe, that Theresa instantly comprehended the occasion of it, but she remained silent. 'Ah!' said Emily, at length, 'it is unnecessary for me to ask the result of your enquiry, your silence, and that look, sufficiently explain it;he is dead!' 'Alas! my dear young lady,' replied Theresa, while tears filled her eyes, 'this world is made up of trouble! the rich have their share as well as the poor! But we must all endeavour to bear what Heaven pleases.' 'He is dead, then!'interrupted Emily'Valancourt is dead!' 'Awelladay! I fear he is,' replied Theresa. 'You fear!' said Emily, 'do you only fear?' 'Alas! yes, madam, I fear he is! neither the steward, or any of the Epourville family, have heard of him since he left Languedoc, and the Count is in great affliction about him, for he says he was always punctual in writing, but that now he has not received a line from him, since he left Languedoc; he appointed to be at home, three weeks ago, but he has neither come, or written, and they fear some accident has befallen him. Alas! that ever I should live to cry for his death! I am old, and might have died without being missed, but he'Emily was faint, and asked for some water, and Theresa, alarmed by the voice, in which she spoke, hastened to her assistance, and, while she held the water to Emily's lips, continued, 'My dear young mistress, do not take it so to heart; the Chevalier may be alive and well, for all this; let us hope the best!' 'O no! I cannot hope,' said Emily, 'I am acquainted with circumstances, that will not suffer me to hope. I am somewhat better now, and can hear what you have to say. Tell me, I entreat, the particulars of what you know.' 'Stay, till you are a little better, mademoiselle, you look sadly!' 'O no, Theresa, tell me all, while I have the power to hear it,' said Emily, 'tell me all, I conjure you!' 'Well, madam, I will then; but the steward did not say much, for Richard says he seemed shy of talking about Mons. Valancourt, and what he gathered was from Gabriel, one of the servants, who said he had heard it from my lord's gentleman.' 'What did he hear?' said Emily. 'Why, madam, Richard has but a bad memory, and could not remember half of it, and, if I had not asked him a great many questions, I should have heard little indeed. But he says that Gabriel said, that he and all the other servants were in great trouble about M. Valancourt, for that he was such a kind young gentleman, they all loved him, as well as if he had been their own brotherand now, to think what was become of him! For he used to be so courteous to them all, and, if any of them had been in fault, M. Valancourt was the first to persuade my lord to forgive them. And then, if any poor family was in distress, M. Valancourt was the first, too, to relieve them, though some folks, not a great way off, could have afforded that much better than he. And then, said Gabriel, he was so gentle to every body, and, for all he had such a noble look with him, he never would command, and call about him, as some of your quality people do, and we never minded him the less for that. Nay, says Gabriel, for that matter, we minded him the more, and would all have run to obey him at a word, sooner than if some folks had told us what to do at full length; aye, and were more afraid of displeasing him, too, than of them, that used rough words to us.' Emily, who no longer considered it to be dangerous to listen to praise, bestowed on Valancourt, did not attempt to interrupt Theresa, but sat, attentive to her words, though almost overwhelmed with grief. 'My Lord,' continued Theresa, 'frets about M. Valancourt sadly, and the more, because, they say, he had been rather harsh against him lately. Gabriel says he had it from my Lord's valet, that M. Valancourt had COMPORTED himself wildly at Paris, and had spent a great deal of money, more a great deal than my Lord liked, for he loves money better than M. Valancourt, who had been led astray sadly. Nay, for that matter, M. Valancourt had been put into prison at Paris, and my Lord, says Gabriel, refused to take him out, and said he deserved to suffer; and, when old Gregoire, the butler, heard of this, he actually bought a walkingstick to take with him to Paris, to visit his young master; but the next thing we hear is, that M. Valancourt is coming home. O, it was a joyful day when he came; but he was sadly altered, and my Lord looked very cool upon him, and he was very sad, indeed. And, soon after, he went away again into Languedoc, and, since that time, we have never seen him.' Theresa paused, and Emily, sighing deeply, remained with her eyes fixed upon the floor, without speaking. After a long pause, she enquired what further Theresa had heard. 'Yet why should I ask?' she added; 'what you have already told is too much. O Valancourt! thou art goneforever gone! and II have murdered thee!' These words, and the countenance of despair which accompanied them, alarmed Theresa, who began to fear, that the shock of the intelligence Emily had just received, had affected her senses. 'My dear young lady, be composed,' said she, 'and do not say such frightful words. You murder M. Valancourt,dear heart!' Emily replied only by a heavy sigh. 'Dear lady, it breaks my heart to see you look so,' said Theresa, 'do not sit with your eyes upon the ground, and all so pale and melancholy; it frightens me to see you.' Emily was still silent, and did not appear to hear any thing that was said to her. 'Besides, mademoiselle,' continued Theresa, 'M. Valancourt may be alive and merry yet, for what we know.' At the mention of his name, Emily raised her eyes, and fixed them, in a wild gaze, upon Theresa, as if she was endeavouring to understand what had been said. 'Aye, my dear lady,' said Theresa, mistaking the meaning of this considerate air, 'M. Valancourt may be alive and merry yet.' On the repetition of these words, Emily comprehended their import, but, instead of producing the effect intended, they seemed only to heighten her distress. She rose hastily from her chair, paced the little room, with quick steps, and, often sighing deeply, clasped her hands, and shuddered. Meanwhile, Theresa, with simple, but honest affection, endeavoured to comfort her; put more wood on the fire, stirred it up into a brighter blaze, swept the hearth, set the chair, which Emily had left, in a warmer situation, and then drew forth from a cupboard a flask of wine. 'It is a stormy night, madam,' said she, 'and blows colddo come nearer the fire, and take a glass of this wine; it will comfort you, as it has done me, often and often, for it is not such wine as one gets every day; it is rich Languedoc, and the last of six flasks that M. Valancourt sent me, the night before he left Gascony for Paris. They have served me, ever since, as cordials, and I never drink it, but I think of him, and what kind words he said to me when he gave them. Theresa, says he, you are not young now, and should have a glass of good wine, now and then. I will send you a few flasks, and, when you taste them, you will sometimes remember me your friend. Yesthose were his very wordsme your friend!' Emily still paced the room, without seeming to hear what Theresa said, who continued speaking. 'And I have remembered him, often enough, poor young gentleman!for he gave me this roof for a shelter, and that, which has supported me. Ah! he is in heaven, with my blessed master, if ever saint was!' Theresa's voice faltered; she wept, and set down the flask, unable to pour out the wine. Her grief seemed to recall Emily from her own, who went towards her, but then stopped, and, having gazed on her, for a moment, turned suddenly away, as if overwhelmed by the reflection, that it was Valancourt, whom Theresa lamented. While she yet paced the room, the still, soft note of an oboe, or flute, was heard mingling with the blast, the sweetness of which affected Emily's spirits; she paused a moment in attention; the tender tones, as they swelled along the wind, till they were lost again in the ruder gust, came with a plaintiveness, that touched her heart, and she melted into tears. 'Aye,' said Theresa, drying her eyes, 'there is Richard, our neighbour's son, playing on the oboe; it is sad enough, to hear such sweet music now.' Emily continued to weep, without replying. 'He often plays of an evening,' added Theresa, 'and, sometimes, the young folks dance to the sound of his oboe. But, dear young lady! do not cry so; and pray take a glass of this wine,' continued she, pouring some into a glass, and handing it to Emily, who reluctantly took it. 'Taste it for M. Valancourt's sake,' said Theresa, as Emily lifted the glass to her lips, 'for he gave it me, you know, madam.' Emily's hand trembled, and she spilt the wine as she withdrew it from her lips. 'For whose sake!who gave the wine?' said she in a faltering voice. 'M. Valancourt, dear lady. I knew you would be pleased with it. It is the last flask I have left.' Emily set the wine upon the table, and burst into tears, while Theresa, disappointed and alarmed, tried to comfort her; but she only waved her hand, entreated she might be left alone, and wept the more. A knock at the cottage door prevented Theresa from immediately obeying her mistress, and she was going to open it, when Emily, checking her, requested she would not admit any person; but, afterwards, recollecting, that she had ordered her servant to attend her home, she said it was only Philippe, and endeavoured to restrain her tears, while Theresa opened the door. A voice, that spoke without, drew Emily's attention. She listened, turned her eyes to the door, when a person now appeared, and immediately a bright gleam, that flashed from the fire, discoveredValancourt! Emily, on perceiving him, started from her chair, trembled, and, sinking into it again, became insensible to all around her. A scream from Theresa now told, that she knew Valancourt, whom her imperfect sight, and the duskiness of the place had prevented her from immediately recollecting; but his attention was immediately called from her to the person, whom he saw, falling from a chair near the fire; and, hastening to her assistance,he perceived, that he was supporting Emily! The various emotions, that seized him upon thus unexpectedly meeting with her, from whom he had believed he had parted for ever, and on beholding her pale and lifeless in his armsmay, perhaps, be imagined, though they could neither be then expressed, or now described, any more than Emily's sensations, when, at length, she unclosed her eyes, and, looking up, again saw Valancourt. The intense anxiety, with which he regarded her, was instantly changed to an expression of mingled joy and tenderness, as his eye met hers, and he perceived, that she was reviving. But he could only exclaim, 'Emily!' as he silently watched her recovery, while she averted her eye, and feebly attempted to withdraw her hand; but, in these the first moments, which succeeded to the pangs his supposed death had occasioned her, she forgot every fault, which had formerly claimed indignation, and beholding Valancourt such as he had appeared, when he won her early affection, she experienced emotions of only tenderness and joy. This, alas! was but the sunshine of a few short moments; recollections rose, like clouds, upon her mind, and, darkening the illusive image, that possessed it, she again beheld Valancourt, degradedValancourt unworthy of the esteem and tenderness she had once bestowed upon him; her spirits faltered, and, withdrawing her hand, she turned from him to conceal her grief, while he, yet more embarrassed and agitated, remained silent. A sense of what she owed to herself restrained her tears, and taught her soon to overcome, in some degree, the emotions of mingled joy and sorrow, that contended at her heart, as she rose, and, having thanked him for the assistance he had given her, bade Theresa good evening. As she was leaving the cottage, Valancourt, who seemed suddenly awakened as from a dream, entreated, in a voice, that pleaded powerfully for compassion, a few moments attention. Emily's heart, perhaps, pleaded as powerfully, but she had resolution enough to resist both, together with the clamorous entreaties of Theresa, that she would not venture home alone in the dark, and had already opened the cottage door, when the pelting storm compelled her to obey their requests. Silent and embarrassed, she returned to the fire, while Valancourt, with increasing agitation, paced the room, as if he wished, yet feared, to speak, and Theresa expressed without restraint her joy and wonder upon seeing him. 'Dear heart! sir,' said she, 'I never was so surprised and overjoyed in my life. We were in great tribulation before you came, for we thought you was dead, and were talking, and lamenting about you, just when you knocked at the door. My young mistress there was crying, fit to break her heart' Emily looked with much displeasure at Theresa, but, before she could speak, Valancourt, unable to repress the emotion, which Theresa's imprudent discovery occasioned, exclaimed, 'O my Emily! am I then still dear to you! Did you, indeed, honour me with a thoughta tear? O heavens! you weepyou weep now!' 'Theresa, sir,' said Emily, with a reserved air, and trying to conquer her tears, 'has reason to remember you with gratitude, and she was concerned, because she had not lately heard of you. Allow me to thank you for the kindness you have shewn her, and to say, that, since I am now upon the spot, she must not be further indebted to you.'' 'Emily,' said Valancourt, no longer master of his emotions, 'is it thus you meet him, whom once you meant to honour with your handthus you meet him, who has loved yousuffered for you?Yet what do I say? Pardon me, pardon me, mademoiselle St. Aubert, I know not what I utter. I have no longer any claim upon your remembranceI have forfeited every pretension to your esteem, your love. Yes! let me not forget, that I once possessed your affections, though to know that I have lost them, is my severest affliction. Afflictiondo I call it!that is a term of mildness.' 'Dear heart!' said Theresa, preventing Emily from replying, 'talk of once having her affections! Why, my dear young lady loves you now, better than she does any body in the whole world, though she pretends to deny it.' 'This is insupportable!' said Emily; 'Theresa, you know not what you say. Sir, if you respect my tranquillity, you will spare me from the continuance of this distress.' 'I do respect your tranquillity too much, voluntarily to interrupt it,' replied Valancourt, in whose bosom pride now contended with tenderness; 'and will not be a voluntary intruder. I would have entreated a few moments attentionyet I know not for what purpose. You have ceased to esteem me, and to recount to you my sufferings will degrade me more, without exciting even your pity. Yet I have been, O Emily! I am indeed very wretched!' added Valancourt, in a voice, that softened from solemnity into grief. 'What! is my dear young master going out in all this rain!' said Theresa. 'No, he shall not stir a step. Dear! dear! to see how gentlefolks can afford to throw away their happiness! Now, if you were poor people, there would be none of this. To talk of unworthiness, and not caring about one another, when I know there are not such a kindhearted lady and gentleman in the whole province, nor any that love one another half so well, if the truth was spoken!' Emily, in extreme vexation, now rose from her chair, 'I must be gone,' said she, 'the storm is over.' 'Stay, Emily, stay, mademoiselle St. Aubert!' said Valancourt, summoning all his resolution, 'I will no longer distress you by my presence. Forgive me, that I did not sooner obey you, and, if you can, sometimes, pity one, who, in losing youhas lost all hope of peace! May you be happy, Emily, however wretched I remain, happy as my fondest wish would have you!' His voice faltered with the last words, and his countenance changed, while, with a look of ineffable tenderness and grief, he gazed upon her for an instant, and then quitted the cottage. 'Dear heart! dear heart!' cried Theresa, following him to the door, 'why, Monsieur Valancourt! how it rains! what a night is this to turn him out in! Why it will give him his death; and it was but now you was crying, mademoiselle, because he was dead. Well! young ladies do change their mind in a minute, as one may say!' Emily made no reply, for she heard not what was said, while, lost in sorrow and thought, she remained in her chair by the fire, with her eyes fixed, and the image of Valancourt still before them. 'M. Valancourt is sadly altered! madam,' said Theresa; 'he looks so thin to what he used to do, and so melancholy, and then he wears his arm in a sling.' Emily raised her eyes at these words, for she had not observed this last circumstance, and she now did not doubt, that Valancourt had received the shot of her gardener at Tholouse; with this conviction her pity for him returning, she blamed herself for having occasioned him to leave the cottage, during the storm. Soon after her servants arrived with the carriage, and Emily, having censured Theresa for her thoughtless conversation to Valancourt, and strictly charging her never to repeat any hints of the same kind to him, withdrew to her home, thoughtful and disconsolate. Meanwhile, Valancourt had returned to a little inn of the village, whither he had arrived only a few moments before his visit to Theresa's cottage, on the way from Tholouse to the chateau of the Count de Duvarney, where he had not been since he bade adieu to Emily at ChateauleBlanc, in the neighbourhood of which he had lingered for a considerable time, unable to summon resolution enough to quit a place, that contained the object most dear to his heart. There were times, indeed, when grief and despair urged him to appear again before Emily, and, regardless of his ruined circumstances, to renew his suit. Pride, however, and the tenderness of his affection, which could not long endure the thought of involving her in his misfortunes, at length, so far triumphed over passion, that he relinquished this desperate design, and quitted ChateauleBlanc. But still his fancy wandered among the scenes, which had witnessed his early love, and, on his way to Gascony, he stopped at Tholouse, where he remained when Emily arrived, concealing, yet indulging his melancholy in the gardens, where he had formerly passed with her so many happy hours; often recurring, with vain regret, to the evening before her departure for Italy, when she had so unexpectedly met him on the terrace, and endeavouring to recall to his memory every word and look, which had then charmed him, the arguments he had employed to dissuade her from the journey, and the tenderness of their last farewel.

In such melancholy recollections he had been indulging, when Emily unexpectedly arrived to him on this very terrace, the evening after her arrival at Tholouse. His emotions, on thus seeing her, can scarcely be imagined; but he so far overcame the first promptings of love, that he forbore to discover himself, and abruptly quitted the gardens. Still, however, the vision he had seen haunted his mind; he became more wretched than before, and the only solace of his sorrow was to return in the silence of the night; to follow the paths which he believed her steps had pressed, during the day; and, to watch round the habitation where she reposed. It was in one of these mournful wanderings, that he had received by the fire of the gardener, who mistook him for a robber, a wound in his arm, which had detained him at Tholouse till very lately, under the hands of a surgeon. There, regardless of himself and careless of his friends, whose late unkindness had urged him to believe, that they were indifferent as to his fate, he remained, without informing them of his situation; and now, being sufficiently recovered to bear travelling, he had taken La Vallee in his way to Estuviere, the Count's residence, partly for the purpose of hearing of Emily, and of being again near her, and partly for that of enquiring into the situation of poor old Theresa, who, he had reason to suppose, had been deprived of her stipend, small as it was, and which enquiry had brought him to her cottage, when Emily happened to be there. This unexpected interview, which had at once shewn him the tenderness of her love and the strength of her resolution, renewed all the acuteness of the despair, that had attended their former separation, and which no effort of reason could teach him, in these moments, to subdue. Her image, her look, the tones of her voice, all dwelt on his fancy, as powerfully as they had late appeared to his senses, and banished from his heart every emotion, except those of love and despair. Before the evening concluded, he returned to Theresa's cottage, that he might hear her talk of Emily, and be in the place, where she had so lately been. The joy, felt and expressed by that faithful servant, was quickly changed to sorrow, when she observed, at one moment, his wild and phrensied look, and, at another, the dark melancholy, that overhung him. After he had listened, and for a considerable time, to all she had to relate, concerning Emily, he gave Theresa nearly all the money he had about him, though she repeatedly refused it, declaring, that her mistress had amply supplied her wants; and then, drawing a ring of value from his finger, he delivered it her with a solemn charge to present it to Emily, of whom he entreated, as a last favour, that she would preserve it for his sake, and sometimes, when she looked upon it, remember the unhappy giver. Theresa wept, as she received the ring, but it was more from sympathy, than from any presentiment of evil; and before she could reply, Valancourt abruptly left the cottage. She followed him to the door, calling upon his name and entreating him to return; but she received no answer, and saw him no more. Chapter 14 Call up him, that left half told The story of Cambuscan bold. MILTON On the following morning, as Emily sat in the parlour adjoining the library, reflecting on the scene of the preceding night, Annette rushed wildly into the room, and, without speaking, sunk breathless into a chair. It was some time before she could answer the anxious enquiries of Emily, as to the occasion of her emotion, but, at length, she exclaimed, 'I have seen his ghost, madam, I have seen his ghost!' 'Who do you mean?' said Emily, with extreme impatience. 'It came in from the hall, madam,' continued Annette, 'as I was crossing to the parlour.' 'Who are you speaking of?' repeated Emily, 'Who came in from the hall? 'It was dressed just as I have seen him, often and often,' added Annette. 'Ah! who could have thought' Emily's patience was now exhausted, and she was reprimanding her for such idle fancies, when a servant entered the room, and informed her, that a stranger without begged leave to speak with her. It immediately occurred to Emily, that this stranger was Valancourt, and she told the servant to inform him, that she was engaged, and could not see any person. The servant, having delivered his message, returned with one from the stranger, urging the first request, and saying, that he had something of consequence to communicate; while Annette, who had hitherto sat silent and amazed, now started up, and crying, 'It is Ludovico!it is Ludovico!' ran out of the room. Emily bade the servant follow her, and, if it really was Ludovico, to shew him into the parlour. In a few minutes, Ludovico appeared, accompanied by Annette, who, as joy rendered her forgetful of all rules of decorum towards her mistress, would not suffer any person to be heard, for some time, but herself. Emily expressed surprise and satisfaction, on seeing Ludovico in safety, and the first emotions increased, when he delivered letters from Count De Villefort and the Lady Blanche, informing her of their late adventure, and of their present situation at an inn among the Pyrenees, where they had been detained by the illness of Mons. St. Foix, and the indisposition of Blanche, who added, that the Baron St. Foix was just arrived to attend his son to his chateau, where he would remain till the perfect recovery of his wounds, and then return to Languedoc, but that her father and herself purposed to be at La Vallee, on the following day. She added, that Emily's presence would be expected at the approaching nuptials, and begged she would be prepared to proceed, in a few days to ChateauleBlanc. For an account of Ludovico's adventure, she referred her to himself; and Emily, though much interested, concerning the means, by which he had disappeared from the north apartments, had the forbearance to suspend the gratification of her curiosity, till he had taken some refreshment, and had conversed with Annette, whose joy, on seeing him in safety, could not have been more extravagant, had he arisen from the grave. Meanwhile, Emily perused again the letters of her friends, whose expressions of esteem and kindness were very necessary consolations to her heart, awakened as it was by the late interview to emotions of keener sorrow and regret. The invitation to ChateauleBlanc was pressed with so much kindness by the Count and his daughter, who strengthened it by a message from the Countess, and the occasion of it was so important to her friend, that Emily could not refuse to accept it, nor, though she wished to remain in the quiet shades of her native home, could she avoid perceiving the impropriety of remaining there alone, since Valancourt was again in the neighbourhood. Sometimes, too, she thought, that change of scenery and the society of her friends might contribute, more than retirement, to restore her to tranquillity. When Ludovico again appeared, she desired him to give a detail of his adventure in the north apartments, and to tell by what means he became a companion of the banditti, with whom the Count had found him. He immediately obeyed, while Annette, who had not yet had leisure to ask him many questions, on the subject, prepared to listen, with a countenance of extreme curiosity, venturing to remind her lady of her incredulity, concerning spirits, in the castle of Udolpho, and of her own sagacity in believing in them; while Emily, blushing at the consciousness of her late credulity, observed, that, if Ludovico's adventure could justify Annette's superstition, he had probably not been here to relate it. Ludovico smiled at Annette, and bowed to Emily, and then began as follows 'You may remember, madam, that, on the night, when I sat up in the north chamber, my lord, the Count, and Mons. Henri accompanied me thither, and that, while they remained there, nothing happened to excite any alarm. When they were gone I made a fire in the bedroom, and, not being inclined to sleep, I sat down on the hearth with a book I had brought with me to divert my mind. I confess I did sometimes look round the chamber, with something like apprehension' 'O very like it, I dare say,' interrupted Annette, 'and I dare say too, if the truth was known, you shook from head to foot.' 'Not quite so bad as that,' replied Ludovico, smiling, 'but several times, as the wind whistled round the castle, and shook the old casements, I did fancy I heard odd noises, and, once or twice, I got up and looked about me; but nothing was to be seen, except the grim figures in the tapestry, which seemed to frown upon me, as I looked at them. I had sat thus for above an hour,' continued Ludovico, 'when again I thought I heard a noise, and glanced my eyes round the room, to discover what it came from, but, not perceiving any thing, I began to read again, and, when I had finished the story I was upon, I felt drowsy, and dropped asleep. But presently I was awakened by the noise I had heard before, and it seemed to come from that part of the chamber, where the bed stood; and then, whether it was the story I had been reading that affected my spirits, or the strange reports, that had been spread of these apartments, I don't know, but, when I looked towards the bed again, I fancied I saw a man's face within the dusky curtains.' At the mention of this, Emily trembled, and looked anxiously, remembering the spectacle she had herself witnessed there with Dorothee. 'I confess, madam, my heart did fail me, at that instant,' continued Ludovico, 'but a return of the noise drew my attention from the bed, and I then distinctly heard a sound, like that of a key, turning in a lock, but what surprised me more was, that I saw no door where the sound seemed to come from. In the next moment, however, the arras near the bed was slowly lifted, and a person appeared behind it, entering from a small door in the wall. He stood for a moment as if half retreating, with his head bending under the arras which concealed the upper part of his face except his eyes scowling beneath the tapestry as he held it; and then, while he raised it higher, I saw the face of another man behind, looking over his shoulder. I know not how it was, but, though my sword was upon the table before me, I had not the power just then to seize it, but sat quite still, watching them, with my eyes half shut as if I was asleep. I suppose they thought me so, and were debating what they should do, for I heard them whisper, and they stood in the same posture for the value of a minute, and then, I thought I perceived other faces in the duskiness beyond the door, and heard louder whispers.' 'This door surprises me,' said Emily, 'because I understood, that the Count had caused the arras to be lifted, and the walls examined, suspecting, that they might have concealed a passage through which you had departed.' 'It does not appear so extraordinary to me, madam,' replied Ludovico, 'that this door should escape notice, because it was formed in a narrow compartment, which appeared to be part of the outward wall, and, if the Count had not passed over it, he might have thought it was useless to search for a door where it seemed as if no passage could communicate with one; but the truth was, that the passage was formed within the wall itself.But, to return to the men, whom I saw obscurely beyond the door, and who did not suffer me to remain long in suspense, concerning their design. They all rushed into the room, and surrounded me, though not before I had snatched up my sword to defend myself. But what could one man do against four? They soon disarmed me, and, having fastened my arms, and gagged my mouth, forced me through the private door, leaving my sword upon the table, to assist, as they said, those who should come in the morning to look for me, in fighting against the ghosts. They then led me through many narrow passages, cut, as I fancied, in the walls, for I had never seen them before, and down several flights of steps, till we came to the vaults underneath the castle; and then opening a stone door, which I should have taken for the wall itself, we went through a long passage, and down other steps cut in the solid rock, when another door delivered us into a cave. After turning and twining about, for some time, we reached the mouth of it, and I found myself on the seabeach at the foot of the cliffs, with the chateau above. A boat was in waiting, into which the ruffians got, forcing me along with them, and we soon reached a small vessel, that was at anchor, where other men appeared, when setting me aboard, two of the fellows who had seized me, followed, and the other two rowed back to the shore, while we set sail. I soon found out what all this meant, and what was the business of these men at the chateau. We landed in Rousillon, and, after lingering several days about the shore, some of their comrades came down from the mountains, and carried me with them to the fort, where I remained till my Lord so unexpectedly arrived, for they had taken good care to prevent my running away, having blindfolded me, during the journey, and, if they had not done this, I think I never could have found my road to any town, through the wild country we traversed. After I reached the fort I was watched like a prisoner, and never suffered to go out, without two or three companions, and I became so weary of life, that I often wished to get rid of it.' 'Well, but they let you talk,' said Annette, 'they did not gagg you after they got you away from the chateau, so I don't see what reason there was to be so very weary of living; to say nothing about the chance you had of seeing me again.' Ludovico smiled, and Emily also, who enquired what was the motive of these men for carrying him off. 'I soon found out, madam,' resumed Ludovico, 'that they were pirates, who had, during many years, secreted their spoil in the vaults of the castle, which, being so near the sea, suited their purpose well. To prevent detection they had tried to have it believed, that the chateau was haunted, and, having discovered the private way to the north apartments, which had been shut up ever since the death of the lady marchioness, they easily succeeded. The housekeeper and her husband, who were the only persons, that had inhabited the castle, for some years, were so terrified by the strange noises they heard in the nights, that they would live there no longer; a report soon went abroad, that it was haunted, and the whole country believed this the more readily, I suppose, because it had been said, that the lady marchioness had died in a strange way, and because my lord never would return to the place afterwards.' 'But why,' said Emily, 'were not these pirates contented with the cavewhy did they think it necessary to deposit their spoil in the castle?' 'The cave, madam,' replied Ludovico, 'was open to any body, and their treasures would not long have remained undiscovered there, but in the vaults they were secure so long as the report prevailed of their being haunted. Thus then, it appears, that they brought at midnight, the spoil they took on the seas, and kept it till they had opportunities of disposing of it to advantage. The pirates were connected with Spanish smugglers and banditti, who live among the wilds of the Pyrenees, and carry on various kinds of traffic, such as nobody would think of; and with this desperate horde of banditti I remained, till my lord arrived. I shall never forget what I felt, when I first discovered himI almost gave him up for lost! but I knew, that, if I shewed myself, the banditti would discover who he was, and probably murder us all, to prevent their secret in the chateau being detected. I, therefore, kept out of my lord's sight, but had a strict watch upon the ruffians, and determined, if they offered him or his family violence, to discover myself, and fight for our lives. Soon after, I overheard some of them laying a most diabolical plan for the murder and plunder of the whole party, when I contrived to speak to some of my lord's attendants, telling them what was going forward, and we consulted what was best to be done; meanwhile my lord, alarmed at the absence of the Lady Blanche, demanded her, and the ruffians having given some unsatisfactory answer, my lord and Mons. St. Foix became furious, so then we thought it a good time to discover the plot, and rushing into the chamber, I called out, "Treachery! my lord count, defend yourself!" His lordship and the chevalier drew their swords directly, and a hard battle we had, but we conquered at last, as, madam, you are already informed of by my Lord Count.' 'This is an extraordinary adventure,' said Emily, 'and much praise is due, Ludovico, to your prudence and intrepidity. There are some circumstances, however, concerning the north apartments, which still perplex me; but, perhaps, you may be able to explain them. Did you ever hear the banditti relate any thing extraordinary of these rooms?' 'No, madam,' replied Ludovico, 'I never heard them speak about the rooms, except to laugh at the credulity of the old housekeeper, who once was very near catching one of the pirates; it was since the Count arrived at the chateau, he said, and he laughed heartily as he related the trick he had played off.' A blush overspread Emily's cheek, and she impatiently desired Ludovico to explain himself. 'Why, my lady,' said he, 'as this fellow was, one night in the bedroom, he heard somebody approaching through the next apartment, and not having time to lift up the arras, and unfasten the door, he hid himself in the bed just by. There he lay for some time in as great a fright, I suppose' 'As you was in,' interrupted Annette, 'when you sat up so boldly to watch by yourself.' 'Aye,' said Ludovico, 'in as great a fright as he ever made any body else suffer; and presently the housekeeper and some other person came up to the bed, when he, thinking they were going to examine it, bethought him, that his only chance of escaping detection, was by terrifying them; so he lifted up the counterpane, but that did not do, till he raised his face above it, and then they both set off, he said, as if they had seen the devil, and he got out of the rooms undiscovered.' Emily could not forbear smiling at this explanation of the deception, which had given her so much superstitious terror, and was surprised, that she could have suffered herself to be thus alarmed, till she considered, that, when the mind has once begun to yield to the weakness of superstition, trifles impress it with the force of conviction. Still, however, she remembered with awe the mysterious music, which had been heard, at midnight, near ChateauleBlanc, and she asked Ludovico if he could give any explanation of it; but he could not. 'I only know, madam,' he added, 'that it did not belong to the pirates, for I have heard them laugh about it, and say, they believed the devil was in league with them there.' 'Yes, I will answer for it he was,' said Annette, her countenance brightening, 'I was sure all along, that he or his spirits had something to do with the north apartments, and now you see, madam, I am right at last.' 'It cannot be denied, that his spirits were very busy in that part of the chateau,' replied Emily, smiling. 'But I am surprised, Ludovico, that these pirates should persevere in their schemes, after the arrival of the Count; what could they expect but certain detection?' 'I have reason to believe, madam,' replied Ludovico, 'that it was their intention to persevere no longer than was necessary for the removal of the stores, which were deposited in the vaults; and it appeared, that they had been employed in doing so from within a short period after the Count's arrival; but, as they had only a few hours in the night for this business, and were carrying on other schemes at the same time, the vaults were not above half emptied, when they took me away. They gloried exceedingly in this opportunity of confirming the superstitious reports, that had been spread of the north chambers, were careful to leave every thing there as they had found it, the better to promote the deception, and frequently, in their jocose moods, would laugh at the consternation, which they believed the inhabitants of the castle had suffered upon my disappearing, and it was to prevent the possibility of my betraying their secret, that they had removed me to such a distance. From that period they considered the chateau as nearly their own; but I found from the discourse of their comrades, that, though they were cautious, at first, in shewing their power there, they had once very nearly betrayed themselves. Going, one night, as was their custom, to the north chambers to repeat the noises, that had occasioned such alarm among the servants, they heard, as they were about to unfasten the secret door, voices in the bedroom. My lord has since told me, that himself and M. Henri were then in the apartment, and they heard very extraordinary sounds of lamentation, which it seems were made by these fellows, with their usual design of spreading terror; and my lord has owned, he then felt somewhat more, than surprise; but, as it was necessary to the peace of his family, that no notice should be taken, he was silent on the subject, and enjoined silence to his son.' Emily, recollecting the change, that had appeared in the spirits of the Count, after the night, when he had watched in the north room, now perceived the cause of it; and, having made some further enquiries upon this strange affair, she dismissed Ludovico, and went to give orders for the accommodation of her friends, on the following day. In the evening, Theresa, lame as she was, came to deliver the ring, with which Valancourt had entrusted her, and, when she presented it, Emily was much affected, for she remembered to have seen him wear it often in happier days. She was, however, much displeased, that Theresa had received it, and positively refused to accept it herself, though to have done so would have afforded her a melancholy pleasure. Theresa entreated, expostulated, and then described the distress of Valancourt, when he had given the ring, and repeated the message, with which he had commissioned her to deliver it; and Emily could not conceal the extreme sorrow this recital occasioned her, but wept, and remained lost in thought. 'Alas! my dear young lady!' said Theresa, 'why should all this be? I have known you from your infancy, and it may well be supposed I love you, as if you was my own, and wish as much to see you happy. M. Valancourt, to be sure, I have not known so long, but then I have reason to love him, as though he was my own son. I know how well you love one another, or why all this weeping and wailing?' Emily waved her hand for Theresa to be silent, who, disregarding the signal, continued, 'And how much you are alike in your tempers and ways, and, that, if you were married, you would be the happiest couple in the whole provincethen what is there to prevent your marrying? Dear dear! to see how some people fling away their happiness, and then cry and lament about it, just as if it was not their own doing, and as if there was more pleasure in wailing and weeping, than in being at peace. Learning, to be sure, is a fine thing, but, if it teaches folks no better than that, why I had rather be without it; if it would teach them to be happier, I would say something to it, then it would be learning and wisdom too.' Age and long services had given Theresa a privilege to talk, but Emily now endeavoured to check her loquacity, and, though she felt the justness of some of her remarks, did not choose to explain the circumstances, that had determined her conduct towards Valancourt. She, therefore, only told Theresa, that it would much displease her to hear the subject renewed; that she had reasons for her conduct, which she did not think it proper to mention, and that the ring must be returned, with an assurance, that she could not accept it with propriety; and, at the same time, she forbade Theresa to repeat any future message from Valancourt, as she valued her esteem and kindness. Theresa was afflicted, and made another attempt, though feeble, to interest her for Valancourt, but the unusual displeasure, expressed in Emily's countenance, soon obliged her to desist, and she departed in wonder and lamentation. To relieve her mind, in some degree, from the painful recollections, that intruded upon it, Emily busied herself in preparations for the journey into Languedoc, and, while Annette, who assisted her, spoke with joy and affection of the safe return of Ludovico, she was considering how she might best promote their happiness, and determined, if it appeared, that his affection was as unchanged as that of the simple and honest Annette, to give her a marriage portion, and settle them on some part of her estate. These considerations led her to the remembrance of her father's paternal domain, which his affairs had formerly compelled him to dispose of to M. Quesnel, and which she frequently wished to regain, because St. Aubert had lamented, that the chief lands of his ancestors had passed into another family, and because they had been his birthplace and the haunt of his early years. To the estate at Tholouse she had no peculiar attachment, and it was her wish to dispose of this, that she might purchase her paternal domains, if M. Quesnel could be prevailed on to part with them, which, as he talked much of living in Italy, did not appear very improbable. Chapter 15 Sweet is the breath of vernal shower, The bees' collected treasures sweet, Sweet music's melting fall, but sweeter yet The still, small voice of gratitude. GRAY On the following day, the arrival of her friend revived the drooping Emily, and La Vallee became once more the scene of social kindness and of elegant hospitality. Illness and the terror she had suffered had stolen from Blanche much of her sprightliness, but all her affectionate simplicity remained, and, though she appeared less blooming, she was not less engaging than before. The unfortunate adventure on the Pyrenees had made the Count very anxious to reach home, and, after little more than a week's stay at La Vallee, Emily prepared to set out with her friends for Languedoc, assigning the care of her house, during her absence, to Theresa. On the evening, preceding her departure, this old servant brought again the ring of Valancourt, and, with tears, entreated her mistress to receive it, for that she had neither seen, or heard of M. Valancourt, since the night when he delivered it to her. As she said this, her countenance expressed more alarm, than she dared to utter; but Emily, checking her own propensity to fear, considered, that he had probably returned to the residence of his brother, and, again refusing to accept the ring, bade Theresa preserve it, till she saw him, which, with extreme reluctance, she promised to do. On the following day, Count De Villefort, with Emily and the Lady Blanche, left La Vallee, and, on the ensuing evening, arrived at the ChateauleBlanc, where the Countess, Henri, and M. Du Pont, whom Emily was surprised to find there, received them with much joy and congratulation. She was concerned to observe, that the Count still encouraged the hopes of his friend, whose countenance declared, that his affection had suffered no abatement from absence; and was much distressed, when, on the second evening after her arrival, the Count, having withdrawn her from the Lady Blanche, with whom she was walking, renewed the subject of M. Du Pont's hopes. The mildness, with which she listened to his intercessions at first, deceiving him, as to her sentiments, he began to believe, that, her affection for Valancourt being overcome, she was, at length, disposed to think favourably of M. Du Pont; and, when she afterwards convinced him of his mistake, he ventured, in the earnestness of his wish to promote what he considered to be the happiness of two persons, whom he so much esteemed, gently to remonstrate with her, on thus suffering an illplaced affection to poison the happiness of her most valuable years. Observing her silence and the deep dejection of her countenance, he concluded with saying, 'I will not say more now, but I will still believe, my dear Mademoiselle St. Aubert, that you will not always reject a person, so truly estimable as my friend Du Pont.' He spared her the pain of replying, by leaving her; and she strolled on, somewhat displeased with the Count for having persevered to plead for a suit, which she had repeatedly rejected, and lost amidst the melancholy recollections, which this topic had revived, till she had insensibly reached the borders of the woods, that screened the monastery of St. Clair, when, perceiving how far she had wandered, she determined to extend her walk a little farther, and to enquire about the abbess and some of her friends among the nuns. Though the evening was now drawing to a close, she accepted the invitation of the friar, who opened the gate, and, anxious to meet some of her old acquaintances, proceeded towards the convent parlour. As she crossed the lawn, that sloped from the front of the monastery towards the sea, she was struck with the picture of repose, exhibited by some monks, sitting in the cloisters, which extended under the brow of the woods, that crowned this eminence; where, as they meditated, at this twilight hour, holy subjects, they sometimes suffered their attention to be relieved by the scene before them, nor thought it profane to look at nature, now that it had exchanged the brilliant colours of day for the sober hue of evening. Before the cloisters, however, spread an ancient chesnut, whose ample branches were designed to screen the full magnificence of a scene, that might tempt the wish to worldly pleasures; but still, beneath the dark and spreading foliage, gleamed a wide extent of ocean, and many a passing sail; while, to the right and left, thick woods were seen stretching along the winding shores. So much as this had been admitted, perhaps, to give to the secluded votary an image of the dangers and vicissitudes of life, and to console him, now that he had renounced its pleasures, by the certainty of having escaped its evils. As Emily walked pensively along, considering how much suffering she might have escaped, had she become a votaress of the order, and remained in this retirement from the time of her father's death, the vesperbell struck up, and the monks retired slowly toward the chapel, while she, pursuing her way, entered the great hall, where an unusual silence seemed to reign. The parlour too, which opened from it, she found vacant, but, as the evening bell was sounding, she believed the nuns had withdrawn into the chapel, and sat down to rest, for a moment, before she returned to the chateau, where, however, the increasing gloom made her now anxious to be. Not many minutes had elapsed, before a nun, entering in haste, enquired for the abbess, and was retiring, without recollecting Emily, when she made herself known, and then learned, that a mass was going to be performed for the soul of sister Agnes, who had been declining, for some time, and who was now believed to be dying. Of her sufferings the sister gave a melancholy account, and of the horrors, into which she had frequently started, but which had now yielded to a dejection so gloomy, that neither the prayers, in which she was joined by the sisterhood, or the assurances of her confessor, had power to recall her from it, or to cheer her mind even with a momentary gleam of comfort.

To this relation Emily listened with extreme concern, and, recollecting the frenzied manners and the expressions of horror, which she had herself witnessed of Agnes, together with the history, that sister Frances had communicated, her compassion was heightened to a very painful degree. As the evening was already far advanced, Emily did not now desire to see her, or to join in the mass, and, after leaving many kind remembrances with the nun, for her old friends, she quitted the monastery, and returned over the cliffs towards the chateau, meditating upon what she had just heard, till, at length she forced her mind upon less interesting subjects. The wind was high, and as she drew near the chateau, she often paused to listen to its awful sound, as it swept over the billows, that beat below, or groaned along the surrounding woods; and, while she rested on a cliff at a short distance from the chateau, and looked upon the wide waters, seen dimly beneath the last shade of twilight, she thought of the following address TO THE WINDS Viewless, through heaven's vast vault your course ye steer, Unknown from whence ye come, or whither go! Mysterious pow'rs! I hear ye murmur low, Till swells your loud gust on my startled ear, And, awful! seems to saysome God is near! I love to list your midnight voices float In the dread storm, that o'er the ocean rolls, And, while their charm the angry wave controuls, Mix with its sullen roar, and sink remote. Then, rising in the pause, a sweeter note, The dirge of spirits, who your deeds bewail, A sweeter note oft swells while sleeps the gale! But soon, ye sightless pow'rs! your rest is o'er, Solemn and slow, ye rise upon the air, Speak in the shrouds, and bid the seaboy fear, And the faintwarbled dirgeis heard no more! Oh! then I deprecate your awful reign! The loud lament yet bear not on your breath! Bear not the crash of bark far on the main, Bear not the cry of men, who cry in vain, The crew's dread chorus sinking into death! Oh! give not these, ye pow'rs! I ask alone, As rapt I climb these dark romantic steeps, The elemental war, the billow's moan; I ask the still, sweet tear, that listening Fancy weeps! Chapter 16 Unnatural deeds Do breed unnatural troubles infected minds To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets. More needs she the divine, than the physician. MACBETH On the following evening, the view of the convent towers, rising among the shadowy woods, reminded Emily of the nun, whose condition had so much affected her; and, anxious to know how she was, as well as to see some of her former friends, she and the Lady Blanche extended their walk to the monastery. At the gate stood a carriage, which, from the heat of the horses, appeared to have just arrived; but a more than common stillness pervaded the court and the cloisters, through which Emily and Blanche passed in their way to the great hall, where a nun, who was crossing to the staircase, replied to the enquiries of the former, that sister Agnes was still living, and sensible, but that it was thought she could not survive the night. In the parlour, they found several of the boarders, who rejoiced to see Emily, and told her many little circumstances that had happened in the convent since her departure, and which were interesting to her only because they related to persons, whom she had regarded with affection. While they thus conversed the abbess entered the room, and expressed much satisfaction at seeing Emily, but her manner was unusually solemn, and her countenance dejected. 'Our house,' said she, after the first salutations were over, 'is truly a house of mourninga daughter is now paying the debt of nature.You have heard, perhaps, that our daughter Agnes is dying?' Emily expressed her sincere concern. 'Her death presents to us a great and awful lesson,' continued the abbess; 'let us read it, and profit by it; let it teach us to prepare ourselves for the change, that awaits us all! You are young, and have it yet in your power to secure "the peace that passeth all understanding"the peace of conscience. Preserve it in your youth, that it may comfort you in age; for vain, alas! and imperfect are the good deeds of our latter years, if those of our early life have been evil!' Emily would have said, that good deeds, she hoped, were never vain; but she considered that it was the abbess who spoke, and she remained silent. 'The latter days of Agnes,' resumed the abbess, 'have been exemplary; would they might atone for the errors of her former ones! Her sufferings now, alas! are great; let us believe, that they will make her peace hereafter! I have left her with her confessor, and a gentleman, whom she has long been anxious to see, and who is just arrived from Paris. They, I hope, will be able to administer the repose, which her mind has hitherto wanted.' Emily fervently joined in the wish. 'During her illness, she has sometimes named you,' resumed the abbess; 'perhaps, it would comfort her to see you; when her present visitors have left her, we will go to her chamber, if the scene will not be too melancholy for your spirits. But, indeed, to such scenes, however painful, we ought to accustom ourselves, for they are salutary to the soul, and prepare us for what we are ourselves to suffer.' Emily became grave and thoughtful; for this conversation brought to her recollection the dying moments of her beloved father, and she wished once more to weep over the spot, where his remains were buried. During the silence, which followed the abbess' speech, many minute circumstances attending his last hours occurred to herhis emotion on perceiving himself to be in the neighbourhood of ChateauleBlanchis request to be interred in a particular spot in the church of this monasteryand the solemn charge he had delivered to her to destroy certain papers, without examining them.She recollected also the mysterious and horrible words in those manuscripts, upon which her eye had involuntarily glanced; and, though they now, and, indeed, whenever she remembered them, revived an excess of painful curiosity, concerning their full import, and the motives for her father's command, it was ever her chief consolation, that she had strictly obeyed him in this particular. Little more was said by the abbess, who appeared too much affected by the subject she had lately left, to be willing to converse, and her companions had been for some time silent from the same cause, when this general reverie was interrupted by the entrance of a stranger, Monsieur Bonnac, who had just quitted the chamber of sister Agnes. He appeared much disturbed, but Emily fancied, that his countenance had more the expression of horror, than of grief. Having drawn the abbess to a distant part of the room, he conversed with her for some time, during which she seemed to listen with earnest attention, and he to speak with caution, and a more than common degree of interest. When he had concluded, he bowed silently to the rest of the company, and quitted the room. The abbess, soon after, proposed going to the chamber of sister Agnes, to which Emily consented, though not without some reluctance, and Lady Blanche remained with the boarders below. At the door of the chamber they met the confessor, whom, as he lifted up his head on their approach, Emily observed to be the same that had attended her dying father; but he passed on, without noticing her, and they entered the apartment, where, on a mattress, was laid sister Agnes, with one nun watching in the chair beside her. Her countenance was so much changed, that Emily would scarcely have recollected her, had she not been prepared to do so it was ghastly, and overspread with gloomy horror; her dim and hollow eyes were fixed on a crucifix, which she held upon her bosom; and she was so much engaged in thought, as not to perceive the abbess and Emily, till they stood at the bedside. Then, turning her heavy eyes, she fixed them, in wild horror, upon Emily, and, screaming, exclaimed, 'Ah! that vision comes upon me in my dying hours!' Emily started back in terror, and looked for explanation to the abbess, who made her a signal not to be alarmed, and calmly said to Agnes, 'Daughter, I have brought Mademoiselle St. Aubert to visit you I thought you would be glad to see her.' Agnes made no reply; but, still gazing wildly upon Emily, exclaimed, 'It is her very self! Oh! there is all that fascination in her look, which proved my destruction! What would you havewhat is it you came to demandRetribution?It will soon be yoursit is yours already. How many years have passed, since last I saw you! My crime is but as yesterday.Yet I am grown old beneath it; while you are still young and bloomingblooming as when you forced me to commit that most abhorred deed! O! could I once forget it!yet what would that avail?the deed is done!' Emily, extremely shocked, would now have left the room; but the abbess, taking her hand, tried to support her spirits, and begged she would stay a few moments, when Agnes would probably be calm, whom now she tried to sooth. But the latter seemed to disregard her, while she still fixed her eyes on Emily, and added, 'What are years of prayers and repentance? they cannot wash out the foulness of murder!Yes, murder! Where is hewhere is he?Look therelook there!see where he stalks along the room! Why do you come to torment me now?' continued Agnes, while her straining eyes were bent on air, 'why was not I punished before?O! do not frown so sternly! Hah! there again! 'til she herself! Why do you look so piteously upon meand smile, too? smile on me! What groan was that?' Agnes sunk down, apparently lifeless, and Emily, unable to support herself, leaned against the bed, while the abbess and the attendant nun were applying the usual remedies to Agnes. 'Peace,' said the abbess, when Emily was going to speak, 'the delirium is going off, she will soon revive. When was she thus before, daughter?' 'Not of many weeks, madam,' replied the nun, 'but her spirits have been much agitated by the arrival of the gentleman she wished so much to see.' 'Yes,' observed the abbess, 'that has undoubtedly occasioned this paroxysm of frenzy. When she is better, we will leave her to repose.' Emily very readily consented, but, though she could now give little assistance, she was unwilling to quit the chamber, while any might be necessary. When Agnes recovered her senses, she again fixed her eyes on Emily, but their wild expression was gone, and a gloomy melancholy had succeeded. It was some moments before she recovered sufficient spirits to speak; she then said feebly'The likeness is wonderful!surely it must be something more than fancy. Tell me, I conjure you,' she added, addressing Emily, 'though your name is St. Aubert, are you not the daughter of the Marchioness?' 'What Marchioness?' said Emily, in extreme surprise; for she had imagined, from the calmness of Agnes's manner, that her intellects were restored. The abbess gave her a significant glance, but she repeated the question. 'What Marchioness?' exclaimed Agnes, 'I know but of onethe Marchioness de Villeroi.' Emily, remembering the emotion of her late father, upon the unexpected mention of this lady, and his request to be laid near to the tomb of the Villerois, now felt greatly interested, and she entreated Agnes to explain the reason of her question. The abbess would now have withdrawn Emily from the room, who being, however, detained by a strong interest, repeated her entreaties. 'Bring me that casket, sister,' said Agnes; 'I will shew her to you; yet you need only look in that mirror, and you will behold her; you surely are her daughter such striking resemblance is never found but among near relations.' The nun brought the casket, and Agnes, having directed her how to unlock it, she took thence a miniature, in which Emily perceived the exact resemblance of the picture, which she had found among her late father's papers. Agnes held out her hand to receive it; gazed upon it earnestly for some moments in silence; and then, with a countenance of deep despair, threw up her eyes to Heaven, and prayed inwardly. When she had finished, she returned the miniature to Emily. 'Keep it,' said she, 'I bequeath it to you, for I must believe it is your right. I have frequently observed the resemblance between you; but never, till this day, did it strike upon my conscience so powerfully! Stay, sister, do not remove the casketthere is another picture I would shew.' Emily trembled with expectation, and the abbess again would have withdrawn her. 'Agnes is still disordered,' said she, 'you observe how she wanders. In these moods she says any thing, and does not scruple, as you have witnessed, to accuse herself of the most horrible crimes.' Emily, however, thought she perceived something more than madness in the inconsistencies of Agnes, whose mention of the Marchioness, and production of her picture, had interested her so much, that she determined to obtain further information, if possible, respecting the subject of it. The nun returned with the casket, and, Agnes pointing out to her a secret drawer, she took from it another miniature. 'Here,' said Agnes, as she offered it to Emily, 'learn a lesson for your vanity, at least; look well at this picture, and see if you can discover any resemblance between what I was, and what I am.' Emily impatiently received the miniature, which her eyes had scarcely glanced upon, before her trembling hands had nearly suffered it to fallit was the resemblance of the portrait of Signora Laurentini, which she had formerly seen in the castle of Udolphothe lady, who had disappeared in so mysterious a manner, and whom Montoni had been suspected of having caused to be murdered. In silent astonishment, Emily continued to gaze alternately upon the picture and the dying nun, endeavouring to trace a resemblance between them, which no longer existed. 'Why do you look so sternly on me?' said Agnes, mistaking the nature of Emily's emotion. 'I have seen this face before,' said Emily, at length; 'was it really your resemblance?' 'You may well ask that question,' replied the nun,'but it was once esteemed a striking likeness of me. Look at me well, and see what guilt has made me. I then was innocent; the evil passions of my nature slept. Sister!' added she solemnly, and stretching forth her cold, damp hand to Emily, who shuddered at its touch'Sister! beware of the first indulgence of the passions; beware of the first! Their course, if not checked then, is rapidtheir force is uncontroulablethey lead us we know not whitherthey lead us perhaps to the commission of crimes, for which whole years of prayer and penitence cannot atone!Such may be the force of even a single passion, that it overcomes every other, and sears up every other approach to the heart. Possessing us like a fiend, it leads us on to the acts of a fiend, making us insensible to pity and to conscience. And, when its purpose is accomplished, like a fiend, it leaves us to the torture of those feelings, which its power had suspendednot annihilated,to the tortures of compassion, remorse, and conscience. Then, we awaken as from a dream, and perceive a new world around uswe gaze in astonishment, and horrorbut the deed is committed; not all the powers of heaven and earth united can undo itand the spectres of conscience will not fly! What are richesgrandeurhealth itself, to the luxury of a pure conscience, the health of the soul;and what the sufferings of poverty, disappointment, despairto the anguish of an afflicted one! O! how long is it since I knew that luxury! I believed, that I had suffered the most agonizing pangs of human nature, in love, jealousy, and despairbut these pangs were ease, compared with the stings of conscience, which I have since endured. I tasted too what was called the sweet of revengebut it was transient, it expired even with the object, that provoked it. Remember, sister, that the passions are the seeds of vices as well as of virtues, from which either may spring, accordingly as they are nurtured. Unhappy they who have never been taught the art to govern them!' 'Alas! unhappy!' said the abbess, 'and illinformed of our holy religion!' Emily listened to Agnes, in silent awe, while she still examined the miniature, and became confirmed in her opinion of its strong resemblance to the portrait at Udolpho. 'This face is familiar to me,' said she, wishing to lead the nun to an explanation, yet fearing to discover too abruptly her knowledge of Udolpho. 'You are mistaken,' replied Agnes, 'you certainly never saw that picture before.' 'No,' replied Emily, 'but I have seen one extremely like it.' 'Impossible,' said Agnes, who may now be called the Lady Laurentini. 'It was in the castle of Udolpho,' continued Emily, looking stedfastly at her. 'Of Udolpho!' exclaimed Laurentini, 'of Udolpho in Italy!' 'The same,' replied Emily. 'You know me then,' said Laurentini, 'and you are the daughter of the Marchioness.' Emily was somewhat surprised at this abrupt assertion. 'I am the daughter of the late Mons. St. Aubert,' said she; 'and the lady you name is an utter stranger to me.' 'At least you believe so,' rejoined Laurentini. Emily asked what reasons there could be to believe otherwise. 'The family likeness, that you bear her,' said the nun. 'The Marchioness, it is known, was attached to a gentleman of Gascony, at the time when she accepted the hand of the Marquis, by the command of her father. Illfated, unhappy woman!' Emily, remembering the extreme emotion which St. Aubert had betrayed on the mention of the Marchioness, would now have suffered something more than surprise, had her confidence in his integrity been less; as it was, she could not, for a moment, believe what the words of Laurentini insinuated; yet she still felt strongly interested, concerning them, and begged, that she would explain them further. 'Do not urge me on that subject,' said the nun, 'it is to me a terrible one! Would that I could blot it from my memory!' She sighed deeply, and, after the pause of a moment, asked Emily, by what means she had discovered her name? 'By your portrait in the castle of Udolpho, to which this miniature bears a striking resemblance,' replied Emily. 'You have been at Udolpho then!' said the nun, with great emotion. 'Alas! what scenes does the mention of it revive in my fancyscenes of happinessof sufferingand of horror!' At this moment, the terrible spectacle, which Emily had witnessed in a chamber of that castle, occurred to her, and she shuddered, while she looked upon the nunand recollected her late wordsthat 'years of prayer and penitence could not wash out the foulness of murder.' She was now compelled to attribute these to another cause, than that of delirium. With a degree of horror, that almost deprived her of sense, she now believed she looked upon a murderer; all the recollected behaviour of Laurentini seemed to confirm the supposition, yet Emily was still lost in a labyrinth of perplexities, and, not knowing how to ask the questions, which might lead to truth, she could only hint them in broken sentences. 'Your sudden departure from Udolpho'said she. Laurentini groaned. 'The reports that followed it,' continued Emily'The west chamberthe mournful veilthe object it conceals!when murders are committed' The nun shrieked. 'What! there again!' said she, endeavouring to raise herself, while her starting eyes seemed to follow some object round the room'Come from the grave! What! Bloodblood too!There was no bloodthou canst not say it!Nay, do not smile,do not smile so piteously!' Laurentini fell into convulsions, as she uttered the last words; and Emily, unable any longer to endure the horror of the scene, hurried from the room, and sent some nuns to the assistance of the abbess. The Lady Blanche, and the boarders, who were in the parlour, now assembled round Emily, and, alarmed by her manner and affrighted countenance, asked a hundred questions, which she avoided answering further, than by saying, that she believed sister Agnes was dying. They received this as a sufficient explanation of her terror, and had then leisure to offer restoratives, which, at length, somewhat revived Emily, whose mind was, however, so much shocked with the terrible surmises, and perplexed with doubts by some words from the nun, that she was unable to converse, and would have left the convent immediately, had she not wished to know whether Laurentini would survive the late attack. After waiting some time, she was informed, that, the convulsions having ceased, Laurentini seemed to be reviving, and Emily and Blanche were departing, when the abbess appeared, who, drawing the former aside, said she had something of consequence to say to her, but, as it was late, she would not detain her then, and requested to see her on the following day. Emily promised to visit her, and, having taken leave, returned with the Lady Blanche towards the chateau, on the way to which the deep gloom of the woods made Blanche lament, that the evening was so far advanced; for the surrounding stillness and obscurity rendered her sensible of fear, though there was a servant to protect her; while Emily was too much engaged by the horrors of the scene she had just witnessed, to be affected by the solemnity of the shades, otherwise than as they served to promote her gloomy reverie, from which, however, she was at length recalled by the Lady Blanche, who pointed out, at some distance, in the dusky path they were winding, two persons slowly advancing. It was impossible to avoid them without striking into a still more secluded part of the wood, whither the strangers might easily follow; but all apprehension vanished, when Emily distinguished the voice of Mons. Du Pont, and perceived, that his companion was the gentleman, whom she had seen at the monastery, and who was now conversing with so much earnestness as not immediately to perceive their approach. When Du Pont joined the ladies, the stranger took leave, and they proceeded to the chateau, where the Count, when he heard of Mons. Bonnac, claimed him for an acquaintance, and, on learning the melancholy occasion of his visit to Languedoc, and that he was lodged at a small inn in the village, begged the favour of Mons. Du Pont to invite him to the chateau. The latter was happy to do so, and the scruples of reserve, which made M. Bonnac hesitate to accept the invitation, being at length overcome, they went to the chateau, where the kindness of the Count and the sprightliness of his son were exerted to dissipate the gloom, that overhung the spirits of the stranger. M. Bonnac was an officer in the French service, and appeared to be about fifty; his figure was tall and commanding, his manners had received the last polish, and there was something in his countenance uncommonly interesting; for over features, which, in youth, must have been remarkably handsome, was spread a melancholy, that seemed the effect of long misfortune, rather than of constitution, or temper. The conversation he held, during supper, was evidently an effort of politeness, and there were intervals in which, unable to struggle against the feelings, that depressed him, he relapsed into silence and abstraction, from which, however, the Count, sometimes, withdrew him in a manner so delicate and benevolent, that Emily, while she observed him, almost fancied she beheld her late father. The party separated, at an early hour, and then, in the solitude of her apartment, the scenes, which Emily had lately witnessed, returned to her fancy, with dreadful energy. That in the dying nun she should have discovered Signora Laurentini, who, instead of having been murdered by Montoni, was, as it now seemed, herself guilty of some dreadful crime, excited both horror and surprise in a high degree; nor did the hints, which she had dropped, respecting the marriage of the Marchioness de Villeroi, and the enquiries she had made concerning Emily's birth, occasion her a less degree of interest, though it was of a different nature. The history, which sister Frances had formerly related, and had said to be that of Agnes, it now appeared, was erroneous; but for what purpose it had been fabricated, unless the more effectually to conceal the true story, Emily could not even guess. Above all, her interest was excited as to the relation, which the story of the late Marchioness de Villeroi bore to that of her father; for, that some kind of relation existed between them, the grief of St. Aubert, upon hearing her named, his request to be buried near her, and her picture, which had been found among his papers, certainly proved. Sometimes it occurred to Emily, that he might have been the lover, to whom it was said the Marchioness was attached, when she was compelled to marry the Marquis de Villeroi; but that he had afterwards cherished a passion for her, she could not suffer herself to believe, for a moment. The papers, which he had so solemnly enjoined her to destroy, she now fancied had related to this connection, and she wished more earnestly than before to know the reasons, that made him consider the injunction necessary, which, had her faith in his principles been less, would have led to believe, that there was a mystery in her birth dishonourable to her parents, which those manuscripts might have revealed. Reflections, similar to these, engaged her mind, during the greater part of the night, and when, at length, she fell into a slumber, it was only to behold a vision of the dying nun, and to awaken in horrors, like those she had witnessed. On the following morning, she was too much indisposed to attend her appointment with the abbess, and, before the day concluded, she heard, that sister Agnes was no more. Mons. Bonnac received this intelligence, with concern; but Emily observed, that he did not appear so much affected now, as on the preceding evening, immediately after quitting the apartment of the nun, whose death was probably less terrible to him, than the confession he had been then called upon to witness. However this might be, he was perhaps consoled, in some degree, by a knowledge of the legacy bequeathed him, since his family was large, and the extravagance of some part of it had lately been the means of involving him in great distress, and even in the horrors of a prison; and it was the grief he had suffered from the wild career of a favourite son, with the pecuniary anxieties and misfortunes consequent upon it, that had given to his countenance the air of dejection, which had so much interested Emily. To his friend Mons. Du Pont he recited some particulars of his late sufferings, when it appeared, that he had been confined for several months in one of the prisons of Paris, with little hope of release, and without the comfort of seeing his wife, who had been absent in the country, endeavouring, though in vain, to procure assistance from his friends. When, at length, she had obtained an order for admittance, she was so much shocked at the change, which long confinement and sorrow had made in his appearance, that she was seized with fits, which, by their long continuance, threatened her life. 'Our situation affected those, who happened to witness it,' continued Mons. Bonnac, 'and one generous friend, who was in confinement at the same time, afterwards employed the first moments of his liberty in efforts to obtain mine. He succeeded; the heavy debt, that oppressed me, was discharged; and, when I would have expressed my sense of the obligation I had received, my benefactor was fled from my search. I have reason to believe he was the victim of his own generosity, and that he returned to the state of confinement, from which he had released me; but every enquiry after him was unsuccessful. Amiable and unfortunate Valancourt!' 'Valancourt!' exclaimed Mons. Du Pont. 'Of what family?' 'The Valancourts, Counts Duvarney,' replied Mons. Bonnac. The emotion of Mons. Du Pont, when he discovered the generous benefactor of his friend to be the rival of his love, can only be imagined; but, having overcome his first surprise, he dissipated the apprehensions of Mons. Bonnac by acquainting him, that Valancourt was at liberty, and had lately been in Languedoc; after which his affection for Emily prompted him to make some enquiries, respecting the conduct of his rival, during his stay at Paris, of which M. Bonnac appeared to be well informed. The answers he received were such as convinced him, that Valancourt had been much misrepresented, and, painful as was the sacrifice, he formed the just design of relinquishing his pursuit of Emily to a lover, who, it now appeared, was not unworthy of the regard, with which she honoured him. The conversation of Mons. Bonnac discovered, that Valancourt, some time after his arrival at Paris, had been drawn into the snares, which determined vice had spread for him, and that his hours had been chiefly divided between the parties of the captivating Marchioness and those gaming assemblies, to which the envy, or the avarice, of his brother officers had spared no art to seduce him. In these parties he had lost large sums, in efforts to recover small ones, and to such losses the Count De Villefort and Mons. Henri had been frequent witnesses. His resources were, at length, exhausted; and the Count, his brother, exasperated by his conduct, refused to continue the supplies necessary to his present mode of life, when Valancourt, in consequence of accumulated debts, was thrown into confinement, where his brother suffered him to remain, in the hope, that punishment might effect a reform of conduct, which had not yet been confirmed by long habit. In the solitude of his prison, Valancourt had leisure for reflection, and cause for repentance; here, too, the image of Emily, which, amidst the dissipation of the city had been obscured, but never obliterated from his heart, revived with all the charms of innocence and beauty, to reproach him for having sacrificed his happiness and debased his talents by pursuits, which his nobler faculties would formerly have taught him to consider were as tasteless as they were degrading. But, though his passions had been seduced, his heart was not depraved, nor had habit riveted the chains, that hung heavily on his conscience; and, as he retained that energy of will, which was necessary to burst them, he, at length, emancipated himself from the bondage of vice, but not till after much effort and severe suffering. Being released by his brother from the prison, where he had witnessed the affecting meeting between Mons. Bonnac and his wife, with whom he had been for some time acquainted, the first use of his liberty formed a striking instance of his humanity and his rashness; for with nearly all the money, just received from his brother, he went to a gaminghouse, and gave it as a last stake for the chance of restoring his friend to freedom, and to his afflicted family. The event was fortunate, and, while he had awaited the issue of this momentous stake, he made a solemn vow never again to yield to the destructive and fascinating vice of gaming. Having restored the venerable Mons. Bonnac to his rejoicing family, he hurried from Paris to Estuviere; and, in the delight of having made the wretched happy, forgot, for a while, his own misfortunes. Soon, however, he remembered, that he had thrown away the fortune, without which he could never hope to marry Emily; and life, unless passed with her, now scarcely appeared supportable; for her goodness, refinement, and simplicity of heart, rendered her beauty more enchanting, if possible, to his fancy, than it had ever yet appeared.

Experience had taught him to understand the full value of the qualities, which he had before admired, but which the contrasted characters he had seen in the world made him now adore; and these reflections, increasing the pangs of remorse and regret, occasioned the deep dejection, that had accompanied him even into the presence of Emily, of whom he considered himself no longer worthy. To the ignominy of having received pecuniary obligations from the Marchioness Chamfort, or any other lady of intrigue, as the Count De Villefort had been informed, or of having been engaged in the depredating schemes of gamesters, Valancourt had never submitted; and these were some of such scandals as often mingle with truth, against the unfortunate. Count De Villefort had received them from authority which he had no reason to doubt, and which the imprudent conduct he had himself witnessed in Valancourt, had certainly induced him the more readily to believe. Being such as Emily could not name to the Chevalier, he had no opportunity of refuting them; and, when he confessed himself to be unworthy of her esteem, he little suspected, that he was confirming to her the most dreadful calumnies. Thus the mistake had been mutual, and had remained so, when Mons. Bonnac explained the conduct of his generous, but imprudent young friend to Du Pont, who, with severe justice, determined not only to undeceive the Count on this subject, but to resign all hope of Emily. Such a sacrifice as his love rendered this, was deserving of a noble reward, and Mons. Bonnac, if it had been possible for him to forget the benevolent Valancourt, would have wished that Emily might accept the just Du Pont. When the Count was informed of the error he had committed, he was extremely shocked at the consequence of his credulity, and the account which Mons. Bonnac gave of his friend's situation, while at Paris, convinced him, that Valancourt had been entrapped by the schemes of a set of dissipated young men, with whom his profession had partly obliged him to associate, rather than by an inclination to vice; and, charmed by the humanity, and noble, though rash generosity, which his conduct towards Mons. Bonnac exhibited, he forgave him the transient errors, that had stained his youth, and restored him to the high degree of esteem, with which he had regarded him, during their early acquaintance. But, as the least reparation he could now make Valancourt was to afford him an opportunity of explaining to Emily his former conduct, he immediately wrote, to request his forgiveness of the unintentional injury he had done him, and to invite him to ChateauleBlanc. Motives of delicacy withheld the Count from informing Emily of this letter, and of kindness from acquainting her with the discovery respecting Valancourt, till his arrival should save her from the possibility of anxiety, as to its event; and this precaution spared her even severer inquietude, than the Count had foreseen, since he was ignorant of the symptoms of despair, which Valancourt's late conduct had betrayed. Chapter 17 But in these cases, We still have judgment here; that we but teach Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return To plague the inventor thus evenhanded justice Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice To our own lips. MACBETH Some circumstances of an extraordinary nature now withdrew Emily from her own sorrows, and excited emotions, which partook of both surprise and horror. A few days followed that, on which Signora Laurentini died, her will was opened at the monastery, in the presence of the superiors and Mons. Bonnac, when it was found, that one third of her personal property was bequeathed to the nearest surviving relative of the late Marchioness de Villeroi, and that Emily was the person. With the secret of Emily's family the abbess had long been acquainted, and it was in observance of the earnest request of St. Aubert, who was known to the friar, that attended him on his deathbed, that his daughter had remained in ignorance of her relationship to the Marchioness. But some hints, which had fallen from Signora Laurentini, during her last interview with Emily, and a confession of a very extraordinary nature, given in her dying hours, had made the abbess think it necessary to converse with her young friend, on the topic she had not before ventured to introduce; and it was for this purpose, that she had requested to see her on the morning that followed her interview with the nun. Emily's indisposition had then prevented the intended conversation; but now, after the will had been examined, she received a summons, which she immediately obeyed, and became informed of circumstances, that powerfully affected her. As the narrative of the abbess was, however, deficient in many particulars, of which the reader may wish to be informed, and the history of the nun is materially connected with the fate of the Marchioness de Villeroi, we shall omit the conversation, that passed in the parlour of the convent, and mingle with our relation a brief history of LAURENTINI DI UDOLPHO, Who was the only child of her parents, and heiress of the ancient house of Udolpho, in the territory of Venice. It was the first misfortune of her life, and that which led to all her succeeding misery, that the friends, who ought to have restrained her strong passions, and mildly instructed her in the art of governing them, nurtured them by early indulgence. But they cherished their own failings in her; for their conduct was not the result of rational kindness, and, when they either indulged, or opposed the passions of their child, they gratified their own. Thus they indulged her with weakness, and reprehended her with violence; her spirit was exasperated by their vehemence, instead of being corrected by their wisdom; and their oppositions became contest for victory, in which the due tenderness of the parents, and the affectionate duties of the child, were equally forgotten; but, as returning fondness disarmed the parents' resentment soonest, Laurentini was suffered to believe that she had conquered, and her passions became stronger by every effort, that had been employed to subdue them. The death of her father and mother in the same year left her to her own discretion, under the dangerous circumstances attendant on youth and beauty. She was fond of company, delighted with admiration, yet disdainful of the opinion of the world, when it happened to contradict her inclinations; had a gay and brilliant wit, and was mistress of all the arts of fascination. Her conduct was such as might have been expected, from the weakness of her principles and the strength of her passions. Among her numerous admirers was the late Marquis de Villeroi, who, on his tour through Italy, saw Laurentini at Venice, where she usually resided, and became her passionate adorer. Equally captivated by the figure and accomplishments of the Marquis, who was at that period one of the most distinguished noblemen of the French court, she had the art so effectually to conceal from him the dangerous traits of her character and the blemishes of her late conduct, that he solicited her hand in marriage. Before the nuptials were concluded, she retired to the castle of Udolpho, whither the Marquis followed, and, where her conduct, relaxing from the propriety, which she had lately assumed, discovered to him the precipice, on which he stood. A minuter enquiry than he had before thought it necessary to make, convinced him, that he had been deceived in her character, and she, whom he had designed for his wife, afterwards became his mistress. Having passed some weeks at Udolpho, he was called abruptly to France, whither he returned with extreme reluctance, for his heart was still fascinated by the arts of Laurentini, with whom, however, he had on various pretences delayed his marriage; but, to reconcile her to this separation, he now gave repeated promises of returning to conclude the nuptials, as soon as the affair, which thus suddenly called him to France, should permit. Soothed, in some degree, by these assurances, she suffered him to depart; and, soon after, her relative, Montoni, arriving at Udolpho, renewed the addresses, which she had before refused, and which she now again rejected. Meanwhile, her thoughts were constantly with the Marquis de Villeroi, for whom she suffered all the delirium of Italian love, cherished by the solitude, to which she confined herself; for she had now lost all taste for the pleasures of society and the gaiety of amusement. Her only indulgences were to sigh and weep over a miniature of the Marquis; to visit the scenes, that had witnessed their happiness, to pour forth her heart to him in writing, and to count the weeks, the days, which must intervene before the period that he had mentioned as probable for his return. But this period passed without bringing him; and week after week followed in heavy and almost intolerable expectation. During this interval, Laurentini's fancy, occupied incessantly by one idea, became disordered; and, her whole heart being devoted to one object, life became hateful to her, when she believed that object lost. Several months passed, during which she heard nothing from the Marquis de Villeroi, and her days were marked, at intervals, with the phrensy of passion and the sullenness of despair. She secluded herself from all visitors, and, sometimes, remained in her apartment, for weeks together, refusing to speak to every person, except her favourite female attendant, writing scraps of letters, reading, again and again, those she had received from the Marquis, weeping over his picture, and speaking to it, for many hours, upbraiding, reproaching and caressing it alternately. At length, a report reached her, that the Marquis had married in France, and, after suffering all the extremes of love, jealousy and indignation, she formed the desperate resolution of going secretly to that country, and, if the report proved true, of attempting a deep revenge. To her favourite woman only she confided the plan of her journey, and she engaged her to partake of it. Having collected her jewels, which, descending to her from many branches of her family, were of immense value, and all her cash, to a very large amount, they were packed in a trunk, which was privately conveyed to a neighbouring town, whither Laurentini, with this only servant, followed, and thence proceeded secretly to Leghorn, where they embarked for France. When, on her arrival in Languedoc, she found, that the Marquis de Villeroi had been married, for some months, her despair almost deprived her of reason, and she alternately projected and abandoned the horrible design of murdering the Marquis, his wife and herself. At length she contrived to throw herself in his way, with an intention of reproaching him, for his conduct, and of stabbing herself in his presence; but, when she again saw him, who so long had been the constant object of her thoughts and affections, resentment yielded to love; her resolution failed; she trembled with the conflict of emotions, that assailed her heart, and fainted away. The Marquis was not proof against her beauty and sensibility; all the energy, with which he had first loved, returned, for his passion had been resisted by prudence, rather than overcome by indifference; and, since the honour of his family would not permit him to marry her, he had endeavoured to subdue his love, and had so far succeeded, as to select the then Marchioness for his wife, whom he loved at first with a tempered and rational affection. But the mild virtues of that amiable lady did not recompense him for her indifference, which appeared, notwithstanding her efforts to conceal it; and he had, for some time, suspected that her affections were engaged by another person, when Laurentini arrived in Languedoc. This artful Italian soon perceived, that she had regained her influence over him, and, soothed by the discovery, she determined to live, and to employ all her enchantments to win his consent to the diabolical deed, which she believed was necessary to the security of her happiness. She conducted her scheme with deep dissimulation and patient perseverance, and, having completely estranged the affections of the Marquis from his wife, whose gentle goodness and unimpassioned manners had ceased to please, when contrasted with the captivations of the Italian, she proceeded to awaken in his mind the jealousy of pride, for it was no longer that of love, and even pointed out to him the person, to whom she affirmed the Marchioness had sacrificed her honour; but Laurentini had first extorted from him a solemn promise to forbear avenging himself upon his rival. This was an important part of her plan, for she knew, that, if his desire of vengeance was restrained towards one party, it would burn more fiercely towards the other, and he might then, perhaps, be prevailed on to assist in the horrible act, which would release him from the only barrier, that withheld him from making her his wife. The innocent Marchioness, meanwhile, observed, with extreme grief, the alteration in her husband's manners. He became reserved and thoughtful in her presence; his conduct was austere, and sometimes even rude; and he left her, for many hours together, to weep for his unkindness, and to form plans for the recovery of his affection. His conduct afflicted her the more, because, in obedience to the command of her father, she had accepted his hand, though her affections were engaged to another, whose amiable disposition, she had reason to believe, would have ensured her happiness. This circumstance Laurentini had discovered, soon after her arrival in France, and had made ample use of it in assisting her designs upon the Marquis, to whom she adduced such seeming proof of his wife's infidelity, that, in the frantic rage of wounded honour, he consented to destroy his wife. A slow poison was administered, and she fell a victim to the jealousy and subtlety of Laurentini and to the guilty weakness of her husband. But the moment of Laurentini's triumph, the moment, to which she had looked forward for the completion of all her wishes, proved only the commencement of a suffering, that never left her to her dying hour. The passion of revenge, which had in part stimulated her to the commission of this atrocious deed, died, even at the moment when it was gratified, and left her to the horrors of unavailing pity and remorse, which would probably have empoisoned all the years she had promised herself with the Marquis de Villeroi, had her expectations of an alliance with him been realized. But he, too, had found the moment of his revenge to be that of remorse, as to himself, and detestation, as to the partner of his crime; the feeling, which he had mistaken for conviction, was no more; and he stood astonished, and aghast, that no proof remained of his wife's infidelity, now that she had suffered the punishment of guilt. Even when he was informed, that she was dying, he had felt suddenly and unaccountably reassured of her innocence, nor was the solemn assurance she made him in her last hour, capable of affording him a stronger conviction of her blameless conduct. In the first horrors of remorse and despair, he felt inclined to deliver up himself and the woman, who had plunged him into this abyss of guilt, into the hands of justice; but, when the paroxysm of his suffering was over, his intention changed. Laurentini, however, he saw only once afterwards, and that was, to curse her as the instigator of his crime, and to say, that he spared her life only on condition, that she passed the rest of her days in prayer and penance. Overwhelmed with disappointment, on receiving contempt and abhorrence from the man, for whose sake she had not scrupled to stain her conscience with human blood, and, touched with horror of the unavailing crime she had committed, she renounced the world, and retired to the monastery of St. Claire, a dreadful victim to unresisted passion. The Marquis, immediately after the death of his wife, quitted ChateauleBlanc, to which he never returned, and endeavoured to lose the sense of his crime amidst the tumult of war, or the dissipations of a capital; but his efforts were vain; a deep dejection hung over him ever after, for which his most intimate friend could not account, and he, at length, died, with a degree of horror nearly equal to that, which Laurentini had suffered. The physician, who had observed the singular appearance of the unfortunate Marchioness, after death, had been bribed to silence; and, as the surmises of a few of the servants had proceeded no further than a whisper, the affair had never been investigated. Whether this whisper ever reached the father of the Marchioness, and, if it did, whether the difficulty of obtaining proof deterred him from prosecuting the Marquis de Villeroi, is uncertain; but her death was deeply lamented by some part of her family, and particularly by her brother, M. St. Aubert; for that was the degree of relationship, which had existed between Emily's father and the Marchioness; and there is no doubt, that he suspected the manner of her death. Many letters passed between the Marquis and him, soon after the decease of his beloved sister, the subject of which was not known, but there is reason to believe, that they related to the cause of her death; and these were the papers, together with some letters of the Marchioness, who had confided to her brother the occasion of her unhappiness, which St. Aubert had so solemnly enjoined his daughter to destroy and anxiety for her peace had probably made him forbid her to enquire into the melancholy story, to which they alluded. Such, indeed, had been his affliction, on the premature death of this his favourite sister, whose unhappy marriage had from the first excited his tenderest pity, that he never could hear her named, or mention her himself after her death, except to Madame St. Aubert. From Emily, whose sensibility he feared to awaken, he had so carefully concealed her history and name, that she was ignorant, till now, that she ever had such a relative as the Marchioness de Villeroi; and from this motive he had enjoined silence to his only surviving sister, Madame Cheron, who had scrupulously observed his request. It was over some of the last pathetic letters of the Marchioness, that St. Aubert was weeping, when he was observed by Emily, on the eve of her departure from La Vallee, and it was her picture, which he had so tenderly caressed. Her disastrous death may account for the emotion he had betrayed, on hearing her named by La Voisin, and for his request to be interred near the monument of the Villerois, where her remains were deposited, but not those of her husband, who was buried, where he died, in the north of France. The confessor, who attended St. Aubert in his last moments, recollected him to be the brother of the late Marchioness, when St. Aubert, from tenderness to Emily, had conjured him to conceal the circumstance, and to request that the abbess, to whose care he particularly recommended her, would do the same; a request, which had been exactly observed. Laurentini, on her arrival in France, had carefully concealed her name and family, and, the better to disguise her real history, had, on entering the convent, caused the story to be circulated, which had imposed on sister Frances, and it is probable, that the abbess, who did not preside in the convent, at the time of her noviciation, was also entirely ignorant of the truth. The deep remorse, that seized on the mind of Laurentini, together with the sufferings of disappointed passion, for she still loved the Marquis, again unsettled her intellects, and, after the first paroxysms of despair were passed, a heavy and silent melancholy had settled upon her spirits, which suffered few interruptions from fits of phrensy, till the time of her death. During many years, it had been her only amusement to walk in the woods near the monastery, in the solitary hours of night, and to play upon a favourite instrument, to which she sometimes joined the delightful melody of her voice, in the most solemn and melancholy airs of her native country, modulated by all the energetic feeling, that dwelt in her heart. The physician, who had attended her, recommended it to the superior to indulge her in this whim, as the only means of soothing her distempered fancy; and she was suffered to walk in the lonely hours of night, attended by the servant, who had accompanied her from Italy; but, as the indulgence transgressed against the rules of the convent, it was kept as secret as possible; and thus the mysterious music of Laurentini had combined with other circumstances, to produce a report, that not only the chateau, but its neighbourhood, was haunted. Soon after her entrance into this holy community, and before she had shewn any symptoms of insanity there, she made a will, in which, after bequeathing a considerable legacy to the convent, she divided the remainder of her personal property, which her jewels made very valuable, between the wife of Mons. Bonnac, who was an Italian lady and her relation, and the nearest surviving relative of the late Marchioness de Villeroi. As Emily St. Aubert was not only the nearest, but the sole relative, this legacy descended to her, and thus explained to her the whole mystery of her father's conduct. The resemblance between Emily and her unfortunate aunt had frequently been observed by Laurentini, and had occasioned the singular behaviour, which had formerly alarmed her; but it was in the nun's dying hour, when her conscience gave her perpetually the idea of the Marchioness, that she became more sensible, than ever, of this likeness, and, in her phrensy, deemed it no resemblance of the person she had injured, but the original herself. The bold assertion, that had followed, on the recovery of her senses, that Emily was the daughter of the Marchioness de Villeroi, arose from a suspicion that she was so; for, knowing that her rival, when she married the Marquis, was attached to another lover, she had scarcely scrupled to believe, that her honour had been sacrificed, like her own, to an unresisted passion. Of a crime, however, to which Emily had suspected, from her phrensied confession of murder, that she had been instrumental in the castle of Udolpho, Laurentini was innocent; and she had herself been deceived, concerning the spectacle, that formerly occasioned her so much terror, and had since compelled her, for a while, to attribute the horrors of the nun to a consciousness of a murder, committed in that castle. It may be remembered, that, in a chamber of Udolpho, hung a black veil, whose singular situation had excited Emily's curiosity, and which afterwards disclosed an object, that had overwhelmed her with horror; for, on lifting it, there appeared, instead of the picture she had expected, within a recess of the wall, a human figure of ghastly paleness, stretched at its length, and dressed in the habiliments of the grave. What added to the horror of the spectacle, was, that the face appeared partly decayed and disfigured by worms, which were visible on the features and hands. On such an object, it will be readily believed, that no person could endure to look twice. Emily, it may be recollected, had, after the first glance, let the veil drop, and her terror had prevented her from ever after provoking a renewal of such suffering, as she had then experienced. Had she dared to look again, her delusion and her fears would have vanished together, and she would have perceived, that the figure before her was not human, but formed of wax. The history of it is somewhat extraordinary, though not without example in the records of that fierce severity, which monkish superstition has sometimes inflicted on mankind. A member of the house of Udolpho, having committed some offence against the prerogative of the church, had been condemned to the penance of contemplating, during certain hours of the day, a waxen image, made to resemble a human body in the state, to which it is reduced after death. This penance, serving as a memento of the condition at which he must himself arrive, had been designed to reprove the pride of the Marquis of Udolpho, which had formerly so much exasperated that of the Romish church; and he had not only superstitiously observed this penance himself, which, he had believed, was to obtain a pardon for all his sins, but had made it a condition in his will, that his descendants should preserve the image, on pain of forfeiting to the church a certain part of his domain, that they also might profit by the humiliating moral it conveyed. The figure, therefore, had been suffered to retain its station in the wall of the chamber, but his descendants excused themselves from observing the penance, to which he had been enjoined. This image was so horribly natural, that it is not surprising Emily should have mistaken it for the object it resembled, nor, since she had heard such an extraordinary account, concerning the disappearing of the late lady of the castle, and had such experience of the character of Montoni, that she should have believed this to be the murdered body of the lady Laurentini, and that he had been the contriver of her death. The situation, in which she had discovered it, occasioned her, at first, much surprise and perplexity; but the vigilance, with which the doors of the chamber, where it was deposited, were afterwards secured, had compelled her to believe, that Montoni, not daring to confide the secret of her death to any person, had suffered her remains to decay in this obscure chamber. The ceremony of the veil, however, and the circumstance of the doors having been left open, even for a moment, had occasioned her much wonder and some doubts; but these were not sufficient to overcome her suspicion of Montoni; and it was the dread of his terrible vengeance, that had sealed her lips in silence, concerning what she had seen in the west chamber. Emily, in discovering the Marchioness de Villeroi to have been the sister of Mons. St. Aubert, was variously affected; but, amidst the sorrow, which she suffered for her untimely death, she was released from an anxious and painful conjecture, occasioned by the rash assertion of Signora Laurentini, concerning her birth and the honour of her parents. Her faith in St. Aubert's principles would scarcely allow her to suspect that he had acted dishonourably; and she felt such reluctance to believe herself the daughter of any other, than her, whom she had always considered and loved as a mother, that she would hardly admit such a circumstance to be possible; yet the likeness, which it had frequently been affirmed she bore to the late Marchioness, the former behaviour of Dorothee the old housekeeper, the assertion of Laurentini, and the mysterious attachment, which St. Aubert had discovered, awakened doubts, as to his connection with the Marchioness, which her reason could neither vanquish, or confirm. From these, however, she was now relieved, and all the circumstances of her father's conduct were fully explained but her heart was oppressed by the melancholy catastrophe of her amiable relative, and by the awful lesson, which the history of the nun exhibited, the indulgence of whose passions had been the means of leading her gradually to the commission of a crime, from the prophecy of which in her early years she would have recoiled in horror, and exclaimedthat it could not be!a crime, which whole years of repentance and of the severest penance had not been able to obliterate from her conscience. Chapter 18 Then, fresh tears Stood on her cheek, as doth the honeydew Upon a gather'd lily almost wither'd SHAKESPEARE After the late discoveries, Emily was distinguished at the chateau by the Count and his family, as a relative of the house of Villeroi, and received, if possible, more friendly attention, than had yet been shewn her. Count De Villefort's surprise at the delay of an answer to his letter, which had been directed to Valancourt, at Estuviere, was mingled with satisfaction for the prudence, which had saved Emily from a share of the anxiety he now suffered, though, when he saw her still drooping under the effect of his former error, all his resolution was necessary to restrain him from relating the truth, that would afford her a momentary relief. The approaching nuptials of the Lady Blanche now divided his attention with this subject of his anxiety, for the inhabitants of the chateau were already busied in preparations for that event, and the arrival of Mons. St. Foix was daily expected. In the gaiety, which surrounded her, Emily vainly tried to participate, her spirits being depressed by the late discoveries, and by the anxiety concerning the fate of Valancourt, that had been occasioned by the description of his manner, when he had delivered the ring. She seemed to perceive in it the gloomy wildness of despair; and, when she considered to what that despair might have urged him, her heart sunk with terror and grief. The state of suspense, as to his safety, to which she believed herself condemned, till she should return to La Vallee, appeared insupportable, and, in such moments, she could not even struggle to assume the composure, that had left her mind, but would often abruptly quit the company she was with, and endeavour to sooth her spirits in the deep solitudes of the woods, that overbrowed the shore. Here, the faint roar of foaming waves, that beat below, and the sullen murmur of the wind among the branches around, were circumstances in unison with the temper of her mind; and she would sit on a cliff, or on the broken steps of her favourite watchtower, observing the changing colours of the evening clouds, and the gloom of twilight draw over the sea, till the white tops of billows, riding towards the shore, could scarcely be discerned amidst the darkened waters. The lines, engraved by Valancourt on this tower, she frequently repeated with melancholy enthusiasm, and then would endeavour to check the recollections and the grief they occasioned, and to turn her thoughts to indifferent subjects. One evening, having wandered with her lute to this her favourite spot, she entered the ruined tower, and ascended a winding staircase, that led to a small chamber, which was less decayed than the rest of the building, and whence she had often gazed, with admiration, on the wide prospect of sea and land, that extended below. The sun was now setting on that tract of the Pyrenees, which divided Languedoc from Rousillon, and, placing herself opposite to a small grated window, which, like the woodtops beneath, and the waves lower still, gleamed with the red glow of the west, she touched the chords of her lute in solemn symphony, and then accompanied it with her voice, in one of the simple and affecting airs, to which, in happier days, Valancourt had often listened in rapture, and which she now adapted to the following lines. TO MELANCHOLY Spirit of love and sorrowhail! Thy solemn voice from far I hear, Mingling with ev'ning's dying gale Hail, with this sadlypleasing tear! O! at this still, this lonely hour, Thine own sweet hour of closing day, Awake thy lute, whose charmful pow'r Shall call up Fancy to obey To paint the wild romantic dream, That meets the poet's musing eye, As, on the bank of shadowy stream, He breathes to her the fervid sigh. O lonely spirit! let thy song Lead me through all thy sacred haunt; The minister's moonlight aisles along, Where spectres raise the midnight chaunt. I hear their dirges faintly swell! Then, sink at once in silence drear, While, from the pillar'd cloister's cell, Dimly their gliding forms appear! Lead where the pinewoods wave on high, Whose pathless sod is darkly seen, As the cold moon, with trembling eye, Darts her long beams the leaves between.

Lead to the mountain's dusky head, Where, far below, in shade profound, Wide forests, plains and hamlets spread, And sad the chimes of vesper sound, Or guide me, where the dashing oar Just breaks the stillness of the vale, As slow it tracks the winding shore, To meet the ocean's distant sail To pebbly banks, that Neptune laves, With measur'd surges, loud and deep, Where the dark cliff bends o'er the waves, And wild the winds of autumn sweep. There pause at midnight's spectred hour, And list the longresounding gale; And catch the fleeting moonlight's pow'r, O'er foaming seas and distant sail. The soft tranquillity of the scene below, where the evening breeze scarcely curled the water, or swelled the passing sail, that caught the last gleam of the sun, and where, now and then, a dipping oar was all that disturbed the trembling radiance, conspired with the tender melody of her lute to lull her mind into a state of gentle sadness, and she sung the mournful songs of past times, till the remembrances they awakened were too powerful for her heart, her tears fell upon the lute, over which she drooped, and her voice trembled, and was unable to proceed. Though the sun had now sunk behind the mountains, and even his reflected light was fading from their highest points, Emily did not leave the watchtower, but continued to indulge her melancholy reverie, till a footstep, at a little distance, startled her, and, on looking through the grate, she observed a person walking below, whom, however, soon perceiving to be Mons. Bonnac, she returned to the quiet thoughtfulness his step had interrupted. After some time, she again struck her lute, and sung her favourite air; but again a step disturbed her, and, as she paused to listen, she heard it ascending the staircase of the tower. The gloom of the hour, perhaps, made her sensible to some degree of fear, which she might not otherwise have felt; for, only a few minutes before, she had seen Mons. Bonnac pass. The steps were quick and bounding, and, in the next moment, the door of the chamber opened, and a person entered, whose features were veiled in the obscurity of twilight; but his voice could not be concealed, for it was the voice of Valancourt! At the sound, never heard by Emily, without emotion, she started, in terror, astonishment and doubtful pleasure, and had scarcely beheld him at her feet, when she sunk into a seat, overcome by the various emotions, that contended at her heart, and almost insensible to that voice, whose earnest and trembling calls seemed as if endeavouring to save her. Valancourt, as he hung over Emily, deplored his own rash impatience, in having thus surprised her for when he had arrived at the chateau, too anxious to await the return of the Count, who, he understood, was in the grounds, he went himself to seek him, when, as he passed the tower, he was struck by the sound of Emily's voice, and immediately ascended. It was a considerable time before she revived, but, when her recollection returned, she repulsed his attentions, with an air of reserve, and enquired, with as much displeasure as it was possible she could feel in these first moments of his appearance, the occasion of his visit. 'Ah Emily!' said Valancourt, 'that air, those wordsalas! I have, then, little to hopewhen you ceased to esteem me, you ceased also to love me!' 'Most true, sir,' replied Emily, endeavouring to command her trembling voice; 'and if you had valued my esteem, you would not have given me this new occasion for uneasiness.' Valancourt's countenance changed suddenly from the anxieties of doubt to an expression of surprise and dismay he was silent a moment, and then said, 'I had been taught to hope for a very different reception! Is it, then, true, Emily, that I have lost your regard forever? am I to believe, that, though your esteem for me may returnyour affection never can? Can the Count have meditated the cruelty, which now tortures me with a second death?' The voice, in which he spoke this, alarmed Emily as much as his words surprised her, and, with trembling impatience, she begged that he would explain them. 'Can any explanation be necessary?' said Valancourt, 'do you not know how cruelly my conduct has been misrepresented? that the actions of which you once believed me guilty (and, O Emily! how could you so degrade me in your opinion, even for a moment!) those actionsI hold in as much contempt and abhorrence as yourself? Are you, indeed, ignorant, that Count de Villefort has detected the slanders, that have robbed me of all I hold dear on earth, and has invited me hither to justify to you my former conduct? It is surely impossible you can be uninformed of these circumstances, and I am again torturing myself with a false hope!' The silence of Emily confirmed this supposition; for the deep twilight would not allow Valancourt to distinguish the astonishment and doubting joy, that fixed her features. For a moment, she continued unable to speak; then a profound sigh seemed to give some relief to her spirits, and she said, 'Valancourt! I was, till this moment, ignorant of all the circumstances you have mentioned; the emotion I now suffer may assure you of the truth of this, and, that, though I had ceased to esteem, I had not taught myself entirely to forget you.' 'This moment,' said Valancourt, in a low voice, and leaning for support against the window'this moment brings with it a conviction that overpowers me!I am dear to you thenstill dear to you, my Emily!' 'Is it necessary that I should tell you so?' she replied, 'is it necessary, that I should saythese are the first moments of joy I have known, since your departure, and that they repay me for all those of pain I have suffered in the interval?' Valancourt sighed deeply, and was unable to reply; but, as he pressed her hand to his lips, the tears, that fell over it, spoke a language, which could not be mistaken, and to which words were inadequate. Emily, somewhat tranquillized, proposed returning to the chateau, and then, for the first time, recollected that the Count had invited Valancourt thither to explain his conduct, and that no explanation had yet been given. But, while she acknowledged this, her heart would not allow her to dwell, for a moment, on the possibility of his unworthiness; his look, his voice, his manner, all spoke the noble sincerity, which had formerly distinguished him; and she again permitted herself to indulge the emotions of a joy, more surprising and powerful, than she had ever before experienced. Neither Emily, or Valancourt, were conscious how they reached the chateau, whither they might have been transferred by the spell of a fairy, for any thing they could remember; and it was not, till they had reached the great hall, that either of them recollected there were other persons in the world besides themselves. The Count then came forth with surprise, and with the joyfulness of pure benevolence, to welcome Valancourt, and to entreat his forgiveness of the injustice he had done him; soon after which, Mons. Bonnac joined this happy group, in which he and Valancourt were mutually rejoiced to meet. When the first congratulations were over, and the general joy became somewhat more tranquil, the Count withdrew with Valancourt to the library, where a long conversation passed between them, in which the latter so clearly justified himself of the criminal parts of the conduct, imputed to him, and so candidly confessed and so feelingly lamented the follies, which he had committed, that the Count was confirmed in his belief of all he had hoped; and, while he perceived so many noble virtues in Valancourt, and that experience had taught him to detest the follies, which before he had only not admired, he did not scruple to believe, that he would pass through life with the dignity of a wise and good man, or to entrust to his care the future happiness of Emily St. Aubert, for whom he felt the solicitude of a parent. Of this he soon informed her, in a short conversation, when Valancourt had left him. While Emily listened to a relation of the services, that Valancourt had rendered Mons. Bonnac, her eyes overflowed with tears of pleasure, and the further conversation of Count De Villefort perfectly dissipated every doubt, as to the past and future conduct of him, to whom she now restored, without fear, the esteem and affection, with which she had formerly received him. When they returned to the supperroom, the Countess and Lady Blanche met Valancourt with sincere congratulations; and Blanche, indeed, was so much rejoiced to see Emily returned to happiness, as to forget, for a while, that Mons. St. Foix was not yet arrived at the chateau, though he had been expected for some hours; but her generous sympathy was, soon after, rewarded by his appearance. He was now perfectly recovered from the wounds, received, during his perilous adventure among the Pyrenees, the mention of which served to heighten to the parties, who had been involved in it, the sense of their present happiness. New congratulations passed between them, and round the suppertable appeared a group of faces, smiling with felicity, but with a felicity, which had in each a different character. The smile of Blanche was frank and gay, that of Emily tender and pensive; Valancourt's was rapturous, tender and gay alternately; Mons. St. Foix's was joyous, and that of the Count, as he looked on the surrounding party, expressed the tempered complacency of benevolence; while the features of the Countess, Henri, and Mons. Bonnac, discovered fainter traces of animation. Poor Mons. Du Pont did not, by his presence, throw a shade of regret over the company; for, when he had discovered, that Valancourt was not unworthy of the esteem of Emily, he determined seriously to endeavour at the conquest of his own hopeless affection, and had immediately withdrawn from ChateauleBlanca conduct, which Emily now understood, and rewarded with her admiration and pity. The Count and his guests continued together till a late hour, yielding to the delights of social gaiety, and to the sweets of friendship. When Annette heard of the arrival of Valancourt, Ludovico had some difficulty to prevent her going into the supperroom, to express her joy, for she declared, that she had never been so rejoiced at any ACCIDENT as this, since she had found Ludovico himself. Chapter 19 Now my task is smoothly done, I can fly, or I can run Quickly to the green earth's end, Where the bow'd welkin low doth bend, And, from thence, can soar as soon To the corners of the moon. MILTON The marriages of the Lady Blanche and Emily St. Aubert were celebrated, on the same day, and with the ancient baronial magnificence, at ChateauleBlanc. The feasts were held in the great hall of the castle, which, on this occasion, was hung with superb new tapestry, representing the exploits of Charlemagne and his twelve peers; here, were seen the Saracens, with their horrible visors, advancing to battle; and there, were displayed the wild solemnities of incantation, and the necromantic feats, exhibited by the magician JARL before the Emperor. The sumptuous banners of the family of Villeroi, which had long slept in dust, were once more unfurled, to wave over the gothic points of painted casements; and music echoed, in many a lingering close, through every winding gallery and colonnade of that vast edifice. As Annette looked down from the corridor upon the hall, whose arches and windows were illuminated with brilliant festoons of lamps, and gazed on the splendid dresses of the dancers, the costly liveries of the attendants, the canopies of purple velvet and gold, and listened to the gay strains that floated along the vaulted roof, she almost fancied herself in an enchanted palace, and declared, that she had not met with any place, which charmed her so much, since she read the fairy tales; nay, that the fairies themselves, at their nightly revels in this old hall, could display nothing finer; while old Dorothee, as she surveyed the scene, sighed, and said, the castle looked as it was wont to do in the time of her youth. After gracing the festivities of ChateauleBlanc, for some days, Valancourt and Emily took leave of their kind friends, and returned to La Vallee, where the faithful Theresa received them with unfeigned joy, and the pleasant shades welcomed them with a thousand tender and affecting remembrances; and, while they wandered together over the scenes, so long inhabited by the late Mons. and Madame St. Aubert, and Emily pointed out, with pensive affection, their favourite haunts, her present happiness was heightened, by considering, that it would have been worthy of their approbation, could they have witnessed it. Valancourt led her to the planetree on the terrace, where he had first ventured to declare his love, and where now the remembrance of the anxiety he had then suffered, and the retrospect of all the dangers and misfortunes they had each encountered, since last they sat together beneath its broad branches, exalted the sense of their present felicity, which, on this spot, sacred to the memory of St. Aubert, they solemnly vowed to deserve, as far as possible, by endeavouring to imitate his benevolence,by remembering, that superior attainments of every sort bring with them duties of superior exertion,and by affording to their fellowbeings, together with that portion of ordinary comforts, which prosperity always owes to misfortune, the example of lives passed in happy thankfulness to GOD, and, therefore, in careful tenderness to his creatures. Soon after their return to La Vallee, the brother of Valancourt came to congratulate him on his marriage, and to pay his respects to Emily, with whom he was so much pleased, as well as with the prospect of rational happiness, which these nuptials offered to Valancourt, that he immediately resigned to him a part of the rich domain, the whole of which, as he had no family, would of course descend to his brother, on his decease. The estates, at Tholouse, were disposed of, and Emily purchased of Mons. Quesnel the ancient domain of her late father, where, having given Annette a marriage portion, she settled her as the housekeeper, and Ludovico as the steward; but, since both Valancourt and herself preferred the pleasant and longloved shades of La Vallee to the magnificence of Epourville, they continued to reside there, passing, however, a few months in the year at the birthplace of St. Aubert, in tender respect to his memory. The legacy, which had been bequeathed to Emily by Signora Laurentini, she begged Valancourt would allow her to resign to Mons. Bonnac; and Valancourt, when she made the request, felt all the value of the compliment it conveyed. The castle of Udolpho, also, descended to the wife of Mons. Bonnac, who was the nearest surviving relation of the house of that name, and thus affluence restored his longoppressed spirits to peace, and his family to comfort. O! how joyful it is to tell of happiness, such as that of Valancourt and Emily; to relate, that, after suffering under the oppression of the vicious and the disdain of the weak, they were, at length, restored to each otherto the beloved landscapes of their native country,to the securest felicity of this life, that of aspiring to moral and labouring for intellectual improvementto the pleasures of enlightened society, and to the exercise of the benevolence, which had always animated their hearts; while the bowers of La Vallee became, once more, the retreat of goodness, wisdom and domestic blessedness! O! useful may it be to have shewn, that, though the vicious can sometimes pour affliction upon the good, their power is transient and their punishment certain; and that innocence, though oppressed by injustice, shall, supported by patience, finally triumph over misfortune! And, if the weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain itthe effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded.

I The Old Pyncheon Family Halfway down a bystreet of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elmtree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every townborn child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm. On my occasional visits to the town aforesaid, I seldom failed to turn down Pyncheon Street, for the sake of passing through the shadow of these two antiquitiesthe great elmtree and the weatherbeaten edifice. The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within. Were these to be worthily recounted, they would form a narrative of no small interest and instruction, and possessing, moreover, a certain remarkable unity, which might almost seem the result of artistic arrangement. But the story would include a chain of events extending over the better part of two centuries, and, written out with reasonable amplitude, would fill a bigger folio volume, or a longer series of duodecimos, than could prudently be appropriated to the annals of all New England during a similar period. It consequently becomes imperative to make short work with most of the traditionary lore of which the old Pyncheon House, otherwise known as the House of the Seven Gables, has been the theme. With a brief sketch, therefore, of the circumstances amid which the foundation of the house was laid, and a rapid glimpse at its quaint exterior, as it grew black in the prevalent east windpointing, too, here and there, at some spot of more verdant mossiness on its roof and wallswe shall commence the real action of our tale at an epoch not very remote from the present day. Still, there will be a connection with the long pasta reference to forgotten events and personages, and to manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wholly obsoletewhich, if adequately translated to the reader, would serve to illustrate how much of old material goes to make up the freshest novelty of human life. Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the littleregarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a fardistant time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity. The House of the Seven Gables, antique as it now looks, was not the first habitation erected by civilized man on precisely the same spot of ground. Pyncheon Street formerly bore the humbler appellation of Maules Lane, from the name of the original occupant of the soil, before whose cottagedoor it was a cowpath. A natural spring of soft and pleasant watera rare treasure on the seagirt peninsula where the Puritan settlement was madehad early induced Matthew Maule to build a hut, shaggy with thatch, at this point, although somewhat too remote from what was then the centre of the village. In the growth of the town, however, after some thirty or forty years, the site covered by this rude hovel had become exceedingly desirable in the eyes of a prominent and powerful personage, who asserted plausible claims to the proprietorship of this and a large adjacent tract of land, on the strength of a grant from the legislature. Colonel Pyncheon, the claimant, as we gather from whatever traits of him are preserved, was characterized by an iron energy of purpose. Matthew Maule, on the other hand, though an obscure man, was stubborn in the defence of what he considered his right; and, for several years, he succeeded in protecting the acre or two of earth which, with his own toil, he had hewn out of the primeval forest, to be his garden ground and homestead. No written record of this dispute is known to be in existence. Our acquaintance with the whole subject is derived chiefly from tradition. It would be bold, therefore, and possibly unjust, to venture a decisive opinion as to its merits; although it appears to have been at least a matter of doubt, whether Colonel Pyncheons claim were not unduly stretched, in order to make it cover the small metes and bounds of Matthew Maule. What greatly strengthens such a suspicion is the fact that this controversy between two illmatched antagonistsat a period, moreover, laud it as we may, when personal influence had far more weight than nowremained for years undecided, and came to a close only with the death of the party occupying the disputed soil. The mode of his death, too, affects the mind differently, in our day, from what it did a century and a half ago. It was a death that blasted with strange horror the humble name of the dweller in the cottage, and made it seem almost a religious act to drive the plough over the little area of his habitation, and obliterate his place and memory from among men. Old Matthew Maule, in a word, was executed for the crime of witchcraft. He was one of the martyrs to that terrible delusion, which should teach us, among its other morals, that the influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob. Clergymen, judges, statesmenthe wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day stood in the inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived. If any one part of their proceedings can be said to deserve less blame than another, it was the singular indiscrimination with which they persecuted, not merely the poor and aged, as in former judicial massacres, but people of all ranks; their own equals, brethren, and wives. Amid the disorder of such various ruin, it is not strange that a man of inconsiderable note, like Maule, should have trodden the martyrs path to the hill of execution almost unremarked in the throng of his fellow sufferers. But, in after days, when the frenzy of that hideous epoch had subsided, it was remembered how loudly Colonel Pyncheon had joined in the general cry, to purge the land from witchcraft; nor did it fail to be whispered, that there was an invidious acrimony in the zeal with which he had sought the condemnation of Matthew Maule. It was well known that the victim had recognized the bitterness of personal enmity in his persecutors conduct towards him, and that he declared himself hunted to death for his spoil. At the moment of executionwith the halter about his neck, and while Colonel Pyncheon sat on horseback, grimly gazing at the sceneMaule had addressed him from the scaffold, and uttered a prophecy, of which history, as well as fireside tradition, has preserved the very words. God, said the dying man, pointing his finger, with a ghastly look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemyGod will give him blood to drink! After the reputed wizards death, his humble homestead had fallen an easy spoil into Colonel Pyncheons grasp. When it was understood, however, that the Colonel intended to erect a family mansionspacious, ponderously framed of oaken timber, and calculated to endure for many generations of his posterity over the spot first covered by the logbuilt hut of Matthew Maule, there was much shaking of the head among the village gossips. Without absolutely expressing a doubt whether the stalwart Puritan had acted as a man of conscience and integrity throughout the proceedings which have been sketched, they, nevertheless, hinted that he was about to build his house over an unquiet grave. His home would include the home of the dead and buried wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of the latter a kind of privilege to haunt its new apartments, and the chambers into which future bridegrooms were to lead their brides, and where children of the Pyncheon blood were to be born. The terror and ugliness of Maules crime, and the wretchedness of his punishment, would darken the freshly plastered walls, and infect them early with the scent of an old and melancholy house. Why, thenwhile so much of the soil around him was bestrewn with the virgin forest leaveswhy should Colonel Pyncheon prefer a site that had already been accurst? But the Puritan soldier and magistrate was not a man to be turned aside from his wellconsidered scheme, either by dread of the wizards ghost, or by flimsy sentimentalities of any kind, however specious. Had he been told of a bad air, it might have moved him somewhat; but he was ready to encounter an evil spirit on his own ground. Endowed with commonsense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite, fastened together by stern rigidity of purpose, as with iron clamps, he followed out his original design, probably without so much as imagining an objection to it. On the score of delicacy, or any scrupulousness which a finer sensibility might have taught him, the Colonel, like most of his breed and generation, was impenetrable. He therefore dug his cellar, and laid the deep foundations of his mansion, on the square of earth whence Matthew Maule, forty years before, had first swept away the fallen leaves. It was a curious, and, as some people thought, an ominous fact, that, very soon after the workmen began their operations, the spring of water, above mentioned, entirely lost the deliciousness of its pristine quality. Whether its sources were disturbed by the depth of the new cellar, or whatever subtler cause might lurk at the bottom, it is certain that the water of Maules Well, as it continued to be called, grew hard and brackish. Even such we find it now; and any old woman of the neighborhood will certify that it is productive of intestinal mischief to those who quench their thirst there. The reader may deem it singular that the head carpenter of the new edifice was no other than the son of the very man from whose dead grip the property of the soil had been wrested. Not improbably he was the best workman of his time; or, perhaps, the Colonel thought it expedient, or was impelled by some better feeling, thus openly to cast aside all animosity against the race of his fallen antagonist. Nor was it out of keeping with the general coarseness and matteroffact character of the age, that the son should be willing to earn an honest penny, or, rather, a weighty amount of sterling pounds, from the purse of his fathers deadly enemy. At all events, Thomas Maule became the architect of the House of the Seven Gables, and performed his duty so faithfully that the timber framework fastened by his hands still holds together. Thus the great house was built. Familiar as it stands in the writers recollectionfor it has been an object of curiosity with him from boyhood, both as a specimen of the best and stateliest architecture of a longpast epoch, and as the scene of events more full of human interest, perhaps, than those of a gray feudal castlefamiliar as it stands, in its rusty old age, it is therefore only the more difficult to imagine the bright novelty with which it first caught the sunshine. The impression of its actual state, at this distance of a hundred and sixty years, darkens inevitably through the picture which we would fain give of its appearance on the morning when the Puritan magnate bade all the town to be his guests. A ceremony of consecration, festive as well as religious, was now to be performed. A prayer and discourse from the Rev. Mr. Higginson, and the outpouring of a psalm from the general throat of the community, was to be made acceptable to the grosser sense by ale, cider, wine, and brandy, in copious effusion, and, as some authorities aver, by an ox, roasted whole, or at least, by the weight and substance of an ox, in more manageable joints and sirloins. The carcass of a deer, shot within twenty miles, had supplied material for the vast circumference of a pasty. A codfish of sixty pounds, caught in the bay, had been dissolved into the rich liquid of a chowder. The chimney of the new house, in short, belching forth its kitchen smoke, impregnated the whole air with the scent of meats, fowls, and fishes, spicily concocted with odoriferous herbs, and onions in abundance. The mere smell of such festivity, making its way to everybodys nostrils, was at once an invitation and an appetite. Maules Lane, or Pyncheon Street, as it were now more decorous to call it, was thronged, at the appointed hour, as with a congregation on its way to church. All, as they approached, looked upward at the imposing edifice, which was henceforth to assume its rank among the habitations of mankind. There it rose, a little withdrawn from the line of the street, but in pride, not modesty. Its whole visible exterior was ornamented with quaint figures, conceived in the grotesqueness of a Gothic fancy, and drawn or stamped in the glittering plaster, composed of lime, pebbles, and bits of glass, with which the woodwork of the walls was overspread. On every side the seven gables pointed sharply towards the sky, and presented the aspect of a whole sisterhood of edifices, breathing through the spiracles of one great chimney. The many lattices, with their small, diamondshaped panes, admitted the sunlight into hall and chamber, while, nevertheless, the second story, projecting far over the base, and itself retiring beneath the third, threw a shadowy and thoughtful gloom into the lower rooms. Carved globes of wood were affixed under the jutting stories. Little spiral rods of iron beautified each of the seven peaks. On the triangular portion of the gable, that fronted next the street, was a dial, put up that very morning, and on which the sun was still marking the passage of the first bright hour in a history that was not destined to be all so bright. All around were scattered shavings, chips, shingles, and broken halves of bricks; these, together with the lately turned earth, on which the grass had not begun to grow, contributed to the impression of strangeness and novelty proper to a house that had yet its place to make among mens daily interests. The principal entrance, which had almost the breadth of a churchdoor, was in the angle between the two front gables, and was covered by an open porch, with benches beneath its shelter. Under this arched doorway, scraping their feet on the unworn threshold, now trod the clergymen, the elders, the magistrates, the deacons, and whatever of aristocracy there was in town or county. Thither, too, thronged the plebeian classes as freely as their betters, and in larger number. Just within the entrance, however, stood two servingmen, pointing some of the guests to the neighborhood of the kitchen and ushering others into the statelier roomshospitable alike to all, but still with a scrutinizing regard to the high or low degree of each. Velvet garments sombre but rich, stiffly plaited ruffs and bands, embroidered gloves, venerable beards, the mien and countenance of authority, made it easy to distinguish the gentleman of worship, at that period, from the tradesman, with his plodding air, or the laborer, in his leathern jerkin, stealing awestricken into the house which he had perhaps helped to build. One inauspicious circumstance there was, which awakened a hardly concealed displeasure in the breasts of a few of the more punctilious visitors. The founder of this stately mansiona gentleman noted for the square and ponderous courtesy of his demeanor, ought surely to have stood in his own hall, and to have offered the first welcome to so many eminent personages as here presented themselves in honor of his solemn festival. He was as yet invisible; the most favored of the guests had not beheld him. This sluggishness on Colonel Pyncheons part became still more unaccountable, when the second dignitary of the province made his appearance, and found no more ceremonious a reception. The lieutenantgovernor, although his visit was one of the anticipated glories of the day, had alighted from his horse, and assisted his lady from her sidesaddle, and crossed the Colonels threshold, without other greeting than that of the principal domestic. This persona grayheaded man, of quiet and most respectful deportmentfound it necessary to explain that his master still remained in his study, or private apartment; on entering which, an hour before, he had expressed a wish on no account to be disturbed. Do not you see, fellow, said the highsheriff of the county, taking the servant aside, that this is no less a man than the lieutenantgovernor? Summon Colonel Pyncheon at once! I know that he received letters from England this morning; and, in the perusal and consideration of them, an hour may have passed away without his noticing it. But he will be illpleased, I judge, if you suffer him to neglect the courtesy due to one of our chief rulers, and who may be said to represent King William, in the absence of the governor himself. Call your master instantly. Nay, please your worship, answered the man, in much perplexity, but with a backwardness that strikingly indicated the hard and severe character of Colonel Pyncheons domestic rule; my masters orders were exceeding strict; and, as your worship knows, he permits of no discretion in the obedience of those who owe him service. Let who list open yonder door; I dare not, though the governors own voice should bid me do it! Pooh, pooh, master high sheriff! cried the lieutenantgovernor, who had overheard the foregoing discussion, and felt himself high enough in station to play a little with his dignity. I will take the matter into my own hands. It is time that the good Colonel came forth to greet his friends; else we shall be apt to suspect that he has taken a sip too much of his Canary wine, in his extreme deliberation which cask it were best to broach in honor of the day! But since he is so much behindhand, I will give him a remembrancer myself! Accordingly, with such a tramp of his ponderous ridingboots as might of itself have been audible in the remotest of the seven gables, he advanced to the door, which the servant pointed out, and made its new panels reecho with a loud, free knock. Then, looking round, with a smile, to the spectators, he awaited a response. As none came, however, he knocked again, but with the same unsatisfactory result as at first. And now, being a trifle choleric in his temperament, the lieutenantgovernor uplifted the heavy hilt of his sword, wherewith he so beat and banged upon the door, that, as some of the bystanders whispered, the racket might have disturbed the dead. Be that as it might, it seemed to produce no awakening effect on Colonel Pyncheon. When the sound subsided, the silence through the house was deep, dreary, and oppressive, notwithstanding that the tongues of many of the guests had already been loosened by a surreptitious cup or two of wine or spirits. Strange, forsooth!very strange! cried the lieutenantgovernor, whose smile was changed to a frown. But seeing that our host sets us the good example of forgetting ceremony, I shall likewise throw it aside, and make free to intrude on his privacy. He tried the door, which yielded to his hand, and was flung wide open by a sudden gust of wind that passed, as with a loud sigh, from the outermost portal through all the passages and apartments of the new house. It rustled the silken garments of the ladies, and waved the long curls of the gentlemens wigs, and shook the windowhangings and the curtains of the bedchambers; causing everywhere a singular stir, which yet was more like a hush. A shadow of awe and halffearful anticipationnobody knew wherefore, nor of whathad all at once fallen over the company. They thronged, however, to the now open door, pressing the lieutenantgovernor, in the eagerness of their curiosity, into the room in advance of them. At the first glimpse they beheld nothing extraordinary a handsomely furnished room, of moderate size, somewhat darkened by curtains; books arranged on shelves; a large map on the wall, and likewise a portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, beneath which sat the original Colonel himself, in an oaken elbowchair, with a pen in his hand. Letters, parchments, and blank sheets of paper were on the table before him. He appeared to gaze at the curious crowd, in front of which stood the lieutenantgovernor; and there was a frown on his dark and massive countenance, as if sternly resentful of the boldness that had impelled them into his private retirement. A little boythe Colonels grandchild, and the only human being that ever dared to be familiar with himnow made his way among the guests, and ran towards the seated figure; then pausing halfway, he began to shriek with terror. The company, tremulous as the leaves of a tree, when all are shaking together, drew nearer, and perceived that there was an unnatural distortion in the fixedness of Colonel Pyncheons stare; that there was blood on his ruff, and that his hoary beard was saturated with it. It was too late to give assistance. The ironhearted Puritan, the relentless persecutor, the grasping and strongwilled man was dead! Dead, in his new house! There is a tradition, only worth alluding to as lending a tinge of superstitious awe to a scene perhaps gloomy enough without it, that a voice spoke loudly among the guests, the tones of which were like those of old Matthew Maule, the executed wizardGod hath given him blood to drink! Thus early had that one guestthe only guest who is certain, at one time or another, to find his way into every human dwellingthus early had Death stepped across the threshold of the House of the Seven Gables! Colonel Pyncheons sudden and mysterious end made a vast deal of noise in its day. There were many rumors, some of which have vaguely drifted down to the present time, how that appearances indicated violence; that there were the marks of fingers on his throat, and the print of a bloody hand on his plaited ruff; and that his peaked beard was dishevelled, as if it had been fiercely clutched and pulled. It was averred, likewise, that the lattice window, near the Colonels chair, was open; and that, only a few minutes before the fatal occurrence, the figure of a man had been seen clambering over the garden fence, in the rear of the house. But it were folly to lay any stress on stories of this kind, which are sure to spring up around such an event as that now related, and which, as in the present case, sometimes prolong themselves for ages afterwards, like the toadstools that indicate where the fallen and buried trunk of a tree has long since mouldered into the earth. For our own part, we allow them just as little credence as to that other fable of the skeleton hand which the lieutenantgovernor was said to have seen at the Colonels throat, but which vanished away, as he advanced farther into the room. Certain it is, however, that there was a great consultation and dispute of doctors over the dead body. OneJohn Swinnerton by namewho appears to have been a man of eminence, upheld it, if we have rightly understood his terms of art, to be a case of apoplexy. His professional brethren, each for himself, adopted various hypotheses, more or less plausible, but all dressed out in a perplexing mystery of phrase, which, if it do not show a bewilderment of mind in these erudite physicians, certainly causes it in the unlearned peruser of their opinions. The coroners jury sat upon the corpse, and, like sensible men, returned an unassailable verdict of Sudden Death! It is indeed difficult to imagine that there could have been a serious suspicion of murder, or the slightest grounds for implicating any particular individual as the perpetrator. The rank, wealth, and eminent character of the deceased must have insured the strictest scrutiny into every ambiguous circumstance. As none such is on record, it is safe to assume that none existed. Traditionwhich sometimes brings down truth that history has let slip, but is oftener the wild babble of the time, such as was formerly spoken at the fireside and now congeals in newspaperstradition is responsible for all contrary averments. In Colonel Pyncheons funeral sermon, which was printed, and is still extant, the Rev. Mr. Higginson enumerates, among the many felicities of his distinguished parishioners earthly career, the happy seasonableness of his death. His duties all performedthe highest prosperity attainedhis race and future generations fixed on a stable basis, and with a stately roof to shelter them for centuries to comewhat other upward step remained for this good man to take, save the final step from earth to the golden gate of heaven! The pious clergyman surely would not have uttered words like these had he in the least suspected that the Colonel had been thrust into the other world with the clutch of violence upon his throat. The family of Colonel Pyncheon, at the epoch of his death, seemed destined to as fortunate a permanence as can anywise consist with the inherent instability of human affairs. It might fairly be anticipated that the progress of time would rather increase and ripen their prosperity, than wear away and destroy it. For, not only had his son and heir come into immediate enjoyment of a rich estate, but there was a claim through an Indian deed, confirmed by a subsequent grant of the General Court, to a vast and as yet unexplored and unmeasured tract of Eastern lands. These possessionsfor as such they might almost certainly be reckonedcomprised the greater part of what is now known as Waldo County, in the state of Maine, and were more extensive than many a dukedom, or even a reigning princes territory, on European soil. When the pathless forest that still covered this wild principality should give placeas it inevitably must, though perhaps not till ages henceto the golden fertility of human culture, it would be the source of incalculable wealth to the Pyncheon blood. Had the Colonel survived only a few weeks longer, it is probable that his great political influence, and powerful connections at home and abroad, would have consummated all that was necessary to render the claim available. But, in spite of good Mr. Higginsons congratulatory eloquence, this appeared to be the one thing which Colonel Pyncheon, provident and sagacious as he was, had allowed to go at loose ends. So far as the prospective territory was concerned, he unquestionably died too soon. His son lacked not merely the fathers eminent position, but the talent and force of character to achieve it he could, therefore, effect nothing by dint of political interest; and the bare justice or legality of the claim was not so apparent, after the Colonels decease, as it had been pronounced in his lifetime. Some connecting link had slipped out of the evidence, and could not anywhere be found. Efforts, it is true, were made by the Pyncheons, not only then, but at various periods for nearly a hundred years afterwards, to obtain what they stubbornly persisted in deeming their right. But, in course of time, the territory was partly regranted to more favored individuals, and partly cleared and occupied by actual settlers. These last, if they ever heard of the Pyncheon title, would have laughed at the idea of any mans asserting a righton the strength of mouldy parchments, signed with the faded autographs of governors and legislators long dead and forgottento the lands which they or their fathers had wrested from the wild hand of nature by their own sturdy toil. This impalpable claim, therefore, resulted in nothing more solid than to cherish, from generation to generation, an absurd delusion of family importance, which all along characterized the Pyncheons. It caused the poorest member of the race to feel as if he inherited a kind of nobility, and might yet come into the possession of princely wealth to support it. In the better specimens of the breed, this peculiarity threw an ideal grace over the hard material of human life, without stealing away any truly valuable quality. In the baser sort, its effect was to increase the liability to sluggishness and dependence, and induce the victim of a shadowy hope to remit all selfeffort, while awaiting the realization of his dreams. Years and years after their claim had passed out of the public memory, the Pyncheons were accustomed to consult the Colonels ancient map, which had been projected while Waldo County was still an unbroken wilderness. Where the old land surveyor had put down woods, lakes, and rivers, they marked out the cleared spaces, and dotted the villages and towns, and calculated the progressively increasing value of the territory, as if there were yet a prospect of its ultimately forming a princedom for themselves. In almost every generation, nevertheless, there happened to be some one descendant of the family gifted with a portion of the hard, keen sense, and practical energy, that had so remarkably distinguished the original founder. His character, indeed, might be traced all the way down, as distinctly as if the Colonel himself, a little diluted, had been gifted with a sort of intermittent immortality on earth. At two or three epochs, when the fortunes of the family were low, this representative of hereditary qualities had made his appearance, and caused the traditionary gossips of the town to whisper among themselves, Here is the old Pyncheon come again! Now the Seven Gables will be newshingled! From father to son, they clung to the ancestral house with singular tenacity of home attachment. For various reasons, however, and from impressions often too vaguely founded to be put on paper, the writer cherishes the belief that many, if not most, of the successive proprietors of this estate were troubled with doubts as to their moral right to hold it. Of their legal tenure there could be no question; but old Matthew Maule, it is to be feared, trode downward from his own age to a far later one, planting a heavy footstep, all the way, on the conscience of a Pyncheon. If so, we are left to dispose of the awful query, whether each inheritor of the propertyconscious of wrong, and failing to rectify itdid not commit anew the great guilt of his ancestor, and incur all its original responsibilities. And supposing such to be the case, would it not be a far truer mode of expression to say of the Pyncheon family, that they inherited a great misfortune, than the reverse? We have already hinted that it is not our purpose to trace down the history of the Pyncheon family, in its unbroken connection with the House of the Seven Gables; nor to show, as in a magic picture, how the rustiness and infirmity of age gathered over the venerable house itself. As regards its interior life, a large, dim lookingglass used to hang in one of the rooms, and was fabled to contain within its depths all the shapes that had ever been reflected therethe old Colonel himself, and his many descendants, some in the garb of antique babyhood, and others in the bloom of feminine beauty or manly prime, or saddened with the wrinkles of frosty age. Had we the secret of that mirror, we would gladly sit down before it, and transfer its revelations to our page. But there was a story, for which it is difficult to conceive any foundation, that the posterity of Matthew Maule had some connection with the mystery of the lookingglass, and that, by what appears to have been a sort of mesmeric process, they could make its inner region all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not as they had shown themselves to the world, nor in their better and happier hours, but as doing over again some deed of sin, or in the crisis of lifes bitterest sorrow.

The popular imagination, indeed, long kept itself busy with the affair of the old Puritan Pyncheon and the wizard Maule; the curse which the latter flung from his scaffold was remembered, with the very important addition, that it had become a part of the Pyncheon inheritance. If one of the family did but gurgle in his throat, a bystander would be likely enough to whisper, between jest and earnest, He has Maules blood to drink! The sudden death of a Pyncheon, about a hundred years ago, with circumstances very similar to what have been related of the Colonels exit, was held as giving additional probability to the received opinion on this topic. It was considered, moreover, an ugly and ominous circumstance, that Colonel Pyncheons picturein obedience, it was said, to a provision of his willremained affixed to the wall of the room in which he died. Those stern, immitigable features seemed to symbolize an evil influence, and so darkly to mingle the shadow of their presence with the sunshine of the passing hour, that no good thoughts or purposes could ever spring up and blossom there. To the thoughtful mind there will be no tinge of superstition in what we figuratively express, by affirming that the ghost of a dead progenitorperhaps as a portion of his own punishmentis often doomed to become the Evil Genius of his family. The Pyncheons, in brief, lived along, for the better part of two centuries, with perhaps less of outward vicissitude than has attended most other New England families during the same period of time. Possessing very distinctive traits of their own, they nevertheless took the general characteristics of the little community in which they dwelt; a town noted for its frugal, discreet, wellordered, and homeloving inhabitants, as well as for the somewhat confined scope of its sympathies; but in which, be it said, there are odder individuals, and, now and then, stranger occurrences, than one meets with almost anywhere else. During the Revolution, the Pyncheon of that epoch, adopting the royal side, became a refugee; but repented, and made his reappearance, just at the point of time to preserve the House of the Seven Gables from confiscation. For the last seventy years the most noted event in the Pyncheon annals had been likewise the heaviest calamity that ever befell the race; no less than the violent deathfor so it was adjudgedof one member of the family by the criminal act of another. Certain circumstances attending this fatal occurrence had brought the deed irresistibly home to a nephew of the deceased Pyncheon. The young man was tried and convicted of the crime; but either the circumstantial nature of the evidence, and possibly some lurking doubts in the breast of the executive, or, lastlyan argument of greater weight in a republic than it could have been under a monarchythe high respectability and political influence of the criminals connections, had availed to mitigate his doom from death to perpetual imprisonment. This sad affair had chanced about thirty years before the action of our story commences. Latterly, there were rumors (which few believed, and only one or two felt greatly interested in) that this longburied man was likely, for some reason or other, to be summoned forth from his living tomb. It is essential to say a few words respecting the victim of this now almost forgotten murder. He was an old bachelor, and possessed of great wealth, in addition to the house and real estate which constituted what remained of the ancient Pyncheon property. Being of an eccentric and melancholy turn of mind, and greatly given to rummaging old records and hearkening to old traditions, he had brought himself, it is averred, to the conclusion that Matthew Maule, the wizard, had been foully wronged out of his homestead, if not out of his life. Such being the case, and he, the old bachelor, in possession of the illgotten spoilwith the black stain of blood sunken deep into it, and still to be scented by conscientious nostrilsthe question occurred, whether it were not imperative upon him, even at this late hour, to make restitution to Maules posterity. To a man living so much in the past, and so little in the present, as the secluded and antiquarian old bachelor, a century and a half seemed not so vast a period as to obviate the propriety of substituting right for wrong. It was the belief of those who knew him best, that he would positively have taken the very singular step of giving up the House of the Seven Gables to the representative of Matthew Maule, but for the unspeakable tumult which a suspicion of the old gentlemans project awakened among his Pyncheon relatives. Their exertions had the effect of suspending his purpose; but it was feared that he would perform, after death, by the operation of his last will, what he had so hardly been prevented from doing in his proper lifetime. But there is no one thing which men so rarely do, whatever the provocation or inducement, as to bequeath patrimonial property away from their own blood. They may love other individuals far better than their relativesthey may even cherish dislike, or positive hatred, to the latter; but yet, in view of death, the strong prejudice of propinquity revives, and impels the testator to send down his estate in the line marked out by custom so immemorial that it looks like nature. In all the Pyncheons, this feeling had the energy of disease. It was too powerful for the conscientious scruples of the old bachelor; at whose death, accordingly, the mansionhouse, together with most of his other riches, passed into the possession of his next legal representative. This was a nephew, the cousin of the miserable young man who had been convicted of the uncles murder. The new heir, up to the period of his accession, was reckoned rather a dissipated youth, but had at once reformed, and made himself an exceedingly respectable member of society. In fact, he showed more of the Pyncheon quality, and had won higher eminence in the world, than any of his race since the time of the original Puritan. Applying himself in earlier manhood to the study of the law, and having a natural tendency towards office, he had attained, many years ago, to a judicial situation in some inferior court, which gave him for life the very desirable and imposing title of judge. Later, he had engaged in politics, and served a part of two terms in Congress, besides making a considerable figure in both branches of the State legislature. Judge Pyncheon was unquestionably an honor to his race. He had built himself a countryseat within a few miles of his native town, and there spent such portions of his time as could be spared from public service in the display of every grace and virtueas a newspaper phrased it, on the eve of an electionbefitting the Christian, the good citizen, the horticulturist, and the gentleman. There were few of the Pyncheons left to sun themselves in the glow of the Judges prosperity. In respect to natural increase, the breed had not thriven; it appeared rather to be dying out. The only members of the family known to be extant were, first, the Judge himself, and a single surviving son, who was now travelling in Europe; next, the thirty years prisoner, already alluded to, and a sister of the latter, who occupied, in an extremely retired manner, the House of the Seven Gables, in which she had a lifeestate by the will of the old bachelor. She was understood to be wretchedly poor, and seemed to make it her choice to remain so; inasmuch as her affluent cousin, the Judge, had repeatedly offered her all the comforts of life, either in the old mansion or his own modern residence. The last and youngest Pyncheon was a little countrygirl of seventeen, the daughter of another of the Judges cousins, who had married a young woman of no family or property, and died early and in poor circumstances. His widow had recently taken another husband. As for Matthew Maules posterity, it was supposed now to be extinct. For a very long period after the witchcraft delusion, however, the Maules had continued to inhabit the town where their progenitor had suffered so unjust a death. To all appearance, they were a quiet, honest, wellmeaning race of people, cherishing no malice against individuals or the public for the wrong which had been done them; or if, at their own fireside, they transmitted from father to child any hostile recollection of the wizards fate and their lost patrimony, it was never acted upon, nor openly expressed. Nor would it have been singular had they ceased to remember that the House of the Seven Gables was resting its heavy framework on a foundation that was rightfully their own. There is something so massive, stable, and almost irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of established rank and great possessions, that their very existence seems to give them a right to exist; at least, so excellent a counterfeit of right, that few poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it, even in their secret minds. Such is the case now, after so many ancient prejudices have been overthrown; and it was far more so in anteRevolutionary days, when the aristocracy could venture to be proud, and the low were content to be abased. Thus the Maules, at all events, kept their resentments within their own breasts. They were generally povertystricken; always plebeian and obscure; working with unsuccessful diligence at handicrafts; laboring on the wharves, or following the sea, as sailors before the mast; living here and there about the town, in hired tenements, and coming finally to the almshouse as the natural home of their old age. At last, after creeping, as it were, for such a length of time along the utmost verge of the opaque puddle of obscurity, they had taken that downright plunge which, sooner or later, is the destiny of all families, whether princely or plebeian. For thirty years past, neither townrecord, nor gravestone, nor the directory, nor the knowledge or memory of man, bore any trace of Matthew Maules descendants. His blood might possibly exist elsewhere; here, where its lowly current could be traced so far back, it had ceased to keep an onward course. So long as any of the race were to be found, they had been marked out from other mennot strikingly, nor as with a sharp line, but with an effect that was felt rather than spoken ofby an hereditary character of reserve. Their companions, or those who endeavored to become such, grew conscious of a circle round about the Maules, within the sanctity or the spell of which, in spite of an exterior of sufficient frankness and goodfellowship, it was impossible for any man to step. It was this indefinable peculiarity, perhaps, that, by insulating them from human aid, kept them always so unfortunate in life. It certainly operated to prolong in their case, and to confirm to them as their only inheritance, those feelings of repugnance and superstitious terror with which the people of the town, even after awakening from their frenzy, continued to regard the memory of the reputed witches. The mantle, or rather the ragged cloak, of old Matthew Maule had fallen upon his children. They were half believed to inherit mysterious attributes; the family eye was said to possess strange power. Among other goodfornothing properties and privileges, one was especially assigned themthat of exercising an influence over peoples dreams. The Pyncheons, if all stories were true, haughtily as they bore themselves in the noonday streets of their native town, were no better than bondservants to these plebeian Maules, on entering the topsyturvy commonwealth of sleep. Modern psychology, it may be, will endeavor to reduce these alleged necromancies within a system, instead of rejecting them as altogether fabulous. A descriptive paragraph or two, treating of the sevengabled mansion in its more recent aspect, will bring this preliminary chapter to a close. The street in which it upreared its venerable peaks has long ceased to be a fashionable quarter of the town; so that, though the old edifice was surrounded by habitations of modern date, they were mostly small, built entirely of wood, and typical of the most plodding uniformity of common life. Doubtless, however, the whole story of human existence may be latent in each of them, but with no picturesqueness, externally, that can attract the imagination or sympathy to seek it there. But as for the old structure of our story, its whiteoak frame, and its boards, shingles, and crumbling plaster, and even the huge, clustered chimney in the midst, seemed to constitute only the least and meanest part of its reality. So much of mankinds varied experience had passed thereso much had been suffered, and something, too, enjoyedthat the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart. It was itself like a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of rich and sombre reminiscences. The deep projection of the second story gave the house such a meditative look, that you could not pass it without the idea that it had secrets to keep, and an eventful history to moralize upon. In front, just on the edge of the unpaved sidewalk, grew the Pyncheon Elm, which, in reference to such trees as one usually meets with, might well be termed gigantic. It had been planted by a greatgrandson of the first Pyncheon, and, though now fourscore years of age, or perhaps nearer a hundred, was still in its strong and broad maturity, throwing its shadow from side to side of the street, overtopping the seven gables, and sweeping the whole black roof with its pendant foliage. It gave beauty to the old edifice, and seemed to make it a part of nature. The street having been widened about forty years ago, the front gable was now precisely on a line with it. On either side extended a ruinous wooden fence of open latticework, through which could be seen a grassy yard, and, especially in the angles of the building, an enormous fertility of burdocks, with leaves, it is hardly an exaggeration to say, two or three feet long. Behind the house there appeared to be a garden, which undoubtedly had once been extensive, but was now infringed upon by other enclosures, or shut in by habitations and outbuildings that stood on another street. It would be an omission, trifling, indeed, but unpardonable, were we to forget the green moss that had long since gathered over the projections of the windows, and on the slopes of the roof nor must we fail to direct the readers eye to a crop, not of weeds, but flowershrubs, which were growing aloft in the air, not a great way from the chimney, in the nook between two of the gables. They were called Alices Posies. The tradition was, that a certain Alice Pyncheon had flung up the seeds, in sport, and that the dust of the street and the decay of the roof gradually formed a kind of soil for them, out of which they grew, when Alice had long been in her grave. However the flowers might have come there, it was both sad and sweet to observe how Nature adopted to herself this desolate, decaying, gusty, rusty old house of the Pyncheon family; and how the everreturning Summer did her best to gladden it with tender beauty, and grew melancholy in the effort. There is one other feature, very essential to be noticed, but which, we greatly fear, may damage any picturesque and romantic impression which we have been willing to throw over our sketch of this respectable edifice. In the front gable, under the impending brow of the second story, and contiguous to the street, was a shopdoor, divided horizontally in the midst, and with a window for its upper segment, such as is often seen in dwellings of a somewhat ancient date. This same shopdoor had been a subject of no slight mortification to the present occupant of the august Pyncheon House, as well as to some of her predecessors. The matter is disagreeably delicate to handle; but, since the reader must needs be let into the secret, he will please to understand, that, about a century ago, the head of the Pyncheons found himself involved in serious financial difficulties. The fellow (gentleman, as he styled himself) can hardly have been other than a spurious interloper; for, instead of seeking office from the king or the royal governor, or urging his hereditary claim to Eastern lands, he bethought himself of no better avenue to wealth than by cutting a shopdoor through the side of his ancestral residence. It was the custom of the time, indeed, for merchants to store their goods and transact business in their own dwellings. But there was something pitifully small in this old Pyncheons mode of setting about his commercial operations; it was whispered, that, with his own hands, all beruffled as they were, he used to give change for a shilling, and would turn a halfpenny twice over, to make sure that it was a good one. Beyond all question, he had the blood of a petty huckster in his veins, through whatever channel it may have found its way there. Immediately on his death, the shopdoor had been locked, bolted, and barred, and, down to the period of our story, had probably never once been opened. The old counter, shelves, and other fixtures of the little shop remained just as he had left them. It used to be affirmed, that the dead shopkeeper, in a white wig, a faded velvet coat, an apron at his waist, and his ruffles carefully turned back from his wrists, might be seen through the chinks of the shutters, any night of the year, ransacking his till, or poring over the dingy pages of his daybook. From the look of unutterable woe upon his face, it appeared to be his doom to spend eternity in a vain effort to make his accounts balance. And nowin a very humble way, as will be seenwe proceed to open our narrative. II The Little Shopwindow It still lacked half an hour of sunrise, when Miss Hepzibah Pyncheonwe will not say awoke, it being doubtful whether the poor lady had so much as closed her eyes during the brief night of midsummerbut, at all events, arose from her solitary pillow, and began what it would be mockery to term the adornment of her person. Far from us be the indecorum of assisting, even in imagination, at a maiden ladys toilet! Our story must therefore await Miss Hepzibah at the threshold of her chamber; only presuming, meanwhile, to note some of the heavy sighs that labored from her bosom, with little restraint as to their lugubrious depth and volume of sound, inasmuch as they could be audible to nobody save a disembodied listener like ourself. The Old Maid was alone in the old house. Alone, except for a certain respectable and orderly young man, an artist in the daguerreotype line, who, for about three months back, had been a lodger in a remote gablequite a house by itself, indeedwith locks, bolts, and oaken bars on all the intervening doors. Inaudible, consequently, were poor Miss Hepzibahs gusty sighs. Inaudible the creaking joints of her stiffened knees, as she knelt down by the bedside. And inaudible, too, by mortal ear, but heard with allcomprehending love and pity in the farthest heaven, that almost agony of prayernow whispered, now a groan, now a struggling silencewherewith she besought the Divine assistance through the day! Evidently, this is to be a day of more than ordinary trial to Miss Hepzibah, who, for above a quarter of a century gone by, has dwelt in strict seclusion, taking no part in the business of life, and just as little in its intercourse and pleasures. Not with such fervor prays the torpid recluse, looking forward to the cold, sunless, stagnant calm of a day that is to be like innumerable yesterdays. The maiden ladys devotions are concluded. Will she now issue forth over the threshold of our story? Not yet, by many moments. First, every drawer in the tall, oldfashioned bureau is to be opened, with difficulty, and with a succession of spasmodic jerks then, all must close again, with the same fidgety reluctance. There is a rustling of stiff silks; a tread of backward and forward footsteps to and fro across the chamber. We suspect Miss Hepzibah, moreover, of taking a step upward into a chair, in order to give heedful regard to her appearance on all sides, and at full length, in the oval, dingyframed toiletglass, that hangs above her table. Truly! well, indeed! who would have thought it! Is all this precious time to be lavished on the matutinal repair and beautifying of an elderly person, who never goes abroad, whom nobody ever visits, and from whom, when she shall have done her utmost, it were the best charity to turn ones eyes another way? Now she is almost ready. Let us pardon her one other pause; for it is given to the sole sentiment, or, we might better sayheightened and rendered intense, as it has been, by sorrow and seclusionto the strong passion of her life. We heard the turning of a key in a small lock; she has opened a secret drawer of an escritoire, and is probably looking at a certain miniature, done in Malbones most perfect style, and representing a face worthy of no less delicate a pencil. It was once our good fortune to see this picture. It is a likeness of a young man, in a silken dressinggown of an old fashion, the soft richness of which is well adapted to the countenance of reverie, with its full, tender lips, and beautiful eyes, that seem to indicate not so much capacity of thought, as gentle and voluptuous emotion. Of the possessor of such features we shall have a right to ask nothing, except that he would take the rude world easily, and make himself happy in it. Can it have been an early lover of Miss Hepzibah? No; she never had a loverpoor thing, how could she?nor ever knew, by her own experience, what love technically means. And yet, her undying faith and trust, her fresh remembrance, and continual devotedness towards the original of that miniature, have been the only substance for her heart to feed upon. She seems to have put aside the miniature, and is standing again before the toiletglass. There are tears to be wiped off. A few more footsteps to and fro; and here, at lastwith another pitiful sigh, like a gust of chill, damp wind out of a longclosed vault, the door of which has accidentally been set, ajarhere comes Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon! Forth she steps into the dusky, timedarkened passage; a tall figure, clad in black silk, with a long and shrunken waist, feeling her way towards the stairs like a nearsighted person, as in truth she is. The sun, meanwhile, if not already above the horizon, was ascending nearer and nearer to its verge. A few clouds, floating high upward, caught some of the earliest light, and threw down its golden gleam on the windows of all the houses in the street, not forgetting the House of the Seven Gables, whichmany such sunrises as it had witnessedlooked cheerfully at the present one. The reflected radiance served to show, pretty distinctly, the aspect and arrangement of the room which Hepzibah entered, after descending the stairs. It was a lowstudded room, with a beam across the ceiling, panelled with dark wood, and having a large chimneypiece, set round with pictured tiles, but now closed by an iron fireboard, through which ran the funnel of a modern stove. There was a carpet on the floor, originally of rich texture, but so worn and faded in these latter years that its once brilliant figure had quite vanished into one indistinguishable hue. In the way of furniture, there were two tables one, constructed with perplexing intricacy and exhibiting as many feet as a centipede; the other, most delicately wrought, with four long and slender legs, so apparently frail that it was almost incredible what a length of time the ancient teatable had stood upon them. Half a dozen chairs stood about the room, straight and stiff, and so ingeniously contrived for the discomfort of the human person that they were irksome even to sight, and conveyed the ugliest possible idea of the state of society to which they could have been adapted. One exception there was, however, in a very antique elbowchair, with a high back, carved elaborately in oak, and a roomy depth within its arms, that made up, by its spacious comprehensiveness, for the lack of any of those artistic curves which abound in a modern chair. As for ornamental articles of furniture, we recollect but two, if such they may be called. One was a map of the Pyncheon territory at the eastward, not engraved, but the handiwork of some skilful old draughtsman, and grotesquely illuminated with pictures of Indians and wild beasts, among which was seen a lion; the natural history of the region being as little known as its geography, which was put down most fantastically awry. The other adornment was the portrait of old Colonel Pyncheon, at two thirds length, representing the stern features of a Puritaniclooking personage, in a skullcap, with a laced band and a grizzly beard; holding a Bible with one hand, and in the other uplifting an iron swordhilt. The latter object, being more successfully depicted by the artist, stood out in far greater prominence than the sacred volume. Face to face with this picture, on entering the apartment, Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon came to a pause; regarding it with a singular scowl, a strange contortion of the brow, which, by people who did not know her, would probably have been interpreted as an expression of bitter anger and illwill. But it was no such thing. She, in fact, felt a reverence for the pictured visage, of which only a fardescended and timestricken virgin could be susceptible; and this forbidding scowl was the innocent result of her nearsightedness, and an effort so to concentrate her powers of vision as to substitute a firm outline of the object instead of a vague one. We must linger a moment on this unfortunate expression of poor Hepzibahs brow. Her scowlas the world, or such part of it as sometimes caught a transitory glimpse of her at the window, wickedly persisted in calling ither scowl had done Miss Hepzibah a very ill office, in establishing her character as an illtempered old maid; nor does it appear improbable that, by often gazing at herself in a dim lookingglass, and perpetually encountering her own frown with its ghostly sphere, she had been led to interpret the expression almost as unjustly as the world did. How miserably cross I look! she must often have whispered to herself; and ultimately have fancied herself so, by a sense of inevitable doom. But her heart never frowned. It was naturally tender, sensitive, and full of little tremors and palpitations; all of which weaknesses it retained, while her visage was growing so perversely stern, and even fierce. Nor had Hepzibah ever any hardihood, except what came from the very warmest nook in her affections. All this time, however, we are loitering faintheartedly on the threshold of our story. In very truth, we have an invincible reluctance to disclose what Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon was about to do. It has already been observed, that, in the basement story of the gable fronting on the street, an unworthy ancestor, nearly a century ago, had fitted up a shop. Ever since the old gentleman retired from trade, and fell asleep under his coffinlid, not only the shopdoor, but the inner arrangements, had been suffered to remain unchanged; while the dust of ages gathered inchdeep over the shelves and counter, and partly filled an old pair of scales, as if it were of value enough to be weighed. It treasured itself up, too, in the halfopen till, where there still lingered a base sixpence, worth neither more nor less than the hereditary pride which had here been put to shame. Such had been the state and condition of the little shop in old Hepzibahs childhood, when she and her brother used to play at hideandseek in its forsaken precincts. So it had remained, until within a few days past. But now, though the shopwindow was still closely curtained from the public gaze, a remarkable change had taken place in its interior. The rich and heavy festoons of cobweb, which it had cost a long ancestral succession of spiders their lifes labor to spin and weave, had been carefully brushed away from the ceiling. The counter, shelves, and floor had all been scoured, and the latter was overstrewn with fresh blue sand. The brown scales, too, had evidently undergone rigid discipline, in an unavailing effort to rub off the rust, which, alas! had eaten through and through their substance. Neither was the little old shop any longer empty of merchantable goods. A curious eye, privileged to take an account of stock and investigate behind the counter, would have discovered a barrel, yea, two or three barrels and half dittoone containing flour, another apples, and a third, perhaps, Indian meal. There was likewise a square box of pinewood, full of soap in bars; also, another of the same size, in which were tallow candles, ten to the pound. A small stock of brown sugar, some white beans and split peas, and a few other commodities of low price, and such as are constantly in demand, made up the bulkier portion of the merchandise. It might have been taken for a ghostly or phantasmagoric reflection of the old shopkeeper Pyncheons shabbily provided shelves, save that some of the articles were of a description and outward form which could hardly have been known in his day. For instance, there was a glass picklejar, filled with fragments of Gibraltar rock; not, indeed, splinters of the veritable stone foundation of the famous fortress, but bits of delectable candy, neatly done up in white paper. Jim Crow, moreover, was seen executing his worldrenowned dance, in gingerbread. A party of leaden dragoons were galloping along one of the shelves, in equipments and uniform of modern cut; and there were some sugar figures, with no strong resemblance to the humanity of any epoch, but less unsatisfactorily representing our own fashions than those of a hundred years ago. Another phenomenon, still more strikingly modern, was a package of lucifer matches, which, in old times, would have been thought actually to borrow their instantaneous flame from the nether fires of Tophet. In short, to bring the matter at once to a point, it was incontrovertibly evident that somebody had taken the shop and fixtures of the longretired and forgotten Mr. Pyncheon, and was about to renew the enterprise of that departed worthy, with a different set of customers. Who could this bold adventurer be? And, of all places in the world, why had he chosen the House of the Seven Gables as the scene of his commercial speculations? We return to the elderly maiden. She at length withdrew her eyes from the dark countenance of the Colonels portrait, heaved a sighindeed, her breast was a very cave of Aolus that morningand stepped across the room on tiptoe, as is the customary gait of elderly women. Passing through an intervening passage, she opened a door that communicated with the shop, just now so elaborately described. Owing to the projection of the upper storyand still more to the thick shadow of the Pyncheon Elm, which stood almost directly in front of the gablethe twilight, here, was still as much akin to night as morning. Another heavy sigh from Miss Hepzibah! After a moments pause on the threshold, peering towards the window with her nearsighted scowl, as if frowning down some bitter enemy, she suddenly projected herself into the shop. The haste, and, as it were, the galvanic impulse of the movement, were really quite startling. Nervouslyin a sort of frenzy, we might almost sayshe began to busy herself in arranging some childrens playthings, and other little wares, on the shelves and at the shopwindow. In the aspect of this darkarrayed, palefaced, ladylike old figure there was a deeply tragic character that contrasted irreconcilably with the ludicrous pettiness of her employment.

It seemed a queer anomaly, that so gaunt and dismal a personage should take a toy in hand; a miracle, that the toy did not vanish in her grasp; a miserably absurd idea, that she should go on perplexing her stiff and sombre intellect with the question how to tempt little boys into her premises! Yet such is undoubtedly her object. Now she places a gingerbread elephant against the window, but with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon the floor, with the dismemberment of three legs and its trunk; it has ceased to be an elephant, and has become a few bits of musty gingerbread. There, again, she has upset a tumbler of marbles, all of which roll different ways, and each individual marble, devildirected, into the most difficult obscurity that it can find. Heaven help our poor old Hepzibah, and forgive us for taking a ludicrous view of her position! As her rigid and rusty frame goes down upon its hands and knees, in quest of the absconding marbles, we positively feel so much the more inclined to shed tears of sympathy, from the very fact that we must needs turn aside and laugh at her. For hereand if we fail to impress it suitably upon the reader, it is our own fault, not that of the theme, here is one of the truest points of melancholy interest that occur in ordinary life. It was the final throe of what called itself old gentility. A ladywho had fed herself from childhood with the shadowy food of aristocratic reminiscences, and whose religion it was that a ladys hand soils itself irremediably by doing aught for breadthis born lady, after sixty years of narrowing means, is fain to step down from her pedestal of imaginary rank. Poverty, treading closely at her heels for a lifetime, has come up with her at last. She must earn her own food, or starve! And we have stolen upon Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon, too irreverently, at the instant of time when the patrician lady is to be transformed into the plebeian woman. In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowningpoint. The tragedy is enacted with as continual a repetition as that of a popular drama on a holiday, and, nevertheless, is felt as deeply, perhaps, as when an hereditary noble sinks below his order. More deeply; since, with us, rank is the grosser substance of wealth and a splendid establishment, and has no spiritual existence after the death of these, but dies hopelessly along with them. And, therefore, since we have been unfortunate enough to introduce our heroine at so inauspicious a juncture, we would entreat for a mood of due solemnity in the spectators of her fate. Let us behold, in poor Hepzibah, the immemorial, ladytwo hundred years old, on this side of the water, and thrice as many on the otherwith her antique portraits, pedigrees, coats of arms, records and traditions, and her claim, as joint heiress, to that princely territory at the eastward, no longer a wilderness, but a populous fertilityborn, too, in Pyncheon Street, under the Pyncheon Elm, and in the Pyncheon House, where she has spent all her daysreduced. Now, in that very house, to be the hucksteress of a centshop. This business of setting up a petty shop is almost the only resource of women, in circumstances at all similar to those of our unfortunate recluse. With her nearsightedness, and those tremulous fingers of hers, at once inflexible and delicate, she could not be a seamstress; although her sampler, of fifty years gone by, exhibited some of the most recondite specimens of ornamental needlework. A school for little children had been often in her thoughts; and, at one time, she had begun a review of her early studies in the New England Primer, with a view to prepare herself for the office of instructress. But the love of children had never been quickened in Hepzibahs heart, and was now torpid, if not extinct; she watched the little people of the neighborhood from her chamberwindow, and doubted whether she could tolerate a more intimate acquaintance with them. Besides, in our day, the very A.B.C. has become a science greatly too abstruse to be any longer taught by pointing a pin from letter to letter. A modern child could teach old Hepzibah more than old Hepzibah could teach the child. Sowith many a cold, deep heartquake at the idea of at last coming into sordid contact with the world, from which she had so long kept aloof, while every added day of seclusion had rolled another stone against the cavern door of her hermitagethe poor thing bethought herself of the ancient shopwindow, the rusty scales, and dusty till. She might have held back a little longer; but another circumstance, not yet hinted at, had somewhat hastened her decision. Her humble preparations, therefore, were duly made, and the enterprise was now to be commenced. Nor was she entitled to complain of any remarkable singularity in her fate; for, in the town of her nativity, we might point to several little shops of a similar description, some of them in houses as ancient as that of the Seven Gables; and one or two, it may be, where a decayed gentlewoman stands behind the counter, as grim an image of family pride as Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon herself. It was overpoweringly ridiculouswe must honestly confess itthe deportment of the maiden lady while setting her shop in order for the public eye. She stole on tiptoe to the window, as cautiously as if she conceived some bloodyminded villain to be watching behind the elmtree, with intent to take her life. Stretching out her long, lank arm, she put a paper of pearlbuttons, a jewsharp, or whatever the small article might be, in its destined place, and straightway vanished back into the dusk, as if the world need never hope for another glimpse of her. It might have been fancied, indeed, that she expected to minister to the wants of the community unseen, like a disembodied divinity or enchantress, holding forth her bargains to the reverential and awestricken purchaser in an invisible hand. But Hepzibah had no such flattering dream. She was well aware that she must ultimately come forward, and stand revealed in her proper individuality; but, like other sensitive persons, she could not bear to be observed in the gradual process, and chose rather to flash forth on the worlds astonished gaze at once. The inevitable moment was not much longer to be delayed. The sunshine might now be seen stealing down the front of the opposite house, from the windows of which came a reflected gleam, struggling through the boughs of the elmtree, and enlightening the interior of the shop more distinctly than heretofore. The town appeared to be waking up. A bakers cart had already rattled through the street, chasing away the latest vestige of nights sanctity with the jinglejangle of its dissonant bells. A milkman was distributing the contents of his cans from door to door; and the harsh peal of a fishermans conch shell was heard far off, around the corner. None of these tokens escaped Hepzibahs notice. The moment had arrived. To delay longer would be only to lengthen out her misery. Nothing remained, except to take down the bar from the shopdoor, leaving the entrance freemore than freewelcome, as if all were household friendsto every passerby, whose eyes might be attracted by the commodities at the window. This last act Hepzibah now performed, letting the bar fall with what smote upon her excited nerves as a most astounding clatter. Thenas if the only barrier betwixt herself and the world had been thrown down, and a flood of evil consequences would come tumbling through the gapshe fled into the inner parlor, threw herself into the ancestral elbowchair, and wept. Our miserable old Hepzibah! It is a heavy annoyance to a writer, who endeavors to represent nature, its various attitudes and circumstances, in a reasonably correct outline and true coloring, that so much of the mean and ludicrous should be hopelessly mixed up with the purest pathos which life anywhere supplies to him. What tragic dignity, for example, can be wrought into a scene like this! How can we elevate our history of retribution for the sin of long ago, when, as one of our most prominent figures, we are compelled to introducenot a young and lovely woman, nor even the stately remains of beauty, stormshattered by afflictionbut a gaunt, sallow, rustyjointed maiden, in a longwaisted silk gown, and with the strange horror of a turban on her head! Her visage is not even ugly. It is redeemed from insignificance only by the contraction of her eyebrows into a nearsighted scowl. And, finally, her great lifetrial seems to be, that, after sixty years of idleness, she finds it convenient to earn comfortable bread by setting up a shop in a small way. Nevertheless, if we look through all the heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find this same entanglement of something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow. Life is made up of marble and mud. And, without all the deeper trust in a comprehensive sympathy above us, we might hence be led to suspect the insult of a sneer, as well as an immitigable frown, on the iron countenance of fate. What is called poetic insight is the gift of discerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beauty and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid. III The First Customer Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon sat in the oaken elbowchair, with her hands over her face, giving way to that heavy downsinking of the heart which most persons have experienced, when the image of hope itself seems ponderously moulded of lead, on the eve of an enterprise at once doubtful and momentous. She was suddenly startled by the tinkling alarmhigh, sharp, and irregularof a little bell. The maiden lady arose upon her feet, as pale as a ghost at cockcrow; for she was an enslaved spirit, and this the talisman to which she owed obedience. This little bellto speak in plainer termsbeing fastened over the shopdoor, was so contrived as to vibrate by means of a steel spring, and thus convey notice to the inner regions of the house when any customer should cross the threshold. Its ugly and spiteful little din (heard now for the first time, perhaps, since Hepzibahs periwigged predecessor had retired from trade) at once set every nerve of her body in responsive and tumultuous vibration. The crisis was upon her! Her first customer was at the door! Without giving herself time for a second thought, she rushed into the shop, pale, wild, desperate in gesture and expression, scowling portentously, and looking far better qualified to do fierce battle with a housebreaker than to stand smiling behind the counter, bartering small wares for a copper recompense. Any ordinary customer, indeed, would have turned his back and fled. And yet there was nothing fierce in Hepzibahs poor old heart; nor had she, at the moment, a single bitter thought against the world at large, or one individual man or woman. She wished them all well, but wished, too, that she herself were done with them, and in her quiet grave. The applicant, by this time, stood within the doorway. Coming freshly, as he did, out of the morning light, he appeared to have brought some of its cheery influences into the shop along with him. It was a slender young man, not more than one or two and twenty years old, with rather a grave and thoughtful expression for his years, but likewise a springy alacrity and vigor. These qualities were not only perceptible, physically, in his make and motions, but made themselves felt almost immediately in his character. A brown beard, not too silken in its texture, fringed his chin, but as yet without completely hiding it; he wore a short mustache, too, and his dark, highfeatured countenance looked all the better for these natural ornaments. As for his dress, it was of the simplest kind; a summer sack of cheap and ordinary material, thin checkered pantaloons, and a straw hat, by no means of the finest braid. Oak Hall might have supplied his entire equipment. He was chiefly marked as a gentlemanif such, indeed, he made any claim to beby the rather remarkable whiteness and nicety of his clean linen. He met the scowl of old Hepzibah without apparent alarm, as having heretofore encountered it and found it harmless. So, my dear Miss Pyncheon, said the daguerreotypistfor it was that sole other occupant of the sevengabled mansionI am glad to see that you have not shrunk from your good purpose. I merely look in to offer my best wishes, and to ask if I can assist you any further in your preparations. People in difficulty and distress, or in any manner at odds with the world, can endure a vast amount of harsh treatment, and perhaps be only the stronger for it; whereas they give way at once before the simplest expression of what they perceive to be genuine sympathy. So it proved with poor Hepzibah; for, when she saw the young mans smilelooking so much the brighter on a thoughtful faceand heard his kindly tone, she broke first into a hysteric giggle and then began to sob. Ah, Mr. Holgrave, cried she, as soon as she could speak, I never can go through with it! Never, never, never! I wish I were dead, and in the old family tomb, with all my forefathers! With my father, and my mother, and my sister! Yes, and with my brother, who had far better find me there than here! The world is too chill and hardand I am too old, and too feeble, and too hopeless! Oh, believe me, Miss Hepzibah, said the young man quietly, these feelings will not trouble you any longer, after you are once fairly in the midst of your enterprise. They are unavoidable at this moment, standing, as you do, on the outer verge of your long seclusion, and peopling the world with ugly shapes, which you will soon find to be as unreal as the giants and ogres of a childs storybook. I find nothing so singular in life, as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it. So it will be with what you think so terrible. But I am a woman! said Hepzibah piteously. I was going to say, a ladybut I consider that as past. Well; no matter if it be past! answered the artist, a strange gleam of halfhidden sarcasm flashing through the kindliness of his manner. Let it go! You are the better without it. I speak frankly, my dear Miss Pyncheon!for are we not friends? I look upon this as one of the fortunate days of your life. It ends an epoch and begins one. Hitherto, the lifeblood has been gradually chilling in your veins as you sat aloof, within your circle of gentility, while the rest of the world was fighting out its battle with one kind of necessity or another. Henceforth, you will at least have the sense of healthy and natural effort for a purpose, and of lending your strength be it great or smallto the united struggle of mankind. This is successall the success that anybody meets with! It is natural enough, Mr. Holgrave, that you should have ideas like these, rejoined Hepzibah, drawing up her gaunt figure with slightly offended dignity. You are a man, a young man, and brought up, I suppose, as almost everybody is nowadays, with a view to seeking your fortune. But I was born a lady, and have always lived one; no matter in what narrowness of means, always a lady. But I was not born a gentleman; neither have I lived like one, said Holgrave, slightly smiling; so, my dear madam, you will hardly expect me to sympathize with sensibilities of this kind; though, unless I deceive myself, I have some imperfect comprehension of them. These names of gentleman and lady had a meaning, in the past history of the world, and conferred privileges, desirable or otherwise, on those entitled to bear them. In the presentand still more in the future condition of societythey imply, not privilege, but restriction! These are new notions, said the old gentlewoman, shaking her head. I shall never understand them; neither do I wish it. We will cease to speak of them, then, replied the artist, with a friendlier smile than his last one, and I will leave you to feel whether it is not better to be a true woman than a lady. Do you really think, Miss Hepzibah, that any lady of your family has ever done a more heroic thing, since this house was built, than you are performing in it today? Never; and if the Pyncheons had always acted so nobly, I doubt whether an old wizard Maules anathema, of which you told me once, would have had much weight with Providence against them. Ah!no, no! said Hepzibah, not displeased at this allusion to the sombre dignity of an inherited curse. If old Maules ghost, or a descendant of his, could see me behind the counter today, he would call it the fulfillment of his worst wishes. But I thank you for your kindness, Mr. Holgrave, and will do my utmost to be a good shopkeeper. Pray do said Holgrave, and let me have the pleasure of being your first customer. I am about taking a walk to the seashore, before going to my rooms, where I misuse Heavens blessed sunshine by tracing out human features through its agency. A few of those biscuits, dipt in seawater, will be just what I need for breakfast. What is the price of half a dozen? Let me be a lady a moment longer, replied Hepzibah, with a manner of antique stateliness to which a melancholy smile lent a kind of grace. She put the biscuits into his hand, but rejected the compensation. A Pyncheon must not, at all events under her forefathers roof, receive money for a morsel of bread from her only friend! Holgrave took his departure, leaving her, for the moment, with spirits not quite so much depressed. Soon, however, they had subsided nearly to their former dead level. With a beating heart, she listened to the footsteps of early passengers, which now began to be frequent along the street. Once or twice they seemed to linger; these strangers, or neighbors, as the case might be, were looking at the display of toys and petty commodities in Hepzibahs shopwindow. She was doubly tortured; in part, with a sense of overwhelming shame that strange and unloving eyes should have the privilege of gazing, and partly because the idea occurred to her, with ridiculous importunity, that the window was not arranged so skilfully, nor nearly to so much advantage, as it might have been. It seemed as if the whole fortune or failure of her shop might depend on the display of a different set of articles, or substituting a fairer apple for one which appeared to be specked. So she made the change, and straightway fancied that everything was spoiled by it; not recognizing that it was the nervousness of the juncture, and her own native squeamishness as an old maid, that wrought all the seeming mischief. Anon, there was an encounter, just at the doorstep, betwixt two laboring men, as their rough voices denoted them to be. After some slight talk about their own affairs, one of them chanced to notice the shopwindow, and directed the others attention to it. See here! cried he; what do you think of this? Trade seems to be looking up in Pyncheon Street! Well, well, this is a sight, to be sure! exclaimed the other. In the old Pyncheon House, and underneath the Pyncheon Elm! Who would have thought it? Old Maid Pyncheon is setting up a centshop! Will she make it go, think you, Dixey? said his friend. I dont call it a very good stand. Theres another shop just round the corner. Make it go! cried Dixey, with a most contemptuous expression, as if the very idea were impossible to be conceived. Not a bit of it! Why, her faceIve seen it, for I dug her garden for her one yearher face is enough to frighten the Old Nick himself, if he had ever so great a mind to trade with her. People cant stand it, I tell you! She scowls dreadfully, reason or none, out of pure ugliness of temper. Well, thats not so much matter, remarked the other man. These sourtempered folks are mostly handy at business, and know pretty well what they are about. But, as you say, I dont think shell do much. This business of keeping centshops is overdone, like all other kinds of trade, handicraft, and bodily labor. I know it, to my cost! My wife kept a centshop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay. Poor business! responded Dixey, in a tone as if he were shaking his headpoor business. For some reason or other, not very easy to analyze, there had hardly been so bitter a pang in all her previous misery about the matter as what thrilled Hepzibahs heart on overhearing the above conversation. The testimony in regard to her scowl was frightfully important; it seemed to hold up her image wholly relieved from the false light of her selfpartialities, and so hideous that she dared not look at it. She was absurdly hurt, moreover, by the slight and idle effect that her setting up shopan event of such breathless interest to herselfappeared to have upon the public, of which these two men were the nearest representatives. A glance; a passing word or two; a coarse laugh; and she was doubtless forgotten before they turned the corner. They cared nothing for her dignity, and just as little for her degradation. Then, also, the augury of illsuccess, uttered from the sure wisdom of experience, fell upon her halfdead hope like a clod into a grave. The mans wife had already tried the same experiment, and failed! How could the born ladythe recluse of half a lifetime, utterly unpractised in the world, at sixty years of agehow could she ever dream of succeeding, when the hard, vulgar, keen, busy, hackneyed New England woman had lost five dollars on her little outlay! Success presented itself as an impossibility, and the hope of it as a wild hallucination. Some malevolent spirit, doing his utmost to drive Hepzibah mad, unrolled before her imagination a kind of panorama, representing the great thoroughfare of a city all astir with customers. So many and so magnificent shops as there were! Groceries, toyshops, drygoods stores, with their immense panes of plateglass, their gorgeous fixtures, their vast and complete assortments of merchandise, in which fortunes had been invested; and those noble mirrors at the farther end of each establishment, doubling all this wealth by a brightly burnished vista of unrealities! On one side of the street this splendid bazaar, with a multitude of perfumed and glossy salesmen, smirking, smiling, bowing, and measuring out the goods. On the other, the dusky old House of the Seven Gables, with the antiquated shopwindow under its projecting story, and Hepzibah herself, in a gown of rusty black silk, behind the counter, scowling at the world as it went by! This mighty contrast thrust itself forward as a fair expression of the odds against which she was to begin her struggle for a subsistence. Success? Preposterous! She would never think of it again! The house might just as well be buried in an eternal fog while all other houses had the sunshine on them; for not a foot would ever cross the threshold, nor a hand so much as try the door! But, at this instant, the shopbell, right over her head, tinkled as if it were bewitched. The old gentlewomans heart seemed to be attached to the same steel spring, for it went through a series of sharp jerks, in unison with the sound. The door was thrust open, although no human form was perceptible on the other side of the halfwindow. Hepzibah, nevertheless, stood at a gaze, with her hands clasped, looking very much as if she had summoned up an evil spirit, and were afraid, yet resolved, to hazard the encounter. Heaven help me! she groaned mentally. Now is my hour of need! The door, which moved with difficulty on its creaking and rusty hinges, being forced quite open, a square and sturdy little urchin became apparent, with cheeks as red as an apple. He was clad rather shabbily (but, as it seemed, more owing to his mothers carelessness than his fathers poverty), in a blue apron, very wide and short trousers, shoes somewhat out at the toes, and a chip hat, with the frizzles of his curly hair sticking through its crevices. A book and a small slate under his arm indicated that he was on his way to school. He stared at Hepzibah a moment, as an elder customer than himself would have been likely enough to do, not knowing what to make of the tragic attitude and queer scowl wherewith she regarded him. Well, child, said she, taking heart at sight of a personage so little formidablewell, my child, what did you wish for? That Jim Crow there in the window, answered the urchin, holding out a cent, and pointing to the gingerbread figure that had attracted his notice, as he loitered along to school; the one that has not a broken foot. So Hepzibah put forth her lank arm, and, taking the effigy from the shopwindow, delivered it to her first customer. No matter for the money, said she, giving him a little push towards the door; for her old gentility was contumaciously squeamish at sight of the copper coin, and, besides, it seemed such pitiful meanness to take the childs pocketmoney in exchange for a bit of stale gingerbread. No matter for the cent. You are welcome to Jim Crow. The child, staring with round eyes at this instance of liberality, wholly unprecedented in his large experience of centshops, took the man of gingerbread, and quitted the premises. No sooner had he reached the sidewalk (little cannibal that he was!) than Jim Crows head was in his mouth. As he had not been careful to shut the door, Hepzibah was at the pains of closing it after him, with a pettish ejaculation or two about the troublesomeness of young people, and particularly of small boys. She had just placed another representative of the renowned Jim Crow at the window, when again the shopbell tinkled clamorously, and again the door being thrust open, with its characteristic jerk and jar, disclosed the same sturdy little urchin who, precisely two minutes ago, had made his exit. The crumbs and discoloration of the cannibal feast, as yet hardly consummated, were exceedingly visible about his mouth. What is it now, child? asked the maiden lady rather impatiently; did you come back to shut the door? No, answered the urchin, pointing to the figure that had just been put up; I want that other Jim Crow. Well, here it is for you, said Hepzibah, reaching it down; but recognizing that this pertinacious customer would not quit her on any other terms, so long as she had a gingerbread figure in her shop, she partly drew back her extended hand, Where is the cent? The little boy had the cent ready, but, like a trueborn Yankee, would have preferred the better bargain to the worse. Looking somewhat chagrined, he put the coin into Hepzibahs hand, and departed, sending the second Jim Crow in quest of the former one. The new shopkeeper dropped the first solid result of her commercial enterprise into the till. It was done! The sordid stain of that copper coin could never be washed away from her palm. The little schoolboy, aided by the impish figure of the negro dancer, had wrought an irreparable ruin. The structure of ancient aristocracy had been demolished by him, even as if his childish grip had torn down the sevengabled mansion. Now let Hepzibah turn the old Pyncheon portraits with their faces to the wall, and take the map of her Eastern territory to kindle the kitchen fire, and blow up the flame with the empty breath of her ancestral traditions! What had she to do with ancestry? Nothing; no more than with posterity! No lady, now, but simply Hepzibah Pyncheon, a forlorn old maid, and keeper of a centshop! Nevertheless, even while she paraded these ideas somewhat ostentatiously through her mind, it is altogether surprising what a calmness had come over her. The anxiety and misgivings which had tormented her, whether asleep or in melancholy daydreams, ever since her project began to take an aspect of solidity, had now vanished quite away. She felt the novelty of her position, indeed, but no longer with disturbance or affright. Now and then, there came a thrill of almost youthful enjoyment. It was the invigorating breath of a fresh outward atmosphere, after the long torpor and monotonous seclusion of her life. So wholesome is effort! So miraculous the strength that we do not know of! The healthiest glow that Hepzibah had known for years had come now in the dreaded crisis, when, for the first time, she had put forth her hand to help herself. The little circlet of the schoolboys copper coindim and lustreless though it was, with the small services which it had been doing here and there about the worldhad proved a talisman, fragrant with good, and deserving to be set in gold and worn next her heart. It was as potent, and perhaps endowed with the same kind of efficacy, as a galvanic ring! Hepzibah, at all events, was indebted to its subtle operation both in body and spirit; so much the more, as it inspired her with energy to get some breakfast, at which, still the better to keep up her courage, she allowed herself an extra spoonful in her infusion of black tea. Her introductory day of shopkeeping did not run on, however, without many and serious interruptions of this mood of cheerful vigor. As a general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a reasonably full exertion of their powers. In the case of our old gentlewoman, after the excitement of new effort had subsided, the despondency of her whole life threatened, ever and anon, to return. It was like the heavy mass of clouds which we may often see obscuring the sky, and making a gray twilight everywhere, until, towards nightfall, it yields temporarily to a glimpse of sunshine. But, always, the envious cloud strives to gather again across the streak of celestial azure. Customers came in, as the forenoon advanced, but rather slowly; in some cases, too, it must be owned, with little satisfaction either to themselves or Miss Hepzibah; nor, on the whole, with an aggregate of very rich emolument to the till. A little girl, sent by her mother to match a skein of cotton thread, of a peculiar hue, took one that the nearsighted old lady pronounced extremely like, but soon came running back, with a blunt and cross message, that it would not do, and, besides, was very rotten! Then, there was a pale, carewrinkled woman, not old but haggard, and already with streaks of gray among her hair, like silver ribbons; one of those women, naturally delicate, whom you at once recognize as worn to death by a bruteprobably a drunken bruteof a husband, and at least nine children. She wanted a few pounds of flour, and offered the money, which the decayed gentlewoman silently rejected, and gave the poor soul better measure than if she had taken it. Shortly afterwards, a man in a blue cotton frock, much soiled, came in and bought a pipe, filling the whole shop, meanwhile, with the hot odor of strong drink, not only exhaled in the torrid atmosphere of his breath, but oozing out of his entire system, like an inflammable gas. It was impressed on Hepzibahs mind that this was the husband of the carewrinkled woman. He asked for a paper of tobacco; and as she had neglected to provide herself with the article, her brutal customer dashed down his newlybought pipe and left the shop, muttering some unintelligible words, which had the tone and bitterness of a curse. Hereupon Hepzibah threw up her eyes, unintentionally scowling in the face of Providence! No less than five persons, during the forenoon, inquired for gingerbeer, or rootbeer, or any drink of a similar brewage, and, obtaining nothing of the kind, went off in an exceedingly bad humor. Three of them left the door open, and the other two pulled it so spitefully in going out that the little bell played the very deuce with Hepzibahs nerves.

A round, bustling, fireruddy housewife of the neighborhood burst breathless into the shop, fiercely demanding yeast; and when the poor gentlewoman, with her cold shyness of manner, gave her hot customer to understand that she did not keep the article, this very capable housewife took upon herself to administer a regular rebuke. A centshop, and no yeast! quoth she; That will never do! Who ever heard of such a thing? Your loaf will never rise, no more than mine will today. You had better shut up shop at once. Well, said Hepzibah, heaving a deep sigh, perhaps I had! Several times, moreover, besides the above instance, her ladylike sensibilities were seriously infringed upon by the familiar, if not rude, tone with which people addressed her. They evidently considered themselves not merely her equals, but her patrons and superiors. Now, Hepzibah had unconsciously flattered herself with the idea that there would be a gleam or halo, of some kind or other, about her person, which would insure an obeisance to her sterling gentility, or, at least, a tacit recognition of it. On the other hand, nothing tortured her more intolerably than when this recognition was too prominently expressed. To one or two rather officious offers of sympathy, her responses were little short of acrimonious; and, we regret to say, Hepzibah was thrown into a positively unchristian state of mind by the suspicion that one of her customers was drawn to the shop, not by any real need of the article which she pretended to seek, but by a wicked wish to stare at her. The vulgar creature was determined to see for herself what sort of a figure a mildewed piece of aristocracy, after wasting all the bloom and much of the decline of her life apart from the world, would cut behind a counter. In this particular case, however mechanical and innocuous it might be at other times, Hepzibahs contortion of brow served her in good stead. I never was so frightened in my life! said the curious customer, in describing the incident to one of her acquaintances. Shes a real old vixen, take my word of it! She says little, to be sure; but if you could only see the mischief in her eye! On the whole, therefore, her new experience led our decayed gentlewoman to very disagreeable conclusions as to the temper and manners of what she termed the lower classes, whom heretofore she had looked down upon with a gentle and pitying complaisance, as herself occupying a sphere of unquestionable superiority. But, unfortunately, she had likewise to struggle against a bitter emotion of a directly opposite kind a sentiment of virulence, we mean, towards the idle aristocracy to which it had so recently been her pride to belong. When a lady, in a delicate and costly summer garb, with a floating veil and gracefully swaying gown, and, altogether, an ethereal lightness that made you look at her beautifully slippered feet, to see whether she trod on the dust or floated in the airwhen such a vision happened to pass through this retired street, leaving it tenderly and delusively fragrant with her passage, as if a bouquet of tearoses had been borne alongthen again, it is to be feared, old Hepzibahs scowl could no longer vindicate itself entirely on the plea of nearsightedness. For what end, thought she, giving vent to that feeling of hostility which is the only real abasement of the poor in presence of the richfor what good end, in the wisdom of Providence, does that woman live? Must the whole world toil, that the palms of her hands may be kept white and delicate? Then, ashamed and penitent, she hid her face. May God forgive me! said she. Doubtless, God did forgive her. But, taking the inward and outward history of the first halfday into consideration, Hepzibah began to fear that the shop would prove her ruin in a moral and religious point of view, without contributing very essentially towards even her temporal welfare. IV A Day Behind the Counter Towards noon, Hepzibah saw an elderly gentleman, large and portly, and of remarkably dignified demeanor, passing slowly along on the opposite side of the white and dusty street. On coming within the shadow of the Pyncheon Elm, he stopped, and (taking off his hat, meanwhile, to wipe the perspiration from his brow) seemed to scrutinize, with especial interest, the dilapidated and rustyvisaged House of the Seven Gables. He himself, in a very different style, was as well worth looking at as the house. No better model need be sought, nor could have been found, of a very high order of respectability, which, by some indescribable magic, not merely expressed itself in his looks and gestures, but even governed the fashion of his garments, and rendered them all proper and essential to the man. Without appearing to differ, in any tangible way, from other peoples clothes, there was yet a wide and rich gravity about them that must have been a characteristic of the wearer, since it could not be defined as pertaining either to the cut or material. His goldheaded cane, tooa serviceable staff, of dark polished woodhad similar traits, and, had it chosen to take a walk by itself, would have been recognized anywhere as a tolerably adequate representative of its master. This characterwhich showed itself so strikingly in everything about him, and the effect of which we seek to convey to the readerwent no deeper than his station, habits of life, and external circumstances. One perceived him to be a personage of marked influence and authority; and, especially, you could feel just as certain that he was opulent as if he had exhibited his bank account, or as if you had seen him touching the twigs of the Pyncheon Elm, and, Midaslike, transmuting them to gold. In his youth, he had probably been considered a handsome man; at his present age, his brow was too heavy, his temples too bare, his remaining hair too gray, his eye too cold, his lips too closely compressed, to bear any relation to mere personal beauty. He would have made a good and massive portrait; better now, perhaps, than at any previous period of his life, although his look might grow positively harsh in the process of being fixed upon the canvas. The artist would have found it desirable to study his face, and prove its capacity for varied expression; to darken it with a frownto kindle it up with a smile. While the elderly gentleman stood looking at the Pyncheon House, both the frown and the smile passed successively over his countenance. His eye rested on the shopwindow, and putting up a pair of goldbowed spectacles, which he held in his hand, he minutely surveyed Hepzibahs little arrangement of toys and commodities. At first it seemed not to please himnay, to cause him exceeding displeasureand yet, the very next moment, he smiled. While the latter expression was yet on his lips, he caught a glimpse of Hepzibah, who had involuntarily bent forward to the window; and then the smile changed from acrid and disagreeable to the sunniest complacency and benevolence. He bowed, with a happy mixture of dignity and courteous kindliness, and pursued his way. There he is! said Hepzibah to herself, gulping down a very bitter emotion, and, since she could not rid herself of it, trying to drive it back into her heart. What does he think of it, I wonder? Does it please him? Ah! he is looking back! The gentleman had paused in the street, and turned himself half about, still with his eyes fixed on the shopwindow. In fact, he wheeled wholly round, and commenced a step or two, as if designing to enter the shop; but, as it chanced, his purpose was anticipated by Hepzibahs first customer, the little cannibal of Jim Crow, who, staring up at the window, was irresistibly attracted by an elephant of gingerbread. What a grand appetite had this small urchin!Two Jim Crows immediately after breakfast!and now an elephant, as a preliminary whet before dinner. By the time this latter purchase was completed, the elderly gentleman had resumed his way, and turned the street corner. Take it as you like, Cousin Jaffrey, muttered the maiden lady, as she drew back, after cautiously thrusting out her head, and looking up and down the streetTake it as you like! You have seen my little shopwindow. Well!what have you to say?is not the Pyncheon House my own, while Im alive? After this incident, Hepzibah retreated to the back parlor, where she at first caught up a halffinished stocking, and began knitting at it with nervous and irregular jerks; but quickly finding herself at odds with the stitches, she threw it aside, and walked hurriedly about the room. At length she paused before the portrait of the stern old Puritan, her ancestor, and the founder of the house. In one sense, this picture had almost faded into the canvas, and hidden itself behind the duskiness of age; in another, she could not but fancy that it had been growing more prominent and strikingly expressive, ever since her earliest familiarity with it as a child. For, while the physical outline and substance were darkening away from the beholders eye, the bold, hard, and, at the same time, indirect character of the man seemed to be brought out in a kind of spiritual relief. Such an effect may occasionally be observed in pictures of antique date. They acquire a look which an artist (if he have anything like the complacency of artists nowadays) would never dream of presenting to a patron as his own characteristic expression, but which, nevertheless, we at once recognize as reflecting the unlovely truth of a human soul. In such cases, the painters deep conception of his subjects inward traits has wrought itself into the essence of the picture, and is seen after the superficial coloring has been rubbed off by time. While gazing at the portrait, Hepzibah trembled under its eye. Her hereditary reverence made her afraid to judge the character of the original so harshly as a perception of the truth compelled her to do. But still she gazed, because the face of the picture enabled herat least, she fancied soto read more accurately, and to a greater depth, the face which she had just seen in the street. This is the very man! murmured she to herself. Let Jaffrey Pyncheon smile as he will, there is that look beneath! Put on him a skullcap, and a band, and a black cloak, and a Bible in one hand and a sword in the otherthen let Jaffrey smile as he mightnobody would doubt that it was the old Pyncheon come again. He has proved himself the very man to build up a new house! Perhaps, too, to draw down a new curse! Thus did Hepzibah bewilder herself with these fantasies of the old time. She had dwelt too much alonetoo long in the Pyncheon Houseuntil her very brain was impregnated with the dryrot of its timbers. She needed a walk along the noonday street to keep her sane. By the spell of contrast, another portrait rose up before her, painted with more daring flattery than any artist would have ventured upon, but yet so delicately touched that the likeness remained perfect. Malbones miniature, though from the same original, was far inferior to Hepzibahs airdrawn picture, at which affection and sorrowful remembrance wrought together. Soft, mildly, and cheerfully contemplative, with full, red lips, just on the verge of a smile, which the eyes seemed to herald by a gentle kindlingup of their orbs! Feminine traits, moulded inseparably with those of the other sex! The miniature, likewise, had this last peculiarity; so that you inevitably thought of the original as resembling his mother, and she a lovely and lovable woman, with perhaps some beautiful infirmity of character, that made it all the pleasanter to know and easier to love her. Yes, thought Hepzibah, with grief of which it was only the more tolerable portion that welled up from her heart to her eyelids, they persecuted his mother in him! He never was a Pyncheon! But here the shopbell rang; it was like a sound from a remote distanceso far had Hepzibah descended into the sepulchral depths of her reminiscences. On entering the shop, she found an old man there, a humble resident of Pyncheon Street, and whom, for a great many years past, she had suffered to be a kind of familiar of the house. He was an immemorial personage, who seemed always to have had a white head and wrinkles, and never to have possessed but a single tooth, and that a halfdecayed one, in the front of the upper jaw. Well advanced as Hepzibah was, she could not remember when Uncle Venner, as the neighborhood called him, had not gone up and down the street, stooping a little and drawing his feet heavily over the gravel or pavement. But still there was something tough and vigorous about him, that not only kept him in daily breath, but enabled him to fill a place which would else have been vacant in the apparently crowded world. To go of errands with his slow and shuffling gait, which made you doubt how he ever was to arrive anywhere; to saw a small households foot or two of firewood, or knock to pieces an old barrel, or split up a pine board for kindlingstuff; in summer, to dig the few yards of garden ground appertaining to a lowrented tenement, and share the produce of his labor at the halves; in winter, to shovel away the snow from the sidewalk, or open paths to the woodshed, or along the clothesline; such were some of the essential offices which Uncle Venner performed among at least a score of families. Within that circle, he claimed the same sort of privilege, and probably felt as much warmth of interest, as a clergyman does in the range of his parishioners. Not that he laid claim to the tithe pig; but, as an analogous mode of reverence, he went his rounds, every morning, to gather up the crumbs of the table and overflowings of the dinnerpot, as food for a pig of his own. In his younger daysfor, after all, there was a dim tradition that he had been, not young, but youngerUncle Venner was commonly regarded as rather deficient, than otherwise, in his wits. In truth he had virtually pleaded guilty to the charge, by scarcely aiming at such success as other men seek, and by taking only that humble and modest part in the intercourse of life which belongs to the alleged deficiency. But now, in his extreme old agewhether it were that his long and hard experience had actually brightened him, or that his decaying judgment rendered him less capable of fairly measuring himselfthe venerable man made pretensions to no little wisdom, and really enjoyed the credit of it. There was likewise, at times, a vein of something like poetry in him; it was the moss or wallflower of his mind in its small dilapidation, and gave a charm to what might have been vulgar and commonplace in his earlier and middle life. Hepzibah had a regard for him, because his name was ancient in the town and had formerly been respectable. It was a still better reason for awarding him a species of familiar reverence that Uncle Venner was himself the most ancient existence, whether of man or thing, in Pyncheon Street, except the House of the Seven Gables, and perhaps the elm that overshadowed it. This patriarch now presented himself before Hepzibah, clad in an old blue coat, which had a fashionable air, and must have accrued to him from the castoff wardrobe of some dashing clerk. As for his trousers, they were of towcloth, very short in the legs, and bagging down strangely in the rear, but yet having a suitableness to his figure which his other garment entirely lacked. His hat had relation to no other part of his dress, and but very little to the head that wore it. Thus Uncle Venner was a miscellaneous old gentleman, partly himself, but, in good measure, somebody else; patched together, too, of different epochs; an epitome of times and fashions. So, you have really begun trade, said hereally begun trade! Well, Im glad to see it. Young people should never live idle in the world, nor old ones neither, unless when the rheumatize gets hold of them. It has given me warning already; and in two or three years longer, I shall think of putting aside business and retiring to my farm. Thats yonderthe great brick house, you knowthe workhouse, most folks call it; but I mean to do my work first, and go there to be idle and enjoy myself. And Im glad to see you beginning to do your work, Miss Hepzibah! Thank you, Uncle Venner said Hepzibah, smiling; for she always felt kindly towards the simple and talkative old man. Had he been an old woman, she might probably have repelled the freedom, which she now took in good part. It is time for me to begin work, indeed! Or, to speak the truth, I have just begun when I ought to be giving it up. Oh, never say that, Miss Hepzibah! answered the old man. You are a young woman yet. Why, I hardly thought myself younger than I am now, it seems so little while ago since I used to see you playing about the door of the old house, quite a small child! Oftener, though, you used to be sitting at the threshold, and looking gravely into the street; for you had always a grave kind of way with youa grownup air, when you were only the height of my knee. It seems as if I saw you now; and your grandfather with his red cloak, and his white wig, and his cocked hat, and his cane, coming out of the house, and stepping so grandly up the street! Those old gentlemen that grew up before the Revolution used to put on grand airs. In my young days, the great man of the town was commonly called King; and his wife, not Queen to be sure, but Lady. Nowadays, a man would not dare to be called King; and if he feels himself a little above common folks, he only stoops so much the lower to them. I met your cousin, the Judge, ten minutes ago; and, in my old towcloth trousers, as you see, the Judge raised his hat to me, I do believe! At any rate, the Judge bowed and smiled! Yes, said Hepzibah, with something bitter stealing unawares into her tone; my cousin Jaffrey is thought to have a very pleasant smile! And so he has replied Uncle Venner. And thats rather remarkable in a Pyncheon; for, begging your pardon, Miss Hepzibah, they never had the name of being an easy and agreeable set of folks. There was no getting close to them. But Now, Miss Hepzibah, if an old man may be bold to ask, why dont Judge Pyncheon, with his great means, step forward, and tell his cousin to shut up her little shop at once? Its for your credit to be doing something, but its not for the Judges credit to let you! We wont talk of this, if you please, Uncle Venner, said Hepzibah coldly. I ought to say, however, that, if I choose to earn bread for myself, it is not Judge Pyncheons fault. Neither will he deserve the blame, added she more kindly, remembering Uncle Venners privileges of age and humble familiarity, if I should, by and by, find it convenient to retire with you to your farm. And its no bad place, either, that farm of mine! cried the old man cheerily, as if there were something positively delightful in the prospect. No bad place is the great brick farmhouse, especially for them that will find a good many old cronies there, as will be my case. I quite long to be among them, sometimes, of the winter evenings; for it is but dull business for a lonesome elderly man, like me, to be nodding, by the hour together, with no company but his airtight stove. Summer or winter, theres a great deal to be said in favor of my farm! And, take it in the autumn, what can be pleasanter than to spend a whole day on the sunny side of a barn or a woodpile, chatting with somebody as old as ones self; or, perhaps, idling away the time with a naturalborn simpleton, who knows how to be idle, because even our busy Yankees never have found out how to put him to any use? Upon my word, Miss Hepzibah, I doubt whether Ive ever been so comfortable as I mean to be at my farm, which most folks call the workhouse. But youyoure a young woman yetyou never need go there! Something still better will turn up for you. Im sure of it! Hepzibah fancied that there was something peculiar in her venerable friends look and tone; insomuch, that she gazed into his face with considerable earnestness, endeavoring to discover what secret meaning, if any, might be lurking there. Individuals whose affairs have reached an utterly desperate crisis almost invariably keep themselves alive with hopes, so much the more airily magnificent as they have the less of solid matter within their grasp whereof to mould any judicious and moderate expectation of good. Thus, all the while Hepzibah was perfecting the scheme of her little shop, she had cherished an unacknowledged idea that some harlequin trick of fortune would intervene in her favor. For example, an unclewho had sailed for India fifty years before, and never been heard of sincemight yet return, and adopt her to be the comfort of his very extreme and decrepit age, and adorn her with pearls, diamonds, and Oriental shawls and turbans, and make her the ultimate heiress of his unreckonable riches. Or the member of Parliament, now at the head of the English branch of the familywith which the elder stock, on this side of the Atlantic, had held little or no intercourse for the last two centuriesthis eminent gentleman might invite Hepzibah to quit the ruinous House of the Seven Gables, and come over to dwell with her kindred at Pyncheon Hall. But, for reasons the most imperative, she could not yield to his request. It was more probable, therefore, that the descendants of a Pyncheon who had emigrated to Virginia, in some past generation, and became a great planter therehearing of Hepzibahs destitution, and impelled by the splendid generosity of character with which their Virginian mixture must have enriched the New England bloodwould send her a remittance of a thousand dollars, with a hint of repeating the favor annually. Orand, surely, anything so undeniably just could not be beyond the limits of reasonable anticipationthe great claim to the heritage of Waldo County might finally be decided in favor of the Pyncheons; so that, instead of keeping a centshop, Hepzibah would build a palace, and look down from its highest tower on hill, dale, forest, field, and town, as her own share of the ancestral territory. These were some of the fantasies which she had long dreamed about; and, aided by these, Uncle Venners casual attempt at encouragement kindled a strange festal glory in the poor, bare, melancholy chambers of her brain, as if that inner world were suddenly lighted up with gas. But either he knew nothing of her castles in the airas how should he?or else her earnest scowl disturbed his recollection, as it might a more courageous mans. Instead of pursuing any weightier topic, Uncle Venner was pleased to favor Hepzibah with some sage counsel in her shopkeeping capacity. Give no credit!these were some of his golden maximsNever take papermoney. Look well to your change! Ring the silver on the fourpound weight! Shove back all English halfpence and base copper tokens, such as are very plenty about town! At your leisure hours, knit childrens woollen socks and mittens! Brew your own yeast, and make your own gingerbeer! And while Hepzibah was doing her utmost to digest the hard little pellets of his already uttered wisdom, he gave vent to his final, and what he declared to be his allimportant advice, as follows Put on a bright face for your customers, and smile pleasantly as you hand them what they ask for! A stale article, if you dip it in a good, warm, sunny smile, will go off better than a fresh one that youve scowled upon. To this last apothegm poor Hepzibah responded with a sigh so deep and heavy that it almost rustled Uncle Venner quite away, like a withered leafas he wasbefore an autumnal gale. Recovering himself, however, he bent forward, and, with a good deal of feeling in his ancient visage, beckoned her nearer to him. When do you expect him home? whispered he. Whom do you mean? asked Hepzibah, turning pale. Ah!You dont love to talk about it, said Uncle Venner. Well, well! well say no more, though theres word of it all over town. I remember him, Miss Hepzibah, before he could run alone! During the remainder of the day, poor Hepzibah acquitted herself even less creditably, as a shopkeeper, than in her earlier efforts. She appeared to be walking in a dream; or, more truly, the vivid life and reality assumed by her emotions made all outward occurrences unsubstantial, like the teasing phantasms of a halfconscious slumber. She still responded, mechanically, to the frequent summons of the shopbell, and, at the demand of her customers, went prying with vague eyes about the shop, proffering them one article after another, and thrusting asideperversely, as most of them supposedthe identical thing they asked for. There is sad confusion, indeed, when the spirit thus flits away into the past, or into the more awful future, or, in any manner, steps across the spaceless boundary betwixt its own region and the actual world; where the body remains to guide itself as best it may, with little more than the mechanism of animal life. It is like death, without deaths quiet privilegeits freedom from mortal care. Worst of all, when the actual duties are comprised in such petty details as now vexed the brooding soul of the old gentlewoman. As the animosity of fate would have it, there was a great influx of custom in the course of the afternoon. Hepzibah blundered to and fro about her small place of business, committing the most unheardof errors now stringing up twelve, and now seven, tallowcandles, instead of ten to the pound; selling ginger for Scotch snuff, pins for needles, and needles for pins; misreckoning her change, sometimes to the public detriment, and much oftener to her own; and thus she went on, doing her utmost to bring chaos back again, until, at the close of the days labor, to her inexplicable astonishment, she found the moneydrawer almost destitute of coin. After all her painful traffic, the whole proceeds were perhaps half a dozen coppers, and a questionable ninepence which ultimately proved to be copper likewise. At this price, or at whatever price, she rejoiced that the day had reached its end. Never before had she had such a sense of the intolerable length of time that creeps between dawn and sunset, and of the miserable irksomeness of having aught to do, and of the better wisdom that it would be to lie down at once, in sullen resignation, and let life, and its toils and vexations, trample over ones prostrate body as they may! Hepzibahs final operation was with the little devourer of Jim Crow and the elephant, who now proposed to eat a camel. In her bewilderment, she offered him first a wooden dragoon, and next a handful of marbles; neither of which being adapted to his else omnivorous appetite, she hastily held out her whole remaining stock of natural history in gingerbread, and huddled the small customer out of the shop. She then muffled the bell in an unfinished stocking, and put up the oaken bar across the door. During the latter process, an omnibus came to a standstill under the branches of the elmtree. Hepzibahs heart was in her mouth. Remote and dusky, and with no sunshine on all the intervening space, was that region of the Past whence her only guest might be expected to arrive! Was she to meet him now? Somebody, at all events, was passing from the farthest interior of the omnibus towards its entrance. A gentleman alighted; but it was only to offer his hand to a young girl whose slender figure, nowise needing such assistance, now lightly descended the steps, and made an airy little jump from the final one to the sidewalk. She rewarded her cavalier with a smile, the cheery glow of which was seen reflected on his own face as he reentered the vehicle. The girl then turned towards the House of the Seven Gables, to the door of which, meanwhilenot the shopdoor, but the antique portalthe omnibusman had carried a light trunk and a bandbox. First giving a sharp rap of the old iron knocker, he left his passenger and her luggage at the doorstep, and departed. Who can it be? thought Hepzibah, who had been screwing her visual organs into the acutest focus of which they were capable. The girl must have mistaken the house. She stole softly into the hall, and, herself invisible, gazed through the dusty sidelights of the portal at the young, blooming, and very cheerful face which presented itself for admittance into the gloomy old mansion. It was a face to which almost any door would have opened of its own accord. The young girl, so fresh, so unconventional, and yet so orderly and obedient to common rules, as you at once recognized her to be, was widely in contrast, at that moment, with everything about her. The sordid and ugly luxuriance of gigantic weeds that grew in the angle of the house, and the heavy projection that overshadowed her, and the timeworn framework of the doornone of these things belonged to her sphere. But, even as a ray of sunshine, fall into what dismal place it may, instantaneously creates for itself a propriety in being there, so did it seem altogether fit that the girl should be standing at the threshold. It was no less evidently proper that the door should swing open to admit her. The maiden lady herself, sternly inhospitable in her first purposes, soon began to feel that the door ought to be shoved back, and the rusty key be turned in the reluctant lock. Can it be Phoebe? questioned she within herself. It must be little Phoebe; for it can be nobody elseand there is a look of her father about her, too! But what does she want here? And how like a country cousin, to come down upon a poor body in this way, without so much as a days notice, or asking whether she would be welcome! Well; she must have a nights lodging, I suppose; and tomorrow the child shall go back to her mother. Phoebe, it must be understood, was that one little offshoot of the Pyncheon race to whom we have already referred, as a native of a rural part of New England, where the old fashions and feelings of relationship are still partially kept up. In her own circle, it was regarded as by no means improper for kinsfolk to visit one another without invitation, or preliminary and ceremonious warning. Yet, in consideration of Miss Hepzibahs recluse way of life, a letter had actually been written and despatched, conveying information of Phoebes projected visit. This epistle, for three or four days past, had been in the pocket of the pennypostman, who, happening to have no other business in Pyncheon Street, had not yet made it convenient to call at the House of the Seven Gables. Noshe can stay only one night, said Hepzibah, unbolting the door. If Clifford were to find her here, it might disturb him! V May and November Phoebe Pyncheon slept, on the night of her arrival, in a chamber that looked down on the garden of the old house. It fronted towards the east, so that at a very seasonable hour a glow of crimson light came flooding through the window, and bathed the dingy ceiling and paperhangings in its own hue. There were curtains to Phoebes bed; a dark, antique canopy, and ponderous festoons of a stuff which had been rich, and even magnificent, in its time; but which now brooded over the girl like a cloud, making a night in that one corner, while elsewhere it was beginning to be day. The morning light, however, soon stole into the aperture at the foot of the bed, betwixt those faded curtains. Finding the new guest therewith a bloom on her cheeks like the mornings own, and a gentle stir of departing slumber in her limbs, as when an early breeze moves the foliagethe dawn kissed her brow. It was the caress which a dewy maidensuch as the Dawn is, immortallygives to her sleeping sister, partly from the impulse of irresistible fondness, and partly as a pretty hint that it is time now to unclose her eyes. At the touch of those lips of light, Phoebe quietly awoke, and, for a moment, did not recognize where she was, nor how those heavy curtains chanced to be festooned around her.

Nothing, indeed, was absolutely plain to her, except that it was now early morning, and that, whatever might happen next, it was proper, first of all, to get up and say her prayers. She was the more inclined to devotion from the grim aspect of the chamber and its furniture, especially the tall, stiff chairs; one of which stood close by her bedside, and looked as if some oldfashioned personage had been sitting there all night, and had vanished only just in season to escape discovery. When Phoebe was quite dressed, she peeped out of the window, and saw a rosebush in the garden. Being a very tall one, and of luxuriant growth, it had been propped up against the side of the house, and was literally covered with a rare and very beautiful species of white rose. A large portion of them, as the girl afterwards discovered, had blight or mildew at their hearts; but, viewed at a fair distance, the whole rosebush looked as if it had been brought from Eden that very summer, together with the mould in which it grew. The truth was, nevertheless, that it had been planted by Alice Pyncheonshe was Phoebes greatgreatgrandauntin soil which, reckoning only its cultivation as a gardenplat, was now unctuous with nearly two hundred years of vegetable decay. Growing as they did, however, out of the old earth, the flowers still sent a fresh and sweet incense up to their Creator; nor could it have been the less pure and acceptable because Phoebes young breath mingled with it, as the fragrance floated past the window. Hastening down the creaking and carpetless staircase, she found her way into the garden, gathered some of the most perfect of the roses, and brought them to her chamber. Little Phoebe was one of those persons who possess, as their exclusive patrimony, the gift of practical arrangement. It is a kind of natural magic that enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a period, may happen to be their home. A wild hut of underbrush, tossed together by wayfarers through the primitive forest, would acquire the home aspect by one nights lodging of such a woman, and would retain it long after her quiet figure had disappeared into the surrounding shade. No less a portion of such homely witchcraft was requisite to reclaim, as it were, Phoebes waste, cheerless, and dusky chamber, which had been untenanted so longexcept by spiders, and mice, and rats, and ghoststhat it was all overgrown with the desolation which watches to obliterate every trace of mans happier hours. What was precisely Phoebes process we find it impossible to say. She appeared to have no preliminary design, but gave a touch here and another there; brought some articles of furniture to light and dragged others into the shadow; looped up or let down a windowcurtain; and, in the course of half an hour, had fully succeeded in throwing a kindly and hospitable smile over the apartment. No longer ago than the night before, it had resembled nothing so much as the old maids heart; for there was neither sunshine nor household fire in one nor the other, and, save for ghosts and ghostly reminiscences, not a guest, for many years gone by, had entered the heart or the chamber. There was still another peculiarity of this inscrutable charm. The bedchamber, no doubt, was a chamber of very great and varied experience, as a scene of human life the joy of bridal nights had throbbed itself away here; new immortals had first drawn earthly breath here; and here old people had died. Butwhether it were the white roses, or whatever the subtle influence might bea person of delicate instinct would have known at once that it was now a maidens bedchamber, and had been purified of all former evil and sorrow by her sweet breath and happy thoughts. Her dreams of the past night, being such cheerful ones, had exorcised the gloom, and now haunted the chamber in its stead. After arranging matters to her satisfaction, Phoebe emerged from her chamber, with a purpose to descend again into the garden. Besides the rosebush, she had observed several other species of flowers growing there in a wilderness of neglect, and obstructing one anothers development (as is often the parallel case in human society) by their uneducated entanglement and confusion. At the head of the stairs, however, she met Hepzibah, who, it being still early, invited her into a room which she would probably have called her boudoir, had her education embraced any such French phrase. It was strewn about with a few old books, and a workbasket, and a dusty writingdesk; and had, on one side, a large black article of furniture, of very strange appearance, which the old gentlewoman told Phoebe was a harpsichord. It looked more like a coffin than anything else; and, indeednot having been played upon, or opened, for yearsthere must have been a vast deal of dead music in it, stifled for want of air. Human finger was hardly known to have touched its chords since the days of Alice Pyncheon, who had learned the sweet accomplishment of melody in Europe. Hepzibah bade her young guest sit down, and, herself taking a chair near by, looked as earnestly at Phoebes trim little figure as if she expected to see right into its springs and motive secrets. Cousin Phoebe, said she, at last, I really cant see my way clear to keep you with me. These words, however, had not the inhospitable bluntness with which they may strike the reader; for the two relatives, in a talk before bedtime, had arrived at a certain degree of mutual understanding. Hepzibah knew enough to enable her to appreciate the circumstances (resulting from the second marriage of the girls mother) which made it desirable for Phoebe to establish herself in another home. Nor did she misinterpret Phoebes character, and the genial activity pervading itone of the most valuable traits of the true New England womanwhich had impelled her forth, as might be said, to seek her fortune, but with a selfrespecting purpose to confer as much benefit as she could anywise receive. As one of her nearest kindred, she had naturally betaken herself to Hepzibah, with no idea of forcing herself on her cousins protection, but only for a visit of a week or two, which might be indefinitely extended, should it prove for the happiness of both. To Hepzibahs blunt observation, therefore, Phoebe replied as frankly, and more cheerfully. Dear cousin, I cannot tell how it will be, said she. But I really think we may suit one another much better than you suppose. You are a nice girlI see it plainly, continued Hepzibah; and it is not any question as to that point which makes me hesitate. But, Phoebe, this house of mine is but a melancholy place for a young person to be in. It lets in the wind and rain, and the snow, too, in the garret and upper chambers, in wintertime, but it never lets in the sunshine. And as for myself, you see what I ama dismal and lonesome old woman (for I begin to call myself old, Phoebe), whose temper, I am afraid, is none of the best, and whose spirits are as bad as can be! I cannot make your life pleasant, Cousin Phoebe, neither can I so much as give you bread to eat. You will find me a cheerful little body, answered Phoebe, smiling, and yet with a kind of gentle dignity, and I mean to earn my bread. You know I have not been brought up a Pyncheon. A girl learns many things in a New England village. Ah! Phoebe, said Hepzibah, sighing, your knowledge would do but little for you here! And then it is a wretched thought that you should fling away your young days in a place like this. Those cheeks would not be so rosy after a month or two. Look at my face! and, indeed, the contrast was very strikingyou see how pale I am! It is my idea that the dust and continual decay of these old houses are unwholesome for the lungs. There is the gardenthe flowers to be taken care of, observed Phoebe. I should keep myself healthy with exercise in the open air. And, after all, child, exclaimed Hepzibah, suddenly rising, as if to dismiss the subject, it is not for me to say who shall be a guest or inhabitant of the old Pyncheon House. Its master is coming. Do you mean Judge Pyncheon? asked Phoebe in surprise. Judge Pyncheon! answered her cousin angrily. He will hardly cross the threshold while I live! No, no! But, Phoebe, you shall see the face of him I speak of. She went in quest of the miniature already described, and returned with it in her hand. Giving it to Phoebe, she watched her features narrowly, and with a certain jealousy as to the mode in which the girl would show herself affected by the picture. How do you like the face? asked Hepzibah. It is handsome!it is very beautiful! said Phoebe admiringly. It is as sweet a face as a mans can be, or ought to be. It has something of a childs expressionand yet not childishonly one feels so very kindly towards him! He ought never to suffer anything. One would bear much for the sake of sparing him toil or sorrow. Who is it, Cousin Hepzibah? Did you never hear, whispered her cousin, bending towards her, of Clifford Pyncheon? Never. I thought there were no Pyncheons left, except yourself and our cousin Jaffrey, answered Phoebe. And yet I seem to have heard the name of Clifford Pyncheon. Yes!from my father or my mother; but has he not been a long while dead? Well, well, child, perhaps he has! said Hepzibah with a sad, hollow laugh; but, in old houses like this, you know, dead people are very apt to come back again! We shall see. And, Cousin Phoebe, since, after all that I have said, your courage does not fail you, we will not part so soon. You are welcome, my child, for the present, to such a home as your kinswoman can offer you. With this measured, but not exactly cold assurance of a hospitable purpose, Hepzibah kissed her cheek. They now went below stairs, where Phoebenot so much assuming the office as attracting it to herself, by the magnetism of innate fitnesstook the most active part in preparing breakfast. The mistress of the house, meanwhile, as is usual with persons of her stiff and unmalleable cast, stood mostly aside; willing to lend her aid, yet conscious that her natural inaptitude would be likely to impede the business in hand. Phoebe and the fire that boiled the teakettle were equally bright, cheerful, and efficient, in their respective offices. Hepzibah gazed forth from her habitual sluggishness, the necessary result of long solitude, as from another sphere. She could not help being interested, however, and even amused, at the readiness with which her new inmate adapted herself to the circumstances, and brought the house, moreover, and all its rusty old appliances, into a suitableness for her purposes. Whatever she did, too, was done without conscious effort, and with frequent outbreaks of song, which were exceedingly pleasant to the ear. This natural tunefulness made Phoebe seem like a bird in a shadowy tree; or conveyed the idea that the stream of life warbled through her heart as a brook sometimes warbles through a pleasant little dell. It betokened the cheeriness of an active temperament, finding joy in its activity, and, therefore, rendering it beautiful; it was a New England traitthe stern old stuff of Puritanism with a gold thread in the web. Hepzibah brought out some old silver spoons with the family crest upon them, and a china teaset painted over with grotesque figures of man, bird, and beast, in as grotesque a landscape. These pictured people were odd humorists, in a world of their owna world of vivid brilliancy, so far as color went, and still unfaded, although the teapot and small cups were as ancient as the custom itself of teadrinking. Your greatgreatgreatgreatgrandmother had these cups, when she was married, said Hepzibah to Phoebe. She was a Davenport, of a good family. They were almost the first teacups ever seen in the colony; and if one of them were to be broken, my heart would break with it. But it is nonsense to speak so about a brittle teacup, when I remember what my heart has gone through without breaking. The cupsnot having been used, perhaps, since Hepzibahs youthhad contracted no small burden of dust, which Phoebe washed away with so much care and delicacy as to satisfy even the proprietor of this invaluable china. What a nice little housewife you are! exclaimed the latter, smiling, and at the same time frowning so prodigiously that the smile was sunshine under a thundercloud. Do you do other things as well? Are you as good at your book as you are at washing teacups? Not quite, I am afraid, said Phoebe, laughing at the form of Hepzibahs question. But I was schoolmistress for the little children in our district last summer, and might have been so still. Ah! tis all very well! observed the maiden lady, drawing herself up. But these things must have come to you with your mothers blood. I never knew a Pyncheon that had any turn for them. It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts; as was Hepzibah of this native inapplicability, so to speak, of the Pyncheons to any useful purpose. She regarded it as an hereditary trait; and so, perhaps, it was, but unfortunately a morbid one, such as is often generated in families that remain long above the surface of society. Before they left the breakfasttable, the shopbell rang sharply, and Hepzibah set down the remnant of her final cup of tea, with a look of sallow despair that was truly piteous to behold. In cases of distasteful occupation, the second day is generally worse than the first. We return to the rack with all the soreness of the preceding torture in our limbs. At all events, Hepzibah had fully satisfied herself of the impossibility of ever becoming wonted to this peevishly obstreperous little bell. Ring as often as it might, the sound always smote upon her nervous system rudely and suddenly. And especially now, while, with her crested teaspoons and antique china, she was flattering herself with ideas of gentility, she felt an unspeakable disinclination to confront a customer. Do not trouble yourself, dear cousin! cried Phoebe, starting lightly up. I am shopkeeper today. You, child! exclaimed Hepzibah. What can a little country girl know of such matters? Oh, I have done all the shopping for the family at our village store, said Phoebe. And I have had a table at a fancy fair, and made better sales than anybody. These things are not to be learnt; they depend upon a knack that comes, I suppose, added she, smiling, with ones mothers blood. You shall see that I am as nice a little saleswoman as I am a housewife! The old gentlewoman stole behind Phoebe, and peeped from the passageway into the shop, to note how she would manage her undertaking. It was a case of some intricacy. A very ancient woman, in a white short gown and a green petticoat, with a string of gold beads about her neck, and what looked like a nightcap on her head, had brought a quantity of yarn to barter for the commodities of the shop. She was probably the very last person in town who still kept the timehonored spinningwheel in constant revolution. It was worth while to hear the croaking and hollow tones of the old lady, and the pleasant voice of Phoebe, mingling in one twisted thread of talk; and still better to contrast their figuresso light and bloomyso decrepit and duskywith only the counter betwixt them, in one sense, but more than threescore years, in another. As for the bargain, it was wrinkled slyness and craft pitted against native truth and sagacity. Was not that well done? asked Phoebe, laughing, when the customer was gone. Nicely done, indeed, child! answered Hepzibah. I could not have gone through with it nearly so well. As you say, it must be a knack that belongs to you on the mothers side. It is a very genuine admiration, that with which persons too shy or too awkward to take a due part in the bustling world regard the real actors in lifes stirring scenes; so genuine, in fact, that the former are usually fain to make it palatable to their selflove, by assuming that these active and forcible qualities are incompatible with others, which they choose to deem higher and more important. Thus, Hepzibah was well content to acknowledge Phoebes vastly superior gifts as a shopkeeper; she listened, with compliant ear, to her suggestion of various methods whereby the influx of trade might be increased, and rendered profitable, without a hazardous outlay of capital. She consented that the village maiden should manufacture yeast, both liquid and in cakes; and should brew a certain kind of beer, nectareous to the palate, and of rare stomachic virtues; and, moreover, should bake and exhibit for sale some little spicecakes, which whosoever tasted would longingly desire to taste again. All such proofs of a ready mind and skilful handiwork were highly acceptable to the aristocratic hucksteress, so long as she could murmur to herself with a grim smile, and a halfnatural sigh, and a sentiment of mixed wonder, pity, and growing affection What a nice little body she is! If she only could be a lady; toobut thats impossible! Phoebe is no Pyncheon. She takes everything from her mother! As to Phoebes not being a lady, or whether she were a lady or no, it was a point, perhaps, difficult to decide, but which could hardly have come up for judgment at all in any fair and healthy mind. Out of New England, it would be impossible to meet with a person combining so many ladylike attributes with so many others that form no necessary (if compatible) part of the character. She shocked no canon of taste; she was admirably in keeping with herself, and never jarred against surrounding circumstances. Her figure, to be sureso small as to be almost childlike, and so elastic that motion seemed as easy or easier to it than rest, would hardly have suited ones idea of a countess. Neither did her facewith the brown ringlets on either side, and the slightly piquant nose, and the wholesome bloom, and the clear shade of tan, and the half dozen freckles, friendly remembrances of the April sun and breezeprecisely give us a right to call her beautiful. But there was both lustre and depth in her eyes. She was very pretty; as graceful as a bird, and graceful much in the same way; as pleasant about the house as a gleam of sunshine falling on the floor through a shadow of twinkling leaves, or as a ray of firelight that dances on the wall while evening is drawing nigh. Instead of discussing her claim to rank among ladies, it would be preferable to regard Phoebe as the example of feminine grace and availability combined, in a state of society, if there were any such, where ladies did not exist. There it should be womans office to move in the midst of practical affairs, and to gild them all, the very homeliestwere it even the scouring of pots and kettleswith an atmosphere of loveliness and joy. Such was the sphere of Phoebe. To find the born and educated lady, on the other hand, we need look no farther than Hepzibah, our forlorn old maid, in her rustling and rusty silks, with her deeply cherished and ridiculous consciousness of long descent, her shadowy claims to princely territory, and, in the way of accomplishment, her recollections, it may be, of having formerly thrummed on a harpsichord, and walked a minuet, and worked an antique tapestrystitch on her sampler. It was a fair parallel between new Plebeianism and old Gentility. It really seemed as if the battered visage of the House of the Seven Gables, black and heavybrowed as it still certainly looked, must have shown a kind of cheerfulness glimmering through its dusky windows as Phoebe passed to and fro in the interior. Otherwise, it is impossible to explain how the people of the neighborhood so soon became aware of the girls presence. There was a great run of custom, setting steadily in, from about ten oclock until towards noonrelaxing, somewhat, at dinnertime, but recommencing in the afternoon, and, finally, dying away a half an hour or so before the long days sunset. One of the stanchest patrons was little Ned Higgins, the devourer of Jim Crow and the elephant, who today signalized his omnivorous prowess by swallowing two dromedaries and a locomotive. Phoebe laughed, as she summed up her aggregate of sales upon the slate; while Hepzibah, first drawing on a pair of silk gloves, reckoned over the sordid accumulation of copper coin, not without silver intermixed, that had jingled into the till. We must renew our stock, Cousin Hepzibah! cried the little saleswoman. The gingerbread figures are all gone, and so are those Dutch wooden milkmaids, and most of our other playthings. There has been constant inquiry for cheap raisins, and a great cry for whistles, and trumpets, and jewsharps; and at least a dozen little boys have asked for molassescandy. And we must contrive to get a peck of russet apples, late in the season as it is. But, dear cousin, what an enormous heap of copper! Positively a copper mountain! Well done! well done! well done! quoth Uncle Venner, who had taken occasion to shuffle in and out of the shop several times in the course of the day. Heres a girl that will never end her days at my farm! Bless my eyes, what a brisk little soul! Yes, Phoebe is a nice girl! said Hepzibah, with a scowl of austere approbation. But, Uncle Venner, you have known the family a great many years. Can you tell me whether there ever was a Pyncheon whom she takes after? I dont believe there ever was, answered the venerable man. At any rate, it never was my luck to see her like among them, nor, for that matter, anywhere else. Ive seen a great deal of the world, not only in peoples kitchens and backyards but at the streetcorners, and on the wharves, and in other places where my business calls me; and Im free to say, Miss Hepzibah, that I never knew a human creature do her work so much like one of Gods angels as this child Phoebe does! Uncle Venners eulogium, if it appear rather too highstrained for the person and occasion, had, nevertheless, a sense in which it was both subtle and true. There was a spiritual quality in Phoebes activity. The life of the long and busy dayspent in occupations that might so easily have taken a squalid and ugly aspecthad been made pleasant, and even lovely, by the spontaneous grace with which these homely duties seemed to bloom out of her character; so that labor, while she dealt with it, had the easy and flexible charm of play. Angels do not toil, but let their good works grow out of them; and so did Phoebe. The two relativesthe young maid and the old onefound time before nightfall, in the intervals of trade, to make rapid advances towards affection and confidence. A recluse, like Hepzibah, usually displays remarkable frankness, and at least temporary affability, on being absolutely cornered, and brought to the point of personal intercourse; like the angel whom Jacob wrestled with, she is ready to bless you when once overcome. The old gentlewoman took a dreary and proud satisfaction in leading Phoebe from room to room of the house, and recounting the traditions with which, as we may say, the walls were lugubriously frescoed. She showed the indentations made by the lieutenantgovernors swordhilt in the doorpanels of the apartment where old Colonel Pyncheon, a dead host, had received his affrighted visitors with an awful frown. The dusky terror of that frown, Hepzibah observed, was thought to be lingering ever since in the passageway. She bade Phoebe step into one of the tall chairs, and inspect the ancient map of the Pyncheon territory at the eastward. In a tract of land on which she laid her finger, there existed a silver mine, the locality of which was precisely pointed out in some memoranda of Colonel Pyncheon himself, but only to be made known when the family claim should be recognized by government. Thus it was for the interest of all New England that the Pyncheons should have justice done them. She told, too, how that there was undoubtedly an immense treasure of English guineas hidden somewhere about the house, or in the cellar, or possibly in the garden. If you should happen to find it, Phoebe, said Hepzibah, glancing aside at her with a grim yet kindly smile, we will tie up the shopbell for good and all! Yes, dear cousin, answered Phoebe; but, in the meantime, I hear somebody ringing it! When the customer was gone, Hepzibah talked rather vaguely, and at great length, about a certain Alice Pyncheon, who had been exceedingly beautiful and accomplished in her lifetime, a hundred years ago. The fragrance of her rich and delightful character still lingered about the place where she had lived, as a dried rosebud scents the drawer where it has withered and perished. This lovely Alice had met with some great and mysterious calamity, and had grown thin and white, and gradually faded out of the world. But, even now, she was supposed to haunt the House of the Seven Gables, and, a great many timesespecially when one of the Pyncheons was to dieshe had been heard playing sadly and beautifully on the harpsichord. One of these tunes, just as it had sounded from her spiritual touch, had been written down by an amateur of music; it was so exquisitely mournful that nobody, to this day, could bear to hear it played, unless when a great sorrow had made them know the still profounder sweetness of it. Was it the same harpsichord that you showed me? inquired Phoebe. The very same, said Hepzibah. It was Alice Pyncheons harpsichord. When I was learning music, my father would never let me open it. So, as I could only play on my teachers instrument, I have forgotten all my music long ago. Leaving these antique themes, the old lady began to talk about the daguerreotypist, whom, as he seemed to be a wellmeaning and orderly young man, and in narrow circumstances, she had permitted to take up his residence in one of the seven gables. But, on seeing more of Mr. Holgrave, she hardly knew what to make of him. He had the strangest companions imaginable; men with long beards, and dressed in linen blouses, and other such newfangled and illfitting garments; reformers, temperance lecturers, and all manner of crosslooking philanthropists; communitymen, and comeouters, as Hepzibah believed, who acknowledged no law, and ate no solid food, but lived on the scent of other peoples cookery, and turned up their noses at the fare. As for the daguerreotypist, she had read a paragraph in a penny paper, the other day, accusing him of making a speech full of wild and disorganizing matter, at a meeting of his bandittilike associates. For her own part, she had reason to believe that he practised animal magnetism, and, if such things were in fashion nowadays, should be apt to suspect him of studying the Black Art up there in his lonesome chamber. But, dear cousin, said Phoebe, if the young man is so dangerous, why do you let him stay? If he does nothing worse, he may set the house on fire! Why, sometimes, answered Hepzibah, I have seriously made it a question, whether I ought not to send him away. But, with all his oddities, he is a quiet kind of a person, and has such a way of taking hold of ones mind, that, without exactly liking him (for I dont know enough of the young man), I should be sorry to lose sight of him entirely. A woman clings to slight acquaintances when she lives so much alone as I do. But if Mr. Holgrave is a lawless person! remonstrated Phoebe, a part of whose essence it was to keep within the limits of law. Oh! said Hepzibah carelesslyfor, formal as she was, still, in her lifes experience, she had gnashed her teeth against human lawI suppose he has a law of his own! VI Maules Well After an early tea, the little countrygirl strayed into the garden. The enclosure had formerly been very extensive, but was now contracted within small compass, and hemmed about, partly by high wooden fences, and partly by the outbuildings of houses that stood on another street. In its centre was a grassplat, surrounding a ruinous little structure, which showed just enough of its original design to indicate that it had once been a summerhouse. A hopvine, springing from last years root, was beginning to clamber over it, but would be long in covering the roof with its green mantle. Three of the seven gables either fronted or looked sideways, with a dark solemnity of aspect, down into the garden. The black, rich soil had fed itself with the decay of a long period of time; such as fallen leaves, the petals of flowers, and the stalks and seedvessels of vagrant and lawless plants, more useful after their death than ever while flaunting in the sun. The evil of these departed years would naturally have sprung up again, in such rank weeds (symbolic of the transmitted vices of society) as are always prone to root themselves about human dwellings. Phoebe saw, however, that their growth must have been checked by a degree of careful labor, bestowed daily and systematically on the garden. The white double rosebush had evidently been propped up anew against the house since the commencement of the season; and a peartree and three damsontrees, which, except a row of currantbushes, constituted the only varieties of fruit, bore marks of the recent amputation of several superfluous or defective limbs. There were also a few species of antique and hereditary flowers, in no very flourishing condition, but scrupulously weeded; as if some person, either out of love or curiosity, had been anxious to bring them to such perfection as they were capable of attaining. The remainder of the garden presented a wellselected assortment of esculent vegetables, in a praiseworthy state of advancement. Summer squashes almost in their golden blossom; cucumbers, now evincing a tendency to spread away from the main stock, and ramble far and wide; two or three rows of stringbeans and as many more that were about to festoon themselves on poles; tomatoes, occupying a site so sheltered and sunny that the plants were already gigantic, and promised an early and abundant harvest. Phoebe wondered whose care and toil it could have been that had planted these vegetables, and kept the soil so clean and orderly. Not surely her cousin Hepzibahs, who had no taste nor spirits for the ladylike employment of cultivating flowers, andwith her recluse habits, and tendency to shelter herself within the dismal shadow of the housewould hardly have come forth under the speck of open sky to weed and hoe among the fraternity of beans and squashes. It being her first day of complete estrangement from rural objects, Phoebe found an unexpected charm in this little nook of grass, and foliage, and aristocratic flowers, and plebeian vegetables. The eye of Heaven seemed to look down into it pleasantly, and with a peculiar smile, as if glad to perceive that nature, elsewhere overwhelmed, and driven out of the dusty town, had here been able to retain a breathingplace. The spot acquired a somewhat wilder grace, and yet a very gentle one, from the fact that a pair of robins had built their nest in the peartree, and were making themselves exceedingly busy and happy in the dark intricacy of its boughs. Bees, toostrange to sayhad thought it worth their while to come hither, possibly from the range of hives beside some farmhouse miles away. How many aerial voyages might they have made, in quest of honey, or honeyladen, betwixt dawn and sunset! Yet, late as it now was, there still arose a pleasant hum out of one or two of the squashblossoms, in the depths of which these bees were plying their golden labor. There was one other object in the garden which Nature might fairly claim as her inalienable property, in spite of whatever man could do to render it his own.

This was a fountain, set round with a rim of old mossy stones, and paved, in its bed, with what appeared to be a sort of mosaicwork of variously colored pebbles. The play and slight agitation of the water, in its upward gush, wrought magically with these variegated pebbles, and made a continually shifting apparition of quaint figures, vanishing too suddenly to be definable. Thence, swelling over the rim of mossgrown stones, the water stole away under the fence, through what we regret to call a gutter, rather than a channel. Nor must we forget to mention a hencoop of very reverend antiquity that stood in the farther corner of the garden, not a great way from the fountain. It now contained only Chanticleer, his two wives, and a solitary chicken. All of them were pure specimens of a breed which had been transmitted down as an heirloom in the Pyncheon family, and were said, while in their prime, to have attained almost the size of turkeys, and, on the score of delicate flesh, to be fit for a princes table. In proof of the authenticity of this legendary renown, Hepzibah could have exhibited the shell of a great egg, which an ostrich need hardly have been ashamed of. Be that as it might, the hens were now scarcely larger than pigeons, and had a queer, rusty, withered aspect, and a gouty kind of movement, and a sleepy and melancholy tone throughout all the variations of their clucking and cackling. It was evident that the race had degenerated, like many a noble race besides, in consequence of too strict a watchfulness to keep it pure. These feathered people had existed too long in their distinct variety; a fact of which the present representatives, judging by their lugubrious deportment, seemed to be aware. They kept themselves alive, unquestionably, and laid now and then an egg, and hatched a chicken; not for any pleasure of their own, but that the world might not absolutely lose what had once been so admirable a breed of fowls. The distinguishing mark of the hens was a crest of lamentably scanty growth, in these latter days, but so oddly and wickedly analogous to Hepzibahs turban, that Phoebeto the poignant distress of her conscience, but inevitablywas led to fancy a general resemblance betwixt these forlorn bipeds and her respectable relative. The girl ran into the house to get some crumbs of bread, cold potatoes, and other such scraps as were suitable to the accommodating appetite of fowls. Returning, she gave a peculiar call, which they seemed to recognize. The chicken crept through the pales of the coop and ran, with some show of liveliness, to her feet; while Chanticleer and the ladies of his household regarded her with queer, sidelong glances, and then croaked one to another, as if communicating their sage opinions of her character. So wise, as well as antique, was their aspect, as to give color to the idea, not merely that they were the descendants of a timehonored race, but that they had existed, in their individual capacity, ever since the House of the Seven Gables was founded, and were somehow mixed up with its destiny. They were a species of tutelary sprite, or Banshee; although winged and feathered differently from most other guardian angels. Here, you odd little chicken! said Phoebe; here are some nice crumbs for you! The chicken, hereupon, though almost as venerable in appearance as its motherpossessing, indeed, the whole antiquity of its progenitors in miniaturemustered vivacity enough to flutter upward and alight on Phoebes shoulder. That little fowl pays you a high compliment! said a voice behind Phoebe. Turning quickly, she was surprised at sight of a young man, who had found access into the garden by a door opening out of another gable than that whence she had emerged. He held a hoe in his hand, and, while Phoebe was gone in quest of the crumbs, had begun to busy himself with drawing up fresh earth about the roots of the tomatoes. The chicken really treats you like an old acquaintance, continued he in a quiet way, while a smile made his face pleasanter than Phoebe at first fancied it. Those venerable personages in the coop, too, seem very affably disposed. You are lucky to be in their good graces so soon! They have known me much longer, but never honor me with any familiarity, though hardly a day passes without my bringing them food. Miss Hepzibah, I suppose, will interweave the fact with her other traditions, and set it down that the fowls know you to be a Pyncheon! The secret is, said Phoebe, smiling, that I have learned how to talk with hens and chickens. Ah, but these hens, answered the young manthese hens of aristocratic lineage would scorn to understand the vulgar language of a barnyard fowl. I prefer to thinkand so would Miss Hepzibahthat they recognize the family tone. For you are a Pyncheon? My name is Phoebe Pyncheon, said the girl, with a manner of some reserve; for she was aware that her new acquaintance could be no other than the daguerreotypist, of whose lawless propensities the old maid had given her a disagreeable idea. I did not know that my cousin Hepzibahs garden was under another persons care. Yes, said Holgrave, I dig, and hoe, and weed, in this black old earth, for the sake of refreshing myself with what little nature and simplicity may be left in it, after men have so long sown and reaped here. I turn up the earth by way of pastime. My sober occupation, so far as I have any, is with a lighter material. In short, I make pictures out of sunshine; and, not to be too much dazzled with my own trade, I have prevailed with Miss Hepzibah to let me lodge in one of these dusky gables. It is like a bandage over ones eyes, to come into it. But would you like to see a specimen of my productions? A daguerreotype likeness, do you mean? asked Phoebe with less reserve; for, in spite of prejudice, her own youthfulness sprang forward to meet his. I dont much like pictures of that sortthey are so hard and stern; besides dodging away from the eye, and trying to escape altogether. They are conscious of looking very unamiable, I suppose, and therefore hate to be seen. If you would permit me, said the artist, looking at Phoebe, I should like to try whether the daguerreotype can bring out disagreeable traits on a perfectly amiable face. But there certainly is truth in what you have said. Most of my likenesses do look unamiable; but the very sufficient reason, I fancy, is, because the originals are so. There is a wonderful insight in Heavens broad and simple sunshine. While we give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it. There is, at least, no flattery in my humble line of art. Now, here is a likeness which I have taken over and over again, and still with no better result. Yet the original wears, to common eyes, a very different expression. It would gratify me to have your judgment on this character. He exhibited a daguerreotype miniature in a morocco case. Phoebe merely glanced at it, and gave it back. I know the face, she replied; for its stern eye has been following me about all day. It is my Puritan ancestor, who hangs yonder in the parlor. To be sure, you have found some way of copying the portrait without its black velvet cap and gray beard, and have given him a modern coat and satin cravat, instead of his cloak and band. I dont think him improved by your alterations. You would have seen other differences had you looked a little longer, said Holgrave, laughing, yet apparently much struck. I can assure you that this is a modern face, and one which you will very probably meet. Now, the remarkable point is, that the original wears, to the worlds eyeand, for aught I know, to his most intimate friendsan exceedingly pleasant countenance, indicative of benevolence, openness of heart, sunny goodhumor, and other praiseworthy qualities of that cast. The sun, as you see, tells quite another story, and will not be coaxed out of it, after half a dozen patient attempts on my part. Here we have the man, sly, subtle, hard, imperious, and, withal, cold as ice. Look at that eye! Would you like to be at its mercy? At that mouth! Could it ever smile? And yet, if you could only see the benign smile of the original! It is so much the more unfortunate, as he is a public character of some eminence, and the likeness was intended to be engraved. Well, I dont wish to see it any more, observed Phoebe, turning away her eyes. It is certainly very like the old portrait. But my cousin Hepzibah has another picturea miniature. If the original is still in the world, I think he might defy the sun to make him look stern and hard. You have seen that picture, then! exclaimed the artist, with an expression of much interest. I never did, but have a great curiosity to do so. And you judge favorably of the face? There never was a sweeter one, said Phoebe. It is almost too soft and gentle for a mans. Is there nothing wild in the eye? continued Holgrave, so earnestly that it embarrassed Phoebe, as did also the quiet freedom with which he presumed on their so recent acquaintance. Is there nothing dark or sinister anywhere? Could you not conceive the original to have been guilty of a great crime? It is nonsense, said Phoebe a little impatiently, for us to talk about a picture which you have never seen. You mistake it for some other. A crime, indeed! Since you are a friend of my cousin Hepzibahs, you should ask her to show you the picture. It will suit my purpose still better to see the original, replied the daguerreotypist coolly. As to his character, we need not discuss its points; they have already been settled by a competent tribunal, or one which called itself competent. But, stay! Do not go yet, if you please! I have a proposition to make you. Phoebe was on the point of retreating, but turned back, with some hesitation; for she did not exactly comprehend his manner, although, on better observation, its feature seemed rather to be lack of ceremony than any approach to offensive rudeness. There was an odd kind of authority, too, in what he now proceeded to say, rather as if the garden were his own than a place to which he was admitted merely by Hepzibahs courtesy. If agreeable to you, he observed, it would give me pleasure to turn over these flowers, and those ancient and respectable fowls, to your care. Coming fresh from country air and occupations, you will soon feel the need of some such outofdoor employment. My own sphere does not so much lie among flowers. You can trim and tend them, therefore, as you please; and I will ask only the least trifle of a blossom, now and then, in exchange for all the good, honest kitchen vegetables with which I propose to enrich Miss Hepzibahs table. So we will be fellowlaborers, somewhat on the community system. Silently, and rather surprised at her own compliance, Phoebe accordingly betook herself to weeding a flowerbed, but busied herself still more with cogitations respecting this young man, with whom she so unexpectedly found herself on terms approaching to familiarity. She did not altogether like him. His character perplexed the little countrygirl, as it might a more practised observer; for, while the tone of his conversation had generally been playful, the impression left on her mind was that of gravity, and, except as his youth modified it, almost sternness. She rebelled, as it were, against a certain magnetic element in the artists nature, which he exercised towards her, possibly without being conscious of it. After a little while, the twilight, deepened by the shadows of the fruittrees and the surrounding buildings, threw an obscurity over the garden. There, said Holgrave, it is time to give over work! That last stroke of the hoe has cut off a beanstalk. Good night, Miss Phoebe Pyncheon! Any bright day, if you will put one of those rosebuds in your hair, and come to my rooms in Central Street, I will seize the purest ray of sunshine, and make a picture of the flower and its wearer. He retired towards his own solitary gable, but turned his head, on reaching the door, and called to Phoebe, with a tone which certainly had laughter in it, yet which seemed to be more than half in earnest. Be careful not to drink at Maules well! said he. Neither drink nor bathe your face in it! Maules well! answered Phoebe. Is that it with the rim of mossy stones? I have no thought of drinking therebut why not? Oh, rejoined the daguerreotypist, because, like an old ladys cup of tea, it is water bewitched! He vanished; and Phoebe, lingering a moment, saw a glimmering light, and then the steady beam of a lamp, in a chamber of the gable. On returning into Hepzibahs apartment of the house, she found the lowstudded parlor so dim and dusky that her eyes could not penetrate the interior. She was indistinctly aware, however, that the gaunt figure of the old gentlewoman was sitting in one of the straightbacked chairs, a little withdrawn from the window, the faint gleam of which showed the blanched paleness of her cheek, turned sideways towards a corner. Shall I light a lamp, Cousin Hepzibah? she asked. Do, if you please, my dear child, answered Hepzibah. But put it on the table in the corner of the passage. My eyes are weak; and I can seldom bear the lamplight on them. What an instrument is the human voice! How wonderfully responsive to every emotion of the human soul! In Hepzibahs tone, at that moment, there was a certain rich depth and moisture, as if the words, commonplace as they were, had been steeped in the warmth of her heart. Again, while lighting the lamp in the kitchen, Phoebe fancied that her cousin spoke to her. In a moment, cousin! answered the girl. These matches just glimmer, and go out. But, instead of a response from Hepzibah, she seemed to hear the murmur of an unknown voice. It was strangely indistinct, however, and less like articulate words than an unshaped sound, such as would be the utterance of feeling and sympathy, rather than of the intellect. So vague was it, that its impression or echo in Phoebes mind was that of unreality. She concluded that she must have mistaken some other sound for that of the human voice; or else that it was altogether in her fancy. She set the lighted lamp in the passage, and again entered the parlor. Hepzibahs form, though its sable outline mingled with the dusk, was now less imperfectly visible. In the remoter parts of the room, however, its walls being so ill adapted to reflect light, there was nearly the same obscurity as before. Cousin, said Phoebe, did you speak to me just now? No, child! replied Hepzibah. Fewer words than before, but with the same mysterious music in them! Mellow, melancholy, yet not mournful, the tone seemed to gush up out of the deep well of Hepzibahs heart, all steeped in its profoundest emotion. There was a tremor in it, too, thatas all strong feeling is electricpartly communicated itself to Phoebe. The girl sat silently for a moment. But soon, her senses being very acute, she became conscious of an irregular respiration in an obscure corner of the room. Her physical organization, moreover, being at once delicate and healthy, gave her a perception, operating with almost the effect of a spiritual medium, that somebody was near at hand. My dear cousin, asked she, overcoming an indefinable reluctance, is there not someone in the room with us? Phoebe, my dear little girl, said Hepzibah, after a moments pause, you were up betimes, and have been busy all day. Pray go to bed; for I am sure you must need rest. I will sit in the parlor awhile, and collect my thoughts. It has been my custom for more years, child, than you have lived! While thus dismissing her, the maiden lady stepped forward, kissed Phoebe, and pressed her to her heart, which beat against the girls bosom with a strong, high, and tumultuous swell. How came there to be so much love in this desolate old heart, that it could afford to well over thus abundantly? Goodnight, cousin, said Phoebe, strangely affected by Hepzibahs manner. If you begin to love me, I am glad! She retired to her chamber, but did not soon fall asleep, nor then very profoundly. At some uncertain period in the depths of night, and, as it were, through the thin veil of a dream, she was conscious of a footstep mounting the stairs heavily, but not with force and decision. The voice of Hepzibah, with a hush through it, was going up along with the footsteps; and, again, responsive to her cousins voice, Phoebe heard that strange, vague murmur, which might be likened to an indistinct shadow of human utterance. VII The Guest When Phoebe awokewhich she did with the early twittering of the conjugal couple of robins in the peartreeshe heard movements below stairs, and, hastening down, found Hepzibah already in the kitchen. She stood by a window, holding a book in close contiguity to her nose, as if with the hope of gaining an olfactory acquaintance with its contents, since her imperfect vision made it not very easy to read them. If any volume could have manifested its essential wisdom in the mode suggested, it would certainly have been the one now in Hepzibahs hand; and the kitchen, in such an event, would forthwith have streamed with the fragrance of venison, turkeys, capons, larded partridges, puddings, cakes, and Christmas pies, in all manner of elaborate mixture and concoction. It was a cookery book, full of innumerable old fashions of English dishes, and illustrated with engravings, which represented the arrangements of the table at such banquets as it might have befitted a nobleman to give in the great hall of his castle. And, amid these rich and potent devices of the culinary art (not one of which, probably, had been tested, within the memory of any mans grandfather), poor Hepzibah was seeking for some nimble little titbit, which, with what skill she had, and such materials as were at hand, she might toss up for breakfast. Soon, with a deep sigh, she put aside the savory volume, and inquired of Phoebe whether old Speckle, as she called one of the hens, had laid an egg the preceding day. Phoebe ran to see, but returned without the expected treasure in her hand. At that instant, however, the blast of a fishdealers conch was heard, announcing his approach along the street. With energetic raps at the shopwindow, Hepzibah summoned the man in, and made purchase of what he warranted as the finest mackerel in his cart, and as fat a one as ever he felt with his finger so early in the season. Requesting Phoebe to roast some coffeewhich she casually observed was the real Mocha, and so long kept that each of the small berries ought to be worth its weight in goldthe maiden lady heaped fuel into the vast receptacle of the ancient fireplace in such quantity as soon to drive the lingering dusk out of the kitchen. The countrygirl, willing to give her utmost assistance, proposed to make an Indian cake, after her mothers peculiar method, of easy manufacture, and which she could vouch for as possessing a richness, and, if rightly prepared, a delicacy, unequalled by any other mode of breakfastcake. Hepzibah gladly assenting, the kitchen was soon the scene of savory preparation. Perchance, amid their proper element of smoke, which eddied forth from the illconstructed chimney, the ghosts of departed cookmaids looked wonderingly on, or peeped down the great breadth of the flue, despising the simplicity of the projected meal, yet ineffectually pining to thrust their shadowy hands into each inchoate dish. The halfstarved rats, at any rate, stole visibly out of their hidingplaces, and sat on their hindlegs, snuffing the fumy atmosphere, and wistfully awaiting an opportunity to nibble. Hepzibah had no natural turn for cookery, and, to say the truth, had fairly incurred her present meagreness by often choosing to go without her dinner rather than be attendant on the rotation of the spit, or ebullition of the pot. Her zeal over the fire, therefore, was quite an heroic test of sentiment. It was touching, and positively worthy of tears (if Phoebe, the only spectator, except the rats and ghosts aforesaid, had not been better employed than in shedding them), to see her rake out a bed of fresh and glowing coals, and proceed to broil the mackerel. Her usually pale cheeks were all ablaze with heat and hurry. She watched the fish with as much tender care and minuteness of attention as ifwe know not how to express it otherwiseas if her own heart were on the gridiron, and her immortal happiness were involved in its being done precisely to a turn! Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly arranged and wellprovisioned breakfasttable. We come to it freshly, in the dewy youth of the day, and when our spiritual and sensual elements are in better accord than at a later period; so that the material delights of the morning meal are capable of being fully enjoyed, without any very grievous reproaches, whether gastric or conscientious, for yielding even a trifle overmuch to the animal department of our nature. The thoughts, too, that run around the ring of familiar guests have a piquancy and mirthfulness, and oftentimes a vivid truth, which more rarely find their way into the elaborate intercourse of dinner. Hepzibahs small and ancient table, supported on its slender and graceful legs, and covered with a cloth of the richest damask, looked worthy to be the scene and centre of one of the cheerfullest of parties. The vapor of the broiled fish arose like incense from the shrine of a barbarian idol, while the fragrance of the Mocha might have gratified the nostrils of a tutelary Lar, or whatever power has scope over a modern breakfasttable. Phoebes Indian cakes were the sweetest offering of allin their hue befitting the rustic altars of the innocent and golden ageor, so brightly yellow were they, resembling some of the bread which was changed to glistening gold when Midas tried to eat it. The butter must not be forgottenbutter which Phoebe herself had churned, in her own rural home, and brought it to her cousin as a propitiatory giftsmelling of cloverblossoms, and diffusing the charm of pastoral scenery through the darkpanelled parlor. All this, with the quaint gorgeousness of the old china cups and saucers, and the crested spoons, and a silver creamjug (Hepzibahs only other article of plate, and shaped like the rudest porringer), set out a board at which the stateliest of old Colonel Pyncheons guests need not have scorned to take his place. But the Puritans face scowled down out of the picture, as if nothing on the table pleased his appetite. By way of contributing what grace she could, Phoebe gathered some roses and a few other flowers, possessing either scent or beauty, and arranged them in a glass pitcher, which, having long ago lost its handle, was so much the fitter for a flowervase. The early sunshineas fresh as that which peeped into Eves bower while she and Adam sat at breakfast therecame twinkling through the branches of the peartree, and fell quite across the table. All was now ready. There were chairs and plates for three. A chair and plate for Hepzibahthe same for Phoebebut what other guest did her cousin look for? Throughout this preparation there had been a constant tremor in Hepzibahs frame; an agitation so powerful that Phoebe could see the quivering of her gaunt shadow, as thrown by the firelight on the kitchen wall, or by the sunshine on the parlor floor. Its manifestations were so various, and agreed so little with one another, that the girl knew not what to make of it. Sometimes it seemed an ecstasy of delight and happiness. At such moments, Hepzibah would fling out her arms, and infold Phoebe in them, and kiss her cheek as tenderly as ever her mother had; she appeared to do so by an inevitable impulse, and as if her bosom were oppressed with tenderness, of which she must needs pour out a little, in order to gain breathingroom. The next moment, without any visible cause for the change, her unwonted joy shrank back, appalled, as it were, and clothed itself in mourning; or it ran and hid itself, so to speak, in the dungeon of her heart, where it had long lain chained, while a cold, spectral sorrow took the place of the imprisoned joy, that was afraid to be enfranchiseda sorrow as black as that was bright. She often broke into a little, nervous, hysteric laugh, more touching than any tears could be; and forthwith, as if to try which was the most touching, a gush of tears would follow; or perhaps the laughter and tears came both at once, and surrounded our poor Hepzibah, in a moral sense, with a kind of pale, dim rainbow. Towards Phoebe, as we have said, she was affectionatefar tenderer than ever before, in their brief acquaintance, except for that one kiss on the preceding nightyet with a continually recurring pettishness and irritability. She would speak sharply to her; then, throwing aside all the starched reserve of her ordinary manner, ask pardon, and the next instant renew the justforgiven injury. At last, when their mutual labor was all finished, she took Phoebes hand in her own trembling one. Bear with me, my dear child, she cried; for truly my heart is full to the brim! Bear with me; for I love you, Phoebe, though I speak so roughly. Think nothing of it, dearest child! By and by, I shall be kind, and only kind! My dearest cousin, cannot you tell me what has happened? asked Phoebe, with a sunny and tearful sympathy. What is it that moves you so? Hush! hush! He is coming! whispered Hepzibah, hastily wiping her eyes. Let him see you first, Phoebe; for you are young and rosy, and cannot help letting a smile break out whether or no. He always liked bright faces! And mine is old now, and the tears are hardly dry on it. He never could abide tears. There; draw the curtain a little, so that the shadow may fall across his side of the table! But let there be a good deal of sunshine, too; for he never was fond of gloom, as some people are. He has had but little sunshine in his lifepoor Cliffordand, oh, what a black shadow. Poor, poor Clifford! Thus murmuring in an undertone, as if speaking rather to her own heart than to Phoebe, the old gentlewoman stepped on tiptoe about the room, making such arrangements as suggested themselves at the crisis. Meanwhile there was a step in the passageway, above stairs. Phoebe recognized it as the same which had passed upward, as through her dream, in the nighttime. The approaching guest, whoever it might be, appeared to pause at the head of the staircase; he paused twice or thrice in the descent; he paused again at the foot. Each time, the delay seemed to be without purpose, but rather from a forgetfulness of the purpose which had set him in motion, or as if the persons feet came involuntarily to a standstill because the motivepower was too feeble to sustain his progress. Finally, he made a long pause at the threshold of the parlor. He took hold of the knob of the door; then loosened his grasp without opening it. Hepzibah, her hands convulsively clasped, stood gazing at the entrance. Dear Cousin Hepzibah, pray dont look so! said Phoebe, trembling; for her cousins emotion, and this mysteriously reluctant step, made her feel as if a ghost were coming into the room. You really frighten me! Is something awful going to happen? Hush! whispered Hepzibah. Be cheerful! whatever may happen, be nothing but cheerful! The final pause at the threshold proved so long, that Hepzibah, unable to endure the suspense, rushed forward, threw open the door, and led in the stranger by the hand. At the first glance, Phoebe saw an elderly personage, in an oldfashioned dressinggown of faded damask, and wearing his gray or almost white hair of an unusual length. It quite overshadowed his forehead, except when he thrust it back, and stared vaguely about the room. After a very brief inspection of his face, it was easy to conceive that his footstep must necessarily be such an one as that which, slowly and with as indefinite an aim as a childs first journey across a floor, had just brought him hitherward. Yet there were no tokens that his physical strength might not have sufficed for a free and determined gait. It was the spirit of the man that could not walk. The expression of his countenancewhile, notwithstanding it had the light of reason in itseemed to waver, and glimmer, and nearly to die away, and feebly to recover itself again. It was like a flame which we see twinkling among halfextinguished embers; we gaze at it more intently than if it were a positive blaze, gushing vividly upwardmore intently, but with a certain impatience, as if it ought either to kindle itself into satisfactory splendor, or be at once extinguished. For an instant after entering the room, the guest stood still, retaining Hepzibahs hand instinctively, as a child does that of the grown person who guides it. He saw Phoebe, however, and caught an illumination from her youthful and pleasant aspect, which, indeed, threw a cheerfulness about the parlor, like the circle of reflected brilliancy around the glass vase of flowers that was standing in the sunshine. He made a salutation, or, to speak nearer the truth, an illdefined, abortive attempt at curtsy. Imperfect as it was, however, it conveyed an idea, or, at least, gave a hint, of indescribable grace, such as no practised art of external manners could have attained. It was too slight to seize upon at the instant; yet, as recollected afterwards, seemed to transfigure the whole man. Dear Clifford, said Hepzibah, in the tone with which one soothes a wayward infant, this is our cousin Phoebelittle Phoebe PyncheonArthurs only child, you know. She has come from the country to stay with us awhile; for our old house has grown to be very lonely now. PhoebePhoebe Pyncheon?Phoebe? repeated the guest, with a strange, sluggish, illdefined utterance. Arthurs child! Ah, I forget! No matter. She is very welcome! Come, dear Clifford, take this chair, said Hepzibah, leading him to his place. Pray, Phoebe, lower the curtain a very little more. Now let us begin breakfast. The guest seated himself in the place assigned him, and looked strangely around. He was evidently trying to grapple with the present scene, and bring it home to his mind with a more satisfactory distinctness. He desired to be certain, at least, that he was here, in the lowstudded, crossbeamed, oakenpanelled parlor, and not in some other spot, which had stereotyped itself into his senses. But the effort was too great to be sustained with more than a fragmentary success. Continually, as we may express it, he faded away out of his place; or, in other words, his mind and consciousness took their departure, leaving his wasted, gray, and melancholy figurea substantial emptiness, a material ghostto occupy his seat at table. Again, after a blank moment, there would be a flickering tapergleam in his eyeballs. It betokened that his spiritual part had returned, and was doing its best to kindle the hearts household fire, and light up intellectual lamps in the dark and ruinous mansion, where it was doomed to be a forlorn inhabitant. At one of these moments of less torpid, yet still imperfect animation, Phoebe became convinced of what she had at first rejected as too extravagant and startling an idea. She saw that the person before her must have been the original of the beautiful miniature in her cousin Hepzibahs possession. Indeed, with a feminine eye for costume, she had at once identified the damask dressinggown, which enveloped him, as the same in figure, material, and fashion, with that so elaborately represented in the picture. This old, faded garment, with all its pristine brilliancy extinct, seemed, in some indescribable way, to translate the wearers untold misfortune, and make it perceptible to the beholders eye.

It was the better to be discerned, by this exterior type, how worn and old were the souls more immediate garments; that form and countenance, the beauty and grace of which had almost transcended the skill of the most exquisite of artists. It could the more adequately be known that the soul of the man must have suffered some miserable wrong, from its earthly experience. There he seemed to sit, with a dim veil of decay and ruin betwixt him and the world, but through which, at flitting intervals, might be caught the same expression, so refined, so softly imaginative, which Malboneventuring a happy touch, with suspended breathhad imparted to the miniature! There had been something so innately characteristic in this look, that all the dusky years, and the burden of unfit calamity which had fallen upon him, did not suffice utterly to destroy it. Hepzibah had now poured out a cup of deliciously fragrant coffee, and presented it to her guest. As his eyes met hers, he seemed bewildered and disquieted. Is this you, Hepzibah? he murmured sadly; then, more apart, and perhaps unconscious that he was overheard, How changed! how changed! And is she angry with me? Why does she bend her brow so? Poor Hepzibah! It was that wretched scowl which time and her nearsightedness, and the fret of inward discomfort, had rendered so habitual that any vehemence of mood invariably evoked it. But at the indistinct murmur of his words her whole face grew tender, and even lovely, with sorrowful affection; the harshness of her features disappeared, as it were, behind the warm and misty glow. Angry! she repeated; angry with you, Clifford! Her tone, as she uttered the exclamation, had a plaintive and really exquisite melody thrilling through it, yet without subduing a certain something which an obtuse auditor might still have mistaken for asperity. It was as if some transcendent musician should draw a soulthrilling sweetness out of a cracked instrument, which makes its physical imperfection heard in the midst of ethereal harmonyso deep was the sensibility that found an organ in Hepzibahs voice! There is nothing but love here, Clifford, she addednothing but love! You are at home! The guest responded to her tone by a smile, which did not half light up his face. Feeble as it was, however, and gone in a moment, it had a charm of wonderful beauty. It was followed by a coarser expression; or one that had the effect of coarseness on the fine mould and outline of his countenance, because there was nothing intellectual to temper it. It was a look of appetite. He ate food with what might almost be termed voracity; and seemed to forget himself, Hepzibah, the young girl, and everything else around him, in the sensual enjoyment which the bountifully spread table afforded. In his natural system, though highwrought and delicately refined, a sensibility to the delights of the palate was probably inherent. It would have been kept in check, however, and even converted into an accomplishment, and one of the thousand modes of intellectual culture, had his more ethereal characteristics retained their vigor. But as it existed now, the effect was painful and made Phoebe droop her eyes. In a little while the guest became sensible of the fragrance of the yet untasted coffee. He quaffed it eagerly. The subtle essence acted on him like a charmed draught, and caused the opaque substance of his animal being to grow transparent, or, at least, translucent; so that a spiritual gleam was transmitted through it, with a clearer lustre than hitherto. More, more! he cried, with nervous haste in his utterance, as if anxious to retain his grasp of what sought to escape him. This is what I need! Give me more! Under this delicate and powerful influence he sat more erect, and looked out from his eyes with a glance that took note of what it rested on. It was not so much that his expression grew more intellectual; this, though it had its share, was not the most peculiar effect. Neither was what we call the moral nature so forcibly awakened as to present itself in remarkable prominence. But a certain fine temper of being was now not brought out in full relief, but changeably and imperfectly betrayed, of which it was the function to deal with all beautiful and enjoyable things. In a character where it should exist as the chief attribute, it would bestow on its possessor an exquisite taste, and an enviable susceptibility of happiness. Beauty would be his life; his aspirations would all tend toward it; and, allowing his frame and physical organs to be in consonance, his own developments would likewise be beautiful. Such a man should have nothing to do with sorrow; nothing with strife; nothing with the martyrdom which, in an infinite variety of shapes, awaits those who have the heart, and will, and conscience, to fight a battle with the world. To these heroic tempers, such martyrdom is the richest meed in the worlds gift. To the individual before us, it could only be a grief, intense in due proportion with the severity of the infliction. He had no right to be a martyr; and, beholding him so fit to be happy and so feeble for all other purposes, a generous, strong, and noble spirit would, methinks, have been ready to sacrifice what little enjoyment it might have planned for itselfit would have flung down the hopes, so paltry in its regardif thereby the wintry blasts of our rude sphere might come tempered to such a man. Not to speak it harshly or scornfully, it seemed Cliffords nature to be a Sybarite. It was perceptible, even there, in the dark old parlor, in the inevitable polarity with which his eyes were attracted towards the quivering play of sunbeams through the shadowy foliage. It was seen in his appreciating notice of the vase of flowers, the scent of which he inhaled with a zest almost peculiar to a physical organization so refined that spiritual ingredients are moulded in with it. It was betrayed in the unconscious smile with which he regarded Phoebe, whose fresh and maidenly figure was both sunshine and flowerstheir essence, in a prettier and more agreeable mode of manifestation. Not less evident was this love and necessity for the Beautiful, in the instinctive caution with which, even so soon, his eyes turned away from his hostess, and wandered to any quarter rather than come back. It was Hepzibahs misfortunenot Cliffords fault. How could heso yellow as she was, so wrinkled, so sad of mien, with that odd uncouthness of a turban on her head, and that most perverse of scowls contorting her browhow could he love to gaze at her? But, did he owe her no affection for so much as she had silently given? He owed her nothing. A nature like Cliffords can contract no debts of that kind. It iswe say it without censure, nor in diminution of the claim which it indefeasibly possesses on beings of another mouldit is always selfish in its essence; and we must give it leave to be so, and heap up our heroic and disinterested love upon it so much the more, without a recompense. Poor Hepzibah knew this truth, or, at least, acted on the instinct of it. So long estranged from what was lovely as Clifford had been, she rejoicedrejoiced, though with a present sigh, and a secret purpose to shed tears in her own chamber that he had brighter objects now before his eyes than her aged and uncomely features. They never possessed a charm; and if they had, the canker of her grief for him would long since have destroyed it. The guest leaned back in his chair. Mingled in his countenance with a dreamy delight, there was a troubled look of effort and unrest. He was seeking to make himself more fully sensible of the scene around him; or, perhaps, dreading it to be a dream, or a play of imagination, was vexing the fair moment with a struggle for some added brilliancy and more durable illusion. How pleasant!How delightful! he murmured, but not as if addressing anyone. Will it last? How balmy the atmosphere through that open window! An open window! How beautiful that play of sunshine! Those flowers, how very fragrant! That young girls face, how cheerful, how blooming!a flower with the dew on it, and sunbeams in the dewdrops! Ah! this must be all a dream! A dream! A dream! But it has quite hidden the four stone walls! Then his face darkened, as if the shadow of a cavern or a dungeon had come over it; there was no more light in its expression than might have come through the iron grates of a prisonwindowstill lessening, too, as if he were sinking farther into the depths. Phoebe (being of that quickness and activity of temperament that she seldom long refrained from taking a part, and generally a good one, in what was going forward) now felt herself moved to address the stranger. Here is a new kind of rose, which I found this morning in the garden, said she, choosing a small crimson one from among the flowers in the vase. There will be but five or six on the bush this season. This is the most perfect of them all; not a speck of blight or mildew in it. And how sweet it is!sweet like no other rose! One can never forget that scent! Ah!let me see!let me hold it! cried the guest, eagerly seizing the flower, which, by the spell peculiar to remembered odors, brought innumerable associations along with the fragrance that it exhaled. Thank you! This has done me good. I remember how I used to prize this flowerlong ago, I suppose, very long ago!or was it only yesterday? It makes me feel young again! Am I young? Either this remembrance is singularly distinct, or this consciousness strangely dim! But how kind of the fair young girl! Thank you! Thank you! The favorable excitement derived from this little crimson rose afforded Clifford the brightest moment which he enjoyed at the breakfasttable. It might have lasted longer, but that his eyes happened, soon afterwards, to rest on the face of the old Puritan, who, out of his dingy frame and lustreless canvas, was looking down on the scene like a ghost, and a most illtempered and ungenial one. The guest made an impatient gesture of the hand, and addressed Hepzibah with what might easily be recognized as the licensed irritability of a petted member of the family. Hepzibah!Hepzibah! cried he with no little force and distinctness, why do you keep that odious picture on the wall? Yes, yes!that is precisely your taste! I have told you, a thousand times, that it was the evil genius of the house!my evil genius particularly! Take it down, at once! Dear Clifford, said Hepzibah sadly, you know it cannot be! Then, at all events, continued he, still speaking with some energy, pray cover it with a crimson curtain, broad enough to hang in folds, and with a golden border and tassels. I cannot bear it! It must not stare me in the face! Yes, dear Clifford, the picture shall be covered, said Hepzibah soothingly. There is a crimson curtain in a trunk above stairsa little faded and motheaten, Im afraidbut Phoebe and I will do wonders with it. This very day, remember, said he; and then added, in a low, selfcommuning voice, Why should we live in this dismal house at all? Why not go to the South of France?to Italy?Paris, Naples, Venice, Rome? Hepzibah will say we have not the means. A droll idea that! He smiled to himself, and threw a glance of fine sarcastic meaning towards Hepzibah. But the several moods of feeling, faintly as they were marked, through which he had passed, occurring in so brief an interval of time, had evidently wearied the stranger. He was probably accustomed to a sad monotony of life, not so much flowing in a stream, however sluggish, as stagnating in a pool around his feet. A slumberous veil diffused itself over his countenance, and had an effect, morally speaking, on its naturally delicate and elegant outline, like that which a brooding mist, with no sunshine in it, throws over the features of a landscape. He appeared to become grosseralmost cloddish. If aught of interest or beautyeven ruined beautyhad heretofore been visible in this man, the beholder might now begin to doubt it, and to accuse his own imagination of deluding him with whatever grace had flickered over that visage, and whatever exquisite lustre had gleamed in those filmy eyes. Before he had quite sunken away, however, the sharp and peevish tinkle of the shopbell made itself audible. Striking most disagreeably on Cliffords auditory organs and the characteristic sensibility of his nerves, it caused him to start upright out of his chair. Good heavens, Hepzibah! what horrible disturbance have we now in the house? cried he, wreaking his resentful impatienceas a matter of course, and a custom of oldon the one person in the world that loved him. I have never heard such a hateful clamor! Why do you permit it? In the name of all dissonance, what can it be? It was very remarkable into what prominent reliefeven as if a dim picture should leap suddenly from its canvasCliffords character was thrown by this apparently trifling annoyance. The secret was, that an individual of his temper can always be pricked more acutely through his sense of the beautiful and harmonious than through his heart. It is even possiblefor similar cases have often happenedthat if Clifford, in his foregoing life, had enjoyed the means of cultivating his taste to its utmost perfectibility, that subtle attribute might, before this period, have completely eaten out or filed away his affections. Shall we venture to pronounce, therefore, that his long and black calamity may not have had a redeeming drop of mercy at the bottom? Dear Clifford, I wish I could keep the sound from your ears, said Hepzibah, patiently, but reddening with a painful suffusion of shame. It is very disagreeable even to me. But, do you know, Clifford, I have something to tell you? This ugly noisepray run, Phoebe, and see who is there!this naughty little tinkle is nothing but our shopbell! Shopbell! repeated Clifford, with a bewildered stare. Yes, our shopbell, said Hepzibah, a certain natural dignity, mingled with deep emotion, now asserting itself in her manner. For you must know, dearest Clifford, that we are very poor. And there was no other resource, but either to accept assistance from a hand that I would push aside (and so would you!) were it to offer bread when we were dying for itno help, save from him, or else to earn our subsistence with my own hands! Alone, I might have been content to starve. But you were to be given back to me! Do you think, then, dear Clifford, added she, with a wretched smile, that I have brought an irretrievable disgrace on the old house, by opening a little shop in the front gable? Our greatgreatgrandfather did the same, when there was far less need! Are you ashamed of me? Shame! Disgrace! Do you speak these words to me, Hepzibah? said Cliffordnot angrily, however; for when a mans spirit has been thoroughly crushed, he may be peevish at small offences, but never resentful of great ones. So he spoke with only a grieved emotion. It was not kind to say so, Hepzibah! What shame can befall me now? And then the unnerved manhe that had been born for enjoyment, but had met a doom so very wretchedburst into a womans passion of tears. It was but of brief continuance, however; soon leaving him in a quiescent, and, to judge by his countenance, not an uncomfortable state. From this mood, too, he partially rallied for an instant, and looked at Hepzibah with a smile, the keen, halfderisory purport of which was a puzzle to her. Are we so very poor, Hepzibah? said he. Finally, his chair being deep and softly cushioned, Clifford fell asleep. Hearing the more regular rise and fall of his breath (which, however, even then, instead of being strong and full, had a feeble kind of tremor, corresponding with the lack of vigor in his character)hearing these tokens of settled slumber, Hepzibah seized the opportunity to peruse his face more attentively than she had yet dared to do. Her heart melted away in tears; her profoundest spirit sent forth a moaning voice, low, gentle, but inexpressibly sad. In this depth of grief and pity she felt that there was no irreverence in gazing at his altered, aged, faded, ruined face. But no sooner was she a little relieved than her conscience smote her for gazing curiously at him, now that he was so changed; and, turning hastily away, Hepzibah let down the curtain over the sunny window, and left Clifford to slumber there. VIII The Pyncheon of Today Phoebe, on entering the shop, beheld there the already familiar face of the little devourerif we can reckon his mighty deeds arightof Jim Crow, the elephant, the camel, the dromedaries, and the locomotive. Having expended his private fortune, on the two preceding days, in the purchase of the above unheardof luxuries, the young gentlemans present errand was on the part of his mother, in quest of three eggs and half a pound of raisins. These articles Phoebe accordingly supplied, and, as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a slight superadded morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of fate whither so varied a caravan had preceded him. This remarkable urchin, in truth, was the very emblem of old Father Time, both in respect of his alldevouring appetite for men and things, and because he, as well as Time, after ingulfing thus much of creation, looked almost as youthful as if he had been just that moment made. After partly closing the door, the child turned back, and mumbled something to Phoebe, which, as the whale was but half disposed of, she could not perfectly understand. What did you say, my little fellow? asked she. Mother wants to know, repeated Ned Higgins more distinctly, how Old Maid Pyncheons brother does? Folks say he has got home. My cousin Hepzibahs brother? exclaimed Phoebe, surprised at this sudden explanation of the relationship between Hepzibah and her guest. Her brother! And where can he have been? The little boy only put his thumb to his broad snubnose, with that look of shrewdness which a child, spending much of his time in the street, so soon learns to throw over his features, however unintelligent in themselves. Then as Phoebe continued to gaze at him, without answering his mothers message, he took his departure. As the child went down the steps, a gentleman ascended them, and made his entrance into the shop. It was the portly, and, had it possessed the advantage of a little more height, would have been the stately figure of a man considerably in the decline of life, dressed in a black suit of some thin stuff, resembling broadcloth as closely as possible. A goldheaded cane, of rare Oriental wood, added materially to the high respectability of his aspect, as did also a neckcloth of the utmost snowy purity, and the conscientious polish of his boots. His dark, square countenance, with its almost shaggy depth of eyebrows, was naturally impressive, and would, perhaps, have been rather stern, had not the gentleman considerately taken upon himself to mitigate the harsh effect by a look of exceeding goodhumor and benevolence. Owing, however, to a somewhat massive accumulation of animal substance about the lower region of his face, the look was, perhaps, unctuous rather than spiritual, and had, so to speak, a kind of fleshly effulgence, not altogether so satisfactory as he doubtless intended it to be. A susceptible observer, at any rate, might have regarded it as affording very little evidence of the general benignity of soul whereof it purported to be the outward reflection. And if the observer chanced to be illnatured, as well as acute and susceptible, he would probably suspect that the smile on the gentlemans face was a good deal akin to the shine on his boots, and that each must have cost him and his bootblack, respectively, a good deal of hard labor to bring out and preserve them. As the stranger entered the little shop, where the projection of the second story and the thick foliage of the elmtree, as well as the commodities at the window, created a sort of gray medium, his smile grew as intense as if he had set his heart on counteracting the whole gloom of the atmosphere (besides any moral gloom pertaining to Hepzibah and her inmates) by the unassisted light of his countenance. On perceiving a young rosebud of a girl, instead of the gaunt presence of the old maid, a look of surprise was manifest. He at first knit his brows; then smiled with more unctuous benignity than ever. Ah, I see how it is! said he in a deep voicea voice which, had it come from the throat of an uncultivated man, would have been gruff, but, by dint of careful training, was now sufficiently agreeableI was not aware that Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon had commenced business under such favorable auspices. You are her assistant, I suppose? I certainly am, answered Phoebe, and added, with a little air of ladylike assumption (for, civil as the gentleman was, he evidently took her to be a young person serving for wages), I am a cousin of Miss Hepzibah, on a visit to her. Her cousin?and from the country? Pray pardon me, then, said the gentleman, bowing and smiling, as Phoebe never had been bowed to nor smiled on before; in that case, we must be better acquainted; for, unless I am sadly mistaken, you are my own little kinswoman likewise! Let me seeMary?Dolly?Phoebe?yes, Phoebe is the name! Is it possible that you are Phoebe Pyncheon, only child of my dear cousin and classmate, Arthur? Ah, I see your father now, about your mouth! Yes, yes! we must be better acquainted! I am your kinsman, my dear. Surely you must have heard of Judge Pyncheon? As Phoebe curtsied in reply, the Judge bent forward, with the pardonable and even praiseworthy purposeconsidering the nearness of blood and the difference of ageof bestowing on his young relative a kiss of acknowledged kindred and natural affection. Unfortunately (without design, or only with such instinctive design as gives no account of itself to the intellect) Phoebe, just at the critical moment, drew back; so that her highly respectable kinsman, with his body bent over the counter and his lips protruded, was betrayed into the rather absurd predicament of kissing the empty air. It was a modern parallel to the case of Ixion embracing a cloud, and was so much the more ridiculous as the Judge prided himself on eschewing all airy matter, and never mistaking a shadow for a substance. The truth wasand it is Phoebes only excusethat, although Judge Pyncheons glowing benignity might not be absolutely unpleasant to the feminine beholder, with the width of a street, or even an ordinarysized room, interposed between, yet it became quite too intense, when this dark, fullfed physiognomy (so roughly bearded, too, that no razor could ever make it smooth) sought to bring itself into actual contact with the object of its regards. The man, the sex, somehow or other, was entirely too prominent in the Judges demonstrations of that sort. Phoebes eyes sank, and, without knowing why, she felt herself blushing deeply under his look. Yet she had been kissed before, and without any particular squeamishness, by perhaps half a dozen different cousins, younger as well as older than this darkbrowned, grislybearded, whiteneckclothed, and unctuouslybenevolent Judge! Then, why not by him? On raising her eyes, Phoebe was startled by the change in Judge Pyncheons face. It was quite as striking, allowing for the difference of scale, as that betwixt a landscape under a broad sunshine and just before a thunderstorm; not that it had the passionate intensity of the latter aspect, but was cold, hard, immitigable, like a daylong brooding cloud. Dear me! what is to be done now? thought the countrygirl to herself. He looks as if there were nothing softer in him than a rock, nor milder than the east wind! I meant no harm! Since he is really my cousin, I would have let him kiss me, if I could! Then, all at once, it struck Phoebe that this very Judge Pyncheon was the original of the miniature which the daguerreotypist had shown her in the garden, and that the hard, stern, relentless look, now on his face, was the same that the sun had so inflexibly persisted in bringing out. Was it, therefore, no momentary mood, but, however skilfully concealed, the settled temper of his life? And not merely so, but was it hereditary in him, and transmitted down, as a precious heirloom, from that bearded ancestor, in whose picture both the expression and, to a singular degree, the features of the modern Judge were shown as by a kind of prophecy? A deeper philosopher than Phoebe might have found something very terrible in this idea. It implied that the weaknesses and defects, the bad passions, the mean tendencies, and the moral diseases which lead to crime are handed down from one generation to another, by a far surer process of transmission than human law has been able to establish in respect to the riches and honors which it seeks to entail upon posterity. But, as it happened, scarcely had Phoebes eyes rested again on the Judges countenance than all its ugly sternness vanished; and she found herself quite overpowered by the sultry, dogday heat, as it were, of benevolence, which this excellent man diffused out of his great heart into the surrounding atmospherevery much like a serpent, which, as a preliminary to fascination, is said to fill the air with his peculiar odor. I like that, Cousin Phoebe! cried he, with an emphatic nod of approbation. I like it much, my little cousin! You are a good child, and know how to take care of yourself. A young girlespecially if she be a very pretty onecan never be too chary of her lips. Indeed, sir, said Phoebe, trying to laugh the matter off, I did not mean to be unkind. Nevertheless, whether or no it were entirely owing to the inauspicious commencement of their acquaintance, she still acted under a certain reserve, which was by no means customary to her frank and genial nature. The fantasy would not quit her, that the original Puritan, of whom she had heard so many sombre traditionsthe progenitor of the whole race of New England Pyncheons, the founder of the House of the Seven Gables, and who had died so strangely in ithad now stepped into the shop. In these days of offhand equipment, the matter was easily enough arranged. On his arrival from the other world, he had merely found it necessary to spend a quarter of an hour at a barbers, who had trimmed down the Puritans full beard into a pair of grizzled whiskers, then, patronizing a readymade clothing establishment, he had exchanged his velvet doublet and sable cloak, with the richly worked band under his chin, for a white collar and cravat, coat, vest, and pantaloons; and lastly, putting aside his steelhilted broadsword to take up a goldheaded cane, the Colonel Pyncheon of two centuries ago steps forward as the Judge of the passing moment! Of course, Phoebe was far too sensible a girl to entertain this idea in any other way than as matter for a smile. Possibly, also, could the two personages have stood together before her eye, many points of difference would have been perceptible, and perhaps only a general resemblance. The long lapse of intervening years, in a climate so unlike that which had fostered the ancestral Englishman, must inevitably have wrought important changes in the physical system of his descendant. The Judges volume of muscle could hardly be the same as the Colonels; there was undoubtedly less beef in him. Though looked upon as a weighty man among his contemporaries in respect of animal substance, and as favored with a remarkable degree of fundamental development, well adapting him for the judicial bench, we conceive that the modern Judge Pyncheon, if weighed in the same balance with his ancestor, would have required at least an oldfashioned fiftysix to keep the scale in equilibrio. Then the Judges face had lost the ruddy English hue that showed its warmth through all the duskiness of the Colonels weatherbeaten cheek, and had taken a sallow shade, the established complexion of his countrymen. If we mistake not, moreover, a certain quality of nervousness had become more or less manifest, even in so solid a specimen of Puritan descent as the gentleman now under discussion. As one of its effects, it bestowed on his countenance a quicker mobility than the old Englishmans had possessed, and keener vivacity, but at the expense of a sturdier something, on which these acute endowments seemed to act like dissolving acids. This process, for aught we know, may belong to the great system of human progress, which, with every ascending footstep, as it diminishes the necessity for animal force, may be destined gradually to spiritualize us, by refining away our grosser attributes of body. If so, Judge Pyncheon could endure a century or two more of such refinement as well as most other men. The similarity, intellectual and moral, between the Judge and his ancestor appears to have been at least as strong as the resemblance of mien and feature would afford reason to anticipate. In old Colonel Pyncheons funeral discourse the clergyman absolutely canonized his deceased parishioner, and opening, as it were, a vista through the roof of the church, and thence through the firmament above, showed him seated, harp in hand, among the crowned choristers of the spiritual world. On his tombstone, too, the record is highly eulogistic; nor does history, so far as he holds a place upon its page, assail the consistency and uprightness of his character. So also, as regards the Judge Pyncheon of today, neither clergyman, nor legal critic, nor inscriber of tombstones, nor historian of general or local politics, would venture a word against this eminent persons sincerity as a Christian, or respectability as a man, or integrity as a judge, or courage and faithfulness as the oftentried representative of his political party. But, besides these cold, formal, and empty words of the chisel that inscribes, the voice that speaks, and the pen that writes, for the public eye and for distant timeand which inevitably lose much of their truth and freedom by the fatal consciousness of so doingthere were traditions about the ancestor, and private diurnal gossip about the Judge, remarkably accordant in their testimony. It is often instructive to take the womans, the private and domestic, view of a public man; nor can anything be more curious than the vast discrepancy between portraits intended for engraving and the pencilsketches that pass from hand to hand behind the originals back. For example tradition affirmed that the Puritan had been greedy of wealth; the Judge, too, with all the show of liberal expenditure, was said to be as closefisted as if his grip were of iron. The ancestor had clothed himself in a grim assumption of kindliness, a rough heartiness of word and manner, which most people took to be the genuine warmth of nature, making its way through the thick and inflexible hide of a manly character. His descendant, in compliance with the requirements of a nicer age, had etherealized this rude benevolence into that broad benignity of smile wherewith he shone like a noonday sun along the streets, or glowed like a household fire in the drawingrooms of his private acquaintance. The Puritanif not belied by some singular stories, murmured, even at this day, under the narrators breathhad fallen into certain transgressions to which men of his great animal development, whatever their faith or principles, must continue liable, until they put off impurity, along with the gross earthly substance that involves it. We must not stain our page with any contemporary scandal, to a similar purport, that may have been whispered against the Judge.

The Puritan, again, an autocrat in his own household, had worn out three wives, and, merely by the remorseless weight and hardness of his character in the conjugal relation, had sent them, one after another, brokenhearted, to their graves. Here the parallel, in some sort, fails. The Judge had wedded but a single wife, and lost her in the third or fourth year of their marriage. There was a fable, howeverfor such we choose to consider it, though, not impossibly, typical of Judge Pyncheons marital deportmentthat the lady got her deathblow in the honeymoon, and never smiled again, because her husband compelled her to serve him with coffee every morning at his bedside, in token of fealty to her liegelord and master. But it is too fruitful a subject, this of hereditary resemblancesthe frequent recurrence of which, in a direct line, is truly unaccountable, when we consider how large an accumulation of ancestry lies behind every man at the distance of one or two centuries. We shall only add, therefore, that the Puritanso, at least, says chimneycorner tradition, which often preserves traits of character with marvellous fidelitywas bold, imperious, relentless, crafty; laying his purposes deep, and following them out with an inveteracy of pursuit that knew neither rest nor conscience; trampling on the weak, and, when essential to his ends, doing his utmost to beat down the strong. Whether the Judge in any degree resembled him, the further progress of our narrative may show. Scarcely any of the items in the abovedrawn parallel occurred to Phoebe, whose country birth and residence, in truth, had left her pitifully ignorant of most of the family traditions, which lingered, like cobwebs and incrustations of smoke, about the rooms and chimneycorners of the House of the Seven Gables. Yet there was a circumstance, very trifling in itself, which impressed her with an odd degree of horror. She had heard of the anathema flung by Maule, the executed wizard, against Colonel Pyncheon and his posteritythat God would give them blood to drinkand likewise of the popular notion, that this miraculous blood might now and then be heard gurgling in their throats. The latter scandalas became a person of sense, and, more especially, a member of the Pyncheon familyPhoebe had set down for the absurdity which it unquestionably was. But ancient superstitions, after being steeped in human hearts and embodied in human breath, and passing from lip to ear in manifold repetition, through a series of generations, become imbued with an effect of homely truth. The smoke of the domestic hearth has scented them through and through. By long transmission among household facts, they grow to look like them, and have such a familiar way of making themselves at home that their influence is usually greater than we suspect. Thus it happened, that when Phoebe heard a certain noise in Judge Pyncheons throatrather habitual with him, not altogether voluntary, yet indicative of nothing, unless it were a slight bronchial complaint, or, as some people hinted, an apoplectic symptomwhen the girl heard this queer and awkward ingurgitation (which the writer never did hear, and therefore cannot describe), she very foolishly started, and clasped her hands. Of course, it was exceedingly ridiculous in Phoebe to be discomposed by such a trifle, and still more unpardonable to show her discomposure to the individual most concerned in it. But the incident chimed in so oddly with her previous fancies about the Colonel and the Judge, that, for the moment, it seemed quite to mingle their identity. What is the matter with you, young woman? said Judge Pyncheon, giving her one of his harsh looks. Are you afraid of anything? Oh, nothing, sirnothing in the world! answered Phoebe, with a little laugh of vexation at herself. But perhaps you wish to speak with my cousin Hepzibah. Shall I call her? Stay a moment, if you please, said the Judge, again beaming sunshine out of his face. You seem to be a little nervous this morning. The town air, Cousin Phoebe, does not agree with your good, wholesome country habits. Or has anything happened to disturb you?anything remarkable in Cousin Hepzibahs family?An arrival, eh? I thought so! No wonder you are out of sorts, my little cousin. To be an inmate with such a guest may well startle an innocent young girl! You quite puzzle me, sir, replied Phoebe, gazing inquiringly at the Judge. There is no frightful guest in the house, but only a poor, gentle, childlike man, whom I believe to be Cousin Hepzibahs brother. I am afraid (but you, sir, will know better than I) that he is not quite in his sound senses; but so mild and quiet he seems to be, that a mother might trust her baby with him; and I think he would play with the baby as if he were only a few years older than itself. He startle me!Oh, no indeed! I rejoice to hear so favorable and so ingenuous an account of my cousin Clifford, said the benevolent Judge. Many years ago, when we were boys and young men together, I had a great affection for him, and still feel a tender interest in all his concerns. You say, Cousin Phoebe, he appears to be weak minded. Heaven grant him at least enough of intellect to repent of his past sins! Nobody, I fancy, observed Phoebe, can have fewer to repent of. And is it possible, my dear, rejoined the Judge, with a commiserating look, that you have never heard of Clifford Pyncheon?that you know nothing of his history? Well, it is all right; and your mother has shown a very proper regard for the good name of the family with which she connected herself. Believe the best you can of this unfortunate person, and hope the best! It is a rule which Christians should always follow, in their judgments of one another; and especially is it right and wise among near relatives, whose characters have necessarily a degree of mutual dependence. But is Clifford in the parlor? I will just step in and see. Perhaps, sir, I had better call my cousin Hepzibah, said Phoebe; hardly knowing, however, whether she ought to obstruct the entrance of so affectionate a kinsman into the private regions of the house. Her brother seemed to be just falling asleep after breakfast; and I am sure she would not like him to be disturbed. Pray, sir, let me give her notice! But the Judge showed a singular determination to enter unannounced; and as Phoebe, with the vivacity of a person whose movements unconsciously answer to her thoughts, had stepped towards the door, he used little or no ceremony in putting her aside. No, no, Miss Phoebe! said Judge Pyncheon in a voice as deep as a thundergrowl, and with a frown as black as the cloud whence it issues. Stay you here! I know the house, and know my cousin Hepzibah, and know her brother Clifford likewise.nor need my little country cousin put herself to the trouble of announcing me!in these latter words, by the by, there were symptoms of a change from his sudden harshness into his previous benignity of manner. I am at home here, Phoebe, you must recollect, and you are the stranger. I will just step in, therefore, and see for myself how Clifford is, and assure him and Hepzibah of my kindly feelings and best wishes. It is right, at this juncture, that they should both hear from my own lips how much I desire to serve them. Ha! here is Hepzibah herself! Such was the case. The vibrations of the Judges voice had reached the old gentlewoman in the parlor, where she sat, with face averted, waiting on her brothers slumber. She now issued forth, as would appear, to defend the entrance, looking, we must needs say, amazingly like the dragon which, in fairy tales, is wont to be the guardian over an enchanted beauty. The habitual scowl of her brow was undeniably too fierce, at this moment, to pass itself off on the innocent score of nearsightedness; and it was bent on Judge Pyncheon in a way that seemed to confound, if not alarm him, so inadequately had he estimated the moral force of a deeply grounded antipathy. She made a repelling gesture with her hand, and stood a perfect picture of prohibition, at full length, in the dark frame of the doorway. But we must betray Hepzibahs secret, and confess that the native timorousness of her character even now developed itself in a quick tremor, which, to her own perception, set each of her joints at variance with its fellows. Possibly, the Judge was aware how little true hardihood lay behind Hepzibahs formidable front. At any rate, being a gentleman of steady nerves, he soon recovered himself, and failed not to approach his cousin with outstretched hand; adopting the sensible precaution, however, to cover his advance with a smile, so broad and sultry, that, had it been only half as warm as it looked, a trellis of grapes might at once have turned purple under its summerlike exposure. It may have been his purpose, indeed, to melt poor Hepzibah on the spot, as if she were a figure of yellow wax. Hepzibah, my beloved cousin, I am rejoiced! exclaimed the Judge most emphatically. Now, at length, you have something to live for. Yes, and all of us, let me say, your friends and kindred, have more to live for than we had yesterday. I have lost no time in hastening to offer any assistance in my power towards making Clifford comfortable. He belongs to us all. I know how much he requireshow much he used to requirewith his delicate taste, and his love of the beautiful. Anything in my housepictures, books, wine, luxuries of the tablehe may command them all! It would afford me most heartfelt gratification to see him! Shall I step in, this moment? No, replied Hepzibah, her voice quivering too painfully to allow of many words. He cannot see visitors! A visitor, my dear cousin!do you call me so? cried the Judge, whose sensibility, it seems, was hurt by the coldness of the phrase. Nay, then, let me be Cliffords host, and your own likewise. Come at once to my house. The country air, and all the conveniencesI may say luxuriesthat I have gathered about me, will do wonders for him. And you and I, dear Hepzibah, will consult together, and watch together, and labor together, to make our dear Clifford happy. Come! why should we make more words about what is both a duty and a pleasure on my part? Come to me at once! On hearing these so hospitable offers, and such generous recognition of the claims of kindred, Phoebe felt very much in the mood of running up to Judge Pyncheon, and giving him, of her own accord, the kiss from which she had so recently shrunk away. It was quite otherwise with Hepzibah; the Judges smile seemed to operate on her acerbity of heart like sunshine upon vinegar, making it ten times sourer than ever. Clifford, said shestill too agitated to utter more than an abrupt sentenceClifford has a home here! May Heaven forgive you, Hepzibah, said Judge Pyncheonreverently lifting his eyes towards that high court of equity to which he appealedif you suffer any ancient prejudice or animosity to weigh with you in this matter. I stand here with an open heart, willing and anxious to receive yourself and Clifford into it. Do not refuse my good officesmy earnest propositions for your welfare! They are such, in all respects, as it behooves your nearest kinsman to make. It will be a heavy responsibility, cousin, if you confine your brother to this dismal house and stifled air, when the delightful freedom of my countryseat is at his command. It would never suit Clifford, said Hepzibah, as briefly as before. Woman! broke forth the Judge, giving way to his resentment, what is the meaning of all this? Have you other resources? Nay, I suspected as much! Take care, Hepzibah, take care! Clifford is on the brink of as black a ruin as ever befell him yet! But why do I talk with you, woman as you are? Make way!I must see Clifford! Hepzibah spread out her gaunt figure across the door, and seemed really to increase in bulk; looking the more terrible, also, because there was so much terror and agitation in her heart. But Judge Pyncheons evident purpose of forcing a passage was interrupted by a voice from the inner room; a weak, tremulous, wailing voice, indicating helpless alarm, with no more energy for selfdefence than belongs to a frightened infant. Hepzibah, Hepzibah! cried the voice; go down on your knees to him! Kiss his feet! Entreat him not to come in! Oh, let him have mercy on me! Mercy! mercy! For the instant, it appeared doubtful whether it were not the Judges resolute purpose to set Hepzibah aside, and step across the threshold into the parlor, whence issued that broken and miserable murmur of entreaty. It was not pity that restrained him, for, at the first sound of the enfeebled voice, a red fire kindled in his eyes, and he made a quick pace forward, with something inexpressibly fierce and grim darkening forth, as it were, out of the whole man. To know Judge Pyncheon was to see him at that moment. After such a revelation, let him smile with what sultriness he would, he could much sooner turn grapes purple, or pumpkins yellow, than melt the ironbranded impression out of the beholders memory. And it rendered his aspect not the less, but more frightful, that it seemed not to express wrath or hatred, but a certain hot fellness of purpose, which annihilated everything but itself. Yet, after all, are we not slandering an excellent and amiable man? Look at the Judge now! He is apparently conscious of having erred, in too energetically pressing his deeds of lovingkindness on persons unable to appreciate them. He will await their better mood, and hold himself as ready to assist them then as at this moment. As he draws back from the door, an allcomprehensive benignity blazes from his visage, indicating that he gathers Hepzibah, little Phoebe, and the invisible Clifford, all three, together with the whole world besides, into his immense heart, and gives them a warm bath in its flood of affection. You do me great wrong, dear Cousin Hepzibah! said he, first kindly offering her his hand, and then drawing on his glove preparatory to departure. Very great wrong! But I forgive it, and will study to make you think better of me. Of course, our poor Clifford being in so unhappy a state of mind, I cannot think of urging an interview at present. But I shall watch over his welfare as if he were my own beloved brother; nor do I at all despair, my dear cousin, of constraining both him and you to acknowledge your injustice. When that shall happen, I desire no other revenge than your acceptance of the best offices in my power to do you. With a bow to Hepzibah, and a degree of paternal benevolence in his parting nod to Phoebe, the Judge left the shop, and went smiling along the street. As is customary with the rich, when they aim at the honors of a republic, he apologized, as it were, to the people, for his wealth, prosperity, and elevated station, by a free and hearty manner towards those who knew him; putting off the more of his dignity in due proportion with the humbleness of the man whom he saluted, and thereby proving a haughty consciousness of his advantages as irrefragably as if he had marched forth preceded by a troop of lackeys to clear the way. On this particular forenoon, so excessive was the warmth of Judge Pyncheons kindly aspect, that (such, at least, was the rumor about town) an extra passage of the watercarts was found essential, in order to lay the dust occasioned by so much extra sunshine! No sooner had he disappeared than Hepzibah grew deadly white, and, staggering towards Phoebe, let her head fall on the young girls shoulder. O Phoebe! murmured she, that man has been the horror of my life! Shall I never, never have the couragewill my voice never cease from trembling long enough to let me tell him what he is? Is he so very wicked? asked Phoebe. Yet his offers were surely kind! Do not speak of themhe has a heart of iron! rejoined Hepzibah. Go, now, and talk to Clifford! Amuse and keep him quiet! It would disturb him wretchedly to see me so agitated as I am. There, go, dear child, and I will try to look after the shop. Phoebe went accordingly, but perplexed herself, meanwhile, with queries as to the purport of the scene which she had just witnessed, and also whether judges, clergymen, and other characters of that eminent stamp and respectability, could really, in any single instance, be otherwise than just and upright men. A doubt of this nature has a most disturbing influence, and, if shown to be a fact, comes with fearful and startling effect on minds of the trim, orderly, and limitloving class, in which we find our little countrygirl. Dispositions more boldly speculative may derive a stern enjoyment from the discovery, since there must be evil in the world, that a high man is as likely to grasp his share of it as a low one. A wider scope of view, and a deeper insight, may see rank, dignity, and station, all proved illusory, so far as regards their claim to human reverence, and yet not feel as if the universe were thereby tumbled headlong into chaos. But Phoebe, in order to keep the universe in its old place, was fain to smother, in some degree, her own intuitions as to Judge Pyncheons character. And as for her cousins testimony in disparagement of it, she concluded that Hepzibahs judgment was embittered by one of those family feuds which render hatred the more deadly by the dead and corrupted love that they intermingle with its native poison. IX Clifford and Phoebe Truly was there something high, generous, and noble in the native composition of our poor old Hepzibah! Or elseand it was quite as probably the caseshe had been enriched by poverty, developed by sorrow, elevated by the strong and solitary affection of her life, and thus endowed with heroism, which never could have characterized her in what are called happier circumstances. Through dreary years Hepzibah had looked forwardfor the most part despairingly, never with any confidence of hope, but always with the feeling that it was her brightest possibilityto the very position in which she now found herself. In her own behalf, she had asked nothing of Providence but the opportunity of devoting herself to this brother, whom she had so lovedso admired for what he was, or might have beenand to whom she had kept her faith, alone of all the world, wholly, unfalteringly, at every instant, and throughout life. And here, in his late decline, the lost one had come back out of his long and strange misfortune, and was thrown on her sympathy, as it seemed, not merely for the bread of his physical existence, but for everything that should keep him morally alive. She had responded to the call. She had come forwardour poor, gaunt Hepzibah, in her rusty silks, with her rigid joints, and the sad perversity of her scowlready to do her utmost; and with affection enough, if that were all, to do a hundred times as much! There could be few more tearful sightsand Heaven forgive us if a smile insist on mingling with our conception of it!few sights with truer pathos in them, than Hepzibah presented on that first afternoon. How patiently did she endeavor to wrap Clifford up in her great, warm love, and make it all the world to him, so that he should retain no torturing sense of the coldness and dreariness without! Her little efforts to amuse him! How pitiful, yet magnanimous, they were! Remembering his early love of poetry and fiction, she unlocked a bookcase, and took down several books that had been excellent reading in their day. There was a volume of Pope, with the Rape of the Lock in it, and another of the Tatler, and an odd one of Drydens Miscellanies, all with tarnished gilding on their covers, and thoughts of tarnished brilliancy inside. They had no success with Clifford. These, and all such writers of society, whose new works glow like the rich texture of a justwoven carpet, must be content to relinquish their charm, for every reader, after an age or two, and could hardly be supposed to retain any portion of it for a mind that had utterly lost its estimate of modes and manners. Hepzibah then took up Rasselas, and began to read of the Happy Valley, with a vague idea that some secret of a contented life had there been elaborated, which might at least serve Clifford and herself for this one day. But the Happy Valley had a cloud over it. Hepzibah troubled her auditor, moreover, by innumerable sins of emphasis, which he seemed to detect, without any reference to the meaning; nor, in fact, did he appear to take much note of the sense of what she read, but evidently felt the tedium of the lecture, without harvesting its profit. His sisters voice, too, naturally harsh, had, in the course of her sorrowful lifetime, contracted a kind of croak, which, when it once gets into the human throat, is as ineradicable as sin. In both sexes, occasionally, this lifelong croak, accompanying each word of joy or sorrow, is one of the symptoms of a settled melancholy; and wherever it occurs, the whole history of misfortune is conveyed in its slightest accent. The effect is as if the voice had been dyed black; orif we must use a more moderate similethis miserable croak, running through all the variations of the voice, is like a black silken thread, on which the crystal beads of speech are strung, and whence they take their hue. Such voices have put on mourning for dead hopes; and they ought to die and be buried along with them! Discerning that Clifford was not gladdened by her efforts, Hepzibah searched about the house for the means of more exhilarating pastime. At one time, her eyes chanced to rest on Alice Pyncheons harpsichord. It was a moment of great peril; fordespite the traditionary awe that had gathered over this instrument of music, and the dirges which spiritual fingers were said to play on itthe devoted sister had solemn thoughts of thrumming on its chords for Cliffords benefit, and accompanying the performance with her voice. Poor Clifford! Poor Hepzibah! Poor harpsichord! All three would have been miserable together. By some good agencypossibly, by the unrecognized interposition of the longburied Alice herselfthe threatening calamity was averted. But the worst of allthe hardest stroke of fate for Hepzibah to endure, and perhaps for Clifford, too was his invincible distaste for her appearance. Her features, never the most agreeable, and now harsh with age and grief, and resentment against the world for his sake; her dress, and especially her turban; the queer and quaint manners, which had unconsciously grown upon her in solitudesuch being the poor gentlewomans outward characteristics, it is no great marvel, although the mournfullest of pities, that the instinctive lover of the Beautiful was fain to turn away his eyes. There was no help for it. It would be the latest impulse to die within him. In his last extremity, the expiring breath stealing faintly through Cliffords lips, he would doubtless press Hepzibahs hand, in fervent recognition of all her lavished love, and close his eyesbut not so much to die, as to be constrained to look no longer on her face! Poor Hepzibah! She took counsel with herself what might be done, and thought of putting ribbons on her turban; but, by the instant rush of several guardian angels, was withheld from an experiment that could hardly have proved less than fatal to the beloved object of her anxiety. To be brief, besides Hepzibahs disadvantages of person, there was an uncouthness pervading all her deeds; a clumsy something, that could but ill adapt itself for use, and not at all for ornament. She was a grief to Clifford, and she knew it. In this extremity, the antiquated virgin turned to Phoebe. No grovelling jealousy was in her heart. Had it pleased Heaven to crown the heroic fidelity of her life by making her personally the medium of Cliffords happiness, it would have rewarded her for all the past, by a joy with no bright tints, indeed, but deep and true, and worth a thousand gayer ecstasies. This could not be. She therefore turned to Phoebe, and resigned the task into the young girls hands. The latter took it up cheerfully, as she did everything, but with no sense of a mission to perform, and succeeding all the better for that same simplicity. By the involuntary effect of a genial temperament, Phoebe soon grew to be absolutely essential to the daily comfort, if not the daily life, of her two forlorn companions. The grime and sordidness of the House of the Seven Gables seemed to have vanished since her appearance there; the gnawing tooth of the dryrot was stayed among the old timbers of its skeleton frame; the dust had ceased to settle down so densely, from the antique ceilings, upon the floors and furniture of the rooms belowor, at any rate, there was a little housewife, as lightfooted as the breeze that sweeps a garden walk, gliding hither and thither to brush it all away. The shadows of gloomy events that haunted the else lonely and desolate apartments; the heavy, breathless scent which death had left in more than one of the bedchambers, ever since his visits of long agothese were less powerful than the purifying influence scattered throughout the atmosphere of the household by the presence of one youthful, fresh, and thoroughly wholesome heart. There was no morbidness in Phoebe; if there had been, the old Pyncheon House was the very locality to ripen it into incurable disease. But now her spirit resembled, in its potency, a minute quantity of ottar of rose in one of Hepzibahs huge, ironbound trunks, diffusing its fragrance through the various articles of linen and wroughtlace, kerchiefs, caps, stockings, folded dresses, gloves, and whatever else was treasured there. As every article in the great trunk was the sweeter for the rosescent, so did all the thoughts and emotions of Hepzibah and Clifford, sombre as they might seem, acquire a subtle attribute of happiness from Phoebes intermixture with them. Her activity of body, intellect, and heart impelled her continually to perform the ordinary little toils that offered themselves around her, and to think the thought proper for the moment, and to sympathizenow with the twittering gayety of the robins in the peartree, and now to such a depth as she could with Hepzibahs dark anxiety, or the vague moan of her brother. This facile adaptation was at once the symptom of perfect health and its best preservative. A nature like Phoebes has invariably its due influence, but is seldom regarded with due honor. Its spiritual force, however, may be partially estimated by the fact of her having found a place for herself, amid circumstances so stern as those which surrounded the mistress of the house; and also by the effect which she produced on a character of so much more mass than her own. For the gaunt, bony frame and limbs of Hepzibah, as compared with the tiny lightsomeness of Phoebes figure, were perhaps in some fit proportion with the moral weight and substance, respectively, of the woman and the girl. To the guestto Hepzibahs brotheror Cousin Clifford, as Phoebe now began to call himshe was especially necessary. Not that he could ever be said to converse with her, or often manifest, in any other very definite mode, his sense of a charm in her society. But if she were a long while absent he became pettish and nervously restless, pacing the room to and fro with the uncertainty that characterized all his movements; or else would sit broodingly in his great chair, resting his head on his hands, and evincing life only by an electric sparkle of illhumor, whenever Hepzibah endeavored to arouse him. Phoebes presence, and the contiguity of her fresh life to his blighted one, was usually all that he required. Indeed, such was the native gush and play of her spirit, that she was seldom perfectly quiet and undemonstrative, any more than a fountain ever ceases to dimple and warble with its flow. She possessed the gift of song, and that, too, so naturally, that you would as little think of inquiring whence she had caught it, or what master had taught her, as of asking the same questions about a bird, in whose small strain of music we recognize the voice of the Creator as distinctly as in the loudest accents of his thunder. So long as Phoebe sang, she might stray at her own will about the house. Clifford was content, whether the sweet, airy homeliness of her tones came down from the upper chambers, or along the passageway from the shop, or was sprinkled through the foliage of the peartree, inward from the garden, with the twinkling sunbeams. He would sit quietly, with a gentle pleasure gleaming over his face, brighter now, and now a little dimmer, as the song happened to float near him, or was more remotely heard. It pleased him best, however, when she sat on a low footstool at his knee. It is perhaps remarkable, considering her temperament, that Phoebe oftener chose a strain of pathos than of gayety. But the young and happy are not ill pleased to temper their life with a transparent shadow. The deepest pathos of Phoebes voice and song, moreover, came sifted through the golden texture of a cheery spirit, and was somehow so interfused with the quality thence acquired, that ones heart felt all the lighter for having wept at it. Broad mirth, in the sacred presence of dark misfortune, would have jarred harshly and irreverently with the solemn symphony that rolled its undertone through Hepzibahs and her brothers life. Therefore, it was well that Phoebe so often chose sad themes, and not amiss that they ceased to be so sad while she was singing them. Becoming habituated to her companionship, Clifford readily showed how capable of imbibing pleasant tints and gleams of cheerful light from all quarters his nature must originally have been. He grew youthful while she sat by him. A beautynot precisely real, even in its utmost manifestation, and which a painter would have watched long to seize and fix upon his canvas, and, after all, in vainbeauty, nevertheless, that was not a mere dream, would sometimes play upon and illuminate his face. It did more than to illuminate; it transfigured him with an expression that could only be interpreted as the glow of an exquisite and happy spirit. That gray hair, and those furrowswith their record of infinite sorrow so deeply written across his brow, and so compressed, as with a futile effort to crowd in all the tale, that the whole inscription was made illegiblethese, for the moment, vanished. An eye at once tender and acute might have beheld in the man some shadow of what he was meant to be. Anon, as age came stealing, like a sad twilight, back over his figure, you would have felt tempted to hold an argument with Destiny, and affirm, that either this being should not have been made mortal, or mortal existence should have been tempered to his qualities. There seemed no necessity for his having drawn breath at all; the world never wanted him; but, as he had breathed, it ought always to have been the balmiest of summer air. The same perplexity will invariably haunt us with regard to natures that tend to feed exclusively upon the Beautiful, let their earthly fate be as lenient as it may. Phoebe, it is probable, had but a very imperfect comprehension of the character over which she had thrown so beneficent a spell. Nor was it necessary. The fire upon the hearth can gladden a whole semicircle of faces round about it, but need not know the individuality of one among them all. Indeed, there was something too fine and delicate in Cliffords traits to be perfectly appreciated by one whose sphere lay so much in the Actual as Phoebes did. For Clifford, however, the reality, and simplicity, and thorough homeliness of the girls nature were as powerful a charm as any that she possessed. Beauty, it is true, and beauty almost perfect in its own style, was indispensable.

Had Phoebe been coarse in feature, shaped clumsily, of a harsh voice, and uncouthly mannered, she might have been rich with all good gifts, beneath this unfortunate exterior, and still, so long as she wore the guise of woman, she would have shocked Clifford, and depressed him by her lack of beauty. But nothing more beautifulnothing prettier, at leastwas ever made than Phoebe. And, therefore, to this manwhose whole poor and impalpable enjoyment of existence heretofore, and until both his heart and fancy died within him, had been a dreamwhose images of women had more and more lost their warmth and substance, and been frozen, like the pictures of secluded artists, into the chillest idealityto him, this little figure of the cheeriest household life was just what he required to bring him back into the breathing world. Persons who have wandered, or been expelled, out of the common track of things, even were it for a better system, desire nothing so much as to be led back. They shiver in their loneliness, be it on a mountaintop or in a dungeon. Now, Phoebes presence made a home about herthat very sphere which the outcast, the prisoner, the potentatethe wretch beneath mankind, the wretch aside from it, or the wretch above itinstinctively pines aftera home! She was real! Holding her hand, you felt something; a tender something; a substance, and a warm one and so long as you should feel its grasp, soft as it was, you might be certain that your place was good in the whole sympathetic chain of human nature. The world was no longer a delusion. By looking a little further in this direction, we might suggest an explanation of an oftensuggested mystery. Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because, probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger. There was something very beautiful in the relation that grew up between this pair, so closely and constantly linked together, yet with such a waste of gloomy and mysterious years from his birthday to hers. On Cliffords part it was the feeling of a man naturally endowed with the liveliest sensibility to feminine influence, but who had never quaffed the cup of passionate love, and knew that it was now too late. He knew it, with the instinctive delicacy that had survived his intellectual decay. Thus, his sentiment for Phoebe, without being paternal, was not less chaste than if she had been his daughter. He was a man, it is true, and recognized her as a woman. She was his only representative of womankind. He took unfailing note of every charm that appertained to her sex, and saw the ripeness of her lips, and the virginal development of her bosom. All her little womanly ways, budding out of her like blossoms on a young fruittree, had their effect on him, and sometimes caused his very heart to tingle with the keenest thrills of pleasure. At such momentsfor the effect was seldom more than momentarythe halftorpid man would be full of harmonious life, just as a longsilent harp is full of sound, when the musicians fingers sweep across it. But, after all, it seemed rather a perception, or a sympathy, than a sentiment belonging to himself as an individual. He read Phoebe as he would a sweet and simple story; he listened to her as if she were a verse of household poetry, which God, in requital of his bleak and dismal lot, had permitted some angel, that most pitied him, to warble through the house. She was not an actual fact for him, but the interpretation of all that he lacked on earth brought warmly home to his conception; so that this mere symbol, or lifelike picture, had almost the comfort of reality. But we strive in vain to put the idea into words. No adequate expression of the beauty and profound pathos with which it impresses us is attainable. This being, made only for happiness, and heretofore so miserably failing to be happyhis tendencies so hideously thwarted, that, some unknown time ago, the delicate springs of his character, never morally or intellectually strong, had given way, and he was now imbecilethis poor, forlorn voyager from the Islands of the Blest, in a frail barque, on a tempestuous sea, had been flung, by the last mountainwave of his shipwreck, into a quiet harbor. There, as he lay more than half lifeless on the strand, the fragrance of an earthly rosebud had come to his nostrils, and, as odors will, had summoned up reminiscences or visions of all the living and breathing beauty amid which he should have had his home. With his native susceptibility of happy influences, he inhales the slight, ethereal rapture into his soul, and expires! And how did Phoebe regard Clifford? The girls was not one of those natures which are most attracted by what is strange and exceptional in human character. The path which would best have suited her was the wellworn track of ordinary life; the companions in whom she would most have delighted were such as one encounters at every turn. The mystery which enveloped Clifford, so far as it affected her at all, was an annoyance, rather than the piquant charm which many women might have found in it. Still, her native kindliness was brought strongly into play, not by what was darkly picturesque in his situation, nor so much, even, by the finer graces of his character, as by the simple appeal of a heart so forlorn as his to one so full of genuine sympathy as hers. She gave him an affectionate regard, because he needed so much love, and seemed to have received so little. With a ready tact, the result of everactive and wholesome sensibility, she discerned what was good for him, and did it. Whatever was morbid in his mind and experience she ignored; and thereby kept their intercourse healthy, by the incautious, but, as it were, heavendirected freedom of her whole conduct. The sick in mind, and, perhaps, in body, are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease, mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them; they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in infinite repetition. But Phoebe afforded her poor patient a supply of purer air. She impregnated it, too, not with a wildflower scentfor wildness was no trait of hersbut with the perfume of gardenroses, pinks, and other blossoms of much sweetness, which nature and man have consented together in making grow from summer to summer, and from century to century. Such a flower was Phoebe in her relation with Clifford, and such the delight that he inhaled from her. Yet, it must be said, her petals sometimes drooped a little, in consequence of the heavy atmosphere about her. She grew more thoughtful than heretofore. Looking aside at Cliffords face, and seeing the dim, unsatisfactory elegance and the intellect almost quenched, she would try to inquire what had been his life. Was he always thus? Had this veil been over him from his birth?this veil, under which far more of his spirit was hidden than revealed, and through which he so imperfectly discerned the actual worldor was its gray texture woven of some dark calamity? Phoebe loved no riddles, and would have been glad to escape the perplexity of this one. Nevertheless, there was so far a good result of her meditations on Cliffords character, that, when her involuntary conjectures, together with the tendency of every strange circumstance to tell its own story, had gradually taught her the fact, it had no terrible effect upon her. Let the world have done him what vast wrong it might, she knew Cousin Clifford too wellor fancied soever to shudder at the touch of his thin, delicate fingers. Within a few days after the appearance of this remarkable inmate, the routine of life had established itself with a good deal of uniformity in the old house of our narrative. In the morning, very shortly after breakfast, it was Cliffords custom to fall asleep in his chair; nor, unless accidentally disturbed, would he emerge from a dense cloud of slumber or the thinner mists that flitted to and fro, until well towards noonday. These hours of drowsihead were the season of the old gentlewomans attendance on her brother, while Phoebe took charge of the shop; an arrangement which the public speedily understood, and evinced their decided preference of the younger shopwoman by the multiplicity of their calls during her administration of affairs. Dinner over, Hepzibah took her knittingworka long stocking of gray yarn, for her brothers winter wearand with a sigh, and a scowl of affectionate farewell to Clifford, and a gesture enjoining watchfulness on Phoebe, went to take her seat behind the counter. It was now the young girls turn to be the nursethe guardian, the playmateor whatever is the fitter phraseof the grayhaired man. X The Pyncheon Garden Clifford, except for Phoebes more active instigation, would ordinarily have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of being, and which sluggishly counselled him to sit in his morning chair till eventide. But the girl seldom failed to propose a removal to the garden, where Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist had made such repairs on the roof of the ruinous arbor, or summerhouse, that it was now a sufficient shelter from sunshine and casual showers. The hopvine, too, had begun to grow luxuriantly over the sides of the little edifice, and made an interior of verdant seclusion, with innumerable peeps and glimpses into the wider solitude of the garden. Here, sometimes, in this green playplace of flickering light, Phoebe read to Clifford. Her acquaintance, the artist, who appeared to have a literary turn, had supplied her with works of fiction, in pamphlet formand a few volumes of poetry, in altogether a different style and taste from those which Hepzibah selected for his amusement. Small thanks were due to the books, however, if the girls readings were in any degree more successful than her elderly cousins. Phoebes voice had always a pretty music in it, and could either enliven Clifford by its sparkle and gayety of tone, or soothe him by a continued flow of pebbly and brooklike cadences. But the fictionsin which the countrygirl, unused to works of that nature, often became deeply absorbedinterested her strange auditor very little, or not at all. Pictures of life, scenes of passion or sentiment, wit, humor, and pathos, were all thrown away, or worse than thrown away, on Clifford; either because he lacked an experience by which to test their truth, or because his own griefs were a touchstone of reality that few feigned emotions could withstand. When Phoebe broke into a peal of merry laughter at what she read, he would now and then laugh for sympathy, but oftener respond with a troubled, questioning look. If a teara maidens sunshiny tear over imaginary woedropped upon some melancholy page, Clifford either took it as a token of actual calamity, or else grew peevish, and angrily motioned her to close the volume. And wisely too! Is not the world sad enough, in genuine earnest, without making a pastime of mock sorrows? With poetry it was rather better. He delighted in the swell and subsidence of the rhythm, and the happily recurring rhyme. Nor was Clifford incapable of feeling the sentiment of poetrynot, perhaps, where it was highest or deepest, but where it was most flitting and ethereal. It was impossible to foretell in what exquisite verse the awakening spell might lurk; but, on raising her eyes from the page to Cliffords face, Phoebe would be made aware, by the light breaking through it, that a more delicate intelligence than her own had caught a lambent flame from what she read. One glow of this kind, however, was often the precursor of gloom for many hours afterward; because, when the glow left him, he seemed conscious of a missing sense and power, and groped about for them, as if a blind man should go seeking his lost eyesight. It pleased him more, and was better for his inward welfare, that Phoebe should talk, and make passing occurrences vivid to his mind by her accompanying description and remarks. The life of the garden offered topics enough for such discourse as suited Clifford best. He never failed to inquire what flowers had bloomed since yesterday. His feeling for flowers was very exquisite, and seemed not so much a taste as an emotion; he was fond of sitting with one in his hand, intently observing it, and looking from its petals into Phoebes face, as if the garden flower were the sister of the household maiden. Not merely was there a delight in the flowers perfume, or pleasure in its beautiful form, and the delicacy or brightness of its hue; but Cliffords enjoyment was accompanied with a perception of life, character, and individuality, that made him love these blossoms of the garden, as if they were endowed with sentiment and intelligence. This affection and sympathy for flowers is almost exclusively a womans trait. Men, if endowed with it by nature, soon lose, forget, and learn to despise it, in their contact with coarser things than flowers. Clifford, too, had long forgotten it; but found it again now, as he slowly revived from the chill torpor of his life. It is wonderful how many pleasant incidents continually came to pass in that secluded gardenspot when once Phoebe had set herself to look for them. She had seen or heard a bee there, on the first day of her acquaintance with the place. And oftenalmost continually, indeedsince then, the bees kept coming thither, Heaven knows why, or by what pertinacious desire, for farfetched sweets, when, no doubt, there were broad cloverfields, and all kinds of garden growth, much nearer home than this. Thither the bees came, however, and plunged into the squashblossoms, as if there were no other squashvines within a long days flight, or as if the soil of Hepzibahs garden gave its productions just the very quality which these laborious little wizards wanted, in order to impart the Hymettus odor to their whole hive of New England honey. When Clifford heard their sunny, buzzing murmur, in the heart of the great yellow blossoms, he looked about him with a joyful sense of warmth, and blue sky, and green grass, and of Gods free air in the whole height from earth to heaven. After all, there need be no question why the bees came to that one green nook in the dusty town. God sent them thither to gladden our poor Clifford. They brought the rich summer with them, in requital of a little honey. When the beanvines began to flower on the poles, there was one particular variety which bore a vivid scarlet blossom. The daguerreotypist had found these beans in a garret, over one of the seven gables, treasured up in an old chest of drawers by some horticultural Pyncheon of days gone by, who doubtless meant to sow them the next summer, but was himself first sown in Deaths gardenground. By way of testing whether there were still a living germ in such ancient seeds, Holgrave had planted some of them; and the result of his experiment was a splendid row of beanvines, clambering, early, to the full height of the poles, and arraying them, from top to bottom, in a spiral profusion of red blossoms. And, ever since the unfolding of the first bud, a multitude of hummingbirds had been attracted thither. At times, it seemed as if for every one of the hundred blossoms there was one of these tiniest fowls of the aira thumbs bigness of burnished plumage, hovering and vibrating about the beanpoles. It was with indescribable interest, and even more than childish delight, that Clifford watched the hummingbirds. He used to thrust his head softly out of the arbor to see them the better; all the while, too, motioning Phoebe to be quiet, and snatching glimpses of the smile upon her face, so as to heap his enjoyment up the higher with her sympathy. He had not merely grown young;he was a child again. Hepzibah, whenever she happened to witness one of these fits of miniature enthusiasm, would shake her head, with a strange mingling of the mother and sister, and of pleasure and sadness, in her aspect. She said that it had always been thus with Clifford when the hummingbirds camealways, from his babyhoodand that his delight in them had been one of the earliest tokens by which he showed his love for beautiful things. And it was a wonderful coincidence, the good lady thought, that the artist should have planted these scarletflowering beanswhich the hummingbirds sought far and wide, and which had not grown in the Pyncheon garden before for forty yearson the very summer of Cliffords return. Then would the tears stand in poor Hepzibahs eyes, or overflow them with a too abundant gush, so that she was fain to betake herself into some corner, lest Clifford should espy her agitation. Indeed, all the enjoyments of this period were provocative of tears. Coming so late as it did, it was a kind of Indian summer, with a mist in its balmiest sunshine, and decay and death in its gaudiest delight. The more Clifford seemed to taste the happiness of a child, the sadder was the difference to be recognized. With a mysterious and terrible Past, which had annihilated his memory, and a blank Future before him, he had only this visionary and impalpable Now, which, if you once look closely at it, is nothing. He himself, as was perceptible by many symptoms, lay darkly behind his pleasure, and knew it to be a babyplay, which he was to toy and trifle with, instead of thoroughly believing. Clifford saw, it may be, in the mirror of his deeper consciousness, that he was an example and representative of that great class of people whom an inexplicable Providence is continually putting at crosspurposes with the world breaking what seems its own promise in their nature; withholding their proper food, and setting poison before them for a banquet; and thuswhen it might so easily, as one would think, have been adjusted otherwisemaking their existence a strangeness, a solitude, and torment. All his life long, he had been learning how to be wretched, as one learns a foreign tongue; and now, with the lesson thoroughly by heart, he could with difficulty comprehend his little airy happiness. Frequently there was a dim shadow of doubt in his eyes. Take my hand, Phoebe, he would say, and pinch it hard with your little fingers! Give me a rose, that I may press its thorns, and prove myself awake by the sharp touch of pain! Evidently, he desired this prick of a trifling anguish, in order to assure himself, by that quality which he best knew to be real, that the garden, and the seven weatherbeaten gables, and Hepzibahs scowl, and Phoebes smile, were real likewise. Without this signet in his flesh, he could have attributed no more substance to them than to the empty confusion of imaginary scenes with which he had fed his spirit, until even that poor sustenance was exhausted. The author needs great faith in his readers sympathy; else he must hesitate to give details so minute, and incidents apparently so trifling, as are essential to make up the idea of this gardenlife. It was the Eden of a thundersmitten Adam, who had fled for refuge thither out of the same dreary and perilous wilderness into which the original Adam was expelled. One of the available means of amusement, of which Phoebe made the most in Cliffords behalf, was that feathered society, the hens, a breed of whom, as we have already said, was an immemorial heirloom in the Pyncheon family. In compliance with a whim of Clifford, as it troubled him to see them in confinement, they had been set at liberty, and now roamed at will about the garden; doing some little mischief, but hindered from escape by buildings on three sides, and the difficult peaks of a wooden fence on the other. They spent much of their abundant leisure on the margin of Maules well, which was haunted by a kind of snail, evidently a titbit to their palates; and the brackish water itself, however nauseous to the rest of the world, was so greatly esteemed by these fowls, that they might be seen tasting, turning up their heads, and smacking their bills, with precisely the air of winebibbers round a probationary cask. Their generally quiet, yet often brisk, and constantly diversified talk, one to another, or sometimes in soliloquyas they scratched worms out of the rich, black soil, or pecked at such plants as suited their tastehad such a domestic tone, that it was almost a wonder why you could not establish a regular interchange of ideas about household matters, human and gallinaceous. All hens are well worth studying for the piquancy and rich variety of their manners; but by no possibility can there have been other fowls of such odd appearance and deportment as these ancestral ones. They probably embodied the traditionary peculiarities of their whole line of progenitors, derived through an unbroken succession of eggs; or else this individual Chanticleer and his two wives had grown to be humorists, and a little crackbrained withal, on account of their solitary way of life, and out of sympathy for Hepzibah, their ladypatroness. Queer, indeed, they looked! Chanticleer himself, though stalking on two stiltlike legs, with the dignity of interminable descent in all his gestures, was hardly bigger than an ordinary partridge; his two wives were about the size of quails; and as for the one chicken, it looked small enough to be still in the egg, and, at the same time, sufficiently old, withered, wizened, and experienced, to have been founder of the antiquated race. Instead of being the youngest of the family, it rather seemed to have aggregated into itself the ages, not only of these living specimens of the breed, but of all its forefathers and foremothers, whose united excellences and oddities were squeezed into its little body. Its mother evidently regarded it as the one chicken of the world, and as necessary, in fact, to the worlds continuance, or, at any rate, to the equilibrium of the present system of affairs, whether in church or state. No lesser sense of the infant fowls importance could have justified, even in a mothers eyes, the perseverance with which she watched over its safety, ruffling her small person to twice its proper size, and flying in everybodys face that so much as looked towards her hopeful progeny. No lower estimate could have vindicated the indefatigable zeal with which she scratched, and her unscrupulousness in digging up the choicest flower or vegetable, for the sake of the fat earthworm at its root. Her nervous cluck, when the chicken happened to be hidden in the long grass or under the squashleaves; her gentle croak of satisfaction, while sure of it beneath her wing; her note of illconcealed fear and obstreperous defiance, when she saw her archenemy, a neighbors cat, on the top of the high fenceone or other of these sounds was to be heard at almost every moment of the day. By degrees, the observer came to feel nearly as much interest in this chicken of illustrious race as the motherhen did. Phoebe, after getting well acquainted with the old hen, was sometimes permitted to take the chicken in her hand, which was quite capable of grasping its cubic inch or two of body. While she curiously examined its hereditary marksthe peculiar speckle of its plumage, the funny tuft on its head, and a knob on each of its legsthe little biped, as she insisted, kept giving her a sagacious wink. The daguerreotypist once whispered her that these marks betokened the oddities of the Pyncheon family, and that the chicken itself was a symbol of the life of the old house, embodying its interpretation, likewise, although an unintelligible one, as such clues generally are. It was a feathered riddle; a mystery hatched out of an egg, and just as mysterious as if the egg had been addle! The second of Chanticleers two wives, ever since Phoebes arrival, had been in a state of heavy despondency, caused, as it afterwards appeared, by her inability to lay an egg. One day, however, by her selfimportant gait, the sideways turn of her head, and the cock of her eye, as she pried into one and another nook of the gardencroaking to herself, all the while, with inexpressible complacencyit was made evident that this identical hen, much as mankind undervalued her, carried something about her person the worth of which was not to be estimated either in gold or precious stones. Shortly after, there was a prodigious cackling and gratulation of Chanticleer and all his family, including the wizened chicken, who appeared to understand the matter quite as well as did his sire, his mother, or his aunt. That afternoon Phoebe found a diminutive eggnot in the regular nest, it was far too precious to be trusted therebut cunningly hidden under the currantbushes, on some dry stalks of last years grass. Hepzibah, on learning the fact, took possession of the egg and appropriated it to Cliffords breakfast, on account of a certain delicacy of flavor, for which, as she affirmed, these eggs had always been famous. Thus unscrupulously did the old gentlewoman sacrifice the continuance, perhaps, of an ancient feathered race, with no better end than to supply her brother with a dainty that hardly filled the bowl of a teaspoon! It must have been in reference to this outrage that Chanticleer, the next day, accompanied by the bereaved mother of the egg, took his post in front of Phoebe and Clifford, and delivered himself of a harangue that might have proved as long as his own pedigree, but for a fit of merriment on Phoebes part. Hereupon, the offended fowl stalked away on his long stilts, and utterly withdrew his notice from Phoebe and the rest of human nature, until she made her peace with an offering of spicecake, which, next to snails, was the delicacy most in favor with his aristocratic taste. We linger too long, no doubt, beside this paltry rivulet of life that flowed through the garden of the Pyncheon House. But we deem it pardonable to record these mean incidents and poor delights, because they proved so greatly to Cliffords benefit. They had the earthsmell in them, and contributed to give him health and substance. Some of his occupations wrought less desirably upon him. He had a singular propensity, for example, to hang over Maules well, and look at the constantly shifting phantasmagoria of figures produced by the agitation of the water over the mosaicwork of colored pebbles at the bottom. He said that faces looked upward to him therebeautiful faces, arrayed in bewitching smileseach momentary face so fair and rosy, and every smile so sunny, that he felt wronged at its departure, until the same flitting witchcraft made a new one. But sometimes he would suddenly cry out, The dark face gazes at me! and be miserable the whole day afterwards. Phoebe, when she hung over the fountain by Cliffords side, could see nothing of all thisneither the beauty nor the uglinessbut only the colored pebbles, looking as if the gush of the waters shook and disarranged them. And the dark face, that so troubled Clifford, was no more than the shadow thrown from a branch of one of the damsontrees, and breaking the inner light of Maules well. The truth was, however, that his fancyreviving faster than his will and judgment, and always stronger than theycreated shapes of loveliness that were symbolic of his native character, and now and then a stern and dreadful shape that typified his fate. On Sundays, after Phoebe had been at churchfor the girl had a churchgoing conscience, and would hardly have been at ease had she missed either prayer, singing, sermon, or benedictionafter churchtime, therefore, there was, ordinarily, a sober little festival in the garden. In addition to Clifford, Hepzibah, and Phoebe, two guests made up the company. One was the artist Holgrave, who, in spite of his consociation with reformers, and his other queer and questionable traits, continued to hold an elevated place in Hepzibahs regard. The other, we are almost ashamed to say, was the venerable Uncle Venner, in a clean shirt, and a broadcloth coat, more respectable than his ordinary wear, inasmuch as it was neatly patched on each elbow, and might be called an entire garment, except for a slight inequality in the length of its skirts. Clifford, on several occasions, had seemed to enjoy the old mans intercourse, for the sake of his mellow, cheerful vein, which was like the sweet flavor of a frostbitten apple, such as one picks up under the tree in December. A man at the very lowest point of the social scale was easier and more agreeable for the fallen gentleman to encounter than a person at any of the intermediate degrees; and, moreover, as Cliffords young manhood had been lost, he was fond of feeling himself comparatively youthful, now, in apposition with the patriarchal age of Uncle Venner. In fact, it was sometimes observable that Clifford half wilfully hid from himself the consciousness of being stricken in years, and cherished visions of an earthly future still before him; visions, however, too indistinctly drawn to be followed by disappointmentthough, doubtless, by depressionwhen any casual incident or recollection made him sensible of the withered leaf. So this oddly composed little social party used to assemble under the ruinous arbor. Hepzibahstately as ever at heart, and yielding not an inch of her old gentility, but resting upon it so much the more, as justifying a princesslike condescensionexhibited a not ungraceful hospitality. She talked kindly to the vagrant artist, and took sage counsellady as she waswith the woodsawyer, the messenger of everybodys petty errands, the patched philosopher. And Uncle Venner, who had studied the world at streetcorners, and other posts equally well adapted for just observation, was as ready to give out his wisdom as a townpump to give water. Miss Hepzibah, maam, said he once, after they had all been cheerful together, I really enjoy these quiet little meetings of a Sabbath afternoon. They are very much like what I expect to have after I retire to my farm! Uncle Venner, observed Clifford in a drowsy, inward tone, is always talking about his farm. But I have a better scheme for him, by and by. We shall see! Ah, Mr. Clifford Pyncheon! said the man of patches, you may scheme for me as much as you please; but Im not going to give up this one scheme of my own, even if I never bring it really to pass. It does seem to me that men make a wonderful mistake in trying to heap up property upon property. If I had done so, I should feel as if Providence was not bound to take care of me; and, at all events, the city wouldnt be! Im one of those people who think that infinity is big enough for us alland eternity long enough. Why, so they are, Uncle Venner, remarked Phoebe after a pause; for she had been trying to fathom the profundity and appositeness of this concluding apothegm. But for this short life of ours, one would like a house and a moderate gardenspot of ones own. It appears to me, said the daguerreotypist, smiling, that Uncle Venner has the principles of Fourier at the bottom of his wisdom; only they have not quite so much distinctness in his mind as in that of the systematizing Frenchman. Come, Phoebe, said Hepzibah, it is time to bring the currants. And then, while the yellow richness of the declining sunshine still fell into the open space of the garden, Phoebe brought out a loaf of bread and a china bowl of currants, freshly gathered from the bushes, and crushed with sugar. These, with waterbut not from the fountain of ill omen, close at handconstituted all the entertainment. Meanwhile, Holgrave took some pains to establish an intercourse with Clifford, actuated, it might seem, entirely by an impulse of kindliness, in order that the present hour might be cheerfuller than most which the poor recluse had spent, or was destined yet to spend.

Nevertheless, in the artists deep, thoughtful, allobservant eyes, there was, now and then, an expression, not sinister, but questionable; as if he had some other interest in the scene than a stranger, a youthful and unconnected adventurer, might be supposed to have. With great mobility of outward mood, however, he applied himself to the task of enlivening the party; and with so much success, that even darkhued Hepzibah threw off one tint of melancholy, and made what shift she could with the remaining portion. Phoebe said to herselfHow pleasant he can be! As for Uncle Venner, as a mark of friendship and approbation, he readily consented to afford the young man his countenance in the way of his professionnot metaphorically, be it understood, but literally, by allowing a daguerreotype of his face, so familiar to the town, to be exhibited at the entrance of Holgraves studio. Clifford, as the company partook of their little banquet, grew to be the gayest of them all. Either it was one of those upquivering flashes of the spirit, to which minds in an abnormal state are liable, or else the artist had subtly touched some chord that made musical vibration. Indeed, what with the pleasant summer evening, and the sympathy of this little circle of not unkindly souls, it was perhaps natural that a character so susceptible as Cliffords should become animated, and show itself readily responsive to what was said around him. But he gave out his own thoughts, likewise, with an airy and fanciful glow; so that they glistened, as it were, through the arbor, and made their escape among the interstices of the foliage. He had been as cheerful, no doubt, while alone with Phoebe, but never with such tokens of acute, although partial intelligence. But, as the sunlight left the peaks of the Seven Gables, so did the excitement fade out of Cliffords eyes. He gazed vaguely and mournfully about him, as if he missed something precious, and missed it the more drearily for not knowing precisely what it was. I want my happiness! at last he murmured hoarsely and indistinctly, hardly shaping out the words. Many, many years have I waited for it! It is late! It is late! I want my happiness! Alas, poor Clifford! You are old, and worn with troubles that ought never to have befallen you. You are partly crazy and partly imbecile; a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody isthough some in less degree, or less perceptibly, than their fellows. Fate has no happiness in store for you; unless your quiet home in the old family residence with the faithful Hepzibah, and your long summer afternoons with Phoebe, and these Sabbath festivals with Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist, deserve to be called happiness! Why not? If not the thing itself, it is marvellously like it, and the more so for that ethereal and intangible quality which causes it all to vanish at too close an introspection. Take it, therefore, while you may. Murmur notquestion notbut make the most of it! XI The Arched Window From the inertness, or what we may term the vegetative character, of his ordinary mood, Clifford would perhaps have been content to spend one day after another, interminablyor, at least, throughout the summertimein just the kind of life described in the preceding pages. Fancying, however, that it might be for his benefit occasionally to diversify the scene, Phoebe sometimes suggested that he should look out upon the life of the street. For this purpose, they used to mount the staircase together, to the second story of the house, where, at the termination of a wide entry, there was an arched window, of uncommonly large dimensions, shaded by a pair of curtains. It opened above the porch, where there had formerly been a balcony, the balustrade of which had long since gone to decay, and been removed. At this arched window, throwing it open, but keeping himself in comparative obscurity by means of the curtain, Clifford had an opportunity of witnessing such a portion of the great worlds movement as might be supposed to roll through one of the retired streets of a not very populous city. But he and Phoebe made a sight as well worth seeing as any that the city could exhibit. The pale, gray, childish, aged, melancholy, yet often simply cheerful, and sometimes delicately intelligent aspect of Clifford, peering from behind the faded crimson of the curtainwatching the monotony of everyday occurrences with a kind of inconsequential interest and earnestness, and, at every petty throb of his sensibility, turning for sympathy to the eyes of the bright young girl! If once he were fairly seated at the window, even Pyncheon Street would hardly be so dull and lonely but that, somewhere or other along its extent, Clifford might discover matter to occupy his eye, and titillate, if not engross, his observation. Things familiar to the youngest child that had begun its outlook at existence seemed strange to him. A cab; an omnibus, with its populous interior, dropping here and there a passenger, and picking up another, and thus typifying that vast rolling vehicle, the world, the end of whose journey is everywhere and nowhere; these objects he followed eagerly with his eyes, but forgot them before the dust raised by the horses and wheels had settled along their track. As regarded novelties (among which cabs and omnibuses were to be reckoned), his mind appeared to have lost its proper grip and retentiveness. Twice or thrice, for example, during the sunny hours of the day, a watercart went along by the Pyncheon House, leaving a broad wake of moistened earth, instead of the white dust that had risen at a ladys lightest footfall; it was like a summer shower, which the city authorities had caught and tamed, and compelled it into the commonest routine of their convenience. With the watercart Clifford could never grow familiar; it always affected him with just the same surprise as at first. His mind took an apparently sharp impression from it, but lost the recollection of this perambulatory shower, before its next reappearance, as completely as did the street itself, along which the heat so quickly strewed white dust again. It was the same with the railroad. Clifford could hear the obstreperous howl of the steamdevil, and, by leaning a little way from the arched window, could catch a glimpse of the trains of cars, flashing a brief transit across the extremity of the street. The idea of terrible energy thus forced upon him was new at every recurrence, and seemed to affect him as disagreeably, and with almost as much surprise, the hundredth time as the first. Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the swiftness of the passing moment. It can merely be a suspended animation; for, were the power actually to perish, there would be little use of immortality. We are less than ghosts, for the time being, whenever this calamity befalls us. Clifford was indeed the most inveterate of conservatives. All the antique fashions of the street were dear to him; even such as were characterized by a rudeness that would naturally have annoyed his fastidious senses. He loved the old rumbling and jolting carts, the former track of which he still found in his longburied remembrance, as the observer of today finds the wheeltracks of ancient vehicles in Herculaneum. The butchers cart, with its snowy canopy, was an acceptable object; so was the fishcart, heralded by its horn; so, likewise, was the countrymans cart of vegetables, plodding from door to door, with long pauses of the patient horse, while his owner drove a trade in turnips, carrots, summersquashes, stringbeans, green peas, and new potatoes, with half the housewives of the neighborhood. The bakers cart, with the harsh music of its bells, had a pleasant effect on Clifford, because, as few things else did, it jingled the very dissonance of yore. One afternoon a scissorgrinder chanced to set his wheel agoing under the Pyncheon Elm, and just in front of the arched window. Children came running with their mothers scissors, or the carvingknife, or the paternal razor, or anything else that lacked an edge (except, indeed, poor Cliffords wits), that the grinder might apply the article to his magic wheel, and give it back as good as new. Round went the busily revolving machinery, kept in motion by the scissorgrinders foot, and wore away the hard steel against the hard stone, whence issued an intense and spiteful prolongation of a hiss as fierce as those emitted by Satan and his compeers in Pandemonium, though squeezed into smaller compass. It was an ugly, little, venomous serpent of a noise, as ever did petty violence to human ears. But Clifford listened with rapturous delight. The sound, however disagreeable, had very brisk life in it, and, together with the circle of curious children watching the revolutions of the wheel, appeared to give him a more vivid sense of active, bustling, and sunshiny existence than he had attained in almost any other way. Nevertheless, its charm lay chiefly in the past; for the scissorgrinders wheel had hissed in his childish ears. He sometimes made doleful complaint that there were no stagecoaches nowadays. And he asked in an injured tone what had become of all those old squaretopped chaises, with wings sticking out on either side, that used to be drawn by a ploughhorse, and driven by a farmers wife and daughter, peddling whortleberries and blackberries about the town. Their disappearance made him doubt, he said, whether the berries had not left off growing in the broad pastures and along the shady country lanes. But anything that appealed to the sense of beauty, in however humble a way, did not require to be recommended by these old associations. This was observable when one of those Italian boys (who are rather a modern feature of our streets) came along with his barrelorgan, and stopped under the wide and cool shadows of the elm. With his quick professional eye he took note of the two faces watching him from the arched window, and, opening his instrument, began to scatter its melodies abroad. He had a monkey on his shoulder, dressed in a Highland plaid; and, to complete the sum of splendid attractions wherewith he presented himself to the public, there was a company of little figures, whose sphere and habitation was in the mahogany case of his organ, and whose principle of life was the music which the Italian made it his business to grind out. In all their variety of occupationthe cobbler, the blacksmith, the soldier, the lady with her fan, the toper with his bottle, the milkmaid sitting by her cowthis fortunate little society might truly be said to enjoy a harmonious existence, and to make life literally a dance. The Italian turned a crank; and, behold! every one of these small individuals started into the most curious vivacity. The cobbler wrought upon a shoe; the blacksmith hammered his iron, the soldier waved his glittering blade; the lady raised a tiny breeze with her fan; the jolly toper swigged lustily at his bottle; a scholar opened his book with eager thirst for knowledge, and turned his head to and fro along the page; the milkmaid energetically drained her cow; and a miser counted gold into his strongboxall at the same turning of a crank. Yes; and, moved by the selfsame impulse, a lover saluted his mistress on her lips! Possibly some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our business or amusementhowever serious, however triflingall dance to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring nothing finally to pass. For the most remarkable aspect of the affair was, that, at the cessation of the music, everybody was petrified at once, from the most extravagant life into a dead torpor. Neither was the cobblers shoe finished, nor the blacksmiths iron shaped out; nor was there a drop less of brandy in the topers bottle, nor a drop more of milk in the milkmaids pail, nor one additional coin in the misers strongbox, nor was the scholar a page deeper in his book. All were precisely in the same condition as before they made themselves so ridiculous by their haste to toil, to enjoy, to accumulate gold, and to become wise. Saddest of all, moreover, the lover was none the happier for the maidens granted kiss! But, rather than swallow this last too acrid ingredient, we reject the whole moral of the show. The monkey, meanwhile, with a thick tail curling out into preposterous prolixity from beneath his tartans, took his station at the Italians feet. He turned a wrinkled and abominable little visage to every passerby, and to the circle of children that soon gathered round, and to Hepzibahs shopdoor, and upward to the arched window, whence Phoebe and Clifford were looking down. Every moment, also, he took off his Highland bonnet, and performed a bow and scrape. Sometimes, moreover, he made personal application to individuals, holding out his small black palm, and otherwise plainly signifying his excessive desire for whatever filthy lucre might happen to be in anybodys pocket. The mean and low, yet strangely manlike expression of his wilted countenance; the prying and crafty glance, that showed him ready to grip at every miserable advantage; his enormous tail (too enormous to be decently concealed under his gabardine), and the deviltry of nature which it betokenedtake this monkey just as he was, in short, and you could desire no better image of the Mammon of copper coin, symbolizing the grossest form of the love of money. Neither was there any possibility of satisfying the covetous little devil. Phoebe threw down a whole handful of cents, which he picked up with joyless eagerness, handed them over to the Italian for safekeeping, and immediately recommenced a series of pantomimic petitions for more. Doubtless, more than one NewEnglanderor, let him be of what country he might, it is as likely to be the casepassed by, and threw a look at the monkey, and went on, without imagining how nearly his own moral condition was here exemplified. Clifford, however, was a being of another order. He had taken childish delight in the music, and smiled, too, at the figures which it set in motion. But, after looking awhile at the longtailed imp, he was so shocked by his horrible ugliness, spiritual as well as physical, that he actually began to shed tears; a weakness which men of merely delicate endowments, and destitute of the fiercer, deeper, and more tragic power of laughter, can hardly avoid, when the worst and meanest aspect of life happens to be presented to them. Pyncheon Street was sometimes enlivened by spectacles of more imposing pretensions than the above, and which brought the multitude along with them. With a shivering repugnance at the idea of personal contact with the world, a powerful impulse still seized on Clifford, whenever the rush and roar of the human tide grew strongly audible to him. This was made evident, one day, when a political procession, with hundreds of flaunting banners, and drums, fifes, clarions, and cymbals, reverberating between the rows of buildings, marched all through town, and trailed its length of trampling footsteps, and most infrequent uproar, past the ordinarily quiet House of the Seven Gables. As a mere object of sight, nothing is more deficient in picturesque features than a procession seen in its passage through narrow streets. The spectator feels it to be fools play, when he can distinguish the tedious commonplace of each mans visage, with the perspiration and weary selfimportance on it, and the very cut of his pantaloons, and the stiffness or laxity of his shirtcollar, and the dust on the back of his black coat. In order to become majestic, it should be viewed from some vantage point, as it rolls its slow and long array through the centre of a wide plain, or the stateliest public square of a city; for then, by its remoteness, it melts all the petty personalities, of which it is made up, into one broad mass of existenceone great lifeone collected body of mankind, with a vast, homogeneous spirit animating it. But, on the other hand, if an impressible person, standing alone over the brink of one of these processions, should behold it, not in its atoms, but in its aggregateas a mighty river of life, massive in its tide, and black with mystery, and, out of its depths, calling to the kindred depth within himthen the contiguity would add to the effect. It might so fascinate him that he would hardly be restrained from plunging into the surging stream of human sympathies. So it proved with Clifford. He shuddered; he grew pale; he threw an appealing look at Hepzibah and Phoebe, who were with him at the window. They comprehended nothing of his emotions, and supposed him merely disturbed by the unaccustomed tumult. At last, with tremulous limbs, he started up, set his foot on the windowsill, and in an instant more would have been in the unguarded balcony. As it was, the whole procession might have seen him, a wild, haggard figure, his gray locks floating in the wind that waved their banners; a lonely being, estranged from his race, but now feeling himself man again, by virtue of the irrepressible instinct that possessed him. Had Clifford attained the balcony, he would probably have leaped into the street; but whether impelled by the species of terror that sometimes urges its victim over the very precipice which he shrinks from, or by a natural magnetism, tending towards the great centre of humanity, it were not easy to decide. Both impulses might have wrought on him at once. But his companions, affrighted by his gesturewhich was that of a man hurried away in spite of himselfseized Cliffords garment and held him back. Hepzibah shrieked. Phoebe, to whom all extravagance was a horror, burst into sobs and tears. Clifford, Clifford! are you crazy? cried his sister. I hardly know, Hepzibah, said Clifford, drawing a long breath. Fear nothingit is over nowbut had I taken that plunge, and survived it, methinks it would have made me another man! Possibly, in some sense, Clifford may have been right. He needed a shock; or perhaps he required to take a deep, deep plunge into the ocean of human life, and to sink down and be covered by its profoundness, and then to emerge, sobered, invigorated, restored to the world and to himself. Perhaps again, he required nothing less than the great final remedydeath! A similar yearning to renew the broken links of brotherhood with his kind sometimes showed itself in a milder form; and once it was made beautiful by the religion that lay even deeper than itself. In the incident now to be sketched, there was a touching recognition, on Cliffords part, of Gods care and love towards himtowards this poor, forsaken man, who, if any mortal could, might have been pardoned for regarding himself as thrown aside, forgotten, and left to be the sport of some fiend, whose playfulness was an ecstasy of mischief. It was the Sabbath morning; one of those bright, calm Sabbaths, with its own hallowed atmosphere, when Heaven seems to diffuse itself over the earths face in a solemn smile, no less sweet than solemn. On such a Sabbath morn, were we pure enough to be its medium, we should be conscious of the earths natural worship ascending through our frames, on whatever spot of ground we stood. The churchbells, with various tones, but all in harmony, were calling out and responding to one anotherIt is the Sabbath!The Sabbath!Yea; the Sabbath!and over the whole city the bells scattered the blessed sounds, now slowly, now with livelier joy, now one bell alone, now all the bells together, crying earnestlyIt is the Sabbath!and flinging their accents afar off, to melt into the air and pervade it with the holy word. The air with Gods sweetest and tenderest sunshine in it, was meet for mankind to breathe into their hearts, and send it forth again as the utterance of prayer. Clifford sat at the window with Hepzibah, watching the neighbors as they stepped into the street. All of them, however unspiritual on other days, were transfigured by the Sabbath influence; so that their very garmentswhether it were an old mans decent coat well brushed for the thousandth time, or a little boys first sack and trousers finished yesterday by his mothers needlehad somewhat of the quality of ascensionrobes. Forth, likewise, from the portal of the old house stepped Phoebe, putting up her small green sunshade, and throwing upward a glance and smile of parting kindness to the faces at the arched window. In her aspect there was a familiar gladness, and a holiness that you could play with, and yet reverence it as much as ever. She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of ones mothertongue. Fresh was Phoebe, moreover, and airy and sweet in her apparel; as if nothing that she woreneither her gown, nor her small straw bonnet, nor her little kerchief, any more than her snowy stockingshad ever been put on before; or, if worn, were all the fresher for it, and with a fragrance as if they had lain among the rosebuds. The girl waved her hand to Hepzibah and Clifford, and went up the street; a religion in herself, warm, simple, true, with a substance that could walk on earth, and a spirit that was capable of heaven. Hepzibah, asked Clifford, after watching Phoebe to the corner, do you never go to church? No, Clifford! she repliednot these many, many years! Were I to be there, he rejoined, it seems to me that I could pray once more, when so many human souls were praying all around me! She looked into Cliffords face, and beheld there a soft natural effusion; for his heart gushed out, as it were, and ran over at his eyes, in delightful reverence for God, and kindly affection for his human brethren. The emotion communicated itself to Hepzibah. She yearned to take him by the hand, and go and kneel down, they two togetherboth so long separate from the world, and, as she now recognized, scarcely friends with Him aboveto kneel down among the people, and be reconciled to God and man at once. Dear brother, said she earnestly, let us go! We belong nowhere. We have not a foot of space in any church to kneel upon; but let us go to some place of worship, even if we stand in the broad aisle. Poor and forsaken as we are, some pewdoor will be opened to us! So Hepzibah and her brother made themselves, readyas ready as they could in the best of their oldfashioned garments, which had hung on pegs, or been laid away in trunks, so long that the dampness and mouldy smell of the past was on themmade themselves ready, in their faded bettermost, to go to church. They descended the staircase togethergaunt, sallow Hepzibah, and pale, emaciated, agestricken Clifford! They pulled open the front door, and stepped across the threshold, and felt, both of them, as if they were standing in the presence of the whole world, and with mankinds great and terrible eye on them alone. The eye of their Father seemed to be withdrawn, and gave them no encouragement. The warm sunny air of the street made them shiver. Their hearts quaked within them at the idea of taking one step farther. It cannot be, Hepzibah!it is too late, said Clifford with deep sadness. We are ghosts! We have no right among human beingsno right anywhere but in this old house, which has a curse on it, and which, therefore, we are doomed to haunt! And, besides, he continued, with a fastidious sensibility, inalienably characteristic of the man, it would not be fit nor beautiful to go! It is an ugly thought that I should be frightful to my fellowbeings, and that children would cling to their mothers gowns at sight of me! They shrank back into the dusky passageway, and closed the door. But, going up the staircase again, they found the whole interior of the house tenfold more dismal, and the air closer and heavier, for the glimpse and breath of freedom which they had just snatched. They could not flee; their jailer had but left the door ajar in mockery, and stood behind it to watch them stealing out. At the threshold, they felt his pitiless grip upon them. For, what other dungeon is so dark as ones own heart! What jailer so inexorable as ones self! But it would be no fair picture of Cliffords state of mind were we to represent him as continually or prevailingly wretched. On the contrary, there was no other man in the city, we are bold to affirm, of so much as half his years, who enjoyed so many lightsome and griefless moments as himself. He had no burden of care upon him; there were none of those questions and contingencies with the future to be settled which wear away all other lives, and render them not worth having by the very process of providing for their support. In this respect he was a childa child for the whole term of his existence, be it long or short. Indeed, his life seemed to be standing still at a period little in advance of childhood, and to cluster all his reminiscences about that epoch; just as, after the torpor of a heavy blow, the sufferers reviving consciousness goes back to a moment considerably behind the accident that stupefied him. He sometimes told Phoebe and Hepzibah his dreams, in which he invariably played the part of a child, or a very young man. So vivid were they, in his relation of them, that he once held a dispute with his sister as to the particular figure or print of a chintz morningdress which he had seen their mother wear, in the dream of the preceding night. Hepzibah, piquing herself on a womans accuracy in such matters, held it to be slightly different from what Clifford described; but, producing the very gown from an old trunk, it proved to be identical with his remembrance of it. Had Clifford, every time that he emerged out of dreams so lifelike, undergone the torture of transformation from a boy into an old and broken man, the daily recurrence of the shock would have been too much to bear. It would have caused an acute agony to thrill from the morning twilight, all the day through, until bedtime; and even then would have mingled a dull, inscrutable pain and pallid hue of misfortune with the visionary bloom and adolescence of his slumber. But the nightly moonshine interwove itself with the morning mist, and enveloped him as in a robe, which he hugged about his person, and seldom let realities pierce through; he was not often quite awake, but slept openeyed, and perhaps fancied himself most dreaming then. Thus, lingering always so near his childhood, he had sympathies with children, and kept his heart the fresher thereby, like a reservoir into which rivulets were pouring not far from the fountainhead. Though prevented, by a subtle sense of propriety, from desiring to associate with them, he loved few things better than to look out of the arched window and see a little girl driving her hoop along the sidewalk, or schoolboys at a game of ball. Their voices, also, were very pleasant to him, heard at a distance, all swarming and intermingling together as flies do in a sunny room. Clifford would, doubtless, have been glad to share their sports. One afternoon he was seized with an irresistible desire to blow soapbubbles; an amusement, as Hepzibah told Phoebe apart, that had been a favorite one with her brother when they were both children. Behold him, therefore, at the arched window, with an earthen pipe in his mouth! Behold him, with his gray hair, and a wan, unreal smile over his countenance, where still hovered a beautiful grace, which his worst enemy must have acknowledged to be spiritual and immortal, since it had survived so long! Behold him, scattering airy spheres abroad from the window into the street! Little impalpable worlds were those soapbubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as imagination, on the nothing of their surface. It was curious to see how the passersby regarded these brilliant fantasies, as they came floating down, and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them. Some stopped to gaze, and perhaps, carried a pleasant recollection of the bubbles onward as far as the streetcorner; some looked angrily upward, as if poor Clifford wronged them by setting an image of beauty afloat so near their dusty pathway. A great many put out their fingers or their walkingsticks to touch, withal; and were perversely gratified, no doubt, when the bubble, with all its pictured earth and sky scene, vanished as if it had never been. At length, just as an elderly gentleman of very dignified presence happened to be passing, a large bubble sailed majestically down, and burst right against his nose! He looked upat first with a stern, keen glance, which penetrated at once into the obscurity behind the arched windowthen with a smile which might be conceived as diffusing a dogday sultriness for the space of several yards about him. Aha, Cousin Clifford! cried Judge Pyncheon. What! Still blowing soapbubbles! The tone seemed as if meant to be kind and soothing, but yet had a bitterness of sarcasm in it. As for Clifford, an absolute palsy of fear came over him. Apart from any definite cause of dread which his past experience might have given him, he felt that native and original horror of the excellent Judge which is proper to a weak, delicate, and apprehensive character in the presence of massive strength. Strength is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible. There is no greater bugbear than a strongwilled relative in the circle of his own connections. XII The Daguerreotypist It must not be supposed that the life of a personage naturally so active as Phoebe could be wholly confined within the precincts of the old Pyncheon House. Cliffords demands upon her time were usually satisfied, in those long days, considerably earlier than sunset. Quiet as his daily existence seemed, it nevertheless drained all the resources by which he lived. It was not physical exercise that overwearied himfor except that he sometimes wrought a little with a hoe, or paced the gardenwalk, or, in rainy weather, traversed a large unoccupied roomit was his tendency to remain only too quiescent, as regarded any toil of the limbs and muscles. But, either there was a smouldering fire within him that consumed his vital energy, or the monotony that would have dragged itself with benumbing effect over a mind differently situated was no monotony to Clifford. Possibly, he was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights, sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more practised with the world. As all is activity and vicissitude to the new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had undergone a kind of new creation, after its longsuspended life. Be the cause what it might, Clifford commonly retired to rest, thoroughly exhausted, while the sunbeams were still melting through his windowcurtains, or were thrown with late lustre on the chamber wall. And while he thus slept early, as other children do, and dreamed of childhood, Phoebe was free to follow her own tastes for the remainder of the day and evening. This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phoebe. The old house, as we have already said, had both the dryrot and the damprot in its walls; it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere than that. Hepzibah, though she had her valuable and redeeming traits, had grown to be a kind of lunatic by imprisoning herself so long in one place, with no other company than a single series of ideas, and but one affection, and one bitter sense of wrong. Clifford, the reader may perhaps imagine, was too inert to operate morally on his fellowcreatures, however intimate and exclusive their relations with him.

But the sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtle and universal than we think; it exists, indeed, among different classes of organized life, and vibrates from one to another. A flower, for instance, as Phoebe herself observed, always began to droop sooner in Cliffords hand, or Hepzibahs, than in her own; and by the same law, converting her whole daily life into a flower fragrance for these two sickly spirits, the blooming girl must inevitably droop and fade much sooner than if worn on a younger and happier breast. Unless she had now and then indulged her brisk impulses, and breathed rural air in a suburban walk, or ocean breezes along the shorehad occasionally obeyed the impulse of Nature, in New England girls, by attending a metaphysical or philosophical lecture, or viewing a sevenmile panorama, or listening to a concerthad gone shopping about the city, ransacking entire depots of splendid merchandise, and bringing home a ribbonhad employed, likewise, a little time to read the Bible in her chamber, and had stolen a little more to think of her mother and her native placeunless for such moral medicines as the above, we should soon have beheld our poor Phoebe grow thin and put on a bleached, unwholesome aspect, and assume strange, shy ways, prophetic of oldmaidenhood and a cheerless future. Even as it was, a change grew visible; a change partly to be regretted, although whatever charm it infringed upon was repaired by another, perhaps more precious. She was not so constantly gay, but had her moods of thought, which Clifford, on the whole, liked better than her former phase of unmingled cheerfulness; because now she understood him better and more delicately, and sometimes even interpreted him to himself. Her eyes looked larger, and darker, and deeper; so deep, at some silent moments, that they seemed like Artesian wells, down, down, into the infinite. She was less girlish than when we first beheld her alighting from the omnibus; less girlish, but more a woman. The only youthful mind with which Phoebe had an opportunity of frequent intercourse was that of the daguerreotypist. Inevitably, by the pressure of the seclusion about them, they had been brought into habits of some familiarity. Had they met under different circumstances, neither of these young persons would have been likely to bestow much thought upon the other, unless, indeed, their extreme dissimilarity should have proved a principle of mutual attraction. Both, it is true, were characters proper to New England life, and possessing a common ground, therefore, in their more external developments; but as unlike, in their respective interiors, as if their native climes had been at worldwide distance. During the early part of their acquaintance, Phoebe had held back rather more than was customary with her frank and simple manners from Holgraves not very marked advances. Nor was she yet satisfied that she knew him well, although they almost daily met and talked together, in a kind, friendly, and what seemed to be a familiar way. The artist, in a desultory manner, had imparted to Phoebe something of his history. Young as he was, and had his career terminated at the point already attained, there had been enough of incident to fill, very creditably, an autobiographic volume. A romance on the plan of Gil Blas, adapted to American society and manners, would cease to be a romance. The experience of many individuals among us, who think it hardly worth the telling, would equal the vicissitudes of the Spaniards earlier life; while their ultimate success, or the point whither they tend, may be incomparably higher than any that a novelist would imagine for his hero. Holgrave, as he told Phoebe somewhat proudly, could not boast of his origin, unless as being exceedingly humble, nor of his education, except that it had been the scantiest possible, and obtained by a few wintermonths attendance at a district school. Left early to his own guidance, he had begun to be selfdependent while yet a boy; and it was a condition aptly suited to his natural force of will. Though now but twentytwo years old (lacking some months, which are years in such a life), he had already been, first, a country schoolmaster; next, a salesman in a country store; and, either at the same time or afterwards, the political editor of a country newspaper. He had subsequently travelled New England and the Middle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticut manufactory of colognewater and other essences. In an episodical way he had studied and practised dentistry, and with very flattering success, especially in many of the factorytowns along our inland streams. As a supernumerary official, of some kind or other, aboard a packetship, he had visited Europe, and found means, before his return, to see Italy, and part of France and Germany. At a later period he had spent some months in a community of Fourierists. Still more recently he had been a public lecturer on Mesmerism, for which science (as he assured Phoebe, and, indeed, satisfactorily proved, by putting Chanticleer, who happened to be scratching near by, to sleep) he had very remarkable endowments. His present phase, as a daguerreotypist, was of no more importance in his own view, nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the preceding ones. It had been taken up with the careless alacrity of an adventurer, who had his bread to earn. It would be thrown aside as carelessly, whenever he should choose to earn his bread by some other equally digressive means. But what was most remarkable, and, perhaps, showed a more than common poise in the young man, was the fact that, amid all these personal vicissitudes, he had never lost his identity. Homeless as he had beencontinually changing his whereabout, and, therefore, responsible neither to public opinion nor to individualsputting off one exterior, and snatching up another, to be soon shifted for a thirdhe had never violated the innermost man, but had carried his conscience along with him. It was impossible to know Holgrave without recognizing this to be the fact. Hepzibah had seen it. Phoebe soon saw it likewise, and gave him the sort of confidence which such a certainty inspires. She was startled, however, and sometimes repellednot by any doubt of his integrity to whatever law he acknowledged, but by a sense that his law differed from her own. He made her uneasy, and seemed to unsettle everything around her, by his lack of reverence for what was fixed, unless, at a moments warning, it could establish its right to hold its ground. Then, moreover, she scarcely thought him affectionate in his nature. He was too calm and cool an observer. Phoebe felt his eye, often; his heart, seldom or never. He took a certain kind of interest in Hepzibah and her brother, and Phoebe herself. He studied them attentively, and allowed no slightest circumstance of their individualities to escape him. He was ready to do them whatever good he might; but, after all, he never exactly made common cause with them, nor gave any reliable evidence that he loved them better in proportion as he knew them more. In his relations with them, he seemed to be in quest of mental food, not heartsustenance. Phoebe could not conceive what interested him so much in her friends and herself, intellectually, since he cared nothing for them, or, comparatively, so little, as objects of human affection. Always, in his interviews with Phoebe, the artist made especial inquiry as to the welfare of Clifford, whom, except at the Sunday festival, he seldom saw. Does he still seem happy? he asked one day. As happy as a child, answered Phoebe; butlike a child, toovery easily disturbed. How disturbed? inquired Holgrave. By things without, or by thoughts within? I cannot see his thoughts! How should I? replied Phoebe with simple piquancy. Very often his humor changes without any reason that can be guessed at, just as a cloud comes over the sun. Latterly, since I have begun to know him better, I feel it to be not quite right to look closely into his moods. He has had such a great sorrow, that his heart is made all solemn and sacred by it. When he is cheerfulwhen the sun shines into his mindthen I venture to peep in, just as far as the light reaches, but no further. It is holy ground where the shadow falls! How prettily you express this sentiment! said the artist. I can understand the feeling, without possessing it. Had I your opportunities, no scruples would prevent me from fathoming Clifford to the full depth of my plummetline! How strange that you should wish it! remarked Phoebe involuntarily. What is Cousin Clifford to you? Oh, nothingof course, nothing! answered Holgrave with a smile. Only this is such an odd and incomprehensible world! The more I look at it, the more it puzzles me, and I begin to suspect that a mans bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom. Men and women, and children, too, are such strange creatures, that one never can be certain that he really knows them; nor ever guess what they have been from what he sees them to be now. Judge Pyncheon! Clifford! What a complex riddlea complexity of complexitiesdo they present! It requires intuitive sympathy, like a young girls, to solve it. A mere observer, like myself (who never have any intuitions, and am, at best, only subtle and acute), is pretty certain to go astray. The artist now turned the conversation to themes less dark than that which they had touched upon. Phoebe and he were young together; nor had Holgrave, in his premature experience of life, wasted entirely that beautiful spirit of youth, which, gushing forth from one small heart and fancy, may diffuse itself over the universe, making it all as bright as on the first day of creation. Mans own youth is the worlds youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earths granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes. So it was with Holgrave. He could talk sagely about the worlds old age, but never actually believed what he said; he was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the worldthat graybearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerableas a tender stripling, capable of being improved into all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest promise of becoming. He had that sense, or inward prophecywhich a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquishthat we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime. It seemed to Holgraveas doubtless it has seemed to the hopeful of every century since the epoch of Adams grandchildrenthat in this age, more than ever before, the mossgrown and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to begin anew. As to the main pointmay we never live to doubt it!as to the better centuries that are coming, the artist was surely right. His error lay in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in applying his own little lifespan as the measure of an interminable achievement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or against it. Yet it was well for him to think so. This enthusiasm, infusing itself through the calmness of his character, and thus taking an aspect of settled thought and wisdom, would serve to keep his youth pure, and make his aspirations high. And when, with the years settling down more weightily upon him, his early faith should be modified by inevitable experience, it would be with no harsh and sudden revolution of his sentiments. He would still have faith in mans brightening destiny, and perhaps love him all the better, as he should recognize his helplessness in his own behalf; and the haughty faith, with which he began life, would be well bartered for a far humbler one at its close, in discerning that mans best directed effort accomplishes a kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of realities. Holgrave had read very little, and that little in passing through the thoroughfare of life, where the mystic language of his books was necessarily mixed up with the babble of the multitude, so that both one and the other were apt to lose any sense that might have been properly their own. He considered himself a thinker, and was certainly of a thoughtful turn, but, with his own path to discover, had perhaps hardly yet reached the point where an educated man begins to think. The true value of his character lay in that deep consciousness of inward strength, which made all his past vicissitudes seem merely like a change of garments; in that enthusiasm, so quiet that he scarcely knew of its existence, but which gave a warmth to everything that he laid his hand on; in that personal ambition, hiddenfrom his own as well as other eyesamong his more generous impulses, but in which lurked a certain efficacy, that might solidify him from a theorist into the champion of some practicable cause. Altogether in his culture and want of culturein his crude, wild, and misty philosophy, and the practical experience that counteracted some of its tendencies; in his magnanimous zeal for mans welfare, and his recklessness of whatever the ages had established in mans behalf; in his faith, and in his infidelity; in what he had, and in what he lackedthe artist might fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his native land. His career it would be difficult to prefigure. There appeared to be qualities in Holgrave, such as, in a country where everything is free to the hand that can grasp it, could hardly fail to put some of the worlds prizes within his reach. But these matters are delightfully uncertain. At almost every step in life, we meet with young men of just about Holgraves age, for whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, even after much and careful inquiry, we never happen to hear another word. The effervescence of youth and passion, and the fresh gloss of the intellect and imagination, endow them with a false brilliancy, which makes fools of themselves and other people. Like certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely in their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washingday. But our business is with Holgrave as we find him on this particular afternoon, and in the arbor of the Pyncheon garden. In that point of view, it was a pleasant sight to behold this young man, with so much faith in himself, and so fair an appearance of admirable powersso little harmed, too, by the many tests that had tried his metalit was pleasant to see him in his kindly intercourse with Phoebe. Her thought had scarcely done him justice when it pronounced him cold; or, if so, he had grown warmer now. Without such purpose on her part, and unconsciously on his, she made the House of the Seven Gables like a home to him, and the garden a familiar precinct. With the insight on which he prided himself, he fancied that he could look through Phoebe, and all around her, and could read her off like a page of a childs storybook. But these transparent natures are often deceptive in their depth; those pebbles at the bottom of the fountain are farther from us than we think. Thus the artist, whatever he might judge of Phoebes capacity, was beguiled, by some silent charm of hers, to talk freely of what he dreamed of doing in the world. He poured himself out as to another self. Very possibly, he forgot Phoebe while he talked to her, and was moved only by the inevitable tendency of thought, when rendered sympathetic by enthusiasm and emotion, to flow into the first safe reservoir which it finds. But, had you peeped at them through the chinks of the gardenfence, the young mans earnestness and heightened color might have led you to suppose that he was making love to the young girl! At length, something was said by Holgrave that made it apposite for Phoebe to inquire what had first brought him acquainted with her cousin Hepzibah, and why he now chose to lodge in the desolate old Pyncheon House. Without directly answering her, he turned from the Future, which had heretofore been the theme of his discourse, and began to speak of the influences of the Past. One subject, indeed, is but the reverberation of the other. Shall we never, never get rid of this Past? cried he, keeping up the earnest tone of his preceding conversation. It lies upon the Present like a giants dead body! In fact, the case is just as if a young giant were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only needs to be decently buried. Just think a moment, and it will startle you to see what slaves we are to bygone timesto Death, if we give the matter the right word! But I do not see it, observed Phoebe. For example, then, continued Holgrave a dead man, if he happens to have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgmentseats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead mens books! We laugh at dead mens jokes, and cry at dead mens pathos! We are sick of dead mens diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We worship the living Deity according to dead mens forms and creeds. Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead mans icy hand obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead mans white, immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to interfere. I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead mens houses; as, for instance, in this of the Seven Gables! And why not, said Phoebe, so long as we can be comfortable in them? But we shall live to see the day, I trust, went on the artist, when no man shall build his house for posterity. Why should he? He might just as reasonably order a durable suit of clothesleather, or guttapercha, or whatever else lasts longestso that his greatgrandchildren should have the benefit of them, and cut precisely the same figure in the world that he himself does. If each generation were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that single change, comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform which society is now suffering for. I doubt whether even our public edificesour capitols, statehouses, courthouses, cityhall, and churchesought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and reform the institutions which they symbolize. How you hate everything old! said Phoebe in dismay. It makes me dizzy to think of such a shifting world! I certainly love nothing mouldy, answered Holgrave. Now, this old Pyncheon House! Is it a wholesome place to live in, with its black shingles, and the green moss that shows how damp they are?its dark, lowstudded roomsits grime and sordidness, which are the crystallization on its walls of the human breath, that has been drawn and exhaled here in discontent and anguish? The house ought to be purified with firepurified till only its ashes remain! Then why do you live in it? asked Phoebe, a little piqued. Oh, I am pursuing my studies here; not in books, however, replied Holgrave. The house, in my view, is expressive of that odious and abominable Past, with all its bad influences, against which I have just been declaiming. I dwell in it for a while, that I may know the better how to hate it. By the by, did you ever hear the story of Maule, the wizard, and what happened between him and your immeasurably greatgrandfather? Yes, indeed! said Phoebe; I heard it long ago, from my father, and two or three times from my cousin Hepzibah, in the month that I have been here. She seems to think that all the calamities of the Pyncheons began from that quarrel with the wizard, as you call him. And you, Mr. Holgrave look as if you thought so too! How singular that you should believe what is so very absurd, when you reject many things that are a great deal worthier of credit! I do believe it, said the artist seriously; not as a superstition, however, but as proved by unquestionable facts, and as exemplifying a theory. Now, see under those seven gables, at which we now look upand which old Colonel Pyncheon meant to be the house of his descendants, in prosperity and happiness, down to an epoch far beyond the presentunder that roof, through a portion of three centuries, there has been perpetual remorse of conscience, a constantly defeated hope, strife amongst kindred, various misery, a strange form of death, dark suspicion, unspeakable disgraceall, or most of which calamity I have the means of tracing to the old Puritans inordinate desire to plant and endow a family. To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is, that, once in every halfcentury, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors. Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in hidden streams, as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean pipes. In the family existence of these Pyncheons, for instanceforgive me Phoebe, but I cannot think of you as one of themin their brief New England pedigree, there has been time enough to infect them all with one kind of lunacy or another. You speak very unceremoniously of my kindred, said Phoebe, debating with herself whether she ought to take offence. I speak true thoughts to a true mind! answered Holgrave, with a vehemence which Phoebe had not before witnessed in him. The truth is as I say! Furthermore, the original perpetrator and father of this mischief appears to have perpetuated himself, and still walks the streetat least, his very image, in mind and bodywith the fairest prospect of transmitting to posterity as rich and as wretched an inheritance as he has received! Do you remember the daguerreotype, and its resemblance to the old portrait? How strangely in earnest you are! exclaimed Phoebe, looking at him with surprise and perplexity; half alarmed and partly inclined to laugh. You talk of the lunacy of the Pyncheons; is it contagious? I understand you! said the artist, coloring and laughing. I believe I am a little mad. This subject has taken hold of my mind with the strangest tenacity of clutch since I have lodged in yonder old gable. As one method of throwing it off, I have put an incident of the Pyncheon family history, with which I happen to be acquainted, into the form of a legend, and mean to publish it in a magazine. Do you write for the magazines? inquired Phoebe. Is it possible you did not know it? cried Holgrave. Well, such is literary fame! Yes. Miss Phoebe Pyncheon, among the multitude of my marvellous gifts I have that of writing stories; and my name has figured, I can assure you, on the covers of Graham and Godey, making as respectable an appearance, for aught I could see, as any of the canonized beadroll with which it was associated. In the humorous line, I am thought to have a very pretty way with me; and as for pathos, I am as provocative of tears as an onion. But shall I read you my story? Yes, if it is not very long, said Phoebeand added laughinglynor very dull. As this latter point was one which the daguerreotypist could not decide for himself, he forthwith produced his roll of manuscript, and, while the late sunbeams gilded the seven gables, began to read. XIII Alice Pyncheon There was a message brought, one day, from the worshipful Gervayse Pyncheon to young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, desiring his immediate presence at the House of the Seven Gables. And what does your master want with me? said the carpenter to Mr. Pyncheons black servant. Does the house need any repair? Well it may, by this time; and no blame to my father who built it, neither! I was reading the old Colonels tombstone, no longer ago than last Sabbath; and, reckoning from that date, the house has stood sevenandthirty years. No wonder if there should be a job to do on the roof. Dont know what massa wants, answered Scipio. The house is a berry good house, and old Colonel Pyncheon think so too, I reckon;else why the old man haunt it so, and frighten a poor niggar as he does? Well, well, friend Scipio; let your master know that Im coming, said the carpenter with a laugh. For a fair, workmanlike job, hell find me his man. And so the house is haunted, is it? It will take a tighter workman than I am to keep the spirits out of the Seven Gables. Even if the Colonel would be quiet, he added, muttering to himself, my old grandfather, the wizard, will be pretty sure to stick to the Pyncheons as long as their walls hold together. Whats that you mutter to yourself, Matthew Maule? asked Scipio. And what for do you look so black at me? No matter, darky, said the carpenter. Do you think nobody is to look black but yourself? Go tell your master Im coming; and if you happen to see Mistress Alice, his daughter, give Matthew Maules humble respects to her. She has brought a fair face from Italyfair, and gentle, and proudhas that same Alice Pyncheon! He talk of Mistress Alice! cried Scipio, as he returned from his errand. The low carpenterman! He no business so much as to look at her a great way off! This young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, it must be observed, was a person little understood, and not very generally liked, in the town where he resided; not that anything could be alleged against his integrity, or his skill and diligence in the handicraft which he exercised. The aversion (as it might justly be called) with which many persons regarded him was partly the result of his own character and deportment, and partly an inheritance. He was the grandson of a former Matthew Maule, one of the early settlers of the town, and who had been a famous and terrible wizard in his day. This old reprobate was one of the sufferers when Cotton Mather, and his brother ministers, and the learned judges, and other wise men, and Sir William Phipps, the sagacious governor, made such laudable efforts to weaken the great enemy of souls, by sending a multitude of his adherents up the rocky pathway of Gallows Hill. Since those days, no doubt, it had grown to be suspected that, in consequence of an unfortunate overdoing of a work praiseworthy in itself, the proceedings against the witches had proved far less acceptable to the Beneficent Father than to that very Arch Enemy whom they were intended to distress and utterly overwhelm. It is not the less certain, however, that awe and terror brooded over the memories of those who died for this horrible crime of witchcraft. Their graves, in the crevices of the rocks, were supposed to be incapable of retaining the occupants who had been so hastily thrust into them. Old Matthew Maule, especially, was known to have as little hesitation or difficulty in rising out of his grave as an ordinary man in getting out of bed, and was as often seen at midnight as living people at noonday. This pestilent wizard (in whom his just punishment seemed to have wrought no manner of amendment) had an inveterate habit of haunting a certain mansion, styled the House of the Seven Gables, against the owner of which he pretended to hold an unsettled claim for groundrent. The ghost, it appearswith the pertinacity which was one of his distinguishing characteristics while aliveinsisted that he was the rightful proprietor of the site upon which the house stood. His terms were, that either the aforesaid groundrent, from the day when the cellar began to be dug, should be paid down, or the mansion itself given up; else he, the ghostly creditor, would have his finger in all the affairs of the Pyncheons, and make everything go wrong with them, though it should be a thousand years after his death. It was a wild story, perhaps, but seemed not altogether so incredible to those who could remember what an inflexibly obstinate old fellow this wizard Maule had been. Now, the wizards grandson, the young Matthew Maule of our story, was popularly supposed to have inherited some of his ancestors questionable traits. It is wonderful how many absurdities were promulgated in reference to the young man. He was fabled, for example, to have a strange power of getting into peoples dreams, and regulating matters there according to his own fancy, pretty much like the stagemanager of a theatre. There was a great deal of talk among the neighbors, particularly the petticoated ones, about what they called the witchcraft of Maules eye. Some said that he could look into peoples minds; others, that, by the marvellous power of this eye, he could draw people into his own mind, or send them, if he pleased, to do errands to his grandfather, in the spiritual world; others, again, that it was what is termed an Evil Eye, and possessed the valuable faculty of blighting corn, and drying children into mummies with the heartburn. But, after all, what worked most to the young carpenters disadvantage was, first, the reserve and sternness of his natural disposition, and next, the fact of his not being a churchcommunicant, and the suspicion of his holding heretical tenets in matters of religion and polity. After receiving Mr. Pyncheons message, the carpenter merely tarried to finish a small job, which he happened to have in hand, and then took his way towards the House of the Seven Gables. This noted edifice, though its style might be getting a little out of fashion, was still as respectable a family residence as that of any gentleman in town. The present owner, Gervayse Pyncheon, was said to have contracted a dislike to the house, in consequence of a shock to his sensibility, in early childhood, from the sudden death of his grandfather. In the very act of running to climb Colonel Pyncheons knee, the boy had discovered the old Puritan to be a corpse. On arriving at manhood, Mr. Pyncheon had visited England, where he married a lady of fortune, and had subsequently spent many years, partly in the mother country, and partly in various cities on the continent of Europe. During this period, the family mansion had been consigned to the charge of a kinsman, who was allowed to make it his home for the time being, in consideration of keeping the premises in thorough repair. So faithfully had this contract been fulfilled, that now, as the carpenter approached the house, his practised eye could detect nothing to criticise in its condition. The peaks of the seven gables rose up sharply; the shingled roof looked thoroughly watertight; and the glittering plasterwork entirely covered the exterior walls, and sparkled in the October sun, as if it had been new only a week ago. The house had that pleasant aspect of life which is like the cheery expression of comfortable activity in the human countenance. You could see, at once, that there was the stir of a large family within it. A huge load of oakwood was passing through the gateway, towards the outbuildings in the rear; the fat cookor probably it might be the housekeeperstood at the side door, bargaining for some turkeys and poultry which a countryman had brought for sale.

Now and then a maidservant, neatly dressed, and now the shining sable face of a slave, might be seen bustling across the windows, in the lower part of the house. At an open window of a room in the second story, hanging over some pots of beautiful and delicate flowersexotics, but which had never known a more genial sunshine than that of the New England autumnwas the figure of a young lady, an exotic, like the flowers, and beautiful and delicate as they. Her presence imparted an indescribable grace and faint witchery to the whole edifice. In other respects, it was a substantial, jollylooking mansion, and seemed fit to be the residence of a patriarch, who might establish his own headquarters in the front gable and assign one of the remainder to each of his six children, while the great chimney in the centre should symbolize the old fellows hospitable heart, which kept them all warm, and made a great whole of the seven smaller ones. There was a vertical sundial on the front gable; and as the carpenter passed beneath it, he looked up and noted the hour. Three oclock! said he to himself. My father told me that dial was put up only an hour before the old Colonels death. How truly it has kept time these sevenandthirty years past! The shadow creeps and creeps, and is always looking over the shoulder of the sunshine! It might have befitted a craftsman, like Matthew Maule, on being sent for to a gentlemans house, to go to the back door, where servants and workpeople were usually admitted; or at least to the side entrance, where the better class of tradesmen made application. But the carpenter had a great deal of pride and stiffness in his nature; and, at this moment, moreover, his heart was bitter with the sense of hereditary wrong, because he considered the great Pyncheon House to be standing on soil which should have been his own. On this very site, beside a spring of delicious water, his grandfather had felled the pinetrees and built a cottage, in which children had been born to him; and it was only from a dead mans stiffened fingers that Colonel Pyncheon had wrested away the titledeeds. So young Maule went straight to the principal entrance, beneath a portal of carved oak, and gave such a peal of the iron knocker that you would have imagined the stern old wizard himself to be standing at the threshold. Black Scipio answered the summons in a prodigious hurry; but showed the whites of his eyes, in amazement on beholding only the carpenter. Lordamercy, what a great man he be, this carpenter fellow! mumbled Scipio, down in his throat. Anybody think he beat on the door with his biggest hammer! Here I am! said Maule sternly. Show me the way to your masters parlor. As he stepped into the house, a note of sweet and melancholy music thrilled and vibrated along the passageway, proceeding from one of the rooms above stairs. It was the harpsichord which Alice Pyncheon had brought with her from beyond the sea. The fair Alice bestowed most of her maiden leisure between flowers and music, although the former were apt to droop, and the melodies were often sad. She was of foreign education, and could not take kindly to the New England modes of life, in which nothing beautiful had ever been developed. As Mr. Pyncheon had been impatiently awaiting Maules arrival, black Scipio, of course, lost no time in ushering the carpenter into his masters presence. The room in which this gentleman sat was a parlor of moderate size, looking out upon the garden of the house, and having its windows partly shadowed by the foliage of fruittrees. It was Mr. Pyncheons peculiar apartment, and was provided with furniture, in an elegant and costly style, principally from Paris; the floor (which was unusual at that day) being covered with a carpet, so skilfully and richly wrought that it seemed to glow as with living flowers. In one corner stood a marble woman, to whom her own beauty was the sole and sufficient garment. Some picturesthat looked old, and had a mellow tinge diffused through all their artful splendorhung on the walls. Near the fireplace was a large and very beautiful cabinet of ebony, inlaid with ivory; a piece of antique furniture, which Mr. Pyncheon had bought in Venice, and which he used as the treasureplace for medals, ancient coins, and whatever small and valuable curiosities he had picked up on his travels. Through all this variety of decoration, however, the room showed its original characteristics; its low stud, its crossbeam, its chimneypiece, with the oldfashioned Dutch tiles; so that it was the emblem of a mind industriously stored with foreign ideas, and elaborated into artificial refinement, but neither larger, nor, in its proper self, more elegant than before. There were two objects that appeared rather out of place in this very handsomely furnished room. One was a large map, or surveyors plan, of a tract of land, which looked as if it had been drawn a good many years ago, and was now dingy with smoke, and soiled, here and there, with the touch of fingers. The other was a portrait of a stern old man, in a Puritan garb, painted roughly, but with a bold effect, and a remarkably strong expression of character. At a small table, before a fire of English seacoal, sat Mr. Pyncheon, sipping coffee, which had grown to be a very favorite beverage with him in France. He was a middleaged and really handsome man, with a wig flowing down upon his shoulders; his coat was of blue velvet, with lace on the borders and at the buttonholes; and the firelight glistened on the spacious breadth of his waistcoat, which was flowered all over with gold. On the entrance of Scipio, ushering in the carpenter, Mr. Pyncheon turned partly round, but resumed his former position, and proceeded deliberately to finish his cup of coffee, without immediate notice of the guest whom he had summoned to his presence. It was not that he intended any rudeness or improper neglectwhich, indeed, he would have blushed to be guilty ofbut it never occurred to him that a person in Maules station had a claim on his courtesy, or would trouble himself about it one way or the other. The carpenter, however, stepped at once to the hearth, and turned himself about, so as to look Mr. Pyncheon in the face. You sent for me, said he. Be pleased to explain your business, that I may go back to my own affairs. Ah! excuse me, said Mr. Pyncheon quietly. I did not mean to tax your time without a recompense. Your name, I think, is MauleThomas or Matthew Maulea son or grandson of the builder of this house? Matthew Maule, replied the carpenterson of him who built the housegrandson of the rightful proprietor of the soil. I know the dispute to which you allude, observed Mr. Pyncheon with undisturbed equanimity. I am well aware that my grandfather was compelled to resort to a suit at law, in order to establish his claim to the foundationsite of this edifice. We will not, if you please, renew the discussion. The matter was settled at the time, and by the competent authoritiesequitably, it is to be presumedand, at all events, irrevocably. Yet, singularly enough, there is an incidental reference to this very subject in what I am now about to say to you. And this same inveterate grudgeexcuse me, I mean no offencethis irritability, which you have just shown, is not entirely aside from the matter. If you can find anything for your purpose, Mr. Pyncheon, said the carpenter, in a mans natural resentment for the wrongs done to his blood, you are welcome to it. I take you at your word, Goodman Maule, said the owner of the Seven Gables, with a smile, and will proceed to suggest a mode in which your hereditary resentmentsjustifiable or otherwisemay have had a bearing on my affairs. You have heard, I suppose, that the Pyncheon family, ever since my grandfathers days, have been prosecuting a stillunsettled claim to a very large extent of territory at the Eastward? Often, replied Mauleand it is said that a smile came over his facevery oftenfrom my father! This claim, continued Mr. Pyncheon, after pausing a moment, as if to consider what the carpenters smile might mean, appeared to be on the very verge of a settlement and full allowance, at the period of my grandfathers decease. It was well known, to those in his confidence, that he anticipated neither difficulty nor delay. Now, Colonel Pyncheon, I need hardly say, was a practical man, well acquainted with public and private business, and not at all the person to cherish illfounded hopes, or to attempt the following out of an impracticable scheme. It is obvious to conclude, therefore, that he had grounds, not apparent to his heirs, for his confident anticipation of success in the matter of this Eastern claim. In a word, I believeand my legal advisers coincide in the belief, which, moreover, is authorized, to a certain extent, by the family traditionsthat my grandfather was in possession of some deed, or other document, essential to this claim, but which has since disappeared. Very likely, said Matthew Mauleand again, it is said, there was a dark smile on his facebut what can a poor carpenter have to do with the grand affairs of the Pyncheon family? Perhaps nothing, returned Mr. Pyncheon, possibly much! Here ensued a great many words between Matthew Maule and the proprietor of the Seven Gables, on the subject which the latter had thus broached. It seems (although Mr. Pyncheon had some hesitation in referring to stories so exceedingly absurd in their aspect) that the popular belief pointed to some mysterious connection and dependence, existing between the family of the Maules and these vast unrealized possessions of the Pyncheons. It was an ordinary saying that the old wizard, hanged though he was, had obtained the best end of the bargain in his contest with Colonel Pyncheon; inasmuch as he had got possession of the great Eastern claim, in exchange for an acre or two of gardenground. A very aged woman, recently dead, had often used the metaphorical expression, in her fireside talk, that miles and miles of the Pyncheon lands had been shovelled into Maules grave; which, by the by, was but a very shallow nook, between two rocks, near the summit of Gallows Hill. Again, when the lawyers were making inquiry for the missing document, it was a byword that it would never be found, unless in the wizards skeleton hand. So much weight had the shrewd lawyers assigned to these fables, that (but Mr. Pyncheon did not see fit to inform the carpenter of the fact) they had secretly caused the wizards grave to be searched. Nothing was discovered, however, except that, unaccountably, the right hand of the skeleton was gone. Now, what was unquestionably important, a portion of these popular rumors could be traced, though rather doubtfully and indistinctly, to chance words and obscure hints of the executed wizards son, and the father of this present Matthew Maule. And here Mr. Pyncheon could bring an item of his own personal evidence into play. Though but a child at the time, he either remembered or fancied that Matthews father had had some job to perform on the day before, or possibly the very morning of the Colonels decease, in the private room where he and the carpenter were at this moment talking. Certain papers belonging to Colonel Pyncheon, as his grandson distinctly recollected, had been spread out on the table. Matthew Maule understood the insinuated suspicion. My father, he saidbut still there was that dark smile, making a riddle of his countenancemy father was an honester man than the bloody old Colonel! Not to get his rights back again would he have carried off one of those papers! I shall not bandy words with you, observed the foreignbred Mr. Pyncheon, with haughty composure. Nor will it become me to resent any rudeness towards either my grandfather or myself. A gentleman, before seeking intercourse with a person of your station and habits, will first consider whether the urgency of the end may compensate for the disagreeableness of the means. It does so in the present instance. He then renewed the conversation, and made great pecuniary offers to the carpenter, in case the latter should give information leading to the discovery of the lost document, and the consequent success of the Eastern claim. For a long time Matthew Maule is said to have turned a cold ear to these propositions. At last, however, with a strange kind of laugh, he inquired whether Mr. Pyncheon would make over to him the old wizards homesteadground, together with the House of the Seven Gables, now standing on it, in requital of the documentary evidence so urgently required. The wild, chimneycorner legend (which, without copying all its extravagances, my narrative essentially follows) here gives an account of some very strange behavior on the part of Colonel Pyncheons portrait. This picture, it must be understood, was supposed to be so intimately connected with the fate of the house, and so magically built into its walls, that, if once it should be removed, that very instant the whole edifice would come thundering down in a heap of dusty ruin. All through the foregoing conversation between Mr. Pyncheon and the carpenter, the portrait had been frowning, clenching its fist, and giving many such proofs of excessive discomposure, but without attracting the notice of either of the two colloquists. And finally, at Matthew Maules audacious suggestion of a transfer of the sevengabled structure, the ghostly portrait is averred to have lost all patience, and to have shown itself on the point of descending bodily from its frame. But such incredible incidents are merely to be mentioned aside. Give up this house! exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon, in amazement at the proposal. Were I to do so, my grandfather would not rest quiet in his grave! He never has, if all stories are true, remarked the carpenter composedly. But that matter concerns his grandson more than it does Matthew Maule. I have no other terms to propose. Impossible as he at first thought it to comply with Maules conditions, still, on a second glance, Mr. Pyncheon was of opinion that they might at least be made matter of discussion. He himself had no personal attachment for the house, nor any pleasant associations connected with his childish residence in it. On the contrary, after sevenandthirty years, the presence of his dead grandfather seemed still to pervade it, as on that morning when the affrighted boy had beheld him, with so ghastly an aspect, stiffening in his chair. His long abode in foreign parts, moreover, and familiarity with many of the castles and ancestral halls of England, and the marble palaces of Italy, had caused him to look contemptuously at the House of the Seven Gables, whether in point of splendor or convenience. It was a mansion exceedingly inadequate to the style of living which it would be incumbent on Mr. Pyncheon to support, after realizing his territorial rights. His steward might deign to occupy it, but never, certainly, the great landed proprietor himself. In the event of success, indeed, it was his purpose to return to England; nor, to say the truth, would he recently have quitted that more congenial home, had not his own fortune, as well as his deceased wifes, begun to give symptoms of exhaustion. The Eastern claim once fairly settled, and put upon the firm basis of actual possession, Mr. Pyncheons propertyto be measured by miles, not acreswould be worth an earldom, and would reasonably entitle him to solicit, or enable him to purchase, that elevated dignity from the British monarch. Lord Pyncheon!or the Earl of Waldo!how could such a magnate be expected to contract his grandeur within the pitiful compass of seven shingled gables? In short, on an enlarged view of the business, the carpenters terms appeared so ridiculously easy that Mr. Pyncheon could scarcely forbear laughing in his face. He was quite ashamed, after the foregoing reflections, to propose any diminution of so moderate a recompense for the immense service to be rendered. I consent to your proposition, Maule! cried he. Put me in possession of the document essential to establish my rights, and the House of the Seven Gables is your own! According to some versions of the story, a regular contract to the above effect was drawn up by a lawyer, and signed and sealed in the presence of witnesses. Others say that Matthew Maule was contented with a private written agreement, in which Mr. Pyncheon pledged his honor and integrity to the fulfillment of the terms concluded upon. The gentleman then ordered wine, which he and the carpenter drank together, in confirmation of their bargain. During the whole preceding discussion and subsequent formalities, the old Puritans portrait seems to have persisted in its shadowy gestures of disapproval; but without effect, except that, as Mr. Pyncheon set down the emptied glass, he thought he beheld his grandfather frown. This sherry is too potent a wine for me; it has affected my brain already, he observed, after a somewhat startled look at the picture. On returning to Europe, I shall confine myself to the more delicate vintages of Italy and France, the best of which will not bear transportation. My Lord Pyncheon may drink what wine he will, and wherever he pleases, replied the carpenter, as if he had been privy to Mr. Pyncheons ambitious projects. But first, sir, if you desire tidings of this lost document, I must crave the favor of a little talk with your fair daughter Alice. You are mad, Maule! exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon haughtily; and now, at last, there was anger mixed up with his pride. What can my daughter have to do with a business like this? Indeed, at this new demand on the carpenters part, the proprietor of the Seven Gables was even more thunderstruck than at the cool proposition to surrender his house. There was, at least, an assignable motive for the first stipulation; there appeared to be none whatever for the last. Nevertheless, Matthew Maule sturdily insisted on the young lady being summoned, and even gave her father to understand, in a mysterious kind of explanationwhich made the matter considerably darker than it looked beforethat the only chance of acquiring the requisite knowledge was through the clear, crystal medium of a pure and virgin intelligence, like that of the fair Alice. Not to encumber our story with Mr. Pyncheons scruples, whether of conscience, pride, or fatherly affection, he at length ordered his daughter to be called. He well knew that she was in her chamber, and engaged in no occupation that could not readily be laid aside; for, as it happened, ever since Alices name had been spoken, both her father and the carpenter had heard the sad and sweet music of her harpsichord, and the airier melancholy of her accompanying voice. So Alice Pyncheon was summoned, and appeared. A portrait of this young lady, painted by a Venetian artist, and left by her father in England, is said to have fallen into the hands of the present Duke of Devonshire, and to be now preserved at Chatsworth; not on account of any associations with the original, but for its value as a picture, and the high character of beauty in the countenance. If ever there was a lady born, and set apart from the worlds vulgar mass by a certain gentle and cold stateliness, it was this very Alice Pyncheon. Yet there was the womanly mixture in her; the tenderness, or, at least, the tender capabilities. For the sake of that redeeming quality, a man of generous nature would have forgiven all her pride, and have been content, almost, to lie down in her path, and let Alice set her slender foot upon his heart. All that he would have required was simply the acknowledgment that he was indeed a man, and a fellowbeing, moulded of the same elements as she. As Alice came into the room, her eyes fell upon the carpenter, who was standing near its centre, clad in green woollen jacket, a pair of loose breeches, open at the knees, and with a long pocket for his rule, the end of which protruded; it was as proper a mark of the artisans calling as Mr. Pyncheons fulldress sword of that gentlemans aristocratic pretensions. A glow of artistic approval brightened over Alice Pyncheons face; she was struck with admirationwhich she made no attempt to concealof the remarkable comeliness, strength, and energy of Maules figure. But that admiring glance (which most other men, perhaps, would have cherished as a sweet recollection all through life) the carpenter never forgave. It must have been the devil himself that made Maule so subtle in his preception. Does the girl look at me as if I were a brute beast? thought he, setting his teeth. She shall know whether I have a human spirit; and the worse for her, if it prove stronger than her own! My father, you sent for me, said Alice, in her sweet and harplike voice. But, if you have business with this young man, pray let me go again. You know I do not love this room, in spite of that Claude, with which you try to bring back sunny recollections. Stay a moment, young lady, if you please! said Matthew Maule. My business with your father is over. With yourself, it is now to begin! Alice looked towards her father, in surprise and inquiry. Yes, Alice, said Mr. Pyncheon, with some disturbance and confusion. This young manhis name is Matthew Mauleprofesses, so far as I can understand him, to be able to discover, through your means, a certain paper or parchment, which was missing long before your birth. The importance of the document in question renders it advisable to neglect no possible, even if improbable, method of regaining it. You will therefore oblige me, my dear Alice, by answering this persons inquiries, and complying with his lawful and reasonable requests, so far as they may appear to have the aforesaid object in view. As I shall remain in the room, you need apprehend no rude nor unbecoming deportment, on the young mans part; and, at your slightest wish, of course, the investigation, or whatever we may call it, shall immediately be broken off. Mistress Alice Pyncheon, remarked Matthew Maule, with the utmost deference, but yet a halfhidden sarcasm in his look and tone, will no doubt feel herself quite safe in her fathers presence, and under his allsufficient protection. I certainly shall entertain no manner of apprehension, with my father at hand, said Alice with maidenly dignity. Neither do I conceive that a lady, while true to herself, can have aught to fear from whomsoever, or in any circumstances! Poor Alice! By what unhappy impulse did she thus put herself at once on terms of defiance against a strength which she could not estimate? Then, Mistress Alice, said Matthew Maule, handing a chairgracefully enough, for a craftsman, will it please you only to sit down, and do me the favor (though altogether beyond a poor carpenters deserts) to fix your eyes on mine! Alice complied, She was very proud. Setting aside all advantages of rank, this fair girl deemed herself conscious of a powercombined of beauty, high, unsullied purity, and the preservative force of womanhoodthat could make her sphere impenetrable, unless betrayed by treachery within. She instinctively knew, it may be, that some sinister or evil potency was now striving to pass her barriers; nor would she decline the contest. So Alice put womans might against mans might; a match not often equal on the part of woman. Her father meanwhile had turned away, and seemed absorbed in the contemplation of a landscape by Claude, where a shadowy and sunstreaked vista penetrated so remotely into an ancient wood, that it would have been no wonder if his fancy had lost itself in the pictures bewildering depths. But, in truth, the picture was no more to him at that moment than the blank wall against which it hung. His mind was haunted with the many and strange tales which he had heard, attributing mysterious if not supernatural endowments to these Maules, as well the grandson here present as his two immediate ancestors. Mr. Pyncheons long residence abroad, and intercourse with men of wit and fashioncourtiers, worldlings, and freethinkershad done much towards obliterating the grim Puritan superstitions, which no man of New England birth at that early period could entirely escape. But, on the other hand, had not a whole community believed Maules grandfather to be a wizard? Had not the crime been proved? Had not the wizard died for it? Had he not bequeathed a legacy of hatred against the Pyncheons to this only grandson, who, as it appeared, was now about to exercise a subtle influence over the daughter of his enemys house? Might not this influence be the same that was called witchcraft? Turning half around, he caught a glimpse of Maules figure in the lookingglass. At some paces from Alice, with his arms uplifted in the air, the carpenter made a gesture as if directing downward a slow, ponderous, and invisible weight upon the maiden. Stay, Maule! exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon, stepping forward. I forbid your proceeding further! Pray, my dear father, do not interrupt the young man, said Alice, without changing her position. His efforts, I assure you, will prove very harmless. Again Mr. Pyncheon turned his eyes towards the Claude. It was then his daughters will, in opposition to his own, that the experiment should be fully tried. Henceforth, therefore, he did but consent, not urge it. And was it not for her sake far more than for his own that he desired its success? That lost parchment once restored, the beautiful Alice Pyncheon, with the rich dowry which he could then bestow, might wed an English duke or a German reigningprince, instead of some New England clergyman or lawyer! At the thought, the ambitious father almost consented, in his heart, that, if the devils power were needed to the accomplishment of this great object, Maule might evoke him. Alices own purity would be her safeguard. With his mind full of imaginary magnificence, Mr. Pyncheon heard a halfuttered exclamation from his daughter. It was very faint and low; so indistinct that there seemed but half a will to shape out the words, and too undefined a purport to be intelligible. Yet it was a call for help!his conscience never doubted it;and, little more than a whisper to his ear, it was a dismal shriek, and long reechoed so, in the region round his heart! But this time the father did not turn. After a further interval, Maule spoke. Behold your daughter, said he. Mr. Pyncheon came hastily forward. The carpenter was standing erect in front of Alices chair, and pointing his finger towards the maiden with an expression of triumphant power, the limits of which could not be defined, as, indeed, its scope stretched vaguely towards the unseen and the infinite. Alice sat in an attitude of profound repose, with the long brown lashes drooping over her eyes. There she is! said the carpenter. Speak to her! Alice! My daughter! exclaimed Mr. Pyncheon. My own Alice! She did not stir. Louder! said Maule, smiling. Alice! Awake! cried her father. It troubles me to see you thus! Awake! He spoke loudly, with terror in his voice, and close to that delicate ear which had always been so sensitive to every discord. But the sound evidently reached her not. It is indescribable what a sense of remote, dim, unattainable distance betwixt himself and Alice was impressed on the father by this impossibility of reaching her with his voice. Best touch her! said Matthew Maule. Shake the girl, and roughly, too! My hands are hardened with too much use of axe, saw, and planeelse I might help you! Mr. Pyncheon took her hand, and pressed it with the earnestness of startled emotion. He kissed her, with so great a heartthrob in the kiss, that he thought she must needs feel it. Then, in a gust of anger at her insensibility, he shook her maiden form with a violence which, the next moment, it affrighted him to remember. He withdrew his encircling arms, and Alicewhose figure, though flexible, had been wholly impassiverelapsed into the same attitude as before these attempts to arouse her. Maule having shifted his position, her face was turned towards him slightly, but with what seemed to be a reference of her very slumber to his guidance. Then it was a strange sight to behold how the man of conventionalities shook the powder out of his periwig; how the reserved and stately gentleman forgot his dignity; how the goldembroidered waistcoat flickered and glistened in the firelight with the convulsion of rage, terror, and sorrow in the human heart that was beating under it. Villain! cried Mr. Pyncheon, shaking his clenched fist at Maule. You and the fiend together have robbed me of my daughter. Give her back, spawn of the old wizard, or you shall climb Gallows Hill in your grandfathers footsteps! Softly, Mr. Pyncheon! said the carpenter with scornful composure. Softly, an it please your worship, else you will spoil those rich laceruffles at your wrists! Is it my crime if you have sold your daughter for the mere hope of getting a sheet of yellow parchment into your clutch? There sits Mistress Alice quietly asleep. Now let Matthew Maule try whether she be as proud as the carpenter found her awhile since. He spoke, and Alice responded, with a soft, subdued, inward acquiescence, and a bending of her form towards him, like the flame of a torch when it indicates a gentle draught of air. He beckoned with his hand, and, rising from her chairblindly, but undoubtingly, as tending to her sure and inevitable centrethe proud Alice approached him. He waved her back, and, retreating, Alice sank again into her seat. She is mine! said Matthew Maule. Mine, by the right of the strongest spirit! In the further progress of the legend, there is a long, grotesque, and occasionally awestriking account of the carpenters incantations (if so they are to be called), with a view of discovering the lost document. It appears to have been his object to convert the mind of Alice into a kind of telescopic medium, through which Mr. Pyncheon and himself might obtain a glimpse into the spiritual world. He succeeded, accordingly, in holding an imperfect sort of intercourse, at one remove, with the departed personages in whose custody the so much valued secret had been carried beyond the precincts of earth. During her trance, Alice described three figures as being present to her spiritualized perception. One was an aged, dignified, sternlooking gentleman, clad as for a solemn festival in grave and costly attire, but with a great bloodstain on his richly wrought band; the second, an aged man, meanly dressed, with a dark and malign countenance, and a broken halter about his neck; the third, a person not so advanced in life as the former two, but beyond the middle age, wearing a coarse woollen tunic and leather breeches, and with a carpenters rule sticking out of his side pocket. These three visionary characters possessed a mutual knowledge of the missing document. One of them, in truthit was he with the bloodstain on his bandseemed, unless his gestures were misunderstood, to hold the parchment in his immediate keeping, but was prevented by his two partners in the mystery from disburdening himself of the trust. Finally, when he showed a purpose of shouting forth the secret loudly enough to be heard from his own sphere into that of mortals, his companions struggled with him, and pressed their hands over his mouth; and forthwithwhether that he were choked by it, or that the secret itself was of a crimson huethere was a fresh flow of blood upon his band. Upon this, the two meanly dressed figures mocked and jeered at the muchabashed old dignitary, and pointed their fingers at the stain. At this juncture, Maule turned to Mr. Pyncheon. It will never be allowed, said he. The custody of this secret, that would so enrich his heirs, makes part of your grandfathers retribution. He must choke with it until it is no longer of any value.

And keep you the House of the Seven Gables! It is too dear bought an inheritance, and too heavy with the curse upon it, to be shifted yet awhile from the Colonels posterity. Mr. Pyncheon tried to speak, butwhat with fear and passioncould make only a gurgling murmur in his throat. The carpenter smiled. Aha, worshipful sir!so you have old Maules blood to drink! said he jeeringly. Fiend in mans shape! why dost thou keep dominion over my child? cried Mr. Pyncheon, when his choked utterance could make way. Give me back my daughter. Then go thy ways; and may we never meet again! Your daughter! said Matthew Maule. Why, she is fairly mine! Nevertheless, not to be too hard with fair Mistress Alice, I will leave her in your keeping; but I do not warrant you that she shall never have occasion to remember Maule, the carpenter. He waved his hands with an upward motion; and, after a few repetitions of similar gestures, the beautiful Alice Pyncheon awoke from her strange trance. She awoke without the slightest recollection of her visionary experience; but as one losing herself in a momentary reverie, and returning to the consciousness of actual life, in almost as brief an interval as the downsinking flame of the hearth should quiver again up the chimney. On recognizing Matthew Maule, she assumed an air of somewhat cold but gentle dignity, the rather, as there was a certain peculiar smile on the carpenters visage that stirred the native pride of the fair Alice. So ended, for that time, the quest for the lost titledeed of the Pyncheon territory at the Eastward; nor, though often subsequently renewed, has it ever yet befallen a Pyncheon to set his eye upon that parchment. But, alas for the beautiful, the gentle, yet too haughty Alice! A power that she little dreamed of had laid its grasp upon her maiden soul. A will, most unlike her own, constrained her to do its grotesque and fantastic bidding. Her father as it proved, had martyred his poor child to an inordinate desire for measuring his land by miles instead of acres. And, therefore, while Alice Pyncheon lived, she was Maules slave, in a bondage more humiliating, a thousandfold, than that which binds its chain around the body. Seated by his humble fireside, Maule had but to wave his hand; and, wherever the proud lady chanced to bewhether in her chamber, or entertaining her fathers stately guests, or worshipping at churchwhatever her place or occupation, her spirit passed from beneath her own control, and bowed itself to Maule. Alice, laugh!the carpenter, beside his hearth, would say; or perhaps intensely will it, without a spoken word. And, even were it prayertime, or at a funeral, Alice must break into wild laughter. Alice, be sad!and, at the instant, down would come her tears, quenching all the mirth of those around her like sudden rain upon a bonfire. Alice, dance.and dance she would, not in such courtlike measures as she had learned abroad, but some highpaced jig, or hopskip rigadoon, befitting the brisk lasses at a rustic merrymaking. It seemed to be Maules impulse, not to ruin Alice, nor to visit her with any black or gigantic mischief, which would have crowned her sorrows with the grace of tragedy, but to wreak a low, ungenerous scorn upon her. Thus all the dignity of life was lost. She felt herself too much abased, and longed to change natures with some worm! One evening, at a bridal party (but not her own; for, so lost from selfcontrol, she would have deemed it sin to marry), poor Alice was beckoned forth by her unseen despot, and constrained, in her gossamer white dress and satin slippers, to hasten along the street to the mean dwelling of a laboringman. There was laughter and good cheer within; for Matthew Maule, that night, was to wed the laborers daughter, and had summoned proud Alice Pyncheon to wait upon his bride. And so she did; and when the twain were one, Alice awoke out of her enchanted sleep. Yet, no longer proudhumbly, and with a smile all steeped in sadnessshe kissed Maules wife, and went her way. It was an inclement night; the southeast wind drove the mingled snow and rain into her thinly sheltered bosom; her satin slippers were wet through and through, as she trod the muddy sidewalks. The next day a cold; soon, a settled cough; anon, a hectic cheek, a wasted form, that sat beside the harpsichord, and filled the house with music! Music in which a strain of the heavenly choristers was echoed! Oh, joy! For Alice had borne her last humiliation! Oh, greater joy! For Alice was penitent of her one earthly sin, and proud no more! The Pyncheons made a great funeral for Alice. The kith and kin were there, and the whole respectability of the town besides. But, last in the procession, came Matthew Maule, gnashing his teeth, as if he would have bitten his own heart in twainthe darkest and woefullest man that ever walked behind a corpse! He meant to humble Alice, not to kill her; but he had taken a womans delicate soul into his rude grip, to play withand she was dead! XIV Phoebes Goodbye Holgrave, plunging into his tale with the energy and absorption natural to a young author, had given a good deal of action to the parts capable of being developed and exemplified in that manner. He now observed that a certain remarkable drowsiness (wholly unlike that with which the reader possibly feels himself affected) had been flung over the senses of his auditress. It was the effect, unquestionably, of the mystic gesticulations by which he had sought to bring bodily before Phoebes perception the figure of the mesmerizing carpenter. With the lids drooping over her eyesnow lifted for an instant, and drawn down again as with leaden weightsshe leaned slightly towards him, and seemed almost to regulate her breath by his. Holgrave gazed at her, as he rolled up his manuscript, and recognized an incipient stage of that curious psychological condition which, as he had himself told Phoebe, he possessed more than an ordinary faculty of producing. A veil was beginning to be muffled about her, in which she could behold only him, and live only in his thoughts and emotions. His glance, as he fastened it on the young girl, grew involuntarily more concentrated; in his attitude there was the consciousness of power, investing his hardly mature figure with a dignity that did not belong to its physical manifestation. It was evident, that, with but one wave of his hand and a corresponding effort of his will, he could complete his mastery over Phoebes yet free and virgin spirit he could establish an influence over this good, pure, and simple child, as dangerous, and perhaps as disastrous, as that which the carpenter of his legend had acquired and exercised over the illfated Alice. To a disposition like Holgraves, at once speculative and active, there is no temptation so great as the opportunity of acquiring empire over the human spirit; nor any idea more seductive to a young man than to become the arbiter of a young girls destiny. Let us, thereforewhatever his defects of nature and education, and in spite of his scorn for creeds and institutionsconcede to the daguerreotypist the rare and high quality of reverence for anothers individuality. Let us allow him integrity, also, forever after to be confided in; since he forbade himself to twine that one link more which might have rendered his spell over Phoebe indissoluble. He made a slight gesture upward with his hand. You really mortify me, my dear Miss Phoebe! he exclaimed, smiling halfsarcastically at her. My poor story, it is but too evident, will never do for Godey or Graham! Only think of your falling asleep at what I hoped the newspaper critics would pronounce a most brilliant, powerful, imaginative, pathetic, and original winding up! Well, the manuscript must serve to light lamps with;if, indeed, being so imbued with my gentle dullness, it is any longer capable of flame! Me asleep! How can you say so? answered Phoebe, as unconscious of the crisis through which she had passed as an infant of the precipice to the verge of which it has rolled. No, no! I consider myself as having been very attentive; and, though I dont remember the incidents quite distinctly, yet I have an impression of a vast deal of trouble and calamityso, no doubt, the story will prove exceedingly attractive. By this time the sun had gone down, and was tinting the clouds towards the zenith with those bright hues which are not seen there until some time after sunset, and when the horizon has quite lost its richer brilliancy. The moon, too, which had long been climbing overhead, and unobtrusively melting its disk into the azurelike an ambitious demagogue, who hides his aspiring purpose by assuming the prevalent hue of popular sentimentnow began to shine out, broad and oval, in its middle pathway. These silvery beams were already powerful enough to change the character of the lingering daylight. They softened and embellished the aspect of the old house; although the shadows fell deeper into the angles of its many gables, and lay brooding under the projecting story, and within the halfopen door. With the lapse of every moment, the garden grew more picturesque; the fruittrees, shrubbery, and flowerbushes had a dark obscurity among them. The commonplace characteristicswhich, at noontide, it seemed to have taken a century of sordid life to accumulatewere now transfigured by a charm of romance. A hundred mysterious years were whispering among the leaves, whenever the slight seabreeze found its way thither and stirred them. Through the foliage that roofed the little summerhouse the moonlight flickered to and fro, and fell silvery white on the dark floor, the table, and the circular bench, with a continual shift and play, according as the chinks and wayward crevices among the twigs admitted or shut out the glimmer. So sweetly cool was the atmosphere, after all the feverish day, that the summer eve might be fancied as sprinkling dews and liquid moonlight, with a dash of icy temper in them, out of a silver vase. Here and there, a few drops of this freshness were scattered on a human heart, and gave it youth again, and sympathy with the eternal youth of nature. The artist chanced to be one on whom the reviving influence fell. It made him feelwhat he sometimes almost forgot, thrust so early as he had been into the rude struggle of man with manhow youthful he still was. It seems to me, he observed, that I never watched the coming of so beautiful an eve, and never felt anything so very much like happiness as at this moment. After all, what a good world we live in! How good, and beautiful! How young it is, too, with nothing really rotten or ageworn in it! This old house, for example, which sometimes has positively oppressed my breath with its smell of decaying timber! And this garden, where the black mould always clings to my spade, as if I were a sexton delving in a graveyard! Could I keep the feeling that now possesses me, the garden would every day be virgin soil, with the earths first freshness in the flavor of its beans and squashes; and the house!it would be like a bower in Eden, blossoming with the earliest roses that God ever made. Moonlight, and the sentiment in mans heart responsive to it, are the greatest of renovators and reformers. And all other reform and renovation, I suppose, will prove to be no better than moonshine! I have been happier than I am now; at least, much gayer, said Phoebe thoughtfully. Yet I am sensible of a great charm in this brightening moonlight; and I love to watch how the day, tired as it is, lags away reluctantly, and hates to be called yesterday so soon. I never cared much about moonlight before. What is there, I wonder, so beautiful in it, tonight? And you have never felt it before? inquired the artist, looking earnestly at the girl through the twilight. Never, answered Phoebe; and life does not look the same, now that I have felt it so. It seems as if I had looked at everything, hitherto, in broad daylight, or else in the ruddy light of a cheerful fire, glimmering and dancing through a room. Ah, poor me! she added, with a halfmelancholy laugh. I shall never be so merry as before I knew Cousin Hepzibah and poor Cousin Clifford. I have grown a great deal older, in this little time. Older, and, I hope, wiser, andnot exactly sadderbut, certainly, with not half so much lightness in my spirits! I have given them my sunshine, and have been glad to give it; but, of course, I cannot both give and keep it. They are welcome, notwithstanding! You have lost nothing, Phoebe, worth keeping, nor which it was possible to keep, said Holgrave after a pause. Our first youth is of no value; for we are never conscious of it until after it is gone. But sometimesalways, I suspect, unless one is exceedingly unfortunatethere comes a sense of second youth, gushing out of the hearts joy at being in love; or, possibly, it may come to crown some other grand festival in life, if any other such there be. This bemoaning of ones self (as you do now) over the first, careless, shallow gayety of youth departed, and this profound happiness at youth regainedso much deeper and richer than that we lostare essential to the souls development. In some cases, the two states come almost simultaneously, and mingle the sadness and the rapture in one mysterious emotion. I hardly think I understand you, said Phoebe. No wonder, replied Holgrave, smiling; for I have told you a secret which I hardly began to know before I found myself giving it utterance. Remember it, however; and when the truth becomes clear to you, then think of this moonlight scene! It is entirely moonlight now, except only a little flush of faint crimson, upward from the west, between those buildings, remarked Phoebe. I must go in. Cousin Hepzibah is not quick at figures, and will give herself a headache over the days accounts, unless I help her. But Holgrave detained her a little longer. Miss Hepzibah tells me, observed he, that you return to the country in a few days. Yes, but only for a little while, answered Phoebe; for I look upon this as my present home. I go to make a few arrangements, and to take a more deliberate leave of my mother and friends. It is pleasant to live where one is much desired and very useful; and I think I may have the satisfaction of feeling myself so here. You surely may, and more than you imagine, said the artist. Whatever health, comfort, and natural life exists in the house is embodied in your person. These blessings came along with you, and will vanish when you leave the threshold. Miss Hepzibah, by secluding herself from society, has lost all true relation with it, and is, in fact, dead; although she galvanizes herself into a semblance of life, and stands behind her counter, afflicting the world with a greatlytobedeprecated scowl. Your poor cousin Clifford is another dead and longburied person, on whom the governor and council have wrought a necromantic miracle. I should not wonder if he were to crumble away, some morning, after you are gone, and nothing be seen of him more, except a heap of dust. Miss Hepzibah, at any rate, will lose what little flexibility she has. They both exist by you. I should be very sorry to think so, answered Phoebe gravely. But it is true that my small abilities were precisely what they needed; and I have a real interest in their welfarean odd kind of motherly sentimentwhich I wish you would not laugh at! And let me tell you frankly, Mr. Holgrave, I am sometimes puzzled to know whether you wish them well or ill. Undoubtedly, said the daguerreotypist, I do feel an interest in this antiquated, povertystricken old maiden lady, and this degraded and shattered gentlemanthis abortive lover of the beautiful. A kindly interest, too, helpless old children that they are! But you have no conception what a different kind of heart mine is from your own. It is not my impulse, as regards these two individuals, either to help or hinder; but to look on, to analyze, to explain matters to myself, and to comprehend the drama which, for almost two hundred years, has been dragging its slow length over the ground where you and I now tread. If permitted to witness the close, I doubt not to derive a moral satisfaction from it, go matters how they may. There is a conviction within me that the end draws nigh. But, though Providence sent you hither to help, and sends me only as a privileged and meet spectator, I pledge myself to lend these unfortunate beings whatever aid I can! I wish you would speak more plainly, cried Phoebe, perplexed and displeased; and, above all, that you would feel more like a Christian and a human being! How is it possible to see people in distress without desiring, more than anything else, to help and comfort them? You talk as if this old house were a theatre; and you seem to look at Hepzibahs and Cliffords misfortunes, and those of generations before them, as a tragedy, such as I have seen acted in the hall of a country hotel, only the present one appears to be played exclusively for your amusement. I do not like this. The play costs the performers too much, and the audience is too coldhearted. You are severe, said Holgrave, compelled to recognize a degree of truth in the piquant sketch of his own mood. And then, continued Phoebe, what can you mean by your conviction, which you tell me of, that the end is drawing near? Do you know of any new trouble hanging over my poor relatives? If so, tell me at once, and I will not leave them! Forgive me, Phoebe! said the daguerreotypist, holding out his hand, to which the girl was constrained to yield her own. I am somewhat of a mystic, it must be confessed. The tendency is in my blood, together with the faculty of mesmerism, which might have brought me to Gallows Hill, in the good old times of witchcraft. Believe me, if I were really aware of any secret, the disclosure of which would benefit your friendswho are my own friends, likewiseyou should learn it before we part. But I have no such knowledge. You hold something back! said Phoebe. Nothingno secrets but my own, answered Holgrave. I can perceive, indeed, that Judge Pyncheon still keeps his eye on Clifford, in whose ruin he had so large a share. His motives and intentions, however are a mystery to me. He is a determined and relentless man, with the genuine character of an inquisitor; and had he any object to gain by putting Clifford to the rack, I verily believe that he would wrench his joints from their sockets, in order to accomplish it. But, so wealthy and eminent as he isso powerful in his own strength, and in the support of society on all sideswhat can Judge Pyncheon have to hope or fear from the imbecile, branded, halftorpid Clifford? Yet, urged Phoebe, you did speak as if misfortune were impending! Oh, that was because I am morbid! replied the artist. My mind has a twist aside, like almost everybodys mind, except your own. Moreover, it is so strange to find myself an inmate of this old Pyncheon House, and sitting in this old garden(hark, how Maules well is murmuring!)that, were it only for this one circumstance, I cannot help fancying that Destiny is arranging its fifth act for a catastrophe. There! cried Phoebe with renewed vexation; for she was by nature as hostile to mystery as the sunshine to a dark corner. You puzzle me more than ever! Then let us part friends! said Holgrave, pressing her hand. Or, if not friends, let us part before you entirely hate me. You, who love everybody else in the world! Goodbye, then, said Phoebe frankly. I do not mean to be angry a great while, and should be sorry to have you think so. There has Cousin Hepzibah been standing in the shadow of the doorway, this quarter of an hour past! She thinks I stay too long in the damp garden. So, good night, and goodbye. On the second morning thereafter, Phoebe might have been seen, in her straw bonnet, with a shawl on one arm and a little carpetbag on the other, bidding adieu to Hepzibah and Cousin Clifford. She was to take a seat in the next train of cars, which would transport her to within half a dozen miles of her country village. The tears were in Phoebes eyes; a smile, dewy with affectionate regret, was glimmering around her pleasant mouth. She wondered how it came to pass, that her life of a few weeks, here in this heavyhearted old mansion, had taken such hold of her, and so melted into her associations, as now to seem a more important centrepoint of remembrance than all which had gone before. How had Hepzibahgrim, silent, and irresponsive to her overflow of cordial sentimentcontrived to win so much love? And Cliffordin his abortive decay, with the mystery of fearful crime upon him, and the close prisonatmosphere yet lurking in his breathhow had he transformed himself into the simplest child, whom Phoebe felt bound to watch over, and be, as it were, the providence of his unconsidered hours! Everything, at that instant of farewell, stood out prominently to her view. Look where she would, lay her hand on what she might, the object responded to her consciousness, as if a moist human heart were in it. She peeped from the window into the garden, and felt herself more regretful at leaving this spot of black earth, vitiated with such an agelong growth of weeds, than joyful at the idea of again scenting her pine forests and fresh cloverfields. She called Chanticleer, his two wives, and the venerable chicken, and threw them some crumbs of bread from the breakfasttable. These being hastily gobbled up, the chicken spread its wings, and alighted close by Phoebe on the windowsill, where it looked gravely into her face and vented its emotions in a croak. Phoebe bade it be a good old chicken during her absence, and promised to bring it a little bag of buckwheat. Ah, Phoebe! remarked Hepzibah, you do not smile so naturally as when you came to us! Then, the smile chose to shine out; now, you choose it should. It is well that you are going back, for a little while, into your native air. There has been too much weight on your spirits. The house is too gloomy and lonesome; the shop is full of vexations; and as for me, I have no faculty of making things look brighter than they are. Dear Clifford has been your only comfort! Come hither, Phoebe, suddenly cried her cousin Clifford, who had said very little all the morning. Close!closer!and look me in the face! Phoebe put one of her small hands on each elbow of his chair, and leaned her face towards him, so that he might peruse it as carefully as he would. It is probable that the latent emotions of this parting hour had revived, in some degree, his bedimmed and enfeebled faculties. At any rate, Phoebe soon felt that, if not the profound insight of a seer, yet a more than feminine delicacy of appreciation, was making her heart the subject of its regard. A moment before, she had known nothing which she would have sought to hide. Now, as if some secret were hinted to her own consciousness through the medium of anothers perception, she was fain to let her eyelids droop beneath Cliffords gaze. A blush, toothe redder, because she strove hard to keep it downascended bigger and higher, in a tide of fitful progress, until even her brow was all suffused with it. It is enough, Phoebe, said Clifford, with a melancholy smile. When I first saw you, you were the prettiest little maiden in the world; and now you have deepened into beauty. Girlhood has passed into womanhood; the bud is a bloom! Go, nowI feel lonelier than I did. Phoebe took leave of the desolate couple, and passed through the shop, twinkling her eyelids to shake off a dewdrop; forconsidering how brief her absence was to be, and therefore the folly of being cast down about itshe would not so far acknowledge her tears as to dry them with her handkerchief. On the doorstep, she met the little urchin whose marvellous feats of gastronomy have been recorded in the earlier pages of our narrative. She took from the window some specimen or other of natural historyher eyes being too dim with moisture to inform her accurately whether it was a rabbit or a hippopotamusput it into the childs hand as a parting gift, and went her way. Old Uncle Venner was just coming out of his door, with a woodhorse and saw on his shoulder; and, trudging along the street, he scrupled not to keep company with Phoebe, so far as their paths lay together; nor, in spite of his patched coat and rusty beaver, and the curious fashion of his towcloth trousers, could she find it in her heart to outwalk him. We shall miss you, next Sabbath afternoon, observed the street philosopher. It is unaccountable how little while it takes some folks to grow just as natural to a man as his own breath; and, begging your pardon, Miss Phoebe (though there can be no offence in an old mans saying it), thats just what youve grown to me! My years have been a great many, and your life is but just beginning; and yet, you are somehow as familiar to me as if I had found you at my mothers door, and you had blossomed, like a running vine, all along my pathway since. Come back soon, or I shall be gone to my farm; for I begin to find these woodsawing jobs a little too tough for my backache. Very soon, Uncle Venner, replied Phoebe. And let it be all the sooner, Phoebe, for the sake of those poor souls yonder, continued her companion. They can never do without you, nownever, Phoebe; neverno more than if one of Gods angels had been living with them, and making their dismal house pleasant and comfortable! Dont it seem to you theyd be in a sad case, if, some pleasant summer morning like this, the angel should spread his wings, and fly to the place he came from? Well, just so they feel, now that youre going home by the railroad! They cant bear it, Miss Phoebe; so be sure to come back! I am no angel, Uncle Venner, said Phoebe, smiling, as she offered him her hand at the streetcorner. But, I suppose, people never feel so much like angels as when they are doing what little good they may. So I shall certainly come back! Thus parted the old man and the rosy girl; and Phoebe took the wings of the morning, and was soon flitting almost as rapidly away as if endowed with the aerial locomotion of the angels to whom Uncle Venner had so graciously compared her. XV The Scowl and Smile Several days passed over the Seven Gables, heavily and drearily enough. In fact (not to attribute the whole gloom of sky and earth to the one inauspicious circumstance of Phoebes departure), an easterly storm had set in, and indefatigably applied itself to the task of making the black roof and walls of the old house look more cheerless than ever before. Yet was the outside not half so cheerless as the interior. Poor Clifford was cut off, at once, from all his scanty resources of enjoyment. Phoebe was not there; nor did the sunshine fall upon the floor. The garden, with its muddy walks, and the chill, dripping foliage of its summerhouse, was an image to be shuddered at. Nothing flourished in the cold, moist, pitiless atmosphere, drifting with the brackish scud of seabreezes, except the moss along the joints of the shingleroof, and the great bunch of weeds, that had lately been suffering from drought, in the angle between the two front gables. As for Hepzibah, she seemed not merely possessed with the east wind, but to be, in her very person, only another phase of this gray and sullen spell of weather; the EastWind itself, grim and disconsolate, in a rusty black silk gown, and with a turban of cloudwreaths on its head. The custom of the shop fell off, because a story got abroad that she soured her small beer and other damageable commodities, by scowling on them. It is, perhaps, true that the public had something reasonably to complain of in her deportment; but towards Clifford she was neither illtempered nor unkind, nor felt less warmth of heart than always, had it been possible to make it reach him. The inutility of her best efforts, however, palsied the poor old gentlewoman. She could do little else than sit silently in a corner of the room, when the wet peartree branches, sweeping across the small windows, created a noonday dusk, which Hepzibah unconsciously darkened with her woebegone aspect. It was no fault of Hepzibahs. Everythingeven the old chairs and tables, that had known what weather was for three or four such lifetimes as her ownlooked as damp and chill as if the present were their worst experience. The picture of the Puritan Colonel shivered on the wall. The house itself shivered, from every attic of its seven gables down to the great kitchen fireplace, which served all the better as an emblem of the mansions heart, because, though built for warmth, it was now so comfortless and empty. Hepzibah attempted to enliven matters by a fire in the parlor. But the storm demon kept watch above, and, whenever a flame was kindled, drove the smoke back again, choking the chimneys sooty throat with its own breath. Nevertheless, during four days of this miserable storm, Clifford wrapt himself in an old cloak, and occupied his customary chair. On the morning of the fifth, when summoned to breakfast, he responded only by a brokenhearted murmur, expressive of a determination not to leave his bed. His sister made no attempt to change his purpose. In fact, entirely as she loved him, Hepzibah could hardly have borne any longer the wretched dutyso impracticable by her few and rigid facultiesof seeking pastime for a still sensitive, but ruined mind, critical and fastidious, without force or volition. It was at least something short of positive despair, that today she might sit shivering alone, and not suffer continually a new grief, and unreasonable pang of remorse, at every fitful sigh of her fellow sufferer. But Clifford, it seemed, though he did not make his appearance below stairs, had, after all, bestirred himself in quest of amusement. In the course of the forenoon, Hepzibah heard a note of music, which (there being no other tuneful contrivance in the House of the Seven Gables) she knew must proceed from Alice Pyncheons harpsichord. She was aware that Clifford, in his youth, had possessed a cultivated taste for music, and a considerable degree of skill in its practice. It was difficult, however, to conceive of his retaining an accomplishment to which daily exercise is so essential, in the measure indicated by the sweet, airy, and delicate, though most melancholy strain, that now stole upon her ear. Nor was it less marvellous that the longsilent instrument should be capable of so much melody. Hepzibah involuntarily thought of the ghostly harmonies, prelusive of death in the family, which were attributed to the legendary Alice. But it was, perhaps, proof of the agency of other than spiritual fingers, that, after a few touches, the chords seemed to snap asunder with their own vibrations, and the music ceased. But a harsher sound succeeded to the mysterious notes; nor was the easterly day fated to pass without an event sufficient in itself to poison, for Hepzibah and Clifford, the balmiest air that ever brought the hummingbirds along with it. The final echoes of Alice Pyncheons performance (or Cliffords, if his we must consider it) were driven away by no less vulgar a dissonance than the ringing of the shopbell. A foot was heard scraping itself on the threshold, and thence somewhat ponderously stepping on the floor. Hepzibah delayed a moment, while muffling herself in a faded shawl, which had been her defensive armor in a forty years warfare against the east wind. A characteristic sound, howeverneither a cough nor a hem, but a kind of rumbling and reverberating spasm in somebodys capacious depth of chest;impelled her to hurry forward, with that aspect of fierce faintheartedness so common to women in cases of perilous emergency. Few of her sex, on such occasions, have ever looked so terrible as our poor scowling Hepzibah.

But the visitor quietly closed the shopdoor behind him, stood up his umbrella against the counter, and turned a visage of composed benignity, to meet the alarm and anger which his appearance had excited. Hepzibahs presentiment had not deceived her. It was no other than Judge Pyncheon, who, after in vain trying the front door, had now effected his entrance into the shop. How do you do, Cousin Hepzibah?and how does this most inclement weather affect our poor Clifford? began the Judge; and wonderful it seemed, indeed, that the easterly storm was not put to shame, or, at any rate, a little mollified, by the genial benevolence of his smile. I could not rest without calling to ask, once more, whether I can in any manner promote his comfort, or your own. You can do nothing, said Hepzibah, controlling her agitation as well as she could. I devote myself to Clifford. He has every comfort which his situation admits of. But allow me to suggest, dear cousin, rejoined the Judge, you errin all affection and kindness, no doubt, and with the very best intentionsbut you do err, nevertheless, in keeping your brother so secluded. Why insulate him thus from all sympathy and kindness? Clifford, alas! has had too much of solitude. Now let him try societythe society, that is to say, of kindred and old friends. Let me, for instance, but see Clifford, and I will answer for the good effect of the interview. You cannot see him, answered Hepzibah. Clifford has kept his bed since yesterday. What! How! Is he ill? exclaimed Judge Pyncheon, starting with what seemed to be angry alarm; for the very frown of the old Puritan darkened through the room as he spoke. Nay, then, I must and will see him! What if he should die? He is in no danger of death, said Hepzibahand added, with bitterness that she could repress no longer, none; unless he shall be persecuted to death, now, by the same man who long ago attempted it! Cousin Hepzibah, said the Judge, with an impressive earnestness of manner, which grew even to tearful pathos as he proceeded, is it possible that you do not perceive how unjust, how unkind, how unchristian, is this constant, this longcontinued bitterness against me, for a part which I was constrained by duty and conscience, by the force of law, and at my own peril, to act? What did I do, in detriment to Clifford, which it was possible to leave undone? How could you, his sisterif, for your neverending sorrow, as it has been for mine, you had known what I didhave, shown greater tenderness? And do you think, cousin, that it has cost me no pang?that it has left no anguish in my bosom, from that day to this, amidst all the prosperity with which Heaven has blessed me?or that I do not now rejoice, when it is deemed consistent with the dues of public justice and the welfare of society that this dear kinsman, this early friend, this nature so delicately and beautifully constitutedso unfortunate, let us pronounce him, and forbear to say, so guiltythat our own Clifford, in fine, should be given back to life, and its possibilities of enjoyment? Ah, you little know me, Cousin Hepzibah! You little know this heart! It now throbs at the thought of meeting him! There lives not the human being (except yourselfand you not more than I) who has shed so many tears for Cliffords calamity. You behold some of them now. There is none who would so delight to promote his happiness! Try me, Hepzibah!try me, Cousin!try the man whom you have treated as your enemy and Cliffords!try Jaffrey Pyncheon, and you shall find him true, to the hearts core! In the name of Heaven, cried Hepzibah, provoked only to intenser indignation by this outgush of the inestimable tenderness of a stern naturein Gods name, whom you insult, and whose power I could almost question, since he hears you utter so many false words without palsying your tonguegive over, I beseech you, this loathsome pretence of affection for your victim! You hate him! Say so, like a man! You cherish, at this moment, some black purpose against him in your heart! Speak it out, at once!or, if you hope so to promote it better, hide it till you can triumph in its success! But never speak again of your love for my poor brother. I cannot bear it! It will drive me beyond a womans decency! It will drive me mad! Forbear! Not another word! It will make me spurn you! For once, Hepzibahs wrath had given her courage. She had spoken. But, after all, was this unconquerable distrust of Judge Pyncheons integrity, and this utter denial, apparently, of his claim to stand in the ring of human sympathieswere they founded in any just perception of his character, or merely the offspring of a womans unreasonable prejudice, deduced from nothing? The Judge, beyond all question, was a man of eminent respectability. The church acknowledged it; the state acknowledged it. It was denied by nobody. In all the very extensive sphere of those who knew him, whether in his public or private capacities, there was not an individualexcept Hepzibah, and some lawless mystic, like the daguerreotypist, and, possibly, a few political opponentswho would have dreamed of seriously disputing his claim to a high and honorable place in the worlds regard. Nor (we must do him the further justice to say) did Judge Pyncheon himself, probably, entertain many or very frequent doubts, that his enviable reputation accorded with his deserts. His conscience, therefore, usually considered the surest witness to a mans integrityhis conscience, unless it might be for the little space of five minutes in the twentyfour hours, or, now and then, some black day in the whole years circlehis conscience bore an accordant testimony with the worlds laudatory voice. And yet, strong as this evidence may seem to be, we should hesitate to peril our own conscience on the assertion, that the Judge and the consenting world were right, and that poor Hepzibah with her solitary prejudice was wrong. Hidden from mankindforgotten by himself, or buried so deeply under a sculptured and ornamented pile of ostentatious deeds that his daily life could take no note of itthere may have lurked some evil and unsightly thing. Nay, we could almost venture to say, further, that a daily guilt might have been acted by him, continually renewed, and reddening forth afresh, like the miraculous bloodstain of a murder, without his necessarily and at every moment being aware of it. Men of strong minds, great force of character, and a hard texture of the sensibilities, are very capable of falling into mistakes of this kind. They are ordinarily men to whom forms are of paramount importance. Their field of action lies among the external phenomena of life. They possess vast ability in grasping, and arranging, and appropriating to themselves, the big, heavy, solid unrealities, such as gold, landed estate, offices of trust and emolument, and public honors. With these materials, and with deeds of goodly aspect, done in the public eye, an individual of this class builds up, as it were, a tall and stately edifice, which, in the view of other people, and ultimately in his own view, is no other than the mans character, or the man himself. Behold, therefore, a palace! Its splendid halls and suites of spacious apartments are floored with a mosaicwork of costly marbles; its windows, the whole height of each room, admit the sunshine through the most transparent of plateglass; its high cornices are gilded, and its ceilings gorgeously painted; and a lofty domethrough which, from the central pavement, you may gaze up to the sky, as with no obstructing medium betweensurmounts the whole. With what fairer and nobler emblem could any man desire to shadow forth his character? Ah! but in some low and obscure nooksome narrow closet on the groundfloor, shut, locked and bolted, and the key flung awayor beneath the marble pavement, in a stagnant waterpuddle, with the richest pattern of mosaicwork abovemay lie a corpse, half decayed, and still decaying, and diffusing its deathscent all through the palace! The inhabitant will not be conscious of it, for it has long been his daily breath! Neither will the visitors, for they smell only the rich odors which the master sedulously scatters through the palace, and the incense which they bring, and delight to burn before him! Now and then, perchance, comes in a seer, before whose sadly gifted eye the whole structure melts into thin air, leaving only the hidden nook, the bolted closet, with the cobwebs festooned over its forgotten door, or the deadly hole under the pavement, and the decaying corpse within. Here, then, we are to seek the true emblem of the mans character, and of the deed that gives whatever reality it possesses to his life. And, beneath the show of a marble palace, that pool of stagnant water, foul with many impurities, and, perhaps, tinged with bloodthat secret abomination, above which, possibly, he may say his prayers, without remembering itis this mans miserable soul! To apply this train of remark somewhat more closely to Judge Pyncheon. We might say (without in the least imputing crime to a personage of his eminent respectability) that there was enough of splendid rubbish in his life to cover up and paralyze a more active and subtle conscience than the Judge was ever troubled with. The purity of his judicial character, while on the bench; the faithfulness of his public service in subsequent capacities; his devotedness to his party, and the rigid consistency with which he had adhered to its principles, or, at all events, kept pace with its organized movements; his remarkable zeal as president of a Bible society; his unimpeachable integrity as treasurer of a widows and orphans fund; his benefits to horticulture, by producing two much esteemed varieties of the pear and to agriculture, through the agency of the famous Pyncheon bull; the cleanliness of his moral deportment, for a great many years past; the severity with which he had frowned upon, and finally cast off, an expensive and dissipated son, delaying forgiveness until within the final quarter of an hour of the young mans life; his prayers at morning and eventide, and graces at mealtime; his efforts in furtherance of the temperance cause; his confining himself, since the last attack of the gout, to five diurnal glasses of old sherry wine; the snowy whiteness of his linen, the polish of his boots, the handsomeness of his goldheaded cane, the square and roomy fashion of his coat, and the fineness of its material, and, in general, the studied propriety of his dress and equipment; the scrupulousness with which he paid public notice, in the street, by a bow, a lifting of the hat, a nod, or a motion of the hand, to all and sundry of his acquaintances, rich or poor; the smile of broad benevolence wherewith he made it a point to gladden the whole worldwhat room could possibly be found for darker traits in a portrait made up of lineaments like these? This proper face was what he beheld in the lookingglass. This admirably arranged life was what he was conscious of in the progress of every day. Then might not he claim to be its result and sum, and say to himself and the community, Behold Judge Pyncheon there? And allowing that, many, many years ago, in his early and reckless youth, he had committed some one wrong actor that, even now, the inevitable force of circumstances should occasionally make him do one questionable deed among a thousand praiseworthy, or, at least, blameless oneswould you characterize the Judge by that one necessary deed, and that halfforgotten act, and let it overshadow the fair aspect of a lifetime? What is there so ponderous in evil, that a thumbs bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil which were heaped into the other scale! This scale and balance system is a favorite one with people of Judge Pyncheons brotherhood. A hard, cold man, thus unfortunately situated, seldom or never looking inward, and resolutely taking his idea of himself from what purports to be his image as reflected in the mirror of public opinion, can scarcely arrive at true selfknowledge, except through loss of property and reputation. Sickness will not always help him do it; not always the deathhour! But our affair now is with Judge Pyncheon as he stood confronting the fierce outbreak of Hepzibahs wrath. Without premeditation, to her own surprise, and indeed terror, she had given vent, for once, to the inveteracy of her resentment, cherished against this kinsman for thirty years. Thus far the Judges countenance had expressed mild forbearancegrave and almost gentle deprecation of his cousins unbecoming violencefree and Christianlike forgiveness of the wrong inflicted by her words. But when those words were irrevocably spoken, his look assumed sternness, the sense of power, and immitigable resolve; and this with so natural and imperceptible a change, that it seemed as if the iron man had stood there from the first, and the meek man not at all. The effect was as when the light, vapory clouds, with their soft coloring, suddenly vanish from the stony brow of a precipitous mountain, and leave there the frown which you at once feel to be eternal. Hepzibah almost adopted the insane belief that it was her old Puritan ancestor, and not the modern Judge, on whom she had just been wreaking the bitterness of her heart. Never did a man show stronger proof of the lineage attributed to him than Judge Pyncheon, at this crisis, by his unmistakable resemblance to the picture in the inner room. Cousin Hepzibah, said he very calmly, it is time to have done with this. With all my heart! answered she. Then, why do you persecute us any longer? Leave poor Clifford and me in peace. Neither of us desires anything better! It is my purpose to see Clifford before I leave this house, continued the Judge. Do not act like a madwoman, Hepzibah! I am his only friend, and an allpowerful one. Has it never occurred to youare you so blind as not to have seenthat, without not merely my consent, but my efforts, my representations, the exertion of my whole influence, political, official, personal, Clifford would never have been what you call free? Did you think his release a triumph over me? Not so, my good cousin; not so, by any means! The furthest possible from that! No; but it was the accomplishment of a purpose long entertained on my part. I set him free! You! answered Hepzibah. I never will believe it! He owed his dungeon to you; his freedom to Gods providence! I set him free! reaffirmed Judge Pyncheon, with the calmest composure. And I came hither now to decide whether he shall retain his freedom. It will depend upon himself. For this purpose, I must see him. Never!it would drive him mad! exclaimed Hepzibah, but with an irresoluteness sufficiently perceptible to the keen eye of the Judge; for, without the slightest faith in his good intentions, she knew not whether there was most to dread in yielding or resistance. And why should you wish to see this wretched, broken man, who retains hardly a fraction of his intellect, and will hide even that from an eye which has no love in it? He shall see love enough in mine, if that be all! said the Judge, with wellgrounded confidence in the benignity of his aspect. But, Cousin Hepzibah, you confess a great deal, and very much to the purpose. Now, listen, and I will frankly explain my reasons for insisting on this interview. At the death, thirty years since, of our uncle Jaffrey, it was foundI know not whether the circumstance ever attracted much of your attention, among the sadder interests that clustered round that eventbut it was found that his visible estate, of every kind, fell far short of any estimate ever made of it. He was supposed to be immensely rich. Nobody doubted that he stood among the weightiest men of his day. It was one of his eccentricities, howeverand not altogether a folly, neitherto conceal the amount of his property by making distant and foreign investments, perhaps under other names than his own, and by various means, familiar enough to capitalists, but unnecessary here to be specified. By Uncle Jaffreys last will and testament, as you are aware, his entire property was bequeathed to me, with the single exception of a life interest to yourself in this old family mansion, and the strip of patrimonial estate remaining attached to it. And do you seek to deprive us of that? asked Hepzibah, unable to restrain her bitter contempt. Is this your price for ceasing to persecute poor Clifford? Certainly not, my dear cousin! answered the Judge, smiling benevolently. On the contrary, as you must do me the justice to own, I have constantly expressed my readiness to double or treble your resources, whenever you should make up your mind to accept any kindness of that nature at the hands of your kinsman. No, no! But here lies the gist of the matter. Of my uncles unquestionably great estate, as I have said, not the halfno, not one third, as I am fully convincedwas apparent after his death. Now, I have the best possible reasons for believing that your brother Clifford can give me a clue to the recovery of the remainder. Clifford!Clifford know of any hidden wealth? Clifford have it in his power to make you rich? cried the old gentlewoman, affected with a sense of something like ridicule at the idea. Impossible! You deceive yourself! It is really a thing to laugh at! It is as certain as that I stand here! said Judge Pyncheon, striking his goldheaded cane on the floor, and at the same time stamping his foot, as if to express his conviction the more forcibly by the whole emphasis of his substantial person. Clifford told me so himself! No, no! exclaimed Hepzibah incredulously. You are dreaming, Cousin Jaffrey. I do not belong to the dreaming class of men, said the Judge quietly. Some months before my uncles death, Clifford boasted to me of the possession of the secret of incalculable wealth. His purpose was to taunt me, and excite my curiosity. I know it well. But, from a pretty distinct recollection of the particulars of our conversation, I am thoroughly convinced that there was truth in what he said. Clifford, at this moment, if he choosesand choose he must!can inform me where to find the schedule, the documents, the evidences, in whatever shape they exist, of the vast amount of Uncle Jaffreys missing property. He has the secret. His boast was no idle word. It had a directness, an emphasis, a particularity, that showed a backbone of solid meaning within the mystery of his expression. But what could have been Cliffords object, asked Hepzibah, in concealing it so long? It was one of the bad impulses of our fallen nature, replied the Judge, turning up his eyes. He looked upon me as his enemy. He considered me as the cause of his overwhelming disgrace, his imminent peril of death, his irretrievable ruin. There was no great probability, therefore, of his volunteering information, out of his dungeon, that should elevate me still higher on the ladder of prosperity. But the moment has now come when he must give up his secret. And what if he should refuse? inquired Hepzibah. Oras I steadfastly believewhat if he has no knowledge of this wealth? My dear cousin, said Judge Pyncheon, with a quietude which he had the power of making more formidable than any violence, since your brothers return, I have taken the precaution (a highly proper one in the near kinsman and natural guardian of an individual so situated) to have his deportment and habits constantly and carefully overlooked. Your neighbors have been eyewitnesses to whatever has passed in the garden. The butcher, the baker, the fishmonger, some of the customers of your shop, and many a prying old woman, have told me several of the secrets of your interior. A still larger circleI myself, among the restcan testify to his extravagances at the arched window. Thousands beheld him, a week or two ago, on the point of flinging himself thence into the street. From all this testimony, I am led to apprehendreluctantly, and with deep griefthat Cliffords misfortunes have so affected his intellect, never very strong, that he cannot safely remain at large. The alternative, you must be awareand its adoption will depend entirely on the decision which I am now about to makethe alternative is his confinement, probably for the remainder of his life, in a public asylum for persons in his unfortunate state of mind. You cannot mean it! shrieked Hepzibah. Should my cousin Clifford, continued Judge Pyncheon, wholly undisturbed, from mere malice, and hatred of one whose interests ought naturally to be dear to hima mode of passion that, as often as any other, indicates mental diseaseshould he refuse me the information so important to myself, and which he assuredly possesses, I shall consider it the one needed jot of evidence to satisfy my mind of his insanity. And, once sure of the course pointed out by conscience, you know me too well, Cousin Hepzibah, to entertain a doubt that I shall pursue it. O JaffreyCousin Jaffrey, cried Hepzibah mournfully, not passionately, it is you that are diseased in mind, not Clifford! You have forgotten that a woman was your mother!that you have had sisters, brothers, children of your own!or that there ever was affection between man and man, or pity from one man to another, in this miserable world! Else, how could you have dreamed of this? You are not young, Cousin Jaffrey!no, nor middleagedbut already an old man! The hair is white upon your head! How many years have you to live? Are you not rich enough for that little time? Shall you be hungryshall you lack clothes, or a roof to shelter youbetween this point and the grave? No! but, with the half of what you now possess, you could revel in costly food and wines, and build a house twice as splendid as you now inhabit, and make a far greater show to the worldand yet leave riches to your only son, to make him bless the hour of your death! Then, why should you do this cruel, cruel thing?so mad a thing, that I know not whether to call it wicked! Alas, Cousin Jaffrey, this hard and grasping spirit has run in our blood these two hundred years. You are but doing over again, in another shape, what your ancestor before you did, and sending down to your posterity the curse inherited from him! Talk sense, Hepzibah, for Heavens sake! exclaimed the Judge, with the impatience natural to a reasonable man, on hearing anything so utterly absurd as the above, in a discussion about matters of business. I have told you my determination. I am not apt to change. Clifford must give up his secret, or take the consequences. And let him decide quickly; for I have several affairs to attend to this morning, and an important dinner engagement with some political friends. Clifford has no secret! answered Hepzibah. And God will not let you do the thing you meditate! We shall see, said the unmoved Judge. Meanwhile, choose whether you will summon Clifford, and allow this business to be amicably settled by an interview between two kinsmen, or drive me to harsher measures, which I should be most happy to feel myself justified in avoiding. The responsibility is altogether on your part. You are stronger than I, said Hepzibah, after a brief consideration; and you have no pity in your strength! Clifford is not now insane; but the interview which you insist upon may go far to make him so. Nevertheless, knowing you as I do, I believe it to be my best course to allow you to judge for yourself as to the improbability of his possessing any valuable secret. I will call Clifford. Be merciful in your dealings with him!be far more merciful than your heart bids you be!for God is looking at you, Jaffrey Pyncheon! The Judge followed his cousin from the shop, where the foregoing conversation had passed, into the parlor, and flung himself heavily into the great ancestral chair. Many a former Pyncheon had found repose in its capacious arms rosy children, after their sports; young men, dreamy with love; grown men, weary with cares; old men, burdened with wintersthey had mused, and slumbered, and departed to a yet profounder sleep. It had been a long tradition, though a doubtful one, that this was the very chair, seated in which the earliest of the Judges New England forefathershe whose picture still hung upon the wallhad given a dead mans silent and stern reception to the throng of distinguished guests. From that hour of evil omen until the present, it may bethough we know not the secret of his heartbut it may be that no wearier and sadder man had ever sunk into the chair than this same Judge Pyncheon, whom we have just beheld so immitigably hard and resolute. Surely, it must have been at no slight cost that he had thus fortified his soul with iron. Such calmness is a mightier effort than the violence of weaker men. And there was yet a heavy task for him to do. Was it a little mattera trifle to be prepared for in a single moment, and to be rested from in another momentthat he must now, after thirty years, encounter a kinsman risen from a living tomb, and wrench a secret from him, or else consign him to a living tomb again? Did you speak? asked Hepzibah, looking in from the threshold of the parlor; for she imagined that the Judge had uttered some sound which she was anxious to interpret as a relenting impulse. I thought you called me back. No, no gruffly answered Judge Pyncheon with a harsh frown, while his brow grew almost a black purple, in the shadow of the room. Why should I call you back? Time flies! Bid Clifford come to me! The Judge had taken his watch from his vest pocket and now held it in his hand, measuring the interval which was to ensue before the appearance of Clifford. XVI Cliffords Chamber Never had the old house appeared so dismal to poor Hepzibah as when she departed on that wretched errand. There was a strange aspect in it. As she trode along the footworn passages, and opened one crazy door after another, and ascended the creaking staircase, she gazed wistfully and fearfully around. It would have been no marvel, to her excited mind, if, behind or beside her, there had been the rustle of dead peoples garments, or pale visages awaiting her on the landingplace above. Her nerves were set all ajar by the scene of passion and terror through which she had just struggled. Her colloquy with Judge Pyncheon, who so perfectly represented the person and attributes of the founder of the family, had called back the dreary past. It weighed upon her heart. Whatever she had heard, from legendary aunts and grandmothers, concerning the good or evil fortunes of the Pyncheonsstories which had heretofore been kept warm in her remembrance by the chimneycorner glow that was associated with themnow recurred to her, sombre, ghastly, cold, like most passages of family history, when brooded over in melancholy mood. The whole seemed little else but a series of calamity, reproducing itself in successive generations, with one general hue, and varying in little, save the outline. But Hepzibah now felt as if the Judge, and Clifford, and herselfthey three togetherwere on the point of adding another incident to the annals of the house, with a bolder relief of wrong and sorrow, which would cause it to stand out from all the rest. Thus it is that the grief of the passing moment takes upon itself an individuality, and a character of climax, which it is destined to lose after a while, and to fade into the dark gray tissue common to the grave or glad events of many years ago. It is but for a moment, comparatively, that anything looks strange or startlinga truth that has the bitter and the sweet in it. But Hepzibah could not rid herself of the sense of something unprecedented at that instant passing and soon to be accomplished. Her nerves were in a shake. Instinctively she paused before the arched window, and looked out upon the street, in order to seize its permanent objects with her mental grasp, and thus to steady herself from the reel and vibration which affected her more immediate sphere. It brought her up, as we may say, with a kind of shock, when she beheld everything under the same appearance as the day before, and numberless preceding days, except for the difference between sunshine and sullen storm. Her eyes travelled along the street, from doorstep to doorstep, noting the wet sidewalks, with here and there a puddle in hollows that had been imperceptible until filled with water. She screwed her dim optics to their acutest point, in the hope of making out, with greater distinctness, a certain window, where she half saw, half guessed, that a tailors seamstress was sitting at her work. Hepzibah flung herself upon that unknown womans companionship, even thus far off. Then she was attracted by a chaise rapidly passing, and watched its moist and glistening top, and its splashing wheels, until it had turned the corner, and refused to carry any further her idly trifling, because appalled and overburdened, mind. When the vehicle had disappeared, she allowed herself still another loitering moment; for the patched figure of good Uncle Venner was now visible, coming slowly from the head of the street downward, with a rheumatic limp, because the east wind had got into his joints. Hepzibah wished that he would pass yet more slowly, and befriend her shivering solitude a little longer. Anything that would take her out of the grievous present, and interpose human beings betwixt herself and what was nearest to herwhatever would defer for an instant the inevitable errand on which she was boundall such impediments were welcome. Next to the lightest heart, the heaviest is apt to be most playful. Hepzibah had little hardihood for her own proper pain, and far less for what she must inflict on Clifford. Of so slight a nature, and so shattered by his previous calamities, it could not well be short of utter ruin to bring him face to face with the hard, relentless man who had been his evil destiny through life. Even had there been no bitter recollections, nor any hostile interest now at stake between them, the mere natural repugnance of the more sensitive system to the massive, weighty, and unimpressible one, must, in itself, have been disastrous to the former. It would be like flinging a porcelain vase, with already a crack in it, against a granite column. Never before had Hepzibah so adequately estimated the powerful character of her cousin Jaffreypowerful by intellect, energy of will, the long habit of acting among men, and, as she believed, by his unscrupulous pursuit of selfish ends through evil means. It did but increase the difficulty that Judge Pyncheon was under a delusion as to the secret which he supposed Clifford to possess. Men of his strength of purpose and customary sagacity, if they chance to adopt a mistaken opinion in practical matters, so wedge it and fasten it among things known to be true, that to wrench it out of their minds is hardly less difficult than pulling up an oak. Thus, as the Judge required an impossibility of Clifford, the latter, as he could not perform it, must needs perish. For what, in the grasp of a man like this, was to become of Cliffords soft poetic nature, that never should have had a task more stubborn than to set a life of beautiful enjoyment to the flow and rhythm of musical cadences! Indeed, what had become of it already? Broken! Blighted! All but annihilated! Soon to be wholly so! For a moment, the thought crossed Hepzibahs mind, whether Clifford might not really have such knowledge of their deceased uncles vanished estate as the Judge imputed to him. She remembered some vague intimations, on her brothers part, whichif the supposition were not essentially preposterousmight have been so interpreted. There had been schemes of travel and residence abroad, daydreams of brilliant life at home, and splendid castles in the air, which it would have required boundless wealth to build and realize.

Had this wealth been in her power, how gladly would Hepzibah have bestowed it all upon her ironhearted kinsman, to buy for Clifford the freedom and seclusion of the desolate old house! But she believed that her brothers schemes were as destitute of actual substance and purpose as a childs pictures of its future life, while sitting in a little chair by its mothers knee. Clifford had none but shadowy gold at his command; and it was not the stuff to satisfy Judge Pyncheon! Was there no help in their extremity? It seemed strange that there should be none, with a city round about her. It would be so easy to throw up the window, and send forth a shriek, at the strange agony of which everybody would come hastening to the rescue, well understanding it to be the cry of a human soul, at some dreadful crisis! But how wild, how almost laughable, the fatalityand yet how continually it comes to pass, thought Hepzibah, in this dull delirium of a worldthat whosoever, and with however kindly a purpose, should come to help, they would be sure to help the strongest side! Might and wrong combined, like iron magnetized, are endowed with irresistible attraction. There would be Judge Pyncheona person eminent in the public view, of high station and great wealth, a philanthropist, a member of Congress and of the church, and intimately associated with whatever else bestows good nameso imposing, in these advantageous lights, that Hepzibah herself could hardly help shrinking from her own conclusions as to his hollow integrity. The Judge, on one side! And who, on the other? The guilty Clifford! Once a byword! Now, an indistinctly remembered ignominy! Nevertheless, in spite of this perception that the Judge would draw all human aid to his own behalf, Hepzibah was so unaccustomed to act for herself, that the least word of counsel would have swayed her to any mode of action. Little Phoebe Pyncheon would at once have lighted up the whole scene, if not by any available suggestion, yet simply by the warm vivacity of her character. The idea of the artist occurred to Hepzibah. Young and unknown, mere vagrant adventurer as he was, she had been conscious of a force in Holgrave which might well adapt him to be the champion of a crisis. With this thought in her mind, she unbolted a door, cobwebbed and long disused, but which had served as a former medium of communication between her own part of the house and the gable where the wandering daguerreotypist had now established his temporary home. He was not there. A book, face downward, on the table, a roll of manuscript, a halfwritten sheet, a newspaper, some tools of his present occupation, and several rejected daguerreotypes, conveyed an impression as if he were close at hand. But, at this period of the day, as Hepzibah might have anticipated, the artist was at his public rooms. With an impulse of idle curiosity, that flickered among her heavy thoughts, she looked at one of the daguerreotypes, and beheld Judge Pyncheon frowning at her. Fate stared her in the face. She turned back from her fruitless quest, with a heartsinking sense of disappointment. In all her years of seclusion, she had never felt, as now, what it was to be alone. It seemed as if the house stood in a desert, or, by some spell, was made invisible to those who dwelt around, or passed beside it; so that any mode of misfortune, miserable accident, or crime might happen in it without the possibility of aid. In her grief and wounded pride, Hepzibah had spent her life in divesting herself of friends; she had wilfully cast off the support which God has ordained his creatures to need from one another; and it was now her punishment, that Clifford and herself would fall the easier victims to their kindred enemy. Returning to the arched window, she lifted her eyesscowling, poor, dimsighted Hepzibah, in the face of Heaven!and strove hard to send up a prayer through the dense gray pavement of clouds. Those mists had gathered, as if to symbolize a great, brooding mass of human trouble, doubt, confusion, and chill indifference, between earth and the better regions. Her faith was too weak; the prayer too heavy to be thus uplifted. It fell back, a lump of lead, upon her heart. It smote her with the wretched conviction that Providence intermeddled not in these petty wrongs of one individual to his fellow, nor had any balm for these little agonies of a solitary soul; but shed its justice, and its mercy, in a broad, sunlike sweep, over half the universe at once. Its vastness made it nothing. But Hepzibah did not see that, just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of Gods care and pity for every separate need. At last, finding no other pretext for deferring the torture that she was to inflict on Cliffordher reluctance to which was the true cause of her loitering at the window, her search for the artist, and even her abortive prayerdreading, also, to hear the stern voice of Judge Pyncheon from below stairs, chiding her delayshe crept slowly, a pale, griefstricken figure, a dismal shape of woman, with almost torpid limbs, slowly to her brothers door, and knocked! There was no reply. And how should there have been? Her hand, tremulous with the shrinking purpose which directed it, had smitten so feebly against the door that the sound could hardly have gone inward. She knocked again. Still no response! Nor was it to be wondered at. She had struck with the entire force of her hearts vibration, communicating, by some subtle magnetism, her own terror to the summons. Clifford would turn his face to the pillow, and cover his head beneath the bedclothes, like a startled child at midnight. She knocked a third time, three regular strokes, gentle, but perfectly distinct, and with meaning in them; for, modulate it with what cautious art we will, the hand cannot help playing some tune of what we feel upon the senseless wood. Clifford returned no answer. Clifford! Dear brother! said Hepzibah. Shall I come in? A silence. Two or three times, and more, Hepzibah repeated his name, without result; till, thinking her brothers sleep unwontedly profound, she undid the door, and entering, found the chamber vacant. How could he have come forth, and when, without her knowledge? Was it possible that, in spite of the stormy day, and worn out with the irksomeness within doors he had betaken himself to his customary haunt in the garden, and was now shivering under the cheerless shelter of the summerhouse? She hastily threw up a window, thrust forth her turbaned head and the half of her gaunt figure, and searched the whole garden through, as completely as her dim vision would allow. She could see the interior of the summerhouse, and its circular seat, kept moist by the droppings of the roof. It had no occupant. Clifford was not thereabouts; unless, indeed, he had crept for concealment (as, for a moment, Hepzibah fancied might be the case) into a great, wet mass of tangled and broadleaved shadow, where the squashvines were clambering tumultuously upon an old wooden framework, set casually aslant against the fence. This could not be, however; he was not there; for, while Hepzibah was looking, a strange grimalkin stole forth from the very spot, and picked his way across the garden. Twice he paused to snuff the air, and then anew directed his course towards the parlor window. Whether it was only on account of the stealthy, prying manner common to the race, or that this cat seemed to have more than ordinary mischief in his thoughts, the old gentlewoman, in spite of her much perplexity, felt an impulse to drive the animal away, and accordingly flung down a window stick. The cat stared up at her, like a detected thief or murderer, and, the next instant, took to flight. No other living creature was visible in the garden. Chanticleer and his family had either not left their roost, disheartened by the interminable rain, or had done the next wisest thing, by seasonably returning to it. Hepzibah closed the window. But where was Clifford? Could it be that, aware of the presence of his Evil Destiny, he had crept silently down the staircase, while the Judge and Hepzibah stood talking in the shop, and had softly undone the fastenings of the outer door, and made his escape into the street? With that thought, she seemed to behold his gray, wrinkled, yet childlike aspect, in the oldfashioned garments which he wore about the house; a figure such as one sometimes imagines himself to be, with the worlds eye upon him, in a troubled dream. This figure of her wretched brother would go wandering through the city, attracting all eyes, and everybodys wonder and repugnance, like a ghost, the more to be shuddered at because visible at noontide. To incur the ridicule of the younger crowd, that knew him notthe harsher scorn and indignation of a few old men, who might recall his once familiar features! To be the sport of boys, who, when old enough to run about the streets, have no more reverence for what is beautiful and holy, nor pity for what is sadno more sense of sacred misery, sanctifying the human shape in which it embodies itselfthan if Satan were the father of them all! Goaded by their taunts, their loud, shrill cries, and cruel laughterinsulted by the filth of the public ways, which they would fling upon himor, as it might well be, distracted by the mere strangeness of his situation, though nobody should afflict him with so much as a thoughtless wordwhat wonder if Clifford were to break into some wild extravagance which was certain to be interpreted as lunacy? Thus Judge Pyncheons fiendish scheme would be ready accomplished to his hands! Then Hepzibah reflected that the town was almost completely watergirdled. The wharves stretched out towards the centre of the harbor, and, in this inclement weather, were deserted by the ordinary throng of merchants, laborers, and seafaring men; each wharf a solitude, with the vessels moored stem and stern, along its misty length. Should her brothers aimless footsteps stray thitherward, and he but bend, one moment, over the deep, black tide, would he not bethink himself that here was the sure refuge within his reach, and that, with a single step, or the slightest overbalance of his body, he might be forever beyond his kinsmans grip? Oh, the temptation! To make of his ponderous sorrow a security! To sink, with its leaden weight upon him, and never rise again! The horror of this last conception was too much for Hepzibah. Even Jaffrey Pyncheon must help her now! She hastened down the staircase, shrieking as she went. Clifford is gone! she cried. I cannot find my brother. Help, Jaffrey Pyncheon! Some harm will happen to him! She threw open the parlordoor. But, what with the shade of branches across the windows, and the smokeblackened ceiling, and the dark oakpanelling of the walls, there was hardly so much daylight in the room that Hepzibahs imperfect sight could accurately distinguish the Judges figure. She was certain, however, that she saw him sitting in the ancestral armchair, near the centre of the floor, with his face somewhat averted, and looking towards a window. So firm and quiet is the nervous system of such men as Judge Pyncheon, that he had perhaps stirred not more than once since her departure, but, in the hard composure of his temperament, retained the position into which accident had thrown him. I tell you, Jaffrey, cried Hepzibah impatiently, as she turned from the parlordoor to search other rooms, my brother is not in his chamber! You must help me seek him! But Judge Pyncheon was not the man to let himself be startled from an easychair with haste illbefitting either the dignity of his character or his broad personal basis, by the alarm of an hysteric woman. Yet, considering his own interest in the matter, he might have bestirred himself with a little more alacrity. Do you hear me, Jaffrey Pyncheon? screamed Hepzibah, as she again approached the parlordoor, after an ineffectual search elsewhere. Clifford is gone. At this instant, on the threshold of the parlor, emerging from within, appeared Clifford himself! His face was preternaturally pale; so deadly white, indeed, that, through all the glimmering indistinctness of the passageway, Hepzibah could discern his features, as if a light fell on them alone. Their vivid and wild expression seemed likewise sufficient to illuminate them; it was an expression of scorn and mockery, coinciding with the emotions indicated by his gesture. As Clifford stood on the threshold, partly turning back, he pointed his finger within the parlor, and shook it slowly as though he would have summoned, not Hepzibah alone, but the whole world, to gaze at some object inconceivably ridiculous. This action, so illtimed and extravagantaccompanied, too, with a look that showed more like joy than any other kind of excitementcompelled Hepzibah to dread that her stern kinsmans ominous visit had driven her poor brother to absolute insanity. Nor could she otherwise account for the Judges quiescent mood than by supposing him craftily on the watch, while Clifford developed these symptoms of a distracted mind. Be quiet, Clifford! whispered his sister, raising her hand to impress caution. Oh, for Heavens sake, be quiet! Let him be quiet! What can he do better? answered Clifford, with a still wilder gesture, pointing into the room which he had just quitted. As for us, Hepzibah, we can dance now!we can sing, laugh, play, do what we will! The weight is gone, Hepzibah! It is gone off this weary old world, and we may be as lighthearted as little Phoebe herself. And, in accordance with his words, he began to laugh, still pointing his finger at the object, invisible to Hepzibah, within the parlor. She was seized with a sudden intuition of some horrible thing. She thrust herself past Clifford, and disappeared into the room; but almost immediately returned, with a cry choking in her throat. Gazing at her brother with an affrighted glance of inquiry, she beheld him all in a tremor and a quake, from head to foot, while, amid these commoted elements of passion or alarm, still flickered his gusty mirth. My God! what is to become of us? gasped Hepzibah. Come! said Clifford in a tone of brief decision, most unlike what was usual with him. We stay here too long! Let us leave the old house to our cousin Jaffrey! He will take good care of it! Hepzibah now noticed that Clifford had on a cloaka garment of long agoin which he had constantly muffled himself during these days of easterly storm. He beckoned with his hand, and intimated, so far as she could comprehend him, his purpose that they should go together from the house. There are chaotic, blind, or drunken moments, in the lives of persons who lack real force of charactermoments of test, in which courage would most assert itselfbut where these individuals, if left to themselves, stagger aimlessly along, or follow implicitly whatever guidance may befall them, even if it be a childs. No matter how preposterous or insane, a purpose is a Godsend to them. Hepzibah had reached this point. Unaccustomed to action or responsibilityfull of horror at what she had seen, and afraid to inquire, or almost to imagine, how it had come to passaffrighted at the fatality which seemed to pursue her brotherstupefied by the dim, thick, stifling atmosphere of dread which filled the house as with a deathsmell, and obliterated all definiteness of thoughtshe yielded without a question, and on the instant, to the will which Clifford expressed. For herself, she was like a person in a dream, when the will always sleeps. Clifford, ordinarily so destitute of this faculty, had found it in the tension of the crisis. Why do you delay so? cried he sharply. Put on your cloak and hood, or whatever it pleases you to wear! No matter what; you cannot look beautiful nor brilliant, my poor Hepzibah! Take your purse, with money in it, and come along! Hepzibah obeyed these instructions, as if nothing else were to be done or thought of. She began to wonder, it is true, why she did not wake up, and at what still more intolerable pitch of dizzy trouble her spirit would struggle out of the maze, and make her conscious that nothing of all this had actually happened. Of course it was not real; no such black, easterly day as this had yet begun to be; Judge Pyncheon had not talked with, her. Clifford had not laughed, pointed, beckoned her away with him; but she had merely been afflictedas lonely sleepers often arewith a great deal of unreasonable misery, in a morning dream! NownowI shall certainly awake! thought Hepzibah, as she went to and fro, making her little preparations. I can bear it no longer I must wake up now! But it came not, that awakening moment! It came not, even when, just before they left the house, Clifford stole to the parlordoor, and made a parting obeisance to the sole occupant of the room. What an absurd figure the old fellow cuts now! whispered he to Hepzibah. Just when he fancied he had me completely under his thumb! Come, come; make haste! or he will start up, like Giant Despair in pursuit of Christian and Hopeful, and catch us yet! As they passed into the street, Clifford directed Hepzibahs attention to something on one of the posts of the front door. It was merely the initials of his own name, which, with somewhat of his characteristic grace about the forms of the letters, he had cut there when a boy. The brother and sister departed, and left Judge Pyncheon sitting in the old home of his forefathers, all by himself; so heavy and lumpish that we can liken him to nothing better than a defunct nightmare, which had perished in the midst of its wickedness, and left its flabby corpse on the breast of the tormented one, to be gotten rid of as it might! XVII The Flight of Two Owls Summer as it was, the east wind set poor Hepzibahs few remaining teeth chattering in her head, as she and Clifford faced it, on their way up Pyncheon Street, and towards the centre of the town. Not merely was it the shiver which this pitiless blast brought to her frame (although her feet and hands, especially, had never seemed so deathacold as now), but there was a moral sensation, mingling itself with the physical chill, and causing her to shake more in spirit than in body. The worlds broad, bleak atmosphere was all so comfortless! Such, indeed, is the impression which it makes on every new adventurer, even if he plunge into it while the warmest tide of life is bubbling through his veins. What, then, must it have been to Hepzibah and Cliffordso timestricken as they were, yet so like children in their inexperienceas they left the doorstep, and passed from beneath the wide shelter of the Pyncheon Elm! They were wandering all abroad, on precisely such a pilgrimage as a child often meditates, to the worlds end, with perhaps a sixpence and a biscuit in his pocket. In Hepzibahs mind, there was the wretched consciousness of being adrift. She had lost the faculty of selfguidance; but, in view of the difficulties around her, felt it hardly worth an effort to regain it, and was, moreover, incapable of making one. As they proceeded on their strange expedition, she now and then cast a look sidelong at Clifford, and could not but observe that he was possessed and swayed by a powerful excitement. It was this, indeed, that gave him the control which he had at once, and so irresistibly, established over his movements. It not a little resembled the exhilaration of wine. Or, it might more fancifully be compared to a joyous piece of music, played with wild vivacity, but upon a disordered instrument. As the cracked jarring note might always be heard, and as it jarred loudest amidst the loftiest exultation of the melody, so was there a continual quake through Clifford, causing him most to quiver while he wore a triumphant smile, and seemed almost under a necessity to skip in his gait. They met few people abroad, even on passing from the retired neighborhood of the House of the Seven Gables into what was ordinarily the more thronged and busier portion of the town. Glistening sidewalks, with little pools of rain here and there along their unequal surface; umbrellas displayed ostentatiously in the shopwindows, as if the life of trade had concentrated itself in that one article; wet leaves of the horsechestnut or elmtrees, torn off untimely by the blast and scattered along the public way; an unsightly accumulation of mud in the middle of the street, which perversely grew the more unclean for its long and laborious washingthese were the more definable points of a very sombre picture. In the way of movement and human life, there was the hasty rattle of a cab or coach, its driver protected by a waterproof cap over his head and shoulders; the forlorn figure of an old man, who seemed to have crept out of some subterranean sewer, and was stooping along the kennel, and poking the wet rubbish with a stick, in quest of rusty nails; a merchant or two, at the door of the postoffice, together with an editor and a miscellaneous politician, awaiting a dilatory mail; a few visages of retired seacaptains at the window of an insurance office, looking out vacantly at the vacant street, blaspheming at the weather, and fretting at the dearth as well of public news as local gossip. What a treasuretrove to these venerable quidnuncs, could they have guessed the secret which Hepzibah and Clifford were carrying along with them! But their two figures attracted hardly so much notice as that of a young girl, who passed at the same instant, and happened to raise her skirt a trifle too high above her ankles. Had it been a sunny and cheerful day, they could hardly have gone through the streets without making themselves obnoxious to remark. Now, probably, they were felt to be in keeping with the dismal and bitter weather, and therefore did not stand out in strong relief, as if the sun were shining on them, but melted into the gray gloom and were forgotten as soon as gone. Poor Hepzibah! Could she have understood this fact, it would have brought her some little comfort; for, to all her other troublesstrange to say!there was added the womanish and oldmaidenlike misery arising from a sense of unseemliness in her attire. Thus, she was fain to shrink deeper into herself, as it were, as if in the hope of making people suppose that here was only a cloak and hood, threadbare and woefully faded, taking an airing in the midst of the storm, without any wearer! As they went on, the feeling of indistinctness and unreality kept dimly hovering round about her, and so diffusing itself into her system that one of her hands was hardly palpable to the touch of the other. Any certainty would have been preferable to this. She whispered to herself, again and again, Am I awake?Am I awake? and sometimes exposed her face to the chill spatter of the wind, for the sake of its rude assurance that she was. Whether it was Cliffords purpose, or only chance, had led them thither, they now found themselves passing beneath the arched entrance of a large structure of gray stone. Within, there was a spacious breadth, and an airy height from floor to roof, now partially filled with smoke and steam, which eddied voluminously upward and formed a mimic cloudregion over their heads. A train of cars was just ready for a start; the locomotive was fretting and fuming, like a steed impatient for a headlong rush; and the bell rang out its hasty peal, so well expressing the brief summons which life vouchsafes to us in its hurried career. Without question or delaywith the irresistible decision, if not rather to be called recklessness, which had so strangely taken possession of him, and through him of HepzibahClifford impelled her towards the cars, and assisted her to enter. The signal was given; the engine puffed forth its short, quick breaths; the train began its movement; and, along with a hundred other passengers, these two unwonted travellers sped onward like the wind. At last, therefore, and after so long estrangement from everything that the world acted or enjoyed, they had been drawn into the great current of human life, and were swept away with it, as by the suction of fate itself. Still haunted with the idea that not one of the past incidents, inclusive of Judge Pyncheons visit, could be real, the recluse of the Seven Gables murmured in her brothers ear Clifford! Clifford! Is not this a dream? A dream, Hepzibah! repeated he, almost laughing in her face. On the contrary, I have never been awake before! Meanwhile, looking from the window, they could see the world racing past them. At one moment, they were rattling through a solitude; the next, a village had grown up around them; a few breaths more, and it had vanished, as if swallowed by an earthquake. The spires of meetinghouses seemed set adrift from their foundations; the broadbased hills glided away. Everything was unfixed from its agelong rest, and moving at whirlwind speed in a direction opposite to their own. Within the car there was the usual interior life of the railroad, offering little to the observation of other passengers, but full of novelty for this pair of strangely enfranchised prisoners. It was novelty enough, indeed, that there were fifty human beings in close relation with them, under one long and narrow roof, and drawn onward by the same mighty influence that had taken their two selves into its grasp. It seemed marvellous how all these people could remain so quietly in their seats, while so much noisy strength was at work in their behalf. Some, with tickets in their hats (long travellers these, before whom lay a hundred miles of railroad), had plunged into the English scenery and adventures of pamphlet novels, and were keeping company with dukes and earls. Others, whose briefer span forbade their devoting themselves to studies so abstruse, beguiled the little tedium of the way with pennypapers. A party of girls, and one young man, on opposite sides of the car, found huge amusement in a game of ball. They tossed it to and fro, with peals of laughter that might be measured by milelengths; for, faster than the nimble ball could fly, the merry players fled unconsciously along, leaving the trail of their mirth afar behind, and ending their game under another sky than had witnessed its commencement. Boys, with apples, cakes, candy, and rolls of variously tinctured lozengesmerchandise that reminded Hepzibah of her deserted shopappeared at each momentary stoppingplace, doing up their business in a hurry, or breaking it short off, lest the market should ravish them away with it. New people continually entered. Old acquaintancesfor such they soon grew to be, in this rapid current of affairscontinually departed. Here and there, amid the rumble and the tumult, sat one asleep. Sleep; sport; business; graver or lighter study; and the common and inevitable movement onward! It was life itself! Cliffords naturally poignant sympathies were all aroused. He caught the color of what was passing about him, and threw it back more vividly than he received it, but mixed, nevertheless, with a lurid and portentous hue. Hepzibah, on the other hand, felt herself more apart from human kind than even in the seclusion which she had just quitted. You are not happy, Hepzibah! said Clifford, apart, in a tone of reproach. You are thinking of that dismal old house, and of Cousin Jaffreyhere came the quake through himand of Cousin Jaffrey sitting there, all by himself! Take my advicefollow my exampleand let such things slip aside. Here we are, in the world, Hepzibah!in the midst of life!in the throng of our fellow beings! Let you and I be happy! As happy as that youth and those pretty girls, at their game of ball! Happy thought Hepzibah, bitterly conscious, at the word, of her dull and heavy heart, with the frozen pain in ithappy. He is mad already; and, if I could once feel myself broad awake, I should go mad too! If a fixed idea be madness, she was perhaps not remote from it. Fast and far as they had rattled and clattered along the iron track, they might just as well, as regarded Hepzibahs mental images, have been passing up and down Pyncheon Street. With miles and miles of varied scenery between, there was no scene for her save the seven old gablepeaks, with their moss, and the tuft of weeds in one of the angles, and the shopwindow, and a customer shaking the door, and compelling the little bell to jingle fiercely, but without disturbing Judge Pyncheon! This one old house was everywhere! It transported its great, lumbering bulk with more than railroad speed, and set itself phlegmatically down on whatever spot she glanced at. The quality of Hepzibahs mind was too unmalleable to take new impressions so readily as Cliffords. He had a winged nature; she was rather of the vegetable kind, and could hardly be kept long alive, if drawn up by the roots. Thus it happened that the relation heretofore existing between her brother and herself was changed. At home, she was his guardian; here, Clifford had become hers, and seemed to comprehend whatever belonged to their new position with a singular rapidity of intelligence. He had been startled into manhood and intellectual vigor; or, at least, into a condition that resembled them, though it might be both diseased and transitory. The conductor now applied for their tickets; and Clifford, who had made himself the pursebearer, put a banknote into his hand, as he had observed others do. For the lady and yourself? asked the conductor. And how far? As far as that will carry us, said Clifford. It is no great matter. We are riding for pleasure merely. You choose a strange day for it, sir! remarked a gimleteyed old gentleman on the other side of the car, looking at Clifford and his companion, as if curious to make them out. The best chance of pleasure, in an easterly rain, I take it, is in a mans own house, with a nice little fire in the chimney. I cannot precisely agree with you, said Clifford, courteously bowing to the old gentleman, and at once taking up the clue of conversation which the latter had proffered. It had just occurred to me, on the contrary, that this admirable invention of the railroadwith the vast and inevitable improvements to be looked for, both as to speed and convenienceis destined to do away with those stale ideas of home and fireside, and substitute something better. In the name of common sense, asked the old gentleman rather testily, what can be better for a man than his own parlor and chimneycorner? These things have not the merit which many good people attribute to them, replied Clifford. They may be said, in few and pithy words, to have ill served a poor purpose. My impression is, that our wonderfully increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to bring us around again to the nomadic state. You are aware, my dear siryou must have observed it in your own experiencethat all human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future. To apply this truth to the topic now under discussion. In the early epochs of our race, men dwelt in temporary huts, of bowers of branches, as easily constructed as a birdsnest, and which they builtif it should be called building, when such sweet homes of a summer solstice rather grew than were made with handswhich Nature, we will say, assisted them to rear where fruit abounded, where fish and game were plentiful, or, most especially, where the sense of beauty was to be gratified by a lovelier shade than elsewhere, and a more exquisite arrangement of lake, wood, and hill.

This life possessed a charm which, ever since man quitted it, has vanished from existence. And it typified something better than itself. It had its drawbacks; such as hunger and thirst, inclement weather, hot sunshine, and weary and footblistering marches over barren and ugly tracts, that lay between the sites desirable for their fertility and beauty. But in our ascending spiral, we escape all this. These railroadscould but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble and the jar got rid ofare positively the greatest blessing that the ages have wrought out for us. They give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any mans inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old wormeaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowherein a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home? Cliffords countenance glowed, as he divulged this theory; a youthful character shone out from within, converting the wrinkles and pallid duskiness of age into an almost transparent mask. The merry girls let their ball drop upon the floor, and gazed at him. They said to themselves, perhaps, that, before his hair was gray and the crowsfeet tracked his temples, this now decaying man must have stamped the impress of his features on many a womans heart. But, alas! no womans eye had seen his face while it was beautiful. I should scarcely call it an improved state of things, observed Cliffords new acquaintance, to live everywhere and nowhere! Would you not? exclaimed Clifford, with singular energy. It is as clear to me as sunshinewere there any in the skythat the greatest possible stumblingblocks in the path of human happiness and improvement are these heaps of bricks and stones, consolidated with mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spikenails, which men painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home! The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it. Morbid influences, in a thousandfold variety, gather about hearths, and pollute the life of households. There is no such unwholesome atmosphere as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by ones defunct forefathers and relatives. I speak of what I know. There is a certain house within my familiar recollectionone of those peakedgable (there are seven of them), projectingstoried edifices, such as you occasionally see in our older townsa rusty, crazy, creaky, dryrotted, dingy, dark, and miserable old dungeon, with an arched window over the porch, and a little shopdoor on one side, and a great, melancholy elm before it! Now, sir, whenever my thoughts recur to this sevengabled mansion (the fact is so very curious that I must needs mention it), immediately I have a vision or image of an elderly man, of remarkably stern countenance, sitting in an oaken elbowchair, dead, stonedead, with an ugly flow of blood upon his shirtbosom! Dead, but with open eyes! He taints the whole house, as I remember it. I could never flourish there, nor be happy, nor do nor enjoy what God meant me to do and enjoy. His face darkened, and seemed to contract, and shrivel itself up, and wither into age. Never, sir! he repeated. I could never draw cheerful breath there! I should think not, said the old gentleman, eyeing Clifford earnestly, and rather apprehensively. I should conceive not, sir, with that notion in your head! Surely not, continued Clifford; and it were a relief to me if that house could be torn down, or burnt up, and so the earth be rid of it, and grass be sown abundantly over its foundation. Not that I should ever visit its site again! for, sir, the farther I get away from it, the more does the joy, the lightsome freshness, the heartleap, the intellectual dance, the youth, in shortyes, my youth, my youth!the more does it come back to me. No longer ago than this morning, I was old. I remember looking in the glass, and wondering at my own gray hair, and the wrinkles, many and deep, right across my brow, and the furrows down my cheeks, and the prodigious trampling of crowsfeet about my temples! It was too soon! I could not bear it! Age had no right to come! I had not lived! But now do I look old? If so, my aspect belies me strangely; fora great weight being off my mindI feel in the very heyday of my youth, with the world and my best days before me! I trust you may find it so, said the old gentleman, who seemed rather embarrassed, and desirous of avoiding the observation which Cliffords wild talk drew on them both. You have my best wishes for it. For Heavens sake, dear Clifford, be quiet! whispered his sister. They think you mad. Be quiet yourself, Hepzibah! returned her brother. No matter what they think! I am not mad. For the first time in thirty years my thoughts gush up and find words ready for them. I must talk, and I will! He turned again towards the old gentleman, and renewed the conversation. Yes, my dear sir, said he, it is my firm belief and hope that these terms of roof and hearthstone, which have so long been held to embody something sacred, are soon to pass out of mens daily use, and be forgotten. Just imagine, for a moment, how much of human evil will crumble away, with this one change! What we call real estatethe solid ground to build a house onis the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests. A man will commit almost any wronghe will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal agesonly to build a great, gloomy, darkchambered mansion, for himself to die in, and for his posterity to be miserable in. He lays his own dead corpse beneath the underpinning, as one may say, and hangs his frowning picture on the wall, and, after thus converting himself into an evil destiny, expects his remotest greatgrandchildren to be happy there. I do not speak wildly. I have just such a house in my minds eye! Then, sir, said the old gentleman, getting anxious to drop the subject, you are not to blame for leaving it. Within the lifetime of the child already born, Clifford went on, all this will be done away. The world is growing too ethereal and spiritual to bear these enormities a great while longer. To me, though, for a considerable period of time, I have lived chiefly in retirement, and know less of such things than most meneven to me, the harbingers of a better era are unmistakable. Mesmerism, now! Will that effect nothing, think you, towards purging away the grossness out of human life? All a humbug! growled the old gentleman. These rapping spirits, that little Phoebe told us of, the other day, said Cliffordwhat are these but the messengers of the spiritual world, knocking at the door of substance? And it shall be flung wide open! A humbug, again! cried the old gentleman, growing more and more testy at these glimpses of Cliffords metaphysics. I should like to rap with a good stick on the empty pates of the dolts who circulate such nonsense! Then there is electricitythe demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the allpervading intelligence! exclaimed Clifford. Is that a humbug, too? Is it a factor have I dreamt itthat, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it! If you mean the telegraph, said the old gentleman, glancing his eye toward its wire, alongside the railtrack, it is an excellent thingthat is, of course, if the speculators in cotton and politics dont get possession of it. A great thing, indeed, sir, particularly as regards the detection of bankrobbers and murderers. I dont quite like it, in that point of view, replied Clifford. A bankrobber, and what you call a murderer, likewise, has his rights, which men of enlightened humanity and conscience should regard in so much the more liberal spirit, because the bulk of society is prone to controvert their existence. An almost spiritual medium, like the electric telegraph, should be consecrated to high, deep, joyful, and holy missions. Lovers, day by dayhour by hour, if so often moved to do itmight send their heartthrobs from Maine to Florida, with some such words as theseI love you forever!My heart runs over with love!I love you more than I can! and, again, at the next messageI have lived an hour longer, and love you twice as much! Or, when a good man has departed, his distant friend should be conscious of an electric thrill, as from the world of happy spirits, telling himYour dear friend is in bliss! Or, to an absent husband, should come tidings thusAn immortal being, of whom you are the father, has this moment come from God! and immediately its little voice would seem to have reached so far, and to be echoing in his heart. But for these poor rogues, the bankrobberswho, after all, are about as honest as nine people in ten, except that they disregard certain formalities, and prefer to transact business at midnight rather than Changehoursand for these murderers, as you phrase it, who are often excusable in the motives of their deed, and deserve to be ranked among public benefactors, if we consider only its resultfor unfortunate individuals like these, I really cannot applaud the enlistment of an immaterial and miraculous power in the universal worldhunt at their heels! You cant, hey? cried the old gentleman, with a hard look. Positively, no! answered Clifford. It puts them too miserably at disadvantage. For example, sir, in a dark, low, crossbeamed, panelled room of an old house, let us suppose a dead man, sitting in an armchair, with a bloodstain on his shirtbosomand let us add to our hypothesis another man, issuing from the house, which he feels to be overfilled with the dead mans presenceand let us lastly imagine him fleeing, Heaven knows whither, at the speed of a hurricane, by railroad! Now, sir, if the fugitive alight in some distant town, and find all the people babbling about that selfsame dead man, whom he has fled so far to avoid the sight and thought of, will you not allow that his natural rights have been infringed? He has been deprived of his city of refuge, and, in my humble opinion, has suffered infinite wrong! You are a strange man, sir! said the old gentleman, bringing his gimleteye to a point on Clifford, as if determined to bore right into him. I cant see through you! No, Ill be bound you cant! cried Clifford, laughing. And yet, my dear sir, I am as transparent as the water of Maules well! But come, Hepzibah! We have flown far enough for once. Let us alight, as the birds do, and perch ourselves on the nearest twig, and consult wither we shall fly next! Just then, as it happened, the train reached a solitary waystation. Taking advantage of the brief pause, Clifford left the car, and drew Hepzibah along with him. A moment afterwards, the trainwith all the life of its interior, amid which Clifford had made himself so conspicuous an objectwas gliding away in the distance, and rapidly lessening to a point which, in another moment, vanished. The world had fled away from these two wanderers. They gazed drearily about them. At a little distance stood a wooden church, black with age, and in a dismal state of ruin and decay, with broken windows, a great rift through the main body of the edifice, and a rafter dangling from the top of the square tower. Farther off was a farmhouse, in the old style, as venerably black as the church, with a roof sloping downward from the threestory peak, to within a mans height of the ground. It seemed uninhabited. There were the relics of a woodpile, indeed, near the door, but with grass sprouting up among the chips and scattered logs. The small raindrops came down aslant; the wind was not turbulent, but sullen, and full of chilly moisture. Clifford shivered from head to foot. The wild effervescence of his moodwhich had so readily supplied thoughts, fantasies, and a strange aptitude of words, and impelled him to talk from the mere necessity of giving vent to this bubblingup gush of ideas had entirely subsided. A powerful excitement had given him energy and vivacity. Its operation over, he forthwith began to sink. You must take the lead now, Hepzibah! murmured he, with a torpid and reluctant utterance. Do with me as you will! She knelt down upon the platform where they were standing and lifted her clasped hands to the sky. The dull, gray weight of clouds made it invisible; but it was no hour for disbeliefno juncture this to question that there was a sky above, and an Almighty Father looking from it! O God!ejaculated poor, gaunt Hepzibahthen paused a moment, to consider what her prayer should beO Godour Fatherare we not thy children? Have mercy on us! XVIII Governor Pyncheon Judge Pyncheon, while his two relatives have fled away with such illconsidered haste, still sits in the old parlor, keeping house, as the familiar phrase is, in the absence of its ordinary occupants. To him, and to the venerable House of the Seven Gables, does our story now betake itself, like an owl, bewildered in the daylight, and hastening back to his hollow tree. The Judge has not shifted his position for a long while now. He has not stirred hand or foot, nor withdrawn his eyes so much as a hairsbreadth from their fixed gaze towards the corner of the room, since the footsteps of Hepzibah and Clifford creaked along the passage, and the outer door was closed cautiously behind their exit. He holds his watch in his left hand, but clutched in such a manner that you cannot see the dialplate. How profound a fit of meditation! Or, supposing him asleep, how infantile a quietude of conscience, and what wholesome order in the gastric region, are betokened by slumber so entirely undisturbed with starts, cramp, twitches, muttered dreamtalk, trumpetblasts through the nasal organ, or any slightest irregularity of breath! You must hold your own breath, to satisfy yourself whether he breathes at all. It is quite inaudible. You hear the ticking of his watch; his breath you do not hear. A most refreshing slumber, doubtless! And yet, the Judge cannot be asleep. His eyes are open! A veteran politician, such as he, would never fall asleep with wideopen eyes, lest some enemy or mischiefmaker, taking him thus at unawares, should peep through these windows into his consciousness, and make strange discoveries among the reminiscences, projects, hopes, apprehensions, weaknesses, and strong points, which he has heretofore shared with nobody. A cautious man is proverbially said to sleep with one eye open. That may be wisdom. But not with both; for this were heedlessness! No, no! Judge Pyncheon cannot be asleep. It is odd, however, that a gentleman so burdened with engagementsand noted, too, for punctualityshould linger thus in an old lonely mansion, which he has never seemed very fond of visiting. The oaken chair, to be sure, may tempt him with its roominess. It is, indeed, a spacious, and, allowing for the rude age that fashioned it, a moderately easy seat, with capacity enough, at all events, and offering no restraint to the Judges breadth of beam. A bigger man might find ample accommodation in it. His ancestor, now pictured upon the wall, with all his English beef about him, used hardly to present a front extending from elbow to elbow of this chair, or a base that would cover its whole cushion. But there are better chairs than thismahogany, black walnut, rosewood, springseated and damaskcushioned, with varied slopes, and innumerable artifices to make them easy, and obviate the irksomeness of too tame an easea score of such might be at Judge Pyncheons service. Yes! in a score of drawingrooms he would be more than welcome. Mamma would advance to meet him, with outstretched hand; the virgin daughter, elderly as he has now got to bean old widower, as he smilingly describes himselfwould shake up the cushion for the Judge, and do her pretty utmost to make him comfortable. For the Judge is a prosperous man. He cherishes his schemes, moreover, like other people, and reasonably brighter than most others; or did so, at least, as he lay abed this morning, in an agreeable halfdrowse, planning the business of the day, and speculating on the probabilities of the next fifteen years. With his firm health, and the little inroad that age has made upon him, fifteen years or twentyyes, or perhaps fiveandtwenty!are no more than he may fairly call his own. Fiveandtwenty years for the enjoyment of his real estate in town and country, his railroad, bank, and insurance shares, his United States stockhis wealth, in short, however invested, now in possession, or soon to be acquired; together with the public honors that have fallen upon him, and the weightier ones that are yet to fall! It is good! It is excellent! It is enough! Still lingering in the old chair! If the Judge has a little time to throw away, why does not he visit the insurance office, as is his frequent custom, and sit awhile in one of their leatherncushioned armchairs, listening to the gossip of the day, and dropping some deeply designed chanceword, which will be certain to become the gossip of tomorrow. And have not the bank directors a meeting at which it was the Judges purpose to be present, and his office to preside? Indeed they have; and the hour is noted on a card, which is, or ought to be, in Judge Pyncheons right vestpocket. Let him go thither, and loll at ease upon his moneybags! He has lounged long enough in the old chair! This was to have been such a busy day. In the first place, the interview with Clifford. Half an hour, by the Judges reckoning, was to suffice for that; it would probably be less, buttaking into consideration that Hepzibah was first to be dealt with, and that these women are apt to make many words where a few would do much betterit might be safest to allow half an hour. Half an hour? Why, Judge, it is already two hours, by your own undeviatingly accurate chronometer. Glance your eye down at it and see! Ah; he will not give himself the trouble either to bend his head, or elevate his hand, so as to bring the faithful timekeeper within his range of vision! Time, all at once, appears to have become a matter of no moment with the Judge! And has he forgotten all the other items of his memoranda? Cliffords affair arranged, he was to meet a State Street broker, who has undertaken to procure a heavy percentage, and the best of paper, for a few loose thousands which the Judge happens to have by him, uninvested. The wrinkled noteshaver will have taken his railroad trip in vain. Half an hour later, in the street next to this, there was to be an auction of real estate, including a portion of the old Pyncheon property, originally belonging to Maules garden ground. It has been alienated from the Pyncheons these fourscore years; but the Judge had kept it in his eye, and had set his heart on reannexing it to the small demesne still left around the Seven Gables; and now, during this odd fit of oblivion, the fatal hammer must have fallen, and transferred our ancient patrimony to some alien possessor. Possibly, indeed, the sale may have been postponed till fairer weather. If so, will the Judge make it convenient to be present, and favor the auctioneer with his bid, on the proximate occasion? The next affair was to buy a horse for his own driving. The one heretofore his favorite stumbled, this very morning, on the road to town, and must be at once discarded. Judge Pyncheons neck is too precious to be risked on such a contingency as a stumbling steed. Should all the above business be seasonably got through with, he might attend the meeting of a charitable society; the very name of which, however, in the multiplicity of his benevolence, is quite forgotten; so that this engagement may pass unfulfilled, and no great harm done. And if he have time, amid the press of more urgent matters, he must take measures for the renewal of Mrs. Pyncheons tombstone, which, the sexton tells him, has fallen on its marble face, and is cracked quite in twain. She was a praiseworthy woman enough, thinks the Judge, in spite of her nervousness, and the tears that she was so oozy with, and her foolish behavior about the coffee; and as she took her departure so seasonably, he will not grudge the second tombstone. It is better, at least, than if she had never needed any! The next item on his list was to give orders for some fruittrees, of a rare variety, to be deliverable at his countryseat in the ensuing autumn. Yes, buy them, by all means; and may the peaches be luscious in your mouth, Judge Pyncheon! After this comes something more important. A committee of his political party has besought him for a hundred or two of dollars, in addition to his previous disbursements, towards carrying on the fall campaign. The Judge is a patriot; the fate of the country is staked on the November election; and besides, as will be shadowed forth in another paragraph, he has no trifling stake of his own in the same great game. He will do what the committee asks; nay, he will be liberal beyond their expectations; they shall have a check for five hundred dollars, and more anon, if it be needed. What next? A decayed widow, whose husband was Judge Pyncheons early friend, has laid her case of destitution before him, in a very moving letter. She and her fair daughter have scarcely bread to eat. He partly intends to call on her todayperhaps soperhaps notaccordingly as he may happen to have leisure, and a small banknote. Another business, which, however, he puts no great weight on (it is well, you know, to be heedful, but not overanxious, as respects ones personal health)another business, then, was to consult his family physician. About what, for Heavens sake? Why, it is rather difficult to describe the symptoms. A mere dimness of sight and dizziness of brain, was it?or disagreeable choking, or stifling, or gurgling, or bubbling, in the region of the thorax, as the anatomists say?or was it a pretty severe throbbing and kicking of the heart, rather creditable to him than otherwise, as showing that the organ had not been left out of the Judges physical contrivance? No matter what it was. The doctor probably would smile at the statement of such trifles to his professional ear; the Judge would smile in his turn; and meeting one anothers eyes, they would enjoy a hearty laugh together! But a fig for medical advice. The Judge will never need it. Pray, pray, Judge Pyncheon, look at your watch, Now! Whatnot a glance! It is within ten minutes of the dinner hour! It surely cannot have slipped your memory that the dinner of today is to be the most important, in its consequences, of all the dinners you ever ate. Yes, precisely the most important; although, in the course of your somewhat eminent career, you have been placed high towards the head of the table, at splendid banquets, and have poured out your festive eloquence to ears yet echoing with Websters mighty organtones. No public dinner this, however. It is merely a gathering of some dozen or so of friends from several districts of the State; men of distinguished character and influence, assembling, almost casually, at the house of a common friend, likewise distinguished, who will make them welcome to a little better than his ordinary fare. Nothing in the way of French cookery, but an excellent dinner, nevertheless. Real turtle, we understand, and salmon, tautog, canvasbacks, pig, English mutton, good roast beef, or dainties of that serious kind, fit for substantial country gentlemen, as these honorable persons mostly are. The delicacies of the season, in short, and flavored by a brand of old Madeira which has been the pride of many seasons. It is the Juno brand; a glorious wine, fragrant, and full of gentle might; a bottledup happiness, put by for use; a golden liquid, worth more than liquid gold; so rare and admirable, that veteran winebibbers count it among their epochs to have tasted it! It drives away the heartache, and substitutes no headache! Could the Judge but quaff a glass, it might enable him to shake off the unaccountable lethargy which (for the ten intervening minutes, and five to boot, are already past) has made him such a laggard at this momentous dinner. It would all but revive a dead man! Would you like to sip it now, Judge Pyncheon? Alas, this dinner. Have you really forgotten its true object? Then let us whisper it, that you may start at once out of the oaken chair, which really seems to be enchanted, like the one in Comus, or that in which Moll Pitcher imprisoned your own grandfather. But ambition is a talisman more powerful than witchcraft. Start up, then, and, hurrying through the streets, burst in upon the company, that they may begin before the fish is spoiled! They wait for you; and it is little for your interest that they should wait. These gentlemenneed you be told it?have assembled, not without purpose, from every quarter of the State. They are practised politicians, every man of them, and skilled to adjust those preliminary measures which steal from the people, without its knowledge, the power of choosing its own rulers. The popular voice, at the next gubernatorial election, though loud as thunder, will be really but an echo of what these gentlemen shall speak, under their breath, at your friends festive board. They meet to decide upon their candidate. This little knot of subtle schemers will control the convention, and, through it, dictate to the party. And what worthier candidatemore wise and learned, more noted for philanthropic liberality, truer to safe principles, tried oftener by public trusts, more spotless in private character, with a larger stake in the common welfare, and deeper grounded, by hereditary descent, in the faith and practice of the Puritanswhat man can be presented for the suffrage of the people, so eminently combining all these claims to the chiefrulership as Judge Pyncheon here before us? Make haste, then! Do your part! The meed for which you have toiled, and fought, and climbed, and crept, is ready for your grasp! Be present at this dinner!drink a glass or two of that noble wine!make your pledges in as low a whisper as you will!and you rise up from table virtually governor of the glorious old State! Governor Pyncheon of Massachusetts! And is there no potent and exhilarating cordial in a certainty like this? It has been the grand purpose of half your lifetime to obtain it. Now, when there needs little more than to signify your acceptance, why do you sit so lumpishly in your greatgreatgrandfathers oaken chair, as if preferring it to the gubernatorial one? We have all heard of King Log; but, in these jostling times, one of that royal kindred will hardly win the race for an elective chiefmagistracy. Well; it is absolutely too late for dinner! Turtle, salmon, tautog, woodcock, boiled turkey, SouthDown mutton, pig, roastbeef, have vanished, or exist only in fragments, with lukewarm potatoes, and gravies crusted over with cold fat. The Judge, had he done nothing else, would have achieved wonders with his knife and fork. It was he, you know, of whom it used to be said, in reference to his ogrelike appetite, that his Creator made him a great animal, but that the dinnerhour made him a great beast. Persons of his large sensual endowments must claim indulgence, at their feedingtime. But, for once, the Judge is entirely too late for dinner! Too late, we fear, even to join the party at their wine! The guests are warm and merry; they have given up the Judge; and, concluding that the FreeSoilers have him, they will fix upon another candidate. Were our friend now to stalk in among them, with that wideopen stare, at once wild and stolid, his ungenial presence would be apt to change their cheer. Neither would it be seemly in Judge Pyncheon, generally so scrupulous in his attire, to show himself at a dinnertable with that crimson stain upon his shirtbosom. By the by, how came it there? It is an ugly sight, at any rate; and the wisest way for the Judge is to button his coat closely over his breast, and, taking his horse and chaise from the livery stable, to make all speed to his own house. There, after a glass of brandy and water, and a muttonchop, a beefsteak, a broiled fowl, or some such hasty little dinner and supper all in one, he had better spend the evening by the fireside. He must toast his slippers a long while, in order to get rid of the chilliness which the air of this vile old house has sent curdling through his veins. Up, therefore, Judge Pyncheon, up! You have lost a day. But tomorrow will be here anon. Will you rise, betimes, and make the most of it? Tomorrow. Tomorrow! Tomorrow. We, that are alive, may rise betimes tomorrow. As for him that has died today, his morrow will be the resurrection morn. Meanwhile the twilight is glooming upward out of the corners of the room. The shadows of the tall furniture grow deeper, and at first become more definite; then, spreading wider, they lose their distinctness of outline in the dark gray tide of oblivion, as it were, that creeps slowly over the various objects, and the one human figure sitting in the midst of them. The gloom has not entered from without; it has brooded here all day, and now, taking its own inevitable time, will possess itself of everything. The Judges face, indeed, rigid and singularly white, refuses to melt into this universal solvent. Fainter and fainter grows the light. It is as if another doublehandful of darkness had been scattered through the air. Now it is no longer gray, but sable. There is still a faint appearance at the window; neither a glow, nor a gleam, nor a glimmerany phrase of light would express something far brighter than this doubtful perception, or sense, rather, that there is a window there. Has it yet vanished? No!yes!not quite! And there is still the swarthy whitenesswe shall venture to marry these illagreeing wordsthe swarthy whiteness of Judge Pyncheons face. The features are all gone there is only the paleness of them left. And how looks it now? There is no window! There is no face! An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmuring about in quest of what was once a world! Is there no other sound? One other, and a fearful one. It is the ticking of the Judges watch, which, ever since Hepzibah left the room in search of Clifford, he has been holding in his hand. Be the cause what it may, this little, quiet, neverceasing throb of Times pulse, repeating its small strokes with such busy regularity, in Judge Pyncheons motionless hand, has an effect of terror, which we do not find in any other accompaniment of the scene. But, listen! That puff of the breeze was louder. It had a tone unlike the dreary and sullen one which has bemoaned itself, and afflicted all mankind with miserable sympathy, for five days past. The wind has veered about! It now comes boisterously from the northwest, and, taking hold of the aged framework of the Seven Gables, gives it a shake, like a wrestler that would try strength with his antagonist. Another and another sturdy tussle with the blast! The old house creaks again, and makes a vociferous but somewhat unintelligible bellowing in its sooty throat (the big flue, we mean, of its wide chimney), partly in complaint at the rude wind, but rather, as befits their century and a half of hostile intimacy, in tough defiance. A rumbling kind of a bluster roars behind the fireboard. A door has slammed above stairs.

A window, perhaps, has been left open, or else is driven in by an unruly gust. It is not to be conceived, beforehand, what wonderful windinstruments are these old timber mansions, and how haunted with the strangest noises, which immediately begin to sing, and sigh, and sob, and shriekand to smite with sledgehammers, airy but ponderous, in some distant chamberand to tread along the entries as with stately footsteps, and rustle up and down the staircase, as with silks miraculously stiffwhenever the gale catches the house with a window open, and gets fairly into it. Would that we were not an attendant spirit here! It is too awful! This clamor of the wind through the lonely house; the Judges quietude, as he sits invisible; and that pertinacious ticking of his watch! As regards Judge Pyncheons invisibility, however, that matter will soon be remedied. The northwest wind has swept the sky clear. The window is distinctly seen. Through its panes, moreover, we dimly catch the sweep of the dark, clustering foliage outside, fluttering with a constant irregularity of movement, and letting in a peep of starlight, now here, now there. Oftener than any other object, these glimpses illuminate the Judges face. But here comes more effectual light. Observe that silvery dance upon the upper branches of the peartree, and now a little lower, and now on the whole mass of boughs, while, through their shifting intricacies, the moonbeams fall aslant into the room. They play over the Judges figure and show that he has not stirred throughout the hours of darkness. They follow the shadows, in changeful sport, across his unchanging features. They gleam upon his watch. His grasp conceals the dialplatebut we know that the faithful hands have met; for one of the city clocks tells midnight. A man of sturdy understanding, like Judge Pyncheon, cares no more for twelve oclock at night than for the corresponding hour of noon. However just the parallel drawn, in some of the preceding pages, between his Puritan ancestor and himself, it fails in this point. The Pyncheon of two centuries ago, in common with most of his contemporaries, professed his full belief in spiritual ministrations, although reckoning them chiefly of a malignant character. The Pyncheon of tonight, who sits in yonder armchair, believes in no such nonsense. Such, at least, was his creed, some few hours since. His hair will not bristle, therefore, at the stories whichin times when chimneycorners had benches in them, where old people sat poking into the ashes of the past, and raking out traditions like live coalsused to be told about this very room of his ancestral house. In fact, these tales are too absurd to bristle even childhoods hair. What sense, meaning, or moral, for example, such as even ghoststories should be susceptible of, can be traced in the ridiculous legend, that, at midnight, all the dead Pyncheons are bound to assemble in this parlor? And, pray, for what? Why, to see whether the portrait of their ancestor still keeps its place upon the wall, in compliance with his testamentary directions! Is it worth while to come out of their graves for that? We are tempted to make a little sport with the idea. Ghoststories are hardly to be treated seriously any longer. The familyparty of the defunct Pyncheons, we presume, goes off in this wise. First comes the ancestor himself, in his black cloak, steeplehat, and trunkbreeches, girt about the waist with a leathern belt, in which hangs his steelhilted sword; he has a long staff in his hand, such as gentlemen in advanced life used to carry, as much for the dignity of the thing as for the support to be derived from it. He looks up at the portrait; a thing of no substance, gazing at its own painted image! All is safe. The picture is still there. The purpose of his brain has been kept sacred thus long after the man himself has sprouted up in graveyard grass. See! he lifts his ineffectual hand, and tries the frame. All safe! But is that a smile?is it not, rather a frown of deadly import, that darkens over the shadow of his features? The stout Colonel is dissatisfied! So decided is his look of discontent as to impart additional distinctness to his features; through which, nevertheless, the moonlight passes, and flickers on the wall beyond. Something has strangely vexed the ancestor! With a grim shake of the head, he turns away. Here come other Pyncheons, the whole tribe, in their half a dozen generations, jostling and elbowing one another, to reach the picture. We behold aged men and grandames, a clergyman with the Puritanic stiffness still in his garb and mien, and a redcoated officer of the old French war; and there comes the shopkeeping Pyncheon of a century ago, with the ruffles turned back from his wrists; and there the periwigged and brocaded gentleman of the artists legend, with the beautiful and pensive Alice, who brings no pride out of her virgin grave. All try the pictureframe. What do these ghostly people seek? A mother lifts her child, that his little hands may touch it! There is evidently a mystery about the picture, that perplexes these poor Pyncheons when they ought to be at rest. In a corner, meanwhile, stands the figure of an elderly man, in a leathern jerkin and breeches, with a carpenters rule sticking out of his side pocket; he points his finger at the bearded Colonel and his descendants, nodding, jeering, mocking, and finally bursting into obstreperous, though inaudible laughter. Indulging our fancy in this freak, we have partly lost the power of restraint and guidance. We distinguish an unlookedfor figure in our visionary scene. Among those ancestral people there is a young man, dressed in the very fashion of today he wears a dark frockcoat, almost destitute of skirts, gray pantaloons, gaiter boots of patent leather, and has a finely wrought gold chain across his breast, and a little silverheaded whalebone stick in his hand. Were we to meet this figure at noonday, we should greet him as young Jaffrey Pyncheon, the Judges only surviving child, who has been spending the last two years in foreign travel. If still in life, how comes his shadow hither? If dead, what a misfortune! The old Pyncheon property, together with the great estate acquired by the young mans father, would devolve on whom? On poor, foolish Clifford, gaunt Hepzibah, and rustic little Phoebe! But another and a greater marvel greets us! Can we believe our eyes? A stout, elderly gentleman has made his appearance; he has an aspect of eminent respectability, wears a black coat and pantaloons, of roomy width, and might be pronounced scrupulously neat in his attire, but for a broad crimson stain across his snowy neckcloth and down his shirtbosom. Is it the Judge, or no? How can it be Judge Pyncheon? We discern his figure, as plainly as the flickering moonbeams can show us anything, still seated in the oaken chair! Be the apparition whose it may, it advances to the picture, seems to seize the frame, tries to peep behind it, and turns away, with a frown as black as the ancestral one. The fantastic scene just hinted at must by no means be considered as forming an actual portion of our story. We were betrayed into this brief extravagance by the quiver of the moonbeams; they dance handinhand with shadows, and are reflected in the lookingglass, which, you are aware, is always a kind of window or doorway into the spiritual world. We needed relief, moreover, from our too long and exclusive contemplation of that figure in the chair. This wild wind, too, has tossed our thoughts into strange confusion, but without tearing them away from their one determined centre. Yonder leaden Judge sits immovably upon our soul. Will he never stir again? We shall go mad unless he stirs! You may the better estimate his quietude by the fearlessness of a little mouse, which sits on its hind legs, in a streak of moonlight, close by Judge Pyncheons foot, and seems to meditate a journey of exploration over this great black bulk. Ha! what has startled the nimble little mouse? It is the visage of Grimalkin, outside of the window, where he appears to have posted himself for a deliberate watch. This grimalkin has a very ugly look. Is it a cat watching for a mouse, or the devil for a human soul? Would we could scare him from the window! Thank Heaven, the night is wellnigh past! The moonbeams have no longer so silvery a gleam, nor contrast so strongly with the blackness of the shadows among which they fall. They are paler now; the shadows look gray, not black. The boisterous wind is hushed. What is the hour? Ah! the watch has at last ceased to tick; for the Judges forgetful fingers neglected to wind it up, as usual, at ten oclock, being half an hour or so before his ordinary bedtimeand it has run down, for the first time in five years. But the great worldclock of Time still keeps its beat. The dreary nightfor, oh, how dreary seems its haunted waste, behind us!gives place to a fresh, transparent, cloudless morn. Blessed, blessed radiance! The daybeameven what little of it finds its way into this always dusky parlorseems part of the universal benediction, annulling evil, and rendering all goodness possible, and happiness attainable. Will Judge Pyncheon now rise up from his chair? Will he go forth, and receive the early sunbeams on his brow? Will he begin this new daywhich God has smiled upon, and blessed, and given to mankindwill he begin it with better purposes than the many that have been spent amiss? Or are all the deeplaid schemes of yesterday as stubborn in his heart, and as busy in his brain, as ever? In this latter case, there is much to do. Will the Judge still insist with Hepzibah on the interview with Clifford? Will he buy a safe, elderly gentlemans horse? Will he persuade the purchaser of the old Pyncheon property to relinquish the bargain in his favor? Will he see his family physician, and obtain a medicine that shall preserve him, to be an honor and blessing to his race, until the utmost term of patriarchal longevity? Will Judge Pyncheon, above all, make due apologies to that company of honorable friends, and satisfy them that his absence from the festive board was unavoidable, and so fully retrieve himself in their good opinion that he shall yet be Governor of Massachusetts? And all these great purposes accomplished, will he walk the streets again, with that dogday smile of elaborate benevolence, sultry enough to tempt flies to come and buzz in it? Or will he, after the tomblike seclusion of the past day and night, go forth a humbled and repentant man, sorrowful, gentle, seeking no profit, shrinking from worldly honor, hardly daring to love God, but bold to love his fellow man, and to do him what good he may? Will he bear about with himno odious grin of feigned benignity, insolent in its pretence, and loathsome in its falsehoodbut the tender sadness of a contrite heart, broken, at last, beneath its own weight of sin? For it is our belief, whatever show of honor he may have piled upon it, that there was heavy sin at the base of this mans being. Rise up, Judge Pyncheon! The morning sunshine glimmers through the foliage, and, beautiful and holy as it is, shuns not to kindle up your face. Rise up, thou subtle, worldly, selfish, ironhearted hypocrite, and make thy choice whether still to be subtle, worldly, selfish, ironhearted, and hypocritical, or to tear these sins out of thy nature, though they bring the lifeblood with them! The Avenger is upon thee! Rise up, before it be too late! What! Thou art not stirred by this last appeal? No, not a jot! And there we see a flyone of your common houseflies, such as are always buzzing on the windowpanewhich has smelt out Governor Pyncheon, and alights, now on his forehead, now on his chin, and now, Heaven help us! is creeping over the bridge of his nose, towards the wouldbe chiefmagistrates wideopen eyes! Canst thou not brush the fly away? Art thou too sluggish? Thou man, that hadst so many busy projects yesterday! Art thou too weak, that wast so powerful? Not brush away a fly? Nay, then, we give thee up! And hark! the shopbell rings. After hours like these latter ones, through which we have borne our heavy tale, it is good to be made sensible that there is a living world, and that even this old, lonely mansion retains some manner of connection with it. We breathe more freely, emerging from Judge Pyncheons presence into the street before the Seven Gables. XIX Alices Posies Uncle Venner, trundling a wheelbarrow, was the earliest person stirring in the neighborhood the day after the storm. Pyncheon Street, in front of the House of the Seven Gables, was a far pleasanter scene than a bylane, confined by shabby fences, and bordered with wooden dwellings of the meaner class, could reasonably be expected to present. Nature made sweet amends that morning for the five unkindly days which had preceded it. It would have been enough to live for, merely to look up at the wide benediction of the sky, or as much of it as was visible between the houses, genial once more with sunshine. Every object was agreeable, whether to be gazed at in the breadth, or examined more minutely. Such, for example, were the wellwashed pebbles and gravel of the sidewalk; even the skyreflecting pools in the centre of the street; and the grass, now freshly verdant, that crept along the base of the fences, on the other side of which, if one peeped over, was seen the multifarious growth of gardens. Vegetable productions, of whatever kind, seemed more than negatively happy, in the juicy warmth and abundance of their life. The Pyncheon Elm, throughout its great circumference, was all alive, and full of the morning sun and a sweettempered little breeze, which lingered within this verdant sphere, and set a thousand leafy tongues awhispering all at once. This aged tree appeared to have suffered nothing from the gale. It had kept its boughs unshattered, and its full complement of leaves; and the whole in perfect verdure, except a single branch, that, by the earlier change with which the elmtree sometimes prophesies the autumn, had been transmuted to bright gold. It was like the golden branch that gained Aeneas and the Sibyl admittance into Hades. This one mystic branch hung down before the main entrance of the Seven Gables, so nigh the ground that any passerby might have stood on tiptoe and plucked it off. Presented at the door, it would have been a symbol of his right to enter, and be made acquainted with all the secrets of the house. So little faith is due to external appearance, that there was really an inviting aspect over the venerable edifice, conveying an idea that its history must be a decorous and happy one, and such as would be delightful for a fireside tale. Its windows gleamed cheerfully in the slanting sunlight. The lines and tufts of green moss, here and there, seemed pledges of familiarity and sisterhood with Nature; as if this human dwellingplace, being of such old date, had established its prescriptive title among primeval oaks and whatever other objects, by virtue of their long continuance, have acquired a gracious right to be. A person of imaginative temperament, while passing by the house, would turn, once and again, and peruse it well its many peaks, consenting together in the clustered chimney; the deep projection over its basementstory; the arched window, imparting a look, if not of grandeur, yet of antique gentility, to the broken portal over which it opened; the luxuriance of gigantic burdocks, near the threshold; he would note all these characteristics, and be conscious of something deeper than he saw. He would conceive the mansion to have been the residence of the stubborn old Puritan, Integrity, who, dying in some forgotten generation, had left a blessing in all its rooms and chambers, the efficacy of which was to be seen in the religion, honesty, moderate competence, or upright poverty and solid happiness, of his descendants, to this day. One object, above all others, would take root in the imaginative observers memory. It was the great tuft of flowersweeds, you would have called them, only a week agothe tuft of crimsonspotted flowers, in the angle between the two front gables. The old people used to give them the name of Alices Posies, in remembrance of fair Alice Pyncheon, who was believed to have brought their seeds from Italy. They were flaunting in rich beauty and full bloom today, and seemed, as it were, a mystic expression that something within the house was consummated. It was but little after sunrise, when Uncle Venner made his appearance, as aforesaid, impelling a wheelbarrow along the street. He was going his matutinal rounds to collect cabbageleaves, turniptops, potatoskins, and the miscellaneous refuse of the dinnerpot, which the thrifty housewives of the neighborhood were accustomed to put aside, as fit only to feed a pig. Uncle Venners pig was fed entirely, and kept in prime order, on these eleemosynary contributions; insomuch that the patched philosopher used to promise that, before retiring to his farm, he would make a feast of the portly grunter, and invite all his neighbors to partake of the joints and spareribs which they had helped to fatten. Miss Hepzibah Pyncheons housekeeping had so greatly improved, since Clifford became a member of the family, that her share of the banquet would have been no lean one; and Uncle Venner, accordingly, was a good deal disappointed not to find the large earthen pan, full of fragmentary eatables, that ordinarily awaited his coming at the back doorstep of the Seven Gables. I never knew Miss Hepzibah so forgetful before, said the patriarch to himself. She must have had a dinner yesterdayno question of that! She always has one, nowadays. So wheres the potliquor and potatoskins, I ask? Shall I knock, and see if shes stirring yet? No, notwont do! If little Phoebe was about the house, I should not mind knocking; but Miss Hepzibah, likely as not, would scowl down at me out of the window, and look cross, even if she felt pleasantly. So, Ill come back at noon. With these reflections, the old man was shutting the gate of the little backyard. Creaking on its hinges, however, like every other gate and door about the premises, the sound reached the ears of the occupant of the northern gable, one of the windows of which had a sideview towards the gate. Good morning, Uncle Venner! said the daguerreotypist, leaning out of the window. Do you hear nobody stirring? Not a soul, said the man of patches. But thats no wonder. Tis barely half an hour past sunrise, yet. But Im really glad to see you, Mr. Holgrave! Theres a strange, lonesome look about this side of the house; so that my heart misgave me, somehow or other, and I felt as if there was nobody alive in it. The front of the house looks a good deal cheerier; and Alices Posies are blooming there beautifully; and if I were a young man, Mr. Holgrave, my sweetheart should have one of those flowers in her bosom, though I risked my neck climbing for it! Well, and did the wind keep you awake last night? It did, indeed! answered the artist, smiling. If I were a believer in ghostsand I dont quite know whether I am or notI should have concluded that all the old Pyncheons were running riot in the lower rooms, especially in Miss Hepzibahs part of the house. But it is very quiet now. Yes, Miss Hepzibah will be apt to oversleep herself, after being disturbed, all night, with the racket, said Uncle Venner. But it would be odd, now, wouldnt it, if the Judge had taken both his cousins into the country along with him? I saw him go into the shop yesterday. At what hour? inquired Holgrave. Oh, along in the forenoon, said the old man. Well, well! I must go my rounds, and so must my wheelbarrow. But Ill be back here at dinnertime; for my pig likes a dinner as well as a breakfast. No mealtime, and no sort of victuals, ever seems to come amiss to my pig. Good morning to you! And, Mr. Holgrave, if I were a young man, like you, Id get one of Alices Posies, and keep it in water till Phoebe comes back. I have heard, said the daguerreotypist, as he drew in his head, that the water of Maules well suits those flowers best. Here the conversation ceased, and Uncle Venner went on his way. For half an hour longer, nothing disturbed the repose of the Seven Gables; nor was there any visitor, except a carrierboy, who, as he passed the front doorstep, threw down one of his newspapers; for Hepzibah, of late, had regularly taken it in. After a while, there came a fat woman, making prodigious speed, and stumbling as she ran up the steps of the shopdoor. Her face glowed with fireheat, and, it being a pretty warm morning, she bubbled and hissed, as it were, as if all afry with chimneywarmth, and summerwarmth, and the warmth of her own corpulent velocity. She tried the shopdoor; it was fast. She tried it again, with so angry a jar that the bell tinkled angrily back at her. The deuce take Old Maid Pyncheon! muttered the irascible housewife. Think of her pretending to set up a centshop, and then lying abed till noon! These are what she calls gentlefolks airs, I suppose! But Ill either start her ladyship, or break the door down! She shook it accordingly, and the bell, having a spiteful little temper of its own, rang obstreperously, making its remonstrances heardnot, indeed, by the ears for which they were intendedbut by a good lady on the opposite side of the street. She opened the window, and addressed the impatient applicant. Youll find nobody there, Mrs. Gubbins. But I must and will find somebody here! cried Mrs. Gubbins, inflicting another outrage on the bell. I want a halfpound of pork, to fry some firstrate flounders for Mr. Gubbinss breakfast; and, lady or not, Old Maid Pyncheon shall get up and serve me with it! But do hear reason, Mrs. Gubbins! responded the lady opposite. She, and her brother too, have both gone to their cousins, Judge Pyncheons at his countryseat. Theres not a soul in the house, but that young daguerreotypeman that sleeps in the north gable. I saw old Hepzibah and Clifford go away yesterday; and a queer couple of ducks they were, paddling through the mudpuddles! Theyre gone, Ill assure you. And how do you know theyre gone to the Judges? asked Mrs. Gubbins. Hes a rich man; and theres been a quarrel between him and Hepzibah this many a day, because he wont give her a living. Thats the main reason of her setting up a centshop. I know that well enough, said the neighbor. But theyre gonethats one thing certain. And who but a blood relation, that couldnt help himself, I ask you, would take in that awfultempered old maid, and that dreadful Clifford? Thats it, you may be sure. Mrs. Gubbins took her departure, still brimming over with hot wrath against the absent Hepzibah. For another halfhour, or, perhaps, considerably more, there was almost as much quiet on the outside of the house as within. The elm, however, made a pleasant, cheerful, sunny sigh, responsive to the breeze that was elsewhere imperceptible; a swarm of insects buzzed merrily under its drooping shadow, and became specks of light whenever they darted into the sunshine; a locust sang, once or twice, in some inscrutable seclusion of the tree; and a solitary little bird, with plumage of pale gold, came and hovered about Alices Posies. At last our small acquaintance, Ned Higgins, trudged up the street, on his way to school; and happening, for the first time in a fortnight, to be the possessor of a cent, he could by no means get past the shopdoor of the Seven Gables. But it would not open. Again and again, however, and half a dozen other agains, with the inexorable pertinacity of a child intent upon some object important to itself, did he renew his efforts for admittance. He had, doubtless, set his heart upon an elephant; or, possibly, with Hamlet, he meant to eat a crocodile. In response to his more violent attacks, the bell gave, now and then, a moderate tinkle, but could not be stirred into clamor by any exertion of the little fellows childish and tiptoe strength. Holding by the doorhandle, he peeped through a crevice of the curtain, and saw that the inner door, communicating with the passage towards the parlor, was closed. Miss Pyncheon! screamed the child, rapping on the windowpane, I want an elephant! There being no answer to several repetitions of the summons, Ned began to grow impatient; and his little pot of passion quickly boiling over, he picked up a stone, with a naughty purpose to fling it through the window; at the same time blubbering and sputtering with wrath. A manone of two who happened to be passing bycaught the urchins arm. Whats the trouble, old gentleman? he asked. I want old Hepzibah, or Phoebe, or any of them! answered Ned, sobbing. They wont open the door; and I cant get my elephant! Go to school, you little scamp! said the man. Theres another centshop round the corner. Tis very strange, Dixey, added he to his companion, whats become of all these Pyncheons! Smith, the liverystable keeper, tells me Judge Pyncheon put his horse up yesterday, to stand till after dinner, and has not taken him away yet. And one of the Judges hired men has been in, this morning, to make inquiry about him. Hes a kind of person, they say, that seldom breaks his habits, or stays out o nights. Oh, hell turn up safe enough! said Dixey. And as for Old Maid Pyncheon, take my word for it, she has run in debt, and gone off from her creditors. I foretold, you remember, the first morning she set up shop, that her devilish scowl would frighten away customers. They couldnt stand it! I never thought shed make it go, remarked his friend. This business of centshops is overdone among the womenfolks. My wife tried it, and lost five dollars on her outlay! Poor business! said Dixey, shaking his head. Poor business! In the course of the morning, there were various other attempts to open a communication with the supposed inhabitants of this silent and impenetrable mansion. The man of rootbeer came, in his neatly painted wagon, with a couple of dozen full bottles, to be exchanged for empty ones; the baker, with a lot of crackers which Hepzibah had ordered for her retail custom; the butcher, with a nice titbit which he fancied she would be eager to secure for Clifford. Had any observer of these proceedings been aware of the fearful secret hidden within the house, it would have affected him with a singular shape and modification of horror, to see the current of human life making this small eddy hereaboutswhirling sticks, straws and all such trifles, round and round, right over the black depth where a dead corpse lay unseen! The butcher was so much in earnest with his sweetbread of lamb, or whatever the dainty might be, that he tried every accessible door of the Seven Gables, and at length came round again to the shop, where he ordinarily found admittance. Its a nice article, and I know the old lady would jump at it, said he to himself. She cant be gone away! In fifteen years that I have driven my cart through Pyncheon Street, Ive never known her to be away from home; though often enough, to be sure, a man might knock all day without bringing her to the door. But that was when shed only herself to provide for. Peeping through the same crevice of the curtain where, only a little while before, the urchin of elephantine appetite had peeped, the butcher beheld the inner door, not closed, as the child had seen it, but ajar, and almost wide open. However it might have happened, it was the fact. Through the passageway there was a dark vista into the lighter but still obscure interior of the parlor. It appeared to the butcher that he could pretty clearly discern what seemed to be the stalwart legs, clad in black pantaloons, of a man sitting in a large oaken chair, the back of which concealed all the remainder of his figure. This contemptuous tranquillity on the part of an occupant of the house, in response to the butchers indefatigable efforts to attract notice, so piqued the man of flesh that he determined to withdraw. So, thought he, there sits Old Maid Pyncheons bloody brother, while Ive been giving myself all this trouble! Why, if a hog hadnt more manners, Id stick him! I call it demeaning a mans business to trade with such people; and from this time forth, if they want a sausage or an ounce of liver, they shall run after the cart for it! He tossed the titbit angrily into his cart, and drove off in a pet. Not a great while afterwards there was a sound of music turning the corner and approaching down the street, with several intervals of silence, and then a renewed and nearer outbreak of brisk melody. A mob of children was seen moving onward, or stopping, in unison with the sound, which appeared to proceed from the centre of the throng; so that they were loosely bound together by slender strains of harmony, and drawn along captive; with ever and anon an accession of some little fellow in an apron and strawhat, capering forth from door or gateway. Arriving under the shadow of the Pyncheon Elm, it proved to be the Italian boy, who, with his monkey and show of puppets, had once before played his hurdygurdy beneath the arched window. The pleasant face of Phoebeand doubtless, too, the liberal recompense which she had flung himstill dwelt in his remembrance. His expressive features kindled up, as he recognized the spot where this trifling incident of his erratic life had chanced. He entered the neglected yard (now wilder than ever, with its growth of hogweed and burdock), stationed himself on the doorstep of the main entrance, and, opening his showbox, began to play. Each individual of the automatic community forthwith set to work, according to his or her proper vocation the monkey, taking off his Highland bonnet, bowed and scraped to the bystanders most obsequiously, with ever an observant eye to pick up a stray cent; and the young foreigner himself, as he turned the crank of his machine, glanced upward to the arched window, expectant of a presence that would make his music the livelier and sweeter. The throng of children stood near; some on the sidewalk; some within the yard; two or three establishing themselves on the very doorstep; and one squatting on the threshold. Meanwhile, the locust kept singing in the great old Pyncheon Elm. I dont hear anybody in the house, said one of the children to another. The monkey wont pick up anything here. There is somebody at home, affirmed the urchin on the threshold. I heard a step! Still the young Italians eye turned sidelong upward; and it really seemed as if the touch of genuine, though slight and almost playful, emotion communicated a juicier sweetness to the dry, mechanical process of his minstrelsy. These wanderers are readily responsive to any natural kindnessbe it no more than a smile, or a word itself not understood, but only a warmth in itwhich befalls them on the roadside of life. They remember these things, because they are the little enchantments which, for the instantfor the space that reflects a landscape in a soapbubblebuild up a home about them. Therefore, the Italian boy would not be discouraged by the heavy silence with which the old house seemed resolute to clog the vivacity of his instrument. He persisted in his melodious appeals; he still looked upward, trusting that his dark, alien countenance would soon be brightened by Phoebes sunny aspect. Neither could he be willing to depart without again beholding Clifford, whose sensibility, like Phoebes smile, had talked a kind of hearts language to the foreigner. He repeated all his music over and over again, until his auditors were getting weary. So were the little wooden people in his showbox, and the monkey most of all. There was no response, save the singing of the locust. No children live in this house, said a schoolboy, at last. Nobody lives here but an old maid and an old man.

Youll get nothing here! Why dont you go along? You fool, you, why do you tell him? whispered a shrewd little Yankee, caring nothing for the music, but a good deal for the cheap rate at which it was had. Let him play as he likes! If theres nobody to pay him, thats his own lookout! Once more, however, the Italian ran over his round of melodies. To the common observerwho could understand nothing of the case, except the music and the sunshine on the hither side of the doorit might have been amusing to watch the pertinacity of the streetperformer. Will he succeed at last? Will that stubborn door be suddenly flung open? Will a group of joyous children, the young ones of the house, come dancing, shouting, laughing, into the open air, and cluster round the showbox, looking with eager merriment at the puppets, and tossing each a copper for longtailed Mammon, the monkey, to pick up? But to us, who know the inner heart of the Seven Gables as well as its exterior face, there is a ghastly effect in this repetition of light popular tunes at its doorstep. It would be an ugly business, indeed, if Judge Pyncheon (who would not have cared a fig for Paganinis fiddle in his most harmonious mood) should make his appearance at the door, with a bloody shirtbosom, and a grim frown on his swarthily white visage, and motion the foreign vagabond away! Was ever before such a grinding out of jigs and waltzes, where nobody was in the cue to dance? Yes, very often. This contrast, or intermingling of tragedy with mirth, happens daily, hourly, momently. The gloomy and desolate old house, deserted of life, and with awful Death sitting sternly in its solitude, was the emblem of many a human heart, which, nevertheless, is compelled to hear the thrill and echo of the worlds gayety around it. Before the conclusion of the Italians performance, a couple of men happened to be passing, On their way to dinner. I say, you young French fellow! called out one of themcome away from that doorstep, and go somewhere else with your nonsense! The Pyncheon family live there; and they are in great trouble, just about this time. They dont feel musical today. It is reported all over town that Judge Pyncheon, who owns the house, has been murdered; and the city marshal is going to look into the matter. So be off with you, at once! As the Italian shouldered his hurdygurdy, he saw on the doorstep a card, which had been covered, all the morning, by the newspaper that the carrier had flung upon it, but was now shuffled into sight. He picked it up, and perceiving something written in pencil, gave it to the man to read. In fact, it was an engraved card of Judge Pyncheons with certain pencilled memoranda on the back, referring to various businesses which it had been his purpose to transact during the preceding day. It formed a prospective epitome of the days history; only that affairs had not turned out altogether in accordance with the programme. The card must have been lost from the Judges vestpocket in his preliminary attempt to gain access by the main entrance of the house. Though well soaked with rain, it was still partially legible. Look here; Dixey! cried the man. This has something to do with Judge Pyncheon. See!heres his name printed on it; and here, I suppose, is some of his handwriting. Lets go to the city marshal with it! said Dixey. It may give him just the clue he wants. After all, whispered he in his companions ear, it would be no wonder if the Judge has gone into that door and never come out again! A certain cousin of his may have been at his old tricks. And Old Maid Pyncheon having got herself in debt by the centshopand the Judges pocketbook being well filledand bad blood amongst them already! Put all these things together and see what they make! Hush, hush! whispered the other. It seems like a sin to be the first to speak of such a thing. But I think, with you, that we had better go to the city marshal. Yes, yes! said Dixey. Well!I always said there was something devilish in that womans scowl! The men wheeled about, accordingly, and retraced their steps up the street. The Italian, also, made the best of his way off, with a parting glance up at the arched window. As for the children, they took to their heels, with one accord, and scampered as if some giant or ogre were in pursuit, until, at a good distance from the house, they stopped as suddenly and simultaneously as they had set out. Their susceptible nerves took an indefinite alarm from what they had overheard. Looking back at the grotesque peaks and shadowy angles of the old mansion, they fancied a gloom diffused about it which no brightness of the sunshine could dispel. An imaginary Hepzibah scowled and shook her finger at them, from several windows at the same moment. An imaginary Cliffordfor (and it would have deeply wounded him to know it) he had always been a horror to these small peoplestood behind the unreal Hepzibah, making awful gestures, in a faded dressinggown. Children are even more apt, if possible, than grown people, to catch the contagion of a panic terror. For the rest of the day, the more timid went whole streets about, for the sake of avoiding the Seven Gables; while the bolder signalized their hardihood by challenging their comrades to race past the mansion at full speed. It could not have been more than half an hour after the disappearance of the Italian boy, with his unseasonable melodies, when a cab drove down the street. It stopped beneath the Pyncheon Elm; the cabman took a trunk, a canvas bag, and a bandbox, from the top of his vehicle, and deposited them on the doorstep of the old house; a straw bonnet, and then the pretty figure of a young girl, came into view from the interior of the cab. It was Phoebe! Though not altogether so blooming as when she first tripped into our storyfor, in the few intervening weeks, her experiences had made her graver, more womanly, and deepereyed, in token of a heart that had begun to suspect its depthsstill there was the quiet glow of natural sunshine over her. Neither had she forfeited her proper gift of making things look real, rather than fantastic, within her sphere. Yet we feel it to be a questionable venture, even for Phoebe, at this juncture, to cross the threshold of the Seven Gables. Is her healthful presence potent enough to chase away the crowd of pale, hideous, and sinful phantoms, that have gained admittance there since her departure? Or will she, likewise, fade, sicken, sadden, and grow into deformity, and be only another pallid phantom, to glide noiselessly up and down the stairs, and affright children as she pauses at the window? At least, we would gladly forewarn the unsuspecting girl that there is nothing in human shape or substance to receive her, unless it be the figure of Judge Pyncheon, whowretched spectacle that he is, and frightful in our remembrance, since our nightlong vigil with him!still keeps his place in the oaken chair. Phoebe first tried the shopdoor. It did not yield to her hand; and the white curtain, drawn across the window which formed the upper section of the door, struck her quick perceptive faculty as something unusual. Without making another effort to enter here, she betook herself to the great portal, under the arched window. Finding it fastened, she knocked. A reverberation came from the emptiness within. She knocked again, and a third time; and, listening intently, fancied that the floor creaked, as if Hepzibah were coming, with her ordinary tiptoe movement, to admit her. But so dead a silence ensued upon this imaginary sound, that she began to question whether she might not have mistaken the house, familiar as she thought herself with its exterior. Her notice was now attracted by a childs voice, at some distance. It appeared to call her name. Looking in the direction whence it proceeded, Phoebe saw little Ned Higgins, a good way down the street, stamping, shaking his head violently, making deprecatory gestures with both hands, and shouting to her at mouthwide screech. No, no, Phoebe! he screamed. Dont you go in! Theres something wicked there! Dontdontdont go in! But, as the little personage could not be induced to approach near enough to explain himself, Phoebe concluded that he had been frightened, on some of his visits to the shop, by her cousin Hepzibah; for the good ladys manifestations, in truth, ran about an equal chance of scaring children out of their wits, or compelling them to unseemly laughter. Still, she felt the more, for this incident, how unaccountably silent and impenetrable the house had become. As her next resort, Phoebe made her way into the garden, where on so warm and bright a day as the present, she had little doubt of finding Clifford, and perhaps Hepzibah also, idling away the noontide in the shadow of the arbor. Immediately on her entering the garden gate, the family of hens half ran, half flew to meet her; while a strange grimalkin, which was prowling under the parlor window, took to his heels, clambered hastily over the fence, and vanished. The arbor was vacant, and its floor, table, and circular bench were still damp, and bestrewn with twigs and the disarray of the past storm. The growth of the garden seemed to have got quite out of bounds; the weeds had taken advantage of Phoebes absence, and the longcontinued rain, to run rampant over the flowers and kitchenvegetables. Maules well had overflowed its stone border, and made a pool of formidable breadth in that corner of the garden. The impression of the whole scene was that of a spot where no human foot had left its print for many preceding daysprobably not since Phoebes departurefor she saw a sidecomb of her own under the table of the arbor, where it must have fallen on the last afternoon when she and Clifford sat there. The girl knew that her two relatives were capable of far greater oddities than that of shutting themselves up in their old house, as they appeared now to have done. Nevertheless, with indistinct misgivings of something amiss, and apprehensions to which she could not give shape, she approached the door that formed the customary communication between the house and garden. It was secured within, like the two which she had already tried. She knocked, however; and immediately, as if the application had been expected, the door was drawn open, by a considerable exertion of some unseen persons strength, not wide, but far enough to afford her a sidelong entrance. As Hepzibah, in order not to expose herself to inspection from without, invariably opened a door in this manner, Phoebe necessarily concluded that it was her cousin who now admitted her. Without hesitation, therefore, she stepped across the threshold, and had no sooner entered than the door closed behind her. XX The Flower of Eden Phoebe, coming so suddenly from the sunny daylight, was altogether bedimmed in such density of shadow as lurked in most of the passages of the old house. She was not at first aware by whom she had been admitted. Before her eyes had adapted themselves to the obscurity, a hand grasped her own with a firm but gentle and warm pressure, thus imparting a welcome which caused her heart to leap and thrill with an indefinable shiver of enjoyment. She felt herself drawn along, not towards the parlor, but into a large and unoccupied apartment, which had formerly been the grand receptionroom of the Seven Gables. The sunshine came freely into all the uncurtained windows of this room, and fell upon the dusty floor; so that Phoebe now clearly sawwhat, indeed, had been no secret, after the encounter of a warm hand with hersthat it was not Hepzibah nor Clifford, but Holgrave, to whom she owed her reception. The subtle, intuitive communication, or, rather, the vague and formless impression of something to be told, had made her yield unresistingly to his impulse. Without taking away her hand, she looked eagerly in his face, not quick to forebode evil, but unavoidably conscious that the state of the family had changed since her departure, and therefore anxious for an explanation. The artist looked paler than ordinary; there was a thoughtful and severe contraction of his forehead, tracing a deep, vertical line between the eyebrows. His smile, however, was full of genuine warmth, and had in it a joy, by far the most vivid expression that Phoebe had ever witnessed, shining out of the New England reserve with which Holgrave habitually masked whatever lay near his heart. It was the look wherewith a man, brooding alone over some fearful object, in a dreary forest or illimitable desert, would recognize the familiar aspect of his dearest friend, bringing up all the peaceful ideas that belong to home, and the gentle current of everyday affairs. And yet, as he felt the necessity of responding to her look of inquiry, the smile disappeared. I ought not to rejoice that you have come, Phoebe, said he. We meet at a strange moment! What has happened? she exclaimed. Why is the house so deserted? Where are Hepzibah and Clifford? Gone! I cannot imagine where they are! answered Holgrave. We are alone in the house! Hepzibah and Clifford gone? cried Phoebe. It is not possible! And why have you brought me into this room, instead of the parlor? Ah, something terrible has happened! I must run and see! No, no, Phoebe! said Holgrave holding her back. It is as I have told you. They are gone, and I know not whither. A terrible event has, indeed happened, but not to them, nor, as I undoubtingly believe, through any agency of theirs. If I read your character rightly, Phoebe, he continued, fixing his eyes on hers with stern anxiety, intermixed with tenderness, gentle as you are, and seeming to have your sphere among common things, you yet possess remarkable strength. You have wonderful poise, and a faculty which, when tested, will prove itself capable of dealing with matters that fall far out of the ordinary rule. Oh, no, I am very weak! replied Phoebe, trembling. But tell me what has happened! You are strong! persisted Holgrave. You must be both strong and wise; for I am all astray, and need your counsel. It may be you can suggest the one right thing to do! Tell me!tell me! said Phoebe, all in a tremble. It oppressesit terrifies methis mystery! Anything else I can bear! The artist hesitated. Notwithstanding what he had just said, and most sincerely, in regard to the selfbalancing power with which Phoebe impressed him, it still seemed almost wicked to bring the awful secret of yesterday to her knowledge. It was like dragging a hideous shape of death into the cleanly and cheerful space before a household fire, where it would present all the uglier aspect, amid the decorousness of everything about it. Yet it could not be concealed from her; she must needs know it. Phoebe, said he, do you remember this? He put into her hand a daguerreotype; the same that he had shown her at their first interview in the garden, and which so strikingly brought out the hard and relentless traits of the original. What has this to do with Hepzibah and Clifford? asked Phoebe, with impatient surprise that Holgrave should so trifle with her at such a moment. It is Judge Pyncheon! You have shown it to me before! But here is the same face, taken within this halfhour said the artist, presenting her with another miniature. I had just finished it when I heard you at the door. This is death! shuddered Phoebe, turning very pale. Judge Pyncheon dead! Such as there represented, said Holgrave, he sits in the next room. The Judge is dead, and Clifford and Hepzibah have vanished! I know no more. All beyond is conjecture. On returning to my solitary chamber, last evening, I noticed no light, either in the parlor, or Hepzibahs room, or Cliffords; no stir nor footstep about the house. This morning, there was the same deathlike quiet. From my window, I overheard the testimony of a neighbor, that your relatives were seen leaving the house in the midst of yesterdays storm. A rumor reached me, too, of Judge Pyncheon being missed. A feeling which I cannot describean indefinite sense of some catastrophe, or consummationimpelled me to make my way into this part of the house, where I discovered what you see. As a point of evidence that may be useful to Clifford, and also as a memorial valuable to myselffor, Phoebe, there are hereditary reasons that connect me strangely with that mans fateI used the means at my disposal to preserve this pictorial record of Judge Pyncheons death. Even in her agitation, Phoebe could not help remarking the calmness of Holgraves demeanor. He appeared, it is true, to feel the whole awfulness of the Judges death, yet had received the fact into his mind without any mixture of surprise, but as an event preordained, happening inevitably, and so fitting itself into past occurrences that it could almost have been prophesied. Why have you not thrown open the doors, and called in witnesses? inquired she with a painful shudder. It is terrible to be here alone! But Clifford! suggested the artist. Clifford and Hepzibah! We must consider what is best to be done in their behalf. It is a wretched fatality that they should have disappeared! Their flight will throw the worst coloring over this event of which it is susceptible. Yet how easy is the explanation, to those who know them! Bewildered and terrorstricken by the similarity of this death to a former one, which was attended with such disastrous consequences to Clifford, they have had no idea but of removing themselves from the scene. How miserably unfortunate! Had Hepzibah but shrieked aloudhad Clifford flung wide the door, and proclaimed Judge Pyncheons deathit would have been, however awful in itself, an event fruitful of good consequences to them. As I view it, it would have gone far towards obliterating the black stain on Cliffords character. And how, asked Phoebe, could any good come from what is so very dreadful? Because, said the artist, if the matter can be fairly considered and candidly interpreted, it must be evident that Judge Pyncheon could not have come unfairly to his end. This mode of death had been an idiosyncrasy with his family, for generations past; not often occurring, indeed, but, when it does occur, usually attacking individuals about the Judges time of life, and generally in the tension of some mental crisis, or, perhaps, in an access of wrath. Old Maules prophecy was probably founded on a knowledge of this physical predisposition in the Pyncheon race. Now, there is a minute and almost exact similarity in the appearances connected with the death that occurred yesterday and those recorded of the death of Cliffords uncle thirty years ago. It is true, there was a certain arrangement of circumstances, unnecessary to be recounted, which made it possible nay, as men look at these things, probable, or even certainthat old Jaffrey Pyncheon came to a violent death, and by Cliffords hands. Whence came those circumstances? exclaimed Phoebe. He being innocent, as we know him to be! They were arranged, said Holgraveat least such has long been my convictionthey were arranged after the uncles death, and before it was made public, by the man who sits in yonder parlor. His own death, so like that former one, yet attended by none of those suspicious circumstances, seems the stroke of God upon him, at once a punishment for his wickedness, and making plain the innocence of Clifford. But this flightit distorts everything! He may be in concealment, near at hand. Could we but bring him back before the discovery of the Judges death, the evil might be rectified. We must not hide this thing a moment longer! said Phoebe. It is dreadful to keep it so closely in our hearts. Clifford is innocent. God will make it manifest! Let us throw open the doors, and call all the neighborhood to see the truth! You are right, Phoebe, rejoined Holgrave. Doubtless you are right. Yet the artist did not feel the horror, which was proper to Phoebes sweet and orderloving character, at thus finding herself at issue with society, and brought in contact with an event that transcended ordinary rules. Neither was he in haste, like her, to betake himself within the precincts of common life. On the contrary, he gathered a wild enjoymentas it were, a flower of strange beauty, growing in a desolate spot, and blossoming in the windsuch a flower of momentary happiness he gathered from his present position. It separated Phoebe and himself from the world, and bound them to each other, by their exclusive knowledge of Judge Pyncheons mysterious death, and the counsel which they were forced to hold respecting it. The secret, so long as it should continue such, kept them within the circle of a spell, a solitude in the midst of men, a remoteness as entire as that of an island in midocean; once divulged, the ocean would flow betwixt them, standing on its widely sundered shores. Meanwhile, all the circumstances of their situation seemed to draw them together; they were like two children who go hand in hand, pressing closely to one anothers side, through a shadowhaunted passage. The image of awful Death, which filled the house, held them united by his stiffened grasp. These influences hastened the development of emotions that might not otherwise have flowered so. Possibly, indeed, it had been Holgraves purpose to let them die in their undeveloped germs. Why do we delay so? asked Phoebe. This secret takes away my breath! Let us throw open the doors! In all our lives there can never come another moment like this! said Holgrave. Phoebe, is it all terror?nothing but terror? Are you conscious of no joy, as I am, that has made this the only point of life worth living for? It seems a sin, replied Phoebe, trembling, to think of joy at such a time! Could you but know, Phoebe, how it was with me the hour before you came! exclaimed the artist. A dark, cold, miserable hour! The presence of yonder dead man threw a great black shadow over everything; he made the universe, so far as my perception could reach, a scene of guilt and of retribution more dreadful than the guilt. The sense of it took away my youth. I never hoped to feel young again! The world looked strange, wild, evil, hostile; my past life, so lonesome and dreary; my future, a shapeless gloom, which I must mould into gloomy shapes! But, Phoebe, you crossed the threshold; and hope, warmth, and joy came in with you! The black moment became at once a blissful one. It must not pass without the spoken word. I love you! How can you love a simple girl like me? asked Phoebe, compelled by his earnestness to speak. You have many, many thoughts, with which I should try in vain to sympathize. And II, tooI have tendencies with which you would sympathize as little. That is less matter. But I have not scope enough to make you happy. You are my only possibility of happiness! answered Holgrave. I have no faith in it, except as you bestow it on me! And thenI am afraid! continued Phoebe, shrinking towards Holgrave, even while she told him so frankly the doubts with which he affected her. You will lead me out of my own quiet path. You will make me strive to follow you where it is pathless. I cannot do so. It is not my nature. I shall sink down and perish! Ah, Phoebe! exclaimed Holgrave, with almost a sigh, and a smile that was burdened with thought. It will be far otherwise than as you forebode. The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits. I have a presentiment that, hereafter, it will be my lot to set out trees, to make fencesperhaps, even, in due time, to build a house for another generationin a word, to conform myself to laws and the peaceful practice of society. Your poise will be more powerful than any oscillating tendency of mine. I would not have it so! said Phoebe earnestly. Do you love me? asked Holgrave. If we love one another, the moment has room for nothing more. Let us pause upon it, and be satisfied. Do you love me, Phoebe? You look into my heart, said she, letting her eyes drop. You know I love you! And it was in this hour, so full of doubt and awe, that the one miracle was wrought, without which every human existence is a blank. The bliss which makes all things true, beautiful, and holy shone around this youth and maiden. They were conscious of nothing sad nor old. They transfigured the earth, and made it Eden again, and themselves the two first dwellers in it. The dead man, so close beside them, was forgotten. At such a crisis, there is no death; for immortality is revealed anew, and embraces everything in its hallowed atmosphere. But how soon the heavy earthdream settled down again! Hark! whispered Phoebe. Somebody is at the street door! Now let us meet the world! said Holgrave. No doubt, the rumor of Judge Pyncheons visit to this house, and the flight of Hepzibah and Clifford, is about to lead to the investigation of the premises. We have no way but to meet it. Let us open the door at once. But, to their surprise, before they could reach the street dooreven before they quitted the room in which the foregoing interview had passedthey heard footsteps in the farther passage. The door, therefore, which they supposed to be securely lockedwhich Holgrave, indeed, had seen to be so, and at which Phoebe had vainly tried to entermust have been opened from without. The sound of footsteps was not harsh, bold, decided, and intrusive, as the gait of strangers would naturally be, making authoritative entrance into a dwelling where they knew themselves unwelcome. It was feeble, as of persons either weak or weary; there was the mingled murmur of two voices, familiar to both the listeners. Can it be? whispered Holgrave. It is they! answered Phoebe. Thank God!thank God! And then, as if in sympathy with Phoebes whispered ejaculation, they heard Hepzibahs voice more distinctly. Thank God, my brother, we are at home! Well!Yes!thank God! responded Clifford. A dreary home, Hepzibah! But you have done well to bring me hither! Stay! That parlor door is open. I cannot pass by it! Let me go and rest me in the arbor, where I usedoh, very long ago, it seems to me, after what has befallen uswhere I used to be so happy with little Phoebe! But the house was not altogether so dreary as Clifford imagined it. They had not made many stepsin truth, they were lingering in the entry, with the listlessness of an accomplished purpose, uncertain what to do nextwhen Phoebe ran to meet them. On beholding her, Hepzibah burst into tears. With all her might, she had staggered onward beneath the burden of grief and responsibility, until now that it was safe to fling it down. Indeed, she had not energy to fling it down, but had ceased to uphold it, and suffered it to press her to the earth. Clifford appeared the stronger of the two. It is our own little Phoebe!Ah! and Holgrave with her, exclaimed he, with a glance of keen and delicate insight, and a smile, beautiful, kind, but melancholy. I thought of you both, as we came down the street, and beheld Alices Posies in full bloom. And so the flower of Eden has bloomed, likewise, in this old, darksome house today. XXI The Departure The sudden death of so prominent a member of the social world as the Honorable Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon created a sensation (at least, in the circles more immediately connected with the deceased) which had hardly quite subsided in a fortnight. It may be remarked, however, that, of all the events which constitute a persons biography, there is scarcely onenone, certainly, of anything like a similar importanceto which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death. In most other cases and contingencies, the individual is present among us, mixed up with the daily revolution of affairs, and affording a definite point for observation. At his decease, there is only a vacancy, and a momentary eddyvery small, as compared with the apparent magnitude of the ingurgitated objectand a bubble or two, ascending out of the black depth and bursting at the surface. As regarded Judge Pyncheon, it seemed probable, at first blush, that the mode of his final departure might give him a larger and longer posthumous vogue than ordinarily attends the memory of a distinguished man. But when it came to be understood, on the highest professional authority, that the event was a natural, andexcept for some unimportant particulars, denoting a slight idiosyncrasyby no means an unusual form of death, the public, with its customary alacrity, proceeded to forget that he had ever lived. In short, the honorable Judge was beginning to be a stale subject before half the country newspapers had found time to put their columns in mourning, and publish his exceedingly eulogistic obituary. Nevertheless, creeping darkly through the places which this excellent person had haunted in his lifetime, there was a hidden stream of private talk, such as it would have shocked all decency to speak loudly at the streetcorners. It is very singular, how the fact of a mans death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and acting among them. Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehood, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal. Could the departed, whoever he may be, return in a week after his decease, he would almost invariably find himself at a higher or lower point than he had formerly occupied, on the scale of public appreciation. But the talk, or scandal, to which we now allude, had reference to matters of no less old a date than the supposed murder, thirty or forty years ago, of the late Judge Pyncheons uncle. The medical opinion with regard to his own recent and regretted decease had almost entirely obviated the idea that a murder was committed in the former case. Yet, as the record showed, there were circumstances irrefragably indicating that some person had gained access to old Jaffrey Pyncheons private apartments, at or near the moment of his death. His desk and private drawers, in a room contiguous to his bedchamber, had been ransacked; money and valuable articles were missing; there was a bloody handprint on the old mans linen; and, by a powerfully welded chain of deductive evidence, the guilt of the robbery and apparent murder had been fixed on Clifford, then residing with his uncle in the House of the Seven Gables. Whencesoever originating, there now arose a theory that undertook so to account for these circumstances as to exclude the idea of Cliffords agency. Many persons affirmed that the history and elucidation of the facts, long so mysterious, had been obtained by the daguerreotypist from one of those mesmerical seers who, nowadays, so strangely perplex the aspect of human affairs, and put everybodys natural vision to the blush, by the marvels which they see with their eyes shut. According to this version of the story, Judge Pyncheon, exemplary as we have portrayed him in our narrative, was, in his youth, an apparently irreclaimable scapegrace. The brutish, the animal instincts, as is often the case, had been developed earlier than the intellectual qualities, and the force of character, for which he was afterwards remarkable. He had shown himself wild, dissipated, addicted to low pleasures, little short of ruffianly in his propensities, and recklessly expensive, with no other resources than the bounty of his uncle. This course of conduct had alienated the old bachelors affection, once strongly fixed upon him. Now it is averredbut whether on authority available in a court of justice, we do not pretend to have investigatedthat the young man was tempted by the devil, one night, to search his uncles private drawers, to which he had unsuspected means of access. While thus criminally occupied, he was startled by the opening of the chamberdoor.

There stood old Jaffrey Pyncheon, in his nightclothes! The surprise of such a discovery, his agitation, alarm, and horror, brought on the crisis of a disorder to which the old bachelor had an hereditary liability; he seemed to choke with blood, and fell upon the floor, striking his temple a heavy blow against the corner of a table. What was to be done? The old man was surely dead! Assistance would come too late! What a misfortune, indeed, should it come too soon, since his reviving consciousness would bring the recollection of the ignominious offence which he had beheld his nephew in the very act of committing! But he never did revive. With the cool hardihood that always pertained to him, the young man continued his search of the drawers, and found a will, of recent date, in favor of Cliffordwhich he destroyedand an older one, in his own favor, which he suffered to remain. But before retiring, Jaffrey bethought himself of the evidence, in these ransacked drawers, that someone had visited the chamber with sinister purposes. Suspicion, unless averted, might fix upon the real offender. In the very presence of the dead man, therefore, he laid a scheme that should free himself at the expense of Clifford, his rival, for whose character he had at once a contempt and a repugnance. It is not probable, be it said, that he acted with any set purpose of involving Clifford in a charge of murder. Knowing that his uncle did not die by violence, it may not have occurred to him, in the hurry of the crisis, that such an inference might be drawn. But, when the affair took this darker aspect, Jaffreys previous steps had already pledged him to those which remained. So craftily had he arranged the circumstances, that, at Cliffords trial, his cousin hardly found it necessary to swear to anything false, but only to withhold the one decisive explanation, by refraining to state what he had himself done and witnessed. Thus Jaffrey Pyncheons inward criminality, as regarded Clifford, was, indeed, black and damnable; while its mere outward show and positive commission was the smallest that could possibly consist with so great a sin. This is just the sort of guilt that a man of eminent respectability finds it easiest to dispose of. It was suffered to fade out of sight or be reckoned a venial matter, in the Honorable Judge Pyncheons long subsequent survey of his own life. He shuffled it aside, among the forgotten and forgiven frailties of his youth, and seldom thought of it again. We leave the Judge to his repose. He could not be styled fortunate at the hour of death. Unknowingly, he was a childless man, while striving to add more wealth to his only childs inheritance. Hardly a week after his decease, one of the Cunard steamers brought intelligence of the death, by cholera, of Judge Pyncheons son, just at the point of embarkation for his native land. By this misfortune Clifford became rich; so did Hepzibah; so did our little village maiden, and, through her, that sworn foe of wealth and all manner of conservatismthe wild reformerHolgrave! It was now far too late in Cliffords life for the good opinion of society to be worth the trouble and anguish of a formal vindication. What he needed was the love of a very few; not the admiration, or even the respect, of the unknown many. The latter might probably have been won for him, had those on whom the guardianship of his welfare had fallen deemed it advisable to expose Clifford to a miserable resuscitation of past ideas, when the condition of whatever comfort he might expect lay in the calm of forgetfulness. After such wrong as he had suffered, there is no reparation. The pitiable mockery of it, which the world might have been ready enough to offer, coming so long after the agony had done its utmost work, would have been fit only to provoke bitterer laughter than poor Clifford was ever capable of. It is a truth (and it would be a very sad one but for the higher hopes which it suggests) that no great mistake, whether acted or endured, in our mortal sphere, is ever really set right. Time, the continual vicissitude of circumstances, and the invariable inopportunity of death, render it impossible. If, after long lapse of years, the right seems to be in our power, we find no niche to set it in. The better remedy is for the sufferer to pass on, and leave what he once thought his irreparable ruin far behind him. The shock of Judge Pyncheons death had a permanently invigorating and ultimately beneficial effect on Clifford. That strong and ponderous man had been Cliffords nightmare. There was no free breath to be drawn, within the sphere of so malevolent an influence. The first effect of freedom, as we have witnessed in Cliffords aimless flight, was a tremulous exhilaration. Subsiding from it, he did not sink into his former intellectual apathy. He never, it is true, attained to nearly the full measure of what might have been his faculties. But he recovered enough of them partially to light up his character, to display some outline of the marvellous grace that was abortive in it, and to make him the object of no less deep, although less melancholy interest than heretofore. He was evidently happy. Could we pause to give another picture of his daily life, with all the appliances now at command to gratify his instinct for the Beautiful, the garden scenes, that seemed so sweet to him, would look mean and trivial in comparison. Very soon after their change of fortune, Clifford, Hepzibah, and little Phoebe, with the approval of the artist, concluded to remove from the dismal old House of the Seven Gables, and take up their abode, for the present, at the elegant countryseat of the late Judge Pyncheon. Chanticleer and his family had already been transported thither, where the two hens had forthwith begun an indefatigable process of egglaying, with an evident design, as a matter of duty and conscience, to continue their illustrious breed under better auspices than for a century past. On the day set for their departure, the principal personages of our story, including good Uncle Venner, were assembled in the parlor. The countryhouse is certainly a very fine one, so far as the plan goes, observed Holgrave, as the party were discussing their future arrangements. But I wonder that the late Judgebeing so opulent, and with a reasonable prospect of transmitting his wealth to descendants of his ownshould not have felt the propriety of embodying so excellent a piece of domestic architecture in stone, rather than in wood. Then, every generation of the family might have altered the interior, to suit its own taste and convenience; while the exterior, through the lapse of years, might have been adding venerableness to its original beauty, and thus giving that impression of permanence which I consider essential to the happiness of any one moment. Why, cried Phoebe, gazing into the artists face with infinite amazement, how wonderfully your ideas are changed! A house of stone, indeed! It is but two or three weeks ago that you seemed to wish people to live in something as fragile and temporary as a birdsnest! Ah, Phoebe, I told you how it would be! said the artist, with a halfmelancholy laugh. You find me a conservative already! Little did I think ever to become one. It is especially unpardonable in this dwelling of so much hereditary misfortune, and under the eye of yonder portrait of a model conservative, who, in that very character, rendered himself so long the evil destiny of his race. That picture! said Clifford, seeming to shrink from its stern glance. Whenever I look at it, there is an old dreamy recollection haunting me, but keeping just beyond the grasp of my mind. Wealth, it seems to say!boundless wealth!unimaginable wealth! I could fancy that, when I was a child, or a youth, that portrait had spoken, and told me a rich secret, or had held forth its hand, with the written record of hidden opulence. But those old matters are so dim with me, nowadays! What could this dream have been? Perhaps I can recall it, answered Holgrave. See! There are a hundred chances to one that no person, unacquainted with the secret, would ever touch this spring. A secret spring! cried Clifford. Ah, I remember now! I did discover it, one summer afternoon, when I was idling and dreaming about the house, long, long ago. But the mystery escapes me. The artist put his finger on the contrivance to which he had referred. In former days, the effect would probably have been to cause the picture to start forward. But, in so long a period of concealment, the machinery had been eaten through with rust; so that at Holgraves pressure, the portrait, frame and all, tumbled suddenly from its position, and lay face downward on the floor. A recess in the wall was thus brought to light, in which lay an object so covered with a centurys dust that it could not immediately be recognized as a folded sheet of parchment. Holgrave opened it, and displayed an ancient deed, signed with the hieroglyphics of several Indian sagamores, and conveying to Colonel Pyncheon and his heirs, forever, a vast extent of territory at the Eastward. This is the very parchment, the attempt to recover which cost the beautiful Alice Pyncheon her happiness and life, said the artist, alluding to his legend. It is what the Pyncheons sought in vain, while it was valuable; and now that they find the treasure, it has long been worthless. Poor Cousin Jaffrey! This is what deceived him, exclaimed Hepzibah. When they were young together, Clifford probably made a kind of fairytale of this discovery. He was always dreaming hither and thither about the house, and lighting up its dark corners with beautiful stories. And poor Jaffrey, who took hold of everything as if it were real, thought my brother had found out his uncles wealth. He died with this delusion in his mind! But, said Phoebe, apart to Holgrave, how came you to know the secret? My dearest Phoebe, said Holgrave, how will it please you to assume the name of Maule? As for the secret, it is the only inheritance that has come down to me from my ancestors. You should have known sooner (only that I was afraid of frightening you away) that, in this long drama of wrong and retribution, I represent the old wizard, and am probably as much a wizard as ever he was. The son of the executed Matthew Maule, while building this house, took the opportunity to construct that recess, and hide away the Indian deed, on which depended the immense landclaim of the Pyncheons. Thus they bartered their eastern territory for Maules gardenground. And now, said Uncle Venner, I suppose their whole claim is not worth one mans share in my farm yonder! Uncle Venner, cried Phoebe, taking the patched philosophers hand, you must never talk any more about your farm! You shall never go there, as long as you live! There is a cottage in our new gardenthe prettiest little yellowishbrown cottage you ever saw; and the sweetestlooking place, for it looks just as if it were made of gingerbreadand we are going to fit it up and furnish it, on purpose for you. And you shall do nothing but what you choose, and shall be as happy as the day is long, and shall keep Cousin Clifford in spirits with the wisdom and pleasantness which is always dropping from your lips! Ah! my dear child, quoth good Uncle Venner, quite overcome, if you were to speak to a young man as you do to an old one, his chance of keeping his heart another minute would not be worth one of the buttons on my waistcoat! Andsoul alive!that great sigh, which you made me heave, has burst off the very last of them! But, never mind! It was the happiest sigh I ever did heave; and it seems as if I must have drawn in a gulp of heavenly breath, to make it with. Well, well, Miss Phoebe! Theyll miss me in the gardens hereabouts, and round by the back doors; and Pyncheon Street, Im afraid, will hardly look the same without old Uncle Venner, who remembers it with a mowing field on one side, and the garden of the Seven Gables on the other. But either I must go to your countryseat, or you must come to my farmthats one of two things certain; and I leave you to choose which! Oh, come with us, by all means, Uncle Venner! said Clifford, who had a remarkable enjoyment of the old mans mellow, quiet, and simple spirit. I want you always to be within five minutes, saunter of my chair. You are the only philosopher I ever knew of whose wisdom has not a drop of bitter essence at the bottom! Dear me! cried Uncle Venner, beginning partly to realize what manner of man he was. And yet folks used to set me down among the simple ones, in my younger days! But I suppose I am like a Roxbury russeta great deal the better, the longer I can be kept. Yes; and my words of wisdom, that you and Phoebe tell me of, are like the golden dandelions, which never grow in the hot months, but may be seen glistening among the withered grass, and under the dry leaves, sometimes as late as December. And you are welcome, friends, to my mess of dandelions, if there were twice as many! A plain, but handsome, darkgreen barouche had now drawn up in front of the ruinous portal of the old mansionhouse. The party came forth, and (with the exception of good Uncle Venner, who was to follow in a few days) proceeded to take their places. They were chatting and laughing very pleasantly together; andas proves to be often the case, at moments when we ought to palpitate with sensibilityClifford and Hepzibah bade a final farewell to the abode of their forefathers, with hardly more emotion than if they had made it their arrangement to return thither at teatime. Several children were drawn to the spot by so unusual a spectacle as the barouche and pair of gray horses. Recognizing little Ned Higgins among them, Hepzibah put her hand into her pocket, and presented the urchin, her earliest and staunchest customer, with silver enough to people the Domdaniel cavern of his interior with as various a procession of quadrupeds as passed into the ark. Two men were passing, just as the barouche drove off. Well, Dixey, said one of them, what do you think of this? My wife kept a centshop three months, and lost five dollars on her outlay. Old Maid Pyncheon has been in trade just about as long, and rides off in her carriage with a couple of hundred thousandreckoning her share, and Cliffords, and Phoebesand some say twice as much! If you choose to call it luck, it is all very well; but if we are to take it as the will of Providence, why, I cant exactly fathom it! Pretty good business! quoth the sagacious Dixeypretty good business! Maules well, all this time, though left in solitude, was throwing up a succession of kaleidoscopic pictures, in which a gifted eye might have seen foreshadowed the coming fortunes of Hepzibah and Clifford, and the descendant of the legendary wizard, and the village maiden, over whom he had thrown loves web of sorcery. The Pyncheon Elm, moreover, with what foliage the September gale had spared to it, whispered unintelligible prophecies. And wise Uncle Venner, passing slowly from the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain of music, and fancied that sweet Alice Pyncheonafter witnessing these deeds, this bygone woe and this present happiness, of her kindred mortalshad given one farewell touch of a spirits joy upon her harpsichord, as she floated heavenward from the House of the Seven Gables! Colophon The House of the Seven Gables was published in 1851 by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This ebook was produced for Standard Ebooks by Alex Cabal, and is based on a transcription produced in 1993 by Judith Boss and Al Haines for Project Gutenberg and on digital scans from Google Books. The cover page is adapted from Bondehave Fra Mjstrakterne, a painting completed circa 1929 by Gerhard Munthe. The cover and title pages feature the League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by The League of Moveable Type. This edition was released on November 7, 2024, 856 p.m. and is based on revision dc54bb4. The first edition of this ebook was released on October 2, 2024, 228 a.m. You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at standardebooks.orgebooksnathanielhawthornethehouseofthesevengables. The volunteerdriven Standard Ebooks project relies on readers like you to submit typos, corrections, and other improvements. Anyone can contribute at standardebooks.org. 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Standard Ebooks is a volunteerdriven project that produces ebook editions of public domain literature using modern typography, technology, and editorial standards, and distributes them free of cost. You can download this and other ebooks carefully produced for true book lovers at standardebooks.org. Preface When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of mans experience. The formerwhile, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human hearthas fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writers own choosing or creation. If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate use of the privileges here stated, and, especially, to mingle the Marvelous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor, than as any portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the public. He can hardly be said, however, to commit a literary crime even if he disregard this caution. In the present work, the author has proposed to himselfbut with what success, fortunately, it is not for him to judgeto keep undeviatingly within his immunities. The point of view in which this tale comes under the Romantic definition lies in the attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us. It is a legend prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray in the distance, down into our own broad daylight, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist, which the reader, according to his pleasure, may either disregard, or allow it to float almost imperceptibly about the characters and events for the sake of a picturesque effect. The narrative, it may be, is woven of so humble a texture as to require this advantage, and, at the same time, to render it the more difficult of attainment. Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works. Not to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself with a moralthe truth, namely, that the wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief; and he would feel it a singular gratification if this romance might effectually convince mankindor, indeed, any one manof the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of illgotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms. In good faith, however, he is not sufficiently imaginative to flatter himself with the slightest hope of this kind. When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtle process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron rodor, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterflythus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first. The reader may perhaps choose to assign an actual locality to the imaginary events of this narrative. If permitted by the historical connectionwhich, though slight, was essential to his planthe author would very willingly have avoided anything of this nature. Not to speak of other objections, it exposes the romance to an inflexible and exceedingly dangerous species of criticism, by bringing his fancypictures almost into positive contact with the realities of the moment. It has been no part of his object, however, to describe local manners, nor in any way to meddle with the characteristics of a community for whom he cherishes a proper respect and a natural regard. He trusts not to be considered as unpardonably offending by laying out a street that infringes upon nobodys private rights, and appropriating a lot of land which had no visible owner, and building a house of materials long in use for constructing castles in the air. The personages of the talethough they give themselves out to be of ancient stability and considerable prominenceare really of the authors own making, or at all events, of his own mixing; their virtues can shed no lustre, nor their defects redound, in the remotest degree, to the discredit of the venerable town of which they profess to be inhabitants. He would be glad, therefore, ifespecially in the quarter to which he alludesthe book may be read strictly as a Romance, having a great deal more to do with the clouds overhead than with any portion of the actual soil of the County of Essex. Lenox, January 27, 1851. The House of the Seven Gables By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Uncopyright May you do good and not evil. May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others. May you share freely, never taking more than you give. Copyright pages exist to tell you that you cant do something. 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That means that nobody can claim a new copyright on an item that is in the public domain for, among other things, work like digitization, markup, or typography. Regardless, the contributors to this ebook release their contributions under the terms in the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, thus dedicating to the worldwide public domain all of the work theyve done on this ebook, including but not limited to metadata, the titlepage, imprint, colophon, this Uncopyright, and any changes or enhancements to, or markup on, the original text and artwork. This dedication doesnt change the copyright status of the source text or artwork. We make this dedication in the interest of enriching our global cultural heritage, to promote free and libre culture around the world, and to give back to the unrestricted culture that has given all of us so much. Table of Contents Titlepage Imprint Preface The House of the Seven Gables I The Old Pyncheon Family II The Little Shopwindow III The First Customer IV A Day Behind the Counter V May and November VI Maules Well VII The Guest VIII The Pyncheon of Today IX Clifford and Phoebe X The Pyncheon Garden XI The Arched Window XII The Daguerreotypist XIII Alice Pyncheon XIV Phoebes Goodbye XV The Scowl and Smile XVI Cliffords Chamber XVII The Flight of Two Owls XVIII Governor Pyncheon XIX Alices Posies XX The Flower of Eden XXI The Departure Colophon Uncopyright Landmarks The House of the Seven Gables

The Beetle by Richard Marsh First published in 1897 This ebook edition was created and published by Global Grey in 2021, and updated on the 12th February 2024 The artwork for the cover is Stag beetle painted by Hans Hoffmann. You can download this book on the site globalgreyebooks.combeetlerichardmarshebook.html GlobalGrey 2024globalgreyebooks.com Contents Book I. The House With The Open Window I. Outside II. Inside III. The Man in the Bed IV. A Lonely Vigil V. An Instruction to Commit Burglary VI. A Singular Felony VII. The Great Paul Lessingham VIII. The Man in the Street IX. The Contents of the Packet Book II. The Haunted Man X. Rejected XI. A Midnight Episode XII. A Morning Visitor XIII. The Picture XIV. The Duchess Ball XV. Mr. Lessingham Speaks XVI. Athertons Magic Vapour XVII. Magic?Or Miracle? XVIII. The Apotheosis of the Beetle XIX. The Lady Rages XX. A Heavy Father XXI. The Terror in the Night XXII. The Haunted Man Book III. The Terror By Night And The Terror By Day XXIII. The Way He Told Her XXIV. A Womans View XXV. The Man in the Street XXVI. A Fathers No XXVII. The Terror by Night XXVIII. The Strange Story of the Man in the Street XXIX. The House on the Road from the Workhouse XXX. The Singular Behaviour of Mr. Holt XXXI. The Terror by Day Book IV. In Pursuit XXXII. A New Client XXXIII. What Came of Looking Through a Lattice XXXIV. After Twenty Years XXXV. A Bringer of Tidings XXXVI. What the Tidings Were XXXVII. What Was Hidden Under the Floor XXXVIII. The Rest of the Find XXXIX. Miss Louisa Coleman XL. What Miss Coleman Saw Through the Window XLI. The ConstableHis Clueand the Cab XLII. The Quarry Doubles XLIII. The Murder at Mrs. Endersons XLIV. The Man Who Was Murdered XLV. All That Mrs. Enderson Knew XLVI. The Sudden Stopping XLVII. The Contents of the ThirdClass Carriage XLVIII. The Conclusion of the Matter Book I. The House With The Open Window The surprising narration of Robert Holt I. Outside No room!Full up! He banged the door in my face. That was the final blow. To have tramped about all day looking for work; to have begged even for a job which would give me money enough to buy a little food; and to have tramped and to have begged in vainthat was bad. But, sick at heart, depressed in mind and in body, exhausted by hunger and fatigue, to have been compelled to pocket any little pride I might have left, and solicit, as the penniless, homeless tramp which indeed I was, a nights lodging in the casual wardand to solicit it in vain!that was worse. Much worse. About as bad as bad could be. I stared, stupidly, at the door which had just been banged in my face. I could scarcely believe that the thing was possible. I had hardly expected to figure as a tramp; but, supposing it conceivable that I could become a tramp, that I should be refused admission to that abode of all ignominy, the tramps ward, was to have attained a depth of misery of which never even in nightmares I had dreamed. As I stood wondering what I should do, a man slouched towards me out of the shadow of the wall. Wont e let yer in? He says its full. Says its full, does e? Thats the lay at Fulhamthey always says its full. They wants to keep the number down. I looked at the man askance. His head hung forward; his hands were in his trouser pockets; his clothes were rags; his tone was husky. Do you mean that they say its full when it isntthat they wont let me in although theres room? Thats itblokes akiddin yer. But, if theres room, arent they bound to let me in? Course they areand, blimey, if I was you Id make em. Blimey I would! He broke into a volley of execrations. But what am I to do? Why, give em another rouserlet em know as you wont be kidded! I hesitated; then, acting on his suggestion, for the second time I rang the bell. The door was flung wide open, and the grizzled pauper, who had previously responded to my summons, stood in the open doorway. Had he been the Chairman of the Board of Guardians himself he could not have addressed me with greater scorn. What, here again! Whats your little game? Think Ive nothing better to do than to wait upon the likes of you? I want to be admitted. Then you wont be admitted! I want to see someone in authority. Aint yer seein someone in authority? I want to see someone besides youI want to see the master. Then you wont see the master! He moved the door swiftly to; but, prepared for such a manoeuvre, I thrust my foot sufficiently inside to prevent his shutting it. I continued to address him. Are you sure that the ward is full? Full two hours ago! But what am I to do? I dont know what youre to do! Which is the next nearest workhouse? Kensington. Suddenly opening the door, as he answered me, putting out his arm he thrust me backwards. Before I could recover the door was closed. The man in rags had continued a grim spectator of the scene. Now he spoke. Nice bloke, aint he? Hes only one of the paupershas he any right to act as one of the officials? I tell yer some of them paupers is wuss than the orficersa long sight wuss! They thinks they owns the ouses, blimey they do. Oh its a fine world, this is! He paused. I hesitated. For some time there had been a suspicion of rain in the air. Now it was commencing to fall in a fine but soaking drizzle. It only needed that to fill my cup to overflowing. My companion was regarding me with a sort of sullen curiosity. Aint you got no money? Not a farthing. Done much of this sort of thing? Its the first time Ive been to a casual wardand it doesnt seem as if Im going to get in now. I thought you looked as if you was a bit fresh.What are yer goin to do? How far is it to Kensington? Workus?about three mile;but, if I was you, Id try St. Georges. Wheres that? In the Fulham Road. Kensingtons only a small place, they do you well there, and its always full as soon as the doors opened;youd ave more chawnce at St. Georges. He was silent. I turned his words over in my mind, feeling as little disposed to try the one place as the other. Presently he began again. Ive travelled from Reading this day, I avetramped every foot!and all the way as I come along, Ill ave a shakedown at Ammersmith, I saysand now Im as fur off from it as ever! This is a fine country, this isI wish every soul in it was swept into the sea, blimey I do! But I aint goin to go no furtherIll ave a bed in Ammersmith or Ill know the reason why. How are you going to manage ithave you got any money? Got any money?My crikey!I look as though I adI sound as though I ad too! I aint ad no brads, cept now and then a brown, this larst six months. How are you going to get a bed then? Ow am I going to?why, like this way. He picked up two stones, one in either hand. The one in his left he flung at the glass which was over the door of the casual ward. It crashed through it, and through the lamp beyond. Thats ow Im goin to get a bed. The door was hastily opened. The grizzled pauper reappeared. He shouted, as he peered at us in the darkness, Who done that? I done it, guvnorand, if you like, you can see me do the other. It might do your eyesight good. Before the grizzled pauper could interfere, he had hurled the stone in his right hand through another pane. I felt that it was time for me to go. He was earning a nights rest at a price which, even in my extremity, I was not disposed to pay. When I left two or three other persons had appeared upon the scene, and the man in rags was addressing them with a degree of frankness, which, in that direction, left little to be desired. I slunk away unnoticed. But had not gone far before I had almost decided that I might as well have thrown in my fortune with the bolder wretch, and smashed a window too. Indeed, more than once my feet faltered, as I all but returned to do the feat which I had left undone. A more miserable night for an outofdoor excursion I could hardly have chosen. The rain was like a mist, and was not only drenching me to the skin, but it was rendering it difficult to see more than a little distance in any direction. The neighbourhood was badly lighted. It was one in which I was a stranger. I had come to Hammersmith as a last resource. It had seemed to me that I had tried to find some occupation which would enable me to keep body and soul together in every other part of London, and that now only Hammersmith was left. And, at Hammersmith, even the workhouse would have none of me! Retreating from the inhospitable portal of the casual ward, I had taken the first turning to the leftand, at the moment, had been glad to take it. In the darkness and the rain, the locality which I was entering appeared unfinished. I seemed to be leaving civilisation behind me. The path was unpaved; the road rough and uneven, as if it had never been properly made. Houses were few and far between. Those which I did encounter, seemed, in the imperfect light, amid the general desolation, to be cottages which were crumbling to decay. Exactly where I was I could not tell. I had a faint notion that, if I only kept on long enough, I should strike some part of Walham Green. How long I should have to keep on I could only guess. Not a creature seemed to be about of whom I could make inquiries. It was as if I was in a land of desolation. I suppose it was between eleven oclock and midnight. I had not given up my quest for work till all the shops were closedand in Hammersmith, that night, at any rate, they were not early closers. Then I had lounged about dispiritedly, wondering what was the next thing I could do. It was only because I feared that if I attempted to spend the night in the open air, without food, when the morning came I should be broken up, and fit for nothing, that I sought a nights free board and lodging. It was really hunger which drove me to the workhouse door. That was Wednesday. Since the Sunday night preceding nothing had passed my lips save water from the public fountainswith the exception of a crust of bread which a man had given me whom I had found crouching at the root of a tree in Holland Park. For three days I had been fastingpractically all the time upon my feet. It seemed to me that if I had to go hungry till the morning I should collapsethere would be an end. Yet, in that strange and inhospitable place, where was I to get food at that time of night, and how? I do not know how far I went. Every yard I covered, my feet dragged more. I was dead beat, inside and out. I had neither strength nor courage left. And within there was that frightful craving, which was as though it shrieked aloud. I leant against some palings, dazed and giddy. If only death had come upon me quickly, painlessly, how true a friend I should have thought it! It was the agony of dying inch by inch which was so hard to bear. It was some minutes before I could collect myself sufficiently to withdraw from the support of the railings, and to start afresh. I stumbled blindly over the uneven road. Once, like a drunken man, I lurched forward, and fell upon my knees. Such was my backboneless state that for some seconds I remained where I was, half disposed to let things slide, accept the good the gods had sent me, and make a night of it just there. A long night, I fancy, it would have been, stretching from time unto eternity. Having regained my feet, I had gone perhaps another couple of hundred yards along the roadHeaven knows that it seemed to me just then a couple of miles!when there came over me again that overpowering giddiness which, I take it, was born of my agony of hunger. I staggered, helplessly, against a low wall which, just there, was at the side of the path. Without it I should have fallen in a heap. The attack appeared to last for hours; I suppose it was only seconds; and, when I came to myself, it was as though I had been aroused from a swoon of sleeparoused, to an extremity of pain. I exclaimed aloud, For a loaf of bread what wouldnt I do! I looked about me, in a kind of frenzy. As I did so I for the first time became conscious that behind me was a house. It was not a large one. It was one of those socalled villas which are springing up in multitudes all round London, and which are let at rentals of from twentyfive to forty pounds a year. It was detached. So far as I could see, in the imperfect light, there was not another building within twenty or thirty yards of either side of it. It was in two storeys. There were three windows in the upper storey. Behind each the blinds were closely drawn. The hall door was on my right. It was approached by a little wooden gate. The house itself was so close to the public road that by leaning over the wall I could have touched either of the windows on the lower floor. There were two of them. One of them was a bow window. The bow window was open. The bottom centre sash was raised about six inches. II. Inside I realised, and, so to speak, mentally photographed all the little details of the house in front of which I was standing with what almost amounted to a gleam of preternatural perception. An instant before, the world swam before my eyes. I saw nothing. Now I saw everything, with a clearness which, as it were, was shocking. Above all, I saw the open window. I stared at it, conscious, as I did so, of a curious catching of the breath. It was so near to me; so very near. I had but to stretch out my hand to thrust it through the aperture. Once inside, my hand would at least be dry. How it rained out there! My scanty clothing was soaked; I was wet to the skin! I was shivering. And, each second, it seemed to rain still faster. My teeth were chattering. The damp was liquefying the very marrow in my bones. And, inside that open window, it was, it must be, so warm, so dry! There was not a soul in sight. Not a human being anywhere near. I listened; there was not a sound. I alone was at the mercy of the sodden night. Of all Gods creatures the only one unsheltered from the fountains of Heaven which He had opened. There was not one to see what I might do; not one to care. I need fear no spy. Perhaps the house was empty; nay, probably. It was my plain duty to knock at the door, rouse the inmates, and call attention to their oversightthe open window. The least they could do would be to reward me for my pains. But, suppose the place was empty, what would be the use of knocking? It would be to make a useless clatter. Possibly to disturb the neighbourhood, for nothing. And, even if the people were at home, I might go unrewarded. I had learned, in a hard school, the worlds ingratitude. To have caused the window to be closedthe inviting window, the tempting window, the convenient window!and then to be no better for it after all, but still to be penniless, hopeless, hungry, out in the cold and the rainbetter anything than that. In such a situation, too late, I should say to myself that mine had been the conduct of a fool. And I should say it justly too. To be sure. Leaning over the low wall I found that I could very easily put my hand inside the room. How warm it was in there! I could feel the difference of temperature in my fingertips. Very quietly I stepped right over the wall. There was just room to stand in comfort between the window and the wall. The ground felt to the foot as if it were cemented. Stooping down, I peered through the opening. I could see nothing. It was black as pitch inside. The blind was drawn right up; it seemed incredible that anyone could be at home, and have gone to bed, leaving the blind up, and the window open. I placed my ear to the crevice. How still it was! Beyond doubt, the place was empty. I decided to push the window up another inch or two, so as to enable me to reconnoitre. If anyone caught me in the act, then there would be an opportunity to describe the circumstances, and to explain how I was just on the point of giving the alarm. Only, I must go carefully. In such damp weather it was probable that the sash would creak. Not a bit of it. It moved as readily and as noiselessly as if it had been oiled. This silence of the sash so emboldened me that I raised it more than I intended. In fact, as far as it would go. Not by a sound did it betray me. Bending over the sill I put my head and half my body into the room. But I was no forwarder. I could see nothing. Not a thing. For all I could tell the room might be unfurnished. Indeed, the likelihood of such an explanation began to occur to me. I might have chanced upon an empty house. In the darkness there was nothing to suggest the contrary. What was I to do? Well, if the house was empty, in such a plight as mine I might be said to have a moral, if not a legal, right, to its bare shelter. Who, with a heart in his bosom, would deny it me? Hardly the most punctilious landlord. Raising myself by means of the sill I slipped my legs into the room. The moment I did so I became conscious that, at any rate, the room was not entirely unfurnished. The floor was carpeted. I have had my feet on some good carpets in my time; I know what carpets are; but never did I stand upon a softer one than that. It reminded me, somehow, even then, of the turf in Richmond Parkit caressed my instep, and sprang beneath my tread. To my poor, travelworn feet, it was luxury after the puddly, uneven road. Should I, now I had ascertained that the room was, at least, partially furnished, beat a retreat? Or should I push my researches further? It would have been rapture to have thrown off my clothes, and to have sunk down, on the carpet, then and there, to sleep. ButI was so hungry; so faminegoaded; what would I not have given to have lighted on something good to eat! I moved a step or two forward, gingerly, reaching out with my hands, lest I struck, unawares, against some unseen thing. When I had taken three or four such steps, without encountering an obstacle, or, indeed, anything at all, I began, all at once, to wish I had not seen the house; that I had passed it by; that I had not come through the window; that I were safely out of it again. I became, on a sudden, aware, that something was with me in the room. There was nothing, ostensible, to lead me to such a conviction; it may be that my faculties were unnaturally keen; but, all at once, I knew that there was something there. What was more, I had a horrible persuasion that, though unseeing, I was seen; that my every movement was being watched. What it was that was with me I could not tell; I could not even guess. It was as though something in my mental organisation had been stricken by a sudden paralysis. It may seem childish to use such language; but I was overwrought, played out; physically speaking, at my last counter; and, in an instant, without the slightest warning, I was conscious of a very curious sensation, the like of which I had never felt before, and the like of which I pray that I never may feel againa sensation of panic fear. I remained rooted to the spot on which I stood, not daring to move, fearing to draw my breath. I felt that the presence with me in the room was something strange, something evil. I do not know how long I stood there, spellbound, but certainly for some considerable space of time. By degrees, as nothing moved, nothing was seen, nothing was heard, and nothing happened, I made an effort to better play the man. I knew that, at the moment, I played the cur. And endeavoured to ask myself of what it was I was afraid. I was shivering at my own imaginings. What could be in the room, to have suffered me to open the window and to enter unopposed? Whatever it was, was surely to the full as great a coward as I was, or why permit, unchecked, my burglarious entry. Since I had been allowed to enter, the probability was that I should be at liberty to retreatand I was sensible of a much keener desire to retreat than I had ever had to enter. I had to put the greatest amount of pressure upon myself before I could summon up sufficient courage to enable me to even turn my head upon my shouldersand the moment I did so I turned it back again. What constrained me, to save my soul I could not have saidbut I was constrained. My heart was palpitating in my bosom; I could hear it beat. I was trembling so that I could scarcely stand. I was overwhelmed by a fresh flood of terror. I stared in front of me with eyes in which, had it been light, would have been seen the frenzy of unreasoning fear. My ears were strained so that I listened with an acuteness of tension which was painful. Something moved. Slightly, with so slight a sound, that it would scarcely have been audible to other ears save mine. But I heard. I was looking in the direction from which the movement came, and, as I looked, I saw in front of me two specks of light. They had not been there a moment before, that I would swear. They were there now. They were eyesI told myself they were eyes. I had heard how cats eyes gleam in the dark, though I had never seen them, and I said to myself that these were cats eyes; that the thing in front of me was nothing but a cat. But I knew I lied. I knew that these were eyes, and I knew they were not cats eyes, but what eyes they were I did not knownor dared to think. They movedtowards me. The creature to which the eyes belonged was coming closer. So intense was my desire to fly that I would much rather have died than stood there still; yet I could not control a limb; my limbs were as if they were not mine. The eyes came onnoiselessly. At first they were between two and three feet from the ground; but, on a sudden, there was a squelching sound, as if some yielding body had been squashed upon the floor. The eyes vanishedto reappear, a moment afterwards, at what I judged to be a distance of some six inches from the floor. And they again came on. So it seemed that the creature, whatever it was to which the eyes belonged, was, after all, but small. Why I did not obey the frantic longing which I had to flee from it, I cannot tell; I only know, I could not. I take it that the stress and privations which I had lately undergone, and which I was, even then, still undergoing, had much to do with my conduct at that moment, and with the part I played in all that followed. Ordinarily I believe that I have as high a spirit as the average man, and as solid a resolution; but when one has been dragged through the Valley of Humiliation, and plunged, again and again, into the Waters of Bitterness and Privation, a man can be constrained to a course of action of which, in his happier moments, he would have deemed himself incapable. I know this of my own knowledge. Slowly the eyes came on, with a strange slowness, and as they came they moved from side to side as if their owner walked unevenly. Nothing could have exceeded the horror with which I awaited their approachexcept my incapacity to escape them. Not for an instant did my glance pass from themI could not have shut my eyes for all the gold the world contains!so that as they came closer I had to look right down to what seemed to be almost the level of my feet. And, at last, they reached my feet. They never paused. On a sudden I felt something on my boot, and, with a sense of shrinking, horror, nausea, rendering me momentarily more helpless, I realised that the creature was beginning to ascend my legs, to climb my body. Even then what it was I could not tellit mounted me, apparently, with as much ease as if I had been horizontal instead of perpendicular. It was as though it were some gigantic spidera spider of the nightmares; a monstrous conception of some dreadful vision. It pressed lightly against my clothing with what might, for all the world, have been spiders legs. There was an amazing host of themI felt the pressure of each separate one. They embraced me softly, stickily, as if the creature glued and unglued them, each time it moved. Higher and higher! It had gained my loins. It was moving towards the pit of my stomach. The helplessness with which I suffered its invasion was not the least part of my agonyit was that helplessness which we know in dreadful dreams. I understood, quite well, that if I did but give myself a hearty shake, the creature would fall off; but I had not a muscle at my command. As the creature mounted its eyes began to play the part of two small lamps; they positively emitted rays of light. By their rays I began to perceive faint outlines of its body. It seemed larger than I had supposed. Either the body itself was slightly phosphorescent, or it was of a peculiar yellow hue. It gleamed in the darkness. What it was there was still nothing to positively show, but the impression grew upon me that it was some member of the spider family, some monstrous member, of the like of which I had never heard or read. It was heavy, so heavy indeed, that I wondered how, with so slight a pressure, it managed to retain its holdthat it did so by the aid of some adhesive substance at the end of its legs I was sureI could feel it stick. Its weight increased as it ascendedand it smelt! I had been for some time aware that it emitted an unpleasant, foetid odour; as it neared my face it became so intense as to be unbearable. It was at my chest. I became more and more conscious of an uncomfortable wobbling motion, as if each time it breathed its body heaved. Its forelegs touched the bare skin about the base of my neck; they stuck to itshall I ever forget the feeling? I have it often in my dreams. While it hung on with those in front it seemed to draw its other legs up after it. It crawled up my neck, with hideous slowness, a quarter of an inch at a time, its weight compelling me to brace the muscles of my back. It reached my chin, it touched my lipsand I stood still and bore it all, while it enveloped my face with its huge, slimy, evilsmelling body, and embraced me with its myriad legs. The horror of it made me mad. I shook myself like one stricken by the shaking ague. I shook the creature off. It squashed upon the floor. Shrieking like some lost spirit, turning, I dashed towards the window. As I went, my foot, catching in some obstacle, I fell headlong to the floor. Picking myself up as quickly as I could I resumed my flightrain or no rain, oh to get out of that room! I already had my hand upon the sill, in another instant I should have been over itthen, despite my hunger, my fatigues, let anyone have stopped me if they could!when someone behind me struck a light. III. The Man in the Bed The illumination which instantly followed was unexpected. It startled me, causing a moments check, from which I was just recovering when a voice said, Keep still! There was a quality in the voice which I cannot describe. Not only an accent of command, but a something malicious, a something saturnine. It was a little guttural, though whether it was a man speaking I could not have positively said; but I had no doubt it was a foreigner. It was the most disagreeable voice I had ever heard, and it had on me the most disagreeable effect; for when it said, Keep still! I kept still. It was as though there was nothing else for me to do. Turn round! I turned round, mechanically, like an automaton. Such passivity was worse than undignified, it was galling; I knew that well. I resented it with secret rage. But in that room, in that presence, I was invertebrate. When I turned I found myself confronting someone who was lying in bed. At the head of the bed was a shelf. On the shelf was a small lamp which gave the most brilliant light I had ever seen. It caught me full in the eyes, having on me such a blinding effect that for some seconds I could see nothing. Throughout the whole of that strange interview I cannot affirm that I saw clearly; the dazzling glare caused dancing specks to obscure my vision. Yet, after an interval of time, I did see something; and what I did see I had rather have left unseen. I saw someone in front of me lying in a bed. I could not at once decide if it was a man or a woman. Indeed at first I doubted if it was anything human. But, afterwards, I knew it to be a manfor this reason, if for no other, that it was impossible such a creature could be feminine. The bedclothes were drawn up to his shoulders; only his head was visible. He lay on his left side, his head resting on his left hand; motionless, eyeing me as if he sought to read my inmost soul. And, in very truth, I believe he read it. His age I could not guess; such a look of age I had never imagined. Had he asserted that he had been living through the ages, I should have been forced to admit that, at least, he looked it. And yet I felt that it was quite within the range of possibility that he was no older than myselfthere was a vitality in his eyes which was startling. It might have been that he had been afflicted by some terrible disease, and it was that which had made him so supernaturally ugly. There was not a hair upon his face or head, but, to make up for it, the skin, which was a saffron yellow, was an amazing mass of wrinkles. The cranium, and, indeed, the whole skull, was so small as to be disagreeably suggestive of something animal. The nose, on the other hand, was abnormally large; so extravagant were its dimensions, and so peculiar its shape, it resembled the beak of some bird of prey. A characteristic of the faceand an uncomfortable one!was that, practically, it stopped short at the mouth. The mouth, with its blubber lips, came immediately underneath the nose, and chin, to all intents and purposes, there was none. This deformityfor the absence of chin amounted to thatit was which gave to the face the appearance of something not humanthat, and the eyes. For so marked a feature of the man were his eyes, that, ere long, it seemed to me that he was nothing but eyes. His eyes ran, literally, across the whole of the upper portion of his faceremember, the face was unwontedly small, and the columna of the nose was razoredged. They were long, and they looked out of narrow windows, and they seemed to be lighted by some internal radiance, for they shone out like lamps in a lighthouse tower. Escape them I could not, while, as I endeavoured to meet them, it was as if I shrivelled into nothingness. Never before had I realised what was meant by the power of the eye. They held me enchained, helpless, spellbound. I felt that they could do with me as they would; and they did. Their gaze was unfaltering, having the birdlike trick of never blinking; this man could have glared at me for hours and never moved an eyelid. It was he who broke the silence. I was speechless. Shut the window. I did as he bade me. Pull down the blind. I obeyed. Turn round again. I was still obedient. What is your name? Then I spoketo answer him. There was this odd thing about the words I uttered, that they came from me, not in response to my will power, but in response to his. It was not I who willed that I should speak; it was he. What he willed that I should say, I said. Just that, and nothing more. For the time I was no longer a man; my manhood was merged in his. I was, in the extremest sense, an example of passive obedience. Robert Holt. What are you? A clerk. You look as if you were a clerk. There was a flame of scorn in his voice which scorched me even then. What sort of a clerk are you? I am out of a situation. You look as if you were out of a situation. Again the scorn. Are you the sort of clerk who is always out of a situation? You are a thief. I am not a thief. Do clerks come through the window? I was stillhe putting no constraint on me to speak. Why did you come through the window? Because it was open. So!Do you always come through a window which is open? No. Then why through this? Because I was wetand coldand hungryand tired. The words came from me as if he had dragged them one by onewhich, in fact, he did. Have you no home? No. Money? No. Friends? No. Then what sort of a clerk are you? I did not answer himI did not know what it was he wished me to say. I was the victim of bad luck, nothing elseI swear it. Misfortune had followed hard upon misfortune.

The firm by whom I had been employed for years suspended payment. I obtained a situation with one of their creditors, at a lower salary. They reduced their staff, which entailed my going. After an interval I obtained a temporary engagement; the occasion which required my services passed, and I with it. After another, and a longer interval, I again found temporary employment, the pay for which was but a pittance. When that was over I could find nothing. That was nine months ago, and since then I had not earned a penny. It is so easy to grow shabby, when you are on the everlasting tramp, and are living on your stock of clothes. I had trudged all over London in search of workwork of any kind would have been welcome, so long as it would have enabled me to keep body and soul together. And I had trudged in vain. Now I had been refused admittance as a casualhow easy is the descent! But I did not tell the man lying on the bed all this. He did not wish to hearhad he wished he would have made me tell him. It may be that he read my story, unspoken though it wasit is conceivable. His eyes had powers of penetration which were peculiarly their ownthat I know. Undress! When he spoke again that was what he said, in those guttural tones of his in which there was a reminiscence of some foreign land. I obeyed, letting my sodden, shabby clothes fall anyhow upon the floor. A look came on his face, as I stood naked in front of him, which, if it was meant for a smile, was a satyrs smile, and which filled me with a sensation of shuddering repulsion. What a white skin you havehow white! What would I not give for a skin as white as thatah yes! He paused, devouring me with his glances; then continued. Go to the cupboard; you will find a cloak; put it on. I went to a cupboard which was in a corner of the room, his eyes following me as I moved. It was full of clothinggarments which might have formed the stockintrade of a costumier whose speciality was providing costumes for masquerades. A long dark cloak hung on a peg. My hand moved towards it, apparently of its own volition. I put it on, its ample folds falling to my feet. In the other cupboard you will find meat, and bread, and wine. Eat and drink. On the opposite side of the room, near the head of his bed, there was a second cupboard. In this, upon a shelf, I found what looked like pressed beef, several round cakes of what tasted like rye bread, and some thin, sour wine, in a strawcovered flask. But I was in no mood to criticise; I crammed myself, I believe, like some famished wolf, he watching me, in silence, all the time. When I had done, which was when I had eaten and drunk as much as I could hold, there returned to his face that satyrs grin. I would that I could eat and drink like thatah yes!Put back what is left. I put it backwhich seemed an unnecessary exertion, there was so little to put. Look me in the face. I looked him in the faceand immediately became conscious, as I did so, that something was going from methe capacity, as it were, to be myself. His eyes grew larger and larger, till they seemed to fill all spacetill I became lost in their immensity. He moved his hand, doing something to me, I know not what, as it passed through the aircutting the solid ground from underneath my feet, so that I fell headlong to the ground. Where I fell, there I lay, like a log. And the light went out. IV. A Lonely Vigil I knew that the light went out. For not the least singular, nor, indeed, the least distressing part of my condition was the fact that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, I never once lost consciousness during the long hours which followed. I was aware of the extinction of the lamp, and of the black darkness which ensued. I heard a rustling sound, as if the man in the bed was settling himself between the sheets. Then all was still. And throughout that interminable night I remained, my brain awake, my body dead, waiting, watching, for the day. What had happened to me I could not guess. That I probably wore some of the external evidences of death my instinct told meI knew I did. Paradoxical though it may sound, I felt as a man might feel who had actually diedas, in moments of speculation, in the days gone by, I had imagined it as quite possible that he would feel. It is very far from certain that feeling necessarily expires with what we call life. I continually asked myself if I could be deadthe inquiry pressed itself on me with awful iteration. Does the body die, and the brainthe I, the egostill live on? God only knows. But, then! the agony of the thought. The hours passed. By slow degrees, the silence was eclipsed. Sounds of traffic, of hurrying footstepslife!were ushers of the morn. Outside the window sparrows twittereda cat mewed, a dog barkedthere was the clatter of a milk can. Shafts of light stole past the blind, increasing in intensity. It still rained, now and again it pattered against the pane. The wind must have shifted, because, for the first time, there came, on a sudden, the clang of a distant clock striking the hourseven. Then, with the interval of a lifetime between each chiming, eightnineten. So far, in the room itself there had not been a sound. When the clock had struck ten, as it seemed to me, years ago, there came a rustling noise, from the direction of the bed. Feet stepped upon the floormoving towards where I was lying. It was, of course, now broad day, and I, presently, perceived that a figure, clad in some queer coloured garment, was standing at my side, looking down at me. It stooped, then knelt. My only covering was unceremoniously thrown from off me, so that I lay there in my nakedness. Fingers prodded me then and there, as if I had been some beast ready for the butchers stall. A face looked into mine, and, in front of me, were those dreadful eyes. Then, whether I was dead or living, I said to myself that this could be nothing humannothing fashioned in Gods image could wear such a shape as that. Fingers were pressed into my cheeks, they were thrust into my mouth, they touched my staring eyes, shut my eyelids, then opened them again, andhorror of horrors!the blubber lips were pressed to minethe soul of something evil entered into me in the guise of a kiss. Then this travesty of manhood reascended to his feet, and said, whether speaking to me or to himself I could not tell, Dead!dead!as good as dead!and better! Well have him buried. He moved away from me. I heard a door open and shut, and knew that he was gone. And he continued gone throughout the day. I had no actual knowledge of his issuing out into the street, but he must have done so, because the house appeared deserted. What had become of the dreadful creature of the night before I could not guess. My first fear was that he had left it behind him in the room with meit might be, as a sort of watchdog. But, as the minutes and the hours passed, and there was still no sign or sound of anything living, I concluded that, if the thing was there, it was, possibly, as helpless as myself, and that during its owners absence, at any rate, I had nothing to fear from its too pressing attentions. That, with the exception of myself, the house held nothing human, I had strong presumptive proof more than once in the course of the day. Several times, both in the morning and the afternoon, people without endeavoured to attract the attention of whoever was within. Vehiclesprobably tradesmens cartsdrew up in front, their stopping being followed by more or less assiduous assaults upon the knocker and the bell. But in every case their appeals remained unheeded. Whatever it was they wanted, they had to go unsatisfied away. Lying there, torpid, with nothing to do but listen, I was, possibly, struck by very little, but it did occur to me that one among the callers was more persistent than the rest. The distant clock had just struck noon when I heard the gate open, and someone approached the front door. Since nothing but silence followed, I supposed that the occupant of the place had returned, and had chosen to do so as silently as he had gone. Presently, however, there came from the doorstep a slight but peculiar call, as if a rat was squeaking. It was repeated three times, and then there was the sound of footsteps quietly retreating, and the gate reclosing. Between one and two the caller came again; there was a repetition of the same signalthat it was a signal I did not doubt; followed by the same retreat. About three the mysterious visitant returned. The signal was repeated, and, when there was no response, fingers tapped softly against the panels of the front door. When there was still no answer, footsteps stole softly round the side of the house, and there came the signal from the rearand then, again, tapping of fingers against what was, apparently, the back door. No notice being taken of these various proceedings, the footsteps returned the way they went, and, as before, the gate was closed. Shortly after darkness had fallen this assiduous caller returned, to make a fourth and more resolute attempt to call attention to his presence. From the peculiar character of his manoeuvres it seemed that he suspected that whoever was within had particular reasons for ignoring him without. He went through the familiar pantomime of the three squeaky calls both at the front door and the backfollowed by the tapping of the fingers on the panels. This time, however, he also tried the window panesI could hear, quite distinctly, the clear, yet distinct, noise of what seemed like knuckles rapping against the windows behind. Disappointed there, he renewed his efforts at the front. The curiously quiet footsteps came round the house, to pause before the window of the room in which I layand then something singular occurred. While I waited for the tapping, there came, instead, the sound of someone or something, scrambling on to the windowsillas if some creature, unable to reach the window from the ground, was endeavouring to gain the vantage of the sill. Some ungainly creature, unskilled in surmounting such an obstacle as a perpendicular brick wall. There was the noise of what seemed to be the scratching of claws, as if it experienced considerable difficulty in obtaining a hold on the unyielding surface. What kind of creature it was I could not thinkI was astonished to find that it was a creature at all. I had taken it for granted that the persevering visitor was either a woman or a man. If, however, as now seemed likely, it was some sort of animal, the fact explained the squeaking soundsthough what, except a rat, did squeak like that was more than I could sayand the absence of any knocking or ringing. Whatever it was, it had gained the summit of its desiresthe windowsill. It panted as if its efforts at climbing had made it short of breath. Then began the tapping. In the light of my new discovery, I perceived, clearly enough, that the tapping was hardly that which was likely to be the product of human fingersit was sharp and definite, rather resembling the striking of the point of a nail against the glass. It was not loud, but in timeit continued with much persistencyit became plainly vicious. It was accompanied by what I can only describe as the most extraordinary noises. There were squeaks, growing angrier and shriller as the minutes passed; what seemed like gaspings for breath; and a peculiar buzzing sound like, yet unlike, the purring of a cat. The creatures resentment at its want of success in attracting attention was unmistakable. The tapping became like the clattering of hailstones; it kept up a continuous noise with its cries and pantings; there was the sound as of some large body being rubbed against the glass, as if it were extending itself against the window, and endeavouring, by force of pressure, to gain an entrance through the pane. So violent did its contortions become that I momentarily anticipated the yielding of the glass, and the excited assailant coming crashing through. Considerably to my relief the window proved more impregnable than seemed at one time likely. The stolid resistance proved, in the end, to be too much either for its endurance or its patience. Just as I was looking for some fresh manifestation of fury, it seemed rather to tumble than to spring off the sill; then came, once more, the same sound of quietly retreating footsteps; and what, under the circumstances, seemed odder still, the same closing of the gate. During the two or three hours which immediately ensued nothing happened at all out of the wayand then took place the most surprising incident of all. The clock had struck ten some time before. Since before the striking of the hour nothing and no one had passed along what was evidently the little frequented road in front of that uncanny house. On a sudden two sounds broke the stillness withoutof someone running, and of cries. Judging from his hurrying steps someone seemed to be flying for his lifeto the accompaniment of curious cries. It was only when the runner reached the front of the house that, in the cries, I recognised the squeaks of the persistent caller. I imagined that he had returned, as before, alone, to renew his attacks upon the windowuntil it was made plain, as it quickly was, that, with him, was some sort of a companion. Immediately there arose, from without, the noise of battle. Two creatures, whose cries were, to me, of so unusual a character, that I found it impossible to even guess at their identity, seemed to be waging war to the knife upon the doorstep. After a minute or two of furious contention, victory seemed to rest with one of the combatants, for the other fled, squeaking as with pain. While I listened, with strained attention, for the next episode in this queer drama, expecting that now would come another assault upon the window, to my unbounded surprise I heard a key thrust in the keyhole, the lock turned, and the front door thrown open with a furious bang. It was closed as loudly as it was opened. Then the door of the room in which I was, was dashed open, with the same display of excitement, and of clamour, footsteps came hurrying in, the door was slammed to with a force which shook the house to its foundations, there was a rustling as of bedclothes, the brilliant illumination of the night before, and a voice, which I had only too good reason to remember said, Stand up. I stood up, automatically, at the word of command, facing towards the bed. There, between the sheets, with his head resting on his hand, in the attitude in which I had seen him last, was the being I had made acquaintance with under circumstances which I was never likely to forgetthe same, yet not the same. V. An Instruction to Commit Burglary That the man in the bed was the one whom, to my cost, I had suffered myself to stumble on the night before, there could, of course, not be the faintest doubt. And yet, directly I saw him, I recognised that some astonishing alteration had taken place in his appearance. To begin with, he seemed youngerthe decrepitude of age had given place to something very like the fire of youth. His features had undergone some subtle change. His nose, for instance, was not by any means so grotesque; its beaklike quality was less conspicuous. The most part of his wrinkles had disappeared, as if by magic. And, though his skin was still as yellow as saffron, his contours had roundedhe had even come into possession of a modest allowance of chin. But the most astounding novelty was that about the face there was something which was essentially feminine; so feminine, indeed, that I wondered if I could by any possibility have blundered, and mistaken a woman for a man; some ghoulish example of her sex, who had so yielded to her depraved instincts as to have become nothing but a ghastly reminiscence of womanhood. The effect of the changes which had come about in his appearancefor, after all, I told myself that it was impossible that I could have been such a simpleton as to have been mistaken on such a question as genderwas heightened by the selfevident fact that, very recently, he had been engaged in some pitched battle; some hand to hand, and, probably, discreditable encounter, from which he had borne away uncomfortable proofs of his opponents prowess. His antagonist could hardly have been a chivalrous fighter, for his countenance was marked by a dozen different scratches which seemed to suggest that the weapons used had been someones fingernails. It was, perhaps, because the heat of the battle was still in his veins that he was in such a state of excitement. He seemed to be almost overwhelmed by the strength of his own feelings. His eyes seemed literally to flame with fire. The muscles of his face were working as if they were wholly beyond his own control. When he spoke his accent was markedly foreign; the words rushed from his lips in an inarticulate torrent; he kept repeating the same thing over and over again in a fashion which was not a little suggestive of insanity. So youre not dead!youre not deadyoure alive!youre alive! Wellhow does it feel to be dead? I ask you!Is it not good to be dead? To keep dead is betterit is the best of all! To have made an end of all things, to cease to strive and to cease to weep, to cease to want and to cease to have, to cease to annoy and to cease to long, to no more careno!not for anything, to put from you the curse of lifeforever!is that not the best? Oh yes!I tell you!do I not know? But for you such knowledge is not yet. For you there is the return to life, the coming out of deathyou shall live on!for me!Live on! He made a movement with his hand, and, directly he did so, it happened as on the previous evening, that a metamorphosis took place in the very abysses of my being. I woke from my torpor, as he put it, I came out of death, and was alive again. I was far, yet, from being my own man; I realised that he exercised on me a degree of mesmeric force which I had never dreamed that one creature could exercise on another; but, at least, I was no longer in doubt as to whether I was or was not dead. I knew I was alive. He lay, watching me, as if he was reading the thoughts which occupied my brainand, for all I know, he was. Robert Holt, you are a thief. I am not. My own voice, as I heard it, startled meit was so long since it had sounded in my ears. You are a thief! Only thieves come through windowsdid you not come through the window? I was stillwhat would my contradiction have availed me? But it is well that you came through the windowwell you are a thiefwell for me! for me! It is you that I am wantingat the happy moment you have dropped yourself into my handsin the nick of time. For you are my slaveat my beck and callmy familiar spirit, to do with as I willyou know thiseh? I did know it, and the knowledge of my impotence was terrible. I felt that if I could only get away from him; only release myself from the bonds with which he had bound me about; only remove myself from the horrible glamour of his near neighbourhood; only get one or two square meals and have an opportunity of recovering from the enervating stress of mental and bodily fatigue;I felt that then I might be something like his match, and that, a second time, he would endeavour in vain to bring me within the compass of his magic. But, as it was, I was conscious that I was helpless, and the consciousness was agony. He persisted in reiterating his former falsehood. I say you are a thief!a thief, Robert Holt, a thief! You came through a window for your own pleasure, now you will go through a window for minenot this window, but another. Where the jest lay I did not perceive; but it tickled him, for a grating sound came from his throat which was meant for laughter. This time it is as a thief that you will gooh yes, be sure. He paused, as it seemed, to transfix me with his gaze. His unblinking eyes never for an instant quitted my face. With what a frightful fascination they constrained meand how I loathed them! When he spoke again there was a new intonation in his speechsomething bitter, cruel, unrelenting. Do you know Paul Lessingham? He pronounced the name as if he hated itand yet as if he loved to have it on his tongue. What Paul Lessingham? There is only one Paul Lessingham! The Paul Lessinghamthe great Paul Lessingham! He shrieked, rather than said this, with an outburst of rage so frenzied that I thought, for the moment, that he was going to spring on me and rend me. I shook all over. I do not doubt that, as I replied, my voice was sufficiently tremulous. All the world knows Paul Lessinghamthe politicianthe statesman. As he glared at me his eyes dilated. I still stood in expectation of a physical assault. But, for the present, he contented himself with words. Tonight you are going through his window like a thief! I had no inkling of his meaningand, apparently, judging from his next words, I looked something of the bewilderment I felt. You do not understand?no!it is simple!what could be simpler? I say that tonighttonight!you are going through his window like a thief. You came through my windowwhy not through the window of Paul Lessingham, the politicianthe statesman. He repeated my words as if in mockery. I amI make it my boast!of that great multitude which regards Paul Lessingham as the greatest living force in practical politics; and which looks to him, with confidence, to carry through that great work of constitutional and social reform which he has set himself to do. I daresay that my tone, in speaking of him, savoured of laudationwhich, plainly, the man in the bed resented. What he meant by his wild words about my going through Paul Lessinghams window like a thief, I still had not the faintest notion. They sounded like the ravings of a madman. As I continued silent, and he yet stared, there came into his tone another notea note of tendernessa note of which I had not deemed him capable. He is good to look at, Paul Lessinghamis he not good to look at? I was aware that, physically, Mr. Lessingham was a fine specimen of manhood, but I was not prepared for the assertion of the fact in such a quarternor for the manner in which the temporary master of my fate continued to harp and enlarge upon the theme. He is straightstraight as the mast of a shiphe is tallhis skin is white; he is strongdo I not know that he is stronghow strong!oh yes! Is there a better thing than to be his wife? his wellbeloved? the light of his eyes? Is there for a woman a happier chance? Oh no, not one! His wife!Paul Lessingham! As, with soft cadences, he gave vent to these unlookedfor sentiments, the fashion of his countenance was changed. A look of longing came into his faceof savage, frantic longingwhich, unalluring though it was, for the moment transfigured him. But the mood was transient. To be his wifeoh yes!the wife of his scorn! the despised and rejected! The return to the venom of his former bitterness was rapidI could not but feel that this was the natural man. Though why a creature such as he was should go out of his way to apostrophise, in such a manner, a publicist of Mr. Lessinghams eminence, surpassed my comprehension. Yet he stuck to his subject like a leechas if it had been one in which he had an engrossing personal interest. He is a devilhard as the granite rockcold as the snows of Ararat. In him there is none of lifes warm bloodhe is accursed! He is falseay, false as the fables of those who lie for love of lieshe is all treachery. Her whom he has taken to his bosom he would put away from him as if she had never beenhe would steal from her like a thief in the nighthe would forget she ever was! But the avenger follows after, lurking in the shadows, hiding among the rocks, waiting, watching, till his time shall come. And it shall come!the day of the avenger!ay, the day! Raising himself to a sitting posture, he threw his arms above his head, and shrieked with a demoniac fury. Presently he became a trifle calmer. Reverting to his recumbent position, resting his head upon his hand, he eyed me steadily; then asked me a question which struck me as being, under the circumstances, more than a little singular. You know his housethe house of the great Paul Lessinghamthe politicianthe statesman? I do not. You lie!you do! The words came from him with a sort of snarlas if he would have lashed me across the face with them. I do not. Men in my position are not acquainted with the residences of men in his. I may, at some time, have seen his address in print; but, if so, I have forgotten it. He looked at me intently, for some moments, as if to learn if I spoke the truth; and apparently, at last, was satisfied that I did. You do not know it?Well!I will show it youI will show the house of the great Paul Lessingham. What he meant I did not know; but I was soon to learnan astounding revelation it proved to be. There was about his manner something hardly human; something which, for want of a better phrase, I would call vulpine. In his tone there was a mixture of mockery and bitterness, as if he wished his words to have the effect of corrosive sublimate, and to sear me as he uttered them. Listen with all your ears. Give me your whole attention. Hearken to my bidding, so that you may do as I bid you. Not that I fear your obedienceoh no! He pausedas if to enable me to fully realise the picture of my helplessness conjured up by his jibes. You came through my window, like a thief. You will go through my window, like a fool. You will go to the house of the great Paul Lessingham. You say you do not know it? Well, I will show it you. I will be your guide. Unseen, in the darkness and the night, I will stalk beside you, and will lead you to where I would have you go.You will go just as you are, with bare feet, and head uncovered, and with but a single garment to hide your nakedness. You will be cold, your feet will be cut and bleedingbut what better does a thief deserve? If any see you, at the least they will take you for a madman; there will be trouble. But have no fear; bear a bold heart. None shall see you while I stalk at your side. I will cover you with the cloak of invisibilityso that you may come in safety to the house of the great Paul Lessingham. He paused again. What he said, wild and wanton though it was, was beginning to fill me with a sense of the most extreme discomfort. His sentences, in some strange, indescribable way, seemed, as they came from his lips, to warp my limbs; to enwrap themselves about me; to confine me, tighter and tighter, within, as it were, swaddling clothes; to make me more and more helpless. I was already conscious that whatever mad freak he chose to set me on, I should have no option but to carry it through. When you come to the house, you will stand, and look, and seek for a window convenient for entry. It may be that you will find one open, as you did mine; if not, you will open one. Howthat is your affair, not mine. You will practise the arts of a thief to steal into his house. The monstrosity of his suggestion fought against the spell which he again was casting upon me, and forced me into speechendowed me with the power to show that there still was in me something of a man; though every second the strands of my manhood, as it seemed, were slipping faster through the fingers which were strained to clutch them. I will not. He was silent. He looked at me. The pupils of his eyes dilateduntil they seemed all pupil. You will.Do you hear?I say you will. I am not a thief, I am an honest manwhy should I do this thing? Because I bid you. Have mercy! On whomon you, or on Paul Lessingham?Who, at any time, has shown mercy unto me, that I should show mercy unto any? He stopped, and then again went onreiterating his former incredible suggestion with an emphasis which seemed to eat its way into my brain. You will practise the arts of a thief to steal into his house; and, being in, will listen. If all be still, you will make your way to the room he calls his study. How shall I find it? I know nothing of his house. The question was wrung from me; I felt that the sweat was standing in great drops upon my brow. I will show it you. Shall you go with me? AyI shall go with you. All the time I shall be with you. You will not see me, but I shall be there. Be not afraid. His claim to supernatural powers, for what he said amounted to nothing less, was, on the face of it, preposterous, but, then, I was in no condition to even hint at its absurdity. He continued. When you have gained the study, you will go to a certain drawer, which is in a certain bureau, in a corner of the roomI see it now; when you are there you shall see it tooand you will open it. Should it be locked? You still will open it. But how shall I open it if it is locked? By those arts in which a thief is skilled. I say to you again that that is your affair, not mine. I made no attempt to answer him. Even supposing that he forced me, by the wicked, and unconscionable exercise of what, I presumed, were the hypnotic powers with which nature had to such a dangerous degree endowed him, to carry the adventure to a certain stage, since he could hardly, at an instants notice, endow me with the knack of picking locks, should the drawer he alluded to be lockedwhich might Providence permit!nothing serious might issue from it after all. He read my thoughts. You will open itthough it be doubly and trebly locked, I say that you will open it.In it you will find he hesitated, as if to reflectsome letters; it may be two or threeI know not just how manythey are bound about by a silken ribbon. You will take them out of the drawer, and, having taken them, you will make the best of your way out of the house, and bear them back to me. And should anyone come upon me while engaged in these nefarious proceedingsfor instance, should I encounter Mr. Lessingham himself, what then? Paul Lessingham?You need have no fear if you encounter him. I need have no fear!If he finds me, in his own house, at dead of night, committing burglary! You need have no fear of him. On your account, or on my own?At least he will have me haled to gaol. I say you need have no fear of him. I say what I mean. How, then, shall I escape his righteous vengeance? He is not the man to suffer a midnight robber to escape him scathelessshall I have to kill him? You will not touch him with a fingernor will he touch you. By what spell shall I prevent him? By the spell of two words. What words are they? Should Paul Lessingham chance to come upon you, and find you in his house, a thief, and should seek to stay you from whatever it is you may be at, you will not flinch nor flee from him, but you will stand still, and you will say Something in the crescendo accents of his voice, something weird and ominous, caused my heart to press against my ribs, so that when he stopped, in my eagerness I cried out, What? The beetle! As the words came from him in a kind of screech, the lamp went out, and the place was all in darkness, and I knew, so that the knowledge filled me with a sense of loathing, that with me, in the room, was the evil presence of the night before. Two bright specks gleamed in front of me; something flopped from off the bed on to the ground; the thing was coming towards me across the floor. It came slowly on, and on, and on. I stood still, speechless in the sickness of my horror. Until, on my bare feet, it touched me with slimy feelers, and my terror lest it should creep up my naked body lent me voice, and I fell shrieking like a soul in agony. It may be that my shrieking drove it from me. At least, it went. I knew it went. And all was still. Until, on a sudden, the lamp flamed out again, and there, lying, as before, in bed, glaring at me with his baleful eyes, was the being whom, in my folly, or in my wisdomwhichever it was!I was beginning to credit with the possession of unhallowed, unlawful powers. You will say that to him; those two words; they only; no more.

And you will see what you will see. But Paul Lessingham is a man of resolution. Should he still persist in interference, or seek to hinder you, you will say those two words again. You need do no more. Twice will suffice, I promise you.Now go.Draw up the blind; open the window; climb through it. Hasten to do what I have bidden you. I wait here for your returnand all the way I shall be with you. VI. A Singular Felony I went to the window; I drew up the blind, unlatching the sash, I threw it open; and clad, or, rather, unclad as I was, I clambered through it into the open air. I was not only incapable of resistance, I was incapable of distinctly formulating the desire to offer resistance. Some compelling influence moved me hither and hither, with completest disregard of whether I would or would not. And yet, when I found myself without, I was conscious of a sense of exultation at having escaped from the miasmic atmosphere of that room of unholy memories. And a faint hope began to dawn within my bosom that, as I increased the distance between myself and it, I might shake off something of the nightmare helplessness which numbed and tortured me. I lingered for a moment by the window; then stepped over the short dividing wall into the street; and then again I lingered. My condition was one of dual personalitywhile, physically, I was bound, mentally, to a considerable extent, I was free. But this measure of freedom on my mental side made my plight no better. For, among other things, I realised what a ridiculous figure I must be cutting, barefooted and bareheaded, abroad, at such an hour of the night, in such a boisterous breezefor I quickly discovered that the wind amounted to something like a gale. Apart from all other considerations, the notion of parading the streets in such a condition filled me with profound disgust. And I do believe that if my tyrannical oppressor had only permitted me to attire myself in my own garments, I should have started with a comparatively light heart on the felonious mission on which he apparently was sending me. I believe, too, that the consciousness of the incongruity of my attire increased my sense of helplessness, and that, had I been dressed as Englishmen are wont to be, who take their walks abroad, he would not have found in me, on that occasion, the facile instrument which, in fact, he did. There was a moment, in which the gravelled pathway first made itself known to my naked feet, and the cutting wind to my naked flesh, when I think it possible that, had I gritted my teeth, and strained my every nerve, I might have shaken myself free from the bonds which shackled me, and bade defiance to the ancient sinner who, for all I knew, was peeping at me through the window. But so depressed was I by the knowledge of the ridiculous appearance I presented that, before I could take advantage of it the moment passednot to return again that night. I did catch, as it were, at its fringe, as it was flying past me, making a hurried movement to one sidethe first I had made, of my own initiative, for hours. But it was too late. My tormentoras if, though unseen, he sawtightened his grip, I was whirled round, and sped hastily onwards in a direction in which I certainly had no desire of travelling. All the way I never met a soul. I have since wondered whether in that respect my experience was not a normal one; whether it might not have happened to any. If so, there are streets in London, long lines of streets, which, at a certain period of the night, in a certain sort of weatherprobably the weather had something to do with itare clean deserted; in which there is neither footpassenger nor vehiclenot even a policeman. The greater part of the route along which I was drivenI know no juster wordwas one with which I had some sort of acquaintance. It led, at first, through what, I take it, was some part of Walham Green; then along the Lillie Road, through Brompton, across the Fulham Road, through the network of streets leading to Sloane Street, across Sloane Street into Lowndes Square. Who goes that way goes some distance, and goes through some important thorough fares; yet not a creature did I see, nor, I imagine, was there a creature who saw me. As I crossed Sloane Street, I fancied that I heard the distant rumbling of a vehicle along the Knightsbridge Road, but that was the only sound I heard. It is painful even to recollect the plight in which I was when I was stoppedfor stopped I was, as shortly and as sharply, as the beast of burden, with a bridle in its mouth, whose driver puts a period to his career. I was wetintermittent gusts of rain were borne on the scurrying wind; in spite of the pace at which I had been brought, I was chilled to the bone; andworst of all!my mudstained feet, all cut and bleeding, were so painfulfor, unfortunately, I was still susceptible enough to painthat it was agony to have them come into contact with the cold and the slime of the hard, unyielding pavement. I had been stopped on the opposite side of the squarethat nearest to the hospital; in front of a house which struck me as being somewhat smaller than the rest. It was a house with a portico; about the pillars of this portico was trelliswork, and on the trelliswork was trained some climbing plant. As I stood, shivering, wondering what would happen next, some strange impulse mastered me, and, immediately, to my own unbounded amazement, I found myself scrambling up the trellis towards the verandah above. I am no gymnast, either by nature or by education; I doubt whether, previously, I had ever attempted to climb anything more difficult than a step ladder. The result was, that, though the impulse might be given me, the skill could not, and I had only ascended a yard or so when, losing my footing, I came slithering down upon my back. Bruised and shaken though I was, I was not allowed to inquire into my injuries. In a moment I was on my feet again, and again I was impelled to climbonly, however, again to come to grief. This time the demon, or whatever it was, that had entered into me, seeming to appreciate the impossibility of getting me to the top of that verandah, directed me to try another way. I mounted the steps leading to the front door, got on to the low parapet which was at one side, thence on to the sill of the adjacent windowhad I slipped then I should have fallen a sheer descent of at least twenty feet to the bottom of the deep area down below. But the sill was broad, andif it is proper to use such language in connection with a transaction of the sort in which I was engagedfortune favoured me. I did not fall. In my clenched fist I had a stone. With this I struck the pane of glass, as with a hammer. Through the hole which resulted, I could just insert my hand, and reach the latch within. In another minute the sash was raised, and I was in the houseI had committed burglary. As I look back and reflect upon the audacity of the whole proceeding, even now I tremble. Hapless slave of anothers will although in very truth I was, I cannot repeat too often that I realised to the full just what it was that I was being compelled to doa fact which was very far from rendering my situation less distressful!and every detail of my involuntary actions was projected upon my brain in a series of pictures, whose clearcut outlines, so long as memory endures, will never fade. Certainly no professional burglar, nor, indeed, any creature in his senses, would have ventured to emulate my surprising rashness. The process of smashing the pane of glassit was plate glasswas anything but a noiseless one. There was, first, the blow itself, then the shivering of the glass, then the clattering of fragments into the area beneath. One would have thought that the whole thing would have made din enough to have roused the Seven Sleepers. But, here, again the weather was on my side. About that time the wind was howling wildlyit came shrieking across the square. It is possible that the tumult which it made deadened all other sounds. Anyhow, as I stood within the room which I had violated, listening for signs of someone being on the alert, I could hear nothing. Within the house there seemed to be the silence of the grave. I drew down the window, and made for the door. It proved by no means easy to find. The windows were obscured by heavy curtains, so that the room inside was dark as pitch. It appeared to be unusually full of furniturean appearance due, perhaps, to my being a stranger in the midst of such Cimmerian blackness. I had to feel my way, very gingerly indeed, among the various impedimenta. As it was I seemed to come into contact with most of the obstacles there were to come into contact with, stumbling more than once over footstools, and over what seemed to be dwarf chairs. It was a miracle that my movements still continued to be unheardbut I believe that the explanation was, that the house was well built; that the servants were the only persons in it at the time; that their bedrooms were on the top floor; that they were fast asleep; and that they were little likely to be disturbed by anything that might occur in the room which I had entered. Reaching the door at last, I opened itlistening for any promise of being interruptedandto adapt a hackneyed phrasedirected by the power which shaped my end, I went across the hall and up the stairs. I passed up the first landing, and, on the second, moved to a door upon the right. I turned the handle, it yielded, the door opened, I entered, closing it behind me. I went to the wall just inside the door, found a handle, jerked it, and switched on the electric lightdoing, I make no doubt, all these things, from a spectators point of view, so naturally, that a judge and jury would have been with difficulty persuaded that they were not the product of my own volition. In the brilliant glow of the electric light I took a leisurely survey of the contents of the room. It was, as the man in the bed had said it would be, a studya fine, spacious apartment, evidently intended rather for work than for show. There were three separate writingtables, one very large and two smaller ones, all covered with an orderly array of manuscripts and papers. A typewriter stood at the side of one. On the floor, under and about them, were piles of books, portfolios, and officiallooking documents. Every available foot of wall space on three sides of the room was lined with shelves, full as they could hold with books. On the fourth side, facing the door, was a large lockup oak bookcase, and, in the farther corner, a quaint old bureau. So soon as I saw this bureau I went for it, straight as an arrow from a bowindeed, it would be no abuse of metaphor to say that I was propelled towards it like an arrow from a bow. It had drawers below, glass doors above, and between the drawers and the doors was a flap to let down. It was to this flap my attention was directed. I put out my hand to open it; it was locked at the top. I pulled at it with both hands; it refused to budge. So this was the lock I was, if necessary, to practise the arts of a thief to open. I was no picklock; I had flattered myself that nothing, and no one, could make me such a thing. Yet now that I found myself confronted by that unyielding flap, I found that pressure, irresistible pressure, was being put upon me to gain, by any and every means, access to its interior. I had no option but to yield. I looked about me in search of some convenient tool with which to ply the felons trade. I found it close beside me. Leaning against the wall, within a yard of where I stood, were examples of various kinds of weaponsamong them, spearheads. Taking one of these spearheads, with much difficulty I forced the point between the flap and the bureau. Using the leverage thus obtained, I attempted to prise it open. The flap held fast; the spearhead snapped in two. I tried another, with the same result; a third, to fail again. There were no more. The most convenient thing remaining was a queer, heavyheaded, sharpedged hatchet. This I took, brought the sharp edge down with all my force upon the refractory flap. The hatchet went throughbefore I had done with it, it was open with a vengeance. But I was destined on the occasion of my firstand, I trust, lastexperience of the burglars calling, to carry the part completely through. I had gained access to the flap itself only to find that at the back were several small drawers, on one of which my observation was brought to bear in a fashion which it was quite impossible to disregard. As a matter of course it was locked, and, once more, I had to search for something which would serve as a roughandready substitute for the missing key. There was nothing at all suitable among the weaponsI could hardly for such a purpose use the hatchet; the drawer in question was such a little one that to have done so would have been to shiver it to splinters. On the mantelshelf, in an open leather case, were a pair of revolvers. Statesmen, nowadays, sometimes stand in actual peril of their lives. It is possible that Mr. Lessingham, conscious of continually threatened danger, carried them about with him as a necessary protection. They were serviceable weapons, large, and somewhat weightyof the type with which, I believe, upon occasion the police are armed. Not only were all the barrels loaded, but, in the case itself there was a supply of cartridges more than sufficient to charge them all again. I was handling the weapons, wonderingif, in my condition, the word was applicablewhat use I could make of them to enable me to gain admission to that drawer, when there came, on a sudden, from the street without, the sound of approaching wheels. There was a whirring within my brain, as if someone was endeavouring to explain to me to what service to apply the revolvers, and I, perforce, strained every nerve to grasp the meaning of my invisible mentor. While I did so, the wheels drew rapidly nearer, and, just as I was expecting them to go whirling by, stoppedin front of the house. My heart leapt in my bosom. In a convulsion of frantic terror, again, during the passage of one frenzied moment, I all but burst the bonds that held me, and fled, haphazard, from the imminent peril. But the bonds were stronger than Iit was as if I had been rooted to the ground. A key was inserted in the keyhole of the front door, the lock was turned, the door thrown open, firm footsteps entered the house. If I could I would not have stood upon the order of my going, but gone at once, anywhere, anyhow; but, at that moment, my comings and goings were not matters in which I was consulted. Panic fear raging within, outwardly I was calm as possible, and stood, turning the revolvers over and over, asking myself what it could be that I was intended to do with them. All at once it came to me in an illuminating flashI was to fire at the lock of the drawer, and blow it open. A madder scheme it would have been impossible to hit upon. The servants had slept through a good deal, but they would hardly sleep through the discharge of a revolver in a room below themnot to speak of the person who had just entered the premises, and whose footsteps were already audible as he came up the stairs. I struggled to make a dumb protest against the insensate folly which was hurrying me to infallible destruction, without success. For me there was only obedience. With a revolver in either hand I marched towards the bureau as unconcernedly as if I would not have given my life to have escaped the denouement which I needed but a slight modicum of common sense to be aware was close at hand. I placed the muzzle of one of the revolvers against the keyhole of the drawer to which my unseen guide had previously directed me, and pulled the trigger. The lock was shattered, the contents of the drawer were at my mercy. I snatched up a bundle of letters, about which a pink ribbon was wrapped. Startled by a noise behind me, immediately following the report of the pistol, I glanced over my shoulder. The room door was open, and Mr. Lessingham was standing with the handle in his hand. VII. The Great Paul Lessingham He was in evening dress. He carried a small portfolio in his left hand. If the discovery of my presence startled him, as it could scarcely have failed to do, he allowed no sign of surprise to escape him. Paul Lessinghams impenetrability is proverbial. Whether on platforms addressing excited crowds, or in the midst of heated discussion in the House of Commons, all the world knows that his coolness remains unruffled. It is generally understood that he owes his success in the political arena in no slight measure to the adroitness which is born of his invulnerable presence of mind. He gave me a taste of its quality then. Standing in the attitude which has been familiarised to us by caricaturists, his feet apart, his broad shoulders well set back, his handsome head a little advanced, his keen blue eyes having in them something suggestive of a bird of prey considering just when, where, and how to pounce, he regarded me for some seconds in perfect silencewhether outwardly I flinched I cannot say; inwardly I know I did. When he spoke, it was without moving from where he stood, and in the calm, airy tones in which he might have addressed an acquaintance who had just dropped in. May I ask, sir, to what I am indebted for the pleasure of your company? He paused, as if waiting for my answer. When none came, he put his question in another form. Pray, sir, who are you, and on whose invitation do I find you here? As I still stood speechless, motionless, meeting his glance without a twitching of an eyebrow, nor a tremor of the hand, I imagine that he began to consider me with an even closer intentness than before. And that theto say the least of itpeculiarity of my appearance, caused him to suspect that he was face to face with an adventure of a peculiar kind. Whether he took me for a lunatic I cannot certainly say; but, from his manner, I think it possible he did. He began to move towards me from across the room, addressing me with the utmost suavity and courtesy. Be so good as to give me the revolver, and the papers you are holding in your hand. As he came on, something entered into me, and forced itself from between my lips, so that I said, in a low, hissing voice, which I vow was never mine, The beetle! Whether it was, or was not, owing, in some degree, to a trick of my imagination, I cannot determine, but, as the words were spoken, it seemed to me that the lights went low, so that the place was all in darkness, and I again was filled with the nauseous consciousness of the presence of something evil in the room. But if, in that matter, my abnormally strained imagination played me a trick, there could be no doubt whatever as to the effect which the words had on Mr. Lessingham. When the mist of the blacknessreal or supposititioushad passed from before my eyes, I found that he had retreated to the extremest limits of the room, and was crouching, his back against the bookshelves, clutching at them, in the attitude of a man who has received a staggering blow, from which, as yet, he has had no opportunity of recovering. A most extraordinary change had taken place in the expression of his face; in his countenance amazement, fear, and horror seemed struggling for the mastery. I was filled with a most discomforting qualm, as I gazed at the frightened figure in front of me, and realised that it was that of the great Paul Lessingham, the god of my political idolatry. Who are you?In Gods name, who are you? His very voice seemed changed; his frenzied, choking accents would hardly have been recognised by either friend or foe. Who are you?Do you hear me ask, who are you? In the name of God, I bid you say! As he perceived that I was still, he began to show a species of excitement which it was unpleasant to witness, especially as he continued to crouch against the bookshelf, as if he was afraid to stand up straight. So far from exhibiting the impassivity for which he was renowned, all the muscles in his face and all the limbs in his body seemed to be in motion at once; he was like a man afflicted with the shivering aguehis very fingers were twitching aimlessly, as they were stretched out on either side of him, as if seeking for support from the shelves against which he leaned. Where have you come from? what do you want? who sent you here? what concern have you with me? is it necessary that you should come and play these childish tricks with me? why? why? The questions came from him with astonishing rapidity. When he saw that I continued silent, they came still faster, mingled with what sounded to me like a stream of inchoate abuse. Why do you stand there in that extraordinary garmentits worse than nakedness, yes, worse than nakedness! For that alone I could have you punished, and I will!and try to play the fool? Do you think I am a boy to be bamboozled by every bogey a blunderer may try to conjure up? If so, youre wrong, as whoever sent you might have had sense enough to let you know. If you tell me who you are, and who sent you here, and what it is you want, I will be merciful; if not, the police shall be sent for, and the law shall take its courseto the bitter end!I warn you.Do you hear? You fool! tell me who you are? The last words came from him in what was very like a burst of childish fury. He himself seemed conscious, the moment after, that his passion was sadly lacking in dignity, and to be ashamed of it. He drew himself straight up. With a pockethandkerchief which he took from an inner pocket of his coat, he wiped his lips. Then, clutching it tightly in his hand, he eyed me with a fixedness which, under any other circumstances, I should have found unbearable. Well, sir, is your continued silence part of the business of the role you have set yourself to play? His tone was firmer, and his bearing more in keeping with his character. If it be so, I presume that I, at least have liberty to speak. When I find a gentleman, even one gifted with your eloquence of silence, playing the part of burglar, I think you will grant that a few words on my part cannot justly be considered to be out of place. Again he paused. I could not but feel that he was employing the vehicle of somewhat cumbrous sarcasm to gain time, and to give himself the opportunity of recovering, if the thing was possible, his pristine courage. That, for some cause wholly hidden from me, the mysterious utterance had shaken his nature to its deepest foundations, was made plainer by his endeavour to treat the whole business with a sort of cynical levity. To commence with, may I ask if you have come through London, or through any portion of it, in that costumeor, rather, in that want of costume? It would seem out of place in a Cairene streetwould it not?even in the Rue de Rabagaswas it not the Rue de Rabagas? He asked the question with an emphasis the meaning of which was wholly lost on me. What he referred to either then, or in what immediately followed, I, of course, knew no more than the man in the moonthough I should probably have found great difficulty in convincing him of my ignorance. I take it that you are a reminiscence of the Rue de Rabagasthat, of course;is it not of course? The little house with the bluegrey Venetians, and the piano with the F sharp missing? Is there still the piano? with the tinny trebleindeed, the whole atmosphere, was it not tinny?You agree with me?I have not forgotten. I am not even afraid to rememberyou perceive it? A new idea seemed to strike himborn, perhaps, of my continued silence. You look Englishis it possible that you are not English? What are you thenFrench? We shall see! He addressed me in a tongue which I recognised as French, but with which I was not sufficiently acquainted to understand. Although, I flatter myself thatas the present narrative should showI have not made an illuse of the opportunities which I have had to improve my, originally, modest education, I regret that I have never had so much as a ghost of a chance to acquire an even rudimentary knowledge of any language except my own. Recognising, I suppose, from my looks, that he was addressing me in a tongue to which I was a stranger, after a time he stopped, added something with a smile, and then began to talk to me in a lingo to which, in a manner of speaking, I was even stranger, for this time I had not the faintest notion what it wasit might have been gibberish for all that I could tell. Quickly perceiving that he had succeeded no better than before, he returned to English. You do not know French?nor the patois of the Rue de Rabagas? Very goodthen what is it that you do know? Are you under a vow of silence, or are you dumbexcept upon occasion? Your face is Englishwhat can be seen of it, and I will take it, therefore, that English spoken words convey some meaning to your brain. So listen, sir, to what I have to saydo me the favour to listen carefully. He was becoming more and more his former self. In his clear, modulated tones there was a ring of something like a threata something which went very far beyond his words. You know something of a period which I choose to have forgottenthat is plain; you come from a person who, probably, knows still more. Go back to that person and say that what I have forgotten I have forgotten; nothing will be gained by anyone by an endeavour to induce me to rememberbe very sure upon that point, say that nothing will be gained by anyone. That time was one of mirage, of delusion, of disease. I was in a condition, mentally and bodily, in which pranks could have been played upon me by any trickster. Such pranks were played. I know that now quite well. I do not pretend to be proficient in the modus operandi of the hankeypankey man, but I know that he has a method, all the sameone susceptible, too, of facile explanation. Go back to your friend, and tell him that I am not again likely to be made the butt of his old methodnor of his new one either.You hear me, sir? I remained motionless and silentan attitude which, plainly, he resented. Are you deaf and dumb? You certainly are not dumb, for you spoke to me just now. Be advised by me, and do not compel me to resort to measures which will be the cause to you of serious discomfort.You hear me, sir? Still, from me, not a sign of comprehensionto his increased annoyance. So be it. Keep your own counsel, if you choose. Yours will be the bitterness, not mine. You may play the lunatic, and play it excellently well, but that you do understand what is said to you is clear.Come to business, sir. Give me that revolver, and the packet of letters which you have stolen from my desk. He had been speaking with the air of one who desired to convince himself as much as meand about his last words there was almost a flavour of braggadocio. I remained unheeding. Are you going to do as I require, or are you insane enough to refuse?in which case I shall summon assistance, and there will quickly be an end of it. Pray do not imagine that you can trick me into supposing that you do not grasp the situation. I know better.Once more, are you going to give me that revolver and those letters? Yet no reply. His anger was growing momentarily greaterand his agitation too. On my first introduction to Paul Lessingham I was not destined to discover in him any one of those qualities of which the world held him to be the undisputed possessor. He showed himself to be as unlike the statesman I had conceived, and esteemed, as he easily could have done. Do you think I stand in awe of you?you!of such a thing as you! Do as I tell you, or I myself will make youand, at the same time, teach you a muchneeded lesson. He raised his voice. In his bearing there was a wouldbe defiance. He might not have been aware of it, but the repetitions of the threats were, in themselves, confessions of weakness. He came a step or two forwardthen, stopping short, began to tremble. The perspiration broke out upon his brow; he made spasmodic little dabs at it with his crumpledup handkerchief. His eyes wandered hither and thither, as if searching for something which they feared to see yet were constrained to seek. He began to talk to himself, out loud, in odd disconnected sentencesapparently ignoring me entirely. What was that?It was nothing.It was my imagination.My nerves are out of order.I have been working too hard.I am not well.Whats that? This last inquiry came from him in a halfstifled shriekas the door opened to admit the head and body of an elderly man in a state of considerable undress. He had the tousled appearance of one who had been unexpectedly roused out of slumber, and unwillingly dragged from bed. Mr. Lessingham stared at him as if he had been a ghost, while he stared back at Mr. Lessingham as if he found a difficulty in crediting the evidence of his own eyes. It was he who broke the silencestutteringly. I am sure I beg your pardon, sir, but one of the maids thought that she heard the sound of a shot, and we came down to see if there was anything the matterI had no idea, sir, that you were here. His eyes travelled from Mr. Lessingham towards mesuddenly increasing, when they saw me, to about twice their previous size. God save us!who is that? The mans selfevident cowardice possibly impressed Mr. Lessingham with the conviction that he himself was not cutting the most dignified of figures. At any rate, he made a notable effort to, once more, assume a bearing of greater determination. You are quite right, Matthews, quite right. I am obliged by your watchfulness. At present you may leave the roomI propose to deal with this fellow myselfonly remain with the other men upon the landing, so that, if I call, you may come to my assistance. Matthews did as he was told, he left the roomwith, I fancy, more rapidity than he had entered it. Mr. Lessingham returned to me, his manner distinctly more determined, as if he found his resolution reinforced by the near neighbourhood of his retainers, Now, my man, you see how the case stands, at a word from me you will be overpowered and doomed to undergo a long period of imprisonment. Yet I am still willing to listen to the dictates of mercy. Put down that revolver, give me those lettersyou will not find me disposed to treat you hardly. For all the attention I paid him, I might have been a graven image. He misunderstood, or pretended to misunderstand, the cause of my silence. Come, I see that you suppose my intentions to be harsher than they really aredo not let us have a scandal, and a scenebe sensible!give me those letters! Again he moved in my direction; again, after he had taken a step or two, to stumble and stop, and look about him with frightened eyes; again to begin to mumble to himself aloud. Its a conjurers trick!Of course!Nothing moreWhat else could it be?Im not to be fooled.Im older than I was. Ive been overdoing itthats all. Suddenly he broke into cries. Matthews! Matthews!Help! help! Matthews entered the room, followed by three other men, younger than himself. Evidently all had slipped into the first articles of clothing they could lay their hands upon, and each carried a stick, or some similar rudimentary weapon. Their master spurred them on. Strike the revolver out of his hand, Matthews!knock him down!take the letters from him!dont be afraid!Im not afraid! In proof of it, he rushed at me, as it seemed half blindly. As he did so I was constrained to shout out, in tones which I should not have recognised as mine, The beetle! And that moment the room was all in darkness, and there were screams as of someone in an agony of terror or of pain. I felt that something had come into the room, I knew not whence nor howsomething of horror. And the next action of which I was conscious was, that under cover of the darkness, I was flying from the room, propelled by I knew not what. VIII.

The Man in the Street Whether anyone pursued I cannot say. I have some dim recollection, as I came out of the room, of women being huddled against the wall upon the landing, and of their screaming as I went past. But whether any effort was made to arrest my progress I cannot tell. My own impression is that not the slightest attempt to impede my headlong flight was made by anyone. In what direction I was going I did not know. I was like a man flying through the phantasmagoric happenings of a dream, knowing neither how nor whither. I tore along what I suppose was a broad passage, through a door at the end into what, I fancy, was a drawingroom. Across this room I dashed, helterskelter, bringing down, in the gloom, unseen articles of furniture, with myself sometimes on top, and sometimes under them. In a trice, each time I fell, I was on my feet againuntil I went crashing against a window which was concealed by curtains. It would not have been strange had I crashed through itbut I was spared that. Thrusting aside the curtains, I fumbled for the fastening of the window. It was a tall French casement, extending, so far as I could judge, from floor to ceiling. When I had it open I stepped through it on to the verandah withoutto find that I was on the top of the portico which I had vainly essayed to ascend from below. I tried the road down which I had tried upproceeding with a breakneck recklessness of which now I shudder to think. It was, probably, some thirty feet above the pavement, yet I rushed at the descent with as much disregard for the safety of life and limb as if it had been only three. Over the edge of the parapet I went, obtaining, with my naked feet, a precarious foothold on the latticeworkthen down I commenced to scramble. I never did get a proper hold, and when I had descended, perhaps, rather more than half the distancescraping, as it seemed to me, every scrap of skin off my body in the processI lost what little hold I had. Down to the bottom I went tumbling, rolling right across the pavement into the muddy road. It was a miracle I was not seriously injuredbut in that sense, certainly, that night the miracles were on my side. Hardly was I down, than I was up againmud and all. Just as I was getting on to my feet I felt a firm hand grip me by the shoulder. Turning I found myself confronted by a tall, slenderly built man, with a long, drooping moustache, and an overcoat buttoned up to the chin, who held me with a grasp of steel. He looked at meand I looked back at him. After the balleh? Even then I was struck by something pleasant in his voice, and some quality as of sunshine in his handsome face. Seeing that I said nothing he went onwith a curious, half mocking smile. Is that the way to come slithering down the Apostles pillar?Is it simple burglary, or simpler murder?Tell me the glad tidings that youve killed St. Paul, and Ill let you go. Whether he was mad or not I cannot saythere was some excuse for thinking so. He did not look mad, though his words and actions alike were strange. Although you have confined yourself to gentle felony, shall I not shower blessings on the head of him who has been robbing Paul?Away with you! He removed his grip, giving me a gentle push as he did soand I was away. I neither stayed nor paused. I knew little of records, but if anyone has made a better record than I did that night between Lowndes Square and Walham Green I should like to know just what it wasI should, too, like to have seen it done. In an incredibly short space of time I was once more in front of the house with the open windowthe packet of letterswhich were like to have cost me so dear!gripped tightly in my hand. IX. The Contents of the Packet I pulled up sharplyas if a brake had been suddenly, and even mercilessly, applied to bring me to a standstill. In front of the window I stood shivering. A shower had recently commencedthe falling rain was being blown before the breeze. I was in a terrible sweatyet tremulous as with cold; covered with mud; bruised, and cut, and bleedingas piteous an object as you would care to see. Every limb in my body ached; every muscle was exhausted; mentally and physically I was done; had I not been held up, willy nilly, by the spell which was upon me, I should have sunk down, then and there, in a hopeless, helpless, hapless heap. But my tormentor was not yet at an end with me. As I stood there, like some broken and beaten hack, waiting for the word of command, it came. It was as if some strong magnetic current had been switched on to me through the window to draw me into the room. Over the low wall I went, over the sillonce more I stood in that chamber of my humiliation and my shame. And once again I was conscious of that awful sense of the presence of an evil thing. How much of it was fact, and how much of it was the product of imagination I cannot say; but, looking back, it seems to me that it was as if I had been taken out of the corporeal body to be plunged into the inner chambers of all nameless sin. There was the sound of something flopping from off the bed on to the ground, and I knew that the thing was coming at me across the floor. My stomach quaked, my heart melted within methe very anguish of my terror gave me strength to screamand scream! Sometimes, even now, I seem to hear those screams of mine ringing through the night, and I bury my face in the pillow, and it is as though I was passing through the very Valley of the Shadow. The thing went backI could hear it slipping and sliding across the floor. There was silence. And, presently, the lamp was lit, and the room was all in brightness. There, on the bed, in the familiar attitude between the sheets, his head resting on his hand, his eyes blazing like living coals, was the dreadful cause of all my agonies. He looked at me with his unpitying, unblinking glance. So!Through the window again!like a thief!Is it always through that door that you come into a house? He pausedas if to give me time to digest his gibe. You saw Paul Lessinghamwell?the great Paul Lessingham!Was he, then, so great? His rasping voice, with its queer foreign twang, reminded me, in some uncomfortable way, of a rusty sawthe things he said, and the manner in which he said them, were alike intended to add to my discomfort. It was solely because the feat was barely possible that he only partially succeeded. Like a thief you went into his housedid I not tell you that you would? Like a thief he found youwere you not ashamed? Since, like a thief he found you, how comes it that you have escapedby what robbers artifice have you saved yourself from gaol? His manner changedso that, all at once, he seemed to snarl at me. Is he great?well!is he greatPaul Lessingham? You are small, but he is smalleryour great Paul Lessingham!Was there ever a man so less than nothing? With the recollection fresh upon me of Mr. Lessingham as I had so lately seen him I could not but feel that there might be a modicum of truth in what, with such an intensity of bitterness, the speaker suggested. The picture which, in my mental gallery, I had hung in the place of honour, seemed, to say the least, to have become a trifle smudged. As usual, the man in the bed seemed to experience not the slightest difficulty in deciphering what was passing through my mind. That is soyou and he, you are a pairthe great Paul Lessingham is as great a thief as youand greater!for, at least, than you he has more courage. For some moments he was still; then exclaimed, with sudden fierceness, Give me what you have stolen! I moved towards the bedmost unwillinglyand held out to him the packet of letters which I had abstracted from the little drawer. Perceiving my disinclination to his near neighbourhood, he set himself to play with it. Ignoring my outstretched hand, he stared me straight in the face. What ails you? Are you not well? Is it not sweet to stand close at my side? You, with your white skin, if I were a woman, would you not take me for a wife? There was something about the manner in which this was said which was so essentially feminine that once more I wondered if I could possibly be mistaken in the creatures sex. I would have given much to have been able to strike him across the faceor, better, to have taken him by the neck, and thrown him through the window, and rolled him in the mud. He condescended to notice what I was holding out to him. So!that is what you have stolen!That is what you have taken from the drawer in the bureauthe drawer which was lockedand which you used the arts in which a thief is skilled to enter. Give it to methief! He snatched the packet from me, scratching the back of my hand as he did so, as if his nails had been talons. He turned the packet over and over, glaring at it as he did soit was strange what a relief it was to have his glance removed from off my face. You kept it in your inner drawer, Paul Lessingham, where none but you could see itdid you? You hid it as one hides treasure. There should be something here worth having, worth seeing, worth knowingyes, worth knowing!since you found it worth your while to hide it up so closely. As I have said, the packet was bound about by a string of pink ribbona fact on which he presently began to comment. With what a pretty string you have encircled itand how neatly it is tied! Surely only a womans hand could tie a knot like thatwho would have guessed yours were such agile fingers?So! An endorsement on the cover! Whats this?lets see whats written!The letters of my dear love, Marjorie Lindon. As he read these words, which, as he said, were endorsed upon the outer sheet of paper which served as a cover for the letters which were enclosed within, his face became transfigured. Never did I suppose that rage could have so possessed a human countenance. His jaw dropped open so that his yellow fangs gleamed though his parted lipshe held his breath so long that each moment I looked to see him fall down in a fit; the veins stood out all over his face and head like seams of blood. I know not how long he continued speechless. When his breath returned, it was with chokings and gaspings, in the midst of which he hissed out his words, as if their mere passage through his throat brought him near to strangulation. The letters of his dear love!of his dear love!his!Paul Lessinghams!So!It is as I guessedas I knewas I saw!Marjorie Lindon!Sweet Marjorie!His dear love!Paul Lessinghams dear love!She with the lily face, the cornhued hair!What is it his dear love has found in her fond heart to write Paul Lessingham? Sitting up in bed he tore the packet open. It contained, perhaps, eight or nine letterssome mere notes, some long epistles. But, short or long, he devoured them with equal appetite, each one over and over again, till I thought he never would have done rereading them. They were on thick white paper, of a peculiar shade of whiteness, with untrimmed edges, On each sheet a crest and an address were stamped in gold, and all the sheets were of the same shape and size. I told myself that if anywhere, at any time, I saw writing paper like that again, I should not fail to know it. The caligraphy was, like the paper, unusual, bold, decided, and, I should have guessed, produced by a J pen. All the time that he was reading he kept emitting sounds, more resembling yelps and snarls than anything more humanlike some savage beast nursing its pentup rage. When he had made an end of readingfor the seasonhe let his passion have full vent. So!That is what his dear love has found it in her heart to write Paul Lessingham!Paul Lessingham! Pen cannot describe the concentrated frenzy of hatred with which the speaker dwelt upon the nameit was demoniac. It is enough!it is the end!it is his doom! He shall be ground between the upper and the nether stones in the towers of anguish, and all that is left of him shall be cast on the accursed stream of the bitter waters, to stink under the bloodgrimed sun! And for herfor Marjorie Lindon!for his dear love!it shall come to pass that she shall wish that she was never bornnor he!and the gods of the shadows shall smell the sweet incense of her suffering!It shall be! it shall be! It is I that say iteven I! In the madness of his rhapsodical frenzy I believe that he had actually forgotten I was there. But, on a sudden, glancing aside, he saw me, and rememberedand was prompt to take advantage of an opportunity to wreak his rage upon a tangible object. It is you!you thief!you still live!to make a mock of one of the children of the gods! He leaped, shrieking, off the bed, and sprang at me, clasping my throat with his horrid hands, bearing me backwards on to the floor; I felt his breath mingle with mine and then God, in His mercy, sent oblivion. Book II. The Haunted Man The story according to Sydney Atherton, Esquire. X. Rejected It was after our second waltz I did it. In the usual quiet cornerwhich, that time, was in the shadow of a palm in the hall. Before I had got into my stride she checked metouching my sleeve with her fan, turning towards me with startled eyes. Stop, please! But I was not to be stopped. Cliff Challoner passed, with Gerty Cazell. I fancy that, as he passed, he nodded. I did not care. I was wound up to go, and I went it. No man knows how he can talk till he does talkto the girl he wants to marry. It is my impression that I gave her recollections of the Restoration poets. She seemed surprisednot having previously detected in me the poetic strain, and insisted on cutting in. Mr. Atherton, I am so sorry. Then I did let fly. Sorry that I love you!why? Why should you be sorry that you have become the one thing needful in any mans eyeseven in mine? The one thing preciousthe one thing to be altogether esteemed! Is it so common for a woman to come across a man who would be willing to lay down his life for her that she should be sorry when she finds him? I did not know that you felt like this, though I confess that I have had mymy doubts. Doubts!I thank you. You are quite aware, Mr. Atherton, that I like you very much. Like me!Bah! I cannot help liking youthough it may be bah. I dont want you to like meI want you to love me. Preciselythat is your mistake. My mistake!in wanting you to love me!when I love you Then you shouldntthough I cant help thinking that you are mistaken even there. Mistaken!in supposing that I love you!when I assert and reassert it with the whole force of my being! What do you want me to do to prove I love youtake you in my arms and crush you to my bosom, and make a spectacle of you before every creature in the place? Id rather you wouldnt, and perhaps you wouldnt mind not talking quite so loud. Mr. Challoner seems to be wondering what youre shouting about. You shouldnt torture me. She opened and shut her fanas she looked down at it I am disposed to suspect that she smiled. I am glad we have had this little explanation, because, of course, you are my friend. I am not your friend. Pardon me, you are. I say Im notif I cant be something else, Ill be no friend. She went oncalmly ignoring meplaying with her fan. As it happens, I am, just now, in rather a delicate position, in which a friend is welcome. Whats the matter? Whos been worrying youyour father? Wellhe has notas yet; but he may be soon. Whats in the wind? Mr. Lessingham. She dropped her voiceand her eyes. For the moment I did not catch her meaning. What? Your friend, Mr. Lessingham. Excuse me, Miss Lindon, but I am by no means sure that anyone is entitled to call Mr. Lessingham a friend of mine. What!Not when I am going to be his wife? That took me aback. I had had my suspicions that Paul Lessingham was more with Marjorie than he had any right to be, but I had never supposed that she could see anything desirable in a stick of a man like that. Not to speak of a hundred and one other considerationsLessingham on one side of the House, and her father on the other; and old Lindon girding at him anywhere and everywherewith his highdried Tory notions of his family importanceto say nothing of his fortune. I dont know if I looked what I feltif I did, I looked uncommonly blank. You have chosen an appropriate moment, Miss Lindon, to make to me such a communication. She chose to disregard my irony. I am glad you think so, because now you will understand what a difficult position I am in. I offer you my hearty congratulations. And I thank you for them, Mr. Atherton, in the spirit in which they are offered, because from you I know they mean so much. I bit my lipfor the life of me I could not tell how she wished me to read her words. Do I understand that this announcement has been made to me as one of the public? You do not. It is made to you, in confidence, as my friendas my greatest friend; because a husband is something more than friend. My pulses tingled. You will be on my side? She had pausedand I stayed silent. On your sideor Mr. Lessinghams? His side is my side, and my side is his side;you will be on our side? I am not sure that I altogether follow you. You are the first I have told. When papa hears it is possible that there will be troubleas you know. He thinks so much of you and of your opinion; when that trouble comes I want you to be on our sideon my side. Why should I?what does it matter? You are stronger than your fatherit is just possible that Lessingham is stronger than you; together, from your fathers point of view, you will be invincible. You are my friendare you not my friend? In effect, you offer me an Apple of Sodom. Thank you;I did not think you so unkind. And youare you kind? I make you an avowal of my love, and, straightway, you ask me to act as chorus to the love of another. How could I tell you loved meas you say! I had no notion. You have known me all your life, yet you have not breathed a word of it till now. If I had spoken before? I imagine that there was a slight movement of her shouldersalmost amounting to a shrug. I do not know that it would have made any difference.I do not pretend that it would. But I do know this, I believe that you yourself have only discovered the state of your own mind within the last halfhour. If she had slapped my face she could not have startled me more. I had no notion if her words were uttered at random, but they came so near the truth they held me breathless. It was a fact that only during the last few minutes had I really realised how things were with meonly since the end of that first waltz that the flame had burst out in my soul which was now consuming me. She had read me by what seemed so like a flash of inspiration that I hardly knew what to say to her. I tried to be stinging. You flatter me, Miss Lindon, you flatter me at every point. Had you only discovered to me the state of your mind a little sooner I should not have discovered to you the state of mine at all. We will consider it terra incognita. Since you wish it. Her provoking calmness stung meand the suspicion that she was laughing at me in her sleeve. I gave her a glimpse of the cloven hoof. But, at the same time, since you assert that you have so long been innocent, I beg that you will continue so no more. At least, your innocence shall be without excuse. For I wish you to understand that I love you, that I have loved you, that I shall love you. Any understanding you may have with Mr. Lessingham will not make the slightest difference. I warn you, Miss Lindon, that, until death, you will have to write me down your lover. She looked at me, with wide open eyesas if I almost frightened her. To be frank, that was what I wished to do. Mr. Atherton! Miss Lindon? That is not like you at all. We seem to be making each others acquaintance for the first time. She continued to gaze at me with her big eyeswhich, to be candid, I found it difficult to meet. On a sudden her face was lighted by a smilewhich I resented. Not after all these yearsnot after all these years! I know you, and though I daresay youre not flawless, I fancy youll be found to ring pretty true. Her manner was almost sisterlyeldersisterly. I could have shaken her. Hartridge coming to claim his dance gave me an opportunity to escape with such remnants of dignity as I could gather about me. He dawdled uphis thumbs, as usual, in his waistcoat pockets. I believe, Miss Lindon, this is our dance. She acknowledged it with a bow, and rose to take his arm. I got up, and left her, without a word. As I crossed the hall I chanced on Percy Woodville. He was in his familiar state of fluster, and was gaping about him as if he had mislaid the Kohinoor, and wondered where in thunder it had got to. When he saw it was I he caught me by the arm. I say, Atherton, have you seen Miss Lindon? I have. No!Have you?By Jove!Where? Ive been looking for her all over the place, except in the cellars and the atticsand I was just going to commence on them. This is our dance. In that case, shes shunted you. No!Impossible! His mouth went like an Oand his eyes ditto, his eyeglass clattering down on to his shirt front. I expect the mistakes mine. Fact is, Ive made a mess of my programme. Its either the last dance, or this dance, or the next, that Ive booked with her, but Im hanged if I know which. Just take a squint at it, theres a good chap, and tell me which one you think it is. I took a squintsince he held the thing within an inch of my nose I could hardly help it; one squint, and that was enoughand more. Some mens ball programmes are studies in impressionism, Percys seemed to me to be a study in madness. It was covered with hieroglyphics, but what they meant, or what they did there anyhow, it was absurd to suppose that I could tellI never put them there!Proverbially, the mans a champion hasher. I regret, my dear Percy, that I am not an expert in cuneiform writing. If you have any doubt as to which dance is yours, youd better ask the ladyshell feel flattered. Leaving him to do his own addling I went to find my coatI panted to get into the open air; as for dancing I felt that I loathed it. Just as I neared the cloakroom someone stopped me. It was Dora Grayling. Have you forgotten that this is our dance? I had forgottenclean. And I was not obliged by her remembering. Though as I looked at her sweet, grey eyes, and at the soft contours of her gentle face, I felt that I deserved well kicking. She is an angelone of the best!but I was in no mood for angels. Not for a very great deal would I have gone through that dance just then, nor, with Dora Grayling, of all women in the world, would I have sat it out.So I was a brute and blundered. You must forgive me, Miss Grayling, butI am not feeling very well, andI dont think Im up to any more dancing.Good night. XI. A Midnight Episode The weather out of doors was in tune with my frame of mindI was in a deuce of a temper, and it was a deuce of a night. A keen northeast wind, warranted to take the skin right off you, was playing catchwhocatchcan with intermittent gusts of blinding rain. Since it was not fit for a dog to walk, none of your cabs for menothing would serve but pedestrian exercise. So I had it. I went down Park Laneand the wind and rain went with mealso, thoughts of Dora Grayling. What a bounder I had beenand was! If there is anything in worse taste than to book a lady for a dance, and then to leave her in the lurch, I should like to know what that thing iswhen found it ought to be made a note of. If any man of my acquaintance allowed himself to be guilty of such a felony in the first degree, I should cut him. I wished someone would try to cut meI should like to see him at it. It was all Marjories faulteverything! past, present, and to come. I had known that girl when she was in long frocksI had, at that period of our acquaintance, pretty recently got out of them; when she was advanced to short ones; and when, once more, she returned to long. And all that timewell, I was nearly persuaded that the whole of the time I had loved her. If I had not mentioned it, it was because I had suffered my affection, like the worm, to lie hidden in the bud,or whatever it is the fellow says. At any rate, I was perfectly positive that if I had had the faintest notion that she would ever seriously consider such a man as Lessingham I should have loved her long ago. Lessingham! Why, he was old enough to be her fatherat least he was a good many years older than I was. And a wretched Radical! It is true that on certain points I, also, am what some people would call a Radicalbut not a Radical of the kind he is. Thank Heaven, no! No doubt I have admired traits in his character, until I learnt this thing of him. I am even prepared to admit that he is a man of abilityin his way! which is, emphatically, not mine. But to think of him in connection with such a girl as Marjorie Lindonpreposterous! Why, the mans as dry as a stickdrier! And cold as an iceberg. Nothing but a politician, absolutely. He a lover!how I could fancy such a stroke of humour setting all the benches in a roar. Both by education, and by nature, he was incapable of even playing such a part; as for being the thingabsurd! If you were to sink a shaft from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, you would find inside him nothing but the dry bones of parties and of politics. What my Marjorieif everyone had his own, she is mine, and, in that sense, she always will be minewhat my Marjorie could see in such a dryasdust out of which even to construct the rudiments of a husband was beyond my fathoming. Suchlike agreeable reflections were fit company for the wind and the wet, so they bore me company all down the lane. I crossed at the corner, going round the hospital towards the square. This brought me to the abidingplace of Paul the Apostle. Like the idiot I was, I went out into the middle of the street, and stood awhile in the mud to curse him and his houseon the whole, when one considers that that is the kind of man I can be, it is, perhaps, not surprising that Marjorie disdained me. May your following, I criedit is an absolute fact that the words were shouted!both in the House and out of it, no longer regard you as a leader! May your party follow after other gods! May your political aspirations wither, and your speeches be listened to by empty benches! May the Speaker persistently and strenuously refuse to allow you to catch his eye, and, at the next election, may your constituency reject you!Jehoram!whats that? I might well ask. Until that moment I had appeared to be the only lunatic at large, either outside the house or in it, but, on a sudden, a second lunatic came on the scene, and that with a vengeance. A window was crashed open from withinthe one over the front door, and someone came plunging through it on to the top of the portico. That it was a case of intended suicide I made sureand I began to be in hopes that I was about to witness the suicide of Paul. But I was not so assured of the intention when the individual in question began to scramble down the pillar of the porch in the most extraordinary fashion I ever witnessedI was not even convinced of a suicidal purpose when he came tumbling down, and lay sprawling in the mud at my feet. I fancy, if I had performed that portion of the act I should have lain quiet for a second or two, to consider whereabouts I was, and which end of me was uppermost. But there was no nonsense of that sort about that singularly agile strangerif he was not made of indiarubber he ought to have been. So to speak, before he was down he was upit was all I could do to grab at him before he was off like a rocket. Such a figure as he presented is seldom seenat least, in the streets of London. What he had done with the rest of his apparel I am not in a position to sayall that was left of it was a long, dark cloak which he strove to wrap round him. Save for thatand mud!he was bare as the palm of my hand. Yet it was his face that held me. In my time I have seen strange expressions on mens faces, but never before one such as I saw on his. He looked like a man might look who, after living a life of undiluted crime, at last finds himself face to face with the devil. It was not the look of a madmanfar from it; it was something worse. It was the expression on the mans countenance, as much as anything else, which made me behave as I did. I said something to himsome nonsense, I know not what. He regarded me with a silence which was supernatural. I spoke to him again;not a word issued from those rigid lips; there was not a tremor of those awful eyeseyes which I was tolerably convinced saw something which I had never seen, or ever should. Then I took my hand from off his shoulder, and let him go. I know not whyI did. He had remained as motionless as a statue while I held himindeed, for any evidence of life he gave, he might have been a statue; but, when my grasp was loosed, how he ran! He had turned the corner and was out of sight before I could say, How do! It was only thenwhen he had gone, and I had realised the extradoubleexpressflashoflightning rate at which he had taken his departurethat it occurred to me of what an extremely sensible act I had been guilty in letting him go at all. Here was an individual who had been committing burglary, or something very like it, in the house of a budding cabinet minister, and who had tumbled plump into my arms, so that all I had to do was to call a policeman and get him quoddedand all that I had done was something of a totally different kind. Youre a nice type of an ideal citizen! I was addressing myself, A first chop specimen of a lowdown idiotto connive at the escape of the robber whos been robbing Paul. Since youve let the villain go, the least you can do is to leave a card on the Apostle, and inquire how hes feeling. I went to Lessinghams front door and knockedI knocked once, I knocked twice, I knocked thrice, and the third time, I give you my word, I made the echoes ringbut still there was not a soul that answered. If this is a case of a seven or seventyfold murder, and the gentleman in the cloak has made a fair clearance of every living creature the house contains, perhaps its just as well Ive chanced upon the scenestill I do think that one of the corpses might get up to answer the door. If it is possible to make noise enough to waken the dead, you bet Im on to it. And I wasI punished that knocker! until I warrant the pounding I gave it was audible on the other side of Green Park. And, at last, I woke the deador, rather, I roused Matthews to a consciousness that something was going on. Opening the door about six inches, through the interstice he protruded his ancient nose. Whos there? Nothing, my dear sir, nothing and no one. It must have been your vigorous imagination which induced you to suppose that there wasyou let it run away with you. Then he knew meand opened the door about two feet. Oh, its you, Mr. Atherton. I beg your pardon, sirI thought it might have been the police. What then? Do you stand in terror of the minions of the lawat last? A most discreet servant, Matthewsjust the fellow for a budding cabinet minister. He glanced over his shoulderI had suspected the presence of a colleague at his back, now I was assured. He put his hand up to his mouthand I thought how exceedingly discreet he looked, in his trousers and his stockinged feet, and with his hair all rumpled, and his braces dangling behind, and his nightshirt creased. Well, sir, I have received instructions not to admit the police. The deuce you have!From whom? Coughing behind his hand, leaning forward, he addressed me with an air which was flatteringly confidential. From Mr. Lessingham, sir. Possibly Mr. Lessingham is not aware that a robbery has been committed on his premises, that the burglar has just come out of his drawingroom window with a hop, skip, and a jump, bounded out of the window like a tennisball, flashed round the corner like a rocket, Again Matthews glanced over his shoulder, as if not clear which way discretion lay, whether fore or aft. Thank you, sir.

I believe that Mr. Lessingham is aware of something of the kind. He seemed to come to a sudden resolution, dropping his voice to a whisper. The fact is, sir, that I fancy Mr. Lessinghams a good deal upset. Upset? I stared at him. There was something in his manner I did not understand. What do you mean by upset? Has the scoundrel attempted violence? Whos there? The voice was Lessinghams, calling to Matthews from the staircase, though, for an instant, I hardly recognised it, it was so curiously petulant. Pushing past Matthews, I stepped into the hall. A young man, I suppose a footman, in the same undress as Matthews, was holding a candleit seemed the only light about the place. By its glimmer I perceived Lessingham standing halfway up the stairs. He was in full war paintas he is not the sort of man who dresses for the House, I took it that he had been mixing pleasure with business. Its I, LessinghamAtherton. Do you know that a fellow has jumped out of your drawingroom window? It was a second or two before he answered. When he did, his voice had lost its petulance. Has he escaped? Cleanhes a mile away by now. It seemed to me that in his tone, when he spoke again, there was a note of relief. I wondered if he had. Poor fellow! more sinned against than sinning! Take my advice, Atherton, and keep out of politics. They bring you into contact with all the lunatics at large. Good night! I am much obliged to you for knocking us up. Matthews, shut the door. Tolerably cool, on my honoura man who brings news big with the fate of Rome does not expect to receive such treatment. He expects to be listened to with deference, and to hear all that there is to hear, and not to be sent to the rightabout before he has had a chance of really opening his lips. Before I knew italmost!the door was shut, and I was on the doorstep. Confound the Apostles impudence! next time he might have his house burnt downand him in it!before I took the trouble to touch his dirty knocker. What did he mean by his allusion to lunatics in politicsdid he think to fool me? There was more in the business than met the eyeand a good deal more than he wished to meet minehence his insolence. The creature. What Marjorie Lindon could see in such an opusculum surpassed my comprehension; especially when there was a man of my sort walking about, who adored the very ground she trod upon. XII. A Morning Visitor All through the night, waking and sleeping, and in my dreams, I wondered what Marjorie could see in him! In those same dreams I satisfied myself that she could, and did, see nothing in him, but everything in meoh the comfort! The misfortune was that when I awoke I knew it was the other way roundso that it was a sad awakening. An awakening to thoughts of murder. So, swallowing a mouthful and a peg, I went into my laboratory to plan murderlegalised murderon the biggest scale it ever has been planned. I was on the track of a weapon which would make war not only an affair of a single campaign, but of a single halfhour. It would not want an army to work it either. Once let an individual, or two or three at most, in possession of my weaponthatwastobe, get within a mile or so of even the largest body of disciplined troops that ever yet a nation put into the field, andpouf!in about the time it takes you to say that they would be all dead men. If weapons of precision, which may be relied upon to slay, are preservers of the peaceand the man is a fool who says that they are not!then I was within reach of the finest preserver of the peace imagination ever yet conceived. What a sublime thought to think that in the hollow of your own hand lies the life and death of nationsand it was almost in mine. I had in front of me some of the finest destructive agents you could wish to light uponcarbonmonoxide, chlorinetrioxide, mercuricoxide, conine, potassamide, potassiumcarboxide, cyanogenwhen Edwards entered. I was wearing a mask of my own invention, a thing that covered ears and head and everything, something like a divers helmetI was dealing with gases a sniff of which meant death; only a few days before, unmasked, I had been doing some fools trick with a couple of acidssulphuric and cyanide of potassiumwhen, somehow, my hand slipped, and, before I knew it, minute portions of them combined. By the mercy of Providence I fell backwards instead of forwards;sequel, about an hour afterwards Edwards found me on the floor, and it took the remainder of that day, and most of the doctors in town, to bring me back to life again. Edwards announced his presence by touching me on the shoulderwhen I am wearing that mask it isnt always easy to make me hear. Someone wishes to see you, sir. Then tell someone that I dont wish to see him. Welltrained servant, Edwardshe walked off with the message as decorously as you please. And then I thought there was an endbut there wasnt. I was regulating the valve of a cylinder in which I was fusing some oxides when, once more, someone touched me on the shoulder. Without turning I took it for granted it was Edwards back again. I have only to give a tiny twist to this tap, my good fellow, and you will be in the land where the bogies bloom. Why will you come where youre not wanted? Then I looked round. Who the devil are you? For it was not Edwards at all, but quite a different class of character. I found myself confronting an individual who might almost have sat for one of the bogies I had just alluded to. His costume was reminiscent of the Algerians whom one finds all over France, and who are the most persistent, insolent and amusing of pedlars. I remember one who used to haunt the rptitions at the Alcazar at Toursbut there! This individual was like the originals, yet unlikehe was less gaudy, and a good deal dingier, than his Gallic prototypes are apt to be. Then he wore a burnoosethe yellow, grimylooking article of the Arab of the Sudan, not the spick and span Arab of the boulevard. Chief difference of all, his face was clean shavenand whoever saw an Algerian of Paris whose chiefest glory was not his welltrimmed moustache and beard? I expected that he would address me in the lingo which these gentlemen call Frenchbut he didnt. You are Mr. Atherton? And you are Mr.Who?how did you come here? Wheres my servant? The fellow held up his hand. As he did so, as if in accordance with a prearranged signal, Edwards came into the room looking excessively startled. I turned to him. Is this the person who wished to see me? Yes, sir. Didnt I tell you to say that I didnt wish to see him? Yes, sir. Then why didnt you do as I told you? I did, sir. Then how comes he here? Really, sir,Edwards put his hand up to his head as if he was half asleepI dont quite know. What do you mean by you dont know? Why didnt you stop him? I think, sir, that I must have had a touch of sudden faintness, because I tried to put out my hand to stop him, andI couldnt. Youre an idiot.Go! And he went. I turned to the stranger. Pray, sir, are you a magician? He replied to my question with another. You, Mr. Athertonare you also a magician? He was staring at my mask with an evident lack of comprehension. I wear this because, in this place, death lurks in so many subtle forms, that, without it, I dare not breathe, He inclined his headthough I doubt if he understood. Be so good as to tell me, briefly, what it is you wish with me. He slipped his hand into the folds of his burnoose, and, taking out a slip of paper, laid it on the shelf by which we were standing. I glanced at it, expecting to find on it a petition, or a testimonial, or a true statement of his sad case; instead it contained two words onlyMarjorie Lindon. The unlookedfor sight of that wellloved name brought the blood into my cheeks. You come from Miss Lindon? He narrowed his shoulders, brought his fingertips together, inclined his head, in a fashion which was peculiarly Oriental, but not particularly explanatoryso I repeated my question. Do you wish me to understand that you do come from Miss Lindon? Again he slipped his hand into his burnoose, again he produced a slip of paper, again he laid it on the shelf, again I glanced at it, again nothing was written on it but a namePaul Lessingham. Well?I seePaul Lessingham.What then? She is goodhe is badis it not so? He touched first one scrap of paper, then the other. I stared. Pray how do you happen to know? He shall never have hereh? What on earth do you mean? Ah!what do I mean! Precisely, what do you mean? And also, and at the same time, who the devil are you? It is as a friend I come to you. Then in that case you may go; I happen to be overstocked in that line just now. Not with the kind of friend I am! The saints forefend! You love heryou love Miss Lindon! Can you bear to think of him in her arms? I took off my maskfeeling that the occasion required it. As I did so he brushed aside the hanging folds of the hood of his burnoose, so that I saw more of his face. I was immediately conscious that in his eyes there was, in an especial degree, what, for want of a better term, one may call the mesmeric quality. That his was one of those morbid organisations which are oftener found, thank goodness, in the east than in the west, and which are apt to exercise an uncanny influence over the weak and the foolish folk with whom they come in contactthe kind of creature for whom it is always just as well to keep a seasoned rope close handy. I was, also, conscious that he was taking advantage of the removal of my mask to try his strength on methan which he could not have found a tougher job. The sensitive something which is found in the hypnotic subject happens, in me, to be wholly absent. I see you are a mesmerist. He started. I am nothinga shadow! And Im a scientist. I should like, with your permissionor without it!to try an experiment or two on you. He moved further back. There came a gleam into his eyes which suggested that he possessed his hideous power to an unusual degreethat, in the estimation of his own people, he was qualified to take his standing as a regular devildoctor. We will try experiments together, you and Ion Paul Lessingham. Why on him? You do not know? I do not. Why do you lie to me? I dont lie to youI havent the faintest notion what is the nature of your interest in Mr. Lessingham. My interest?that is another thing; it is your interest of which we are speaking. Pardon meit is yours. Listen! you love herand he! But at a word from you he shall not have hernever! It is I who say itI! And, once more, sir, who are you? I am of the children of Isis! Is that so?It occurs to me that you have made a slight mistakethis is London, not a doghole in the desert. Do I not know?what does it matter?you shall see! There will come a time when you will want meyou will find that you cannot bear to think of him in her armsher whom you love! You will call to me, and I shall come, and of Paul Lessingham there shall be an end. While I was wondering whether he was really as mad as he sounded, or whether he was some impudent charlatan who had an axe of his own to grind, and thought that he had found in me a grindstone, he had vanished from the room. I moved after him. Hang it all!stop! I cried. He must have made pretty good travelling, because, before I had a foot in the hall, I heard the front door slam, and, when I reached the street, intent on calling him back, neither to the right nor to the left was there a sign of him to be seen. XIII. The Picture I wonder what that nicelooking beggar really means, and who he happens to be? That was what I said to myself when I returned to the laboratory. If it is true that, now and again, Providence does write a mans character on his face, then there cant be the slightest shred of a doubt that a curious ones been written on his. I wonder what his connection has been with the Apostleor if its only part of his game of bluff. I strode up and downfor the moment my interest in the experiments I was conducting had waned. If it was all bluff I never saw a better piece of actingand yet what sort of finger can such a precisian as St. Paul have in such a pie? The fellow seemed to squirm at the mere mention of the risinghopeoftheRadicals name. Can the objection be political? Let me considerwhat has Lessingham done which could offend the religious or patriotic susceptibilities of the most fanatical of Orientals? Politically, I can recall nothing. Foreign affairs, as a rule, he has carefully eschewed. If he has offendedand if he hasnt the seeming was uncommonly good!the cause will have to be sought upon some other track. But, then, what track? The more I strove to puzzle it out, the greater the puzzlement grew. Absurd!The rascal has had no more connection with St. Paul than St. Peter. The probability is that hes a crackpot; and if he isnt, he has some little game on footin close association with the hunt of the oofbird!which he tried to work off on me, but couldnt. As forfor Marjoriemy Marjorie!only she isnt mine, confound it!if I had had my senses about me, I should have broken his head in several places for daring to allow her name to pass his lipsthe unbaptised Mohammedan!Now to return to the chase of splendid murder! I snatched up my maskone of the most ingenious inventions, by the way, of recent years; if the armies of the future wear my mask they will defy my weapon!and was about to readjust it in its place, when someone knocked at the door. Whos there?Come in! It was Edwards. He looked round him as if surprised. I beg your pardon, sirI thought you were engaged. I didnt know thatthat gentleman had gone. He went up the chimney, as all that kind of gentlemen do.Why the deuce did you let him in when I told you not to? Really, sir, I dont know. I gave him your message, andhe looked at me, andthat is all I remember till I found myself standing in this room. Had it not been Edwards I might have suspected him of having had his palm well greasedbut, in his case, I knew better. It was as I thoughtmy visitor was a mesmerist of the first class; he had actually played some of his tricks, in broad daylight, on my servant, at my own front doora man worth studying. Edwards continued. There is someone else, sir, who wishes to see youMr. Lessingham. Mr. Lessingham! At that moment the juxtaposition seemed odd, though I daresay it was so rather in appearance than in reality. Show him in. Presently in came Paul. I am free to confessI have owned it before!that, in a sense, I admire that manso long as he does not presume to thrust himself into a certain position. He possesses physical qualities which please my eyespeaking as a mere biologist like the suggestion conveyed by his every pose, his every movement, of a tenacious hold on lifeof reserve force, of a repository of bone and gristle on which he can fall back at pleasure. The fellows lithe and active; not hasty, yet agile; clean built, well hungthe sort of man who might be relied upon to make a good recovery. You might beat him in a sprintmental or physicalthough to do that you would have to be spry!but in a staying race he would see you out. I do not know that he is exactly the kind of man whom I would trustunless I knew that he was on the jobwhich knowledge, in his case, would be uncommonly hard to attain. He is too calm; too selfcontained; with the knack of looking all round him even in moments of extremest periland for whatever he does he has a good excuse. He has the reputation, both in the House and out of it, of being a man of iron nerveand with some reason; yet I am not so sure. Unless I read him wrongly his is one of those individualities which, confronted by certain eventualities, collapseto rise, the moment of trial having passed, like Phoenix from her ashes. However it might be with his adherents, he would show no trace of his disaster. And this was the man whom Marjorie loved. Well, she could show some cause. He was a man of positiondestined, probably, to rise much higher; a man of partswith capacity to make the most of them; not illlooking; with agreeable mannerswhen he chose; and he came within the ladys definition of a gentleman, he always did the right thing, at the right time, in the right way. And yet! Well, I take it that we are all cads, and that we most of us are prigs; for mercys sake do not let us all give ourselves away. He was dressed as a gentleman should be dressedblack frock coat, black vest, dark grey trousers, standup collar, smartlytied bow, gloves of the proper shade, neatly brushed hair, and a smile, which if was not childlike, at any rate was bland. I am not disturbing you? Not at all. Sure?I never enter a place like this, where a man is matching himself with nature, to wrest from her her secrets, without feeling that I am crossing the threshold of the unknown. The last time I was in this room was just after you had taken out the final patents for your System of Telegraphy at Sea, which the Admiralty purchasedwiselyWhat is it, now? Death. No?really?what do you mean? If you are a member of the next government, you will possibly learn; I may offer them the refusal of a new wrinkle in the art of murder. I seea new projectile.How long is this race to continue between attack and defence? Until the sun grows cold. And then? Therell be no defencenothing to defend. He looked at me with his calm, grave eyes. The theory of the Age of Ice towards which we are advancing is not a cheerful one. He began to finger a glass retort which lay upon a table. By the way, it was very good of you to give me a look in last night. I am afraid you thought me peremptoryI have come to apologise. I dont know that I thought you peremptory; I thought youqueer. Yes. He glanced at me with that expressionless look upon his face which he could summon at will, and which is at the bottom of the superstition about his iron nerve. I was worried, and not well. Besides, one doesnt care to be burgled, even by a maniac. Was he a maniac? Did you see him? Very clearly. Where? In the street. How close were you to him? Closer than I am to you. Indeed. I didnt know you were so close to him as that. Did you try to stop him? Easier said than donehe was off at such a rate. Did you see how he was dressedor, rather, undressed? I did. In nothing but a cloak on such a night. Who but a fanatic would have attempted burglary in such a costume? Did he take anything? Absolutely nothing. It seems to have been a curious episode. He moved his eyebrowsaccording to members of the House the only gesture in which he has been known to indulge. We become accustomed to curious episodes. Oblige me by not mentioning it to anyoneto anyone. He repeated the last two words, as if to give them emphasis. I wondered if he was thinking of Marjorie. I am communicating with the police. Until they move I dont want it to get into the papersor to be talked about. Its a worryyou understand? I nodded. He changed the theme. This that youre engaged uponis it a projectile or a weapon? If you are a member of the next government you will possibly know; if you arent you possibly wont. I suppose you have to keep this sort of thing secret? I do. It seems that matters of much less moment you wish to keep secret. You mean that business of last night? If a trifle of that sort gets into the papers, or gets talked aboutwhich is the same thing!you have no notion how we are pestered. It becomes an almost unbearable nuisance. Jones the Unknown can commit murder with less inconvenience to himself than Jones the Notorious can have his pocket pickedthere is not so much exaggeration in that as there sounds.Goodbyethanks for your promise. I had given him no promise, but that was by the way. He turned as to gothen stopped. Theres another thingI believe youre a specialist on questions of ancient superstitions and extinct religions. I am interested in such subjects, but I am not a specialist. Can you tell me what were the exact tenets of the worshippers of Isis? Neither I nor any manwith scientific certainty. As you know, she had a brother; the cult of Osiris and Isis was one and the same. What, precisely, were its dogmas, or its practices, or anything about it, none, now, can tell. The papyri, hieroglyphics, and so on, which remain are very far from being exhaustive, and our knowledge of those which do remain, is still less so. I suppose that the marvels which are told of it are purely legendary? To what marvels do you particularly refer? Werent supernatural powers attributed to the priests of Isis? Broadly speaking, at that time, supernatural powers were attributed to all the priests of all the creeds. I see. Presently he continued. I presume that her cult is long since extinctthat none of the worshippers of Isis exist today. I hesitatedI was wondering why he had hit on such a subject; if he really had a reason, or if he was merely asking questions as a cover for something elseyou see, I knew my Paul. That is not so sure. He looked at me with that passionless, yet searching glance of his. You think that she still is worshipped? I think it possible, even probable, that, here and there, in AfricaAfrica is a large order!homage is paid to Isis, quite in the good old way. Do you know that as a fact? Excuse me, but do you know it as a fact?Are you aware that you are treating me as if I was on the witness stand?Have you any special purpose in making these inquiries? He smiled. In a kind of a way I have. I have recently come across rather a curious story; I am trying to get to the bottom of it. What is the story? I am afraid that at present I am not at liberty to tell it you; when I am I will. You will find it interestingas an instance of a singular survival.Didnt the followers of Isis believe in transmigration? Some of themno doubt. What did they understand by transmigration? Transmigration. Yesbut of the soul or of the body? How do you mean?transmigration is transmigration. Are you driving at something in particular? If youll tell me fairly and squarely what it is Ill do my best to give you the information you require; as it is, your questions are a bit perplexing. Oh, it doesnt matteras you say, transmigration is transmigration. I was eyeing him keenly; I seemed to detect in his manner an odd reluctance to enlarge on the subject he himself had started. He continued to trifle with the retort upon the table. Hadnt the followers of Isis awhat shall I say?a sacred emblem? How? Hadnt they an especial regard for some sort of awasnt it some sort of abeetle? You mean Scarabaeus saceraccording to Latreille, Scarabaeus egyptiorum? Undoubtedlythe scarab was venerated throughout Egyptindeed, speaking generally, most things that had life, for instance, cats; as you know, Orisis continued among men in the figure of Apis, the bull. Werent the priests of Isisor some of themsupposed to assume, after death, the form of ascarabaeus? I never heard of it. Are you sure?think! I shouldnt like to answer such a question positively, offhand, but I dont, on the spur of the moment, recall any supposition of the kind. Dont laugh at meIm not a lunatic!but I understand that recent researches have shown that even in some of the most astounding of the ancient legends there was a substratum of fact. Is it absolutely certain that there could be no shred of truth in such a belief? In what belief? In the belief that a priest of Isisor anyoneassumed after death the form of a scarabaeus? It seems to me, Lessingham, that you have lately come across some uncommonly interesting data, of a kind, too, which it is your bounden duty to give to the worldor, at any rate, to that portion of the world which is represented by me. Cometell us all about it!what are you afraid of? I am afraid of nothingand some day you shall be toldbut not now. At present, answer my question. Then repeat your questionclearly. Is it absolutely certain that there could be no foundation of truth in the belief that a priest of Isisor anyoneassumed after death the form of a beetle? I know no more than the man in the moonhow the dickens should I? Such a belief may have been symbolical. Christians believe that after death the body takes the shape of wormsand so, in a sense, it doesand, sometimes, eels. That is not what I mean. Then what do you mean? Listen. If a person, of whose veracity there could not be a vestige of a doubt, assured you that he had seen such a transformation actually take place, could it conceivably be explained on natural grounds? Seen a priest of Isis assume the form of a beetle? Or a follower of Isis? Before, or after death? He hesitated. I had seldom seen him wear such an appearance of interestto be frank, I was keenly interested too!but, on a sudden there came into his eyes a glint of something that was almost terror. When he spoke, it was with the most unwonted awkwardness. Inin the very act of dying. In the very act of dying? Ifhe had seen a follower of Isis inthe very act of dying, assumethe form of aa beetle, on any conceivable grounds would such a transformation be susceptible of a natural explanation? I staredas who would not? Such an extraordinary question was rendered more extraordinary by coming from such a manyet I was almost beginning to suspect that there was something behind it more extraordinary still. Look here, Lessingham, I can see youve a capital tale to tellso tell it, man! Unless Im mistaken, its not the kind of tale in which ordinary scruples can have any part or parcelanyhow, its hardly fair of you to set my curiosity all agog, and then to leave it unappeased. He eyed me steadily, the appearance of interest fading more and more, until, presently, his face assumed its wonted expressionless masksomehow I was conscious that what he had seen in my face was not altogether to his liking. His voice was once more bland and selfcontained. I perceive you are of opinion that I have been told a taradiddle. I suppose I have. But what is the taradiddle?dont you see Im burning? Unfortunately, Atherton, I am on my honour. Until I have permission to unloose it, my tongue is tied. He picked up his hat and umbrella from where he had placed them on the table. Holding them in his left hand, he advanced to me with his right outstretched. It is very good of you to suffer my continued interruption; I know, to my sorrow, what such interruptions meanbelieve me, I am not ungrateful. What is this? On the shelf, within a foot or so of where I stood, was a sheet of paperthe size and shape of half a sheet of post note. At this he stooped to glance. As he did so, something surprising occurred. On the instant a look came on to his face which, literally, transfigured him. His hat and umbrella fell from his grasp on to the floor. He retreated, gibbering, his hands held out as if to ward something off from him, until he reached the wall on the other side of the room. A more amazing spectacle than he presented I never saw. Lessingham! I exclaimed. Whats wrong with you? My first impression was that he was struck by a fit of epilepsythough anyone less like an epileptic subject it would be hard to find. In my bewilderment I looked round to see what could be the immediate cause. My eye fell upon the sheet of paper, I stared at it with considerable surprise. I had not noticed it there previously, I had not put it therewhere had it come from? The curious thing was that, on it, produced apparently by some process of photogravure, was an illustration of a species of beetle with which I felt that I ought to be acquainted, and yet was not. It was of a dull golden green; the colour was so well brought outeven to the extent of seeming to scintillate, and the whole thing was so dexterously done that the creature seemed alive. The semblance of reality was, indeed, so vivid that it needed a second glance to be assured that it was a mere trick of the reproducer. Its presence there was oddafter what we had been talking about it might seem to need explanation; but it was absurd to suppose that that alone could have had such an effect on a man like Lessingham. With the thing in my hand, I crossed to where he waspressing his back against the wall, he had shrunk lower inch by inch till he was actually crouching on his haunches. Lessingham!come, man, whats wrong with you? Taking him by the shoulder, I shook him with some vigour. My touch had on him the effect of seeming to wake him out of a dream, of restoring him to consciousness as against the nightmare horrors with which he was struggling. He gazed up at me with that look of cunning on his face which one associates with abject terror. Atherton?Is it you?Its all rightquite right.Im wellvery well. As he spoke, he slowly drew himself up, till he was standing erect. Then, in that case, all I can say is that you have a queer way of being very well. He put his hand up to his mouth, as if to hide the trembling of his lips. Its the pressure of overworkIve had one or two attacks like thisbut its nothing, onlya local lesion. I observed him keenly; to my thinking there was something about him which was very odd indeed. Only a local lesion!If you take my stronglyurged advice youll get a medical opinion without delayif you havent been wise enough to have done so already. Ill go today;at once; but I know its only mental overstrain. Youre sure its nothing to do with this? I held out in front of him the photogravure of the beetle. As I did so he backed away from me, shrieking, trembling as with palsy. Take it away! take it away! he screamed. I stared at him, for some seconds, astonished into speechlessness. Then I found my tongue. Lessingham!Its only a picture!Are you stark mad? He persisted in his ejaculations. Take it away! take it away!Tear it up!Burn it! His agitation was so unnaturalfrom whatever cause it arose!that, fearing the recurrence of the attack from which he had just recovered, I did as he bade me. I tore the sheet of paper into quarters, and, striking a match, set fire to each separate piece. He watched the process of incineration as if fascinated. When it was concluded, and nothing but ashes remained, he gave a gasp of relief. Lessingham, I said, youre either mad already, or youre going madwhich is it? I think its neither. I believe I am as sane as you. Itsits that story of which I was speaking; itit seems curious, but Ill tell you all about itsome day. As I observed, I think you will find it an interesting instance of a singular survival. He made an obvious effort to become more like his usual self. It is extremely unfortunate, Atherton, that I should have troubled you with such a display of weaknessespecially as I am able to offer you so scant an explanation. One thing I would ask of youto observe strict confidence. What has taken place has been between ourselves. I am in your hands, but you are my friend, I know I can rely on you not to speak of it to anyoneand, in particular, not to breathe a hint of it to Miss Lindon. Why, in particular, not to Miss Lindon? Can you not guess? I hunched my shoulder. If what I guess is what you mean is not that a cause the more why silence would be unfair to her? It is for me to speak, if for anyone. I shall not fail to do what should be done.Give me your promise that you will not hint a word to her of what you have so unfortunately seen? I gave him the promise he required. There was no more work for me that day. The Apostle, his divagations, his example of the coleoptera, his Arabian friendthese things were as microbes which, acting on a system already predisposed for their reception, produced high fever; I was in a feverof unrest. Brain in a whirl!Marjorie, Paul, Isis, beetle, mesmerism, in delirious jumble. Loves upsetting!in itself a sufficiently severe disease; but when complications intervene, suggestive of mystery and novelties, so that you do not know if you are moving in an atmosphere of dreams or of frozen factsif, then, your temperature does not rise, like that rocket of M.

Verneswhich reached the moon, then you are a freak of an entirely genuine kind, and if the surgeons do not preserve you, and place you on view, in pickle, they ought to, for the sake of historical doubters, for no one will believe that there ever was a man like you, unless you yourself are somewhere around to prove them Thomases. MyselfI am not that kind of man. When I get warm I grow heated, and when I am heated there is likely to be a variety show of a gaudy kind. When Paul had gone I tried to think things out, and if I had kept on trying something would have happenedso I went on the river instead. XIV. The Duchess Ball That night was the Duchess of Datchets ballthe first person I saw as I entered the dancingroom was Dora Grayling. I went straight up to her. Miss Grayling, I behaved very badly to you last night, I have come to make to you my apologiesto sue for your forgiveness! My forgiveness? Her head went backshe has a pretty birdlike trick of cocking it a little on one side. You were not well. Are you better? Quite.You forgive me? Then grant me plenary absolution by giving me a dance for the one I lost last night. She rose. A man came upa stranger to me; shes one of the best hunted women in Englandtheres a million with her. This is my dance, Miss Grayling. She looked at him. You must excuse me. I am afraid I have made a mistake. I had forgotten that I was already engaged. I had not thought her capable of it. She took my arm, and away we went, and left him staring. Its he whos the sufferer now, I whispered, as we went roundshe can waltz! You think so? It was I last nightI did not mean, if I could help it, to suffer again. To me a dance with you means something. She went all redadding, as an afterthought, Nowadays so few men really dance. I expect its because you dance so well. Thank you. We danced the waltz right through, then we went to an impromptu shelter which had been rigged up on a balcony. And we talked. Theres something sympathetic about Miss Grayling which leads one to talk about ones selfbefore I was half aware of it I was telling her of all my plans and projectsactually telling her of my latest notion which, ultimately, was to result in the destruction of whole armies as by a flash of lightning. She took an amount of interest in it which was surprising. What really stands in the way of things of this sort is not theory but practiceone can prove ones facts on paper, or on a small scale in a room; what is wanted is proof on a large scale, by actual experiment. If, for instance, I could take my plant to one of the forests of South America, where there is plenty of animal life but no human, I could demonstrate the soundness of my position then and there. Why dont you? Think of the money it would cost. I thought I was a friend of yours. I had hoped you were. Then why dont you let me help you? Help me?How? By letting you have the money for your South American experiment;it would be an investment on which I should expect to receive good interest. I fidgeted. It is very good of you, Miss Grayling, to talk like that. She became quite frigid. Please dont be absurd!I perceive quite clearly that you are snubbing me, and that you are trying to do it as delicately as you know how. Miss Grayling! I understand that it was an impertinence on my part to volunteer assistance which was unasked; you have made that sufficiently plain. I assure you Pray dont. Of course, if it had been Miss Lindon it would have been different; she would at least have received a civil answer. But we are not all Miss Lindon. I was aghast. The outburst was so uncalled forI had not the faintest notion what I had said or done to cause it; she was in such a surprising passionand it suited her!I thought I had never seen her look prettierI could do nothing else but stare. So she went onwith just as little reason. Here is someone coming to claim this danceI cant throw all my partners over. Have I offended you so irremediably that it will be impossible for you to dance with me again? Miss Grayling!I shall be only too delighted. She handed me her card. Which may I have? For your own sake you had better place it as far off as you possibly can. They all seem taken. That doesnt matter; strike off any name you please, anywhere and put your own instead. It was giving me an almost embarrassingly free hand. I booked myself for the next waltz but twowho it was who would have to give way to me I did not trouble to inquire. Mr. Atherton!is that you? It wasit was also she. It was Marjorie! And so soon as I saw her I knew that there was only one woman in the world for methe mere sight of her sent the blood tingling through my veins. Turning to her attendant cavalier, she dismissed him with a bow. Is there an empty chair? She seated herself in the one Miss Grayling had just vacated. I sat down beside her. She glanced at me, laughter in her eyes. I was all in a stupid tremblement. You remember that last night I told you that I might require your friendly services in diplomatic intervention? I noddedI felt that the allusion was unfair. Well, the occasions comeor, at least, its very near. She was stilland I said nothing to help her. You know how unreasonable papa can be. I didnever a more pigheaded man in England than Geoffrey Lindonor, in a sense, a duller. But, just then, I was not prepared to admit it to his child. You know what an absurd objection he has toPaul. There was an appreciative hesitation before she uttered the fellows Christian namewhen it came it was with an accent of tenderness which stung me like a gadfly. To speak to meof all menof the fellow in such a tone waslike a woman. Has Mr. Lindon no notion of how things stand between you? Except what he suspects. That is just where you are to come in, papa thinks so much of youI want you to sound Pauls praises in his earto prepare him for what must come. Was ever rejected lover burdened with such a task? Its enormity kept me still. Sydney, you have always been my friendmy truest, dearest friend. When I was a little girl you used to come between papa and me, to shield me from his wrath. Now that I am a big girl I want you to be on my side once more, and to shield me still. Her voice softened. She laid her hand upon my arm. How, under her touch, I burned. But I dont understand what cause there has been for secrecywhy should there have been any secrecy from the first? It was Pauls wish that papa should not be told. Is Mr. Lessingham ashamed of you? Sydney! Or does he fear your father? You are unkind. You know perfectly well that papa has been prejudiced against him all along, you know that his political position is just now one of the greatest difficulty, that every nerve and muscle is kept on the continual strain, that it is in the highest degree essential that further complications of every and any sort should be avoided. He is quite aware that his suit will not be approved of by papa, and he simply wishes that nothing shall be said about it till the end of the sessionthat is all. I see! Mr. Lessingham is cautious even in lovemakingpolitician first, and lover afterwards. Well!why not?would you have him injure the cause he has at heart for want of a little patience? It depends what cause it is he has at heart. What is the matter with you?why do you speak to me like that?it is not like you at all. She looked at me shrewdly, with flashing eyes. Is it possible that you arejealous?that you were in earnest in what you said last night?I thought that was the sort of thing you said to every girl. I would have given a great deal to take her in my arms, and press her to my bosom then and thereto think that she should taunt me with having said to her the sort of thing I said to every girl. What do you know of Mr. Lessingham? What all the world knowsthat history will be made by him. There are kinds of history in the making of which one would not desire to be associated. What do you know of his private lifeit was to that that I was referring. Reallyyou go too far. I know that he is one of the best, just as he is one of the greatest, of men; for me, that is sufficient. If you do know that, it is sufficient. I do know itall the world knows it. Everyone with whom he comes in contact is awaremust be aware, that he is incapable of a dishonourable thought or action. Take my advice, dont appreciate any man too highly. In the book of every mans life there is a page which he would wish to keep turned down. There is no such page in Paulsthere may be in yours; I think that probable. Thank you. I fear it is more than probable. I fear that, in my case, the page may extend to several. There is nothing Apostolic about menot even the name. Sydney!you are unendurable!It is the more strange to hear you talk like this since Paul regards you as his friend. He flatters me. Are you not his friend? Is it not sufficient to be yours? Nowho is against Paul is against me. That is hard. How is it hard? Who is against the husband can hardly be for the wifewhen the husband and the wife are one. But as yet you are not one.Is my cause so hopeless? What do you call your cause?are you thinking of that nonsense you were talking about last night? She laughed! You call it nonsense.You ask for sympathy, and giveso much! I will give you all the sympathy you stand in need ofI promise it! My poor, dear Sydney!dont be so absurd! Do you think that I dont know you? Youre the best of friends, and the worst of loversas the one, so true; so fickle as the other. To my certain knowledge, with how many girls have you been in loveand out again. It is true that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, you have never been in love with me beforebut thats the merest accident. Believe me, my dear, dear Sydney, youll be in love with someone else tomorrowif youre not halfway there tonight. I confess, quite frankly, that, in that direction, all the experience I have had of you has in nowise strengthened my prophetic instinct. Cheer up!one never knows!Who is this thats coming? It was Dora Grayling who was comingI went off with her without a wordwe were halfway through the dance before she spoke to me. I am sorry that I was cross to you just now, anddisagreeable. Somehow I always seem destined to show to you my most unpleasant side. The blame was minewhat sort of side do I show you? You are far kinder to me than I deservenow, and always. That is what you say. Pardon me, its trueelse how comes it that, at this time of day, Im without a friend in all the world? You!without a friend!I never knew a man who had so many!I never knew a person of whom so many men and women join in speaking well! Miss Grayling! As for never having done anything worth doing, think of what you have done. Think of your discoveries, think of your inventions, think ofbut never mind! The world knows you have done great things, and it confidently looks to you to do still greater. You talk of being friendless, and yet when I ask, as a favouras a great favour!to be allowed to do something to show my friendship, youwell, you snub me. I snub you! You know you snubbed me. Do you really mean that you take an interest inin my work? You know I mean it. She turned to me, her face all glowingand I did know it. Will you come to my laboratory tomorrow morning? Will I!wont I! With your aunt? Yes, with my aunt. Ill show you round, and tell you all there is to be told, and then if you still think theres anything in it, Ill accept your offer about that South American experimentthat is, if it still holds good. Of course it still holds good. And well be partners. Partners?Yeswe will be partners. It will cost a terrific sum. There are some things which never can cost too much. Thats not my experience. I hope it will be mine. Its a bargain? On my side, I promise you that its a bargain. When I got outside the room I found that Percy Woodville was at my side. His round face was, in a manner of speaking as long as my arm. He took his glass out of his eye, and rubbed it with his handkerchiefand directly he put it back he took it out and rubbed it again, I believe that I never saw him in such a state of flusterand, when one speaks of Woodville, that means something. Atherton, I am in a devil of a stew. He looked it. All of a heap!Ive had a blow which I shall never get over! Then get under. Woodville is one of those fellows who will insist on telling me their most private matterseven to what they owe their washerwomen for the ruination of their shirts. Why, goodness alone can tellheaven knows I am not sympathetic. Dont be an idiot!you dont know what Im suffering!Im as nearly as possible stark mad. Thats all right, old chapIve seen you that way more than once before. Dont talk like thatyoure not a perfect brute! I bet you a shilling that I am. Dont torture meyoure not. Atherton! He seized me by the lapels of my coat, seeming half beside himselffortunately he had drawn me into a recess, so that we were noticed by few observers. What do you think has happened? My dear chap, how on earth am I to know? Shes refused me! Has she!Well I never!Buck uptry some other addressthere are quite as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. Atherton, youre a blackguard. He had crumpled his handkerchief into a ball, and was actually bobbing at his eyes with itthe idea of Percy Woodville being dissolved in tears was excruciatingly funnybut, just then, I could hardly tell him so. Theres not a doubt of itits my way of being sympathetic. Dont be so down, mantry her again! Its not the slightest useI know it isntfrom the way she treated me. Dont be so surewomen often say what they mean least. Whos the lady? Who?Is there more women in the world than one for me, or has there ever been? You ask me who! What does the word mean to me but Marjorie Lindon! Marjorie Lindon? I fancy that my jaw dropped openthat, to use his own vernacular, I was all of a heap. I felt like it. I strode awayleaving him mazedand all but ran into Marjories arms. Im just leaving. Will you see me to the carriage, Mr. Atherton? I saw her to the carriage. Are you off?can I give you a lift? Thank youI am not thinking of being off. Im going to the House of Commonswont you come? What are you going there for? Directly she spoke of it I knew why she was goingand she knew that I knew, as her words showed. You are quite well aware of what the magnet is. You are not so ignorant as not to know that the Agricultural Amendment Act is on tonight, and that Paul is to speak. I always try to be there when Paul is to speak, and I mean to always keep on trying. He is a fortunate man. Indeedand again indeed. A man with such gifts as his is inadequately described as fortunate.But I must be off. He expected to be up before, but I heard from him a few minutes ago that there has been a delay, but that he will be up within halfanhour.Till our next meeting. As I returned into the house, in the hall I met Percy Woodville. He had his hat on. Where are you off to? Im off to the House. To hear Paul Lessingham? Damn Paul Lessingham! With all my heart! Theres a division expectedIve got to go. Someone else has gone to hear Paul LessinghamMarjorie Lindon. No!you dont say so!by Jove!I say, Atherton, I wish I could make a speechI never can. When Im electioneering I have to have my speeches written for me, and then I have to read em. But, by Jove, if I knew Miss Lindon was in the gallery, and if I knew anything about the thing, or could get someone to tell me something, hang me if I wouldnt speakId show her Im not the fool she thinks I am! Speak, Percy, speak!youd knock em silly, sir!I tell you what Ill doIll come with you! Ill to the House as well!Paul Lessingham shall have an audience of three. XV. Mr. Lessingham Speaks The House was full. Percy and I went upstairsto the gallery which is theoretically supposed to be reserved for what are called distinguished strangers,those curious animals. Trumperton was up, hammering out those sentences which smell, not so much of the lamp as of the dunderhead. Nobody was listeningexcept the men in the Press Gallery; where is the brain of the House, and ninety percent, of its wisdom. It was not till Trumperton had finished that I discovered Lessingham. The tedious ancient resumed his seat amidst a murmur of sounds which, I have no doubt, some of the pressmen interpreted next day as loud and continued applause. There was movement in the House, possibly expressive of relief; a hum of voices; men came flocking in. Then, from the Opposition benches, there rose a sound which was applauseand I perceived that, on a cross bench close to the gangway, Paul Lessingham was standing up bareheaded. I eyed him criticallyas a collector might eye a valuable specimen, or a pathologist a curious subject. During the last four and twenty hours my interest in him had grown apace. Just then, to me, he was the most interesting man the world contained. When I remembered how I had seen him that same morning, a nerveless, terrorstricken wretch, grovelling, like some craven cur, upon the floor, frightened, to the verge of imbecility, by a shadow, and less than a shadow, I was confronted by two hypotheses. Either I had exaggerated his condition then, or I exaggerated his condition now. So far as appearance went, it was incredible that this man could be that one. I confess that my feeling rapidly became one of admiration. I love the fighter. I quickly recognised that here we had him in perfection. There was no seeming about him thenthe man was to the manner born. To his fingertips a fighting man. I had never realised it so clearly before. He was coolness itself. He had all his faculties under complete command. While never, for a moment, really exposing himself, he would be swift in perceiving the slightest weakness in his opponents defence, and, so soon as he saw it, like lightning, he would slip in a telling blow. Though defeated, he would hardly be disgraced; and one might easily believe that their very victories would be so expensive to his assailants, that, in the end, they would actually conduce to his own triumph. Hang me! I told myself, if, after all, I am surprised if Marjorie does see something in him. For I perceived how a clever and imaginative young woman, seeing him at his best, holding his own, like a gallant knight, against overwhelming odds, in the lists in which he was so much at home, might come to think of him as if he were always and only there, ignoring altogether the kind of man he was when the joust was finished. It did me good to hear him, I do know thatand I could easily imagine the effect he had on one particular auditor who was in the Ladies Cage. It was very far from being an oration in the American sense; it had little or nothing of the fire and fury of the French Tribune; it was marked neither by the ponderosity nor the sentiment of the eloquent German; yet it was as satisfying as are the efforts of either of the three, producing, without doubt, precisely the effect which the speaker intended. His voice was clear and calm, not exactly musical, yet distinctly pleasant, and it was so managed that each word he uttered was as audible to every person present as if it had been addressed particularly to him. His sentences were short and crisp; the words which he used were not big ones, but they came from him with an agreeable ease; and he spoke just fast enough to keep ones interest alert without invoking a strain on the attention. He commenced by making, in the quietest and most courteous manner, sarcastic comments on the speeches and methods of Trumperton and his friends which tickled the House amazingly. But he did not make the mistake of pushing his personalities too far. To a speaker of a certain sort nothing is easier than to sting to madness. If he likes, his every word is barbed. Wounds so given fester; they are not easily forgiven;it is essential to a politician that he should have his firmest friends among the fools; or his climbing days will soon be over. Soon his sarcasms were at an end. He began to exchange them for sweetsounding phrases. He actually began to say pleasant things to his opponents; apparently to mean them. To put them in a good conceit with themselves. He pointed out how much truth there was in what they said; and then, as if by accident, with what ease and at how little cost, amendments might be made. He found their arguments, and took them for his own, and flattered them, whether they would or would not, by showing how firmly they were founded upon fact; and grafted other arguments upon them, which seemed their natural sequelae; and transformed them, and drove them hither and thither; and brought themtheir own arguments!to a round, irrefragable conclusion, which was diametrically the reverse of that to which they themselves had brought them. And he did it all with an aptness, a readiness, a grace, which was incontestable. So that, when he sat down, he had performed that most difficult of all feats, he had delivered what, in a House of Commons sense, was a practical, statesmanlike speech, and yet one which left his hearers in an excellent humour. It was a great successan immense success. A parliamentary triumph of almost the highest order. Paul Lessingham had been coming on by leaps and bounds. When he resumed his seat, amidst applause which, this time, really was applause, there were, probably, few who doubted that he was destined to go still farther. How much farther it is true that time alone could tell; but, so far as appearances went, all the prizes, which are as the crown and climax of a statesmans career, were well within his reach. For my part, I was delighted. I had enjoyed an intellectual exercisea species of enjoyment not so common as it might be. The Apostle had almost persuaded me that the political game was one worth playing, and that its triumphs were things to be desired. It is something, after all, to be able to appeal successfully to the passions and aspirations of your peers; to gain their plaudits; to prove your skill at the game you yourself have chosen; to be looked up to and admired. And when a womans eyes look down on you, and her ears drink in your every word, and her heart beats time with yourseach man to his own temperament, but when that woman is the woman whom you love, to know that your triumph means her glory, and her gladness, to me that would be the best part of it all. In that hourthe Apostles hour!I almost wished that I were a politician too! The division was over. The business of the night was practically done. I was back again in the lobby! The theme of conversation was the Apostles speechon every side they talked of it. Suddenly Marjorie was at my side. Her face was glowing. I never saw her look more beautifulor happier. She seemed to be alone. So you have come, after all!Wasnt it splendid?wasnt it magnificent? Isnt it grand to have such great gifts, and to use them to such good purpose?Speak, Sydney! Dont feign a coolness which is foreign to your nature! I saw that she was hungry for me to praise the man whom she delighted to honour. But, somehow, her enthusiasm cooled mine. It was not a bad speech, of a kind. Of a kind! How her eyes flashed fire! With what disdain she treated me! What do you mean by of a kind? My dear Sydney, are you not aware that it is an attribute of small minds to attempt to belittle those which are greater? Even if you are conscious of inferiority, its unwise to show it. Mr. Lessinghams was a great speech, of any kind; your incapacity to recognise the fact simply reveals your lack of the critical faculty. It is fortunate for Mr. Lessingham that there is at least one person in whom the critical faculty is so bountifully developed. Apparently, in your judgment, he who discriminates is lost. I thought she was going to burst into passion. But, instead, laughing, she placed her hand upon my shoulder. Poor Sydney!I understand!It is so sad!Do you know you are like a little boy who, when he is beaten, declares that the victor has cheated him. Never mind! as you grow older, you will learn better. She stung me almost beyond bearingI cared not what I said. You, unless I am mistaken, will learn better before you are older. What do you mean? Before I could have told herif I had meant to tell; which I did notLessingham came up. I hope I have not kept you waiting; I have been delayed longer than I expected. Not at allthough I am quite ready to get away; its a little tiresome waiting here. This with a mischievous glance towards mea glance which compelled Lessingham to notice me. You do not often favour us. I dont. I find better employment for my time. You are wrong. Its the cant of the day to underrate the House of Commons, and the work which it performs; dont you suffer yourself to join in the chorus of the simpletons. Your time cannot be better employed than in endeavouring to improve the body politic. I am obliged to you.I hope you are feeling better than when I saw you last. A gleam came into his eyes, fading as quickly as it came. He showed no other sign of comprehension, surprise, or resentment. Thank you.I am very well. Marjorie perceived that I meant more than met the eye, and that what I meant was meant unpleasantly. Comelet us be off. It is Mr. Atherton tonight who is not well. She had just slipped her arm through Lessinghams when her father approached. Old Lindon stared at her on the Apostles arm, as if he could hardly believe that it was she. I thought that you were at the Duchess? So I have been, papa; and now Im here. Here! Old Lindon began to stutter and stammer, and to grow red in the face, as is his wont when at all excited. Wwhat do you mean by here?whwheres the carriage? Where should it be, except waiting for me outsideunless the horses have run away. IIIll take you down to it. II dont approve of yyour wwwaiting in a place like this. Thank you, papa, but Mr. Lessingham is going to take me down.I shall see you afterwards.Goodbye. Anything cooler than the way in which she walked off I do not think I ever saw. This is the age of feminine advancement. Young women think nothing of twisting their mothers round their fingers, let alone their fathers; but the fashion in which that young woman walked off, on the Apostles arm, and left her father standing there, was, in its way, a study. Lindon seemed scarcely able to realise that the pair of them had gone. Even after they had disappeared in the crowd he stood staring after them, growing redder and redder, till the veins stood out upon his face, and I thought that an apoplectic seizure threatened. Then, with a gasp, he turned to me. Damned scoundrel! I took it for granted that he alluded to the gentlemaneven though his following words hardly suggested it. Only this morning I forbade her to have anything to do with him, and nnow hes wwalked off with her! Cconfounded adventurer! Thats what he is, an adventurer, and before many hours have passed Ill take the liberty to tell him so! Jamming his fists into his pockets, and puffing like a grampus in distress, he took himself awayand it was time he did, for his words were as audible as they were pointed, and already people were wondering what the matter was. Woodville came up as Lindon was goingjust as sorely distressed as ever. She went away with Lessinghamdid you see her? Of course I saw her. When a man makes a speech like Lessinghams any girl would go away with himand be proud to. When you are endowed with such great powers as he is, and use them for such lofty purposes, shell walk away with youbut, till then, never. He was at his old trick of polishing his eyeglass. Its bitter hard. When I knew that she was there, Id half a mind to make a speech myself, upon my word I had, only I didnt know what to speak about, and I cant speak anyhowhow can a fellow speak when hes shoved into the gallery? As you say, how can he?he cant stand on the railing and shouteven with a friend holding him behind. I know I shall speak one daybound to; and then she wont be there. Itll be better for you if she isnt. Think so?Perhaps youre right. Id be safe to make a mess of it, and then, if she were to see me at it, itd be the devil! Pon my word, Ive been wishing, lately, I was clever. He rubbed his nose with the rim of his eyeglass, looking the most comically disconsolate figure. Put black care behind you, Percy!buck up, my boy! The divisions overyou are freenow well go on the fly. And we did go on the fly. XVI. Athertons Magic Vapour I bore him off to supper at the Helicon. All the way in the cab he was trying to tell me the story of how he proposed to Marjorieand he was very far from being through with it when we reached the club. There was the usual crowd of supperites, but we got a little table to ourselves, in a corner of the room, and before anything was brought for us to eat he was at it again. A good many of the people were pretty near to shouting, and as they seemed to be all speaking at once, and the band was playing, and as the Helicon supper band is not piano, Percy did not have it quite all to himself, but, considering the delicacy of his subject, he talked as loudly as was decentgetting more so as he went on. But Percy is peculiar. I dont know how many times Ive tried to tell herover and over again. Have you now? Yes, pretty near every time I met herbut I never seemed to get quite to it, dont you know. How was that? Why, just as I was going to say, Miss Lindon, may I offer you the gift of my affection Was that how you invariably intended to begin? Well, not alwaysone time like that, another time another way. Fact is, I got off a little speech by heart, but I never got a chance to reel it off, so I made up my mind to just say anything. And what did you say? Well, nothingyou see, I never got there. Just as I was feeling my way, shed ask me if I preferred big sleeves to little ones, or top hats to billycocks, or some nonsense of the kind. Would she now? Yesof course I had to answer, and by the time Id answered the chance was lost. Percy was polishing his eyeglass. I tried to get there so many times, and she choked me off so often, that I cant help thinking that she suspected what it was that I was after. You think she did? She must have done. Once I followed her down Piccadilly, and chivied her into a glove shop in the Burlington Arcade. I meant to propose to her in thereI hadnt had a wink of sleep all night through dreaming of her, and I was just about desperate. And did you propose? The girl behind the counter made me buy a dozen pairs of gloves instead. They turned out to be three sizes too large for me when they came home. I believe she thought Id gone to spoon the glove girlshe went out and left me there. That girl loaded me with all sorts of things when she was goneI couldnt get away. She held me with her blessed eye. I believe it was a glass one. Miss Lindensor the glove girls? The glove girls. She sent me home a whole cartload of green ties, and declared Id ordered them. I shall never forget that day. Ive never been up the Arcade since, and never mean to. You gave Miss Lindon a wrong impression. I dont know. I was always giving her wrong impressions. Once she said that she knew I was not a marrying man, that I was the sort of chap who never would marry, because she saw it in my face. Under the circumstances, that was trying. Bitter hard. Percy sighed again. I shouldnt mind if I wasnt so gone. Im not a fellow who does get gone, but when I do get gone, I get so beastly gone. I tell you what, Percyhave a drink! Im a teetotaleryou know I am. You talk of your heart being broken, and of your being a teetotaler in the same breathif your heart were really broken youd throw teetotalism to the winds. Do you think sowhy? Because you wouldmen whose hearts are broken always doyoud swallow a magnum at the least. Percy groaned. When I drink Im always illbut Ill have a try. He had a trymaking a good beginning by emptying at a draught the glass which the waiter had just now filled.

Then he relapsed into melancholy. Tell me, Percyhonest Indian!do you really love her? Love her? His eyes grew round as saucers. Dont I tell you that I love her? I know you tell me, but that sort of thing is easy telling. What does it make you feel like, this love you talk so much about? Feel like?Just anyhowand nohow. You should look inside me, and then youd know. I see.Its like that, is it?Suppose she loved another man, what sort of feeling would you feel towards him? Does she love another man? I say, suppose. I dare say she does. I expect thats it.What an idiot I am not to have thought of that before. He sighedand refilled his glass. Hes a lucky chap, whoever he is. IdId like to tell him so. Youd like to tell him so? Hes such a jolly lucky chap, you know. Possiblybut his jolly good luck is your jolly bad luck. Would you be willing to resign her to him without a word? If she loves him. But you say you love her. Of course I do. Well then? You dont suppose that, because I love her, I shouldnt like to see her happy?Im not such a beast!Id sooner see her happy than anything else in all the world. I seeEven happy with another?Im afraid that my philosophy is not like yours. If I loved Miss Lindon, and she loved, say, Jones, Im afraid I shouldnt feel like that towards Jones at all. What would you feel like? Murder.Percy, you come home with meweve begun the night together, lets end it togetherand Ill show you one of the finest notions for committing murder on a scale of real magnificence you ever dreamed of. I should like to make use of it to show my feelings towards the supposititious Joneshed know what I felt for him when once he had been introduced to it. Percy went with me without a word. He had not had much to drink, but it had been too much for him, and he was in a condition of maundering sentimentality. I got him into a cab. We dashed along Piccadilly. He was silent, and sat looking in front of him with an air of vacuous sullenness which illbecame his cast of countenance. I bade the cabman pass though Lowndes Square. As we passed the Apostles I pulled him up. I pointed out the place to Woodville. You see, Percy, thats Lessinghams house!thats the house of the man who went away with Marjorie! Yes. Words came from him slowly, with a quite unnecessary stress on each. Because he made a speech.Id like to make a speech.One day Ill make a speech. Because he made a speechonly that, and nothing more! When a man speaks with an Apostles tongue, he can witch any woman in the land.Hallo, whos that?Lessingham, is that you? I saw, or thought I saw, someone, or something, glide up the steps, and withdraw into the shadow of the doorway, as if unwilling to be seen. When I hailed no one answered. I called again. Dont be shy, my friend! I sprang out of the cab, ran across the pavement, and up the steps. To my surprise, there was no one in the doorway. It seemed incredible, but the place was empty. I felt about me with my hands, as if I had been playing at blind mans buff, and grasped at vacancy. I came down a step or two. Ostensibly, theres a vacuumwhich nature abhors.I say, driver, didnt you see someone come up the steps? I thought I did, sirI could have sworn I did. So could I.Its very odd. Perhaps whoever it was has gone into the ouse, sir. I dont see how. We should have heard the door open, if we hadnt seen itand we should have seen it, its not so dark as that.Ive half a mind to ring the bell and inquire. I shouldnt do that if I was you, siryou jump in, and Ill get along. This is Mr. Lessinghamsthe great Mr. Lessinghams. I believe the cabman thought that I was drunkand not respectable enough to claim acquaintance with the great Mr. Lessingham. Wake up, Woodville! Do you know I believe theres some mystery about this placeI feel assured of it. I feel as if I were in the presence of something uncannysomething which I can neither see, nor touch, nor hear. The cabman bent down from his seat, wheedling me. Jump in, sir, and well be getting along. I jumped in, and we got alongbut not far. Before we had gone a dozen yards, I was out again, without troubling the driver to stop. He pulled up, aggrieved. Well, sir, whats the matter now? Youll be damaging yourself before youve done, and then youll be blaming me. I had caught sight of a cat crouching in the shadow of the railingsa black one. That cat was my quarry. Either the creature was unusually sleepy, or slow, or stupid, or it had lost its witswhich a cat seldom does lose!anyhow, without making an attempt to escape it allowed me to grab it by the nape of the neck. So soon as we were inside my laboratory, I put the cat into my glass box. Percy stared. What have you put it there for? That, my dear Percy, is what you are shortly about to see. You are about to be the witness of an experiment which, to a legislatorsuch as you are!ought to be of the greatest possible interest. I am going to demonstrate, on a small scale, the action of the force which, on a large scale, I propose to employ on behalf of my native land. He showed no signs of being interested. Sinking into a chair, he recommenced his wearisome reiteration. I hate cats!Do let it go!Im always miserable when theres a cat in the room. Nonsensethats your fancy! What you wants a taste of whiskyyoull be as chirpy as a cricket. I dont want anything more to drink!Ive had too much already! I paid no heed to what he said. I poured two stiff doses into a couple of tumblers. Without seeming to be aware of what it was that he was doing he disposed of the better half of the one I gave him at a draught. Putting his glass upon the table, he dropped his head upon his hands, and groaned. What would Marjorie think of me if she saw me now? Think?nothing. Why should she think of a man like you, when she has so much better fish to fry? Im feeling frightfully ill!Ill be drunk before Ive done! Then be drunk!only, for gracious sake, be lively drunk, not deadly doleful.Cheer up, Percy! I clapped him on the shoulderalmost knocking him off his seat on to the floor. I am now going to show you that little experiment of which I was speaking!You see that cat? Of course I see it!the beast!I wish youd let it go! Why should I let it go?Do you know whose cat that is? That cats Paul Lessinghams. Paul Lessinghams? Yes, Paul Lessinghamsthe man who made the speechthe man whom Marjorie went away with. How do you know its his? I dont know it is, but I believe it isI choose to believe it is!I intend to believe it is!It was outside his house, therefore its his catthats how I argue. I cant get Lessingham inside that box, so I get his cat instead. Whatever for? You shall see.You observe how happy it is? It dont seem happy. Weve all our ways of seeming happythats its way, The creature was behaving like a cat gone mad, dashing itself against the sides of its glass prison, leaping to and fro, and from side to side, squealing with rage, or with terror, or with both. Perhaps it foresaw what was comingthere is no fathoming the intelligence of what we call the lower animals. Its a funny way. We some of us have funny ways, beside cats. Now, attention! Observe this little toyyouve seen something of its kind before. Its a spring gun; you pull the springdrop the charge into the barrelrelease the springand the charge is fired. Ill unlock this safe, which is built into the wall. Its a letter lock, the combination just now, is whisky,you see, thats a hint to you. Youll notice the safe is strongly madeits airtight, fireproof, the outer casing is of tripleplated drillproof steelthe contents are valuableto me!and devilish dangerousId pity the thief who, in his innocent ignorance, broke in to steal. Look insideyou see its full of ballsglass balls, each in its own little separate nest; light as feathers; transparentyou can see right through them. Here are a couple, like tiny pills. They contain neither dynamite, nor cordite, nor anything of the kind, yet, given a fair field and no favour, theyll work more mischief than all the explosives man has fashioned. Take hold of oneyou say your heart is broken!squeeze this under your noseit wants but a gentle pressureand in less time than no time youll be in the land where they say there are no broken hearts. He shrunk back. I dont know what youre talking about.I dont want the thing.Take it away. Think twicethe chance may not recur. I tell you I dont want it. Sure?Consider! Of course Im sure! Then the cat shall have it. Let the poor brute go! The poor brutes goingto the land which is so near, and yet so far. Once more, if you please, attention. Notice what I do with this toy gun. I pull back the spring; I insert this small glass pellet; I thrust the muzzle of the gun through the opening in the glass box which contains the Apostles catyoull observe it fits quite close, which, on the whole, is perhaps as well for us.I am about to release the spring.Close attention, please.Notice the effect. Atherton, let the brute go! The brutes gone! Ive released the springthe pellet has been dischargedit has struck against the roof of the glass boxit has been broken by the contactand, hey presto! the cat lies deadand that in face of its nine lives. You perceive how still it ishow still! Lets hope that, now, its really happy. The cat which I choose to believe is Paul Lessinghams has received its quietus; in the morning Ill send it back to him, with my respectful compliments. Hell miss it if I dont.Reflect! think of a huge bomb, filled with what well call Athertons Magic Vapour, fired, say, from a hundred and twenty ton gun, bursting at a given elevation over the heads of an opposing force. Properly managed, in less than an instant of time, a hundred thousand menquite possibly more!would drop down dead, as if smitten by the lightning of the skies. Isnt that something like a weapon, sir? Im not well!I want to get away!I wish Id never come! That was all Woodville had to say. Rubbish!Youre adding to your stock of information every second, and, in these days, when a member of Parliament is supposed to know all about everything, informations the one thing wanted. Empty your glass, manthats the time of day for you! I handed him his tumbler. He drained what was left of its contents, then, in a fit of tipsy, childish temper he flung the tumbler from him. I had placedcarelessly enoughthe second pellet within a foot of the edge of the table. The shock of the heavy beaker striking the board close to it, set it rolling. I was at the other side. I started forward to stop its motion, but I was too late. Before I could reach the crystal globule, it had fallen off the edge of the table on to the floor at Woodvilles feet, and smashed in falling. As it smashed, he was looking down, wondering, no doubt, in his stupidity, what the pother was aboutfor I was shouting, and making something of a clatter in my efforts to prevent the catastrophe which I saw was coming. On the instant, as the vapour secreted in the broken pellet gained access to the air, he fell forward on to his face. Rushing to him, I snatched his senseless body from the ground, and dragged it, staggeringly, towards the door which opened on to the yard. Flinging the door open, I got him into the open air. As I did so, I found myself confronted by someone who stood outside. It was Lessinghams mysterious EgyptoArabian friendmy mornings visitor. XVII. Magic?Or Miracle? The passage into the yard from the electrically lit laboratory was a passage from brilliancy to gloom. The shrouded figure, standing in the shadow, was like some object in a dream. My own senses reeled. It was only because I had resolutely held my breath, and kept my face averted that I had not succumbed to the fate which had overtaken Woodville. Had I been a moment longer in gaining the open air, it would have been too late. As it was, in placing Woodville on the ground, I stumbled over him. My senses left me. Even as they went I was conscious of exclaimingremembering the saying about the engineer being hoist by his own petard, Athertons Magic Vapour! My sensations on returning to consciousness were curious. I found myself being supported in someones arms, a strangers face was bending over me, and the most extraordinary pair of eyes I had ever seen were looking into mine. Who the deuce are you? I asked. Then, understanding that it was my uninvited visitor, with scant ceremony I drew myself away from him. By the light which was streaming through the laboratory door I saw that Woodville was lying close beside mestark and still. Is he dead? I cried. Percy.speak, man!its not so bad with you as that! But it was pretty badso bad that, as I bent down and looked at him, my heart beat uncomfortably fast lest it was as bad as it could be. His heart seemed stillthe vapour took effect directly on the cardiac centres. To revive their action and that instantly, was indispensable. Yet my brain was in such a whirl that I could not even think of how to set about beginning. Had I been alone, it is more than probable Woodville would have died. As I stared at him, senselessly, aimlessly, the stranger, passing his arms beneath his body, extended himself at full length upon his motionless form. Putting his lips to Percys, he seemed to be pumping life from his own body into the unconscious mans. As I gazed bewildered, surprised, presently there came a movement of Percys body. His limbs twitched, as if he was in pain. By degrees, the motions became convulsivetill on a sudden he bestirred himself to such effect that the stranger was rolled right off him. I bent downto find that the young gentlemans condition still seemed very far from satisfactory. There was a rigidity about the muscles of his face, a clamminess about his skin, a disagreeable suggestiveness about the way in which his teeth and the whites of his eyes were exposed, which was uncomfortable to contemplate. The stranger must have seen what was passing through my mindnot a very difficult thing to see. Pointing to the recumbent Percy, he said, with that queer foreign twang of his, which, whatever it had seemed like in the morning, sounded musical enough just then. All will be well with him. I am not so sure. The stranger did not deign to answer. He was kneeling on one side of the victim of modern science, I on the other. Passing his hand to and fro in front of the unconscious countenance, as if by magic all semblance of discomfort vanished from Percys features, and, to all appearances, he was placidly asleep. Have you hypnotised him? What does it matter? If it was a case of hypnotism, it was very neatly done. The conditions were both unusual and trying, the effect produced seemed all that could be desiredthe change brought about in half a dozen seconds was quite remarkable. I began to be aware of a feeling of quasirespect for Paul Lessinghams friend. His morals might be peculiar, and manners he might have none, but in this case, at any rate, the end seemed to have justified the means. He went on. He sleeps. When he awakes he will remember nothing that has been. Leave himthe night is warmall will be well. As he said, the night was warmand it was dry. Percy would come to little harm by being allowed to enjoy, for a while, the pleasant breezes. So I acted on the strangers advice, and left him lying in the yard, while I had a little interview with the impromptu physician. XVIII. The Apotheosis of the Beetle The laboratory door was closed. The stranger was standing a foot or two away from it. I was further within the room, and was subjecting him to as keen a scrutiny as circumstances permitted. Beyond doubt he was conscious of my observation, yet he bore himself with an air of indifference, which was suggestive of perfect unconcern. The fellow was Oriental to the fingertipsthat much was certain; yet in spite of a pretty wide personal knowledge of Oriental people I could not make up my mind as to the exact part of the east from which he came. He was hardly an Arab, he was not a fellahhe was not, unless I erred, a Mohammedan at all. There was something about him which was distinctly not Mussulmanic. So far as looks were concerned, he was not a flattering example of his race, whatever his race might be. The portentous size of his beaklike nose would have been, in itself, sufficient to damn him in any court of beauty. His lips were thick and shapelessand this, joined to another peculiarity in his appearance, seemed to suggest that, in his veins there ran more than a streak of negro blood. The peculiarity alluded to was his semblance of great age. As one eyed him one was reminded of the legends told of people who have been supposed to have retained something of their pristine vigour after having lived for centuries. As, however, one continued to gaze, one began to wonder if he really was so old as he seemedif, indeed, he was exceptionally old at all. Negroes, and especially negresses, are apt to age with extreme rapidity. Among coloured folk one sometimes encounters women whose faces seem to have been lined by the passage of centuries, yet whose actual tale of years would entitle them to regard themselves, here in England, as in the prime of life. The senility of the fellows countenance, besides, was contradicted by the juvenescence of his eyes. No really old man could have had eyes like that. They were curiously shaped, reminding me of the elongated, faceted eyes of some queer creature, with whose appearance I was familiar, although I could not, at the instant, recall its name. They glowed not only with the force and fire, but, also, with the frenzy of youth. More uncannylooking eyes I had never encounteredtheir possessor could not be, in any sense of the word, a clubable person. Owing, probably, to some peculiar formation of the opticnerve one felt, as one met his gaze, that he was looking right through you. More obvious danger signals never yet were placed in a creatures head. The individual who, having once caught sight of him, still sought to cultivate their owners acquaintance, had only himself to thank if the very worst results of frequenting evil company promptly ensued. It happens that I am myself endowed with an unusual tenacity of vision. I could, for instance, easily outstare any man I ever met. Yet, as I continued to stare at this man, I was conscious that it was only by an effort of will that I was able to resist a baleful something which seemed to be passing from his eyes to mine. It might have been imagination, but, in that sense, I am not an imaginative man; and, if it was, it was imagination of an unpleasantly vivid kind. I could understand how, in the case of a nervous, or a sensitive temperament, the fellow might exercise, by means of the peculiar quality of his glance alone, an influence of a most disastrous sort, which given an appropriate subject in the manifestation of its power might approach almost to the supernatural. If ever man was endowed with the traditional evil eye, in which Italians, among modern nations, are such profound believers, it was he. When we had stared at each other for, I daresay, quite five minutes, I began to think I had had about enough of it. So, by way of breaking the ice, I put to him a question. May I ask how you found your way into my back yard? He did not reply in words, but, raising his hands he lowered them, palms downward, with a gesture which was peculiarly Oriental. Indeed?Is that so?Your meaning may be lucidity itself to you, but, for my benefit, perhaps you would not mind translating it into words. Once more I ask, how did you find your way into my back yard? Again nothing but the gesture. Possibly you are not sufficiently acquainted with English manners and customs to be aware that you have placed yourself within reach of the pains and penalties of the law. Were I to call in the police you would find yourself in an awkward situationand, unless you are presently more explanatory, called in they will be. By way of answer he indulged in a distortion of the countenance which might have been meant for a smileand which seemed to suggest that he regarded the police with a contempt which was too great for words. Why do you laughdo you think that being threatened with the police is a joke? You are not likely to find it so.Have you suddenly been bereft of the use of your tongue? He proved that he had not by using it. I have still the use of my tongue. That, at least, is something. Perhaps, since the subject of how you got into my back yard seems to be a delicate one, you will tell me why you got there. You know why I have come. Pardon me if I appear to flatly contradict you, but that is precisely what I do not know. You do know. Do I?Then, in that case, I presume that you are here for the reason which appears upon the surfaceto commit a felony. You call me thief? What else are you? I am no thief.You know why I have come. He raised his head a little. A look came into his eyes which I felt that I ought to understand, yet to the meaning of which I seemed, for the instant, to have mislaid the key. I shrugged my shoulders. I have come because you wanted me. Because I wanted you!On my word!Thats sublime! All night you have wanted medo I not know? When she talked to you of him, and the blood boiled in your veins; when he spoke, and all the people listened, and you hated him, because he had honour in her eyes. I was startled. Either he meant what it appeared incredible that he could mean, orthere was confusion somewhere. Take my advice, my friend, and dont try to come the buncosteerer over meIm a bit in that line myself, you know. This time the score was minehe was puzzled. I know not what you talk of. In that case, were equalI know not what you talk of either. His manner, for him, was childlike and bland. What is it you do not know? This morning did I not sayif you want me, then I come? I fancy I have some faint recollection of your being so good as to say something of the kind, butwheres the application? Do you not feel for him the same as I? Whos the him? Paul Lessingham. It was spoken quietly, but with a degree ofto put it gentlyspitefulness which showed that at least the will to do the Apostle harm would not be lacking. And, pray, what is the common feeling which we have for him? Hate. Plainly, with this gentleman, hate meant hatein the solid Oriental sense. I should hardly have been surprised if the mere utterance of the words had seared his lips. I am by no means prepared to admit that I have this feeling which you attribute to me, but, even granting that I have, what then? Those who hate are kin. That, also, I should be slow to admit; butto go a step fartherwhat has all this to do with your presence on my premises at this hour of the night? You love her. This time I did not ask him to supply the namebeing unwilling that it should be soiled by the traffic of his lips. She loves himthat is not well. If you choose, she shall love youthat will be well. Indeed.And pray how is this consummation which is so devoutly to be desired to be brought about? Put your hand into mine. Say that you wish it. It shall be done. Moving a step forward, he stretched out his hand towards me. I hesitated. There was that in the fellows manner which, for the moment, had for me an unwholesome fascination. Memories flashed through my mind of stupid stories which have been told of compacts made with the devil. I almost felt as if I was standing in the actual presence of one of the powers of evil. I thought of my love for Marjoriewhich had revealed itself after all these years; of the delight of holding her in my arms, of feeling the pressure of her lips to mine. As my gaze met his, the lower side of what the conquest of this fair lady would mean, burned in my brain; fierce imaginings blazed before my eyes. To win heronly to win her! What nonsense he was talking! What empty brag it was! Suppose, just for the sake of the joke, I did put my hand in his, and did wish, right out, what it was plain he knew. If I wished, what harm would it do! It would be the purest jest. Out of his own mouth he would be confounded, for it was certain that nothing would come of it. Why should I not do it then? I would act on his suggestionI would carry the thing right through. Already I was advancing towards him, whenI stopped. I dont know why. On the instant, my thoughts went off at a tangent. What sort of a blackguard did I call myself that I should take a womans name in vain for the sake of playing fools tricks with such scum of the earth as the hideous vagabond in front of meand that the name of the woman whom I loved? Rage took hold of me. You hound! I cried. In my sudden passage from one mood to another, I was filled with the desire to shake the life half out of him. But so soon as I moved a step in his direction, intending war instead of peace, he altered the position of his hand, holding it out towards me as if forbidding my approach. Directly he did so, quite involuntarily, I pulled up deadas if my progress had been stayed by bars of iron and walls of steel. For the moment, I was astonished to the verge of stupefaction. The sensation was peculiar. I was as incapable of advancing another inch in his direction as if I had lost the use of my limbsI was even incapable of attempting to attempt to advance. At first I could only stare and gape. Presently I began to have an inkling of what had happened. The scoundrel had almost succeeded in hypnotising me. That was a nice thing to happen to a man of my sort at my time of life. A shiver went down my backwhat might have occurred if I had not pulled up in time! What pranks might a creature of that character not have been disposed to play. It was the old story of the peril of playing with edged tools; I had made the dangerous mistake of underrating the enemys strength. Evidently, in his own line, the fellow was altogether something out of the usual way. I believe that even as it was he thought he had me. As I turned away, and leaned against the table at my back, I fancy that he shiveredas if this proof of my being still my own master was unexpected. I was silentit took some seconds to enable me to recover from the shock of the discovery of the peril in which I had been standing. Then I resolved that I would endeavour to do something which should make me equal to this gentleman of many talents. Take my advice, my friend, and dont attempt to play that hankey pankey off on to me again. I dont know what you talk of. Dont lie to meor Ill burn you into ashes. Behind me was an electrical machine, giving an eighteen inch spark. It was set in motion by a lever fitted into the table, which I could easily reach from where I sat. As I spoke the visitor was treated to a little exhibition of electricity. The change in his bearing was amusing. He shook with terror. He salaamed down to the ground. My lord!my lord!have mercy, oh my lord! Then you be careful, thats all. You may suppose yourself to be something of a magician, but it happens, unfortunately for you, that I can do a bit in that line myselfperhaps Im a trifle better at the game than you are. Especially as you have ventured into my stronghold, which contains magic enough to make a show of a hundred thousand such as you. Taking down a bottle from a shelf, I sprinkled a drop or two of its contents on the floor. Immediately flames arose, accompanied by a blinding vapour. It was a sufficiently simple illustration of one of the qualities of phosphorousbromide, but its effect upon my visitor was as startling as it was unexpected. If I could believe the evidence of my own eyesight, in the very act of giving utterance to a scream of terror he disappeared, how, or why, or whither, there was nothing to showin his place, where he had been standing, there seemed to be a dim object of some sort in a state of frenzied agitation on the floor. The phosphorescent vapour was confusing; the lights appeared to be suddenly burning low; before I had sense enough to go and see if there was anything there, and, if so, what, the flames had vanished, the man himself had reappeared, and, prostrated on his knees, was salaaming in a condition of abject terror. My lord! my lord! he whined. I entreat you, my lord, to use me as your slave! Ill use you as my slave! Whether he or I was the more agitated it would have been difficult to saybut, at least, it would not have done to betray my feelings as he did his. Stand up! He stood up. I eyed him as he did with an interest which, so far as I was concerned, was of a distinctly new and original sort. Whether or not I had been the victim of an ocular delusion I could not be sure. It was incredible to suppose that he could have disappeared as he had seemed to disappearit was also incredible that I could have imagined his disappearance. If the thing had been a trick, I had not the faintest notion how it had been worked; and, if it was not a trick, then what was it? Was it something new in scientific marvels? Could he give me as much instruction in the qualities of unknown forces as I could him? In the meanwhile he stood in an attitude of complete submission, with downcast eyes, and hands crossed upon his breast. I started to crossexamine him. I am going to ask you some questions. So long as you answer them promptly, truthfully, you will be safe. Otherwise you had best beware. Ask, oh my lord. What is the nature of your objection to Mr. Lessingham? Revenge. What has he done to you that you should wish to be revenged on him? It is the feud of the innocent blood. What do you mean by that? On his hands is the blood of my kin. It cries aloud for vengeance. Who has he killed? That, my lord, is for meand for him. I see.Am I to understand that you do not choose to answer me, and that I am again to use mymagic? I saw that he quivered. My lord, he has spilled the blood of her who has lain upon his breast. I hesitated. What he meant appeared clear enough. Perhaps it would be as well not to press for further details. The words pointed to what it might be courteous to call an Eastern Romancethough it was hard to conceive of the Apostle figuring as the hero of such a theme. It was the old tale retold, that to the life of every man there is a backgroundthat it is precisely in the unlikeliest cases that the backgrounds darkest. What would that pennyplainandtwopencecoloured bogey, the Nonconformist Conscience, make of such a story if it were blazoned through the land. Would Paul not come down with a run? Spilling blood is a figure of speech; pretty, perhaps, but vague. If you mean that Mr. Lessingham has been killing someone, your surest and most effectual revenge would be gained by an appeal to the law. What has the Englishmans law to do with me? If you can prove that he has been guilty of murder it would have a great deal to do with you. I assure you that at any rate, in that sense, the Englishmans law is no respecter of persons. Show him to be guilty, and it would hang Paul Lessingham as indifferently, and as cheerfully, as it would hang Bill Brown. Is that so? It is so, as, if you choose, you will be easily able to prove to your own entire satisfaction. He had raised his head, and was looking at something which he seemed to see in front of him with a maleficent glare in his sensitive eyes which it was not nice to see. He would be shamed? Indeed he would be shamed. Before all men? Before all menand, I take it, before all women too. And he would hang? If shown to have been guilty of wilful murderyes. His hideous face was lighted up by a sort of diabolical exultation which made it, if that were possible, more hideous still. I had apparently given him a wrinkle which pleased him most consummately. Perhaps I will do that in the endin the end! He opened his eyes to their widest limits, then shut them tightas if to gloat on the picture which his fancy painted. Then reopened them. In the meantime I will have vengeance in my own fashion. He knows already that the avenger is upon himhe has good reason to know it.

And through the days and the nights the knowledge shall be with him still, and it shall be to him as the bitterness of deathaye, of many deaths. For he will know that escape there is none, and that for him there shall be no more sun in the sky, and that the terror shall be with him by night and by day, at his rising up and at his lying down, wherever his eyes shall turn it shall be thereyet, behold, the sap and the juice of my vengeance is in this, in that though he shall be very sure that the days that are, are as the days of his death, yet shall he know that the death, the great death, is comingcomingand shall be on himwhen I will! The fellow spoke like an inspired maniac. If he meant half what he saidand if he did not then his looks and his tones belied him!then a promising future bade fair to be in store for Mr. Lessinghamand, also, circumstances being as they were, for Marjorie. It was this latter reflection which gave me pause. Either this imprecatory fanatic would have to be disposed of, by Lessingham himself, or by someone acting on his behalf, and, so far as their power of doing mischief went, his big words proved empty windbags, or Marjorie would have to be warned that there was at least one passage in her suitors life, into which, ere it was too late, it was advisable that inquiry should be made. To allow Marjorie to irrevocably link her fate with the Apostles, without being first of all made aware that he was, to all intents and purposes, a haunted manthat was not to be thought of. You employ large phrases. My words cooled the others heated blood. Once more his eyes were cast down, his hands crossed upon his breast I crave my lords pardon. My wound is ever new. By the way, what was the secret history, this morning, of that little incident of the cockroach? He glanced up quickly. Cockroach?I know not what you say. Wellwas it beetle, then? Beetle! He seemed, all at once, to have lost his voicethe word was gasped. After you went we found, upon a sheet of paper, a capitally executed drawing of a beetle, which, I fancy, you must have left behind youScaraboeus sacer, wasnt it? I know not what you talk of. Its discovery seemed to have quite a singular effect on Mr. Lessingham. Now, why was that? I know nothing. Oh yes you doand, before you go, I mean to know something too. The man was trembling, looking this way and that, showing signs of marked discomfiture. That there was something about that ancient scarab, which figures so largely in the still unravelled tangles of the Egyptian mythologies, and the effect which the mere sight of its cartouchefor the drawing had resembled something of the kindhad had on such a seasoned vessel as Paul Lessingham, which might be well worth my finding out, I felt convincedthe mans demeanour, on my recurring to the matter, told its own plain tale. I made up my mind, if possible, to probe the business to the bottom, then and there. Listen to me, my friend. I am a plain man, and I use plain speechits a kind of hobby I have. You will give me the information I require, and that at once, or I will pit my magic against yoursin which case I think it extremely probable that you will come off worst from the encounter. I reached out for the lever, and the exhibition of electricity recommenced. Immediately his tremors were redoubled. My lord, I know not of what you talk. None of your lies for me.Tell me why, at the sight of the thing on that sheet of paper, Paul Lessingham went green and yellow. Ask him, my lord. Probably, later on, that is what I shall do. In the meantime, I am asking you. Answeror look out for squalls. The electrical exhibition was going on. He was glaring at it as if he wished that it would stop. As if ashamed of his cowardice, plainly, on a sudden, he made a desperate effort to get the better of his fearsand succeeded better than I had expected or desired. He drew himself up with what, in him, amounted to an air of dignity. I am a child of Isis! It struck me that he made this remark, not so much to impress me, as with a view of elevating his own low spirits. Are you?Then, in that case, I regret that I am unable to congratulate the lady on her offspring. When I said that, a ring came into his voice which I had not heard before. Silence!You know not of what you speak!I warn you, as I warned Paul Lessingham, be careful not to go too far. Be not like himheed my warning. What is it I am being warned againstthe beetle? Yesthe beetle! Were I upon oath, and this statement being made, in the presence of witnesses, say, in a solicitors office, I standing in fear of pains and penalties, I think that, at this point, I should leave the paper blank. No man likes to own himself a fool, or that he ever was a fooland ever since I have been wondering whether, on that occasion, that child of Isis did, or did not, play the fool with me. His performance was realistic enough at the time, heaven knows. But, as it gets farther and farther away, I ask myself, more and more confidently, as time effluxes, whether, after all, it was not clever jugglingsuperhumanly clever juggling, if you will; that, and nothing more. If it was something more, then, with a vengeance! there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in our philosophy. The mere possibility opens vistas which the sane mind fears to contemplate. Since, then, I am not on oath, and, should I fall short of verbal accuracy, I do not need to fear the engines of the law, what seemed to happen was this. He was standing within about ten feet of where I leaned against the edge of the table. The light was full on, so that it was difficult to suppose that I could make a mistake as to what took place in front of me. As he replied to my mocking allusion to the beetle by echoing my own words, he vanishedor, rather, I saw him taking a different shape before my eyes. His loose draperies all fell off him, and, as they were in the very act of falling, there issued, or there seemed to issue out of them, a monstrous creature of the beetle typethe man himself was gone. On the point of size I wish to make myself clear. My impression, when I saw it first, was that it was as large as the man had been, and that it was, in some way, standing up on end, the legs towards me. But, the moment it came in view, it began to dwindle, and that so rapidly that, in a couple of seconds at most, a little heap of drapery was lying on the floor, on which was a truly astonishing example of the coleoptera. It appeared to be a beetle. It was, perhaps, six or seven inches high, and about a foot in length. Its scales were of a vivid golden green. I could distinctly see where the wings were sheathed along the back, and, as they seemed to be slightly agitated, I looked, every moment, to see them opened, and the thing take wing. I was so astonishedas who would not have been?that for an appreciable space of time I was practically in a state of stupefaction. I could do nothing but stare. I was acquainted with the legendary transmigrations of Isis, and with the story of the beetle which issues from the womans womb through all eternity, and with the other pretty tales, but this, of which I was an actual spectator, was something new, even in legends. If the man, with whom I had just been speaking, was gone, where had he gone to? If this glittering creature was there, in his stead, whence had it come? I do protest this much, that, after the first shock of surprise had passed, I retained my presence of mind. I felt as an investigator might feel, who has stumbled, haphazard, on some astounding, some epochmaking, discovery. I was conscious that I should have to make the best use of my mental faculties if I was to take full advantage of so astonishing an accident. I kept my glance riveted on the creature, with the idea of photographing it on my brain. I believe that if it were possible to take a retinal printwhich it someday will beyou would have a perfect picture of what it was I saw. Beyond doubt it was a lamellicorn, one of the copridae. With the one exception of its monstrous size, there were the characteristics in plain view;the convex body, the large head, the projecting clypeus. More, its smooth head and throat seemed to suggest that it was a female. Equally beyond a doubt, apart from its size, there were unusual features present too. The eyes were not only unwontedly conspicuous, they gleamed as if they were lighted by internal flamesin some indescribable fashion they reminded me of my vanished visitor. The colouring was superb, and the creature appeared to have the chameleonlike faculty of lightening and darkening the shades at will. Its not least curious feature was its restlessness. It was in a state of continual agitation; and, as if it resented my inspection, the more I looked at it the more its agitation grew. As I have said, I expected every moment to see it take wing and circle through the air. All the while I was casting about in my mind as to what means I could use to effect its capture. I did think of killing it, and, on the whole, I rather wish that I had at any rate attempted slaughterthere were dozens of things, lying ready to my hand, any one of which would have severely tried its constitution;but, on the spur of the moment, the only method of taking it alive which occurred to me, was to pop over it a big tin canister which had contained sodalime. This canister was on the floor to my left. I moved towards it, as nonchalantly as I could, keeping an eye on that shining wonder all the time. Directly I moved, its agitation perceptibly increasedit was, so to speak, all one whirr of tremblement; it scintillated, as if its coloured scales had been so many prisms; it began to unsheath its wings, as if it had finally decided that it would make use of them. Picking up the tin, disembarrassing it of its lid, I sprang towards my intended victim. Its wings opened wide; obviously it was about to rise; but it was too late. Before it had cleared the ground, the tin was over it. It remained over it, however, for an instant only. I had stumbled, in my haste, and, in my effort to save myself from falling face foremost on to the floor, I was compelled to remove my hands from the tin. Before I was able to replace them, the tin was sent flying, and, while I was still partially recumbent, within eighteen inches of me, that beetle swelled and swelled, until it had assumed its former portentous dimensions, when, as it seemed, it was enveloped by a human shape, and in less time than no time, there stood in front of me, naked from top to toe, my truly versatile Oriental friend. One startling fact nudity revealedthat I had been egregiously mistaken on the question of sex. My visitor was not a man, but a woman, and, judging from the brief glimpse which I had of her body, by no means old or illshaped either. If that transformation was not a bewildering one, then two and two make five. The most levelheaded scientist would temporarily have lost his mental equipoise on witnessing such a quick change as that within a span or two of his own nose I was not only witless, I was breathless tooI could only gape. And, while I gaped, the woman, stooping down, picking up her draperies, began to huddle them on her anyhowand, also, to skeddadle towards the door which led into the yard. When I observed this last manoeuvre, to some extent I did rise to the requirements of the situation. Leaping up, I rushed to stay her flight. Stop! I shouted. But she was too quick for me. Ere I could reach her, she had opened the door, and was through itand, what was more, she had slammed it in my face. In my excitement, I did some fumbling with the handle. When, in my turn, I was in the yard, she was out of sight. I did fancy I saw a dim form disappearing over the wall at the further side, and I made for it as fast as I knew how. I clambered on to the wall, looking this way and that, but there was nothing and no one to be seen. I listened for the sound of retreating footsteps, but all was still. Apparently I had the entire neighbourhood to my own sweet self. My visitor had vanished. Time devoted to pursuit I felt would be time illspent. As I returned across the yard, Woodville, who still was taking his rest under the open canopy of heaven, sat up. Seemingly my approach had roused him out of slumber. At sight of me he rubbed his eyes, and yawned, and blinked. I say, he remarked, not at all unreasonably, where am I? Youre on holyor on haunted groundhang me if I quite know which!but thats where you are, my boy. By Jove!I am feeling queer!I have got a headache, dont you know. I shouldnt be in the least surprised at anything you have, or haventIm beyond surprise. Its a drop of whisky you are wantingand what Im wanting tooonly, for goodness sake, drop me none of your drops! Mine is a case for a bottle at the least. I put my arm through his, and went with him into the laboratory. And, when we were in, I shut, and locked, and barred the door. XIX. The Lady Rages Dora Grayling stood in the doorway. I told your servant he need not trouble to show me inand Ive come without my aunt. I hope Im not intruding. She wasconfoundedly; and it was on the tip of my tongue to tell her so. She came into the room, with twinkling eyes, looking radiantly happythat sort of look which makes even a plain young woman prepossessing. Am I intruding?I believe I am. She held out her hand, while she was still a dozen feet away, and when I did not at once dash forward to make a clutch at it, she shook her head and made a little mouth at me. Whats the matter with you?Arent you well? I was not wellI was very far from well. I was as unwell as I could be without being positively ill, and any person of common discernment would have perceived it at a glance. At the same time I was not going to admit anything of the kind to her. Thank youI am perfectly well. Then, if I were you, I would endeavour to become imperfectly well; a little imperfection in that direction might make you appear to more advantage. I am afraid that that I am not one of those persons who ever do appear to much advantagedid I not tell you so last night? I believe you did say something of the kindits very good of you to remember. Have you forgotten something else which you said to me last night? You can hardly expect me to keep fresh in my memory all the follies of which my tongue is guilty. Thank you.That is quite enough.Good day. She turned as if to go. Miss Grayling! Mr. Atherton? Whats the matter?What have I been saying now? Last night you invited me to come and see you this morningis that one of the follies of which your tongue was guilty? The engagement had escaped my recollectionit is a factand my face betrayed me. You had forgotten? Her cheeks flamed; her eyes sparkled. You must pardon my stupidity for not having understood that the imitation was of that general kind which is never meant to be acted on. She was half way to the door before I stopped herI had to take her by the shoulder to do it. Miss Grayling!You are hard on me. I suppose I am.Is anything harder than to be intruded on by an undesired, and unexpected, guest? Now you are harder still.If you knew what I have gone through since our conversation of last night, in your strength you would be merciful. Indeed?What have you gone through? I hesitated. What I actually had gone through I certainly did not propose to tell her. Other reasons apart I did not desire to seem madder than I admittedly amand I lacked sufficient plausibility to enable me to concoct, on the spur of the moment, a plain tale of the doings of my midnight visitor which would have suggested that the narrator was perfectly sane. So I fencedor tried to. For one thingI have had no sleep. I had notnot one single wink. When I did get between the sheets, all night I lay in agony, I suffered from that worst form of nightmarethe nightmare of the man who is wide awake. There was continually before my fevered eyes the strange figure of that Nameless Thing. I had often smiled at tales of haunted folkhere was I one of them. My feelings were not rendered more agreeable by a strengthening conviction that if I had only retained the normal attitude of a scientific observer I should, in all probability, have solved the mystery of my Oriental friend, and that his example of the genus of copridae might have been pinnedby a very large pin!on a piecea monstrous piece!of cork. It was galling to reflect that he and I had played together a game of bluffa game at which civilisation was once more proved to be a failure. She could not have seen all this in my face; but she saw somethingbecause her own look softened. You do look tired. She seemed to be casting about in her own mind for a cause. You have been worrying. She glanced round the big laboratory. Have you been spending the night in thiswizards cave? Pretty well. Oh! The monosyllable, as she uttered it, was big with meaning. Uninvited, she seated herself in an armchair, a huge old thing, of shagreen leather, which would have held half a dozen of her. Demure in it she looked, like an agreeable reminiscence, alive, and a little uptodate, of the women of long ago. Her dove grey eyes seemed to perceive so much more than they cared to show. How is it that you have forgotten that you asked me to come?didnt you mean it? Of course I meant it. Then how is it youve forgotten? I didnt forget. Dont tell fibs.Something is the mattertell me what it is.Is it that I am too early? Nothing of the sortyou couldnt be too early. Thank you.When you pay a compliment, even so neat an one as that, sometimes, you should look as if you meant it.It is earlyI know its early, but afterwards I want you to come to lunch. I told aunt that I would bring you back with me. You are much better to me than I deserve. Perhaps. A tone came into her voice which was almost pathetic. I think that to some men women are almost better than they deserve. I dont know why. I suppose it pleases them. It is odd. There was a different intonationa dryness. Have you forgotten what I came for? Not a bit of itI am not quite the brute I seem. You came to see an illustration of that pleasant little fancy of mine for slaughtering my fellows. The fact is, Im hardly in a mood for that just nowIve been illustrating it too much already. What do you mean? Well, for one thing its been murdering Lessinghams cat. Mr. Lessinghams cat? Then it almost murdered Percy Woodville. Mr. Atherton!I wish you wouldnt talk like that. Its a fact. It was a question of a little matter in a wrong place, and, if it hadnt been for something very like a miracle, hed be dead. I wish you wouldnt have anything to do with such thingsI hate them. I stared. Hate them?I thought youd come to see an illustration. And pray what was your notion of an illustration? Well, another cat would have had to be killed, at least. And do you suppose that I would have sat still while a cat was being killed for myedification? It neednt necessarily have been a cat, but something would have had to be killedhow are you going to illustrate the deathdealing propensities of a weapon of that sort without it? Is it possible that you imagine that I came here to see something killed? Then for what did you come? I do not know what there was about the question which was startling, but as soon as it was out, she went a fiery red. Because I was a fool. I was bewildered. Either she had got out of the wrong side of bed, or I hador we both had. Here she was, assailing me, hammer and tongs, so far as I could see, for absolutely nothing. You are pleased to be satirical at my expense. I should not dare. Your detection of me would be so painfully rapid. I was in no mood for jangling. I turned a little away from her. Immediately she was at my elbow. Mr. Atherton? Miss Grayling. Are you cross with me? Why should I be? If it pleases you to laugh at my stupidity you are completely justified. But you are not stupid. No?Nor you satirical. You are not stupidyou know you are not stupid; it was only stupidity on my part to pretend that you were. It is very good of you to say so.But I fear that I am an indifferent host. Although you would not care for an illustration, there may be other things which you might find amusing. Why do you keep on snubbing me? I keep on snubbing you! You are always snubbing meyou know you are. Sometimes I feel as if I hated you. Miss Grayling! I do! I do! I do! After all, it is only natural. That is how you talkas if I were a child, and you wereoh I dont know what.Well, Mr. Atherton, I am sorry to be obliged to leave you. I have enjoyed my visit very much. I only hope I have not seemed too intrusive. She flouncedflounce was the only appropriate word!out of the room before I could stop her. I caught her in the passage. Miss Grayling, I entreat you Pray do not entreat me, Mr. Atherton. Standing still she turned to me. I would rather show myself to the door as I showed myself in, but, if that is impossible, might I ask you not to speak to me between this and the street? The hint was broad enough, even for me. I escorted her through the hall without a wordin perfect silence she shook the dust of my abode from off her feet. I had made a pretty mess of things. I felt it as I stood on the top of the steps and watched her goingshe was walking off at four miles an hour; I had not even ventured to ask to be allowed to call a hansom. It was beginning to occur to me that this was a case in which another blow upon the river might be, to say the least of it, advisableand I was just returning into the house with the intention of putting myself into my flannels, when a cab drew up, and old Lindon got out of it. XX. A Heavy Father Mr. Lindon was excitedthere is no mistaking it when he is, because with him excitement means perspiration, and as soon as he was out of the cab he took off his hat and began to wipe the lining. Atherton, I want to speak to youmost particularlysomewhere in private. I took him into my laboratory. It is my rule to take no one there; it is a workshop, not a playroomthe place is private; but, recently, my rules had become dead letters. Directly he was inside, Lindon began puffing and stewing, wiping his forehead, throwing out his chest, as if he were oppressed by a sense of his own importance. Then he started off talking at the top of his voiceand it is not a low one either. Atherton, IIve always looked on you as aa kind of a son. Thats very kind of you. Ive always regarded you as aa levelheaded fellow; a man from whom sound advice can be obtained when sound adviceisis most to be desired. That also is very kind of you. And therefore I make no apology for coming to you atat what may be regarded as aa strictly domestic crisis; at a moment in the history of the Lindons when delicacy and common sense areare essentially required. This time I contented myself with nodding. Already I perceived what was coming; somehow, when I am with a man I feel so much more clearheaded than I do when I am with a womanrealise so much better the nature of the ground on which I am standing. What do you know of this man Lessingham? I knew it was coming. What all the world knows. And what does all the world know of him?I ask you that! A flashy, plausible, shallowpated, carpetbaggerthat is what all the world knows of him. The mans a political adventurerhe snatches a precarious, and criminal, notoriety, by trading on the follies of his fellowcountrymen. He is devoid of decency, destitute of principle, and impervious to all the feelings of a gentleman. What do you know of him besides this? I am not prepared to admit that I do know that. Oh yes you do!dont talk nonsense!you choose to screen the fellow! I say what I meanI always have said, and I always shall say.What do you know of him outside politicsof his familyof his private life? Wellnot very much. Of course you dont!nor does anybody else! The mans a mushroomor a toadstool, rather!sprung up in the course of a single night, apparently out of some dirty ditch.Why, sir, not only is he without ordinary intelligence, he is even without a Brummagen substitute for manners. He had worked himself into a state of heat in which his countenance presented a not too agreeable assortment of scarlets and purples. He flung himself into a chair, threw his coat wide open, and his arms too, and started off again. The family of the Lindons is, at this moment, represented by aa young womanby my daughter, sir. She represents me, and its her duty to represent me adequatelyadequately, sir! And whats more, between ourselves, sir, its her duty to marry. My propertys my own, and I wouldnt have it pass to either of my confounded brothers on any account. Theyre next door to fools, andand they dont represent me in any possible sense of the word. My daughter, sir, can marry whom she pleaseswhom she pleases! Theres no one in England, peer or commoner, who would not esteem it an honour to have her for his wifeIve told her soyes, sir, Ive told her, though youyoud think that she, of all people in the world, wouldnt require telling. Yet what do you think she does? Sheshe actually carries on what II cant help calling aa compromising acquaintance with this man Lessingham! No! But I say yes!and I wish to heaven I didnt. IIve warned her against the scoundrel more than once; IIve told her to cut him dead. And yet, asas you saw yourself, last night, inin the face of the assembled House of Commons, after that twaddling claptrap speech of his, in which there was not one sound sentiment, nor an idea whichwhich would hold water, she positively went away with him, inin the most ostentatious andand disgraceful fashion, onon his arm, andand actually snubbed her father.It is monstrous that a parenta father!should be subjected to such treatment by his child. The poor old boy polished his brow with his pockethandkerchief. When I got home II told her what I thought of her, I promise you thatand I told her what I thought of himI didnt mince my words with her. There are occasions when plain speaking is demandedand that was one. I positively forbade her to speak to the fellow again, or to recognise him if she met him in the street. I pointed out to her, with perfect candour, that the fellow was an infernal scoundrelthat and nothing else!and that he would bring disgrace on whoever came into contact with him, even with the end of a barge pole.And what do you think she said? She promised to obey you, I make no doubt. Did she, sir!By gad, did she!That shows how much you know her!She said, and, by gad, by her manner, andand the way she went on, youdyoud have thought that she was the parent and I was the childshe said that II grieved her, that she was disappointed in me, that times have changedyes, sir, she said that times have changed!that, nowadays, parents werent Russian autocratsno, sir, not Russian autocrats!thatthat she was sorry she couldnt oblige meyes, sir, that was how she put itshe was sorry she couldnt oblige me, but it was altogether out of the question to suppose that she could put a period to a friendship which she valued, simply on account ofof my unreasonable prejudicesandandand, in short, sheshe told me to go the devil, sir! And did you I was on the point of asking him if he wentbut I checked myself in time. Let us look at the matter as men of the world. What do you know against Lessingham, apart from his politics? Thats just itI know nothing. In a sense, isnt that in his favour? I dont see how you make that out. II dont mind telling you that IIve had inquiries made. Hes not been in the House six yearsthis is his second Parliamenthes jumped up like a jackinthebox. His first constituency was Harwichtheyve got him still, and much good may he do em!but how he came to stand for the placeor who, or what, or where he was before he stood for the place, no one seems to have the faintest notion. Hasnt he been a great traveller? I never heard of it. Not in the East? Has he told you so? NoI was only wondering. Well, it seems to me that to find out that nothing is known against him is something in his favour! My dear Sydney, dont talk nonsense. What it proves is simplythat hes a nothing and a nobody. Had he been anything or anyone, something would have been known about him, either for or against. I dont want my daughter to marry a man whowhowhos shot up through a trap, simply because nothing is known against him. Hahang me, if I wouldnt ten times sooner she should marry you. When he said that, my heart leaped in my bosom. I had to turn away. I am afraid that is out of the question. He stopped in his tramping, and looked at me askance. Why? I felt that, if I was not careful, I should be done forand, probably, in his present mood, Marjorie too. My dear Lindon, I cannot tell you how grateful I am to you for your suggestion, but I can only repeat thatunfortunately, anything of the kind is out of the question. I dont see why. Perhaps not. Youyoure a pretty lot, upon my word! Im afraid we are. II want you to tell her that Lessingham is a damned scoundrel. I see.But I would suggest that if I am to use the influence with which you credit me to the best advantage, or to preserve a shred of it, I had hardly better state the fact quite so bluntly as that. I dont care how you state itstate it as you like. Onlyonly I want you to soak her mind with a loathing of the fellow; III want you to paint him in his true colours; ininin fact, II want you to choke him off. While he still struggled with his words, and with the perspiration on his brow, Edwards entered. I turned to him. What is it? Miss Lindon, sir, wishes to see you particularly, and at once. At that moment I found the announcement a trifle perplexingit delighted Lindon. He began to stutter and to stammer. Tthe very thing!ccouldnt have been better!show her in here! Hhide me somewhereI dont care wherebehind that screen! Yyou use your influence with her;ggive her a good talking to;ttell her what Ive told you; and atat the critical moment Ill come in, and thenthen if we cant manage her between us, itll be a wonder. The proposition staggered me. But, my dear Mr. Lindon, I fear that I cannot He cut me short. Here she comes! Ere I could stop him he was behind the screenI had not seen him move with such agility before!and before I could expostulate Marjorie was in the room. Something which was in her bearing, in her face, in her eyes, quickened the beating of my pulsesshe looked as if something had come into her life, and taken the joy clean out of it. XXI. The Terror in the Night Sydney! she cried, Im so glad that I can see you! She might bebut, at that moment, I could scarcely assert that I was a sharer of her joy. I told you that if trouble overtook me I should come to you, andIm in trouble now. Such strange trouble. So was Iand in perplexity as well. An idea occurred to meI would outwit her eavesdropping father. Come with me into the housetell me all about it there. She refused to budge. NoI will tell you all about it here. She looked about heras it struck me queerly. This is just the sort of place in which to unfold a tale like mine. It looks uncanny. But But me no buts! Sydney, dont torture melet me stop here where I amdont you see Im haunted? She had seated herself. Now she stood up, holding her hands out in front of her in a state of extraordinary agitation, her manner as wild as her words. Why are you staring at me like that? Do you think Im mad?I wonder if Im going mad.Sydney, do people suddenly go mad? Youre a bit of everything, youre a bit of a doctor too, feel my pulsethere it is!tell me if Im ill! I felt her pulseit did not need its swift beating to inform me that fever of some sort was in her veins. I gave her something in a glass. She held it up to the level of her eyes. Whats this? Its a decoction of my own. You might not think it, but my brain sometimes gets into a whirl. I use it as a sedative. It will do you good. She drained the glass.

Its done me good alreadyI believe it has; thats being something like a doctor.Well, Sydney, the storm has almost burst. Last night papa forbade me to speak to Paul Lessinghamby way of a prelude. Exactly. Mr. Lindon Yes, Mr. Lindonthats papa. I fancy we almost quarrelled. I know papa said some surprising thingsbut its a way he hashes apt to say surprising things. Hes the best father in the world, butits not in his nature to like a really clever person; your good high dried old Tory never can;Ive always thought that thats why hes so fond of you. Thank you, I presume that is the reason, though it had not occurred to me before. Since her entry, I had, to the best of my ability, been turning the position over in my mind. I came to the conclusion that, all things considered, her father had probably as much right to be a sharer of his daughters confidence as I had, even from the vantage of the screenand that for him to hear a few home truths proceeding from her lips might serve to clear the air. From such a clearance the lady would not be likely to come off worst. I had not the faintest inkling of what was the actual purport of her visit. She started off, as it seemed to me, at a tangent. Did I tell you last night about what took place yesterday morningabout the adventure of my finding the man? Not a word. I believe I meant toIm half disposed to think hes brought me trouble. Isnt there some superstition about evil befalling whoever shelters a homeless stranger? Well hope not, for humanitys sake. I fancy there isI feel sure there is.Anyhow, listen to my story. Yesterday morning, before breakfastto be accurate, between eight and nine, I looked out of the window, and I saw a crowd in the street. I sent Peter out to see what was the matter. He came back and said there was a man in a fit. I went out to look at the man in the fit. I found, lying on the ground, in the centre of the crowd, a man who, but for the tattered remnants of what had apparently once been a cloak, would have been stark naked. He was covered with dust, and dirt, and blooda dreadful sight. As you know, I have had my smattering of instruction in First Aid to the Injured, and that kind of thing, so, as no one else seemed to have any sense, and the man seemed as good as dead, I thought I would try my hand. Directly I knelt down beside him, what do you think he said? Thank you. Nonsense.He said, in such a queer, hollow, croaking voice, Paul Lessingham. I was dreadfully startled. To hear a perfect stranger, a man in his condition, utter that name in such a fashionto me, of all people in the world!took me aback. The policeman who was holding his head remarked, Thats the first time hes opened his mouth. I thought he was dead. He opened his mouth a second time. A convulsive movement went all over him, and he exclaimed, with the strangest earnestness, and so loudly that you might have heard him at the other end of the street, Be warned, Paul Lessingham, be warned! It was very silly of me, perhaps, but I cannot tell you how his words, and his mannerthe two togetheraffected me.Well, the long and the short of it was, that I had him taken into the house, and washed, and put to bedand I had the doctor sent for. The doctor could make nothing of it at all. He reported that the man seemed to be suffering from some sort of cataleptic seizureI could see that he thought it likely to turn out almost as interesting a case as I did. Did you acquaint your father with the addition to his household? She looked at me, quizzically. You see, when one has such a father as mine one cannot tell him everything, at once. There are occasions on which one requires time. I felt that this would be wholesome hearing for old Lindon. Last night, after papa and I had exchanged our little courtesieswhich, it is to be hoped, were to papas satisfaction, since they were not to be mineI went to see the patient. I was told that he had neither eaten nor drunk, moved nor spoken. But, so soon as I approached his bed, he showed signs of agitation. He half raised himself upon his pillow, and he called out, as if he had been addressing some large assemblyI cant describe to you the dreadful something which was in his voice, and on his facePaul Lessingham!Beware!The Beetle! When she said that, I was startled. Are you sure those were the words he used? Quite sure. Do you think I could mistake themespecially after what has happened since? I hear them singing in my earsthey haunt me all the time. She put her hands up to her face, as if to veil something from her eyes. I was becoming more and more convinced that there was something about the Apostles connection with his Oriental friend which needed probing to the bottom. What sort of a man is he to look at, this patient of yours? I had my doubts as to the gentlemans identitywhich her words dissolved; only, however, to increase my mystification in another direction. He seems to be between thirty and forty. He has light hair, and straggling sandy whiskers. He is so thin as to be nothing but skin and bonethe doctor says its a case of starvation. You say he has light hair, and sandy whiskers. Are you sure the whiskers are real? She opened her eyes. Of course theyre real. Why shouldnt they be real? Does he strike you as being aforeigner? Certainly not. He looks like an Englishman, and he speaks like one, and not, I should say, of the lowest class. It is true that there is a very curious, a weird, quality in his voice, what I have heard of it, but it is not unEnglish. If it is catalepsy he is suffering from, then it is a kind of catalepsy I never heard of. Have you ever seen a clairvoyant? I nodded. He seems to me to be in a state of clairvoyance. Of course the doctor laughed when I told him so, but we know what doctors are, and I still believe that he is in some condition of the kind. When he said that last night he struck me as being under what those sort of people call influence, and that whoever had him under influence was forcing him to speak against his will, for the words came from his lips as if they had been wrung from him in agony. Knowing what I did know, that struck me as being rather a remarkable conclusion for her to have reached, by the exercise of her own unaided powers of intuitionbut I did not choose to let her know I thought so. My dear Marjorie!you who pride yourself on having your imagination so strictly under control!on suffering it to take no errant flights! Is not the fact that I do so pride myself proof that I am not likely to make assertions wildlyproof, at any rate, to you? Listen to me. When I left that unfortunate creatures roomI had had a nurse sent for, I left him in her chargeand reached my own bedroom, I was possessed by a profound conviction that some appalling, intangible, but very real danger, was at that moment threatening Paul. Rememberyou had had an exciting evening; and a discussion with your father. Your patients words came as a climax. That is what I told myselfor, rather, that was what I tried to tell myself; because, in some extraordinary fashion, I had lost the command of my powers of reflection. Precisely. It was not preciselyor, at least, it was not precisely in the sense you mean. You may laugh at me, Sydney, but I had an altogether indescribable feeling, a feeling which amounted to knowledge, that I was in the presence of the supernatural. Nonsense! It was not nonsenseI wish it had been nonsense. As I have said, I was conscious, completely conscious, that some frightful peril was assailing Paul. I did not know what it was, but I did know that it was something altogether awful, of which merely to think was to shudder. I wanted to go to his assistance, I tried to, more than once; but I couldnt, and I knew that I couldntI knew that I couldnt move as much as a finger to help him.Stoplet me finish!I told myself that it was absurd, but it wouldnt do; absurd or not, there was the terror with me in the room. I knelt down, and I prayed, but the words wouldnt come. I tried to ask God to remove this burden from my brain, but my longings wouldnt shape themselves into words, and my tongue was palsied. I dont know how long I struggled, but, at last, I came to understand that, for some cause, God had chosen to leave me to fight the fight alone. So I got up, and undressed, and went to bedand that was the worst of all. I had sent my maid away in the first rush of my terror, afraid, and, I think, ashamed, to let her see my fear. Now I would have given anything to summon her back again, but I couldnt do it, I couldnt even ring the bell. So, as I say, I got into bed. She paused, as if to collect her thoughts. To listen to her words, and to think of the suffering which they meant to her, was almost more than I could endure. I would have thrown away the world to have been able to take her in my arms, and soothe her fears. I knew her to be, in general, the least hysterical of young women; little wont to become the prey of mere delusions; and, incredible though it sounded, I had an innate conviction that, even in its wildest periods, her story had some sort of basis in solid fact. What that basis amounted to, it would be my business, at any and every cost, quickly to determine. You know how you have always laughed at me because of my objection tocockroaches, and how, in spring, the neighbourhood of Maybugs has always made me uneasy. As soon as I got into bed I felt that something of the kind was in the room. Something of what kind? Some kind ofbeetle. I could hear the whirring of its wings; I could hear its droning in the air; I knew that it was hovering above my head; that it was coming lower and lower, nearer and nearer. I hid myself; I covered myself all over with the clothesthen I felt it bumping against the coverlet. And, Sydney! She drew closer. Her blanched cheeks and frightened eyes made my heart bleed. Her voice became but an echo of itself. It followed me. Marjorie! It got into the bed. You imagined it. I didnt imagine it. I heard it crawl along the sheets, till it found a way between them, and then it crawled towards me. And I felt itagainst my face.And its there now. Where? She raised the forefinger of her left hand. There!Cant you hear it droning? She listened, intently. I listened too. Oddly enough, at that instant the droning of an insect did become audible. Its only a bee, child, which has found its way through the open window. I wish it were only a bee, I wish it were.Sydney, dont you feel as if you were in the presence of evil? Dont you want to get away from it, back into the presence of God? Marjorie! Pray, Sydney, pray!I cant!I dont know why, but I cant! She flung her arms about my neck, and pressed herself against me in paroxysmal agitation. The violence of her emotion bade fair to unman me too. It was so unlike Marjorieand I would have given my life to save her from a toothache. She kept repeating her own wordsas if she could not help it. Pray, Sydney, pray! At last I did as she wished me. At least, there is no harm in prayingI never heard of its bringing hurt to anyone. I repeated aloud the Lords Prayerthe first time for I know not how long. As the divine sentences came from my lips, hesitatingly enough, I make no doubt, her tremors ceased. She became calmer. Until, as I reached the last great petition, Deliver us from evil, she loosed her arms from about my neck, and dropped upon her knees, close to my feet. And she joined me in the closing words, as a sort of chorus. For Thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, forever and ever. Amen. When the prayer was ended, we both of us were still. She with her head bowed, and her hands clasped; and I with something tugging at my heartstrings which I had not felt there for many and many a year, almost as if it had been my mothers hand;I daresay that sometimes she does stretch out her hand, from her place among the angels, to touch my heartstrings, and I know nothing of it all the while. As the silence still continued, I chanced to glance up, and there was old Lindon peeping at us from his hidingplace behind the screen. The look of amazed perplexity which was on his big red face struck me with such a keen sense of the incongruous that it was all I could do to keep from laughter. Apparently the sight of us did nothing to lighten the fog which was in his brain, for he stammered out, in what was possibly intended for a whisper, Isis she mmad? The whisperif it was meant for a whisperwas more than sufficiently audible to catch his daughters ears. She startedraised her headsprang to her feetturnedand saw her father. Papa! Immediately her sire was seized with an access of stuttering. Wwwhat the ddevils thethe mmmeaning of this? Her utterance was clear enoughI fancy her parent found it almost painfully clear. Rather it is for me to ask, what is the meaning of this! Is it possible, that, all the time, you have actually been concealed behind thatscreen? Unless I am mistaken the old gentleman cowered before the directness of his daughters gazeand endeavoured to conceal the fact by an explosion of passion. Dodont you sspeak to me lilike that, you unundutiful girl! IIm your father! You certainly are my father; though I was unaware until now that my father was capable of playing the part of eavesdropper. Rage rendered him speechlessor, at any rate, he chose to let us believe that that was the determining cause of his continuing silence. So Marjorie turned to meand, on the whole, I had rather she had not. Her manner was very different from what it had been just nowit was more than civil, it was freezing. Am I to understand, Mr. Atherton, that this has been done with your cognisance? That while you suffered me to pour out my heart to you unchecked, you were aware, all the time, that there was a listener behind the screen? I became keenly aware, on a sudden, that I had borne my share in playing her a very shabby trickI should have liked to throw old Lindon through the window. The thing was not of my contriving. Had I had the opportunity I would have compelled Mr. Lindon to face you when you came in. But your distress caused me to lose my balance. And you will do me the justice to remember that I endeavoured to induce you to come with me into another room. But I do not seem to remember your hinting at there being any particular reason why I should have gone. You never gave me a chance. Sydney!I had not thought you would have played me such a trick! When she said thatin such a tone!the woman whom I loved!I could have hammered my head against the wall. The hound I was to have treated her so scurvily! Perceiving I was crushed she turned again to face her father, cool, calm, stately;she was, on a sudden, once more, the Marjorie with whom I was familiar. The demeanour of parent and child was in striking contrast. If appearances went for aught, the odds were heavy that in any encounter which might be coming the senior would suffer. I hope, papa, that you are going to tell me that there has been some curious mistake, and that nothing was farther from your intention than to listen at a keyhole. What would you have thoughtand saidif I had attempted to play the spy on you? And I have always understood that men were so particular on points of honour. Old Lindon was still hardly fit to do much else than spluttercertainly not qualified to chop phrases with this sharptongued maiden. Ddont talk to me lilike that, girl!II believe youre sstark mad! He turned to me. Wwhat was that tomfoolery she was talking to you about? To what do you allude? About a rubrubbishing bbeetle, and ggoodness alone knows whatddiseased and mmorbid imaginationrreared on the literature of the gutter!I never thought that a child of mine could have ssunk to such a depth!Now, Atherton, I ask you to ttell me franklywhat do you think of a child who behaves as she has done? Who ttakes a nameless vagabond into the house and conconceals his presence from her father? And mmark the sequel! even the vagabond warns her against the rrascal Lessingham!Now, Atherton, tell me what you think of a girl who behaves like that? I shrugged my shoulders. II know very well what you ddo think of herdont be afraid to say it out because shes present. No; Sydney, dont be afraid. I saw that her eyes were dancingin a manner of speaking, her looks brightened under the sunshine of her fathers displeasure. Lets hear what you think of her as aas a mman of the world! Pray, Sydney, do! What you feel for her in youryour heart of hearts! Yes, Sydney, what do you feel for me in your heart of hearts? The baggage beamed with heartless sweetnessshe was making a mock of me. Her father turned as if he would have rent her. Ddont you speak until youre spoken to! Atherton, II hope Im not deceived in you; II hope youre the man II took you for; that youre willing andand ready to play the part of aaan honest friend to this mismisguided simpleton. Tthis is not the time for mincing words, itits the time for candid speech. Tell thisthis weak minded young woman, right out, whether this man Lessingham is, or is not, a damned scoundrel. Papa!Do you really think that Sydneys opinion, or your opinion, is likely to alter facts? Do you hear, Atherton, tell this wretched girl the truth! My dear Mr. Lindon, I have already told you that I know nothing either for or against Mr. Lessingham except what is known to all the world. Exactlyand all the world knows him to be a miserable adventurer who is scheming to entrap my daughter. I am bound to say, since you press me, that your language appears to me to be unnecessarily strong. Atherton, IIm ashamed of you! You see, Sydney, even papa is ashamed of you; now you are outside the pale.My dear papa, if you will allow me to speak, I will tell you what I know to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.That Mr. Lessingham is a man with great gifts goes without sayingpermit me, papa! He is a man of genius. He is a man of honour. He is a man of the loftiest ambitions, of the highest aims. He has dedicated his whole life to the improvement of the conditions amidst which the less fortunate of his fellow countrymen are at present compelled to exist. That seems to me to be an object well worth having. He has asked me to share his lifework, and I have told him that I will; when, and where, and how, he wants me to. And I will. I do not suppose his life has been free from peccadilloes. I have no delusion on the point. What mans life has? Who among men can claim to be without sin? Even the members of our highest families sometimes hide behind screens. But I know that he is, at least, as good a man as I ever met, I am persuaded that I shall never meet a better; and I thank God that I have found favour in his eyes.Goodbye, Sydney.I suppose I shall see you again, papa. With the merest inclination of her head to both of us she straightway left the room. Lindon would have stopped her. Sstay, yyyyou he stuttered. But I caught him by the arm. If you will be advised by me, you will let her go. No good purpose will be served by a multiplication of words. Atherton, IIm disappointed in you. Youyou havent behaved as I expected. II havent received from you the assistance which I looked for. My dear Lindon, it seems to me that your method of diverting the young lady from the path which she has set herself to tread is calculated to send her furiously along it. Cconfound the women! cconfound the women! I dont mind telling you, in cconfidence, that atat times, her mother was the devil, and Ill beIll be hanged if her daughter isnt worse.What was the tomfoolery she was talking to you about? Is she mad? NoI dont think shes mad. I never heard such stuff, it made my blood run cold to hear her. Whats the matter with the girl? Wellyou must excuse my saying that I dont fancy you quite understand women. II dontand III dont want to either. I hesitated; then resolved on a taradiddlein Marjories interest. Marjorie is highstrungextremely sensitive. Her imagination is quickly aflame. Perhaps, last night, you drove her as far as was safe. You heard for yourself how, in consequence, she suffered. You dont want people to say you have driven her into a lunatic asylum. Igood heavens, no! IIll send for the doctor directly I get homeIIll have the best opinion in town. Youll do nothing of the kindyoull only make her worse. What you have to do is to be patient with her, and let her have peace.As for this affair of Lessinghams, I have a suspicion that it may not be all such plain sailing as she supposes. What do you mean? I mean nothing. I only wish you to understand that until you hear from me again you had better let matters slide. Give the girl her head. Give the girl her head! Hhavent II ggiven the ggirl her hhead all her llife! He looked at his watch. Why, the days half gone! He began scurrying towards the front door, I following at his heels. Ive got a committee meeting on at the clubmmost important! For weeks theyve been giving us the worst food you ever tasted in your lifepplayed havoc with my digestion, and IIm going to tell them ifthings arent changed, theytheyll have to pay my doctors bills.As for that man, Lessingham As he spoke, he himself opened the hall door, and there, standing on the step was that man Lessingham himself. Lindon was a picture. The Apostle was as cool as a cucumber. He held out his hand. Good morning, Mr. Lindon. What delightful weather we are having. Lindon put his hand behind his backand behaved as stupidly as he very well could have done. You will understand, Mr. Lessingham, that, in future, I dont know you, and that I shall decline to recognise you anywhere; and that what I say applies equally to any member of my family. With his hat very much on the back of his head he went down the steps like an inflated turkeycock. XXII. The Haunted Man To have received the cut discourteous from his future fatherinlaw might have been the most commonplace of incidentsLessingham evinced not a trace of discomposure. So far as I could judge, he took no notice of the episode whatever, behaving exactly as if nothing had happened. He merely waited till Mr. Lindon was well off the steps; then, turning to me, he placidly observed, Interrupting you again, you see.May I? The sight of him had set up such a turmoil in my veins, that, for the moment, I could not trust myself to speak. I felt, acutely, that an explanation with him was, of all things, the thing most to be desiredand that quickly. Providence could not have thrown him more opportunely in the way. If, before he went away, we did not understand each other a good deal more clearly, upon certain points, the fault should not be mine. Without a responsive word, turning on my heels, I led the way into the laboratory. Whether he noticed anything peculiar in my demeanour, I could not tell. Within he looked about him with that purely facial smile, the sight of which had always engendered in me a certain distrust of him. Do you always receive visitors in here? By no means. What is this? Stooping down, he picked up something from the floor. It was a ladys pursea gorgeous affair, of crimson leather and gleaming gold. Whether it was Marjories or Miss Graylings I could not tell. He watched me as I examined it. Is it yours? No. It is not mine. Placing his hat and umbrella on one chair, he placed himself upon anothervery leisurely. Crossing his legs, laying his folded hands upon his knees, he sat and looked at me. I was quite conscious of his observation; but endured it in silence, being a little wishful that he should begin. Presently he had, as I suppose, enough of looking at me, and spoke. Atherton, what is the matter with you?Have I done something to offend you too? Why do you ask? Your manner seems a little singular. You think so? I do. What have you come to see me about? Just now, nothing.I like to know where I stand. His manner was courteous, easy, even graceful. I was outmanoeuvred. I understood the man sufficiently well to be aware that when once he was on the defensive, the first blow would have to come from me. So I struck it. I, also, like to know where I stand.Lessingham, I am aware, and you know that I am aware, that you have made certain overtures to Miss Lindon. That is a fact in which I am keenly interested. Ashow? The Lindons and the Athertons are not the acquaintances of one generation only. Marjorie Lindon and I have been friends since childhood. She looks upon me as a brother As a brother? As a brother. Yes. Mr. Lindon regains me as a son. He has given me his confidence; as I believe you are aware, Marjorie has given me hers; and now I want you to give me yours. What do you want to know? I wish to explain my position before I say what I have to say, because I want you to understand me clearly.I believe, honestly, that the thing I most desire in this world is to see Marjorie Lindon happy. If I thought she would be happy with you, I should say, God speed you both! and I should congratulate you with all my heart, because I think that you would have won the best girl in the whole world to be your wife. I think so too. But, before I did that, I should have to see, at least, some reasonable probability that she would be happy with you. Why should she not? Will you answer a question? What is the question? What is the story in your life of which you stand in such hideous terror? There was a perceptible pause before he answered. Explain yourself. No explanation is neededyou know perfectly well what I mean. You credit me with miraculous acumen. Dont juggle, Lessinghambe frank! The frankness should not be all on one side.There is that in your frankness, although you may be unconscious of it, which some men might not unreasonably resent. Do you resent it? That depends. If you are arrogating to yourself the right to place yourself between Miss Lindon and me, I do resent it, strongly. Answer my question! I answer no question which is addressed to me in such a tone. He was as calm as you please. I recognised that already I was in peril of losing my temperwhich was not at all what I desired. I eyed him intently, he returning me look for look. His countenance betrayed no sign of a guilty conscience; I had not seen him more completely at his ease. He smiledfacially, and also, as it seemed to me, a little derisively. I am bound to admit that his bearing showed not the faintest shadow of resentment, and that in his eyes there was a gentleness, a softness, which I had not observed in them beforeI could almost have suspected him of being sympathetic. In this matter, you must know, I stand in the place of Mr. Lindon. Well? Surely you must understand that before anyone is allowed to think of marriage with Marjorie Lindon he will have to show that his past, as the advertisements have it, will bear the fullest investigation. Is that so?Will your past bear the fullest investigation? I winced. At any rate, it is known to all the world. Is it?Forgive me if I say, I doubt it. I doubt if, of any wise man, that can be said with truth. In all our lives there are episodes which we keep to ourselves. I felt that that was so true that, for the instant, I hardly knew what to say. But there are episodes and episodes, and when it comes to a man being haunted one draws the line. Haunted? As you are. He got up. Atherton, I think that I understand you, but I fear that you do not understand me. He went to where a selfacting mercurial airpump was standing on a shelf. What is this curious arrangement of glass tubes and bulbs? I do not think that you do understand me, or you would know that I am in no mood to be trifled with. Is it some kind of an exhauster? My dear Lessingham, I am entirely at your service. I intend to have an answer to my question before you leave this room, but, in the meanwhile, your convenience is mine. There are some very interesting things here which you might care to see. Marvellous, is it not, how the human intellect progressesfrom conquest unto conquest. Among the ancients the progression had proceeded farther than with us. In what respect? For instance, in the affair of the Apotheosis of the Beetle;I saw it take place last night. Where? Herewithin a few feet of where you are standing. Are you serious? Perfectly. What did you see? I saw the legendary Apotheosis of the Beetle performed, last night, before my eyes, with a gaudy magnificence at which the legends never hinted. That is odd. I once thought that I saw something of the kind myself. So I understand. From whom? From a friend of yours. From a friend of mine?Are you sure it was from a friend of mine? The mans attempt at coolness did him creditbut it did not deceive me. That he thought I was endeavouring to bluff him out of his secret I perceived quite clearly; that it was a secret which he would only render with his life I was beginning to suspect. Had it not been for Marjorie, I should have cared nothinghis affairs were his affairs; though I realised perfectly well that there was something about the man which, from the scientific explorers point of view, might be well worth finding out. Still, as I say, if it had not been for Marjorie, I should have let it go; but, since she was so intimately concerned in it, I wondered more and more what it could be. My attitude towards what is called the supernatural is an open one. That all things are possible I unhesitatingly believeI have, even in my short time, seen so many socalled impossibilities proved possible. That we know everything, I doubt;that our greatgreatgreatgreatgrandsires, our forebears of thousands of years ago, of the extinct civilisations, knew more on some subjects than we do, I think is, at least, probable. All the legends can hardly be false. Because men claimed to be able to do things in those days which we cannot do, and which we do not know how they did we profess to think that their claims are finally dismissed by exclaiminglies! But it is not so sure. For my part, what I had seen I had seen. I had seen some devils trick played before my very eyes. Some trick of the same sort seemed to have been played upon my MarjorieI repeat that I write my Marjorie because, to me, she will always be my Marjorie! It had driven her half out of her senses. As I looked at Lessingham, I seemed to see her at his side, as I had seen her not long ago, with her white, drawn face, and staring eyes, dumb with an agony of fear. Her life was bidding fair to be knit with hiswhat Upas tree of horror was rooted in his very bones? The thought that her sweet purity was likely to be engulfed in a devils slough in which he was wallowing was not to be endured. As I realised that the man was more than my match at the game which I was playingin which such vital interests were at stake!my hands itched to clutch him by the throat, and try another way. Doubtless my face revealed my feelings, because, presently, he said, Are you aware how strangely you are looking at me, Atherton? Were my countenance a mirror I think you would be surprised to see in it your own. I drew back from himI daresay, sullenly. Not so surprised as, yesterday morning, you would have been to have seen yoursat the mere sight of a pictured scarab. How easily you quarrel. I do not quarrel. Then perhaps its I. If that is so, then, at once, the quarrels endedpouf! its done. Mr. Lindon, I fear, because, politically, we differ, regards me as anathema. Has he put some of his spirit into you?You are a wiser man. I am aware that you are an adept with words. But this is a case in which words only will not serve. Then what will serve? I am myself beginning to wonder. And I. As you so courteously suggest, I believe I am wiser than Lindon. I do not care for your politics, or for what you call your politics, one fig. I do not care if you are as other men are, as I amnot unspotted from the world! But I do care if you are leprous. And I believe you are.

Atherton! Ever since I have known you I have been conscious of there being something about you which I found it difficult to diagnose;in an unwholesome sense, something out of the common, nonnatural; an atmosphere of your own. Events, so far as you are concerned, have, during the last few days moved quickly. They have thrown an uncomfortably lurid light on that peculiarity of yours which I have noticed. Unless you can explain them to my satisfaction, you will withdraw your pretensions to Miss Lindons hand, or I shall place certain facts before that lady, and, if necessary, publish them to the world. He grew visibly paler but he smiledfacially. You have your own way of conducting a conversation, Mr. Atherton.What are the events to whose rapid transit you are alluding? Who was the individual, practically stark naked, who came out of your house, in such singular fashion, at dead of night? Is that one of the facts with which you propose to tickle the public ear? Is that the only explanation which you have to offer? Proceed, for the present, with your indictment. I am not so unobservant as you appear to imagine. There were features about the episode which struck me forcibly at the time, and which have struck me more forcibly since. To suggest, as you did yesterday morning, that it was an ordinary case of burglary, or that the man was a lunatic, is an absurdity. Pardon meI did nothing of the kind. Then what do you suggest? I suggested, and do suggest, nothing. All the suggestions come from you. You went very much out of your way to beg me to keep the matter quiet. There is an appearance of suggestion about that. You take a jaundiced view of all my actions, Mr. Atherton. Nothing, to me, could seem more natural.Howeverproceed. He had his hands behind his back, and rested them on the edge of the table against which he was leaning. He was undoubtedly ill at ease; but so far I had not made the impression on him, either mentally or morally, which I desired. Who is your Oriental friend? I do not follow you. Are you sure? I am certain. Repeat your question. Who is your Oriental friend? I was not aware that I had one. Do you swear that? He laughed, a strange laugh. Do you seek to catch me tripping? You conduct your case with too much animus. You must allow me to grasp the exact purport of your inquiry before I can undertake to reply to it on oath. Are you not aware that at present there is in London an individual who claims to have had a very close, and a very curious, acquaintance with you in the East? I am not. That you swear? That I do swear. That is singular. Why is it singular? Because I fancy that that individual haunts you. Haunts me? Haunts you. You jest. You think so?You remember that picture of the scarabaeus which, yesterday morning, frightened you into a state of semiidiocy. You use strong language.I know what you allude to. Do you mean to say that you dont know that you were indebted for that to your Oriental friend? I dont understand you. Are you sure? Certainly I am sure.It occurs to me, Mr. Atherton, that an explanation is demanded from you rather than from me. Are you aware that the purport of my presence here is to ask you how that picture found its way into your room? It was projected by the Lord of the Beetle. The words were chance onesbut they struck a mark. The Lord He falteredand stopped. He showed signs of discomposure. I will be frank with yousince frankness is what you ask. His smile, that time, was obviously forced. Recently I have been the victim of delusions; there was a pause before the word, of a singular kind. I have feared that they were the result of mental overstrain. Is it possible that you can enlighten me as to their source? I was silent. He was putting a great strain upon himself, but the twitching of his lips betrayed him. A little more, and I should reach the other side of Mr. Lessinghamthe side which he kept hidden from the world. Who is thisindividual whom you speak of as myOriental friend? Being your friend, you should know better than I do. What sort of man is he to look at? I did not say it was a man. But I presume it is a man. I did not say so. He seemed, for a moment, to hold his breathand he looked at me with eyes which were not friendly. Then, with a display of selfcommand which did him credit, he drew himself upright, with an air of dignity which well became him. Atherton, consciously, or unconsciously, you are doing me a serious injustice. I do not know what conception it is which you have formed of me, or on what the conception is founded, but I protest that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, I am as reputable, as honest, and as clean a man as you are. But youre haunted. Haunted? He held himself erect, looking me straight in the face. Then a shiver went all over him; the muscles of his mouth twitched; and, in an instant, he was livid. He staggered against the table. Yes, God knows its trueIm haunted. So either youre mad, and therefore unfit to marry; or else youve done something which places you outside the tolerably generous boundaries of civilised society, and are therefore still more unfit to marry. Youre on the horns of a dilemma. IIm the victim of a delusion. What is the nature of the delusion? Does it take the shape of abeetle? Atherton! Without the slightest warning, he collapsedwas transformed; I can describe the change which took place in him in no other way. He sank in a heap on the floor; he held up his hands above his head; and he gibberedlike some frenzied animal. A more uncomfortable spectacle than he presented it would be difficult to find. I have seen it matched in the padded rooms of lunatic asylums, but nowhere else. The sight of him set every nerve of my body on edge. In Heavens name, what is the matter with you, man? Are you stark, staring mad? Heredrink this! Filling a tumbler with brandy, I forced it between his quivering fingers. Then it was some moments before I could get him to understand what it was I wanted him to do. When he did get the glass to his lips, he swallowed its contents as if they were so much water. By degrees his senses returned to him. He stood up. He looked about him, with a smile which was positively ghastly. Itsits a delusion. Its a very queer kind of a delusion, if it is. I eyed him, curiously. He was evidently making the most strenuous efforts to regain his selfcontrolall the while with that horrible smile about his lips. Atherton, youyou take me at an advantage. I was still. Whowhos your Oriental friend? My Oriental friend?you mean yours. I supposed, at first, that the individual in question was a man; but it appears that shes a woman. A woman?Oh.How do you mean? Well, the face is a mansof an uncommonly disagreeable type, of which the powers forbid that there are many!and the voice is a mansalso of a kind!but the body, as, last night, I chanced to discover, is a womans. That sounds very odd. He closed his eyes. I could see that his cheeks were clammy. Do youdo you believe in witchcraft? That depends. Have you heard of Obi? I have. I have been told that an Obeah man can put a spell upon a person which compels a person to see whatever hethe Obeah manmay please. Do you think thats possible? It is not a question to which I should be disposed to answer either yes or no. He looked at me out of his halfclosed eyes. It struck me that he was making conversationsaying anything for the sake of gaining time. I remember reading a book entitled Obscure Diseases of the Brain. It contained some interesting data on the subject of hallucinations. Possibly. Now, candidly, would you recommend me to place myself in the hands of a mental pathologist? I dont think that youre insane, if thats what you mean. No?That is good hearing. Of all diseases insanity is the most to be dreaded.Well, Atherton, Im keeping you. The truth is that, insane or not, I am very far from well. I think I must give myself a holiday. He moved towards his hat and umbrella. There is something else which you must do. What is that? You must resign your pretensions to Miss Lindons hand. My dear Atherton, if my health is really failing me, I shall resign everythingeverything! He repeated his own word with a little movement of his hands which was pathetic. Understand me, Lessingham. What else you do is no affair of mine. I am concerned only with Miss Lindon. You must give me your definite promise, before you leave this room, to terminate your engagement with her before tonight. His back was towards me. There will come a time when your conscience will prick you because of your treatment of me; when you will realise that I am the most unfortunate of men. I realise that now. It is because I realise it that I am so desirous that the shadow of your evil fortune shall not fall upon an innocent girl. He turned. Atherton, what is your actual position with reference to Marjorie Lindon? She regards me as a brother. And do you regard her as a sister? Are your sentiments towards her purely fraternal? You know that I love her. And do you suppose that my removal will clear the path for you? I suppose nothing of the kind. You may believe me or not, but my one desire is for her happiness, and surely, if you love her, that is your desire too. That is so. He paused. An expression of sadness stole over his face of which I had not thought it capable. That is so to an extent of which you do not dream. No man likes to have his hand forced, especially by one whom he regardsmay I say it?as a possible rival. But I will tell you this much. If the blight which has fallen on my life is likely to continue, I would not wishGod forbid that I should wish to join her fate with minenot for all that the world could offer me. He stopped. And I was still. Presently he continued. When I was younger I was subject to asimilar delusion. But it vanishedI saw no trace of it for yearsI thought that I had done with it for good. Recently, however, it has returnedas you have witnessed. I shall institute inquiries into the cause of its reappearance; if it seems likely to be irremovable, or even if it bids fair to be prolonged, I shall not only, as you phrase it, withdraw my pretensions to Miss Lindens hand, but to all my other ambitions. In the interim, as regards Miss Lindon I shall be careful to hold myself on the footing of a mere acquaintance. You promise me? I do.And on your side, Atherton, in the meantime, deal with me more gently. Judgment in my case has still to be given. You will find that I am not the guilty wretch you apparently imagine. And there are few things more disagreeable to ones selfesteem than to learn, too late, that one has persisted in judging another man too harshly. Think of all that the world has, at this moment, to offer me, and what it will mean if I have to turn my back on itowing to a mischievous twist of fortunes wheel. He turned, is if to go. Then stopped, and looked round, in an attitude of listening. Whats that? There was a sound of droningI recalled what Marjorie had said of her experiences of the night before, it was like the droning of a beetle. The instant the Apostle heard it, the fashion of his countenance began to changeit was pitiable to witness. I rushed to him. Lessingham!dont be a fool!play the man! He gripped my left arm with his right hand till it felt as if it were being compressed in a vice. ThenI shall have to have some more brandy. Fortunately the bottle was within reach from where I stood, otherwise I doubt if he would have released my arm to let me get at it. I gave him the decanter and the glass. He helped himself to a copious libation. By the time that he had swallowed it the droning sound had gone. He put down the empty tumbler. When a man has to resort to alcohol to keep his nerves up to concert pitch, things are in a bad way with him, you may be sure of thatbut then you have never known what it is to stand in momentary expectation of a ttette with the devil. Again he turned to leave the roomand this time he actually went. I let him go alone. I heard his footsteps passing along the passage, and the halldoor close. Then I sat in an armchair, stretched my legs out in front of me, thrust my hands in my trouser pockets, andI wondered. I had been there, perhaps, four or five minutes, when there was a slight noise at my side. Glancing round, I saw a sheet of paper come fluttering through the open window. It fell almost at my feet. I picked it up. It was a picture of a beetlea facsimile of the one which had had such an extraordinary effect on Mr. Lessingham the day before. If this was intended for St. Paul, its a trifle late;unless I could hear that someone was approaching along the corridor. I looked up, expecting to see the Apostle reappear;in which expectation I was agreeably disappointed. The newcomer was feminine. It was Miss Grayling. As she stood in the open doorway, I saw that her cheeks were red as roses. I hope I am not interrupting you again, butI left my purse here. She stopped; then added, as if it were an afterthought, AndI want you to come and lunch with me. I locked the picture of the beetle in the drawerand I lunched with Dora Grayling. Book III. The Terror By Night And The Terror By Day Miss Marjorie Lindon tells the tale. XXIII. The Way He Told Her I am the happiest woman in the world! I wonder how many women have said that of themselves in their timebut I am. Paul has told me that he loves me. How long I have made inward confession of my love for him, I should be ashamed to say. It sounds prosaic, but I believe it is a fact that the first stirring of my pulses was caused by the report of a speech of his which I read in the Times. It was on the Eight Hours Bill. Papa was most unflattering. He said that he was an oily spouter, an ignorant agitator, an irresponsible firebrand, and a good deal more to the same effect. I remember very well how papa fidgeted with the paper, declaring that it read even worse than it had sounded, and goodness knew that it had sounded bad enough. He was so very emphatic that when he had gone I thought I would see what all the pother was about, and read the speech for myself. So I read it. It affected me quite differently. The speakers words showed such knowledge, charity, and sympathy that they went straight to my heart. After that I read everything of Paul Lessinghams which I came across. And the more I read the more I was impressed. But it was some time before we met. Considering what papas opinions were, it was not likely that he would go out of his way to facilitate a meeting. To him, the mere mention of the name was like a red rag to a bull. But at last we did meet. And then I knew that he was stronger, greater, better even than his words. It is so often the other way; one finds that men, and women too, are so apt to put their best, as it were, into their shop windows, that the discovery was as novel as it was delightful. When the ice was once broken, we often met. I do not know how it was. We did not plan our meetingsat first, at any rate. Yet we seemed always meeting. Seldom a day passed on which we did not meetsometimes twice or thrice. It was odd how we were always coming across each other in the most unlikely places. I believe we did not notice it at the time, but looking back I can see that we must have managed our engagements so that somewhere, somehow, we should be certain to have an opportunity of exchanging half a dozen words. Those constant encounters could not have all been chance ones. But I never supposed he loved menever. I am not even sure that, for some time, I was aware that I loved him. We were great on friendship, both of us.I was quite aware that I was his friendthat he regarded me as his friend; he told me so more than once. I tell you this, he would say, referring to this, that, or the other, because I know that, in speaking to you, I am speaking to a friend. With him those were not empty words. All kinds of people talk to one like thatespecially men; it is a kind of formula which they use with every woman who shows herself disposed to listen. But Paul is not like that. He is chary of speech; not by any means a womans man. I tell him that is his weakest point. If legend does not lie more even than is common, few politicians have achieved prosperity without the aid of women. He replies that he is not a politician; that he never means to be a politician. He simply wishes to work for his country; if his country does not need his serviceswell, let it be. Papas political friends have always so many axes of their own to grind, that, at first, to hear a member of Parliament talk like that was almost disquieting. I had dreamed of men like that; but I never encountered one till I met Paul Lessingham. Our friendship was a pleasant one. It became pleasanter and pleasanter. Until there came a time when he told me everything; the dreams he dreamed; the plans which he had planned; the great purposes which, if health and strength were given him, he intended to carry to a great fulfilment. And, at last, he told me something else. It was after a meeting at a Working Womens Club in Westminster. He had spoken, and I had spoken too. I dont know what papa would have said, if he had known, but I had. A formal resolution had been proposed, and I had seconded itin perhaps a couple of hundred words; but that would have been quite enough for papa to have regarded me as an Abandoned Wretchpapa always puts those sort of words into capitals. Papa regards a speechifying woman as a thing of horrorI have known him look askance at a Primrose Dame. The night was fine. Paul proposed that I should walk with him down the Westminster Bridge Road, until we reached the House, and then he would see me into a cab. I did as he suggested. It was still early, not yet ten, and the streets were alive with people. Our conversation, as we went, was entirely political. The Agricultural Amendment Act was then before the Commons, and Paul felt very strongly that it was one of those measures which give with one hand, while taking with the other. The committee stage was at hand, and already several amendments were threatened, the effect of which would be to strengthen the landlord at the expense of the tenant. More than one of these, and they not the most moderate, were to be proposed by papa. Paul was pointing out how it would be his duty to oppose these tooth and nail, when, all at once, he stopped. I sometimes wonder how you really feel upon this matter. What matter? On the difference of opinion, in political matters, which exists between your father and myself. I am conscious that Mr. Lindon regards my action as a personal question, and resents it so keenly, that I am sometimes moved to wonder if at least a portion of his resentment is not shared by you. I have explained; I consider papa the politician as one person, and papa the father as quite another. You are his daughter. Certainly I am;but would you, on that account, wish me to share his political opinions, even though I believe them to be wrong? You love him. Of course I dohe is the best of fathers. Your defection will be a grievous disappointment. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. I wondered what was passing through his mind. The subject of my relations with papa was one which, without saying anything at all about it, we had consented to taboo. I am not so sure. I am permeated with a suspicion that papa has no politics. Miss Lindon!I fancy that I can adduce proof to the contrary. I believe that if papa were to marry again, say, a Home Ruler, within three weeks his wifes politics would be his own. Paul thought before he spoke; then he smiled. I suppose that men sometimes do change their coats to please their wiveseven their political ones. Papas opinions are the opinions of those with whom he mixes. The reason why he consorts with Tories of the crusted school is because he fears that if he associated with anybody elsewith Radicals, saybefore he knew it, he would be a Radical too. With him, association is synonymus with logic. Paul laughed outright. By this time we had reached Westminster Bridge. Standing, we looked down upon the river. A long line of lanterns was gliding mysteriously over the waters; it was a tug towing a string of barges. For some moments neither spoke. Then Paul recurred to what I had just been saying. And youdo you think marriage would colour your convictions? Would it yours? That depends. He was silent. Then he said, in that tone which I had learned to look for when he was most in earnest, It depends on whether you would marry me. I was still. His words were so unexpected that they took my breath away. I knew not what to make of them. My head was in a whirl. Then he addressed to me a monosyllabic interrogation. Well? I found my voiceor a part of it. Well?to what? He came a little closer. Will you be my wife? The part of my voice which I had found, was lost again. Tears came into my eyes. I shivered. I had not thought that I could be so absurd. Just then the moon came from behind a cloud; the rippling waters were tipped with silver. He spoke again, so gently that his words just reached my ears. You know that I love you. Then I knew that I loved him too. That what I had fancied was a feeling of friendship was something very different. It was as if somebody, in tearing a veil from before my eyes, had revealed a spectacle which dazzled me. I was speechless. He misconstrued my silence. Have I offended you? No. I fancy that he noted the tremor which was in my voice, and read it rightly. For he too was still. Presently his hand stole along the parapet, and fastened upon mine, and held it tight. And that was how it came about. Other things were said; but they were hardly of the first importance. Though I believe we took some time in saying them. Of myself I can say with truth, that my heart was too full for copious speech; I was dumb with a great happiness. And, I believe, I can say the same of Paul. He told me as much when we were parting. It seemed that we had only just come there when Paul started. Turning, he stared up at Big Ben. Midnight!The House up!Impossible! But it was more than possible, it was fact. We had actually been on the Bridge two hours, and it had not seemed ten minutes. Never had I supposed that the flight of time could have been so entirely unnoticed. Paul was considerably taken aback. His legislative conscience pricked him. He excused himselfin his own fashion. Fortunately, for once in a way, my business in the House was not so important as my business out of it. He had his arm through mine. We were standing face to face. So you call this business! He laughed. He not only saw me into a cab, but he saw me home in it. And in the cab he kissed me. I fancy I was a little out of sorts that night. My nervous system was, perhaps, demoralised. Because, when he kissed me, I did a thing which I never doI have my own standard of behaviour, and that sort of thing is quite outside of it; I behaved like a sentimental chit. I cried. And it took him all the way to my fathers door to comfort me. I can only hope that, perceiving the singularity of the occasion, he consented to excuse me. XXIV. A Womans View Sydney Atherton has asked me to be his wife. It is not only annoying; worse, it is absurd. This is the result of Pauls wish that our engagement should not be announced. He is afraid of papa;not really, but for the moment. The atmosphere of the House is charged with electricity. Party feeling runs high. They are at each other, hammer and tongs, about this Agricultural Amendment Act. The strain on Paul is tremendous. I am beginning to feel positively concerned. Little things which I have noticed about him lately convince me that he is being overwrought. I suspect him of having sleepless nights. The amount of work which he has been getting through lately has been too much for any single human being, I care not who he is. He himself admits that he shall be glad when the session is at an end. So shall I. In the meantime, it is his desire that nothing shall be said about our engagement until the House rises. It is reasonable enough. Papa is sure to be violentlately, the barest allusion to Pauls name has been enough to make him explode. When the discovery does come, he will be unmanageableI foresee it clearly. From little incidents which have happened recently I predict the worst. He will be capable of making a scene within the precincts of the House. And, as Paul says, there is some truth in the saying that the last straw breaks the camels back. He will be better able to face papas wild wrath when the House has risen. So the news is to bide a wee. Of course Paul is right. And what he wishes I wish too. Still, it is not all such plain sailing for me as he perhaps thinks. The domestic atmosphere is almost as electrical as that in the House. Papa is like the terrier who scents a rathe is always sniffing the air. He has not actually forbidden me to speak to Paulhis courage is not quite at the sticking point; but he is constantly making uncomfortable allusions to persons who number among their acquaintance political adventurers, grasping carpetbaggers, Radical riffraff, and that kind of thing. Sometimes I venture to call my soul my own; but such a tempest invariably follows that I become discreet again as soon as I possibly can. So, as a rule, I suffer in silence. Still, I would with all my heart that the concealment were at an end. No one need imagine that I am ashamed of being about to marry Paulpapa least of all. On the contrary, I am as proud of it as a woman can be. Sometimes, when he has said or done something unusually wonderful, I fear that my pride will outI do feel it so strong within me. I should be delighted to have a trial of strength with papa; anywhere, at any timeI should not be so rude to him as he would be to me. At the bottom of his heart papa knows that I am the more sensible of the two; after a pitched battle or so he would understand it better still. I know papa! I have not been his daughter for all these years in vain. I feel like hotblooded soldiers must feel, who, burning to attack the enemy in the open field, are ordered to skulk behind hedges, and be shot at. One result is that Sydney has actually made a proposal of marriagehe of all people! It is too comical. The best of it was that he took himself quite seriously. I do not know how many times he has confided to me the sufferings which he has endured for love of other womensome of them, I am sorry to say, decent married women too; but this is the first occasion on which the theme has been a personal one. He was so frantic, as he is wont to be, that, to calm him, I told him about Paulwhich, under the circumstances, to him I felt myself at liberty to do. In return, he was melodramatic; hinting darkly at I know not what, I was almost cross with him. He is a curious person, Sydney Atherton. I suppose it is because I have known him all my life, and have always looked upon him, in cases of necessity, as a capital substitute for a brother, that I criticise him with so much frankness. In some respects, he is a genius; in othersI will not write fool, for that he never is, though he has often done some extremely foolish things. The fame of his inventions is in the mouths of all men; though the half of them has never been told. He is the most extraordinary mixture. The things which most people would like to have proclaimed in the street, he keeps tightly locked in his own bosom; while those which the same persons would be only too glad to conceal, he shouts from the roofs. A very famous man once told me that if Mr. Atherton chose to become a specialist, to take up one branch of inquiry, and devote his life to it, his fame, before he died, would bridge the spheres. But sticking to one thing is not in Sydneys line at all. He prefers, like the bee, to roam from flower to flower. As for his being in love with me, it is ridiculous. He is as much in love with the moon. I cannot think what has put the idea into his head. Some girl must have been illusing him, or he imagines that she has. The girl whom he ought to marry, and whom he ultimately will marry, is Dora Grayling. She is young, charming, immensely rich, and over head and ears in love with him;if she were not, then he would be over head and ears in love with her. I believe he is very near it as it issometimes he is so very rude to her. It is a characteristic of Sydneys, that he is apt to be rude to a girl whom he really likes. As for Dora, I suspect she dreams of him. He is tall, straight, very handsome, with a big moustache, and the most extraordinary eyes;I fancy that those eyes of his have as much to do with Doras state as anything. I have heard it said that he possesses the hypnotic power to an unusual degree, and that, if he chose to exercise it, he might become a danger to society. I believe he has hypnotised Dora. He makes an excellent brother. I have gone to him, many and many a time, for helpand some excellent advice I have received. I daresay I shall consult him still. There are matters of which one would hardly dare to talk to Paul. In all things he is the great man. He could hardly condescend to chiffons. Now Sydney can and does. When he is in the mood, on the vital subject of trimmings a woman could not appeal to a sounder authority. I tell him, if he had been a dressmaker, he would have been magnificent. I am sure he would. XXV. The Man in the Street This morning I had an adventure. I was in the breakfastroom. Papa, as usual, was late for breakfast, and I was wondering whether I should begin without him, when, chancing to look round, something caught my eye in the street. I went to the window to see what it was. A small crowd of people was in the middle of the road, and they were all staring at something which, apparently, was lying on the ground. What it was I could not see. The butler happened to be in the room. I spoke to him. Peter, what is the matter in the street? Go and see. He went and saw; and, presently, he returned. Peter is an excellent servant; but the fashion of his speech, even when conveying the most trivial information, is slightly sesquipedalian. He would have made a capital cabinet minister at question timehe wraps up the smallest petitions of meaning in the largest possible words. An unfortunate individual appears to have been the victim of a catastrophe. I am informed that he is dead. The constable asserts that he is drunk. Drunk?dead? Do you mean that he is dead drunk?at this hour! He is either one or the other. I did not behold the individual myself. I derived my information from a bystander. That was not sufficiently explicit for me. I gave way to a, seemingly, quite causeless impulse of curiosity, I went out into the street, just as I was, to see for myself. It was, perhaps, not the most sensible thing I could have done, and papa would have been shocked; but I am always shocking papa. It had been raining in the night, and the shoes which I had on were not so well suited as they might have been for an encounter with the mud. I made my way to the point of interest. Whats the matter? I asked. A workman, with a bag of tools over his shoulder, answered me. Theres something wrong with someone. Policeman says hes drunk, but he looks to me as if he was something worse. Will you let me pass, please? When they saw I was a woman, they permitted me to reach the centre of the crowd. A man was lying on his back, in the grease and dirt of the road. He was so plastered with mud, that it was difficult, at first, to be sure that he really was a man. His head and feet were bare. His body was partially covered by a long ragged cloak. It was obvious that that one wretched, dirtstained, sopping wet rag was all the clothing he had on. A huge constable was holding his shoulders in his hands, and was regarding him as if he could not make him out at all.

He seemed uncertain as to whether it was or was not a case of shamming. He spoke to him as if he had been some refractory child. Come, my lad, this wont do!Wake up!Whats the matter? But he neither woke up, nor explained what was the matter. I took hold of his hand. It was icy cold. Apparently the wrist was pulseless. Clearly this was no ordinary case of drunkenness. There is something seriously wrong, officer. Medical assistance ought to be had at once. Do you think hes in a fit, miss? That a doctor should be able to tell you better than I can. There seems to be no pulse. I should not be surprised to find that he was The word dead was actually on my lips, when the stranger saved me from making a glaring exposure of my ignorance by snatching his wrist away from me, and sitting up in the mud. He held out his hands in front of him, opened his eyes, and exclaimed, in a loud, but painfully raucous tone of voice, as if he was suffering from a very bad cold, Paul Lessingham! I was so surprised that I all but sat down in the mud. To hear Paulmy Paul!apostrophised by an individual of his appearance, in that fashion, was something which I had not expected. Directly the words were uttered, he closed his eyes again, sank backward, and seemingly relapsed into unconsciousnessthe constable gripping him by the shoulder just in time to prevent him banging the back of his head against the road. The officer shook himscarcely gently. Now, my lad, its plain that youre not dead!Whats the meaning of this?Move yourself! Looking round I found that Peter was close behind. Apparently he had been struck by the singularity of his mistress behaviour, and had followed to see that it did not meet with the reward which it deserved. I spoke to him. Peter, let someone go at once for Dr. Cotes! Dr. Cotes lives just round the corner, and since it was evident that the mans lapse into consciousness had made the policeman sceptical as to his case being so serious as it seemed, I thought it might be advisable that a competent opinion should be obtained without delay. Peter was starting, when again the stranger returned to consciousnessthat is, if it really was consciousness, as to which I was more than a little in doubt. He repeated his previous pantomime; sat up in the mud, stretched out his arms, opened his eyes unnaturally wideand yet they appeared unseeing!a sort of convulsion went all over him, and he shriekedit really amounted to shriekingas a man might shriek who was in mortal terror. Be warned, Paul Lessinghambe warned! For my part, that settled it. There was a mystery here which needed to be unravelled. Twice had he called upon Pauls nameand in the strangest fashion! It was for me to learn the why and the wherefore; to ascertain what connection there was between this lifeless creature and Paul Lessingham. Providence might have cast him there before my door. I might be entertaining an angel unawares. My mind was made up on the instant. Peter, hasten for Dr. Cotes. Peter passed the word, and immediately a footman started running as fast as his legs would carry him. Officer, I will have this man taken into my fathers house.Will some of you men help to carry him? There were volunteers enough, and to spare. I spoke to Peter in the hall. Is papa down yet? Mr. Lindon has sent down to say that you will please not wait for him for breakfast. He has issued instructions to have his breakfast conveyed to him upstairs. Thats all right. I nodded towards the poor wretch who was being carried through the hall. You will say nothing to him about this unless he particularly asks. You understand? Peter bowed. He is discretion itself. He knows I have my vagaries, and it is not his fault if the savour of them travels to papa. The doctor was in the house almost as soon as the stranger. Wants washing, he remarked, directly he saw him. And that certainly was trueI never saw a man who stood more obviously in need of the good offices of soap and water. Then he went through the usual medical formula, I watching all the while. So far as I could see the man showed not the slightest sign of life. Is he dead? He will be soon, if he doesnt have something to eat. The fellows starving. The doctor asked the policeman what he knew of him. That sagacious officers reply was vague. A boy had run up to him crying that a man was lying dead in the street. He had straightway followed the boy, and discovered the stranger. That was all he knew. What is the matter with the man? I inquired of the doctor, when the constable had gone. Dont know.It may be catalepsy, and it maynt.When I do know, you may ask again. Dr. Cotes manner was a trifle brusqueparticularly, I believe, to me. I remember that once he threatened to box my ears. When I was a small child I used to think nothing of boxing his. Realising that no satisfaction was to be got out of a speechless manparticularly as regards his mysterious references to PaulI went upstairs. I found that papa was under the impression that he was suffering from a severe attack of gout. But as he was eating a capital breakfast, and apparently enjoying itwhile I was still fastingI ventured to hope that the matter was not so serious as he feared. I mentioned nothing to him about the person whom I had found in the streetlest it should aggravate his gout. When he is like that, the slightest thing does. XXVI. A Fathers No Paul has stormed the House of Commons with one of the greatest speeches which even he has delivered, and I have quarrelled with papa. And, also, I have very nearly quarrelled with Sydney. Sydneys little affair is nothing. He actually still persists in thinking himself in love with meas if, since last night, when he what he calls proposed to me, he has not time to fall out of love, and in again, half a dozen times; and, on the strength of it, he seems to consider himself entitled to make himself as disagreeable as he can. That I should not mindfor Sydney disagreeable is about as nice as Sydney any other way; but when it comes to his shooting poisoned shafts at Paul, I object. If he imagines that anything he can say, or hint, will lessen my estimation of Paul Lessingham by one hairs breadth, he has less wisdom even than I gave him credit for. By the way, Percy Woodville asked me to be his wife tonightwhich, also, is nothing; he has been trying to do it for the last three yearsthough, under the circumstances, it is a little trying; but he would not spit venom merely because I preferred another manand he, I believe, does care for me. Papas affair is serious. It is the first clashing of the foilsand this time, I imagine, the buttons are really off. This morning he said a few words, not so much to, as at me. He informed me that Paul was expected to speak tonightas if I did not know it!and availed himself of the opening to load him with the abuse which, in his case, he thinks is not unbecoming to a gentleman. I dont knowor, rather, I do know what he would think, if he heard another man use, in the presence of a woman, the kind of language which he habitually employs. However, I said nothing. I had a motive for allowing the chaff to fly before the wind. But, tonight, issue was joined. I, of course, went to hear Paul speakas I have done over and over again before. Afterwards, Paul came and fetched me from the cage. He had to leave me for a moment, while he gave somebody a message; and in the lobby, there was Sydneyall sneers! I could have pinched him. Just as I was coming to the conclusion that I should have to stick a pin into his arm, Paul returnedand, positively, Sydney was rude to him. I was ashamed, if Mr. Atherton was not. As if it was not enough that he should be insulted by a mere popinjay, at the very moment when he had been adding another stone to the fabric of his countrys glorypapa came up. He actually wanted to take me away from Paul. I should have liked to see him do it. Of course I went down with Paul to the carriage, leaving papa to follow if he chose. He did not choosebut, none the less, he managed to be home within three minutes after I had myself returned. Then the battle began. It is impossible for me to give an idea of papa in a rage. There may be men who look well when they lose their temper, but, if there are, papa is certainly not one. He is always talking about the magnificence, and the high breeding of the Lindons, but anything less highbred than the head of the Lindons, in his moments of wrath, it would be hard to conceive. His language I will not attempt to portraybut his observations consisted, mainly, of abuse of Paul, glorification of the Lindons, and orders to me. I forbid youI forbid you when papa wishes to be impressive he repeats his own words three or four times over; I dont know if he imagines that they are improved by repetition; if he does, he is wrongI forbid you ever again to speak to thatthatthat Here followed language. I was silent. My cue was to keep cool. I believe that, with the exception, perhaps, of being a little white, and exceedingly sorry that papa should so forget himself, I was about the same as I generally am. Do you hear me?do you hear what I say?do you hear me, miss? Yes, papa; I hear you. Thenthenthen promise me!promise that you will do as I tell you!mark my words, my girl, you shall promise before you leave this room! My dear papa!do you intend me to spend the remainder of my life in the drawingroom? Dont you be impertinent!dododont you speak to me like that!III wont have it! I tell you what it is, papa, if you dont take care youll have another attack of gout. Damn gout. That was the most sensible thing he said; if such a tormentor as gout can be consigned to the nether regions by the mere utterance of a word, by all means let the word be uttered. Off he went again. The mans a ruffianly, rascally and so on. Theres not such a villainous vagabond and all the rest of it. And I order youIm a Lindon, and I order you! Im your father, and I order you!I order you never to speak to such asuch avarious vain repetitionsagain, andandand I order you never to look at him! Listen to me, papa. I will promise you never to speak to Paul Lessingham again, if you will promise me never to speak to Lord Cantilever againor to recognise him if you meet him in the street. You should have seen how papa glared. Lord Cantilever is the head of his party. Its august, and, I presume, reverenced leader. He is papas particular fetish. I am not sure that he does regard him as being any lower than the angels, but if he does it is certainly something in decimals. My suggestion seemed as outrageous to him as his suggestion seemed to me. But it is papas misfortune that he can only see one side of a questionand thats his own. Youyou dare to compare Lord Cantilever toto thatthatthat! I am not comparing them. I am not aware of there being anything in particular against Lord Cantileverthat is against his character. But, of course, I should not dream of comparing a man of his calibre, with one of real ability, like Paul Lessingham. It would be to treat his lordship with too much severity. I could not help itbut that did it. The rest of papas conversation was a jumble of explosions. It was all so sad. Papa poured all the vials of his wrath upon Paulto his own sore disfigurement. He threatened me with all the pains and penalties of the inquisition if I did not immediately promise to hold no further communication with Mr. Lessinghamof course I did nothing of the kind. He cursed me, in default, by bell, book, and candleand by ever so many other things beside. He called me the most dreadful namesme! his only child. He warned me that I should find myself in prison before I had doneI am not sure that he did not hint darkly at the gallows. Finally, he drove me from the room in a whirlwind of anathemas. XXVII. The Terror by Night When I left papaor, rather, when papa had driven me from himI went straight to the man whom I had found in the street. It was late, and I was feeling both tired and worried, so that I only thought of seeing for myself how he was. In some way, he seemed to be a link between Paul and myself, and as, at that moment, links of that kind were precious, I could not have gone to bed without learning something of his condition. The nurse received me at the door. Well, nurse, hows the patient? Nurse was a plump, motherly woman, who had attended more than one odd protg of mine, and whom I kept pretty constantly at my beck and call. She held out her hands. Its hard to tell. He hasnt moved since I came. Not moved?Is he still insensible? He seems to me to be in some sort of trance. He does not appear to breathe, and I can detect no pulsation, but the doctor says hes still aliveits the queerest case I ever saw. I went farther into the room. Directly I did so the man in the bed gave signs of life which were sufficiently unmistakable. Nurse hastened to him. Why, she exclaimed, hes moving!he might have heard you enter! He not only might have done, but it seemed possible that that was what he actually had done. As I approached the bed, he raised himself to a sitting posture, as, in the morning, he had done in the street, and he exclaimed, as if he addressed himself to someone whom he saw in front of himI cannot describe the almost more than human agony which was in his voice, Paul Lessingham!Beware!The Beetle! What he meant I had not the slightest notion. Probably that was why what seemed more like a pronouncement of delirium than anything else had such an extraordinary effect upon my nerves. No sooner had he spoken than a sort of blank horror seemed to settle down upon my mind. I actually found myself trembling at the knees. I felt, all at once, as if I was standing in the immediate presence of something awful yet unseen. As for the speaker, no sooner were the words out of his lips, than, as was the case in the morning, he relapsed into a condition of trance. Nurse, bending over him, announced the fact. Hes gone off again!What an extraordinary thing!I suppose it is real. It was clear, from the tone of her voice, that she shared the doubt which had troubled the policeman, Theres not a trace of a pulse. From the look of things he might be dead. Of one thing Im sure, that theres something unnatural about the man. No natural illness I ever heard of, takes hold of a man like this. Glancing up, she saw that there was something unusual in my face; an appearance which startled her. Why, Miss Marjorie, whats the matter!You look quite ill! I felt ill, and worse than ill; but, at the same time, I was quite incapable of describing what I felt to nurse. For some inscrutable reason I had even lost the control of my tongueI stammered. IIIm not feeling very well, nurse; III think Ill be better in bed. As I spoke, I staggered towards the door, conscious, all the while, that nurse was staring at me with eyes wide open, When I got out of the room, it seemed, in some incomprehensible fashion, as if something had left it with me, and that It and I were alone together in the corridor. So overcome was I by the consciousness of its immediate propinquity, that, all at once, I found myself cowering against the wallas if I expected something or someone to strike me. How I reached my bedroom I do not know. I found Fanchette awaiting me. For the moment her presence was a positive comfortuntil I realised the amazement with which she was regarding me. Mademoiselle is not well? Thank you, Fanchette, II am rather tired. I will undress myself tonightyou can go to bed. But if mademoiselle is so tired, will she not permit me to assist her? The suggestion was reasonable enoughand kindly too; for, to say the least of it, she had as much cause for fatigue as I had. I hesitated. I should have liked to throw my arms about her neck, and beg her not to leave me; but, the plain truth is, I was ashamed. In my inner consciousness I was persuaded that the sense of terror which had suddenly come over me was so absolutely causeless, that I could not bear the notion of playing the craven in my maids eyes. While I hesitated, something seemed to sweep past me through the air, and to brush against my cheek in passing. I caught at Fanchettes arm. Fanchette!Is there something with us in the room? Something with us in the room?Mademoiselle?What does mademoiselle mean? She looked disturbedwhich was, on the whole, excusable. Fanchette is not exactly a strongminded person, and not likely to be much of a support when a support was most required. If I was going to play the fool, I would be my own audience. So I sent her off. Did you not hear me tell you that I will undress myself?you are to go to bed. She went to bedwith quite sufficient willingness. The instant that she was out of the room I wished that she was back again. Such a paroxysm of fear came over me, that I was incapable of stirring from the spot on which I stood, and it was all I could do to prevent myself from collapsing in heap on the floor. I had never, till then, had reason to suppose that I was a coward. Nor to suspect myself of being the possessor of nerves. I was as little likely as anyone to be frightened by shadows. I told myself that the whole thing was sheer absurdity, and that I should be thoroughly ashamed of my own conduct when the morning came. If you dont want to be selfbranded as a contemptible idiot, Marjorie Lindon, you will call up your courage, and these foolish fears will fly. But it would not do. Instead of flying, they grew worse. I became convincedand the process of conviction was terrible beyond words!that there actually was something with me in the room, some invisible horrorwhich, at any moment, might become visible. I seemed to understandwith a sense of agony which nothing can describe!that this thing which was with me was with Paul. That we were linked together by the bond of a common, and a dreadful terror. That, at that moment, that same awful peril which was threatening me, was threatening him, and that I was powerless to move a finger in his aid. As with a sort of second sight, I saw out of the room in which I was, into another, in which Paul was crouching on the floor, covering his face with his hands, and shrieking. The vision came again and again with a degree of vividness of which I cannot give the least conception. At last the horror, and the reality of it, goaded me to frenzy. Paul! Paul! I screamed. As soon as I found my voice, the vision faded. Once more I understood that, as a matter of simple fact, I was standing in my own bedroom; that the lights were burning brightly; that I had not yet commenced to remove a particle of dress. Am I going mad? I wondered. I had heard of insanity taking extraordinary forms, but what could have caused softening of the brain in me I had not the faintest notion. Surely that sort of thing does not come on onein such a wholly unmitigated form!without the slightest noticeand that my mental faculties were sound enough a few minutes back I was certain. The first premonition of anything of the kind had come upon me with the melodramatic utterance of the man I had found in the street. Paul Lessingham!Beware!The Beetle! The words were ringing in my ears.What was that?There was a buzzing sound behind me. I turned to see what it was. It moved as I moved, so that it was still at my back. I swung, swiftly, right round on my heels. It still eluded meit was still behind. I stood and listenedwhat was it that hovered so persistently at my back? The buzzing was distinctly audible. It was like the humming of a bee. Orcould it be a beetle? My whole life long I have had an antipathy to beetlesof any sort or kind. I have objected neither to rats nor mice, nor cows, nor bulls, nor snakes, nor spiders, nor toads, nor lizards, nor any of the thousand and one other creatures, animate or otherwise, to which so many people have a rooted, and, apparently, illogical dislike. My petand onlyhorror has been beetles. The mere suspicion of a harmless, and, I am told, necessary cockroach, being within several feet has always made me seriously uneasy. The thought that a great, winged beetleto me, a flying beetle is the horror of horrors!was with me in my bedroomgoodness alone knew how it had got there!was unendurable. Anyone who had beheld me during the next few moments would certainly have supposed I was deranged. I turned and twisted, sprang from side to side, screwed myself into impossible positions, in order to obtain a glimpse of the detested visitantbut in vain. I could hear it all the time; but see itnever! The buzzing sound was continually behind. The terror returnedI began to think that my brain must be softening. I dashed to the bed. Flinging myself on my knees, I tried to pray. But I was speechlesswords would not come; my thoughts would not take shape. I all at once became conscious, as I struggled to ask help of God, that I was wrestling with something evilthat if I only could ask kelp of Him, evil would flee. But I could not. I was helplessovermastered. I hid my face in the bedclothes, cramming my fingers into my ears. But the buzzing was behind me all the time. I sprang up, striking out, blindly, wildly, right and left, hitting nothingthe buzzing always came from a point at which, at the moment, I was not aiming. I tore off my clothes. I had on a lovely frock which I had worn for the first time that night; I had had it specially made for the occasion of the Duchess ball, andmore especiallyin honour of Pauls great speech. I had said to myself, when I saw my image in a mirror, that it was the most exquisite gown I had ever had, that it suited me to perfection, and that it should continue in my wardrobe for many a day, if only as a souvenir of a memorable night. Now, in the madness of my terror, all reflections of that sort were forgotten. My only desire was to away with it. I tore it off anyhow, letting it fall in rags on the floor at my feet. All else that I had on I flung in the same way after it; it was a veritable holocaust of dainty garmentsI acting as relentless executioner who am, as a rule, so tender with my things. I leaped upon the bed, switched off the electric light, hurried into bed, burying myself, over head and all, deep down between the sheets. I had hoped that by shutting out the light, I might regain my senses. That in the darkness I might have opportunity for sane reflection. But I had made a grievous error. I had exchanged bad for worse. The darkness lent added terrors. The light had not been out five seconds before I would have given all that I was worth to be able to switch it on again. As I cowered beneath the bedclothes I heard the buzzing sound above my headthe sudden silence of the darkness had rendered it more audible than it had been before. The thing, whatever it was, was hovering above the bed. It came nearer and nearer; it grew clearer and clearer. I felt it alight upon the coverlet;shall I ever forget the sensations with which I did feel it? It weighed upon me like a ton of lead. How much of the seeming weight was real, and how much imaginary, I cannot pretend to say; but that it was much heavier than any beetle I have ever seen or heard of, I am sure. For a time it was stilland during that time I doubt if I even drew my breath. Then I felt it begin to move, in wobbling fashion, with awkward, ungainly gait, stopping every now and then, as if for rest. I was conscious that it was progressing, slowly, yet surely, towards the head of the bed. The emotion of horror with which I realised what this progression might mean, will be, I fear, with me to the end of my lifenot only in dreams, but too often, also, in my waking hours. My heart, as the Psalmist has it, melted like wax within me. I was incapable of movementdominated by something as hideous as, and infinitely more powerful than, the fascination of the serpent. When it reached the head of the bed, what I fearedwith what a fear!would happen, did happen. It began to find its way insideto creep between the sheets; the wonder is I did not die! I felt it coming nearer and nearer, inch by inch; I knew that it was upon me, that escape there was none; I felt something touch my hair. And then oblivion did come to my aid. For the first time in my life I swooned. XXVIII. The Strange Story of the Man in the Street I have been anticipating for some weeks past, that things would become excitingand they have. But hardly in the way which I foresaw. It is the old story of the unexpected happening. Suddenly events of the most extraordinary nature have come crowding on me from the most unlookedfor quarters. Let me try to take them in something like their proper order. To begin with, Sydney has behaved very badly. So badly that it seems likely that I shall have to recast my whole conception of his character. It was nearly nine oclock this morning when II cannot say woke up, because I do not believe that I had really been asleepbut when I returned to consciousness. I found myself sitting up in bed, trembling like some frightened child. What had actually happened to me I did not knowcould not guess. I was conscious of an overwhelming sense of nausea, and, generally, I was feeling very far from well. I endeavoured to arrange my thoughts, and to decide upon some plan of action. Finally, I decided to go for advice and help where I had so often gone beforeto Sydney Atherton. I went to him. I told him the whole gruesome story. He saw, he could not help but see what a deep impress the events of the night had made on me. He heard me to the end with every appearance of sympathyand then all at once I discovered that all the time papa had been concealed behind a large screen which was in the room, listening to every word I had been uttering. That I was dumbfoundered, goes without saying. It was bad enough in papa, but in Sydney it seemed, and it was, such treachery. He and I have told each other secrets all our lives; it has never entered my imagination, as he very well knows, to play him false, in one jot or tittle; and I have always understood that, in this sort of matter, men pride themselves on their sense of honour being so much keener than womens. I told them some plain truths; and I fancy that I left them both feeling heartily ashamed of themselves. One result the experience had on meit wound me up. It had on me the revivifying effect of a cold douche. I realised that mine was a situation in which I should have to help myself. When I returned home I learned that the man whom I had found in the street was himself again, and was as conscious as he was ever likely to be. Burning with curiosity to learn the nature of the connection which existed between Paul and him, and what was the meaning of his oracular apostrophes, I merely paused to remove my hat before hastening into his apartment. When he saw me, and heard who I was, the expressions of his gratitude were painful in their intensity. The tears streamed down his cheeks. He looked to me like a man who had very little life left in him. He looked weak, and white, and worn to a shadow. Probably he never had been robust, and it was only too plain that privation had robbed him of what little strength he had ever had. He was nothing else but skin and bone. Physical and mental debility was written large all over him. He was not badlookingin a milk and watery sort of way. He had pale blue eyes and very fair hair, and, I daresay, at one time, had been a spruce enough clerk. It was difficult to guess his age, one ages so rapidly under the stress of misfortune, but I should have set him down as being about forty. His voice, though faint enough at first, was that of an educated man, and as he went on, and gathered courage, and became more and more in earnest, he spoke with a simple directness which was close akin to eloquence. It was a curious story which he had to tell. So curious, so astounding indeed, that, by the time it was finished, I was in such a state of mind, that I could perceive no alternative but to forgive Sydney, and, in spite of his recent, and scandalous misbehaviour, again appeal to him for assistance. It seemed, if the story told by the man whom I had found in the street was trueand incredible though it sounded, he spoke like a truthful man!that Paul was threatened by some dreadful, and, to me, wholly incomprehensible danger; that it was a case in which even moments were precious; and I felt that, with the best will in the world, it was a position in which I could not move alone. The shadow of the terror of the night was with me still, and with that fresh in my recollection how could I hope, singlehanded, to act effectually against the mysterious being of whom this amazing tale was told? No! I believed that Sydney did care for me, in his own peculiar way; I knew that he was quick, and cool, and fertile in resource, and that he showed to most advantage in a difficult situation; it was possible that he had a conscience, of a sort, and that, this time, I might not appeal to it in vain. So I sent a servant off to fetch him, helter skelter. As luck would have it, the servant returned with him within five minutes. It appeared that he had been lunching with Dora Grayling, who lives just at the end of the street, and the footman had met him coming down the steps. I had him shown into my own room. I want you to go to the man whom I found in the street, and listen to what he has to say. With pleasure. Can I trust you? To listen to what he has to say?I believe so. Can I trust you to respect my confidence? He was not at all abashedI never saw Sydney Atherton when he was abashed. Whatever the offence of which he has been guilty, he always seems completely at his ease. His eyes twinkled. You canI will not breathe a syllable even to papa. In that case, come! But, you understand, I am going to put to the test the affirmations which you have made during all these years, and to prove if you have any of the feeling for me which you pretend. Directly we were in the strangers room, Sydney marched straight up to the bed, stared at the man who was lying in it, crammed his hands into his trouser pockets, and whistled. I was amazed. So! he exclaimed. Its you! Do you know this man? I asked. I am hardly prepared to go so far as to say that I know him, but, I chance to have a memory for faces, and it happens that I have met this gentleman on at least one previous occasion. Perhaps he remembers me.Do you? The stranger seemed uneasyas if he found Sidneys tone and manner disconcerting. I do. You are the man in the street. Precisely. I am thatindividual. And you are the man who came through the window. And in a much more comfortable condition you appear to be than when first I saw you. Sydney turned to me. It is just possible, Miss Lindon, that I may have a few remarks to make to this gentleman which would be better made in privateif you dont mind. But I do mindI mind very much. What do you suppose I sent for you here for? Sydney smiled that absurd, provoking smile of hisas if the occasion were not sufficiently serious. To show that you still repose in me a vestige of your confidence. Dont talk nonsense. This man has told me a most extraordinary story, and I have sent for youas you may believe, not too willinglySydney bowedin order that he may repeat it in your presence, and in mine. Is that so?Well! Permit me to offer you a chairthis tale may turn out to be a trifle long. To humour him I accepted the chair he offered, though I should have preferred to stand;he seated himself on the side of the bed, fixing on the stranger those keen, quizzical, not too merciful, eyes of his. Well, sir, we are at your serviceif you will be so good as to favour us with a second edition of that pleasant yarn you have been spinning. Butlet us begin at the right end!whats your name? My name is Robert Holt. That so?Then, Mr. Robert Holtlet her go! Thus encouraged, Mr. Holt repeated the tale which he had told me, only in more connected fashion than before.

I fancy that Sydneys glances exercised on him a sort of hypnotic effect, and this kept him to the pointhe scarcely needed a word of prompting from the first syllable to the last. He told how, tired, wet, hungry, desperate, despairing, he had been refused admittance to the casual wardthat unfailing resource, as one would have supposed, of those who had abandoned even hope. How he had come upon an open window in an apparently empty house, and, thinking of nothing but shelter from the inclement night, he had clambered through it. How he had found himself in the presence of an extraordinary being, who, in his debilitated and nervous state, had seemed to him to be only half human. How this dreadful creature had given utterance to wild sentiments of hatred towards Paul Lessinghammy Paul! How he had taken advantage of Holts enfeebled state to gain over him the most complete, horrible, and, indeed, almost incredible ascendency. How he actually had sent Holt, practically naked, into the stormdriven streets, to commit burglary at Pauls houseand how heHolthad actually gone without being able to offer even a shadow of opposition. How Paul, suddenly returning home, had come upon Holt engaged in the very act of committing burglary, and how, on his hearing Holt make a cabalistic reference to some mysterious beetle, the manhood had gone out of him, and he had suffered the intruder to make good his escape without an effort to detain him. The story had seemed sufficiently astonishing the first time, it seemed still more astonishing the secondbut, as I watched Sydney listening, what struck me chiefly was the conviction that he had heard it all before. I charged him with it directly Holt had finished. This is not the first time you have been told this tale. Pardon mebut it is. Do you suppose I live in an atmosphere of fairy tales? Something in his manner made me feel sure he was deceiving me. Sydney!Dont tell me a story!Paul has told you! I am not telling you a storyat least, on this occasion; and Mr. Lessingham has not told me. Suppose we postpone these details to a little later. And perhaps, in the interim, you will permit me to put a question or two to Mr. Holt. I let him have his waythough I knew he was concealing something from me; that he had a more intimate acquaintance with Mr. Holts strange tale than he chose to confess. And, for some cause, his reticence annoyed me. He looked at Mr. Holt in silence for a second or two. Then he said, with the quizzical little air of bland impertinence which is peculiarly his own. I presume, Mr. Holt, you have been entertaining us with a novelty in fables, and that we are not expected to believe this pleasant little yarn of yours. I expect nothing. But I have told you the truth. And you know it. This seemed to take Sydney aback. I protest that, like Miss Lindon, you credit me with a more extensive knowledge than I possess. However, we will let that pass.I take it that you paid particular attention to this mysterious habitant of this mysterious dwelling. I saw that Mr. Holt shuddered. I am not likely ever to forget him. Then, in that case, you will be able to describe him to us. To do so adequately would be beyond my powers. But I will do my best. If the original was more remarkable than the description which he gave of him, then he must have been remarkable indeed. The impression conveyed to my mind was rather of a monster than a human being. I watched Sydney attentively as he followed Mr. Holts somewhat lurid language, and there was something in his demeanour which made me more and more persuaded that he was more behind the scenes in this strange business than he pretended, or than the speaker suspected. He put a question which seemed uncalled for by anything which Mr. Holt had said. You are sure this thing of beauty was a man? No, sir, that is exactly what I am not sure. There was a note in Sydneys voice which suggested that he had received precisely the answer which he had expected. Did you think it was a woman? I did think so, more than once. Though I can hardly explain what made me think so. There was certainly nothing womanly about the face. He paused, as if to reflect. Then added, I suppose it was a question of instinct. I see.Just so.It occurs to me, Mr. Holt, that you are rather strong on questions of instinct. Sydney got off the bed. He stretched himself, as if fatiguedwhich is a way he has. I will not do you the injustice to hint that I do not believe a word of your charming, and simple, narrative. On the contrary, I will demonstrate my perfect credence by remarking that I have not the slightest doubt that you will be able to point out to me, for my particular satisfaction, the delightful residence on which the whole is founded. Mr. Holt colouredSydneys tone could scarcely have been more significant. You must remember, sir, that it was a dark night, that I had never been in that neighbourhood before, and that I was not in a condition to pay much attention to locality. All of which is granted, buthow far was it from Hammersmith Workhouse? Possibly under half a mile. Then, in that case, surely you can remember which turning you took on leaving Hammersmith WorkhouseI suppose there are not many turnings you could have taken. I think I could remember. Then you shall have an opportunity to try. It isnt a very far cry to Hammersmithdont you think you are well enough to drive there now, just you and I together in a cab? I should say so. I wished to get up this morning. It is by the doctors orders I have stayed in bed. Then, for once in a while, the doctors orders shall be ignoredI prescribe fresh air. Sydney turned to me. Since Mr. Holts wardrobe seems rather to seek, dont you think a suit of one of the men might fit himif Mr. Holt wouldnt mind making shift for the moment?Then, by the time youve finished dressing, Mr. Holt, I shall be ready. While they were ascertaining which suit of clothes would be best adapted to his figure, I went with Sydney to my room. So soon as we were in, I let him know that this was not a matter in which I intended to be trifled with. Of course you understand, Sydney, that I am coming with you. He pretended not to know what I meant. Coming with me?I am delighted to hear itbut where? To the house of which Mr. Holt has been speaking. Nothing could give me greater pleasure, butmight I point out?Mr. Holt has to find it yet? I will come to help you to help him find it. Sydney laughedbut I could see he did not altogether relish the suggestion. Three in a hansom? There is such a thing as a fourwheeled cabor I could order a carriage if youd like one. Sydney looked at me out of the corners of his eyes; then began to walk up and down the room, with his hands in his trouser pockets. Presently he began to talk nonsense. I need not say with what a sensation of joy I should anticipate the delights of a drive with youeven in a fourwheeled cab; but, were I in your place, I fancy that I should allow Holt and your humble servant to go hunting out this house of his alone. It may prove a more tedious business than you imagine. I promise that, after the hunt is over, I will describe the proceedings to you with the most literal accuracy. I daresay.Do you think I dont know youve been deceiving me all the time? Deceiving you?I! Yesyou! Do you think Im quite an idiot? My dear Marjorie! Do you think I cant see that you know all about what Mr. Holt has been telling usperhaps more about it than he knows himself? On my word!With what an amount of knowledge you do credit me. Yes, I door discredit you, rather. If I were to trust you, you would tell me just as much as you chosewhich would be nothing. Im coming with youso theres an end. Very well.Do you happen to know if there are any revolvers in the house? Revolvers?whatever for? Because I should like to borrow one. I will not conceal from yousince you press methat this is a case in which a revolver is quite likely to be required. You are trying to frighten me. I am doing nothing of the kind, only, under the circumstances, I am bound to point out to you what it is you may expect. Oh, you think that youre bound to point that out, do youthen now your bounden dutys done. As for there being any revolvers in the house, papa has a perfect arsenalwould you like to take them all? Thanks, but I daresay I shall be able to manage with oneunless you would like one too. You may find yourself in need of it. I am obliged to you, but, on this occasion, I dont think Ill trouble. Ill run the risk.Oh, Sydney, what a hypocrite you are! Its for your sake, if I seem to be. I tell you most seriously, that I earnestly advise you to allow Mr. Holt and I to manage this affair alone. I dont mind going so far as to say that this is a matter with which, in days to come, you will wish that you had not allowed yourself to be associated. What do you mean by that? Do you dare to insinuate anything againstPaul? I insinuate nothing. What I mean, I say right out; and, my dear Marjorie, what I actually do mean is thisthat if, in spite of my urgent solicitations, you will persist in accompanying us, the expedition, so far as I am concerned, will be postponed. That is what you do mean, is it? Then thats settled. I rang the bell. The servant came. Order a fourwheeled cab at once. And let me know the moment Mr. Holt is ready. The servant went. I turned to Sydney. If you will excuse me, I will go and put my hat on. You are, of course, at liberty to please yourself as to whether you will or will not go, but, if you dont, then I shall go with Mr. Holt alone. I moved to the door. He stopped me. My dear Marjorie, why will you persist in treating me with such injustice? Believe me, you have no idea what sort of adventure this is which you are setting out uponor you would hear reason. I assure you that you are gratuitously proposing to thrust yourself into imminent peril. What sort of peril? Why do you beat about the bushwhy dont you speak right out? I cant speak right out, there are circumstances which render it practically impossibleand thats the plain truthbut the danger is none the less real on that account. I am not jestingI am in earnest; wont you take my word for it? It is not a question of taking your word onlyit is a question of something else beside. I have not forgotten my adventures of last nightand Mr. Holts story is mysterious enough in itself; but there is something more mysterious still at the back of itsomething which you appear to suggest points unpleasantly at Paul. My duty is clear, and nothing you can say will turn me from it. Paul, as you are very well aware, is already overweighted with affairs of state, pretty nearly borne down by themor I would take the tale to him, and he would talk to you after a fashion of his own. Things being as they are, I propose to show you that, although I am not yet Pauls wife, I can make his interests my own as completely as though I were. I can, therefore, only repeat that it is for you to decide what you intend to do; but, if you prefer to stay, I shall go with Mr. Holtalone. Understand that, when the time for regret comesas it will come!you are not to blame me for having done what I advised you not to do. My dear Mr. Atherton, I will undertake to do my utmost to guard your spotless reputation; I should be sorry that anyone should hold you responsible for anything I either said or did. Very well!Your blood be on your own head! My blood? Yesyour blood. I shouldnt be surprised if it comes to blood before were through.Perhaps youll oblige me with the loan of one of that arsenal of revolvers of which you spoke. I let him have his old revolveror, rather, I let him have one of papas new ones. He put it in the hip pocket in his trousers. And the expedition startedin a fourwheeled car. XXIX. The House on the Road from the Workhouse Mr. Holt looked as if he was in somebody elses garments. He was so thin, and worn, and wasted, that the suit of clothes which one of the men had lent him hung upon him as on a scarecrow. I was almost ashamed of myself for having incurred a share of the responsibility of taking him out of bed. He seemed so weak and bloodless that I should not have been surprised if he had fainted on the road. I had taken care that he should eat as much as he could eat before we startedthe suggestion of starvation which he had conveyed to ones mind was dreadful!and I had brought a flask of brandy in case of accidents, but, in spite of everything, I could not conceal from myself that he would be more at home in a sickbed than in a jolting cab. It was not a cheerful drive. There was in Sydneys manner towards me an air of protection which I instinctively resentedhe appeared to be regarding me as a careful, and anxious, nurse might regard a wrongheaded and disobedient child. Conversation distinctly languished. Since Sydney seemed disposed to patronise me, I was bent on snubbing him. The result was, that the majority of the remarks which were uttered were addressed to Mr. Holt. The cab stoppedafter what had appeared to me to be an interminable journey. I was rejoiced at the prospect of its being at an end. Sydney put his head out of the window. A short parley with the driver ensued. This is Ammersmith Workhouse, its a large place, sirwhich part of it might you be wanting? Sydney appealed to Mr. Holt. He put his head out of the window in his turnhe did not seem to recognise our surroundings at all. We have come a different waythis is not the way I went; I went through Hammersmithand to the casual ward; I dont see that here. Sydney spoke to the cabman. Driver, wheres the casual ward? Thats the other end, sir. Then take us there. He took us there. Then Sydney appealed again to Mr. Holt. Shall I dismiss the cabmanor dont you feel equal to walking? Thank you, I feel quite equal to walkingI think the exercise will do me good. So the cabman was dismisseda step which weand I, in particularhad subsequent cause to regret. Mr. Holt took his bearings. He pointed to a door which was just in front of us. Thats the entrance to the casual ward, and that, over it, is the window through which the other man threw a stone. I went to the rightback the way I had come. We went to the right. I reached this corner. We had reached a corner. Mr. Holt looked about him, endeavouring to recall the way he had gone. A good many roads appeared to converge at that point, so that he might have wandered in either of several directions. Presently he arrived at something like a decision. I think this is the way I wentI am nearly sure it is. He led the way, with something of an air of dubitation, and we followed. The road he had chosen seemed to lead to nothing and nowhere. We had not gone many yards from the workhouse gates before we were confronted by something like chaos. In front and on either side of us were large spaces of waste land. At some more or less remote period attempts appeared to have been made at brickmakingthere were untidy stacks of biliouslooking bricks in evidence. Here and there enormous weatherstained boards announced that This Desirable Land was to be Let for Building Purposes. The road itself was unfinished. There was no pavement, and we had the bare uneven ground for sidewalk. It seemed, so far as I could judge, to lose itself in space, and to be swallowed up by the wilderness of Desirable Land which lay beyond. In the near distance there were houses enough, and to spareof a kind. But they were in other roads. In the one in which we actually were, on the right, at the end, there was a row of unfurnished carcases, but only two buildings which were in anything like a fit state for occupation. One stood on either side, not facing each otherthere was a distance between them of perhaps fifty yards. The sight of them had a more exciting effect on Mr. Holt than it had on me. He moved rapidly forwardcoming to a standstill in front of the one upon our left, which was the nearer of the pair. This is the house! he exclaimed. He seemed almost exhilaratedI confess that I was depressed. A more dismallooking habitation one could hardly imagine. It was one of those dreadful jerrybuilt houses which, while they are still new, look old. It had quite possibly only been built a year or two, and yet, owing to neglect, or to poverty of construction, or to a combination of the two, it was already threatening to tumble down. It was a small place, a couple of storeys high, and would have been dearI should think!at thirty pounds a year. The windows had surely never been washed since the house was builtthose on the upper floor seemed all either cracked or broken. The only sign of occupancy consisted in the fact that a blind was down behind the window of the room on the ground floor. Curtains there were none. A low wall ran in front, which had apparently at one time been surmounted by something in the shape of an iron railinga rusty piece of metal still remained on one end; but, since there was only about a foot between it and the building, which was practically built upon the roadwhether the wall was intended to ensure privacy, or was merely for ornament, was not clear. This is the house! repeated Mr. Holt, showing more signs of life than I had hitherto seen in him. Sydney looked it up and downit apparently appealed to his aesthetic sense as little as it did to mine. Are you sure? I am certain. It seems empty. It seemed empty to me that nightthat is why I got into it in search of shelter. Which is the window which served you as a door? This one. Mr. Holt pointed to the window on the ground floorthe one which was screened by a blind. There was no sign of a blind when I first saw it, and the sash was upit was that which caught my eye. Once more Sydney surveyed the place, in comprehensive fashion, from roof to basementthen he scrutinisingly regarded Mr. Holt. You are quite sure this is the house? It might be awkward if you proved mistaken. I am going to knock at the door, and if it turns out that that mysterious acquaintance of yours does not, and never has lived here, we might find an explanation difficult. I am sure it is the housecertain! I know itI feel it hereand here. Mr. Holt touched his breast, and his forehead. His manner was distinctly odd. He was trembling, and a fevered expression had come into his eyes. Sydney glanced at him, for a moment, in silence. Then he bestowed his attention upon me. May I ask if I may rely upon your preserving your presence of mind? The mere question ruffled my plumes. What do you mean? What I say. I am going to knock at that door, and I am going to get through it, somehow. It is quite within the range of possibility that, when I am through, there will be some strange happeningsas you have heard from Mr. Holt. The house is commonplace enough without; you may not find it so commonplace within. You may find yourself in a position in which it will be in the highest degree essential that you should keep your wits about you. I am not likely to let them stray. Then thats all right.Do I understand that you propose to come in with me? Of course I dowhat do you suppose Ive come for? What nonsense you are talking. I hope that you will still continue to consider it nonsense by the time this little adventures done. That I resented his impertinence goes without sayingto be talked to in such a strain by Sydney Atherton, whom I had kept in subjection ever since he was in knickerbockers, was a little tryingbut I am forced to admit that I was more impressed by his manner, or his words, or by Mr. Holts manner, or something, than I should have cared to own. I had not the least notion what was going to happen, or what horrors that woebegonelooking dwelling contained. But Mr. Holts story had been of the most astonishing sort, my experiences of the previous night were still fresh, and, altogether, now that I was in such close neighbourhood with the Unknownwith a capital U!although it was broad daylight, it loomed before me in a shape for whichcandidly!I was not prepared. A more disreputablelooking front door I have not seenit was in perfect harmony with the remainder of the establishment. The paint was off; the woodwork was scratched and dented; the knocker was red with rust. When Sydney took it in his hand I was conscious of quite a little thrill. As he brought it down with a sharp rattat, I half expected to see the door fly open, and disclose some gruesome object glaring out at us. Nothing of the kind took place; the door did not budgenothing happened. Sydney waited a second or two, then knocked again; another second or two, then another knock. There was still no sign of any notice being taken of our presence. Sydney turned to Mr. Holt. Seems as if the place was empty. Mr. Holt was in the most singular condition of agitationit made me uncomfortable to look at him. You do not knowyou cannot tell; there may be someone there who hears and pays no heed. Ill give them another chance. Sydney brought down the knocker with thundering reverberations. The din must have been audible half a mile away. But from within the house there was still no sign that any heard. Sydney came down the step. Ill try another wayI may have better fortune at the back. He led the way round to the rear, Mr. Holt and I following in single file. There the place seemed in worse case even than in the front. There were two empty rooms on the ground floor at the backthere was no mistake about their being empty, without the slightest difficulty we could see right into them. One was apparently intended for a kitchen and washhouse combined, the other for a sittingroom. There was not a stick of furniture in either, nor the slightest sign of human habitation. Sydney commented on the fact. Not only is it plain that no one lives in these charming apartments, but it looks to me uncommonly as if no one ever had lived in them. To my thinking Mr. Holts agitation was increasing every moment. For some reason of his own, Sydney took no notice of it whateverpossibly because he judged that to do so would only tend to make it worse. An odd change had even taken place in Mr. Holts voicehe spoke in a sort of tremulous falsetto. It was only the front room which I saw. Very good; then, before very long, you shall see that front room again. Sydney rapped with his knuckles on the glass panels of the back door. He tried the handle; when it refused to yield he gave it a vigorous shaking. He saluted the dirty windowsso far as succeeding in attracting attention was concerned, entirely in vain. Then he turned again to Mr. Holthalf mockingly. I call you to witness that I have used every lawful means to gain the favourable notice of your mysterious friend. I must therefore beg to stand excused if I try something slightly unlawful for a change. It is true that you found the window already open; but, in my case, it soon will be. He took a knife out of his pocket, and, with the open blade, forced back the catchas I am told that burglars do. Then he lifted the sash. Behold! he exclaimed. What did I tell you?Now, my dear Marjorie, if I get in first and Mr. Holt gets in after me, we shall be in a position to open the door for you. I immediately saw through his design. No, Mr. Atherton; you will get in first, and I will get in after you, through the windowbefore Mr. Holt. I dont intend to wait for you to open the door. Sydney raised his hands and opened his eyes, as if grieved at my want of confidence. But I did not mean to be left in the lurch, to wait their pleasure, while on pretence of opening the door, they searched the house. So Sydney climbed in first, and I secondit was not a difficult operation, since the windowsill was under three feet from the groundand Mr. Holt last. Directly we were in, Sydney put his hand up to his mouth, and shouted. Is there anybody in this house? If so, will he kindly step this way, as there is someone wishes to see him. His words went echoing through the empty rooms in a way which was almost uncanny. I suddenly realised that if, after all, there did happen to be somebody in the house, and he was at all disagreeable, our presence on his premises might prove rather difficult to explain. However, no one answered. While I was waiting for Sydney to make the next move, he diverted my attention to Mr. Holt. Hollo, Holt, whats the matter with you? Man, dont play the fool like that! Something was the matter with Mr. Holt. He was trembling all over as if attacked by a shaking palsy. Every muscle in his body seemed twitching at once. A strained look had come on his face, which was not nice to see. He spoke as with an effort. Im all right.Its nothing. Oh, is it nothing? Then perhaps youll drop it. Wheres that brandy? I handed Sydney the flask. Here, swallow this. Mr. Holt swallowed the cupful of neat spirit which Sydney offered without an attempt at parley. Beyond bringing some remnants of colour to his ashen cheeks it seemed to have no effect on him whatever. Sydney eyed him with a meaning in his glance which I was at a loss to understand. Listen to me, my lad. Dont think you can deceive me by playing any of your fool tricks, and dont delude yourself into supposing that I shall treat you as anything but dangerous if you do. Ive got this. He showed the revolver of papas which I had lent him. Dont imagine that Miss Lindons presence will deter me from using it. Why he addressed Mr. Holt in such a strain surpassed my comprehension. Mr. Holt, however, evinced not the faintest symptoms of resentmenthe had become, on a sudden, more like an automaton than a man. Sydney continued to gaze at him as if he would have liked his glance to penetrate to his inmost soul. Keep in front of me, if you please, Mr. Holt, and lead the way to this mysterious apartment in which you claim to have had such a remarkable experience. Of me he asked in a whisper, Did you bring a revolver? I was startled. A revolver?The idea!How absurd you are! Sydney said something which was so rudeand so uncalled for!that it was worthy of papa in his most violent moments. Id sooner be absurd than a fool in petticoats. I was so angry that I did not know what to sayand before I could say it he went on. Keep your eyes and ears well open; be surprised at nothing you see or hear. Stick close to me. And for goodness sake remain mistress of as many of your senses as you conveniently can. I had not the least idea what was the meaning of it all. To me there seemed nothing to make such a pother about. And yet I was conscious of a fluttering of the heart as if there soon might be something, I knew Sydney sufficiently well to be aware that he was one of the last men in the world to make a fuss without reasonand that he was as little likely to suppose that there was a reason when as a matter of fact there was none. Mr. Holt led the way, as Sydney desiredor, rather, commanded, to the door of the room which was in front of the house. The door was closed. Sydney tapped on a panel. All was silence. He tapped again. Anyone in there? he demanded. As there was still no answer, he tried the handle. The door was locked. The first sign of the presence of a human being we have haddoors dont lock themselves. Its just possible that there may have been someone or something about the place, at some time or other, after all. Grasping the handle firmly, he shook it with all his mightas he had done with the door at the back. So flimsily was the place constructed that he made even the walls to tremble. Within there!if anyone is in there!if you dont open this door, I shall. There was no response. So be it!Im going to pursue my wild career of defiance of established law and order, and gain admission in one way, if I cant in another. Putting his right shoulder against the door, he pushed with his whole force. Sydney is a big man, and very strong, and the door was weak. Shortly, the lock yielded before the continuous pressure, and the door flew open. Sydney whistled. So!It begins to occur to me, Mr. Holt, that that story of yours may not have been such pure romance as it seemed. It was plain enough that, at any rate, this room had been occupied, and that recentlyand, if his taste in furniture could be taken as a test, by an eccentric occupant to boot. My own first impression was that there was someone, or something, living in it stillan uncomfortable odour greeted our nostrils, which was suggestive of some evilsmelling animal. Sydney seemed to share my thought. A pretty perfume, on my word! Lets shed a little more light on the subject, and see what causes it. Marjorie, stop where you are until I tell you. I had noticed nothing, from without, peculiar about the appearance of the blind which screened the window, but it must have been made of some unusually thick material, for, within, the room was strangely dark. Sydney entered, with the intention of drawing up the blind, but he had scarcely taken a couple of steps when he stopped. Whats that? Its it, said Mr. Holt, in a voice which was so unlike his own that it was scarcely recognisable. It?What do you mean by it? The Beetle! Judging from the sound of his voice Sydney was all at once in a state of odd excitement. Oh, is it!Then, if this time I dont find out the how and the why and the wherefore of that charming conjuring trick, Ill give you leave to write me down an asswith a great, big A. He rushed farther into the roomapparently his efforts to lighten it did not meet with the immediate success which he desired. Whats the matter with this confounded blind? Theres no cord! How do you pull it up?What the In the middle of his sentence Sydney ceased speaking. Suddenly Mr. Holt, who was standing by my side on the threshold of the door, was seized with such a fit of trembling, that, fearing he was going to fall, I caught him by the arm. A most extraordinary look was on his face. His eyes were distended to their fullest width, as if with horror at what they saw in front of them. Great beads of perspiration were on his forehead. Its coming! he screamed. Exactly what happened I do not know. But, as he spoke, I heard, proceeding from the room, the sound of the buzzing of wings. Instantly it recalled my experiences of the night beforeas it did so I was conscious of a most unpleasant qualm. Sydney swore a great oath, as if he were beside himself with rage. If you wont go up, you shall come down. I suppose, failing to find a cord, he seized the blind from below, and dragged it downit came, roller and all, clattering to the floor. The room was all in light. I hurried in. Sydney was standing by the window, with a look of perplexity upon his face which, under any other circumstances, would have been comical. He was holding papas revolver in his hand, and was glaring round and round the room, as if wholly at a loss to understand how it was he did not see what he was looking for. Marjorie! he exclaimed. Did you hear anything? Of course I did. It was that which I heard last nightwhich so frightened me. Oh, was it? Then, by in his excitement he must have been completely oblivious of my presence, for he used the most terrible language, when I find it therell be a small discussion. It cant have got out of the roomI know the creatures here; I not only heard it, I felt it brush against my face.Holt, come inside and shut that door. Mr. Holt raised his arms, as if he were exerting himself to make a forward movementbut he remained rooted to the spot on which he stood. I cant! he cried. You cant!Why? It wont let me. What wont let you? The Beetle! Sydney moved till he was close in front of him. He surveyed him with eager eyes. I was just at his back. I heard him murmurpossibly to me. By George!Its just as I thought!The beggars hypnotised! Then he said aloud, Can you see it now? Yes. Where? Behind you. As Mr. Holt spoke, I again heard, quite close to me, that buzzing sound. Sydney seemed to hear it tooit caused him to swing round so quickly that he all but whirled me off my feet.

I beg your pardon, Marjorie, but this is of the nature of an unparalleled experiencedidnt you hear something then? I diddistinctly; it was close to mewithin an inch or two of my face. We stared about us, then back at each otherthere was nothing else to be seen. Sydney laughed, doubtfully. Its uncommonly queer. I dont want to suggest that there are visions about, or I might suspect myself of softening of the brain. Butits queer. Theres a trick about it somewhere, I am convinced; and no doubt its simple enough when you know how its donebut the difficulty is to find that out.Do you think our friend over there is acting? He looks to me as if he were ill. He does look ill. He also looks as if he were hypnotised. If he is, it must be by suggestionand thats what makes me doubtful, because it will be the first plainly established case of hypnotism by suggestion Ive encountered.Holt! Yes. That, said Sydney in my ear, is the voice and that is the manner of a hypnotised man, but, on the other hand, a person under influence generally responds only to the hypnotistwhich is another feature about our peculiar friend which arouses my suspicions. Then, aloud, Dont stand there like an idiotcome inside. Again Mr. Holt made an apparently futile effort to do as he was bid. It was painful to look at himhe was like a feeble, frightened, tottering child, who would come on, but cannot. I cant. No nonsense, my man! Do you think that this is a performance in a booth, and that I am to be taken in by all the humbug of the professional mesmerist? Do as I tell youcome into the room. There was a repetition, on Mr. Holts part, of his previous pitiful struggle; this time it was longer sustained than beforebut the result was the same. I cant! he wailed. Then I say you canand shall! If I pick you up, and carry you, perhaps you will not find yourself so helpless as you wish me to suppose. Sydney moved forward to put his threat into execution. As he did so, a strange alteration took place in Mr. Holts demeanour. XXX. The Singular Behaviour of Mr. Holt I was standing in the middle of the room, Sydney was between the door and me; Mr. Holt was in the hall, just outside the doorway, in which he, so to speak, was framed. As Sydney advanced towards him he was seized with a kind of convulsionhe had to lean against the side of the door to save himself from falling. Sydney paused, and watched. The spasm went as suddenly as it cameMr. Holt became as motionless as he had just now been the other way. He stood in an attitude of febrile expectancyhis chin raised, his head thrown back, his eyes glancing upwardswith the dreadful fixed glare which had come into them ever since we had entered the house. He looked to me as if his every faculty was strained in the act of listeningnot a muscle in his body seemed to move; he was as rigid as a figure carved in stone. Presently the rigidity gave place to what, to an onlooker, seemed causeless agitation. I hear! he exclaimed, in the most curious voice I had ever heard. I come! It was as though he was speaking to someone who was far away. Turning, he walked down the passage to the front door. Hollo! cried Sydney. Where are you off to? We both of us hastened to see. He was fumbling with the latch; before we could reach him, the door was open, and he was through it. Sydney, rushing after him, caught him on the step and held him by the arm. Whats the meaning of this little caper?Where do you think youre going now? Mr. Holt did not condescend to turn and look at him. He said, in the same dreamy, faraway, unnatural tone of voiceand he kept his unwavering gaze fixed on what was apparently some distant object which was visible only to himself. I am going to him. He calls me. Who calls you? The Lord of the Beetle. Whether Sydney released his arm or not I cannot say. As he spoke, he seemed to me to slip away from Sydneys grasp. Passing through the gateway, turning to the right, he commenced to retrace his steps in the direction we had come. Sydney stared after him in unequivocal amazement. Then he looked at me. Well!this is a pretty fix!now whats to be done? Whats the matter with him? I inquired. Is he mad? Theres method in his madness if he is. Hes in the same condition in which he was that night I saw him come out of the Apostles window. Sydney has a horrible habit of calling Paul the Apostle; I have spoken to him about it over and over againbut my words have not made much impression. He ought to be followedhe may be sailing off to that mysterious friend of his this instant.But, on the other hand, he maynt, and it may be nothing but a trick of our friend the conjurers to get us away from this elegant abode of his. Hes done me twice already, I dont want to be done againand I distinctly do not want him to return and find me missing. Hes quite capable of taking the hint, and removing himself into the Ewigkeitwhen the clue to as pretty a mystery as ever I came across will have vanished. I can stay, I said. You?Alone? He eyed me doubtinglyevidently not altogether relishing the proposition. Why not? You might send the first person you meetpoliceman, cabman, or whoever it isto keep me company. It seems a pity now that we dismissed that cab. Yes, it does seem a pity. Sydney was biting his lip. Confound that fellow! how fast he moves. Mr. Holt was already nearing the end of the road. If you think it necessary, by all means follow to see where he goesyou are sure to meet somebody whom you will be able to send before you have gone very far. I suppose I shall.You wont mind being left alone? Why should I?Im not a child. Mr. Holt, reaching the corner, turned it, and vanished out of sight. Sydney gave an exclamation of impatience. If I dont make haste I shall lose him. Ill do as you suggestdispatch the first individual I come across to hold watch and ward with you. Thatll be all right. He started off at a runshouting to me as he went. It wont be five minutes before somebody comes! I waved my hand to him. I watched him till he reached the end of the road. Turning, he waved his hand to me. Then he vanished, as Mr. Holt had done. And I was alone. XXXI. The Terror by Day My first impulse, after Sydneys disappearance, was to laugh. Why should he display anxiety on my behalf merely because I was to be the sole occupant of an otherwise empty house for a few minutes more or lessand in broad daylight too! To say the least, the anxiety seemed unwarranted. I lingered at the gate, for a moment or two, wondering what was at the bottom of Mr. Holts singular proceedings, and what Sydney really proposed to gain by acting as a spy upon his wanderings. Then I turned to reenter the house. As I did so, another problem suggested itself to my mindwhat connection, of the slightest importance, could a man in Paul Lessinghams position have with the eccentric being who had established himself in such an unsatisfactory dwellingplace? Mr. Holts story I had only dimly understoodit struck me that it would require a deal of understanding. It was more like a farrago of nonsense, an outcome of delirium, than a plain statement of solid facts. To tell the truth, Sydney had taken it more seriously than I expected. He seemed to see something in it which I emphatically did not. What was double Dutch to me, seemed clear as print to him. So far as I could judge, he actually had the presumption to imagine that Paulmy Paul!Paul Lessingham!the great Paul Lessingham!was mixed up in the very mysterious adventures of poor, weakminded, hysterical Mr. Holt, in a manner which was hardly to his credit. Of course, any idea of the kind was purely and simply balderdash. Exactly what bee Sydney had got in his bonnet, I could not guess. But I did know Paul. Only let me find myself face to face with the fantastic author of Mr. Holts weird tribulations, and I, a woman, singlehanded, would do my best to show him that whoever played pranks with Paul Lessingham trifled with edged tools. I had returned to that historical front room which, according to Mr. Holt, had been the scene of his most disastrous burglarious entry. Whoever had furnished it had had original notions of the resources of modern upholstery. There was not a table in the placeno chair or couch, nothing to sit down upon except the bed. On the floor there was a marvellous carpet which was apparently of eastern manufacture. It was so thick, and so pliant to the tread, that moving over it was like walking on thousandyearold turf. It was woven in gorgeous colours, and covered with When I discovered what it actually was covered with, I was conscious of a disagreeable sense of surprise. It was covered with beetles! All over it, with only a few inches of space between each, were representations of some peculiar kind of beetleit was the same beetle, over, and over, and over. The artist had woven his undesirable subject into the warp and woof of the material with such cunning skill that, as one continued to gaze, one began to wonder if by any possibility the creatures could be alive. In spite of the softness of the texture, and the artof a kind!which had been displayed in the workmanship, I rapidly arrived at the conclusion that it was the most uncomfortable carpet I had ever seen. I wagged my finger at the repeated portrayals of theto me!unspeakable insect. If I had discovered that you were there before Sydney went, I think it just possible that I should have hesitated before I let him go. Then there came a revulsion of feeling. I shook myself. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Marjorie Lindon, to even think such nonsense. Are you all nerves and morbid imaginingsyou who have prided yourself on being so strongminded! A pretty sort you are to do battle for anyone.Why, theyre only makebelieves! Half involuntarily, I drew my foot over one of the creatures. Of course, it was nothing but imagination; but I seemed to feel it squelch beneath my shoe. It was disgusting. Come! I cried. This wont do! As Sydney would phrase itam I going to make an idiot of myself? I turned to the windowlooking at my watch. Its more than five minutes ago since Sydney went. That companion of mine ought to be already on the way. Ill go and see if he is coming. I went to the gate. There was not a soul in sight. It was with such a distinct sense of disappointment that I perceived this was so, that I was in two minds what to do. To remain where I was, looking, with gaping eyes, for the policeman, or the cabman, or whoever it was Sydney was dispatching to act as my temporary associate, was tantamount to acknowledging myself a simpletonwhile I was conscious of a most unmistakable reluctance to return within the house. Common sense, or what I took for common sense, however, triumphed, and, after loitering for another five minutes, I did go in again. This time, ignoring, to the best of my ability, the beetles on the floor, I proceeded to expend my curiosityand occupy my thoughtsin an examination of the bed. It only needed a very cursory examination, however, to show that the seeming bed was, in reality, none at allor if it was a bed after the manner of the Easterns it certainly was not after the fashion of the Britons. There was no frameworknothing to represent the bedstead. It was simply a heap of rugs piled apparently indiscriminately upon the floor. A huge mass of them there seemed to be; of all sorts, and shapes, and sizesand materials too. The top one was of white silkin quality, exquisite. It was of huge size, yet, with a little compression, one might almost have passed it through the proverbial wedding ring. So far as space admitted I spread it out in front of me. In the middle was a picturewhether it was embroidered on the substance or woven in it, I could not quite make out. Nor, at first, could I gather what it was the artist had intended to depictthere was a brilliancy about it which was rather dazzling. By degrees, I realised that the lurid hues were meant for flamesand, when one had got so far, one perceived that they were by no means badly imitated either. Then the meaning of the thing dawned on meit was a representation of a human sacrifice. In its way, as ghastly a piece of realism as one could see. On the right was the majestic seated figure of a goddess. Her hands were crossed upon her knees, and she was naked from her waist upwards. I fancied it was meant for Isis. On her brow was perched a gailyapparelled beetlethat ubiquitous beetle!forming a bright spot of colour against her coppery skinit was an exact reproduction of the creatures which were imaged on the carpet. In front of the idol was an enormous fiery furnace. In the very heart of the flames was an altar. On the altar was a naked white woman being burned alive. There could be no doubt as to her being alive, for she was secured by chains in such a fashion that she was permitted a certain amount of freedom, of which she was availing herself to contort and twist her body into shapes which were horribly suggestive of the agony which she was enduringthe artist, indeed, seemed to have exhausted his powers in his efforts to convey a vivid impression of the pains which were tormenting her. A pretty picture, on my word! A pleasant taste in art the garnitures of this establishment suggest! The person who likes to live with this kind of thing, especially as a covering to his bed, must have his own notions as to what constitute agreeable surroundings. As I continued staring at the thing, all at once it seemed as if the woman on the altar moved. It was preposterous, but she appeared to gather her limbs together, and turn half over. What can be the matter with me? Am I going mad? She cant be moving! If she wasnt, then certainly something wasshe was lifted right into the air. An idea occurred to me. I snatched the rug aside. The mystery was explained! A thin, yellow, wrinkled hand was protruding from amidst the heap of rugsit was its action which had caused the seeming movement of the figure on the altar. I stared, confounded. The hand was followed by an arm; the arm by a shoulder; the shoulder by a headand the most awful, hideous, wickedlooking face I had ever pictured even in my most dreadful dreams. A pair of baleful eyes were glaring up at mine. I understood the position in a flash of startled amazement. Sydney, in following Mr. Holt, had started on a wild goose chase after all. I was alone with the occupant of that mysterious housethe chief actor in Mr. Holts astounding tale. He had been hidden in the heap of rugs all the while. Book IV. In Pursuit The conclusion of the matter is extracted from the casebook of the Hon. Augustus Champnell, Confidential Agent. XXXII. A New Client On the afternoon of Friday, June 2, 18, I was entering in my casebook some memoranda having reference to the very curious matter of the Duchess of Datchets Deedbox. It was about two oclock. Andrews came in and laid a card upon my desk. On it was inscribed Mr. Paul Lessingham. Show Mr. Lessingham in. Andrews showed him in. I was, of course, familiar with Mr. Lessinghams appearance, but it was the first time I had had with him any personal communication. He held out his hand to me. You are Mr. Champnell? I am. I believe that I have not had the honour of meeting you before, Mr. Champnell, but with your father, the Earl of Glenlivet, I have the pleasure of some acquaintance. I bowed. He looked at me, fixedly, as if he were trying to make out what sort of man I was. You are very young, Mr. Champnell. I have been told that an eminent offender in that respect once asserted that youth is not of necessity a crime. And you have chosen a singular professionone in which one hardly looks for juvenility. You yourself, Mr. Lessingham, are not old. In a statesman one expects grey hairs.I trust that I am sufficiently ancient to be able to do you service. He smiled. I think it possible. I have heard of you more than once, Mr. Champnell, always to your advantage. My friend, Sir John Seymour, was telling me, only the other day, that you have recently conducted for him some business, of a very delicate nature, with much skill and tact; and he warmly advised me, if ever I found myself in a predicament, to come to you. I find myself in a predicament now. Again I bowed. A predicament, I fancy, of an altogether unparalleled sort. I take it that anything I may say to you will be as though it were said to a father confessor. You may rest assured of that. Good.Then, to make the matter clear to you I must begin by telling you a storyif I may trespass on your patience to that extent. I will endeavour not to be more verbose than the occasion requires. I offered him a chair, placing it in such a position that the light from the window would have shone full upon his face. With the calmest possible air, as if unconscious of my design, he carried the chair to the other side of my desk, twisting it right round before he sat on itso that now the light was at his back and on my face. Crossing his legs, clasping his hands about his knee, he sat in silence for some moments, as if turning something over in his mind. He glanced round the room. I suppose, Mr. Champnell, that some singular tales have been told in here. Some very singular tales indeed. I am never appalled by singularity. It is my normal atmosphere. And yet I should be disposed to wager that you have never listened to so strange a story as that which I am about to tell you now. So astonishing, indeed, is the chapter in my life which I am about to open out to you, that I have more than once had to take myself to task, and fit the incidents together with mathematical accuracy in order to assure myself of its perfect truth. He paused. There was about his demeanour that suggestion of reluctance which I not uncommonly discover in individuals who are about to take the skeletons from their cupboards and parade them before my eyes. His next remark seemed to point to the fact that he perceived what was passing through my thoughts. My position is not rendered easier by the circumstance that I am not of a communicative nature. I am not in sympathy with the spirit of the age which craves for personal advertisement. I hold that the private life even of a public man should be held inviolate. I resent, with peculiar bitterness, the attempts of prying eyes to peer into matters which, as it seems to me, concern myself alone. You must, therefore, bear with me, Mr. Champnell, if I seem awkward in disclosing to you certain incidents in my career which I had hoped would continue locked in the secret depository of my own bosom, at any rate till I was carried to the grave. I am sure you will suffer me to stand excused if I frankly admit that it is only an irresistible chain of incidents which has constrained me to make of you a confidant. My experience tells me, Mr. Lessingham, that no one ever does come to me until they are compelled. In that respect I am regarded as something worse even than a medical man. A wintry smile flitted across his featuresit was clear that he regarded me as a good deal worse than a medical man. Presently he began to tell me one of the most remarkable tales which even I had heard. As he proceeded I understood how strong, and how natural, had been his desire for reticence. On the mere score of credibility he must have greatly preferred to have kept his own counsel. For my part I own, unreservedly, that I should have deemed the tale incredible had it been told me by Tom, Dick, or Harry, instead of by Paul Lessingham. XXXIII. What Came of Looking Through a Lattice He began in accents which halted not a little. By degrees his voice grew firmer. Words came from him with greater fluency. I am not yet forty. So when I tell you that twenty years ago I was a mere youth I am stating what is a sufficiently obvious truth. It is twenty years ago since the events of which I am going to speak transpired. I lost both my parents when I was quite a lad, and by their death I was left in a position in which I was, to an unusual extent in one so young, my own master. I was ever of a rambling turn of mind, and when, at the mature age of eighteen, I left school, I decided that I should learn more from travel than from sojourn at a university. So, since there was no one to say me nay, instead of going either to Oxford or Cambridge, I went abroad. After a few months I found myself in EgyptI was down with fever at Shepheards Hotel in Cairo. I had caught it by drinking polluted water during an excursion with some Bedouins to Palmyra. When the fever had left me I went out one night into the town in search of amusement. I went, unaccompanied, into the native quarter, not a wise thing to do, especially at night, but at eighteen one is not always wise, and I was weary of the monotony of the sickroom, and eager for something which had in it a spice of adventure. I found myself in a street which I have reason to believe is no longer existing. It had a French name, and was called the Rue de RabagasI saw the name on the corner as I turned into it, and it has left an impress on the tablets of my memory which is never likely to be obliterated. It was a narrow street, and, of course, a dirty one, illlit, and, apparently, at the moment of my appearance, deserted. I had gone, perhaps, halfway down its tortuous length, blundering more than once into the kennel, wondering what fantastic whim had brought me into such unsavoury quarters, and what would happen to me if, as seemed extremely possible, I lost my way. On a sudden my ears were saluted by sounds which proceeded from a house which I was passingsounds of music and of singing. I paused. I stood awhile to listen. There was an open window on my right, which was screened by latticed blinds. From the room which was behind these blinds the sounds were coming. Someone was singing, accompanied by an instrument resembling a guitarsinging uncommonly well. Mr. Lessingham stopped. A stream of recollection seemed to come flooding over him. A dreamy look came into his eyes. I remember it all as clearly as if it were yesterday. How it all comes backthe dirty street, the evil smells, the imperfect light, the girls voice filling all at once the air. It was a girls voicefull, and round, and sweet; an organ seldom met with, especially in such a place as that. She sang a little chansonnette, which, just then, half Europe was hummingit occurred in an opera which they were acting at one of the Boulevard theatresLa Ptite Voyageuse. The effect, coming so unexpectedly, was startling. I stood and heard her to an end. Inspired by I know not what impulse of curiosity, when the song was finished, I moved one of the lattice blinds a little aside, so as to enable me to get a glimpse of the singer. I found myself looking into what seemed to be a sort of cafone of those places which are found all over the Continent, in which women sing in order to attract custom. There was a low platform at one end of the room, and on it were seated three women. One of them had evidently just been accompanying her own songshe still had an instrument of music in her hands, and was striking a few idle notes. The other two had been acting as audience. They were attired in the fantastic apparel which the women who are found in such places generally wear. An old woman was sitting knitting in a corner, whom I took to be the inevitable patronne. With the exception of these four the place was empty. They must have heard me touch the lattice, or seen it moving, for no sooner did I glance within than the three pairs of eyes on the platform were raised and fixed on mine. The old woman in the corner alone showed no consciousness of my neighbourhood. We eyed one another in silence for a second or two. Then the girl with the harpthe instrument she was manipulating proved to be fashioned more like a harp than a guitarcalled out to me, Entrez, monsieur!Soye le bienvenu! I was a little tired. Rather curious as to whereabouts I wasthe place struck me, even at that first momentary glimpse, as hardly in the ordinary line of that kind of thing. And not unwilling to listen to a repetition of the former song, or to another sung by the same singer. On condition, I replied, that you sing me another song. Ah, monsieur, with the greatest pleasure in the world I will sing you twenty. She was almost, if not quite, as good as her word. She entertained me with song after song. I may safely say that I have seldom if ever heard melody more enchanting. All languages seemed to be the same to her. She sang in French and Italian, German and Englishin tongues with which I was unfamiliar. It was in these Eastern harmonies that she was most successful. They were indescribably weird and thrilling, and she delivered them with a verve and sweetness which was amazing. I sat at one of the little tables with which the room was dotted, listening entranced. Time passed more rapidly than I supposed. While she sang I sipped the liquor with which the old woman had supplied me. So enthralled was I by the display of the girls astonishing gifts that I did not notice what it was I was drinking. Looking back I can only surmise that it was some poisonous concoction of the creatures own. That one small glass had on me the strangest effect. I was still weak from the fever which I had only just succeeded in shaking off, and that, no doubt, had something to do with the result. But, as I continued to sit, I was conscious that I was sinking into a lethargic condition, against which I was incapable of struggling. After a while the original performer ceased her efforts, and, her companions taking her place, she came and joined me at the little table. Looking at my watch I was surprised to perceive the lateness of the hour. I rose to leave. She caught me by the wrist. Do not go, she said;she spoke English of a sort, and with the queerest accent. All is well with you. Rest awhile. You will smileI should smile, perhaps, were I the listener instead of you, but it is the simple truth that her touch had on me what I can only describe as a magnetic influence. As her fingers closed upon my wrist, I felt as powerless in her grasp as if she held me with bands of steel. What seemed an invitation was virtually a command. I had to stay whether I would or wouldnt. She called for more liquor, and at what again was really her command I drank of it. I do not think that after she touched my wrist I uttered a word. She did all the talking. And, while she talked, she kept her eyes fixed on my face. Those eyes of hers! They were a devils. I can positively affirm that they had on me a diabolical effect. They robbed me of my consciousness, of my power of volition, of my capacity to thinkthey made me as wax in her hands. My last recollection of that fatal night is of her sitting in front of me, bending over the table, stroking my wrist with her extended fingers, staring at me with her awful eyes. After that, a curtain seems to descend. There comes a period of oblivion. Mr. Lessingham ceased. His manner was calm and selfcontained enough; but, in spite of that I could see that the mere recollection of the things which he told me moved his nature to its foundations. There was eloquence in the drawn lines about his mouth, and in the strained expression of his eyes. So far his tale was sufficiently commonplace. Places such as the one which he described abound in the Cairo of today; and many are the Englishmen who have entered them to their exceeding bitter cost. With that keen intuition which has done him yeomans service in the political arena, Mr. Lessingham at once perceived the direction my thoughts were taking. You have heard this tale before?No doubt. And often. The traps are many, and the fools and the unwary are not a few. The singularity of my experience is still to come. You must forgive me if I seem to stumble in the telling. I am anxious to present my case as baldly, and with as little appearance of exaggeration as possible. I say with as little appearance, for some appearance of exaggeration I fear is unavoidable. My case is so unique, and so out of the common run of our everyday experience, that the plainest possible statement must smack of the sensational. As, I fancy, you have guessed, when understanding returned to me, I found myself in an apartment with which I was unfamiliar. I was lying, undressed, on a heap of rugs in a corner of a lowpitched room which was furnished in a fashion which, when I grasped the details, filled me with amazement. By my side knelt the Woman of the Songs. Leaning over, she wooed my mouth with kisses. I cannot describe to you the sense of horror and of loathing with which the contact of her lips oppressed me. There was about her something so unnatural, so inhuman, that I believe even then I could have destroyed her with as little sense of moral turpitude as if she had been some noxious insect. Where am I? I exclaimed. You are with the children of Isis, she replied. What she meant I did not know, and do not to this hour. You are in the hands of the great goddessof the mother of men. How did I come here? By the loving kindness of the great mother. I do not, of course, pretend to give you the exact text of her words, but they were to that effect. Half raising myself on the heap of rugs, I gazed about meand was astounded at what I saw. The place in which I was, though the reverse of lofty, was of considerable sizeI could not conceive whereabouts it could be. The walls and roof were of bare stoneas though the whole had been hewed out of the solid rock. It seemed to be some sort of temple, and was redolent with the most extraordinary odour. An altar stood about the centre, fashioned out of a single block of stone. On it a fire burned with a faint blue flamethe fumes which rose from it were no doubt chiefly responsible for the prevailing perfumes. Behind it was a huge bronze figure, more than life size. It was in a sitting posture, and represented a woman. Although it resembled no portrayal of her I have seen either before or since, I came afterwards to understand that it was meant for Isis. On the idols brow was poised a beetle. That the creature was alive seemed clear, for, as I looked at it, it opened and shut its wings. If the one on the forehead of the goddess was the only live beetle which the place contained, it was not the only representation. It was modelled in the solid stone of the roof, and depicted in flaming colours on hangings which here and there were hung against the walls. Wherever the eye turned it rested on a scarab. The effect was bewildering. It was as though one saw things through the distorted glamour of a nightmare. I asked myself if I were not still dreaming; if my appearance of consciousness were not after all a mere delusion; if I had really regained my senses. And, here, Mr. Champnell, I wish to point out, and to emphasise the fact, that I am not prepared to positively affirm what portion of my adventures in that extraordinary, and horrible place, was actuality, and what the product of a feverish imagination. Had I been persuaded that all I thought I saw, I really did see, I should have opened my lips long ago, let the consequences to myself have been what they might. But there is the crux. The happenings were of such an incredible character, and my condition was such an abnormal oneI was never really myself from the first moment to the lastthat I have hesitated, and still do hesitate, to assert where, precisely, fiction ended and fact began. With some misty notion of testing my actual condition I endeavoured to get off the heap of rugs on which I reclined. As I did so the woman at my side laid her hand against my chest, lightly. But, had her gentle pressure been the equivalent of a ton of iron, it could not have been more effectual. I collapsed, sank back upon the rugs, and lay there, panting for breath, wondering if I had crossed the border line which divides madness from sanity. Let me get up!let me go! I gasped.

Nay, she murmured, stay with me yet awhile, O my beloved. And again she kissed me. Once more Mr. Lessingham paused. An involuntary shudder went all over him. In spite of the evidently great effort which he was making to retain his selfcontrol his features were contorted by an anguished spasm. For some seconds he seemed at a loss to find words to enable him to continue. When he did go on, his voice was harsh and strained. I am altogether incapable of even hinting to you the nauseous nature of that womans kisses. They filled me with an indescribable repulsion. I look back at them with a feeling of physical, mental, and moral horror, across an interval of twenty years. The most dreadful part of it was that I was wholly incapable of offering even the faintest resistance to her caresses. I lay there like a log. She did with me as she would, and in dumb agony I endured. He took his handkerchief from his pocket, and, although the day was cool, with it he wiped the perspiration from his brow. To dwell in detail on what occurred during my involuntary sojourn in that fearful place is beyond my power. I cannot even venture to attempt it. The attempt, were it made, would be futile, and, to me, painful beyond measure. I seem to have seen all that happened as in a glass darklywith about it all an element of unreality. As I have already remarked, the things which revealed themselves, dimly, to my perception, seemed too bizarre, too hideous, to be true. It was only afterwards, when I was in a position to compare dates, that I was enabled to determine what had been the length of my imprisonment. It appears that I was in that horrible den more than two monthstwo unspeakable months. And the whole time there were comings and goings, a phantasmagoric array of eerie figures continually passed to and fro before my hazy eyes. What I judge to have been religious services took place; in which the altar, the bronze image, and the beetle on its brow, figure largely. Not only were they conducted with a bewildering confusion of mysterious rites, but, if my memory is in the least degree trustworthy, they were orgies of nameless horrors. I seem to have seen things take place at them at the mere thought of which the brain reels and trembles. Indeed it is in connection with the cult of the obscene deity to whom these wretched creatures paid their scandalous vows that my most awful memories seem to have been associated. It may have beenI hope it was, a mirage born of my half delirious state, but it seemed to me that they offered human sacrifices. When Mr. Lessingham said this, I pricked up my ears. For reasons of my own, which will immediately transpire, I had been wondering if he would make any reference to a human sacrifice. He noted my display of interestbut misapprehended the cause. I see you start, I do not wonder. But I repeat that unless I was the victim of some extraordinary species of double sightin which case the whole business would resolve itself into the fabric of a dream, and I should indeed thank God!I saw, on more than one occasion, a human sacrifice offered on that stone altar, presumably to the grim image which looked down on it. And, unless I err, in each case the sacrificial object was a woman, stripped to the skin, as white as you or Iand before they burned her they subjected her to every variety of outrage of which even the minds of demons could conceive. More than once since then I have seemed to hear the shrieks of the victims ringing through the air, mingled with the triumphant cries of her frenzied murderers, and the music of their harps. It was the cumulative horrors of such a scene which gave me the strength, or the courage, or the madness, I know not which it was, to burst the bonds which bound me, and which, even in the bursting, made of me, even to this hour, a haunted man. There had been a sacrificeunless, as I have repeatedly observed, the whole was nothing but a dream. A womana young and lovely Englishwoman, if I could believe the evidence of my own eyes, had been outraged, and burnt alive, while I lay there helpless, looking on. The business was concluded. The ashes of the victim had been consumed by the participants. The worshippers had departed. I was left alone with the woman of the songs, who apparently acted as the guardian of that worse than slaughterhouse. She was, as usual after such an orgie, rather a devil than a human being, drunk with an insensate frenzy, delirious with inhuman longings. As she approached to offer to me her loathed caresses, I was on a sudden conscious of something which I had not felt before when in her company. It was as though something had slipped away from mesome weight which had oppressed me, some bond by which I had been bound. I was aroused, all at once, to a sense of freedom; to a knowledge that the blood which coursed through my veins was after all my own, that I was master of my own honour. I can only suppose that through all those weeks she had kept me there in a state of mesmeric stupor. That, taking advantage of the weakness which the fever had left behind, by the exercise of her diabolical arts, she had not allowed me to pass out of a condition of hypnotic trance. Now, for some reason, the cord was loosed. Possibly her absorption in her religious duties had caused her to forget to tighten it. Anyhow, as she approached me, she approached a man, and one who, for the first time for many a day, was his own man. She herself seemed wholly unconscious of anything of the kind. As she drew nearer to me, and nearer, she appeared to be entirely oblivious of the fact that I was anything but the fibreless, emasculated creature which, up to that moment, she had made of me. But she knew it when she touched mewhen she stooped to press her lips to mine. At that instant the accumulating rage which had been smouldering in my breast through all those leaden torturing hours, sprang into flame. Leaping off my couch of rugs, I flung my hands about her throatand then she knew I was awake. Then she strove to tighten the cord which she had suffered to become unduly loose. Her baleful eyes were fixed on mine. I knew that she was putting out her utmost force to trick me of my manhood. But I fought with her like one possessed, and I conqueredin a fashion. I compressed her throat with my two hands as with an iron vice. I knew that I was struggling for more than life, that the odds were all against me, that I was staking my all upon the casting of a dieI stuck at nothing which could make me victor. Tighter and tighter my pressure grewI did not stay to think if I was killing hertill on a sudden Mr. Lessingham stopped. He stared with fixed, glassy eyes, as if the whole was being reenacted in front of him. His voice faltered. I thought he would break down. But, with an effort, he continued. On a sudden, I felt her slipping from between my fingers. Without the slightest warning, in an instant she had vanished, and where, not a moment before, she herself had been, I found myself confronting a monstrous beetlea huge, writhing creation of some wild nightmare. At first the creature stood as high as I did. But, as I stared at it, in stupefied amazementas you may easily imaginethe thing dwindled while I gazed. I did not stop to see how far the process of dwindling continueda stark raving madman for the nonce, I fled as if all the fiends in hell were at my heels. XXXIV. After Twenty Years How I reached the open air I cannot tell youI do not know. I have a confused recollection of rushing through vaulted passages, through endless corridors, of trampling over people who tried to arrest my passageand the rest is blank. When I again came to myself I was lying in the house of an American missionary named Clements. I had been found, at early dawn, stark naked, in a Cairo street, and picked up for dead. Judging from appearances I must have wandered for miles, all through the night. Whence I had come, or whither I was going, none could tellI could not tell myself. For weeks I hovered between life and death. The kindness of Mr. and Mrs. Clements was not to be measured by words. I was brought to their house a penniless, helpless, battered stranger, and they gave me all they had to offer, without money and without pricewith no expectation of an earthly reward. Let no one pretend that there is no Christian charity under the sun. The debt I owed that man and woman I was never able to repay. Before I was properly myself again, and in a position to offer some adequate testimony of the gratitude I felt, Mrs. Clements was dead, drowned during an excursion on the Nile, and her husband had departed on a missionary expedition into Central Africa, from which he never returned. Although, in a measure, my physical health returned, for months after I had left the roof of my hospitable hosts, I was in a state of semiimbecility. I suffered from a species of aphasia. For days together I was speechless, and could remember nothingnot even my own name. And, when that stage had passed, and I began to move more freely among my fellows, for years I was but a wreck of my former self. I was visited, at all hours of the day and night, by frightfulI know not whether to call them visions, they were real enough to me, but since they were visible to no one but myself, perhaps that is the word which best describes them. Their presence invariably plunged me into a state of abject terror, against which I was unable to even make a show of fighting. To such an extent did they embitter my existence, that I voluntarily placed myself under the treatment of an expert in mental pathology. For a considerable period of time I was under his constant supervision, but the visitations were as inexplicable to him as they were to me. By degrees, however, they became rarer and rarer, until at last I flattered myself that I had once more become as other men. After an interval, to make sure, I devoted myself to politics. Thenceforward I have lived, as they phrase it, in the public eye. Private life, in any peculiar sense of the term, I have had none. Mr. Lessingham ceased. His tale was not uninteresting, and, to say the least of it, was curious. But I still was at a loss to understand what it had to do with me, or what was the purport of his presence in my room. Since he remained silent, as if the matter, so far as he was concerned, was at an end, I told him so. I presume, Mr. Lessingham, that all this is but a prelude to the play. At present I do not see where it is that I come in. Still for some seconds he was silent. When he spoke his voice was grave and sombre, as if he were burdened by a weight of woe. Unfortunately, as you put it, all this has been but a prelude to the play. Were it not so I should not now stand in such pressing want of the services of a confidential agentthat is, of an experienced man of the world, who has been endowed by nature with phenomenal perceptive faculties, and in whose capacity and honour I can place the completest confidence. I smiledthe compliment was a pointed one. I hope your estimate of me is not too high. I hope notfor my sake, as well as for your own. I have heard great things of you. If ever man stood in need of all that human skill and acumen can do for him, I certainly am he. His words aroused my curiosity. I was conscious of feeling more interested than heretofore. I will do my best for you. Man can do no more. Only give my best a trial. I will. At once. He looked at me long and earnestly. Then, leaning forward, he said, lowering his voice perhaps unconsciously, The fact is, Mr. Champnell, that quite recently events have happened which threaten to bridge the chasm of twenty years, and to place me face to face with that plague spot of the past. At this moment I stand in imminent peril of becoming again the wretched thing I was when I fled from that den of all the devils. It is to guard me against this that I have come to you. I want you to unravel the tangled thread which threatens to drag me to my doomand, when unravelled to sunder itforever, if God wills!in twain. Explain. To be frank, for the moment I thought him mad. He went on. Three weeks ago, when I returned late one night from a sitting in the House of Commons, I found, on my study table, a sheet of paper on which there was a representationmarvellously like!of the creature into which, as it seemed to me, the woman of the songs was transformed as I clutched her throat between my hands. The mere sight of it brought back one of those visitations of which I have told you, and which I thought I had done with foreverI was convulsed by an agony of fear, thrown into a state approximating to a paralysis both of mind and body. But why? I cannot tell you. I only know that I have never dared to allow my thoughts to recur to that last dread scene, lest the mere recurrence should drive me mad. What was this you found upon your study tablemerely a drawing? It was a representation, produced by what process I cannot say, which was so wonderfully, so diabolically, like the original, that for a moment I thought the thing itself was on my table. Who put it there? That is precisely what I wish you to find outwhat I wish you to make it your instant business to ascertain. I have found the thing, under similar circumstances, on three separate occasions, on my study tableand each time it has had on me the same hideous effect. Each time after you have returned from a late sitting in the House of Commons? Exactly. Where are thesewhat shall I call themdelineations? That, again, I cannot tell you. What do you mean? What I say. Each time, when I recovered, the thing had vanished. Sheet of paper and all? Apparentlythough on that point I could not be positive. You will understand that my study table is apt to be littered with sheets of paper, and I could not absolutely determine that the thing had not stared at me from one of those. The delineation itself, to use your word, certainly had vanished. I began to suspect that this was a case rather for a doctor than for a man of my profession. And hinted as much. Dont you think it is possible, Mr. Lessingham, that you have been overworking yourselfthat you have been driving your brain too hard, and that you have been the victim of an optical delusion? I thought so myself; I may say that I almost hoped so. But wait till I have finished. You will find that there is no loophole in that direction. He appeared to be recalling events in their due order. His manner was studiously coldas if he were endeavouring, despite the strangeness of his story, to impress me with the literal accuracy of each syllable he uttered. The night before last, on returning home, I found in my study a stranger. A stranger? Yes.In other words, a burglar. A burglar?I see.Go on. He had paused. His demeanour was becoming odder and odder. On my entry he was engaged in forcing an entry into my bureau. I need hardly say that I advanced to seize him. ButI could not. You could not?How do you mean you could not? I mean simply what I say. You must understand that this was no ordinary felon. Of what nationality he was I cannot tell you. He only uttered two words, and they were certainly in English, but apart from that he was dumb. He wore no covering on his head or feet. Indeed, his only garment was a long dark flowing cloak which, as it fluttered about him, revealed that his limbs were bare. An unique costume for a burglar. The instant I saw him I realised that he was in some way connected with that adventure in the Rue de Rabagas. What he said and did, proved it to the hilt. What did he say and do? As I approached to effect his capture, he pronounced aloud two words which recalled that awful scene the recollection of which always lingers in my brain, and of which I never dare to permit myself to think. Their very utterance threw me into a sort of convulsion. What were the words? Mr. Lessingham opened his mouthand shut it. A marked change took place in the expression of his countenance. His eyes became fixed and staringresembling the glassy orbs of the somnambulist. For a moment I feared that he was going to give me an object lesson in the visitations of which I had heard so much. I rose, with a view of offering him assistance. He motioned me back. Thank you.It will pass away. His voice was dry and huskyunlike his usual silvern tones. After an uncomfortable interval he managed to continue. You see for yourself, Mr. Champnell, what a miserable weakling, when this subject is broached, I still remain. I cannot utter the words the stranger uttered, I cannot even write them down. For some inscrutable reason they have on me an effect similar to that which spells and incantations had on people in tales of witchcraft. I suppose, Mr. Lessingham, that there is no doubt that this mysterious stranger was not himself an optical delusion? Scarcely. There is the evidence of my servants to prove the contrary. Did your servants see him? Some of themyes. Then there is the evidence of the bureau. The fellow had smashed the top right in two. When I came to examine the contents I learned that a packet of letters was missing. They were letters which I had received from Miss Lindon, a lady whom I hope to make my wife. This, also, I state to you in confidence. What use would he be likely to make of them? If matters stand as I fear they do, he might make a very serious misuse of them. If the object of these wretches, after all these years, is a wild revenge, they would be capable, having discovered what she is to me, of working Miss Lindon a fatal mischiefor, at the very least, of poisoning her mind. I see.How did the thief escapedid he, like the delineation, vanish into air? He escaped by the much more prosaic method of dashing through the drawingroom window, and clambering down from the verandah into the street, where he ran right into someones arms. Into whose armsa constables? No; into Mr. AthertonsSydney Athertons. The inventor? The same.Do you know him? I do. Sydney Atherton and I are friends of a good many years standing.But Atherton must have seen where he came from;and, anyhow, if he was in the state of undress which you have described, why didnt he stop him? Mr. Athertons reasons were his own. He did not stop him, and, so far as I can learn, he did not attempt to stop him. Instead, he knocked at my hall door to inform me that he had seen a man climb out of my window. I happen to know that, at certain seasons, Atherton is a queer fishbut that sounds very queer indeed. The truth is, Mr. Champnell, that, if it were not for Mr. Atherton, I doubt if I should have troubled you even now. The accident of his being an acquaintance of yours makes my task easier. He drew his chair closer to me with an air of briskness which had been foreign to him before. For some reason, which I was unable to fathom, the introduction of Athertons name seemed to have enlivened him. However, I was not long to remain in darkness. In half a dozen sentences he threw more light on the real cause of his visit to me than he had done in all that had gone before. His bearing, too, was more businesslike and to the point. For the first time I had some glimmerings of the politicianalert, keen, eageras he is known to all the world. Mr. Atherton, like myself, has been a postulant for Miss Lindons hand. Because I have succeeded where he has failed, he has chosen to be angry. It seems that he has had dealings, either with my visitor of Tuesday night, or with some other his acquaintance, and he proposes to use what he has gleaned from him to the disadvantage of my character. I have just come from Mr. Atherton. From hints he dropped I conclude that, probably during the last few hours, he has had an interview with someone who was connected in some way with that lurid patch in my career; that this person made socalled revelations, which were nothing but a series of monstrous lies; and these socalled revelations Mr. Atherton has threatened, in so many words, to place before Miss Lindon. That is an eventuality which I wish to avoid. My own conviction is that there is at this moment in London an emissary from that den in the whilom Rue de Rabagasfor all I know it may be the Woman of the Songs herself. Whether the sole purport of this individuals presence is to do me injury, I am, as yet, in no position to say, but that it is proposed to work me mischief, at any rate, by the way, is plain. I believe that Mr. Atherton knows more about this persons individuality and whereabouts than he has been willing, so far, to admit. I want you, therefore, to ascertain these things on my behalf; to find out what, and where, this person is, to drag her!or him;out into the light of day. In short, I want you to effectually protect me from the terrorism which threatens once more to overwhelm my mental and my physical powerswhich bids fair to destroy my intellect, my career, my life, my all. What reason have you for suspecting that Mr. Atherton has seen this individual of whom you speakhas he told you so? Practicallyyes. I know Atherton well. In his not infrequent moments of excitement he is apt to use strong language, but it goes no further. I believe him to be the last person in the world to do anyone an intentional injustice, under any circumstances whatever. If I go to him, armed with credentials from you, when he understands the real gravity of the situationwhich it will be my business to make him do, I believe that, spontaneously, of his own accord, he will tell me as much about this mysterious individual as he knows himself. Then go to him at once. Good. I will. The result I will communicate to you. I rose from my seat. As I did so, someone rushed into the outer office with a din and a clatter. Andrews voice, and another, became distinctly audibleAndrews apparently raised in vigorous expostulation. Raised, seemingly, in vain, for presently the door of my own particular sanctum was thrown open with a crash, and Mr. Sydney Atherton himself came dashing inevidently conspicuously under the influence of one of those not infrequent moments of excitement of which I had just been speaking. XXXV. A Bringer of Tidings Atherton did not wait to see who might or might not be present, but, without even pausing to take breath, he broke into full cry on the instantas is occasionally his wont. Champnell!Thank goodness Ive found you in!I want you!At once!Dont stop to talk, but stick your hat on, and put your best foot forwardIll tell you all about it in the cab. I endeavoured to call his attention to Mr. Lessinghams presencebut without success. My dear fellow When I had got as far as that he cut me short. Dont dear fellow me!None of your jabber! And none of your excuses either! I dont care if youve got an engagement with the Queen, youll have to chuck it. Wheres that dashed hat of yoursor are you going without it? Dont I tell you that every second cut to waste may mean the difference between life and death?Do you want me to drag you down to the cab by the hair of your head? I will try not to constrain you to quite so drastic a resourceand I was coming to you at once in any case. I only want to call your attention to the fact that I am not alone.Here is Mr. Lessingham. In his harumscarum haste Mr. Lessingham had gone unnoticed. Now that his observation was particularly directed to him, Atherton started, turned, and glared at my latest client in a fashion which was scarcely flattering. Oh!Its you, is it?What the deuce are you doing here? Before Lessingham could reply to this most unceremonious query, Atherton, rushing forward, gripped him by the arm. Have you seen her? Lessingham, not unnaturally nonplussed by the others curious conduct, stared at him in unmistakable amazement. Have I seen whom? Marjorie Lindon! Marjorie Lindon? Lessingham paused. He was evidently asking himself what the inquiry meant. I have not seen Miss Lindon since last night. Why do you ask? Then Heaven help us!As Im a living man I believe he, she, or it has got her! His words were incomprehensible enough to stand in copious need of explanationas Mr. Lessingham plainly thought. What is it that you mean, sir? What I sayI believe that that Oriental friend of yours has got her in her clutchesif it is a her; goodness alone knows what the infernal conjurers real sex may be. Atherton!Explain yourself! On a sudden Lessinghams tones rang out like a trumpet call. If damage comes to her I shall be fit to cut my throatand yours! Mr. Lessinghams next proceeding surprised meI imagine it surprised Atherton still more. Springing at Sydney like a tiger, he caught him by the throat. Youyou hound! Of what wretched folly have you been guilty? If so much as a hair of her head is injured you shall repay it me ten thousandfold!You mischiefmaking, intermeddling, jealous fool! He shook Sydney as if he had been a ratthen flung him from him headlong on to the floor. It reminded me of nothing so much as Othellos treatment of Iago. Never had I seen a man so transformed by rage. Lessingham seemed to have positively increased in stature. As he stood glowering down at the prostrate Sydney, he might have stood for a materialistic conception of human retribution. Sydney, I take it, was rather surprised than hurt. For a moment or two he lay quite still. Then, lifting his head, he looked up his assailant. Then, raising himself to his feet, he shook himselfas if with a view of learning if all his bones were whole. Putting his hands up to his neck, he rubbed it, gently. And he grinned. By God, Lessingham, theres more in you than I thought. After all, you are a man. Theres some holding power in those wrists of yourstheyve nearly broken my neck. When this business is finished, I should like to put on the gloves with you, and fight it out. Youre clean wasted upon politicsDamn it, man, give me your hand! Mr. Lessingham did not give him his hand. Atherton took itand gave it a hearty shake with both of his. If the first paroxysm of his passion had passed, Lessingham was still sufficiently stern. Be so good as not to trifle, Mr. Atherton. If what you say is correct, and the wretch to whom you allude really has Miss Lindon at her mercy, then the woman I loveand whom you also pretend to love!stands in imminent peril not only of a ghastly death, but of what is infinitely worse than death. The deuce she does! Atherton wheeled round towards me. Champnell, havent you got that dashed hat of yours yet? Dont stand there like a tailors dummy, keeping me on tenterhooksmove yourself! Ill tell you all about it in the cab.And, Lessingham, if youll come with us Ill tell you too. XXXVI. What the Tidings Were Three in a hansom cab is not, under all circumstances, the most comfortable method of conveyancewhen one of the trio happens to be Sydney Atherton in one of his moments of excitement it is distinctly the opposite; as, on that occasion, Mr. Lessingham and I both quickly found. Sometimes he sat on my knees, sometimes on Lessinghams, and frequently, when he unexpectedly stood up, and all but precipitated himself on to the horses back, on nobodys. In the eagerness of his gesticulations, first he knocked off my hat, then he knocked off Lessinghams, then his own, then all three togetheronce, his own hat rolling into the mud, he sprang into the road, without previously going through the empty form of advising the driver of his intention, to pick it up. When he turned to speak to Lessingham, he thrust his elbow into my eye; and when he turned to speak to me, he thrust it into Lessinghams. Never, for one solitary instant, was he at rest, or either of us at ease. The wonder is that the gymnastics in which he incessantly indulged did not sufficiently attract public notice to induce a policeman to put at least a momentary period to our progress. Had speed not been of primary importance I should have insisted on the transference of the expedition to the somewhat wider limits of a fourwheeler. His elucidation of the causes of his agitation was apparently more comprehensible to Lessingham than it was to me. I had to piece this and that together under considerable difficulties. By degrees I did arrive at something like a clear notion of what had actually taken place. He commenced by addressing Lessinghamand thrusting his elbow into my eye. Did Marjorie tell you about the fellow she found in the street? Up went his arm to force the trapdoor open overheadand off went my hat. Now then, William Henry!let her go!if you kill the horse Ill buy you another! We were already going much faster than, legally, we ought to have donebut that, seemingly to him was not a matter of the slightest consequence. Lessingham replied to his inquiry. She did not. You know the fellow I saw coming out of your drawingroom window? Yes. Well, Marjorie found him the morning after in front of her breakfastroom windowin the middle of the street. Seems he had been wandering about all night, unclothedin the rain and the mud, and all the rest of itin a condition of hypnotic trance. Who is the gentleman you are alluding to? Says his names Holt, Robert Holt. Holt?Is he an Englishman? Very much soCity quilldriver out of a shopstony broke absolutely! Got the chuck from the casual wardwouldnt let him inhouse full, and that sort of thingpoor devil! Pretty passes you politicians bring men to! Are you sure? Of what? Are you sure that this man, Robert Holt, is the same person whom, as you put it, you saw coming out of my drawingroom window? Sure!Of course Im sure!Think I didnt recognise him?Besides, there was the mans own taleowned to it himselfbesides all the rest, which sent one rushing Fulham way. You must remember, Mr. Atherton, that I am wholly in the dark as to what has happened. What has the man, Holt, to do with the errand on which we are bound? Am I not coming to it? If you would let me tell the tale in my own way I should get there in less than no time, but you will keep on cutting inhow the deuce do you suppose Champnell is to make head or tail of the business if you will persist in interrupting?Marjorie took the beggar inhe told his tale to hershe sent for methat was just now; caught me on the steps after I had been lunching with Dora Grayling. Holt redished his yarnI smelt a ratsaw that a connection possibly existed between the thief whod been playing confounded conjuring tricks off on to me and this interesting party down Fulham way What party down Fulham way? This friend of Holtsam I not telling you? There you are, you seewont let me finish! When Holt slipped through the windowwhich is the most sensible thing he seems to have done; if Id been in his shoes Id have slipped through forty windows!dusky coloured charmer caught him on the hopdoctored himsent him out to commit burglary by deputy. I said to Holt, Show us this agreeable little crib, young man. Holt was gamethen Marjorie chipped inshe wanted to go and see it too. I said, Youll be sorry if you do,that settled it! After that shed have gone if shed diedI never did have a persuasive way with women. So off we toddled, Marjorie, Holt, and I, in a growlerspotted the crib in less than no timeinvited ourselves in by the kitchen windowhouse seemed empty. Presently Holt became hypnotised before my eyesthe best established case of hypnotism by suggestion I ever yet encounteredstarted off on a pilgrimage of one. Like an idiot I followed, leaving Marjorie to wait for me Alone? Alone!Am I not telling you?Great Scott, Lessingham, in the House of Commons they must be hazy to think you smart! I said, Ill send the first sane soul I meet to keep you company. As luck would have it, I never met oneonly kids, and a baker, who wouldnt leave his cart, or take it with him either. Id covered pretty nearly two miles before I came across a peelerand when I did the man was crackedand he thought me mad, or drunk, or both.

By the time Id got myself within nodding distance of being run in for obstructing the police in the execution of their duty, without inducing him to move a single one of his twentyfourinch feet, Holt was out of sight. So, since all my pains in his direction were clean thrown away, there was nothing left for me but to scurry back to Marjorieso I scurried, and I found the house empty, no one there, and Marjorie gone. But, I dont quite follow Atherton impetuously declined to allow Mr. Lessingham to conclude. Of course you dont quite follow, and youll follow still less if you will keep getting in front. I went upstairs and downstairs, inside and outshouted myself hoarse as a crownothing was to be seen of Marjorieor heard; until, as I was coming down the stairs for about the fiveandfiftieth time, I stepped on something hard which was lying in the passage. I picked it upit was a ring; this ring. Its shape is not just what it wasIm not as light as gossamer, especially when I come jumping down stairs six at a timebut whats left of it is here. Sydney held something in front of him. Mr. Lessingham wriggled to one side to enable him to see. Then he made a snatch at it. Its mine! Sydney dodged it out of his reach. What do you mean, its yours? Its the ring I gave Marjorie for an engagement ring. Give it me, you hound!unless you wish me to do you violence in the cab. With complete disregard of the limitations of spaceor of my comfortLessingham thrust him vigorously aside. Then gripping Sydney by the wrist, he seized the gaudSydney yielding it just in time to save himself from being precipitated into the street. Ravished of his treasure, Sydney turned and surveyed the ravisher with something like a glance of admiration. Hang me, Lessingham, if I dont believe there is some warm blood in those fishlike veins of yours. Please the piper, Ill live to fight you after allwith the bare ones, sir, as a gentleman should do. Lessingham seemed to pay no attention to him whatever. He was surveying the ring, which Sydney had trampled out of shape, with looks of the deepest concern. Marjories ring!The one I gave her! Something serious must have happened to her before she would have dropped my ring, and left it lying where it fell. Atherton went on. Thats it!What has happened to her!Ill be dashed if I know!When it was clear that there she wasnt, I tore off to find out where she was. Came across old Lindonhe knew nothing;I rather fancy I startled him in the middle of Pall Mall, when I left he stared after me like one possessed, and his hat was lying in the gutter. Went homeshe wasnt there. Asked Dora Graylingshed seen nothing of her. No one had seen anything of hershe had vanished into air. Then I said to myself, Youre a firstclass idiot, on my honour! While youre looking for her, like a lost sheep, the betting is that the girls in Holts friends house the whole jolly time. When you were there, the chances are that shed just stepped out for a stroll, and that now shes back again, and wondering where on earth youve gone! So I made up my mind that Id fly back and seebecause the idea of her standing on the front doorstep looking for me, while I was going off my nut looking for her, commended itself to what I call my sense of humour; and on my way it struck me that it would be the part of wisdom to pick up Champnell, because if there is a man who can be backed to find a needle in any amount of haystacks it is the great Augustus.That horse has moved itself after all, because here we are. Now, cabman, dont go driving further onyoull have to put a girdle round the earth if you do; because youll have to reach this point again before you get your fare.This is the magicians house! XXXVII. What Was Hidden Under the Floor The cab pulled up in front of a tumbledown cheap villa in an unfinished cheap neighbourhoodthe whole place a living monument of the defeat of the speculative builder. Atherton leaped out on to the grassgrown rubble which was meant for a footpath. I dont see Marjorie looking for me on the doorstep. Nor did II saw nothing but what appeared to be an unoccupied ramshackle brick abomination. Suddenly Sydney gave an exclamation. Hullo!The front doors closed! I was hard at his heels. What do you mean? Why, when I went I left the front door open. It looks as if Ive made an idiot of myself after all, and Marjories returnedlets hope to goodness that I have. He knocked. While we waited for a response I questioned him. Why did you leave the door open when you went? I hardly knowI imagine that it was with some dim idea of Marjories being able to get in if she returned while I was absentbut the truth is I was in such a condition of helter skelter that I am not prepared to swear that I had any reasonable reason. I suppose there is no doubt that you did leave it open? Absolutely noneon that Ill stake my life. Was it open when you returned from your pursuit of Holt? Wide openI walked straight in expecting to find her waiting for me in the front roomI was struck all of a heap when I found she wasnt there. Were there any signs of a struggle? Nonethere were no signs of anything. Everything was just as I had left it, with the exception of the ring which I trod on in the passage, and which Lessingham has. If Miss Lindon has returned, it does not look as if she were in the house at present. It did notunless silence had such meaning. Atherton had knocked loudly three times without succeeding in attracting the slightest notice from within. It strikes me that this is another case of seeking admission through that hospitable window at the back. Atherton led the way to the rear. Lessingham and I followed. There was not even an apology for a yard, still less a gardenthere was not even a fence of any sort, to serve as an enclosure, and to shut off the house from the wilderness of waste land. The kitchen window was open. I asked Sydney if he had left it so. I dont knowI dare say we did; I dont fancy that either of us stood on the order of his coming. While he spoke, he scrambled over the sill. We followed. When he was in, he shouted at the top of his voice, Marjorie! Marjorie! Speak to me, Marjorieit is ISydney! The words echoed through the house. Only silence answered. He led the way to the front room. Suddenly he stopped. Hollo! he cried. The blinds down! I had noticed, when we were outside, that the blind was down at the front room window. It was up when I went, that Ill swear. That someone has been here is pretty plainlets hope its Marjorie. He had only taken a step forward into the room when he again stopped short to exclaim. My stars!heres a sudden clearance!Why, the place is emptyeverythings clean gone! What do you mean?was it furnished when you left? The room was empty enough then. Furnished?I dont know that it was exactly what youd call furnishedthe party who ran this establishment had a taste in upholstery which was all his ownbut there was a carpet, and a bed, andand lots of thingsfor the most part, I should have said, distinctly Eastern curiosities. They seem to have evaporated into smokewhich may be a way which is common enough among Eastern curiosities, though its queer to me. Atherton was staring about him as if he found it difficult to credit the evidence of his own eyes. How long ago is it since you left? He referred to his watch. Something over an hourpossibly an hour and a half; I couldnt swear to the exact moment, but it certainly isnt more. Did you notice any signs of packing up? Not a sign. Going to the window he drew up the blindspeaking as he did so. The queer thing about this business is that when we first got in this blind wouldnt draw up a little bit, so, since it wouldnt go up I pulled it down, roller and all, now it draws up as easily and smoothly as if it had always been the best blind that ever lived. Standing at Sydneys back I saw that the cabman on his box was signalling to us with his outstretched hand. Sydney perceived him too. He threw up the sash. Whats the matter with you? Excuse me, sir, but whos the old gent? What old gent? Why the old gent peeping through the window of the room upstairs? The words were hardly out of the drivers mouth when Sydney was through the door and flying up the staircase. I followed rather more soberlyhis methods were a little too flighty for me. When I reached the landing, dashing out of the front room he rushed into the one at the backthen through a door at the side. He came out shouting. Whats the idiot mean!with his old gent! Id old gent him if I got him!Theres not a creature about the place! He returned into the front roomI at his heels. That certainly was emptyand not only empty, but it showed no traces of recent occupation. The dust lay thick upon the floorthere was that mouldy, earthy smell which is so frequently found in apartments which have been long untenanted. Are you sure, Atherton, that there is no one at the back? Of course Im sureyou can go and see for yourself if you like; do you think Im blind? Jehus drunk. Throwing up the sash he addressed the driver. What do you mean with your old gent at the window?what window? That window, sir. Go to!youre dreaming, man!theres no one here. Begging your pardon, sir, but there was someone there not a minute ago. Imagination, cabmanthe slant of the light on the glassor your eyesights defective. Excuse me, sir, but its not my imagination, and my eyesights as good as any mans in Englandand as for the slant of the light on the glass, there aint much glass for the light to slant on. I saw him peeping through that bottom broken pane on your left hand as plainly as I see you. He must be somewhere abouthe cant have got awayhes at the back. Aint there a cupboard nor nothing where he could hide? The cabmans manner was so extremely earnest that I went myself to see. There was a cupboard on the landing, but the door of that stood wide open, and that obviously was bare. The room behind was small, and, despite the splintered glass in the window frame, stuffy. Fragments of glass kept company with the dust on the floor, together with a choice collection of stones, brickbats, and other missileswhich not improbably were the cause of their being there. In the corner stood a cupboardbut a momentary examination showed that that was as bare as the other. The door at the side, which Sydney had left wide open, opened on to a closet, and that was empty. I glanced upthere was no trap door which led to the roof. No practicable nook or cranny, in which a living being could lie concealed, was anywhere at hand. I returned to Sydneys shoulder to tell the cabman so. There is no place in which anyone could hide, and there is no one in either of the roomsyou must have been mistaken, driver. The man waxed wroth. Dont tell me! How could I come to think I saw something when I didnt? Ones eyes are apt to play us tricks;how could you see what wasnt there? Thats what I want to know. As I drove up, before you told me to stop, I saw him looking through the windowthe one at which you are. Hed got his nose glued to the broken pane, and was staring as hard as he could stare. When I pulled up, off he startedI saw him get up off his knees, and go to the back of the room. When the gentleman took to knocking, back he cameto the same old spot, and flopped down on his knees. I didnt know what caper you was up toyou might be bum bailiffs for all I knew!and I supposed that he wasnt so anxious to let you in as you might be to get inside, and that was why he didnt take no notice of your knocking, while all the while he kept a eye on what was going on. When you goes round to the back, up he gets again, and I reckoned that he was going to meet yer, and perhaps give yer a bit of his mind, and that presently I should hear a shindy, or that something would happen. But when you pulls up the blind downstairs, to my surprise back he come once more. He shoves his old nose right through the smash in the pane, and wags his old head at me like a chattering magpie. That didnt seem to me quite the civil thing to doI hadnt done no harm to him; so I gives you the office, and lets you know that he was there. But for you to say that he wasnt there, and never had beenblimey! that cops the biscuit. If he wasnt there, all I can say is I aint here, and my orse aint here, and my cab aint neitherdamn it!the house aint here, and nothing aint! He settled himself on his perch with an air of the most extreme ill usagehe had been standing up to tell his tale. That the man was serious was unmistakable. As he himself suggested, what inducement could he have had to tell a lie like that? That he believed himself to have seen what he declared he saw was plain. But, on the other hand, what could have becomein the space of fifty seconds!of his old gent? Atherton put a question. What did he look likethis old gent of yours? Well, that I shouldnt hardly like to say. It wasnt much of his face I could see, only his face and his eyesand they wasnt pretty. He kept a thing over his head all the time, as if he didnt want too much to be seen. What sort of a thing? Whyone of them cloak sort of things, like them Arab blokes used to wear what used to be at Earls Court Exhibitionyou know! This piece of information seemed to interest my companions more than anything he had said before. A burnoose do you mean? How am I to know what the things called? I aint up in foreign languagestaint likely! All I know that them Arab blokes what was at Earls Court used to walk about in them all over the placesometimes they wore them over their heads, and sometimes they didnt. In fact if youd asked me, instead of trying to make out as I sees double, or things what was only inside my own noddle, or something or other, I should have said this here old gent what Ive been telling you about was a Arab blokewhen he gets off his knees to sneak away from the window, I could see that he had his cloak thing, what was over his head, wrapped all round him. Mr. Lessingham turned to me, all quivering with excitement. I believe that what he says is true! Then where can this mysterious old gentleman have got tocan you suggest an explanation? It is strange, to say the least of it, that the cabman should be the only person to see or hear anything of him. Some devils trick has been playedI know it, I feel it!my instinct tells me so! I stared. In such a matter one hardly expects a man of Paul Lessinghams stamp to talk of instinct. Atherton stared too. Then, on a sudden, he burst out, By the Lord, I believe the Apostles rightthe whole place reeks to me of hankeypankeyit did as soon as I put my nose inside. In matters of prestidigitation, Champnell, we Westerns are among the rudimentsweve everything to learnOrientals leave us at the post. If their civilisations what were pleased to call extinct, their conjuringwhen you get to know it!is all alive oh! He moved towards the door. As he went he slipped, or seemed to, all but stumbling on to his knees. Something tripped me upwhats this? He was stamping on the floor with his foot. Heres a board loose. Come and lend me a hand, one of you fellows, to get it up. Who knows what mysterys beneath? I went to his aid. As he said, a board in the floor was loose. His stepping on it unawares had caused his stumble. Together we prised it out of its placeLessingham standing by and watching us the while. Having removed it, we peered into the cavity it disclosed. There was something there. Why, cried Atherton, its a womans clothing! XXXVIII. The Rest of the Find It was a womans clothing, beyond a doubt, all thrown in anyhowas if the person who had placed it there had been in a desperate hurry. An entire outfit was there, shoes, stockings, body linen, corsets, and alleven to hat, gloves, and hairpins;these latter were mixed up with the rest of the garments in strange confusion. It seemed plain that whoever had worn those clothes had been stripped to the skin. Lessingham and Sydney stared at me in silence as I dragged them out and laid them on the floor. The dress was at the bottomit was an alpaca, of a pretty shade in blue, bedecked with lace and ribbons, as is the fashion of the hour, and lined with seagreen silk. It had perhaps been a charming confection onceand that a very recent one!but now it was all soiled and creased and torn and tumbled. The two spectators made a simultaneous pounce at it as I brought it to the light. My God! cried Sydney, its Marjories!she was wearing it when I saw her last! Its Marjories! gasped Lessinghamhe was clutching at the ruined costume, staring at it like a man who has just received sentence of death. She wore it when she was with me yesterdayI told her how it suited her, and how pretty it was! There was silenceit was an eloquent find; it spoke for itself. The two men gazed at the heap of feminine gloriesit might have been the most wonderful sight they ever had seen. Lessingham was the first to speakhis face had all at once grown grey and haggard. What has happened to her? I replied to his question with another. Are you sure this is Miss Lindens dress? I am sureand were proof needed, here it is. He had found the pocket, and was turning out the contents. There was a purse, which contained money and some visiting cards on which were her name and address; a small bunch of keys, with her nameplate attached; a handkerchief, with her initials in a corner. The question of ownership was placed beyond a doubt. You see, said Lessingham, exhibiting the money which was in the purse, it is not robbery which has been attempted. Here are two tenpound notes, and one for five, besides gold and silverover thirty pounds in all. Atherton, who had been turning over the accumulation of rubbish between the joists, proclaimed another find. Here are her rings, and watch, and a braceletno, it certainly does not look as if theft had been an object. Lessingham was glowering at him with knitted brows. I have to thank you for this. Sydney was unwontedly meek. You are hard on me, Lessingham, harder than I deserveI had rather have thrown away my own life than have suffered misadventure to have come to her. Yours are idle words. Had you not meddled this would not have happened. A fool works more mischief with his folly than of malice prepense. If hurt has befallen Marjorie Lindon you shall account for it to me with your lifes blood. Let it be so, said Sydney. I am content. If hurt has come to Marjorie, God knows that I am willing enough that death should come to me. While they wrangled, I continued to search. A little to one side, under the flooring which was still intact, I saw something gleam. By stretching out my hand, I could just manage to reach itit was a long plait of womans hair. It had been cut off at the rootsso close to the head in one place that the scalp itself had been cut, so that the hair was clotted with blood. They were so occupied with each other that they took no notice of me. I had to call their attention to my discovery. Gentlemen, I fear that I have here something which will distress youis not this Miss Lindons hair? They recognised it on the instant. Lessingham, snatching it from my hands, pressed it to his lips. This is mineI shall at least have something. He spoke with a grimness which was a little startling. He held the silken tresses at arms length. This points to murderfoul, cruel, causeless murder. As I live, I will devote my allmoney, time, reputation!to gaining vengeance on the wretch who did this deed. Atherton chimed in. To that I say, Amen! He lifted his hand. God is my witness! It seems to me, gentlemen, that we move too fastto my mind it does not by any means of necessity point to murder. On the contrary, I doubt if murder has been done. Indeed, I dont mind owning that I have a theory of my own which points all the other way. Lessingham caught me by the sleeve. Mr. Champnell, tell me your theory. I will, a little later. Of course it may be altogether wrong;though I fancy it is not; I will explain my reasons when we come to talk of it. But, at present, there are things which must be done. I vote for tearing up every board in the house! cried Sydney. And for pulling the whole infernal place to pieces. Its a conjurers den.I shouldnt be surprised if cabbys old gent is staring at us all the while from some peephole of his own. We examined the entire house, methodically, so far as we were able, inch by inch. Not another board proved looseto lift those which were nailed down required tools, and those we were without. We sounded all the wallswith the exception of the party walls they were the usual lath and plaster constructions, and showed no signs of having been tampered with. The ceilings were intact; if anything was concealed in them it must have been there some timethe cement was old and dirty. We took the closet to pieces; examined the chimneys; peered into the kitchen oven and the copper;in short, we pried into everything which, with the limited means at our disposal, could be pried intowithout result. At the end we found ourselves dusty, dirty, and discomfited. The cabmans old gent remained as much a mystery as ever, and no further trace had been discovered of Miss Lindon. Atherton made no effort to disguise his chagrin. Now whats to be done? There seems to be just nothing in the place at all, and yet that there is, and that its the key to the whole confounded business I should be disposed to swear. In that case I would suggest that you should stay and look for it. The cabman can go and look for the requisite tools, or a workman to assist you, if you like. For my part it appears to me that evidence of another sort is, for the moment, of paramount importance; and I propose to commence my search for it by making a call at the house which is over the way. I had observed, on our arrival, that the road only contained two houses which were in anything like a finished statethat which we were in, and another, some fifty or sixty yards further down, on the opposite side. It was to this I referred. The twain immediately proffered their companionship. I will come with you, said Mr. Lessingham. And I, echoed Sydney. Well leave this sweet homestead in charge of the cabmanIll pull it to pieces afterwards. He went out and spoke to the driver. Cabby, were going to pay a visit to the little crib over thereyou keep an eye on this one. And if you see a sign of anyone being about the placeliving, or dead, or anyhowyou give me a yell. I shall be on the lookout, and Ill be with you before you can say Jack Robinson. You bet Ill yellIll raise the hair right off you. The fellow grinned. But I dont know if you gents are hiring me by the dayI want to change my horse; he ought to have been in his stable a couple of hours ago. Never mind your horselet him rest a couple of hours extra tomorrow to make up for those he has lost today. Ill take care you dont lose anything by this little jobor your horse either.By the way, look herethis will be better than yelling. Taking a revolver out of his trousers pocket he handed it up to the grinning driver. If that old gent of yours does appear, you have a pop at himI shall hear that easier than a yell. You can put a bullet through him if you likeI give you my word it wont be murder. I dont care if it is, declared the cabman, handling the weapon like one who was familiar with arms of precision. I used to fancy my revolver shooting when I was with the colours, and if I do get a chance Ill put a shot through the old hunks, if only to prove to you that Im no liar. Whether the man was in earnest or not I could not tellnor whether Atherton meant what he said in answer. If you shoot him Ill give you fifty pounds. All right! The driver laughed. Ill do my best to earn that fifty! XXXIX. Miss Louisa Coleman That the house over the way was tenanted was plain to all the worldat least one occupant sat gazing through the window of the first floor front room. An old woman in a capone of those large oldfashioned caps which our grandmothers used to wear, tied with strings under the chin. It was a bow window, and as she was seated in the bay looking right in our direction she could hardly have failed to see us as we advancedindeed she continued to stare at us all the while with placid calmness. Yet I knocked once, twice, and yet again without the slightest notice being taken of my summons. Sydney gave expression to his impatience in his own peculiar vein. Knockers in this part of the world seem intended for ornament onlynobody seems to pay any attention to them when theyre used. The old lady upstairs must be either deaf or dotty. He went out into the road to see if she still was there. Shes looking at me as calmly as you pleasewhat does she think were doing here, I wonder; playing a tune on her front door by way of a little amusement?Madam! He took off his hat and waved it to her. Madam! might I observe that if you wont condescend to notice that were here your front door will run the risk of being severely injured!She dont care for me any more than if I was nothing at allsound another tattoo upon that knocker. Perhaps shes so deaf that nothing short of a cataclysmal uproar will reach her auditory nerves. She immediately proved, however, that she was nothing of the sort. Hardly had the sounds of my further knocking died away than, throwing up the window, she thrust out her head and addressed me in a fashion which, under the circumstances, was as unexpected as it was uncalled for. Now, young man, you neednt be in such a hurry! Sydney explained. Pardon me, madam, its not so much a hurry were in as pressed for timethis is a matter of life and death. She turned her attention to Sydneyspeaking with a frankness for which, I imagine, he was unprepared. I dont want none of your imperence, young man. Ive seen you beforeyouve been hanging about here the whole day long!and I dont like the looks of you, and so Ill let you know. Thats my front door, and thats my knockerIll come down and open when I like, but Im not going to be hurried, and if the knockers so much as touched again, I wont come down at all. She closed the window with a bang. Sydney seemed divided between mirth and indignation. Thats a nice old lady, on my honourone of the good old crusty sort. Agreeable characters this neighbourhood seems to growa sojourn hereabouts should do one good. Unfortunately I dont feel disposed just now to stand and kick my heels in the road. Again saluting the old dame by raising his hat he shouted to her at the top of his voice. Madam, I beg ten thousand pardons for troubling you, but this is a matter in which every second is of vital importancewould you allow me to ask you one or two questions? Up went the window; out came the old ladys head. Now, young man, you neednt put yourself out to holler at meI wont be hollered at! Ill come down and open that door in five minutes by the clock on my mantelpiece, and not a moment before. The fiat delivered, down came the window. Sydney looked ruefulhe consulted his watch. I dont know what you think, Champnell, but I really doubt if this comfortable creature can tell us anything worth waiting another five minutes to hear. We mustnt let the grass grow under our feet, and time is getting on. I was of a different opinionand said so. Im afraid, Atherton, that I cant agree with you. She seems to have noticed you hanging about all day; and it is at least possible that she has noticed a good deal which would be well worth our hearing. What more promising witness are we likely to find?her house is the only one which overlooks the one we have just quitted. I am of opinion that it may not only prove well worth our while to wait five minutes, but also that it would be as well, if possible, not to offend her by the way. Shes not likely to afford us the information we require if you do. Good. If thats what you think Im sure Im willing to waitonly its to be hoped that that clock upon her mantelpiece moves quicker than its mistress. Presently, when about a minute had gone, he called to the cabman. Seen a sign of anything? The cabman shouted back. Neer a signyoull hear a sound of popguns when I do. Those five minutes did seem long ones. But at last Sydney, from his post of vantage in the road, informed us that the old lady was moving. Shes getting up;shes leaving the window;lets hope to goodness shes coming down to open the door. Thats been the longest five minutes Ive known. I could hear uncertain footsteps descending the stairs. They came along the passage. The door was openedon the chain. The old lady peered at us through an aperture of about six inches. I dont know what you young men think youre after, but have all three of you in my house I wont. Ill have him and youa skinny finger was pointed to Lessingham and me; then it was directed towards Athertonbut have him I wont. So if its anything particular you want to say to me, youll just tell him to go away. On hearing this Sydneys humility was abject. His hat was in his handhe bent himself double. Suffer me to make you a million apologies, madam, if I have in any way offended you; nothing, I assure you, could have been farther from my intention, or from my thoughts. I dont want none of your apologies, and I dont want none of you neither; I dont like the looks of you, and so I tell you. Before I let anybody into my house youll have to sling your hook. The door was banged in our faces. I turned to Sydney. The sooner you go the better it will be for us. You can wait for us over the way. He shrugged his shoulders, and groanedhalf in jest, half in earnest. If I must I suppose I mustits the first time Ive been refused admittance to a ladys house in all my life! What have I done to deserve this thing?If you keep me waiting long Ill tear that infernal den to pieces! He sauntered across the road, viciously kicking the stones as he went. The door reopened. Has that other young man gone? He has. Then now Ill let you in. Have him inside my house I wont. The chain was removed. Lessingham and I entered. Then the door was refastened and the chain replaced. Our hostess showed us into the front room on the ground floor; it was sparsely furnished and not too cleanbut there were chairs enough for us to sit upon; which she insisted on our occupying. Sit down, doI cant abide to see folks standing; it gives me the fidgets. So soon as we were seated, without any overture on our parts she plunged in medias res. I know what it is youve come aboutI know! You want me to tell you who it is as lives in the house over the road. Well, I can tell youand I dare bet a shilling that Im about the only one who can. I inclined my head. Indeed. Is that so, madam? She was huffed at once. Dont madam meI cant bear none of your lip service. Im a plainspoken woman, thats what I am, and I like other peoples tongues to be as plain as mine. My names Miss Louisa Coleman; but Im generally called Miss ColemanIm only called Louisa by my relatives. Since she was apparently between seventy and eightyand looked every year of her apparent ageI deemed that possible. Miss Coleman was evidently a character. If one was desirous of getting information out of her it would be necessary to allow her to impart it in her own mannerto endeavour to induce her to impart it in anybody elses would be time clean wasted. We had Sydneys fate before our eyes. She started with a sort of roundabout preamble. This property is mine; it was left me by my uncle, the late George Henry Jobsonhes buried in Hammersmith Cemetery just over the wayhe left me the whole of it. Its one of the finest building sites near London, and it increases in value every year, and Im not going to let it for another twenty, by which time the value will have more than trebledso if that is what youve come about, as heaps of people do, you might have saved yourselves the trouble.

I keep the boards standing, just to let people know that the ground is to letthough, as I say, it wont be for another twenty years, when itll be for the erection of highclass mansions only, same as there is in Grosvenor Squareno shops or public houses, and none of your shanties. I live in this place just to keep an eye upon the propertyand as for the house over the way, Ive never tried to let it, and it never has been let, not until a month ago, when, one morning, I had this letter. You can see it if you like. She handed me a greasy envelope which she ferreted out of a capacious pocket which was suspended from her waist, and which she had to lift up her skirt to reach. The envelope was addressed, in unformed characters, Miss Louisa Coleman, The Rhododendrons, Convolvulus Avenue, High Oaks Park, West Kensington.I felt, if the writer had not been of a humorous turn of mind, and drawn on his imagination, and this really was the ladys correct address, then there must be something in a name. The letter within was written in the same straggling, characterless calligraphyI should have said, had I been asked offhand, that the whole thing was the composition of a servant girl. The composition was about on a par with the writing. The undersigned would be oblidged if Miss Coleman would let her emptey house. I do not know the rent but send fifty pounds. If more will send. Please address, Mohamed el Kheir, Post Office, Sligo Street, London. It struck me as being as singular an application for a tenancy as I remembered to have encountered. When I passed it on to Lessingham, he seemed to think so too. This is a curious letter, Miss Coleman. So I thoughtand still more so when I found the fifty pounds inside. There were five tenpound notes, all loose, and the letter not even registered. If I had been asked what was the rent of the house, I should have said, at the most, not more than twenty poundsbecause, between you and me, it wants a good bit of doing up, and is hardly fit to live in as it stands. I had had sufficient evidence of the truth of this altogether apart from the landladys frank admission. Why, for all he could have done to help himself I might have kept the money, and only sent him a receipt for a quarter. And some folks would have donebut Im not one of that sort myself, and shouldnt care to be. So I sent this here partyI never could pronounce his name, and never shalla receipt for a year. Miss Coleman paused to smooth her apron, and consider. Well, the receipt should have reached this here party on the Thursday morning, as it wereI posted it on the Wednesday night, and on the Thursday, after breakfast, I thought Id go over the way to see if there was any little thing I could dobecause there wasnt hardly a whole pane of glass in the placewhen I all but went all of a heap. When I looked across the road, blessed it the party wasnt in alreadyat least as much as he ever was in, which, so far as I can make out, never has been anything particularthough how he had got in, unless it was through a window in the middle of the night, is more than I should care to saythere was nobody in the house when I went to bed, that I could pretty nearly take my Bible oathyet there was the blind up at the parlour, and, whats more, it was down, and its been down pretty nearly ever since. Well, I says to myself, for right down imperence this beats anythingwhy hes in the place before he knows if Ill let him have it. Perhaps he thinks I havent got a word to say in the matterfifty pounds or no fifty pounds, Ill soon show him. So I slips on my bonnet, and I walks over the road, and I hammers at the door. Well, I have seen people hammering since then, many a one, and how theyve kept it up has puzzled mefor an hour, some of thembut I was the first one as begun it. I hammers, and I hammers, and I kept on hammering, but it wasnt no more use than if Id been hammering at a tombstone. So I starts rapping at the window, but that wasnt no use neither. So I goes round behind, and I hammers at the back doorbut there, I couldnt make anyone hear nohow. So I says to myself, Perhaps the party as is in, aint in, in a manner of speaking; but Ill keep an eye on the house, and when he is in Ill take care that he aint out again before Ive had a word to say. So I come back home, and as I said I would, I kept an eye on the house the whole of that livelong day, but never a soul went either out or in. But the next day, which it was a Friday, I got out of bed about five oclock, to see if it was raining, through my having an idea of taking a little excursion if the weather was fine, when I see a party coming down the road. He had on one of them dirtycoloured bedcover sort of things, and it was wrapped all over his head and round his body, like, as I have been told, them there Arabs wearand, indeed, Ive seen them in them myself at West Brompton, when they was in the exhibition there. It was quite fine, and broad day, and I see him as plainly as I see youhe comes skimming along at a tear of a pace, pulls up at the house over the way, opens the front door, and lets himself in. So, I says to myself, there you are. Well, Mr. Arab, or whatever, or whoever, you may be, Ill take good care that you dont go out again before youve had a word from me. Ill show you that landladies have their rights, like other Christians, in this country, however it may be in yours. So I kept an eye on the house, to see that he didnt go out again, and nobody never didnt, and between seven and eight I goes and I knocks at the doorbecause I thought to myself that the earlier I was the better it might be. If youll believe me, no more notice was taken of me than if I was one of the dead. I hammers, and I hammers, till my wrist was aching, I daresay I hammered twenty timesand then I went round to the back door, and I hammers at thatbut it wasnt the least good in the world. I was that provoked to think I should be treated as if I was nothing and nobody, by a dirty foreigner, who went about in a bedgown through the public streets, that it was all I could do to hold myself. I comes round to the front again, and I starts hammering at the window, with every knuckle on my hands, and I calls out, Im Miss Louisa Coleman, and Im the owner of this house, and you cant deceive meI saw you come in, and youre in now, and if you dont come and speak to me this moment Ill have the police. All of a sudden, when I was least expecting it, and was hammering my very hardest at the pane, up goes the blind, and up goes the window too, and the most awfullooking creature ever I heard of, not to mention seeing, puts his head right into my facehe was more like a hideous baboon than anything else, let alone a man. I was struck all of a heap, and plumps down on the little wall, and all but tumbles head over heels backwards, And he starts shrieking, in a sort of a kind of English, and in such a voice as Id never heard the likeit was like a rusty steam engine. Go away! go away! I dont want you! I will not have younever! You have your fifty poundsyou have your moneythat is the whole of youthat is all you want! You come to me no more!never!never no more!or you be sorry!Go away! I did go away, and that as fast as ever my legs would carry mewhat with his looks, and what with his voice, and what with the way that he went on, I was nothing but a mass of trembling. As for answering him back, or giving him a piece of my mind, as I had meant to, I wouldnt have done it not for a thousand pounds. I dont mind confessing, between you and me, that I had to swallow four cups of tea, right straight away, before my nerves was steady. Well, I says to myself, when I did feel, as it might be, a little more easy, you never have let that house before, and now youve let it with a vengeanceso you have. If that there new tenant of yours isnt the greatest villain that ever went unhung it must be because hes got near relations whats as bad as himselfbecause two families like his Im sure there cant be. A nice sort of Arab party to have sleeping over the road he is! But after a time I cools down, as it werebecause Im one of them sort as likes to see on both sides of a question. After all, I says to myself, he has paid his rent, and fifty pounds is fifty poundsI doubt if the whole house is worth much more, and he cant do much damage to it whatever he does. I shouldnt have minded, so far as that went, if hed set fire to the place, for, between ourselves, its insured for a good bit over its value. So I decided that Id let things be as they were, and see how they went on. But from that hour to this Ive never spoken to the man, and never wanted to, and wouldnt, not of my own free will, not for a shilling a timethat face of his will haunt me if I live till Noah, as the saying is. Ive seen him going in and out at all hours of the day and nightthat Arab partys a mystery if ever there was onehe always goes tearing along as if hes flying for his life. Lots of people have come to the house, all sorts and kinds, men and womentheyve been mostly women, and even little children. Ive seen them hammer and hammer at that front door, but never a one have I seen let inor yet seen taken any notice of, and I think I may say, and yet tell no lie, that Ive scarcely took my eye off the house since hes been inside it, over and over again in the middle of the night have I got up to have a look, so that Ive not missed much that has took place. Whats puzzled me is the noises thats come from the house. Sometimes for days together theres not been a sound, it might have been a house of the dead; and then, all through the night, thereve been yells and screeches, squawks and screamsI never heard nothing like it. I have thought, and more than once, that the devil himself must be in that front room, let alone all the rest of his demons. And as for cats!where theyve come from I cant think. I didnt use to notice hardly a cat in the neighbourhood till that there Arab party camethere isnt much to attract them; but since he came theres been regiments. Sometimes at night theres been troops about the place, screeching like madIve wished them farther, I can tell you. That Arab party must be fond of em. Ive seen them inside the house, at the windows, upstairs and downstairs, as it seemed to me, a dozen at a time. XL. What Miss Coleman Saw Through the Window As Miss Coleman had paused, as if her narrative was approaching a conclusion, I judged it expedient to make an attempt to bring the record as quickly as possible up to date. I take it, Miss Coleman, that you have observed what has occurred in the house today. She tightened her nutcracker jaws and glared at me disdainfullyher dignity was ruffled. Im coming to it, arent I?if youll let me. If youve got no manners Ill learn you some. One doesnt like to be hurried at my time of life, young man. I was meekly silent;plainly, if she was to talk, everyone else must listen. During the last few days there have been some queer goings on over the roadout of the common queer, I mean, for goodness knows that they always have been queer enough. That Arab party has been flitting about like a creature possessedIve seen him going in and out twenty times a day. This morning She pausedto fix her eyes on Lessingham. She apparently observed his growing interest as she approached the subject which had brought us thereand resented it. Dont look at me like that, young man, because I wont have it. And as for questions, I may answer questions when Im done, but dont you dare to ask me one before, because I wont be interrupted. Up to then Lessingham had not spoken a wordbut it seemed as if she was endowed with the faculty of perceiving the huge volume of the words which he had left unuttered. This morningas Ive said already she glanced at Lessingham as if she defied his contradictionwhen that Arab party came home it was just on the stroke of seven. I know what was the exact time because, when I went to the door to the milkman, my clock was striking the half hour, and I always keep it thirty minutes fast. As I was taking the milk, the man said to me, Hollo, Miss Coleman, heres your friend coming along. What friend? I saysfor I aint got no friends, as I know, round here, nor yet, I hope no enemies neither. And I looks round, and there was the Arab party coming tearing down the road, his bedcover thing all flying in the wind, and his arms straight out in front of himI never did see anyone go at such a pace. My goodness, I says, I wonder he dont do himself an injury. I wonder someone else dont do him an injury, says the milkman. The very sight of him is enough to make my milk go sour. And he picked up his pail and went away quite grumpythough what that Arab partys done to him is more than I can say.I have always noticed that milkmans tempers short like his measure. I wasnt best pleased with him for speaking of that Arab party as my friend, which he never has been, and never wont be, and never could be neither. Five persons went to the house after the milkman was gone, and that there Arab party was safe insidethree of them was commercials, that I know, because afterwards they came to me. But of course they none of them got no chance with that there Arab party except of hammering at his front door, which aint what you might call a paying game, nor nice for the temper but for that I dont blame him, for if once those commercials do begin talking theyll talk forever. Now Im coming to this afternoon. I thought it was about timethough for the life of me, I did not dare to hint as much. Well, it might have been three, or it might have been half past, anyhow it was thereabouts, when up there comes two men and a woman, which one of the men was that young man whats a friend of yours. Oh, I says to myself, heres something new in callers, I wonder what it is theyre wanting. That young man what was a friend of yours, he starts hammering, and hammering, as the custom was with everyone who came, and, as usual, no more notice was taken of him than nothingthough I knew that all the time the Arab party was indoors. At this point I felt that at all hazards I must interpose a question. You are sure he was indoors? She took it better than I feared she might. Of course Im surehadnt I seen him come in at seven, and he never hadnt gone out since, for I dont believe that Id taken my eyes off the place not for two minutes together, and Id never had a sight of him. If he wasnt indoors, where was he then? For the moment, so far as I was concerned, the query was unanswerable. She triumphantly continued Instead of doing what most did, when theyd had enough of hammering, and going away, these three they went round to the back, and Im blessed if they mustnt have got through the kitchen window, woman and all, for all of a sudden the blind in the front room was pulled not up, but downdragged down it was, and there was that young man whats a friend of yours standing with it in his hand. Well, I says to myself, if that aint cool I should like to know what is. If, when you aint let in, you can let yourself in, and that without so much as saying by your leave, or with your leave, things is coming to a pretty pass. Wherever can that Arab party be, and whatever can he be thinking of, to let them go on like that because that hes the sort to allow a liberty to be took with him, and say nothing, I dont believe. Every moment I expects to hear a noise and see a row begin, but, so far as I could make out, all was quiet and there wasnt nothing of the kind. So I says to myself, Theres more in this than meets the eye, and them three parties must have right upon their side, or they wouldnt be doing what they are doing in the way they are, thered be a shindy. Presently, in about five minutes, the front door opens, and a young mannot the one whats your friend, but the othercomes sailing out, and through the gate, and down the road, as stiff and upright as a grenadierI never see anyone walk more upright, and few as fast. At his heels comes the young man what is your friend, and it seems to me that he couldnt make out what this other was adoing of. I says to myself, Theres been a quarrel between them two, and him as has gone has hooked it. This young man what is your friend he stood at the gate, all of a fidget, staring after the other with all his eyes, as if he couldnt think what to make of him, and the young woman, she stood on the doorstep, staring after him too. As the young man what had hooked it turned the corner, and was out of sight, all at once your friend he seemed to make up his mind, and he started off running as hard as he could peltand the young woman was left alone. I expected, every minute, to see him come back with the other young man, and the young woman, by the way she hung about the gate, she seemed to expect it too. But no, nothing of the kind. So when, as I expect, shed had enough of waiting, she went into the house again, and I see her pass the front room window. After a while, back she comes to the gate, and stands looking and looking, but nothing was to be seen of either of them young men. When shed been at the gate, I daresay five minutes, back she goes into the houseand I never saw nothing of her again. You never saw anything of her again?Are you sure she went back into the house? As sure as I am that I see you. I suppose that you didnt keep a constant watch upon the premises? But thats just what I did do. I felt something queer was going on, and I made up my mind to see it through. And when I make up my mind to a thing like that Im not easy to turn aside. I never moved off the chair at my bedroom window, and I never took my eyes off the house, not till you come knocking at my front door. But, since the young lady is certainly not in the house at present, she must have eluded your observation, and, in some manner, have left it without your seeing her. I dont believe she did, I dont see how she could have donetheres something queer about that house, since that Arab partys been inside it. But though I didnt see her, I did see someone else. Who was that? A young man. A young man? Yes, a young man, and thats what puzzled me, and whats been puzzling me ever since, for see him go in I never did do. Can you describe him? Not as to the face, for he wore a dirty cloth cap pulled down right over it, and he walked so quickly that I never had a proper look. But I should know him anywhere if I saw him, if only because of his clothes and his walk. What was there peculiar about his clothes and his walk? Why, his clothes were that old, and torn, and dirty, that a ragman wouldnt have given a thank you for themand as for fitthere wasnt none, they hung upon him like a scarecrowhe was a regular figure of fun; I should think the boys would call after him if they saw him in the street. As for his walk, he walked off just like the first young man had done, he strutted along with his shoulders back, and his head in the air, and that stiff and straight that my kitchen poker would have looked crooked beside of him. Did nothing happen to attract your attention between the young ladys going back into the house and the coming out of this young man? Miss Coleman cogitated. Now you mention it there didthough I should have forgotten all about it if you hadnt asked methat comes of your not letting me tell the tale in my own way. About twenty minutes after the young woman had gone in someone put up the blind in the front room, which that young man had dragged right down, I couldnt see who it was for the blind was between us, and it was about ten minutes after that that young man came marching out. And then what followed? Why, in about another ten minutes that Arab party himself comes scooting through the door. The Arab party? Yes, the Arab party! The sight of him took me clean aback. Where hed been, and what hed been doing with himself while them there people played hispyhi about his premises Id have given a shilling out of my pocket to have known, but there he was, as large as life, and carrying a bundle. A bundle? A bundle, on his head, like a muffinman carries his tray. It was a great thing, you never would have thought he could have carried it, and it was easy to see that it was as much as he could manage; it bent him nearly double, and he went crawling along like a snailit took him quite a time to get to the end of the road. Mr. Lessingham leaped up from his seat, crying, Marjorie was in that bundle! I doubt it, I said. He moved about the room distractedly, wringing his hands. She was! she must have been! God help us all! I repeat that I doubt it. If you will be advised by me you will wait awhile before you arrive at any such conclusion. All at once there was a tapping at the window pane. Atherton was staring at us from without. He shouted through the glass, Come out of that, you fossils!Ive news for you! XLI. The ConstableHis Clueand the Cab Miss Coleman, getting up in a fluster, went hurrying to the door. I wont have that young man in my house. I wont have him! Dont let him dare to put his nose across my doorstep. I endeavoured to appease her perturbation. I promise you that he shall not come in, Miss Coleman. My friend here, and I, will go and speak to him outside. She held the front door open just wide enough to enable Lessingham and me to slip through, then she shut it after us with a bang. She evidently had a strong objection to any intrusion on Sydneys part. Standing just without the gate he saluted us with a characteristic vigour which was scarcely flattering to our late hostess. Behind him was a constable. I hope you two have been mewed in with that old pussy long enough. While youve been tittletattling Ive been doinglisten to what this bobbys got to say. The constable, his thumbs thrust inside his belt, wore an indulgent smile upon his countenance. He seemed to find Sydney amusing. He spoke in a deep bass voiceas if it issued from his boots. I dont know that Ive got anything to say. It was plain that Sydney thought otherwise. You wait till Ive given this pretty pair of gossips a lead, officer, then Ill trot you out. He turned to us. After Id poked my nose into every dashed hole in that infernal den, and been rewarded with nothing but a pain in the back for my trouble, I stood cooling my heels on the doorstep, wondering if I should fight the cabman, or get him to fight me, just to pass the time awayfor he says he can box, and he looks itwhen who should come strolling along but this magnificent example of the metropolitan constabulary. He waved his hand towards the policeman, whose grin grew wider. I looked at him, and he looked at me, and then when wed had enough of admiring each others fine features and striking proportions, he said to me, Has he gone? I said, Who?Baxter?or Bob Brown? He said, No, the Arab. I said, What do you know about any Arab? He said, Well, I saw him in the Broadway about threequarters of an hour ago, and then, seeing you here, and the house all open, I wondered if he had gone for good. With that I almost jumped out of my skin, though you can bet your life I never showed it. I said, How do you know it was he? He said, It was him right enough, theres no doubt about that. If youve seen him once, youre not likely to forget him. Where was he going? He was talking to a cabmanfourwheeler. Hed got a great bundle on his headwanted to take it inside with him. Cabman didnt seem to see it. That was enough for meI picked this most deserving officer up in my arms, and carried him across the road to you two fellows like a flash of lightning. Since the policeman was six feet three or four, and more than sufficiently broad in proportion, his scarcely seemed the kind of figure to be picked up in anybodys arms and carried like a flash of lightning, whichas his smile grew more indulgent, he himself appeared to think. Still, even allowing for Athertons exaggeration, the news which he had brought was sufficiently important. I questioned the constable upon my own account. There is my card, officer, probably, before the day is over, a charge of a very serious character will be preferred against the person who has been residing in the house over the way. In the meantime it is of the utmost importance that a watch should be kept upon his movements. I suppose you have no sort of doubt that the person you saw in the Broadway was the one in question? Not a morsel. I know him as well as I do my own brotherwe all do upon this beat. Hes known amongst us as the Arab. Ive had my eye on him ever since he came to the place. A queer fish he is. I always have said that hes up to some game or other. I never came across one like him for flying about in all sorts of weather, at all hours of the night, always tearing along as if for his life. As I was telling this gentleman I saw him in the Broadwaywell, now its about an hour since, perhaps a little more. I was coming on duty when I saw a crowd in front of the District Railway Stationand there was the Arab, having a sort of argument with the cabman. He had a great bundle on his head, five or six feet long, perhaps longer. He wanted to take this great bundle with him into the cab, and the cabman, he didnt see it. You didnt wait to see him drive off. NoI hadnt time. I was due at the stationI was cutting it pretty fine as it was. You didnt speak to himor to the cabman? No, it wasnt any business of mine you understand. The whole thing just caught my eye as I was passing. And you didnt take the cabmans number? No, well, as far as that goes it wasnt needful. I know the cabman, his name and all about him, his stables in Bradmore. I whipped out my notebook. Give me his address. I dont know what his Christian name is, Tom, I believe, but Im not sure. Anyhow his surnames Ellis and his address is Church Mews, St. Johns Road, BradmoreI dont know his number, but anyone will tell you which is his place, if you ask for FourWheel Ellisthats the name hes known by among his pals because of his driving a fourwheeler. Thank you, officer. I am obliged to you. Two halfcrowns changed hands. If you will keep an eye on the house and advise me at the address which you will find on my card, of anything which takes place there during the next few days, you will do me a service. We had clambered back into the hansom, the driver was just about to start, when the constable was struck by a sudden thought. One moment, sirblessed if I wasnt going to forget the most important bit of all. I did hear him tell Ellis where to drive him tohe kept saying it over and over again, in that queer lingo of his. Waterloo Railway Station, Waterloo Railway Station. All right, said Ellis, Ill drive you to Waterloo Railway Station right enough, only Im not going to have that bundle of yours inside my cab. There isnt room for it, so you put it on the roof. To Waterloo Railway Station, said the Arab, I take my bundle with me to Waterloo Railway StationI take it with me. Who says you dont take it with you? said Ellis. You can take it, and twenty more besides, for all I care, only you dont take it inside my cabput it on the roof. I take it with me to Waterloo Railway Station, said the Arab, and there they were, wrangling and jangling, and neither seeming to be able to make out what the other was after, and the people all laughing. Waterloo Railway Stationyou are sure that was what he said? Ill take my oath to it, because I said to myself, when I heard it, I wonder what youll have to pay for that little lot, for the District Railway Stations outside the fourmile radius. As we drove off I was inclined to ask myself, a little bitterlyand perhaps unjustlyif it were not characteristic of the average London policeman to almost forget the most important part of his informationat any rate to leave it to the last and only to bring it to the front on having his palm crossed with silver. As the hansom bowled along we three had what occasionally approached a warm discussion. Marjorie was in that bundle, began Lessingham, in the most lugubrious of tones, and with the most woebegone of faces. I doubt it, I observed. She wasI feel itI know it. She was either dead and mutilated, or gagged and drugged and helpless. All that remains is vengeance. I repeat that I doubt it. Atherton struck in. I am bound to say, with the best will in the world to think otherwise, that I agree with Lessingham. You are wrong. Its all very well for you to talk in that cocksure way, but its easier for you to say Im wrong than to prove it. If I am wrong, and if Lessinghams wrong, how do you explain his extraordinary insistance on taking it inside the cab with him, which the bobby describes? If there wasnt something horrible, awful in that bundle of his, of which he feared the discovery, why was he so reluctant to have it placed upon the roof? There probably was something in it which he was particularly anxious should not be discovered, but I doubt if it was anything of the kind which you suggest. Here is Marjorie in a house alonenothing has been seen of her sinceher clothing, her hair, is found hidden away under the floor. This scoundrel sallies forth with a huge bundle on his headthe bobby speaks of it being five or six feet long, or longera bundle which he regards with so much solicitude that he insists on never allowing it to go, for a single instant, out of his sight and reach. What is in the thing? dont all the facts most unfortunately point in one direction? Mr. Lessingham covered his face with his hands, and groaned. I fear that Mr. Atherton is right. I differ from you both. Sydney at once became heated. Then perhaps you can tell us what was in the bundle? I fancy I could make a guess at the contents. Oh you could, could you, then, perhaps, for our sakes, youll make itand not play the oracular owl!Lessingham and I are interested in this business, after all. It contained the bearers personal property that, and nothing more. Stay! before you jeer at me, suffer me to finish. If I am not mistaken as to the identity of the person whom the constable describes as the Arab, I apprehend that the contents of that bundle were of much more importance to him than if they had consisted of Miss Lindon, either dead or living. More. I am inclined to suspect that if the bundle was placed on the roof of the cab, and if the driver did meddle with it, and did find out the contents, and understand them, he would have been driven, out of hand, stark staring mad. Sydney was silent, as if he reflected. I imagine he perceived there was something in what I said. But what has become of Miss Lindon? I fancy that Miss Lindon, at this moment, issomewhere; I dont, just now, know exactly where, but I hope very shortly to be able to give you a clearer notionattired in a rotten, dirty pair of boots; a filthy, tattered pair of trousers; a ragged, unwashed apology for a shirt; a greasy, ancient, shapeless coat; and a frowsy peaked cloth cap. They stared at me, openedeyed. Atherton was the first to speak. What on earth do you mean? I mean that it seems to me that the facts point in the direction of my conclusions rather than yoursand that very strongly too. Miss Coleman asserts that she saw Miss London return into the house; that within a few minutes the blind was replaced at the front window; and that shortly after a young man, attired in the costume I have described, came walking out of the front door. I believe that young man was Miss Marjorie Lindon. Lessingham and Atherton both broke out into interrogations, with Sydney, as usual, loudest. Butman alive! what on earth should make her do a thing like that? Marjorie, the most retiring, modest girl on all Gods earth, walk about in broad daylight, in such a costume, and for no reason at all! my dear Champnell, you are suggesting that she first of all went mad. She was in a state of trance. Good God!Champnell! Well? Then you think thatjuggling villain did get hold of her? Undoubtedly.

Here is my view of the case, mind it is only a hypothesis and you must take it for what it is worth. It seems to me quite clear that the Arab, as we will call the person for the sake of identification, was somewhere about the premises when you thought he wasnt. Butwhere? We looked upstairs, and downstairs, and everywherewhere could he have been? That, as at present advised, I am not prepared to say, but I think you may take it for granted that he was there. He hypnotised the man Holt, and sent him away, intending you to go after him, and so being rid of you both The deuce he did, Champnell! You write me down an ass! As soon as the coast was clear he discovered himself to Miss Lindon, who, I expect, was disagreeably surprised, and hypnotised her. The hound! The devil! The first exclamation was Lessinghams, the second Sydneys. He then constrained her to strip herself to the skin The wretch! The fiend! He cut off her hair; he hid it and her clothes under the floor where we found themwhere I think it probable that he had already some ancient masculine garments concealed By Jove! I shouldnt be surprised if they were Holts. I remember the man saying that that nice joker stripped him of his dudsand certainly when I saw himand when Marjorie found him!he had absolutely nothing on but a queer sort of cloak. Can it be possible that that humorous professor of hankeypankeymay all the maledictions of the accursed alight upon his head!can have sent Marjorie Lindon, the daintiest damsel in the land!into the streets of London rigged out in Holts old togs! As to that, I am not able to give an authoritative opinion, but, if I understand you aright, it at least is possible. Anyhow I am disposed to think that he sent Miss Lindon after the man Holt, taking it for granted that he had eluded you. Thats it. Write me down an ass again! That he did elude you, you have yourself admitted. Thats because I stopped talking with that muttonheaded bobbyId have followed the man to the ends of the earth if it hadnt been for that. Precisely; the reason is immaterial, it is the fact with which we are immediately concerned. He did elude you. And I think you will find that Miss Lindon and Mr. Holt are together at this moment. In mens clothing? Both in mens clothing, or, rather, Miss Lindon is in a mans rags. Great Potiphar! To think of Marjorie like that! And where they are, the Arab is not very far off either. Lessingham caught me by the arm. And what diabolical mischief do you imagine that he proposes to do to her? I shirked the question. Whatever it is, it is our business to prevent his doing it. And where do you think they have been taken? That it will be our immediate business to endeavour to discoverand here, at any rate, we are at Waterloo. XLII. The Quarry Doubles I turned towards the bookingoffice on the main departure platform. As I went, the chief platform inspector, George Bellingham, with whom I had some acquaintance, came out of his office. I stopped him. Mr. Bellingham, will you be so good as to step with me to the bookingoffice, and instruct the clerk in charge to answer one or two questions which I wish to put to him. I will explain to you afterwards what is their exact import, but you know me sufficiently to be able to believe me when I say that they refer to a matter in which every moment is of the first importance. He turned and accompanied us into the interior of the bookingcase. To which of the clerks, Mr. Champnell, do you wish to put your questions? To the one who issues thirdclass tickets to Southampton. Bellingham beckoned to a man who was counting a heap of money, and apparently seeking to make it tally with the entries in a huge ledger which lay open before himhe was a short, slightlybuilt young fellow, with a pleasant face and smiling eyes. Mr. Stone, this gentleman wishes to ask you one or two questions. I am at his service. I put my questions. I want to know, Mr. Stone, if, in the course of the day, you have issued any tickets to a person dressed in Arab costume? His reply was prompt. I haveby the last train, the 725three singles. Three singles! Then my instinct had told me rightly. Can you describe the person? Mr. Stones eyes twinkled. I dont know that I can, except in a general wayhe was uncommonly old and uncommonly ugly, and he had a pair of the most extraordinary eyes I ever sawthey gave me a sort of alloverish feeling when I saw them glaring at me through the pigeon hole. But I can tell you one thing about him, he had a great bundle on his head, which he steadied with one hand, and as it bulged out in all directions its presence didnt make him popular with other people who wanted tickets too. Undoubtedly this was our man. You are sure he asked for three tickets? Certain. He said three tickets to Southampton; laid down the exact farenineteen and sixand held up three fingerslike that. Three nasty looking fingers they were, with nails as long as talons. You didnt see who were his companions? I didntI didnt try to look. I gave him his tickets and off he wentwith the people grumbling at him because that bundle of his kept getting in their way. Bellingham touched me on the arm. I can tell you about the Arab of whom Mr. Stone speaks. My attention was called to him by his insisting on taking his bundle with him into the carriageit was an enormous thing, he could hardly squeeze it through the door; it occupied the entire seat. But as there werent as many passengers as usual, and he wouldnt or couldnt be made to understand that his precious bundle would be safe in the luggage van along with the rest of the luggage, and as he wasnt the sort of person you could argue with to any advantage, I had him put into an empty compartment, bundle and all. Was he alone then? I thought so at the time, he said nothing about having more than one ticket, or any companions, but just before the train started two other menEnglish mengot into his compartment; and as I came down the platform, the ticket inspector at the barrier informed me that these two men were with him, because he held tickets for the three, which, as he was a foreigner, and they seemed English, struck the inspector as odd. Could you describe the two men? I couldnt, not particularly, but the man who had charge of the barrier might. I was at the other end of the train when they got in. All I noticed was that one seemed to be a commonplace looking individual and that the other was dressed like a tramp, all rags and tatters, a disreputable looking object he appeared to be. That, I said to myself, was Miss Marjorie Lindon, the lovely daughter of a famous house; the wifeelect of a coming statesman. To Bellingham I remarked aloud I want you to strain a point, Mr. Bellingham, and to do me a service which I assure you you shall never have any cause to regret. I want you to wire instructions down the line to detain this Arab and his companions and to keep them in custody until the receipt of further instructions. They are not wanted by the police as yet, but they will be as soon as I am able to give certain information to the authorities at Scotland Yardand wanted very badly. But, as you will perceive for yourself, until I am able to give that information every moment is important.Wheres the Station Superintendent? Hes gone. At present Im in charge. Then will you do this for me? I repeat that you shall never have any reason to regret it. I will if youll accept all responsibility. Ill do that with the greatest pleasure. Bellingham looked at his watch. Its about twenty minutes to nine. The trains scheduled for Basingstoke at 906. If we wire to Basingstoke at once they ought to be ready for them when they come. Good! The wire was sent. We were shown into Bellinghams office to await results Lessingham paced agitatedly to and fro; he seemed to have reached the limits of his selfcontrol, and to be in a condition in which movement of some sort was an absolute necessity. The mercurial Sydney, on the contrary, leaned back in a chair, his legs stretched out in front of him, his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets, and stared at Lessingham, as if he found relief to his feelings in watching his companions restlessness. I, for my part, drew up as full a prcis of the case as I deemed advisable, and as time permitted, which I despatched by one of the companys police to Scotland Yard. Then I turned to my associates. Now, gentlemen, its past dinner time. We may have a journey in front of us. If you take my advice youll have something to eat. Lessingham shook his head. I want nothing. Nor I, echoed Sydney. I started up. You must pardon my saying nonsense, but surely you of all men, Mr. Lessingham, should be aware that you will not improve the situation by rendering yourself incapable of seeing it through. Come and dine. I haled them off with me, willy nilly, to the refreshment room. I dinedafter a fashion; Mr. Lessingham swallowed with difficulty, a plate of soup; Sydney nibbled at a plate of the most unpromising looking chicken and ham,he proved, indeed, more intractable than Lessingham, and was not to be persuaded to tackle anything easier of digestion. I was just about to take cheese after chop when Bellingham came hastening in, in his hand an open telegram. The birds have flown, he cried. Flown!How? In reply he gave me the telegram. I glanced at it. It ran Persons described not in the train. Guard says they got out at Vauxhall. Have wired Vauxhall to advise you. Thats a levelheaded chap, said Bellingham. The man who sent that telegram. His wiring to Vauxhall should save us a lot of timewe ought to hear from there directly. Hollo! whats this? I shouldnt be surprised if this is it. As he spoke a porter enteredhe handed an envelope to Bellingham. We all three kept our eyes fixed on the inspectors face as he opened it. When he perceived the contents he gave an exclamation of surprise. This Arab of yours, and his two friends, seem rather a curious lot, Mr. Champnell. He passed the paper on to me. It took the form of a report. Lessingham and Sydney, regardless of forms and ceremonies, leaned over my shoulder as I read it. Passengers by 730 Southampton, on arrival of train, complained of noises coming from a compartment in coach 8964. Stated that there had been shrieks and yells ever since the train left Waterloo, as if someone was being murdered. An Arab and two Englishmen got out of the compartment in question, apparently the party referred to in wire just to hand from Basingstoke. All three declared that there was nothing the matter. That they had been shouting for fun. Arab gave up three third singles for Southampton, saying, in reply to questions, that they had changed their minds, and did not want to go any farther. As there were no signs of a struggle or of violence, nor, apparently, any definite cause for detention, they were allowed to pass. They took a fourwheeler, No. 09435. The Arab and one man went inside, and the other man on the box. They asked to be driven to Commercial Road, Limehouse. The cab has since returned. Driver says he put the three men down, at their request, in Commercial Road, at the corner of Sutcliffe Street, near the East India Docks. They walked up Sutcliffe Street, the Englishmen in front, and the Arab behind, took the first turning to the right, and after that he saw nothing of them. The driver further states that all the way the Englishman inside, who was so ragged and dirty that he was reluctant to carry him, kept up a sort of wailing noise which so attracted his attention that he twice got off his box to see what was the matter, and each time he said it was nothing. The cabman is of opinion that both the Englishmen were of weak intellect. We were of the same impression here. They said nothing, except at the seeming instigation of the Arab, but when spoken to stared and gaped like lunatics. It may be mentioned that the Arab had with him an enormous bundle, which he persisted, in spite of all remonstrances, on taking with him inside the cab. As soon as I had mastered the contents of the report, and perceived what I believed to beunknown to the writer himselfits hideous inner meaning, I turned to Bellingham. With your permission, Mr. Bellingham, I will keep this communicationit will be safe in my hands, you will be able to get a copy, and it may be necessary that I should have the original to show to the police. If any inquiries are made for me from Scotland Yard, tell them that I have gone to the Commercial Road, and that I will report my movements from Limehouse Police Station. In another minute we were once more traversing the streets of Londonthree in a hansom cab. XLIII. The Murder at Mrs. Endersons It is something of a drive from Waterloo to Limehouseit seems longer when all your nerves are tingling with anxiety to reach your journeys end; and the cab I had hit upon proved to be not the fastest I might have chosen. For some time after our start, we were silent. Each was occupied with his own thoughts. Then Lessingham, who was sitting at my side, said to me, Mr. Champnell, you have that report. I have. Will you let me see it once more? I gave it to him. He read it once, twiceand I fancy yet again. I purposely avoided looking at him as he did so. Yet all the while I was conscious of his pallid cheeks, the twitched muscles of his mouth, the feverish glitter of his eyesthis Leader of Men, whose predominate characteristic in the House of Commons was immobility, was rapidly approximating to the condition of a hysterical woman. The mental strain which he had been recently undergoing was proving too much for his physical strength. This disappearance of the woman he loved bade fair to be the final straw. I felt convinced that unless something was done quickly to relieve the strain upon his mind he was nearer to a state of complete mental and moral collapse than he himself imagined. Had he been under my orders I should have commanded him to at once return home, and not to think; but conscious that, as things were, such a direction would be simply futile, I decided to do something else instead. Feeling that suspense was for him the worst possible form of suffering I resolved to explain, so far as I was able, precisely what it was I feared, and how I proposed to prevent it. Presently there came the question for which I had been waiting, in a harsh, broken voice which no one who had heard him speak on a public platform, or in the House of Commons, would have recognised as his. Mr. Champnellwho do you think this person is of whom the report from Vauxhall Station speaks as being all in rags and tatters? He knew perfectly wellbut I understood the mental attitude which induced him to prefer that the information should seem to come from me. I hope that it will prove to be Miss Lindon. Hope! He gave a sort of gasp. Yes, hopebecause if it is I think it possible, nay probable, that within a few hours you will have her again enfolded in your arms. Pray God that it may be so! pray God!pray the good God! I did not dare to look round for, from the tremor which was in his tone, I was persuaded that in the speakers eyes were tears. Atherton continued silent. He was leaning half out of the cab, staring straight ahead, as if he saw in front a young girls face, from which he could not remove his glance, and which beckoned him on. After a while Lessingham spoke again, as if half to himself and half to me. This mention of the shrieks on the railway, and of the wailing noise in the cabwhat must this wretch have done to her? How my darling must have suffered! That was a theme on which I myself scarcely ventured to allow my thoughts to rest. The notion of a gentlynurtured girl being at the mercy of that fiend incarnate, possessedas I believed that socalled Arab to be possessedof all the paraphernalia of horror and of dread, was one which caused me tangible shrinkings of the body. Whence had come those shrieks and yells, of which the writer of the report spoke, which had caused the Arabs fellowpassengers to think that murder was being done? What unimaginable agony had caused them? what speechless torture? And the wailing noise, which had induced the prosaic, indurated London cabman to get twice off his box to see what was the matter, what anguish had been provocative of that? The helpless girl who had already endured so much, endured, perhaps, that to which death would have been preferred!shut up in that rattling, jolting box on wheels, alone with that diabolical Asiatic, with the enormous bundle, which was but the lurking place of nameless terrorswhat might she not, while being borne through the heart of civilised London, have been made to suffer? What had she not been made to suffer to have kept up that continued wailing noise? It was not a theme on which it was wise to permit ones thoughts to lingerand particularly was it clear that it was one from which Lessinghams thoughts should have been kept as far as possible away. Come, Mr. Lessingham, neither you nor I will do himself any good by permitting his reflections to flow in a morbid channel. Let us talk of something else. By the way, werent you due to speak in the House tonight? Due!Yes, I was duebut what does it matter? But have you acquainted no one with the cause of your nonattendance? Acquaint!whom should I acquaint? My good sir! Listen to me, Mr. Lessingham. Let me entreat you very earnestly, to follow my advice. Call another cabor take this! and go at once to the House. It is not too late. Play the man, deliver the speech you have undertaken to deliver, perform your political duties. By coming with me you will be a hindrance rather than a help, and you may do your reputation an injury from which it never may recover. Do as I counsel you, and I will undertake to do my very utmost to let you have good news by the time your speech is finished. He turned on me with a bitterness for which I was unprepared. If I were to go down to the House, and try to speak in the state in which I am now, they would laugh at me, I should be ruined. Do you not run an equally great risk of being ruined by staying away? He gripped me by the arm. Mr. Champnell, do you know that I am on the verge of madness? Do you know that as I am sitting here by your side I am living in a dual world? I am going on and on to catch thatthat fiend, and I am back again in that Egyptian den, upon that couch of rugs, with the Woman of the Songs beside me, and Marjorie is being torn and tortured, and burnt before my eyes! God help me! Her shrieks are ringing in my ears! He did not speak loudly, but his voice was none the less impressive on that account. I endeavoured my hardest to be stern. I confess that you disappoint me, Mr. Lessingham. I have always understood that you were a man of unusual strength; you appear instead, to be a man of extraordinary weakness; with an imagination so illgoverned that its ebullitions remind me of nothing so much as feminine hysterics. Your wild language is not warranted by circumstances. I repeat that I think it quite possible that by tomorrow morning she will be returned to you. Yesbut how? as the Marjorie I have known, as I saw her lastor how? That was the question which I had already asked myself, in what condition would she be when we had succeeded in snatching her from her captors grip? It was a question to which I had refused to supply an answer. To him I lied by implication. Let us hope that, with the exception of being a trifle scared, she will be as sound and hale and hearty as even in her life. Do you yourself believe that shell be like thatuntouched, unchanged, unstained? Then I lied right outit seemed to me necessary to calm his growing excitement. I do. You dont! Mr. Lessingham! Do you think that I cant see your face and read in it the same thoughts which trouble me? As a man of honour do you care to deny that when Marjorie Lindon is restored to meif she ever is!you fear she will be but the mere soiled husk of the Marjorie whom I knew and loved? Even supposing that there may be a modicum of truth in what you saywhich I am far from being disposed to admitwhat good purpose do you propose to serve by talking in such a strain? Noneno good purposeunless it be the desire of looking the truth in the face. For, Mr. Champnell, you must not seek to play with me the hypocrite, nor try to hide things from me as if I were a child. If my life is ruinedit is ruinedlet me know it, and look the knowledge in the face. That, to me, is to play the man. I was silent. The wild tale he had told me of that Cairene inferno, oddly enoughyet why oddly, for the world is all coincidence!had thrown a flood of light on certain events which had happened some three years previously and which ever since had remained shrouded in mystery. The conduct of the business afterwards came into my handsand briefly, what had occurred was this Three personstwo sisters and their brother, who was younger than themselves, members of a decent English family, were going on a trip round the world. They were young, adventurous, andnot to put too fine a point on itfoolhardy. The evening after their arrival in Cairo, by way of what is called a lark, in spite of the protestations of people who were better informed than themselves, they insisted on going, alone, for a ramble through the native quarter. They wentbut they never returned. Or, rather the two girls never returned. After an interval the young man was found againwhat was left of him. A fuss was made when there were no signs of their reappearance, but as there were no relations, nor even friends of theirs, but only casual acquaintances on board the ship by which they had travelled, perhaps not so great a fuss as might have been was made. Anyhow, nothing was discovered. Their widowed mother, alone in England, wondering how it was that beyond the receipt of a brief wire, acquainting her with their arrival at Cairo, she had heard nothing further of their wanderings, placed herself in communication with the diplomatic people over thereto learn that, to all appearances, her three children had vanished from off the face of the earth. Then a fuss was madewith a vengeance. So far as one can judge the whole town and neighbourhood was turned pretty well upside down. But nothing came of itso far as any results were concerned, the authorities might just as well have left the mystery of their vanishment alone. It continued where it was in spite of them. However, some three months afterwards a youth was brought to the British Embassy by a party of friendly Arabs who asserted that they had found him naked and nearly dying in some remote spot in the Wady Haifa desert. It was the brother of the two lost girls. He was as nearly dying as he very well could be without being actually dead when they brought him to the Embassyand in a state of indescribable mutilation. He seemed to rally for a time under careful treatment, but he never again uttered a coherent word. It was only from his delirious ravings that any idea was formed of what had really occurred. Shorthand notes were taken of some of the utterances of his delirium. Afterwards they were submitted to me. I remembered the substance of them quite well, and when Mr. Lessingham began to tell me of his own hideous experiences they came back to me more clearly still. Had I laid those notes before him I have little doubt but that he would have immediately perceived that seventeen years after the adventure which had left such an indelible scar upon his own life, this youthhe was little more than a boyhad seen the things which he had seen, and suffered the nameless agonies and degradations which he had suffered. The young man was perpetually raving about some indescribable den of horror which was own brother to Lessinghams temple and about some female monster, whom he regarded with such fear and horror that every allusion he made to her was followed by a convulsive paroxysm which taxed all the ingenuity of his medical attendants to bring him out of. He frequently called upon his sisters by name, speaking of them in a manner which inevitably suggested that he had been an unwilling and helpless witness of hideous tortures which they had undergone; and then he would rise in bed, screaming, Theyre burning them! theyre burning them! Devils! devils! And at those times it required all the strength of those who were in attendance to restrain his maddened frenzy. The youth died in one of these fits of great preternatural excitement, without, as I have previously written, having given utterance to one single coherent word, and by some of those who were best able to judge it was held to have been a mercy that he did die without having been restored to consciousness. And, presently, tales began to be whispered, about some idolatrous sect, which was stated to have its headquarters somewhere in the interior of the countrysome located it in this neighbourhood, and some in thatwhich was stated to still practise, and to always have practised, in unbroken historical continuity, the debased, unclean, mystic, and bloody rites, of a form of idolatry which had had its birth in a period of the worlds story which was so remote, that to all intents and purposes it might be described as prehistoric. While the ferment was still at its height, a man came to the British Embassy who said that he was a member of a tribe which had its habitat on the banks of the White Nile. He asserted that he was in association with this very idolatrous sectthough he denied that he was one of the actual sectaries. He did admit, however, that he had assisted more than once at their orgies, and declared that it was their constant practice to offer young women as sacrificespreferably white Christian women, with a special preference, if they could get them, to young English women. He vowed that he himself had seen with his own eyes, English girls burnt alive. The description which he gave of what preceded and followed these foul murders appalled those who listened. He finally wound up by offering, on payment of a stipulated sum of money, to guide a troop of soldiers to this den of demons, so that they should arrive there at a moment when it was filled with worshippers, who were preparing to participate in an orgie which was to take place during the next few days. His offer was conditionally accepted. He was confined in an apartment with one man on guard inside and another on guard outside the room. That night the sentinel without was startled by hearing a great noise and frightful screams issuing from the chamber in which the native was interned. He summoned assistance. The door was opened. The soldier on guard within was stark, staring madhe died within a few months, a gibbering maniac to the end. The native was dead. The window, which was a very small one, was securely fastened inside and strongly barred without. There was nothing to show by what means entry had been gained. Yet it was the general opinion of those who saw the corpse that the man had been destroyed by some wild beast. A photograph was taken of the body after death, a copy of which is still in my possession. In it are distinctly shown lacerations about the neck and the lower portion of the abdomen, as if they had been produced by the claws of some huge and ferocious animal. The skull is splintered in halfadozen places, and the face is torn to rags. That was more than three years ago. The whole business has remained as great a mystery as ever. But my attention has once or twice been caught by trifling incidents, which have caused me to more than suspect that the wild tale told by that murdered native had in it at least the elements of truth; and which have even led me to wonder if the trade in kidnapping was not being carried on to this very hour, and if women of my own flesh and blood were not still being offered up on that infernal altar. And now, here was Paul Lessingham, a man of worldwide reputation, of great intellect, of undoubted honour, who had come to me with a wholly unconscious verification of all my worst suspicions! That the creature spoken of as an Araband who was probably no more an Arab than I was, and whose name was certainly not Mohamed el Kheir!was an emissary from that den of demons, I had no doubt. What was the exact purport of the creatures presence in England was another question, Possibly part of the intention was the destruction of Paul Lessingham, body, soul and spirit; possibly another part was the procuration of fresh victims for that longdrawnout holocaust. That this latter object explained the disappearance of Miss Lindon I felt persuaded. That she was designed by the personification of evil who was her captor, to suffer all the horrors at which the stories pointed, and then to be burned alive, amidst the triumphant yells of the attendant demons, I was certain. That the wretch, aware that the pursuit was in full cry, was tearing, twisting, doubling, and would stick at nothing which would facilitate the smuggling of the victim out of England, was clear. My interest in the quest was already far other than a merely professional one. The blood in my veins tingled at the thought of such a woman as Miss Lindon being in the power of such a monster. I may assuredly claim that throughout the whole business I was urged forward by no thought of fee or of reward. To have had a share in rescuing that unfortunate girl, and in the destruction of her noxious persecutor, would have been reward enough for me. One is not always, even in strictly professional matters, influenced by strictly professional instincts. The cab slowed. A voice descended through the trap door. This is Commercial Road, sirwhat part of it do you want? Drive me to Limehouse Police Station. We were driven there. I made my way to the usual inspector behind the usual pigeonhole. My name is Champnell. Have you received any communication from Scotland Yard tonight having reference to a matter in which I am interested? Do you mean about the Arab? We received a telephonic message about half an hour ago. Since communicating with Scotland Yard this has come to hand from the authorities at Vauxhall Station. Can you tell me if anything has been seen of the person in question by the men of your division? I handed the Inspector the report. His reply was laconic. I will inquire. He passed through a door into an inner room and the report went with him. Beg pardon, sir, but was that a Harab you was atalking about to the Hinspector? The speaker was a gentleman unmistakably of the guttersnipe class. He was seated on a form. Close at hand hovered a policeman whose special duty it seemed to be to keep an eye upon his movements. Why do you ask? I beg your pardon, sir, but I saw a Harab myself about a hour agoleastways he looked like as if he was a Harab. What sort of a looking person was he? I cant ardly tell you that, sir, because I didnt never have a proper look at himbut I know he had a bloomin great bundle on is ead. It was like this, ere. I was comin round the corner, as he was passin, I never see im till I was right atop of im, so that I haccidentally run agin immy heye! didnt e give me a downer! I was down on the back of my ead in the middle of the road before I knew where I was and e was at the other end of the street. If e adnt knocked me moren arf silly Id been after im, sharpI tell you! and hasked im what e thought e was adoin of, but afore my senses was back agin e was out o sightclean! You are sure he had a bundle on his head? I noticed it most particular. How long ago do you say this was? and where? About a hour agoperhaps more, perhaps less. Was he alone? It seemed to me as if a cove was a follerin im, leastways there was a bloke as was akeepin close at is eelsthough I dont know what is little game was, Im sure. Ask the pleesmanhe knows, he knows everything the pleesman do. I turned to the pleesman.

Who is this man? The pleesman put his hands behind his back, and threw out his chest. His manner was distinctly affable. Wellhes being detained upon suspicion. Hes given us an address at which to make inquiries, and inquiries are being made. I shouldnt pay too much attention to what he says if I were you. I dont suppose hed be particular about a lie or two. This frank expression of opinion rearoused the indignation of the gentleman on the form. There you hare! at it again! Thats just like you peelersyoure all the same! What do you know about me?Nuffink! This genleman aint got no call to believe me, not as I knows onits all the same to me if e do or dont, but its trewth what Im sayin, all the same. At this point the Inspector reappeared at the pigeonhole. He cut short the flow of eloquence. Now then, not so much noise outside there! He addressed me. None of our men have seen anything of the person youre inquiring for, so far as were aware. But, if you like, I will place a man at your disposal, and he will go round with you, and you will be able to make your own inquiries. A capless, wildly excited young ragamuffin came dashing in at the street door. He gasped out, as clearly as he could for the speed which he had made Theres been murder done, Mr. Pleesmana Harabs killed a bloke. Mr. Pleesman gripped him by the shoulder. Whats that? The youngster put up his arm, and ducked his head, instinctively, as if to ward off a blow. Leave me alone! I dont want none of your andling!I aint done nuffink to you! I tell you e as! The Inspector spoke through the pigeonhole. He has what, my lad? What do you say has happened? Theres been murder doneits right enough!there as!up at Mrs. Endersons, in Paradise Placea Harabs been and killed a bloke! XLIV. The Man Who Was Murdered The Inspector spoke to me. If what the boy says is correct it sounds as if the person whom you are seeking may have had a finger in the pie. I was of the same opinion, as, apparently, were Lessingham and Sidney. Atherton collared the youth by the shoulder which Mr. Pleesman had left disengaged. What sort of looking bloke is it whos been murdered? I dunno! I avent seen im! Mrs. Enderson, she says to me! Gustus Barley, she says, a blokes been murdered. That there Harab what I chucked out alf a hour ago been and murdered im, and left im behind up in my back room. You run as ard as you can tear and tell them there dratted pleese whats so fond of shovin their dirty noses into respectable peoples ouses. So I comes and tells yer. Thats all I knows about it. We went four in the hansom which had been waiting in the street to Mrs. Hendersons in Paradise Placethe Inspector and we three. Mr. Pleesman and Gustus Barley followed on foot. The Inspector was explanatory. Mrs. Henderson keeps a sort of lodginghousea Sailors Home she calls it, but no one could call it sweet. It doesnt bear the best of characters, and if you asked me what I thought of it, I should say in plain English that it was a disorderly house. Paradise Place proved to be within three or four hundred yards of the Station House. So far as could be seen in the dark it consisted of a row of houses of considerable dimensionsand also of considerable antiquity. They opened on to two or three stone steps which led directly into the street. At one of the doors stood an old lady with a shawl drawn over her head. This was Mrs. Henderson. She greeted us with garrulous volubility. So you ave come, ave you? I thought you never was acomin that I did. She recognised the Inspector. Its you, Mr. Phillips, is it? Perceiving us, she drew a little back Whos them ere parties? They aint coppers? Mr. Phillips dismissed her inquiry, curtly. Never you mind who they are. Whats this about someone being murdered. Ssh! The old lady glanced round. Dont you speak so loud, Mr. Phillips. No one dont know nothing about it as yet. The parties whats in my ouse is most respectablemost! and they couldnt abide the notion of there being police about the place. We quite believe that, Mrs. Henderson. The Inspectors tone was grim. Mrs. Henderson led the way up a staircase which would have been distinctly the better for repairs. It was necessary to pick ones way as one went, and as the light was defective stumbles were not infrequent. Our guide paused outside a door on the topmost landing. From some mysterious recess in her apparel she produced a key. Its in ere. I locked the door so that nothing mightnt be disturbed. I knows ow particular you pleesmen is. She turned the key. We all went inwe, this time, in front, and she behind. A candle was guttering on a broken and dilapidated single washhand stand. A small iron bedstead stood by its side, the clothes on which were all tumbled and tossed. There was a rushseated chair with a hole in the seatand that, with the exception of one or two chipped pieces of stoneware, and a small round mirror which was hung on a nail against the wall, seemed to be all that the room contained. I could see nothing in the shape of a murdered man. Nor, it appeared, could the Inspector either. Whats the meaning of this, Mrs. Henderson? I dont see anything here. Its beind the bed, Mr. Phillips. I left im just where I found im, I wouldnt ave touched im not for nothing, nor yet ave let nobody else ave touched im neither, because, as I say, I know ow particular you pleesmen is. We all four went hastily forward. Atherton and I went to the head of the bed, Lessingham and the Inspector, leaning right across the bed, peeped over the side. There, on the floor in the space which was between the bed and the wall, lay the murdered man. At sight of him an exclamation burst from Sydneys lips. Its Holt! Thank God! cried Lessingham. It isnt Marjorie! The relief in his tone was unmistakable. That the one was gone was plainly nothing to him in comparison with the fact that the other was left. Thrusting the bed more into the centre of the room I knelt down beside the man on the floor. A more deplorable spectacle than he presented I have seldom witnessed. He was decently clad in a grey tweed suit, white hat, collar and necktie, and it was perhaps that fact which made his extreme attenuation the more conspicuous. I doubt if there was an ounce of flesh on the whole of his body. His cheeks and the sockets of his eyes were hollow. The skin was drawn tightly over his cheek bonesthe bones themselves were staring through. Even his nose was wasted, so that nothing but a ridge of cartilage remained. I put my arm beneath his shoulder and raised him from the floor; no resistance was offered by the bodys gravityhe was as light as a little child. I doubt, I said, if this man has been murdered. It looks to me like a case of starvation, or exhaustionpossibly a combination of both. Whats that on his neck? asked the Inspectorhe was kneeling at my side. He referred to two abrasions of the skinone on either side of the mans neck. They look to me like scratches. They seem pretty deep, but I dont think theyre sufficient in themselves to cause death. They might be, joined to an already weakened constitution. Is there anything in his pockets?lets lift him on to the bed. We lifted him on to the beda featherweight he was to lift. While the Inspector was examining his pocketsto find them emptya tall man with a big black beard came bustling in. He proved to be Dr. Glossop, the local police surgeon, who had been sent for before our quitting the Station House. His first pronouncement, made as soon as he commenced his examination, was, under the circumstances, sufficiently startling. I dont believe the mans dead. Why didnt you send for me directly you found him? The question was put to Mrs. Henderson. Well, Dr. Glossop, I wouldnt touch im myself, and I wouldnt ave im touched by no one else, because, as Ive said afore, I know ow particular them pleesmen is. Then in that case, if he does die youll have had a hand in murdering himthats all. The lady sniggered. Of course Dr. Glossop, we all knows that youll always ave your joke. Youll find it a joke if you have to hang, as you ought to, you The doctor said what he did say to himself, under his breath. I doubt if it was flattering to Mrs. Henderson. Have you got any brandy in the house? Weve got everythink in the ouse for them as likes to pay for iteverythink. Then, suddenly remembering that the police were present, and that hers were not exactly licensed premises, Leastways we can send out for it for them parties as gives us the money, being, as is well known, always willing to oblige. Then send for someto the tap downstairs, if thats the nearest! If this man dies before youve brought it Ill have you locked up as sure as youre a living woman. The arrival of the brandy was not long delayedbut the man on the bed had regained consciousness before it came. Opening his eyes he looked up at the doctor bending over him. Hollo, my man! thats more like the time of day! How are you feeling? The patient stared hazily up at the doctor, as if his sense of perception was not yet completely restoredas if this big bearded man was something altogether strange. Atherton bent down beside the doctor. Im glad to see you looking better, Mr. Holt. You know me dont you? Ive been running about after you all day long. You areyou are The mans eyes closed, as if the effort at recollection exhausted him. He kept them closed as he continued to speak. I know who you are. You arethe gentleman. Yes, thats it, Im the gentlemanname of Atherton.Miss Lindons friend. And I daresay youre feeling pretty well done up, and in want of something to eat and drinkheres some brandy for you. The doctor had some in a tumbler. He raised the patients head, allowing it to trickle down his throat. The man swallowed it mechanically, motionless, as if unconscious what it was that he was doing. His cheeks flushed, the passing glow of colour caused their condition of extraordinary, and, indeed, extravagant attentuation, to be more prominent than ever. The doctor laid him back upon the bed, feeling his pulse with one hand, while he stood and regarded him in silence. Then, turning to the Inspector, he said to him in an undertone; If you want him to make a statement hell have to make it now, hes going fast. You wont be able to get much out of himhes too far gone, and I shouldnt bustle him, but get what you can. The Inspector came to the front, a notebook in his hand. I understand from this gentleman signifying Athertonthat your names Robert Holt. Im an Inspector of police, and I want you to tell me what has brought you into this condition. Has anyone been assaulting you? Holt, opening his eyes, glanced up at the speaker mistily, as if he could not see him clearlystill less understand what it was that he was saying. Sydney, stooping over him, endeavoured to explain. The Inspector wants to know how you got here, has anyone been doing anything to you? Has anyone been hurting you? The mans eyelids were partially closed. Then they opened wider and wider. His mouth opened too. On his skeleton features there came a look of panic fear. He was evidently struggling to speak. At last words came. The beetle! He stopped. Then, after an effort, spoke again. The beetle! Whats he mean? asked the Inspector. I think I understand, Sydney answered; then turning again to the man in the bed. Yes, I hear what you saythe beetle. Well, has the beetle done anything to you? It took me by the throat! Is that the meaning of the marks upon your neck? The beetle killed me. The lids closed. The man relapsed into a state of lethargy. The Inspector was puzzled;and said so. Whats he mean about a beetle? Atherton replied. I think I understand what he meansand my friends do too. Well explain afterwards. In the meantime I think Id better get as much out of him as I canwhile theres time. Yes, said the doctor, his hand upon the patients pulse, while theres time. There isnt muchonly seconds. Sydney endeavoured to rouse the man from his stupor. Youve been with Miss Lindon all the afternoon and evening, havent you, Mr. Holt? Atherton had reached a chord in the mans consciousness. His lips movedin painful articulation. Yesall the afternoonand eveningGod help me! I hope God will help you my poor fellow; youve been in need of His help if ever man was. Miss Lindon is disguised in your old clothes, isnt she? Yesin my old clothes. My God! And where is Miss Lindon now? The man had been speaking with his eyes closed. Now he opened them, wide; there came into them the former staring horror. He became possessed by uncontrollable agitationhalf raising himself in bed. Words came from his quivering lips as if they were only drawn from him by the force of his anguish. The beetles going to kill Miss Lindon. A momentary paroxysm seemed to shake the very foundations of his being. His whole frame quivered. He fell back on to the bedominously. The doctor examined him in silencewhile we too were still. This time hes gone for good, therell be no conjuring him back again. I felt a sudden pressure on my arm, and found that Lessingham was clutching me with probably unconscious violence. The muscles of his face were twitching. He trembled. I turned to the doctor. Doctor, if there is any of that brandy left will you let me have it for my friend? Lessingham disposed of the remainder of the shillings worth. I rather fancy it saved us from a scene. The Inspector was speaking to the woman of the house. Now, Mrs. Henderson, perhaps youll tell us what all this means. Who is this man, and how did he come in here, and who came in with him, and what do you know about it altogether? If youve got anything to say, say it, only youd better be careful, because its my duty to warn you that anything you do say may be used against you. XLV. All That Mrs. Enderson Knew Mrs. Henderson put her hands under her apron and smirked. Well, Mr. Phillips, it do sound strange to ear you talkin to me like that. Anybodyd think Id done something as I didnt ought to a done to ear you going on. As for whats appened, Ill tell you all I know with the greatest willingness on earth. And as for bein careful, there aint no call for you to tell me to be that, for that I always am, as by now you ought to know. YesI do know. Is that all you have to say? Rilly, Mr. Phillips, what a man you are for catching people up, you rilly are. O course that aint all Ive got to sayaint I just acomin to it? Then come. If you presses me so youll muddle of me up, and then if I do appen to make a herror, youll say Im a liar, when goodness knows there aint no more truthful woman not in Limehouse. Words plainly trembled on the Inspectors lipswhich he refrained from uttering. Mrs. Henderson cast her eyes upwards, as if she sought for inspiration from the filthy ceiling. So far as I can swear it might ave been a hour ago, or it might ave been a hour and a quarter, or it might ave been a hour and twenty minutes Were not particular as to the seconds. When I ears a knockin at my front door, and when I comes to open it, there was a Harab party, with a great bundle on is ead, bigger nor isself, and two other parties along with him. This Harab party says, in that queer foreign way them Harab parties as of talkin, A room for the night, a room. Now I dont much care for foreigners, and never did, especially them Harabs, which their abits aint my ownso I as much ints the same. But this ere Harab party, he didnt seem to quite foller of my meaning, for all he done was to say as he said afore, A room for the night, a room. And he shoves a couple of arf crowns into my and. Now its always been a motter o mine, that money is money, and one mans money is as good as another mans. So, not wishing to be disagreeablewhich other people would have taken em if I adnt, I shows em up ere. Id been downstairs it might ave been arf a hour, when I ears a shindy acoming from this room What sort of a shindy? Yelling and shriekingoh my gracious, it was enough to set your blood all curdledfor earpiercingness I never did ear nothing like it. We do ave troublesome parties in ere, like they do elsewhere, but I never did ear nothing like that before. I stood it for about a minute, but it kep on, and kep on, and every moment I expected as the other parties as was in the ouse would be complainin, so up I comes and I thumps at the door, and it seemed that thump I might for all the notice that was took of me. Did the noise keep on? Keep on! I should think it did keep on! Lord love you! shriek after shriek, I expected to see the roof took off. Were there any other noises? For instance, were there any sounds of struggling, or of blows? There werent no sounds except of the party hollering. One party only? One party only. As I says afore, shriek after shriekwhen you put your ear to the panel there was a noise like some other party blubbering, but that werent nothing, as for the hollering you wouldnt have thought that nothing what you might call umin could ave kep up such a screechin. I thumps and thumps and at last when I did think that I should ave to ave the door broke down, the Harab says to me from inside, Go away! I pay for the room! go away! I did think that pretty good, I tell you that. So I says, Pay for the room or not pay for the room, you didnt pay to make that shindy! And whats more I says, If I ear it again, I says, out you goes! And if you dont go quiet Ill ave somebody in asll pretty quickly make you! Then was there silence? So to speak there wasonly there was this sound as if some party was ablubbering, and another sound as if a party was apanting for his breath. Then what happened? Seeing that, so to speak, all was quiet, down I went again. And in another quarter of a hour, or it might ave been twenty minutes, I went to the front door to get a mouthful of hair. And Mrs. Barker, what lives over the road, at No. 24, she comes to me and says, That there Arab party of yours didnt stop long. I looks at er, I dont quite foller you, I sayswhich I didnt. I saw him come in, she says, and then, a few minutes back, I see im go again, with a great bundle on is ead he couldnt ardly stagger under! Oh, I says, thats news to me, I didnt know ed gone, nor see him neither which I didnt. So, up I comes again, and, sure enough, the door was open, and it seems to me that the room was empty, till I come upon this pore young man what was lying beind the bed. There was a growl from the doctor. If youd had any sense, and sent for me at once, he might have been alive at this moment. Ow was I to know that, Dr. Glossop? I couldnt tell. My finding im there murdered was quite enough for me. So I runs downstairs, and I nips old of Gustus Barley, what was leaning against the wall, and I says to him, Gustus Barley, run to the station as fast as you can and tell em that a mans been murderedthat Harabs been and killed a bloke. And thats all I know about it, and I couldnt tell you no more, Mr. Phillips, not if you was to keep on asking me questions not for hours and hours. Then you think it was this manwith a motion towards the bedwho was shrieking? To tell you the truth, Mr. Phillips, about that I dont ardly know what to think. If you ad asked me I should ave said it was a woman. I ought to know a womans holler when I ear it, if anyone does, Ive eard enough of em in my time, goodness knows. And I should ave said that only a woman could ave hollered like that and only er when she was raving mad. But there werent no woman with him. There was only this man whats murdered, and the other manand as for the other man I will say this, that e adnt got twopennyworth of clothes to cover im. But, Mr. Phillips, howsomever that may be, thats the last Harab Ill ave under my roof, no matter what they pays, and you may mark my words Ill ave no more. Mrs. Henderson, once more glancing upward, as if she imagined herself to have made some declaration of a religious nature, shook her head with much solemnity. XLVI. The Sudden Stopping As we were leaving the house a constable gave the Inspector a note. Having read it he passed it to me. It was from the local office. Message received that an Arab with a big bundle on his head has been noticed loitering about the neighbourhood of St. Pancras Station. He seemed to be accompanied by a young man who had the appearance of a tramp. Young man seemed ill. They appeared to be waiting for a train, probably to the North. Shall I advise detention? I scribbled on the flyleaf of the note. Have them detained. If they have gone by train have a special in readiness. In a minute we were again in the cab. I endeavoured to persuade Lessingham and Atherton to allow me to conduct the pursuit alonein vain. I had no fear of Athertons succumbing, but I was afraid for Lessingham. What was more almost than the expectation of his collapse was the fact that his looks and manner, his whole bearing, so eloquent of the agony and agitation of his mind, was beginning to tell upon my nerves. A catastrophe of some sort I foresaw. Of the curtains fall upon one tragedy we had just been witnesses. That there was worsemuch worse, to follow I did not doubt. Optimistic anticipations were out of the questionthat the creature we were chasing would relinquish the prey uninjured, no one, after what we had seen and heard, could by any possibility suppose. Should a necessity suddenly arise for prompt and immediate action, that Lessingham would prove a hindrance rather than a help I felt persuaded. But since moments were precious, and Lessingham was not to be persuaded to allow the matter to proceed without him, all that remained was to make the best of his presence. The great arch of St. Pancras was in darkness. An occasional light seemed to make the darkness still more visible. The station seemed deserted. I thought, at first, that there was not a soul about the place, that our errand was in vain, that the only thing for us to do was to drive to the police station and to pursue our inquiries there. But as we turned towards the bookingoffice, our footsteps ringing out clearly through the silence and the night, a door opened, a light shone out from the room within, and a voice inquired Whos that? My names Champnell. Has a message been received from me from the Limehouse Police Station? Step this way. We stepped that wayinto a snug enough office, of which one of the railway inspectors was apparently in charge. He was a big man, with a fair beard. He looked me up and down, as if doubtfully. Lessingham he recognised at once. He took off his cap to him. Mr. Lessingham, I believe? I am Mr. Lessingham. Have you any news for me? I fancy, by his looksthat the official was struck by the pallor of the speakers faceand by his tremulous voice. I am instructed to give certain information to a Mr. Augustus Champnell. I am Mr. Champnell. Whats your information? With reference to the Arab about whom you have been making inquiries. A foreigner, dressed like an Arab, with a great bundle on his head, took two single thirds for Hull by the midnight express. Was he alone? It is believed that he was accompanied by a young man of very disreputable appearance. They were not together at the bookingoffice, but they had been seen together previously. A minute or so after the Arab had entered the train this young man got into the same compartmentthey were in the front wagon. Why were they not detained? We had no authority to detain them, nor any reason, until your message was received a few minutes ago we at this station were not aware that inquiries were being made for them. You say he booked to Hulldoes the train run through to Hull? Noit doesnt go to Hull at all. Part of its the Liverpool and Manchester Express, and part of its for Carlisle. It divides at Derby. The man youre looking for will change either at Sheffield or at Cudworth Junction and go on to Hull by the first train in the morning. Theres a local service. I looked at my watch. You say the train left at midnight. Its now nearly fiveandtwenty past. Wheres it now? Nearing St. Albans, its due there 1235. Would there be time for a wire to reach St. Albans? Hardlyand anyhow therell only be enough railway officials about the place to receive and despatch the train. Theyll be fully occupied with their ordinary duties. There wont be time to get the police there. You could wire to St. Albans to inquire if they were still in the train? That could be donecertainly. Ill have it done at once if you like. Then wheres the next stoppage? Well, theyre at Luton at 1251. But thats another case of St. Albans. You see there wont be much more than twenty minutes by the time youve got your wire off, and I dont expect therell be many people awake at Luton. At these country places sometimes theres a policeman hanging about the station to see the express go through, but, on the other hand, very often there isnt, and if there isnt, probably at this time of night itll take a good bit of time to get the police on the premises. I tell you what I should advise. Whats that? The train is due at Bedford at 129send your wire there. There ought to be plenty of people about at Bedford, and anyhow therell be time to get the police to the station. Very good. I instructed them to tell you to have a special readyhave you got one? Theres an engine with steam up in the shedwell have all ready for you in less than ten minutes. And I tell you whatyoull have about fifty minutes before the train is due at Bedford. Its a fifty mile run. With luck you ought to get there pretty nearly as soon as the express does.Shall I tell them to get ready? At once. While he issued directions through a telephone to what, I presume, was the engine shed, I drew up a couple of telegrams. Having completed his orders he turned to me. Theyre coming out of the siding nowtheyll be ready in less than ten minutes. Ill see that the lines kept clear. Have you got those wires? Here is onethis is for Bedford. It ran Arrest the Arab who is in train due at 129. When leaving St. Pancras he was in a thirdclass compartment in front wagon. He has a large bundle, which detain. He took two third singles for Hull. Also detain his companion, who is dressed like a tramp. This is a young lady whom the Arab has disguised and kidnapped while in a condition of hypnotic trance. Let her have medical assistance and be taken to a hotel. All expenses will be paid on the arrival of the undersigned who is following by special train. As the Arab will probably be very violent a sufficient force of police should be in waiting. Augustus Champnell. And this is the other. It is probably too late to be of any use at St. Albansbut send it there, and also to Luton. Is Arab with companion in train which left St. Pancras at 1300? If so, do not let them get out till train reaches Bedford, where instructions are being wired for arrest. The Inspector rapidly scanned them both. They ought to do your business, I should think. Come along with meIll have them sent at once, and well see if your trains ready. The train was not readynor was it ready within the prescribed ten minutes. There was some hitch, I fancy, about a saloon. Finally we had to be content with an ordinary oldfashioned firstclass carriage. The delay, however, was not altogether time lost. Just as the engine with its solitary coach was approaching the platform someone came running up with an envelope in his hand. Telegram from St. Albans. I tore it open. It was brief and to the point. Arab with companion was in train when it left here. Am wiring Luton. Thats all right. Now unless something wholly unforeseen takes place, we ought to have them. That unforeseen! I went forward with the Inspector and the guard of our train to exchange a few final words with the driver. The Inspector explained what instructions he had given. Ive told the driver not to spare his coal but to take you into Bedford within five minutes after the arrival of the express. He says he thinks that he can do it. The driver leaned over his engine, rubbing his hands with the usual oily rag. He was a short, wiry man with grey hair and a grizzled moustache, with about him that bearing of semihumorous, frankfaced resolution which one notes about enginedrivers as a class. We ought to do it, the gradients are against us, but its a clear night and theres no wind. The only thing that will stop us will be if theres any shunting on the road, or any luggage trains; of course, if we are blocked, we are blocked, but the Inspector says hell clear the way for us. Yes, said the Inspector, Ill clear the way. Ive wired down the road already. Atherton broke in. Driver, if you get us into Bedford within five minutes of the arrival of the mail therell be a fivepound note to divide between your mate and you. The driver grinned. Well get you there in time, sir, if we have to go clear through the shunters. It isnt often we get a chance of a fivepound note for a run to Bedford, and well do our best to earn it. The fireman waved his hand in the rear. Thats right, sir! he cried. Well have to trouble you for that fivepound note. So soon as we were clear of the station it began to seem probable that, as the fireman put it, Atherton would be troubled. Journeying in a train which consists of a single carriage attached to an engine which is flying at topmost speed is a very different business from being an occupant of an ordinary train which is travelling at ordinary express rates. I had discovered that for myself before. That night it was impressed on me more than ever. A tyroor even a nervous seasonmight have been excused for expecting at every moment we were going to be derailed. It was hard to believe that the carriage had any springsit rocked and swung, and jogged and jolted. Of smooth travelling had we none. Talking was out of the question;and for that, I, personally, was grateful. Quite apart from the difficulty we experienced in keeping our seatsand when every moment our position was being altered and we were jerked backwards and forwards up and down, this way and that, that was a business which required carethe noise was deafening. It was as though we were being pursued by a legion of shrieking, bellowing, raging demons. George! shrieked Atherton, he does mean to earn that fiver. I hope Ill be alive to pay it him! He was only at the other end of the carriage, but though I could see by the distortion of his visage that he was shouting at the top of his voiceand he has a voiceI only caught here and there a word or two of what he was saying. I had to make sense of the whole. Lessinghams contortions were a study. Few of that large multitude of persons who are acquainted with him only by means of the portraits which have appeared in the illustrated papers, would then have recognised the rising statesman. Yet I believe that few things could have better fallen in with his mood than that wild travelling. He might have been almost shaken to piecesbut the very severity of the shaking served to divert his thoughts from the one dread topic which threatened to absorb them to the exclusion of all else beside. Then there was the tonic influence of the element of risk. The pickmeup effect of a spice of peril. Actual danger there quite probably was none; but there very really seemed to be. And one thing was absolutely certain, that if we did come to smash while going at that speed we should come to as everlasting smash as the heart of man could by any possibility desire. It is probable that the knowledge that this was so warmed the blood in Lessinghams veins. At any rate asto use what in this case, was simply a form of speechI sat and watched him, it seemed to me that he was getting a firmer hold of the strength which had all but escaped him, and that with every jog and jolt he was becoming more and more of a man. On and on we went dashing, clashing, smashing, roaring, rumbling. Atherton, who had been endeavouring to peer through the window, strained his lungs again in the effort to make himself audible.

Where the devil are we? Looking at my watch I screamed back at him. Its nearly one, so I suppose were somewhere in the neighbourhood of Luton.Hollo! Whats the matter? That something was the matter seemed certain. There was a shrill whistle from the engine. In a second we were consciousalmost too consciousof the application of the Westinghouse brake. Of all the jolting that was ever jolted! the mere reverberation of the carriage threatened to resolve our bodies into their component parts. Feeling what we felt then helped us to realise the retardatory force which that vacuum brake must be exertingit did not seem at all surprising that the train should have been brought to an almost instant standstill. Simultaneously all three of us were on our feet. I let down my window and Atherton let down hishe shouting out, I should think that Inspectors wire hasnt had its proper effect, looks as if were blockedor else weve stopped at Luton. It cant be Bedford. It wasnt Bedfordso much seemed clear. Though at first from my window I could make out nothing. I was feeling more than a trifle dazedthere was a singing in my earsthe sudden darkness was impenetrable. Then I became conscious that the guard was opening the door of his compartment. He stood on the step for a moment, seeming to hesitate. Then, with a lamp in his hand, he descended on to the line. Whats the matter? I asked. Dont know, sir. Seems as if there was something on the road. Whats up there? This was to the man on the engine. The fireman replied Someone in front theres waving a red light like madlucky I caught sight of him, we should have been clean on top of him in another moment. Looks as if there was something wrong. Here he comes. As my eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness I became aware that someone was making what haste he could along the sixfoot way, swinging a red light as he came. Our guard advanced to meet him, shouting as he went Whats the matter! Whos that? A voice replied, My God! Is that George Hewett. I thought you were coming right on top of us! Our guard again. What! Jim Branson! What the devil are you doing here, whats wrong? I thought you were on the twelve out, were chasing you. Are you? Then youve caught us. Thank God for it!Were a wreck. I had already opened the carriage door. With that we all three clambered out on to the line. XLVII. The Contents of the ThirdClass Carriage I moved to the stranger who was holding the lamp. He was in official uniform. Are you the guard of the 1200 out from St. Pancras? I am. Wheres your train? Whats happened? As for where it is, there it is, right in front of you, whats left of it. As to whats happened, why, were wrecked. What do you mean by youre wrecked? Some heavy loaded trucks broke loose from a goods in front and came running down the hill on top of us. How long ago was it? Not ten minutes. I was just starting off down the road to the signal box, its a good two miles away, when I saw you coming. My God! I thought there was going to be another smash. Much damage done? Seems to me as if were all smashed up. As far as I can make out theyre matchboxed up in front. I feel as if I was all broken up inside of me. Ive been in the service going on for thirty years, and this is the first accident Ive been in. It was too dark to see the mans face, but judging from his tone he was either crying or very near to it. Our guard turned and shouted back to our engine, Youd better go back to the box and let em know! All right! came echoing back. The special immediately commenced retreating, whistling continually as it went. All the country side must have heard the engine shrieking, and all who did hear must have understood that on the line something was seriously wrong. The smashed train was all in darkness, the force of the collision had put out all the carriage lamps. Here was a flickering candle, there the glimmer of a match, these were all the lights which shone upon the scene. People were piling up debris by the side of the line, for the purpose of making a firemore for illumination than for warmth. Many of the passengers had succeeded in freeing themselves, and were moving hither and thither about the line. But the majority appeared to be still imprisoned. The carriage doors were jammed. Without the necessary tools it was impossible to open them. Every step we took our ears were saluted by piteous cries. Men, women, children, appealed to us for help. Open the door, sir! In the name of God, sir, open the door! Over and over again, in all sorts of tones, with all degrees of violence, the supplication was repeated. The guards vainly endeavoured to appease the, in many cases, halffrenzied creatures. All right, sir! If youll only wait a minute or two, madam! We cant get the doors open without tools, a special trains just started off to get them. If youll only have patience therell be plenty of help for everyone of you directly. Youll be quite safe in there, if youll only keep still. But that was just what they found it most difficult to dokeep still! In the front of the train all was chaos. The trucks which had done the mischiefthere were afterwards shown to be six of them, together with two guards vansappeared to have been laden with bags of Portland cement. The bags had burst, and everything was covered with what seemed gritty dust. The air was full of the stuff, it got into our eyes, half blinding us. The engine of the express had turned a complete somersault. It vomited forth smoke, and steam, and flamesevery moment it seemed as if the woodwork of the carriages immediately behind and beneath would catch fire. The front coaches were, as the guard had put it, matchboxed. They were nothing but a heap of debristelescoped into one another in a state of apparently inextricable confusion. It was broad daylight before access was gained to what had once been the interiors. The condition of the first thirdclass compartment revealed an extraordinary state of things. Scattered all over it were pieces of what looked like partially burnt rags, and fragments of silk and linen. I have those fragments now. Experts have assured me that they are actually neither of silk nor linen! but of some materialanimal rather than vegetablewith which they are wholly unacquainted. On the cushions and woodworkespecially on the woodwork of the floorwere huge blotchesstains of some sort. When first noticed they were damp, and gave out a most unpleasant smell. One of the pieces of woodwork is yet in my possessionwith the stain still on it. Experts have pronounced upon it toowith the result that opinions are divided. Some maintain that the stain was produced by human blood, which had been subjected to a great heat, and, so to speak, parboiled. Others declare that it is the blood of some wild animalpossibly of some creature of the cat species. Yet others affirm that it is not blood at all, but merely paint. While a fourth describes it asI quote the written opinion which lies in front of mecaused apparently by a deposit of some sort of viscid matter, probably the excretion of some variety of lizard. In a corner of the carriage was the body of what seemed a young man costumed like a tramp. It was Marjorie Lindon. So far as a most careful search revealed, that was all the compartment contained. XLVIII. The Conclusion of the Matter It is several years since I bore my part in the events which I have rapidly sketchedor I should not have felt justified in giving them publicity. Exactly how many years, for reasons which should be sufficiently obvious, I must decline to say. Marjorie Lindon still lives. The spark of life which was left in her, when she was extricated from among the debris of the wrecked express, was fanned again into flame. Her restoration was, however, not merely an affair of weeks or months, it was a matter of years. I believe that, even after her physical powers were completely restoredin itself a tedious taskshe was for something like three years under medical supervision as a lunatic. But all that skill and money could do was done, and in course of timethe great healerthe results were entirely satisfactory. Her father is deadand has left her in possession of the family estates. She is married to the individual who, in these pages, has been known as Paul Lessingham. Were his real name divulged she would be recognised as the popular and universally reverenced wife of one of the greatest statesmen the age has seen. Nothing has been said to her about the fateful day on which she wasconsciously or unconsciouslyparaded through London in the tattered masculine habiliments of a vagabond. She herself has never once alluded to it. With the return of reason the affair seems to have passed from her memory as wholly as if it had never been, which, although she may not know it, is not the least cause she has for thankfulness. Therefore what actually transpired will never, in all human probability, be certainly known and particularly what precisely occurred in the railway carriage during that dreadful moment of sudden passing from life unto death. What became of the creature who all but did her to death; who he wasif it was a he, which is extremely doubtful; whence he came; whither he went; what was the purport of his presence hereto this hour these things are puzzles. Paul Lessingham has not since been troubled by his old tormentor. He has ceased to be a haunted man. None the less he continues to have what seems to be a constitutional disrelish for the subject of beetles, nor can he himself be induced to speak of them. Should they be mentioned in a general conversation, should he be unable to immediately bring about a change of theme, he will, if possible, get up and leave the room. More, on this point he and his wife are one. The fact may not be generally known, but it is so. Also I have reason to believe that there still are moments in which he harks back, with something like physical shrinking, to that awful nightmare of the past, and in which he prays God, that as it is distant from him now so may it be kept far off from him forever. Before closing, one matter may be casually mentioned. The tale has never been told, but I have unimpeachable authority for its authenticity. During the recent expeditionary advance towards Dongola, a body of native troops which was encamped at a remote spot in the desert was aroused one night by what seemed to be the sound of a loud explosion. The next morning, at a distance of about a couple of miles from the camp, a huge hole was discovered in the groundas if blasting operations, on an enormous scale, had recently been carried on. In the hole itself, and round about it, were found fragments of what seemed bodies; credible witnesses have assured me that they were bodies neither of men nor women, but of creatures of some monstrous growth. I prefer to believe, since no scientific examination of the remains took place, that these witnesses ignorantly, though innocently, erred. One thing is sure. Numerous pieces, both of stone and of metal, were seen, which went far to suggest that some curious subterranean building had been blown up by the force of the explosion. Especially were there portions of moulded metal which seemed to belong to what must have been an immense bronze statue. There were picked up also, more than a dozen replicas in bronze of the whilom sacred scarabaeus. That the den of demons described by Paul Lessingham, had, that night, at last come to an end, and that these things which lay scattered, here and there, on that treeless plain, were the evidences of its final destruction, is not a hypothesis which I should care to advance with any degree of certainty. But, putting this and that together, the facts seem to point that wayand it is a consummation devoutly to be desired. Bythebye, Sydney Atherton has married Miss Dora Grayling. Her wealth has made him one of the richest men in England. She began, the story goes, by loving him immensely; I can answer for the fact that he has ended by loving her as much. Their devotion to each other contradicts the pessimistic nonsense which supposes that every marriage must be of necessity a failure. He continues his career of an inventor. His investigations into the subject of aerial flight, which have brought the flying machine within the range of practical politics, are on everybodys tongue. The best man at Athertons wedding was Percy Woodville, now the Earl of Barnes. Within six months afterwards he married one of Mrs. Athertons bridesmaids. It was never certainly shown how Robert Holt came to his end. At the inquest the coroners jury was content to return a verdict of Died of exhaustion. He lies buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, under a handsome tombstone, the cost of which, had he had it in his pockets, might have indefinitely prolonged his days. It should be mentioned that that portion of this strange history which purports to be The Surprising Narration of Robert Holt was compiled from the statements which Holt made to Atherton, and to Miss Lindon, as she then was, when, a mudstained, shattered derelict he lay at the ladys fathers house. Miss Lindens contribution towards the elucidation of the mystery was written with her own hand. After her physical strength had come back to her, and, while mentally, she still hovered between the darkness and the light, her one relaxation was writing. Although she would never speak of what she had written, it was found that her theme was always the same. She confided to pen and paper what she would not speak of with her lips. She told, and retold, and retold again, the story of her love, and of her tribulation so far as it is contained in the present volume. Her MSS. invariably began and ended at the same point. They have all of them been destroyed, with one exception. That exception is herein placed before the reader. On the subject of the Mystery of the Beetle I do not propose to pronounce a confident opinion. Atherton and I have talked it over many and many a time, and at the end we have got no forrarder. So far as I am personally concerned, experience has taught me that there are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, and I am quite prepared to believe that the socalled Beetle, which others saw, but I never, wasor is, for it cannot be certainly shown that the thing is not still existinga creature born neither of God nor man. THE END I'm Julie, the woman who runs Global Grey the website where this ebook was published. These are my own formatted editions, and I hope you enjoyed reading this particular one. If you have this book because you bought it as part of a collection thank you so much for your support. If you downloaded it for free please consider (if you havent already) making a small donation to help keep the site running. If you bought this from Amazon or anywhere else, you have been ripped off by someone taking free ebooks from my site and selling them as their own. You should definitely get a refund Thanks for reading this and I hope you visit the site again new books are added regularly so you'll always find something of interest )

Vathek by William Beckford First published in 1786. This edition was first published in 1849 This ebook edition was created and published by Global Grey on 20th January 2021, and updated on the 10th March 2023 The artwork for the cover is Orientalec painted by Ivana Kobilca. You can download this book on the site globalgreyebooks.comvathekanarabiantaleebook.html GlobalGrey 2023globalgreyebooks.com Contents Memoir By William North Preface Vathek Memoir By William North William Beckford, the author of the following celebrated Eastern tale, was born in 1760, and died in the spring of 1844, at the advanced age of eightyfour years. It is to be regretted, that a man of so remarkable a character, did not leave the world some record of a life offering points of interest different from that of any of his contemporaries, from the peculiarly studious retirement and eccentric avocations in which it was chiefly passed. Such a memoir would have formed a curious contrast with that of the late M. de Chateaubriand, who, born nearly at the same period, outlived but by a few years, the strange Englishman, whose famous romance forms a brilliant ornament to French literature, which even Atala is unlikely to outlive in the memory of Chateaubriands countrymen. All men of genius should write autobiographies. Such works are inestimable lessons to posterity. As it is, there are few men, of whom it is more difficult to compose an elaborate and detailed history than the author of Vathek. From such scanty sources as are open to us, the reader must be content with a few striking facts and illustrations, which may serve to convey some idea of the idiosyncrasy of a man, whose whole life was a sort of mystery, even to his personal acquaintances. His greatgreatgrandfather was lieutenantgovernor and commander of the forces in Jamaica; and his grandfather president of the council in the same island. His father, though not a merchant, as has been represented, but a large landed proprietor, both in England and the West Indies, was lord mayor of London, and distinguished himself in presenting an address to the king, George the Third,by a spirited retort to his majesty,who had the illbreeding to treat discourteously a deputation which the lord mayor headed. The portraits of Alderman Beckford, and his more celebrated son, were painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. The former died in 1770, leaving the subject of this memoir the wealthiest commoner in England. No pains were spared on the education of the young Croesusthe lords Chatham and Camden being consulted by his father on that subject. Besides Latin and Greek, he spoke five modern languages, and wrote three with facility and elegance. He read Persian and Arabic, designed with great skill, and studied the science of music under the great Mozart. At the age of eighteen he visited Paris, and was introduced to Voltaire. On taking leave of me, said Beckford, he placed his hand on my head, saying, There, young Englishman, I give you the blessing of a very old man. Voltaire was a mere skeletona bony anatomy. His countenance I shall never forget. His first literary production, Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters, was written at the early age of seventeen. It would appear, that the old housekeeper at Fonthill, was in the habit of edifying visitors to its picture gallery by a description of the paintings, mainly derived from her own fertile imagination. This suggested to our author, the humorous idea of composing a catalogue of suppositious painters with histories of each, equally fanciful and grotesque. Henceforward, the old housekeeper had a printed guide (or rather, misguider) to go by, and could discourse at large on the merits of Og of Bashan! Waterslouchy of Amsterdam! and Herr Sucrewasser of Vienna! their wives and styles! As for the country squires, etc., they, Beckford tells us, took all for gospel. Vathek,the superb Vathek, which Lord Byron so much admired, and on which he so frequently complimented the author,Vathek, the finest of Oriental romances, as Lallah Rookh is the first of Oriental poems, by the pen of a Frank, was written and published before our author had completed his twentieth year, it having been composed at a single sitting! Yes, for three days and two nights did the indefatigable author persevere in his task. He completed it, and a serious illness was the result. What other literary man ever equalled this feat of rapidity and genius? Vathek was originally written in French, of which its style is a model. The translation which follows, is not by the author himself, though he expressed perfect satisfaction with it. It was originally published in 1786. For splendour of description, exquisite humour, and supernatural interest and grandeur, it stands without a rival in romance. In as thoroughly Oriental keeping, Hopes Anastasius, or Memoirs of a Modern Greek, which Beckford himself highly admired, can alone be compared with it. Much of the description of Vatheks palace, and even the renowned Hall of Eblis, was afterwards visibly embodied in the real Fonthill Abbey, of which wonders, almost as fabulous, were at one time reported and believed. Fonthill Abbey, which had been destroyed by fire, and rebuilt during the lifetime of the elder Beckford, was on account of its bad site demolished, and again rebuilt under the superintendence of our author himself, assisted by James Wyatt, Esq., the architect, with a magnificence that excited the greatest attention and wonder at the time. The total outlay of building Fonthill, including furniture, articles of virtu, etc., must have been enormous, not much within the million, as estimated by the Times. A writer in the Athenum mentions 400,000 as the sum. Beckford informed Mr. Cyrus Redding, that the exact cost of building Fonthill was 273,000. The distinguishing architectural peculiarity of Fonthill Abbey, was a lofty tower, 280 feet in height. This tower was prominently shadowed forth in Vathek, and shows how strong a hold the idea had upon his mind. Such was his impatience to see Fonthill completed, that he had the works continued by torchlight, with relays of workmen. During the progress of the building, the tower caught fire, and was partly destroyed. The owner, however, was present, and enjoyed the magnificent burning spectacle. It was soon restored; but a radical fault in laying the foundation, caused it eventually to fall down, and leave Fonthill a ruin in the lifetime of its founder. Not so much his extravagant mode of life, which is the common notion, as the loss of two large estates in a law suit (the value of which may be inferred from the fact, that fifteen hundred slaves were upon them) induced our author to quit Fonthill, and offer it and its contents for public sale. There was a general desire to see the interior of the palace, in which its lord had lived in a luxurious seclusion, so little admired by the curious of the fashionable world. He is fortunate, says the Times of 1822, who finds a vacant chair within twenty miles of Fonthill; the solitude of a private apartment is a luxury which few can hope for. . . . Falstaff himself could not take his ease at this moment within a dozen leagues of Fonthill. . . . The beds through the county are (literally) doing double dutypeople who come in from a distance during the night must wait to go to bed until others get up in the morning. . . . Not a farmhouse, however humble,not a cottage near Fonthill, but gives shelter to fashion, to beauty, and rank; ostrich plumes, which, by their very waving, we can trace back to Piccadilly, are seen nodding at a casement window over a depopulated poultryyard. The costly treasures of art and virtu, as well as the furniture of the rich mansion, were scattered far and wide; and one of its tables served the writer of this memoir to scribble upon, when first stern necessity, or yet sterner ambition, urged him to add his mite to the Babel tower of literature. At that table I first read Vathek. I have read it often since, and every perusal has increased my admiration. Nearly fifty years after the publication of Vathek, in 1835, Mr. Beckford published his Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaca and Batalha, which he had taken in 1795, together with an epistolatory record of his observations in Italy, Spain and Portugal, between the years 1780 and 1794. These are marked, as he himself intimates, with the bloom and heyday of youthful spirits and youthful confidence, at a period when the older order of things existed with all its picturesque pomps and absurdities; when Venice enjoyed her Piombi and submarine dungeons; Prance her Bastille; the Peninsula her Holy Inquisition. With none of those subjects, however, are the letters occupiedbut with delineations of landscape, and the effects of natural phenomena. These literary efforts appear to have exhausted their authors productive powers; in a word, he seems soon to have been usedup, and then to have discontinued his search after new sensations, or to have been content to live without them. After the sale of Fonthill, our author lived a considerable time in Portugal, and hence Lord Byron, who was fond of casting the shadow of his own imagination over every object, penned the wellknown lines at Cintra There thou, too, Vathek, Englands wealthiest son,Once formed thy paradise; as not awareWhere wanton wealth her mightiest deeds hath done,Meek peace, voluptuous lures, was ever wont to shun. Here didst thou dwell; here scenes of pleasure plan,Beneath yon mountains ever beauteous brow;But now, as if a thing unblest by man,Thy fairy dwelling is as lone as thou! Here giant weeds a passage scarce allowTo halls deserted; portals gaping wideFresh lessons to the thinking bosom; howVain are the pleasaunces on earth supplied,Swept into wrecks anon by times ungentle tide. These sombre verses contrast strangely with Beckfords saying to Mr. Cyrus Redding, in his seventysixth year, that he had never felt a moments ennui in his life. Beckford was in person scarcely above the middle height, slender, and well formed, with features indicating great intellectual power. He was exactly one year younger than Pitt, the companion of his minority. His political principles were popular, though it is recorded, that at a court ball on the Queens birthday, in 1782, he, with Miss North, led up a country dance. He sat in parliament, in his early years, both for Wells and Hendon, but retired on account of bad health. This, however, he overcame by careful diet and exercise, as testified by his great bodily activity almost to the last. He was a man of most extensive reading, and cultivated taste. The last years of his life were passed at Bathwhere he united two houses in Lansdown Crescent, by an arch thrown across the street, and containing his library, which was well selected, and very extensive. Not far off, he again erected a tower, 180 feet high, of which the following description was given at the time of his decease, by a correspondent of the Athenum Mr. Beckford, at an early period of his residence there, erected a lofty tower, in the apartments of which were placed many of his choicest paintings and articles of virtu. Asiatic in its style, with gilded lattices and blinds, or curtains, of crimson cloth, its striped ceilings, its minaret, and other accessories, conveyed the idea that the being who designed the place and endeavoured to carry out the plan, was deeply imbued with the spirit of that lonely grandeur and strict solitariness which obtains through all countries and among all people of the East. The building was surrounded by a high wall, and entrance afforded to the garden in which the tower stood, by a door of small dimensions. The garden itself was Eastern in its character. Though comparatively circumscribed in its size, nevertheless were to be found within it, solitary walks and deep retiring shades, such as could be supposed Vathek, the mournful and the magnificent, loved, and from the bowers of which might be expected would suddenly fall upon the ear, sounds of the cymbal and the dulcimer. The building contained several apartments crowded with the finest paintings. At the time I made my inspection the walls were crowded with the choicest productions of the easel. The memory falls back upon ineffaceable impressions of Old Franks, Breughel, Cuyp, Titian, (a Holy Family), Hondekooter, Polemberg, and a host of other painters whose works have immortalized Art. Ornaments of the most exquisite gold fillagree, carvings in ivory and wood, Raphaelesque china, goblets formed of gems, others fashioned by the miraculous hands of Benvenuto Cellini, filled the many cabinets and recherch receptacles created for such things. The doors of the rooms were of finely polished woodthe windows of single sweeps of plate glassthe cornices of gilded silver; every part, both within and without, bespeaking the wealth, the magnificence, and the taste of him who had built this temple in dedication to grandeur, solitariness, and the arts. From the summit of this tower, Mr. Beckford, and he alone without a telescope,could behold that other tower of his youthful magnificence, Fonthill; on which he loved to gaze, with feelings which it would be difficult to describe. His eyesight was wonderful; he could gaze upon the sun like an eagle; and on the day that the great tower at Fonthill fell he missed it in the landscape long before the news of the catastrophe reached Bath. In conclusion, we have only to add, that our author, in his lifetime, had all that wealth can give, and in his grave his memory will retain that which no wealth can purchase. Whatever may have been his errors, they have died with him. His genius yet lives, and Vathek, now for the first time presented to the public in a popular form, will, whilst English literature lasts, never want readers, and, while good taste flourishes, admirers. Preface The original of the following story, with some others of a similar kind, collected in the east by a man of letters, was communicated to the editor above three years ago. The pleasure he received from the perusal of it induced him at that time to transcribe, and since to translate it. How far the copy may be a just representation it becomes not him to determine. He presumes however to hope that if the difficulty of accommodating our English idioms to the Arabic, preserving the correspondent tones of a diversified narration, and discriminating the nicer touches of character through the shades of foreign manners be duly considered, a failure in some points will not preclude him from all claim to indulgence; especially if those images, sentiments, and passions, which being independent of local peculiarities, may be expressed in every language, shall be found to retain their native energy in our own. Vathek Vathek, ninth Caliph1 of the race of the Abassides, was the son of Motassem, and the grandson of Haroun Al Raschid. From an early accession to the throne, and the talents he possessed to adorn it, his subjects were induced to expect that his reign would be long and happy. His figure was pleasing and majestic; but when he was angry, one of his eyes became so terrible2 that no person could bear to behold it; and the wretch upon whom it was fixed instantly fell backward, and sometimes expired. For fear, however, of depopulating his dominions, and making his palace desolate, he but rarely gave way to his anger. Being much addicted to women, and the pleasures of the table, he sought by his affability to procure agreeable companions; and he succeeded the better, as his generosity was unbounded and his indulgences unrestrained; for he was by no means scrupulous nor did he think, with the Caliph Omar Ben Abdalaziz,3 that it was necessary to make a hell of this world to enjoy Paradise in the next. He surpassed in magnificence all his predecessors. The palace of Alkoremmi, which his father Motassem had erected on the hill of Pied Horses, and which commanded the whole city of Samarah,4 was in his idea far too scanty he added, therefore, five wings, or rather other palaces, which he destined for the particular gratification of each of his senses. In the first of these were tables continually covered with the most exquisite dainties, which were supplied both by night and by day according to their constant consumption; whilst the most delicious wines, and the choicest cordials, flowed forth from a hundred fountains, that were never exhausted. This palace was called The Eternal, or Unsatiating Banquet. The second was styled The Temple of Melody, or the Nectar of the Soul. It was inhabited by the most skilful musicians and admired poets of the time, who not only displayed their talents within, but dispersing in bands without, caused every surrounding scene to reverberate their songs, which were continually varied in the most delightful succession. The palace named The Delight of the Eyes, or the Support of Memory, was one entire enchantment. Rarities collected from every corner of the earth were there found in such profusion as to dazzle and confound, but for the order in which they were arranged. One gallery exhibited the pictures of the celebrated Mani; and statues that seemed to be alive. Here a wellmanaged perspective attracted the sight; there, the magic of optics agreeably deceived it; whilst the naturalist, on his part, exhibited in their several classes the various gifts that heaven had bestowed on our globe. In a word, Vathek omitted nothing in this particular that might gratify the curiosity of those who resorted to it, although he was not able to satisfy his own; for he was, of all men, the most curious. The Palace of Perfumes, which was termed likewise, The Incentive to Pleasure, consisted of various halls, where the different perfumes which the earth produces were kept perpetually burning in censers of gold. Flambeaus and aromatic lamps were here lighted in open day; but the too powerful effects of this agreeable delirium might be avoided by descending into an immense garden, where an assemblage of every fragrant flower diffused through the air the purest odours. The fifth palace, denominated The Retreat of Joy, or the Dangerous, was frequented by troops of young females, beautiful as the Houris,5 and not less seducing, who never failed to receive with caresses all whom the Caliph allowed to approach them; for he was by no means disposed to be jealous, as his own women were secluded within the palace he inhabited himself. Notwithstanding the sensuality in which Vathek indulged, he experienced no abatement in the love of his people, who thought that a sovereign immersed in pleasure was not less tolerable to his subjects than one that employed himself in creating them foes. But the unquiet and impetuous disposition of the Caliph would not allow him to rest there he had studied so much for his amusement in the lifetime of his father as to acquire a great deal of knowledge, though not a sufficiency to satisfy himself; for he wished to know everything; even sciences that did not exist. He was fond of engaging in disputes with the learned, but liked them not to push their opposition with warmth. He stopped the mouths of those with presents, whose mouths could be stopped; whilst others, whom his liberality was unable to subdue, he sent to prison to cool their blood; a remedy that often succeeded. Vathek discovered also a predilection for theological controversy; but it was not with the orthodox that he usually held. By this means he induced the zealots to oppose him, and then persecuted them in return; for he resolved, at any rate, to have reason on his side. The great prophet Mahomet, whose vicars the Caliphs are, beheld with indignation from his abode in the seventh heaven the irreligious conduct of such a vicegerent. Let us leave him to himself, said he to the Genii,6 who are always ready to receive his commands; let us see to what lengths his folly and impiety will carry him; if he run into excess we shall know how to chastise him. Assist him, therefore, to complete the tower which, in imitation of Nimrod, he hath begun; not, like that great warrior, to escape being drowned, but from the insolent curiosity of penetrating the secrets of heaven he will not divine the fate that awaits him. The Genii obeyed; and when the workmen had raised their structure a cubit in the day time, two cubits more were added in the night. The expedition with which the fabric arose was not a little flattering to the vanity of Vathek. He fancied that even insensible matter showed forwardness to subserve his designs; not considering that the successes of the foolish and wicked form the first rod of their chastisement. His pride arrived at its height when, having ascended, for the first time, the eleven thousand stairs of his tower, he cast his eyes below and beheld men not larger than pismires; mountains than shells; and cities than beehives. The idea which such an elevation inspired of his own grandeur completely bewildered him; he was almost ready to adore himself; till lifting his eyes upwards, he saw the stars as high above him as they appeared when he stood on the surface of the earth. He consoled himself, however, for this transient perception of his littleness with the thought of being great in the eyes of the others, and flattered himself that the light of his mind would extend beyond the reach of his sight, and transfer to the stars the decrees of his destiny. With this view the inquisitive prince passed most of his nights on the summit of his tower, till he became an adept in the mysteries of astrology, and imagined that the planets had disclosed to him the most marvellous adventures, which were to be accomplished by an extraordinary personage, from a country altogether unknown. Prompted by motives of curiosity, he had always been courteous to strangers; but from this instant he redoubled his attention, and ordered it to be announced by sound of trumpet, through all the streets of Samarah, that no one of his subjects, on peril of his displeasure, should either lodge or detain a traveller, but forthwith bring him to the palace. Not long after this proclamation, there arrived in his metropolis, a man so hideous that the very guards who arrested him were forced to shut their eyes as they led him along. The Caliph himself appeared startled at so horrible a visage; but joy succeeded to this emotion of terror when the stranger displayed to his view such rarities as he had never before seen, and of which he had no conception. In reality, nothing was ever so extraordinary as the merchandise this stranger produced. Most of his curiosities, which were not less admirable for their workmanship than their splendour, had besides, their several virtues described on a parchment fastened to each. There were slippers which enabled the feet to walk; knives that cut without the motion of a hand; sabres which dealt the blow at the person they were wished to strike; and the whole enriched with gems that were hitherto unknown. The sabres, whose blades emitted a dazzling radiance, fixed more than all the Caliphs attention, who promised himself to decipher at his leisure the uncouth characters engraven on their sides. Without, therefore, demanding their price, he ordered all the coined gold to be brought from his treasury, and commanded the merchant to take what he pleased. The stranger complied with modesty and silence. Vathek, imagining that the merchants taciturnity was occasioned by the awe which his presence inspired, encouraged him to advance, and asked him, with an air of condescension, Who he was? whence he came? and where he obtained such beautiful commodities? The man, or rather monster, instead of making a reply, thrice rubbed his forehead, which, as well as his body, was blacker than ebony; four times clapped his paunch, the projection of which was enormous; opened wide his huge eyes, which glowed like firebrands; began to laugh with a hideous noise, and discovered his long amber coloured teeth bestreaked with green. The Caliph, though a little startled, renewed his enquiries, but without being able to procure a reply. At which, beginning to be ruffled, he exclaimed, knowest thou, varlet, who I am? and at whom thou art aiming thy gibes? Then addressing his guards, have ye heard him speak? is he dumb? He hath spoken, they replied, though but little. Let him speak then again, said Vathek, and tell me who he is, from whence he came, and where he procured these singular curiosities, or I swear, by the ass of Balaam, that I will make him rue his pertinacity. This menace was accompanied by the Caliph with one of his angry and perilous glances, which the stranger sustained without the slightest emotion, although his eyes were fixed on the terrible eye of the prince. No words can describe the amazement of the courtiers, when they beheld this rude merchant withstand the encounter unshocked. They all fell prostrate with their faces on the ground, to avoid the risk of their lives, and continued in the same abject posture till the Caliph exclaimed in a furious tone Up, cowards! seize the miscreant! see that he be committed to prison, and guarded by the best of my soldiers! Let him, however, retain the money I gave him; it is not my intent to take from him his property, I only want him to speak. No sooner had he uttered these words than the stranger was surrounded, pinioned with strong fetters, and hurried away to the prison of the great tower, which was encompassed by seven empalements of iron bars, and armed with spikes in every direction, longer and sharper than spits. The Caliph, nevertheless, remained in the most violent agitation. He sat down indeed to eat, but of the three hundred covers that were daily placed before him, could taste of no more than thirtytwo. A diet to which he had been so little accustomed, was sufficient of itself to prevent him from sleeping, what then must be its effect when joined to the anxiety that prayed upon his spirits? At the first glimpse of dawn he hastened to the prison, again to importune this intractable stranger; but the rage of Vathek exceeded all bounds on finding the prison empty, the gates burst asunder, and his guards lying lifeless around him. In the paroxysm of his passion he fell furiously on the poor carcases, and kicked them till evening without intermission. His courtiers and viziers exerted their efforts to soothe his extravagance, but finding every expedient ineffectual, they all united in one vociferation The Caliph is gone mad! the Caliph is out of his senses! This outcry, which was soon resounded through the streets of Samarah, at length reached the ears of Carathis, his mother she flew in the utmost consternation to try her ascendency on the mind of her son. Her tears and caresses called off his attention; and he was prevailed upon by her entreaties to be brought back to the palace. Carathis, apprehensive of leaving Vathek to himself, caused him to be put to bed; and seating herself by him, endeavoured by her conversation to heal and compose him. Nor could any one have attempted it with better success; for the Caliph not only loved her as a mother but respected her as a person of superior genius. It was she who had induced him, being a Greek herself, to adopt all the sciences and systems of her country, which good Mussulmans hold in such thorough abhorrence. Judicial astrology was one of those systems in which Carathis was a perfect adept. She began, therefore, with reminding her son of the promise which the stars had made him; and intimated an intention of consulting them again. Alas! sighed the Caliph, as soon at he could speak, what a fool have I been! not for the kicks bestowed on my guards, who so tamely submitted to death, but for never considering that this extraordinary man was the same the planets had foretold; whom, instead of illtreating, I should have conciliated by all the arts of persuasion. The past, said Carathis, cannot be recalled; but it behoves us to think of the future perhaps you may again see the object you so much regret it is possible the inscriptions on the sabres will afford information. Eat, therefore, and take thy repose, my dear son. We will consider, tomorrow, in what manner to act. Vathek yielded to her counsel as well as he could, and arose in the morning with a mind more at ease. The sabres he commanded to be instantly brought; and poring upon them through a green glass, that their glittering might not dazzle, he set himself in earnest to decipher the inscriptions; but his reiterated attempts were all of them nugatory in vain did he beat his head and bite his nails; not a letter of the whole was he able to ascertain. So unlucky a disappointment would have undone him again, had not Carathis, by good fortune, entered the apartment. Have patience, son! said she. You certainly are possessed of every important science, but the knowledge of languages is a trifle, at best; and the accomplishment of none but a pedant. Issue forth a proclamation that you will confer such rewards as become your greatness upon any one that shall interpret what you do not understand, and what it is beneath you to learn. You will soon find your curiosity gratified. That may be, said the Caliph; but in the mean time I shall be horribly disgusted by a crowd of smatterers, who will come to the trial as much for the pleasure of retailing their jargon as from the hope of gaining the reward. To avoid this evil, it will be proper to add that I will put every candidate to death who shall fail to give satisfaction; for, thank heaven, I have skill enough to distinguish between one that translates and one that invents. Of that I have no doubt, replied Carathis, but to put the ignorant to death is somewhat severe, and may be productive of dangerous effects. Content yourself with commanding their beards to be burnt beards, in a state, are not quite so essential as men. The Caliph submitted to the reasons of his mother, and sending for Morakanabad, his prime vizier, said Let the common criers proclaim, not only in Samarah, but throughout every city in my empire, that whosoever will repair hither, and decipher certain characters which appear to be inexplicable, shall experience the liberality for which I am renowned; but that all who fail upon trial shall have their beards burnt off to the last hair. Let them add also, that I will bestow fifty beautiful slaves, and as many jars of apricots from the isle of Kirmith, upon any man that shall bring me intelligence of the stranger. The subjects of the Caliph, like their sovereign, being great admirers of women, and apricots from Kirmith, felt their mouths water at these promises, but were totally unable to gratify their hankering, for no one knew which way the stranger had gone. As to the Caliphs other requisition the result was different the learned, the halflearned, and those who were neither, but fancied themselves equal to both, came boldly to hazard their beards, and all shamefully lost them. The exaction of these forfeitures, which found sufficient employment for the Eunuchs, gave them such a smell of singed hair as greatly to disgust the ladies of the seraglio, and make it necessary that this new occupation of their guardians should be transferred into other hands. At length, however, an old man presented himself, whose beard was a cubitandahalf longer than any that had appeared before him. The officers of the palace whispered to each other, as they ushered him in What a pity such a beard should be burnt! Even the Caliph, when he saw it, concurred with them in opinion; but his concern was entirely needless. This venerable personage read the characters with facility, and explained them verbatim, as follows We were made where everything good is made; we are the least of the wonders of a place where all is wonderful; and deserving the sight of the first potentate on earth.

You translate admirably! cried Vathek. I know to what these marvellous characters allude. Let him receive as many robes of honour, and thousands of sequins of gold, as he hath spoken words. I am in some measure relieved from the perplexity that embarrassed me! Vathek invited the old man to dine, and even to remain some days in the palace. Unluckily for him, he accepted the offer; for the Caliph having ordered him next morning to be called, said Read again to me what you have read already; I cannot hear too often the promise that is made me, the completion of which I languish to obtain. The old man forthwith put on his green spectacles; but they instantly dropped from his nose, on perceiving that the characters he had read the day preceding, had given place to others of different import. What ails you? asked the Caliph; and why these symptoms of wonder? Sovereign of the world, replied the old man, these sabres hold another language today, from that they yesterday held. How say you? returned Vathek. But it matters not! tell me, if you can, what they mean. It is this, my lord, rejoined the old man Woe to the rash mortal who seeks to know that of which he should remain ignorant and to undertake that which surpasseth his power! And woe to thee! cried the Caliph, in a burst of indignation today thou art void of understanding begone from my presence, they shall burn but the half of thy beard, because thou wert yesterday fortunate in guessing. My gifts I never resume. The old man, wise enough to perceive he had luckily escaped, considering the folly of disclosing so disgusting a truth, immediately withdrew, and appeared not again. But it was not long before Vathek discovered abundant reason to regret his precipitation; for though he could not decipher the characters himself, yet, by constantly poring upon them, he plainly perceived that they every day changed; and unfortunately no other candidate offered to explain them. This perplexing occupation inflamed his blood, dazzled his sight, and brought on a giddiness and debility that he could not support. He failed not, however, though in so reduced a condition, to be often carried to his tower, as he flattered himself that he might there read in the stars, which he went to consult, something more congruous to his wishes. But in this his hopes were deluded; for his eyes, dimmed by the vapours of his head, began to subserve his curiosity so ill, that he beheld nothing but a thick dun cloud, which he took for the most direful of omens. Agitated with so much anxiety, Vathek entirely lost all firmness; a fever seized him and his appetite failed. Instead of being one of the greatest eaters, he became as distinguished for drinking. So insatiable was the thirst which tormented him, that his mouth, like a funnel, was always open to receive the various liquors that might be poured into it and especially cold water, which calmed him more than every other. This unhappy prince being thus incapacitated for the enjoyment of any pleasure, commanded the palaces of the five senses to be shut up; forebore to appear in public, either to display his magnificence or administer justice; and retired to the inmost apartment of his harem. As he had ever been an indulgent husband, his wives, overwhelmed with grief at his deplorable situation, incessantly offered their prayers for his health, and unremittingly supplied him with water. In the mean time, the Princess Carathis, whose affliction no words can describe, instead of restraining herself to sobbing and tears, was closeted daily with the Vizier Morakanabad, to find out some cure or mitigation of the Caliphs disease. Under the persuasion that it was caused by enchantment, they turned over together leaf by leaf, all the books of magic that might point out a remedy; and caused the horrible stranger, whom they accused as the enchanter, to be everywhere sought for with the strictest diligence. At the distance of a few miles from Samarah stood a high mountain, whose sides were swarded with wild thyme and basil, and its summit overspread with so delightful a plain that it might be taken for the Paradise destined for the faithful. Upon it grew a hundred thickets of eglantine and other fragrant shrubs; a hundred arbours of roses, jessamine, and honeysuckle; as many clumps of orange trees, cedar, and citron; whose branches, interwoven with the palm, the pomegranate, and the vine, presented every luxury that could regale the eye or the taste. The ground was strewed with violets, harebells, and pansies; in the midst of which sprung forth tufts of jonquils, hyacinths, and carnations, with every other perfume that impregnates the air. Four fountains, not less clear than deep, and so abundant as to slake the thirst of ten armies, seemed purposely placed here to make the scene more resemble the garden of Eden, which was watered by the four sacred rivers. Here the nightingale sang the birth of the rose, her wellbeloved, and at the same time lamented its shortlived beauty; whilst the turtle deplored the loss of more substantial pleasures and the wakeful lark hailed the rising light that reanimates the whole creation. Here, more than anywhere, the mingled melodies of birds expressed the various passions they inspired; as if the exquisite fruits, which they pecked at pleasure, had given them a double energy. To this mountain Vathek was sometimes brought, for the sake of breathing a purer air; and especially, to drink at will of the four fountains, which were reputed in the highest degree salubrious, and sacred to himself. His attendants were his mother, his wives, and some eunuchs, who assiduously employed themselves in filling capacious bowls of rock crystal, and emulously presenting them to him. But it frequently happened that his avidity exceeded their zeal; insomuch that he would prostrate himself upon the ground to lap up the water, of which he could never have enough. One day when this unhappy prince had been long lying in so debasing a posture, a voice, hoarse but strong, thus addressed him Why assumest thou the function of a dog, oh Caliph, so proud of thy dignity and power? At this apostrophe he raised up his head and beheld the stranger that had caused him so much affliction. Inflamed with anger at the sight, he exclaimed Accursed Giaour!7 what comest thou hither to do? is it not enough to have transformed a prince, remarkable for his agility, into one of those leather barrels which the Bedouin Arabs carry on their camels when they traverse the deserts? Perceivest thou not that I may perish by drinking to excess, no less than by a total abstinence? Drink then this draught, said the stranger, as he presented to him a phial of a red and yellow mixture; and to satiate the thirst of thy soul as well as of thy body, know that I am an Indian, but from a region of India which is wholly unknown. The Caliph, delighted to see his desires accomplished in part, and flattering himself with the hope of obtaining their entire fulfilment, without a moments hesitation swallowed the potion, and instantaneously found his health restored, his thirst appeased, and his limbs as agile as ever. In the transports of his joy, Vathek leaped upon the neck of the frightful Indian, and kissed his horrid mouth and hollow cheeks, as though they had been the coral lips, and the lilies and roses of his most beautiful wives; whilst they, less terrified than jealous at the sight, dropped their veils to hide the blush of mortification that suffused their foreheads. Nor would the scene have closed here, had not Carathis, with all the art of insinuation, a little repressed the raptures of her son. Having prevailed upon him to return to Samarah, she caused a herald to precede him, whom she commanded to proclaim as loudly as possible The wonderful stranger hath appeared again; he hath healed the Caliph; he hath spoken! he hath spoken! Forthwith all the inhabitants of this vast city quitted their habitations, and ran together in crowds to see the procession of Vathek and the Indian, whom they now blessed as much as they had before execrated, incessantly shouting, He hath healed our sovereign; he hath spoken! he hath spoken! Nor were these words forgotten in the public festivals, which were celebrated the same evening to testify the general joy, for the poets applied them as a chorus to all the songs they composed. The Caliph, in the mean while caused the palaces of the senses to be again set open, and as he found himself prompted to visit that of taste, in preference to the rest, immediately ordered a splendid entertainment, to which his great officers and favourite courtiers were all invited. The Indian, who was placed near the prince, seemed to think that as a proper acknowledgment of so distinguished a privilege, he could neither eat, drink, nor talk too much. The various dainties were no sooner served up than they vanished, to the great mortification of Vathek, who piqued himself on being the greatest eater alive, and at this time in particular had an excellent appetite. The rest of the company looked round at each other in amazement, but the Indian without appearing to observe it, quaffed large bumpers to the health of each of them sung in a style altogether extravagant; related stories at which he laughed immoderately; and poured forth extemporaneous verses which would not have been thought bad, but for the strange grimaces with which they were uttered. In a word, his loquacity was equal to that of a hundred astrologers; he ate as much as a hundred porters, and caroused in proportion. The Caliph, notwithstanding the table had been thirty times covered, found himself incommoded by the voraciousness of his guest, who was now considerably declined in the princes esteem. Vathek, however, being unwilling to betray the chagrin he could hardly disguise, said in a whisper to Bababalouk,8 the chief of his eunuchs You see how enormous his performances in every way are; what would be the consequence should he get at my wives? Go! redouble your vigilance, and be sure look well to my Circassians, who would be more to his taste than all of the rest. The bird of the morning had thrice renewed his song, when the hour of the divan9 sounded. Vathek, in gratitude to his subjects, having promised to attend, immediately arose from table and repaired thither leaning upon his vizier, who could scarcely support him, so disordered was the poor prince by the wine he had drank, and still more by the extravagant vagaries of his boisterous guest. The viziers, the officers of the crown, and of the law, arranged themselves in a semicircle about their sovereign, and preserved a respectful silence, whilst the Indian, who looked as cool as if come from a fast, sat down without ceremony on a step of the throne, laughing in his sleeve at the indignation with which his temerity had filled the spectators. The Caliph, however, whose ideas were confused and his head embarrassed, went on administering justice at haphazard, till at length the prime vizier10 perceiving his situation, hit upon a sudden expedient to interrupt the audience, and rescue the honour of his master, to whom he said in a whisper My lord, the princess Carathis, who hath passed the night in consulting the planets, informs you that they portend you evil; and the danger is urgent. Beware, lest this stranger whom you have so lavishly recompensed for his magical gewgaws, should make some attempt on your life his liquor, which at first had the appearance of effecting your cure, may be no more than a poison of a sudden operation. Slight not this surmise; ask him, at least, of what it was compounded; whence he procured it; and mention the sabres, which you seem to have forgotten. Vathek, to whom the insolent airs of the stranger became every moment less supportable, intimated to his vizier by a wink of acquiescence, that he would adopt his advice, and at once turning towards the Indian, said Get up and declare in full divan of what drugs the liquor was compounded you enjoined me to take, for it is suspected to be poison; add also the explanation I have so earnestly desired concerning the sabres you sold me, and thus show your gratitude for the favours heaped on you. Having pronounced these words in as moderate a tone as a Caliph well could, he waited in silent expectation for an answer; but the Indian, still keeping his seat, began to renew his loud shouts of laughter, and exhibit the same horrid grimaces he had shown them before, without vouchsafing a word in reply. Vathek, no longer able to brook such insolence, immediately kicked him from the steps, instantly descending repeated his blow, and persisted with such assiduity, as incited all who were present to follow his example. Every foot was aimed at the Indian, and no sooner had any one given him a kick than he felt himself constrained to reiterate the stroke. The stranger afforded them no small entertainment; for being both short and plump, he collected himself into a ball and rolled round on all sides at the blows of his assailants, who pressed after him wherever he turned, with an eagerness beyond conception, whilst their numbers were every moment increasing. The ball, indeed, in passing from one apartment to another, drew every person after it that came in its way, insomuch that the whole palace was thrown into confusion, and resounded with a tremendous clamour. The women of the harem, amazed at the uproar, flew to their blinds to discover the cause, but no sooner did they catch a glimpse of the ball than feeling themselves unable to refrain, they broke from the clutches of their eunuchs, who to stop their flight pinched them till they bled, but in vain; whilst themselves, though trembling with terror at the escape of their charge, were as incapable of resisting the attraction. The Indian, after having traversed the halls, galleries, chambers, kitchens, gardens, and stables of the palace, at last took his course through the courts, whilst the Caliph, pursuing him closer than the rest, bestowed as many kicks as he possibly could, yet not without receiving now and then one, which his competitors, in their eagerness, designed for the ball. Carathis, Morakanabad, and two or three old viziers whose wisdom had hitherto withstood the attraction, wishing to prevent Vathek from exposing himself in the presence of his subjects, fell down in his way to impede the pursuit, but he, regardless of their obstruction, leaped over their heads, and went on as before. They then ordered the muezzins to call the people to prayers, both for the sake of getting them out of the way, and of endeavouring by their petitions to avert the calamity; but neither of these expedients was a whit more successful. The sight of this fatal ball was alone sufficient to draw after it every beholder. The muezzins themselves, though they saw it but at a distance, hastened down from their minarets and mixed with the crowd, which continued to increase in so surprising a manner, that scarce an inhabitant was left in Samarah, except the aged, the sick confined to their beds, and infants at the breast, whose nurses could run more nimbly without them. Even Carathis, Morakanabad, and the rest, were all become of the party. The shrill screams of the females who had broken from their apartments, and were unable to extricate themselves from the pressure of the crowd, together with those of the eunuchs jostling after them, terrified lest their charge should escape from their sight, increased by the execrations of husbands urging forward and menacing both, kicks given and received, stumblings and overthrows at every step, in a word, the confusion that universally prevailed, rendered Samarah like a city taken by storm, and devoted to absolute plunder. At last the cursed Indian, who still preserved his rotundity of figure, after passing through all the streets and public places, and leaving them empty, rolled onwards to the plain of Catoul, and traversed the valley at the foot of the mountain of the four fountains. As a continual fall of water had excavated an immense gulph in the valley, whose opposite side was closed in by a steep acclivity, the Caliph and his attendants were apprehensive lest the ball should bound into the chasm, and to prevent it, redoubled their efforts, but in vain. The Indian persevered in his onward direction, and as had been apprehended, glancing from the precipice with the rapidity of lightning, was lost in the gulph below. Vathek would have followed the perfidious Giaour, had not an invisible agency arrested his progress. The multitude that pressed after him were at once checked in the same manner, and a calm instantaneously ensued. They all gazed at each other with an air of astonishment; and notwithstanding that the loss of veils and turbans, together with torn habits, and dust blended with sweat, presented a most laughable spectacle, there was not one smile to be seen; on the contrary, all with looks of confusion and sadness returned in silence to Samarah, and retired to their inmost apartments, without ever reflecting that they had been impelled by an invisible power into the extravagance for which they reproached themselves for it is but just, that men who so often arrogate to their own merit the good of which they are but instruments, should attribute to themselves the absurdities which they could not prevent. The Caliph was the only person that refused to leave the valley. He commanded his tents to be pitched there, and stationed himself on the very edge of the precipice, in spite of the representations of Carathis and Morakanabad, who pointed out the hazard of its brink giving way, and the vicinity to the magician that had so severely tormented him. Vathek derided all their remonstrances; and having ordered a thousand flambeaus to be lighted, and directed his attendants to proceed in lighting more, lay down on the slippery margin, and attempted, by the help of this artificial splendour, to look through that gloom which all the fires of the empyrean had been insufficient to pervade. One while he fancied to himself voices arising from the depth of the gulph, at another he seemed to distinguish the accents of the Indian, but all was no more than the hollow murmur of waters, and the din of the cataracts that rushed from steep to steep, down the sides of the mountain. Having passed the night in this cruel perturbation, the Caliph at daybreak retired to his tent, where, without taking the least sustenance, he continued to doze till the dusk of evening began to come on; he then resumed his vigils as before, and persevered in observing them for many nights together. At length, fatigued with so successless an employment, he sought relief from change. To this end he sometimes paced with hasty strides across the plain; and as he wildly gazed at the stars, reproached them with having deceived him; but lo! on a sudden the clear blue sky appeared streaked over with streams of blood, which reached from the valley even to the city of Samarah. As this awful phenomenon seemed to touch his tower, Vathek at first thought of repairing thither to view it more distinctly, but feeling himself unable to advance, and being overcome with apprehension, he muffled up his face in his robe. Terrifying as these prodigies were, this impression upon him was no more than momentary, and served only to stimulate his love of the marvellous. Instead, therefore, of returning to his palace, he persisted in the resolution of abiding where the Indian vanished from his view. One night, however, while he was walking as usual on the plain, the moon and the stars at once were eclipsed, and a total darkness ensued. The earth trembled beneath him, and a voice came forth, the voice of the Giaour, who in accents more sonorous than thunder, thus addressed him Wouldst thou devote thyself to me? adore then the terrestrial influences, and abjure Mahomet. On these conditions I will bring thee to the palace of subterranean fire there shalt thou behold, in immense depositories, the treasures which the stars have promised thee, and which will be conferred by those intelligences whom thou shalt thus render propitious. It was from thence I brought my sabres; and it is there that Soliman Ben Daoud reposes, surrounded by the talismans that control the world. The astonished Caliph trembled as he answered, yet in a style that showed him to be no novice in preternatural adventures Where art thou? Be present to my eyes; dissipate the gloom that perplexes me, and of which I deem thee the cause. After the many flambeaus I have burnt to discover thee, thou mayest at least grant a glimpse of thy horrible visage. Abjure then Mahomet, replied the Indian, and promise me full proofs of thy sincerity; otherwise thou shalt never behold me again. The unhappy Caliph, instigated by insatiable curiosity, lavished his promises in the utmost profusion. The sky immediately brightened; and by the light of the planets, which seemed almost to blaze, Vathek beheld the earth open, and at the extremity of a vast black chasm a portal of ebony, before which stood the Indian, still blacker, holding in his hand a golden key, that caused the lock to resound. How, cried Vathek, can I descend to thee, without the certainty of breaking my neck? Come take me, and instantly open the portal. Not so fast, replied the Indian, impatient Caliph! Know that I am parched with thirst, and cannot open this door till my thirst be thoroughly appeased. I require the blood of fifty of the most beautiful sons of thy viziers and great men, or neither can my thirst nor thy curiosity be satisfied. Return to Samarah; procure for me this necessary libation; come back hither; throw it thyself into this chasm; and then shalt thou see! Having thus spoken, the Indian turned his back on the Caliph, who, incited by the suggestion of demons, resolved on the direful sacrifice. He now pretended to have regained his tranquillity, and set out for Samarah amidst the acclamations of a people who still loved him, and forbore not to rejoice when they believed him to have recovered his reason. So successfully did he conceal the emotion of his heart, that even Carathis and Morakanabad were equally deceived with the rest. Nothing was heard of but festivals and rejoicings. The ball, which no tongue had hitherto ventured to mention, was again brought on the tapis. A general laugh went round; though many, still smarting under the hands of the surgeon, from the hurts received in that memorable adventure, had no great reason for mirth. The prevalence of this gay humour was not a little grateful to Vathek, as perceiving how much it conduced to his project. He put on the appearance of affability to every one; but especially to his viziers, and the grandees of his court, whom he failed not to regale with a sumptuous banquet, during which he insensibly inclined the conversation to the children of his guests. Having asked, with a goodnatured air, who of them were blessed with the handsomest boys, every father at once asserted the pretensions of his own; and the contest imperceptibly grew so warm, that nothing could have withholden them from coming to blows but their profound reverence for the person of the Caliph. Under the pretence, therefore, of reconciling the disputants, Vathek took upon him to decide; and with this view commanded the boys to be brought. It was not long before a troop of these poor children made their appearance, all equipped by their fond mothers with such ornaments as might give the greatest relief to their beauty, or most advantageously display the graces of their age. But whilst this brilliant assemblage attracted the eyes and hearts of every one besides, the Caliph scrutinized each in his turn with a malignant avidity that passed for attention, and selected from their number the fifty whom he judged the Giaour would prefer. With an equal show of kindness as before, he proposed to celebrate a festival on the plain, for the entertainment of his young favourites, who he said ought to rejoice still more than all at the restoration of his health, on account of the favours he intended for them. The Caliphs proposal was received with the greatest delight, and soon published through Samarah. Litters, camels, and horses were prepared. Women and children, old men and youngevery one placed himself in the station he chose. The cavalcade set forward, attended by all the confectioners in the city and its precincts. The populace, following on foot, composed an amazing crowd, and occasioned no little noise. All was joy; nor did any one call to mind what most of them had suffered when they first travelled the road they were now passing so gaily. The evening was serene, the air refreshing, the sky clear, and the flowers exhaled their fragrance. The beams of the declining sun, whose mild splendour reposed on the summit of the mountain, shed a glow of ruddy light over its green declivity, and the white flocks sporting upon it. No sounds were audible, save the murmurs of the four fountains, and the reeds and voices of shepherds, calling to each other from different eminences. The lovely innocents, proceeding to the destined sacrifice, added not a little to the hilarity of the scene. They approached the plain full of sportiveness; some coursing butterflies, others culling flowers, or picking up the shining little pebbles that attracted their notice. At intervals, they nimbly started from each other, for the sake of being caught again, and mutually imparting a thousand caresses. The dreadful chasm, at whose bottom the portal of ebony was placed, began to appear at a distance. It looked like a black streak that divided the plain. Morakanabad and his companions took it for some work which the Caliph had ordered. Unhappy men! little did they surmise for what it was destined. Vathek, not liking that they should examine it too nearly, stopped the procession, and ordered a spacious circle to be formed on this side, at some distance from the accursed chasm. The bodyguard of eunuchs was detached, to measure out the lists intended for the games, and prepare ringles for the lines to keep off the crowd. The fifty competitors were soon stripped, and presented to the admiration of the spectators the suppleness and grace of their delicate limbs. Their eyes sparkled with a joy which those of their fond parents reflected. Every one offered wishes for the little candidate nearest his heart, and doubted not of his being victorious. A breathless suspense awaited the contest of these amiable and innocent victims. The Caliph, availing himself of the first moment to retire from the crowd, advanced towards the chasm, and there heard, yet not without shuddering, the voice of the Indian; who, gnashing his teeth, eagerly demanded Where are they? Where are they? perceivest thou not how my mouth waters? Relentless Giaour! answered Vathek, with emotion, can nothing content thee but the massacre of these lovely victims? Ah! wert thou to behold their beauty, it must certainly move thy compassion. Perdition on thy compassion, babbler! cried the Indian. Give them me! instantly give them, or my portal shall be closed against thee for ever! Not so loudly, replied the Caliph, blushing. I understand thee, returned the Giaour, with the grin of an ogre thou wantest to summon up more presence of mind. I will for a moment forbear. During this exquisite dialogue the games went forward with all alacrity, and at length concluded, just as the twilight began to overcast the mountains. Vathek, who was still standing on the edge of the chasm, called out with all his might Let my fifty little favourites approach me, separately; and let them come in the order of their success. To the first I will give my diamond bracelet; to the second my collar of emeralds; to the third my aigret of rubies; to the fourth my girdle of topazes; and to the rest, each a part of my dress, even down to my slippers. This declaration was received with reiterated acclamations; and all extolled the liberality of a prince who would thus strip himself for the amusement of his subjects and the encouragement of the rising generation. The Caliph in the mean while undressed himself by degrees; and raising his arm as high as he was able, made each of the prizes glitter in the air; but, whilst he delivered it with one hand to the child, who sprang forward to receive it, he with the other pushed the poor innocent into the gulph, where the Giaour, with a sullen muttering, incessantly repeated More! more! This dreadful device was executed with so much dexterity, that the boy who was approaching him remained unconscious of the fate of his forerunner; and as to the spectators, the shades of evening, together with their distance, precluded them from perceiving any object distinctly. Vathek, having in this manner thrown in the last of the fifty, and expecting that the Giaour on receiving him would have presented the key, already fancied himself as great as Soliman, and consequently above being amenable for what he had done; when, to his utter amazement, the chasm closed, and the ground became as entire as the rest of the plain. No language could express his rage and despair. He execrated the perfidy of the Indian; loaded him with the most infamous invectives; and stamped with his foot as resolving to be heard. He persisted in this demeanour till his strength failed him, and then fell on the earth like one void of sense. His viziers and grandees, who were nearer than the rest, supposed him at first to be sitting on the grass at play with their amiable children; but at length, prompted by doubt, they advanced towards the spot, and found the Caliph alone, who wildly demanded what they wanted. Our children! our children! cried they. It is assuredly pleasant, said he, to make me accountable for accidents. Your children, while at play, fell from the precipice that was here; and I should have experienced their fate had I not been saved by a sudden start back. At these words, the fathers of the fifty boys cried out aloud the mothers repeated their exclamations an octave higher; whilst the rest, without knowing the cause, soon drowned the voices of both, with still louder lamentations of their own. Our Caliph, said they, and the report soon circulated, Our Caliph has played us this trick, to gratify his accursed Giaour. Let us punish him for his perfidy! let us avenge ourselves! let us avenge the blood of the innocent! let us throw this cruel Prince into the gulph that is near, and let his name be mentioned no more! At this rumour, and these menaces, Carathis, full of consternation, hastened to Morakanabad, and said Vizier, you have lost two beautiful boys, and must necessarily be the most afflicted of fathers; but you are virtuous; save your master! I will brave every hazard, replied the Vizier, to rescue him from his present danger; but afterwards will abandon him to his fate. Bababalouk, continued he, put yourself at the head of your Eunuchs, disperse the mob, and if possible bring back this unhappy Prince to his palace. Bababalouk and his fraternity, felicitating each other in a low voice on their disability of ever being fathers, obeyed the mandate of the Vizier; who, seconding their exertions to the utmost of his power, at length accomplished his generous enterprise, and retired, as he resolved, to lament at his leisure.

No sooner had the Caliph reentered his palace, than Carathis commanded the doors to be fastened; but perceiving the tumult to be still violent, and hearing the imprecations which resounded from all quarters, she said to her son Whether the populace be right or wrong, it behoves you to provide for your safety let us retire to your own apartment, and from thence, through the subterranean passage known only to ourselves, into your tower; there, with the assistance of the mutes who never leave it, we may be able to make some resistance. Bababalouk, supposing us to be still in the palace, will guard its avenues for his own sake; and we shall soon find, without the counsels of that blubberer Morakanabad, what expedient may be the best to adopt. Vathek, without making the least reply, acquiesced in his mothers proposal, and repeated as he went Nefarious Giaour! where art thou? hast thou not yet devoured those poor children? where are thy sabres? thy golden key? thy talismans? Carathis, who guessed from these interrogations a part of the truth, had no difficulty to apprehend in getting at the whole, as soon as he should be a little composed in his tower. This Princess was so far from being influenced by scruples that she was as wicked as woman could be, which is not saying a little, for the sex pique themselves on their superiority in every competition. The recital of the Caliph therefore occasioned neither terror nor surprise to his mother; she felt no emotion but from the promises of the Giaour; and said to her son This Giaour, it must be confessed, is somewhat sanguinary in his taste, but the terrestrial powers are always terrible nevertheless, what the one has promised and the others can confer, will prove a sufficient indemnification. No crimes should be thought too dear for such a reward. Forbear then to revile the Indian you have not fulfilled the conditions to which his services are annexed. For instance, is not a sacrifice to the subterranean Genii required? and should we not be prepared to offer it as soon as the tumult is subsided? This charge I will take on myself, and have no doubt of succeeding by means of your treasures; which, as there are now so many others in store, may without fear be exhausted. Accordingly, the Princess, who possessed the most consummate skill in the art of persuasion, went immediately back through the subterranean passage, and presenting herself to the populace from a window of the palace, began to harangue them with all the address of which she was mistress, whilst Bababalouk showered money from both hands amongst the crowd, who by these united means were soon appeased. Every person retired to his home, and Carathis returned to the tower. Prayer at break of day was announced, when Carathis and Vathek ascended the steps which led to the summit of the tower, where they remained for some time, though the weather was lowering and wet. This impending gloom corresponded with their malignant dispositions; but when the sun began to break through the clouds, they ordered a pavilion to be raised as a screen from the intrusion of his beams. The Caliph, overcome with fatigue, sought refreshment from repose, at the same time hoping that significant dreams might attend on his slumbers; whilst the indefatigable Carathis, followed by a party of her mutes, descended to prepare whatever she judged proper for the oblation of the approaching night. By secret stairs, known only to herself and her son, she first repaired to the mysterious recesses in which were deposited the mummies that had been brought from the catacombs of the ancient Pharaohs. Of these she ordered several to be taken. From thence she resorted to a gallery, where, under the guard of fifty female negroes, mute, and blind of the right eye, were preserved the oil of the most venomous serpents, rhinoceros horns, and woods of a subtle and penetrating odour, procured from the interior of the Indies, together with a thousand other horrible rarieties. This collection had been formed for a purpose like the present, by Carathis herself, from a presentiment that she might one day enjoy some intercourse with the infernal powers, to whom she had ever been passionately attached, and to whose taste she was no stranger. To familiarize herself the better with the horrors in view, the Princess remained in the company of her negresses, who squinted in the most amiable manner from the only eye they had, and leered with exquisite delight at the skulls and skeletons which Carathis had drawn forth from her cabinets, whose key she entrusted to no one; all of them making contortions, and uttering a frightful jargon, but very amusing to the Princess till at last, being stunned by their gibbering, and suffocated by the potency of their exhalations, she was forced to quit the gallery, after stripping it of a part of its treasures. Whilst she was thus occupied, the Caliph, who instead of the visions he expected, had acquired in these insubstantial regions a voracious appetite, was greatly provoked at the negresses for, having totally forgotten their deafness, he had impatiently asked them for food; and seeing them regardless of his demand, he began to cuff, pinch, and push them, till Carathis arrived to terminate a scene so indecent, to the great content of these miserable creatures, who having been brought up by her, understood all her signs, and communicated in the same way their thoughts in return. Son! what means all this? said she, panting for breath. I thought I heard as I came up, the shrieks of a thousand bats, tearing from their crannies in the recesses of a cavern, and it was the outcry only of these poor mutes, whom you were so unmercifully abusing. In truth you but ill deserve the admirable provision I have brought you. Give it me instantly! exclaimed the Caliph I am perishing for hunger! As to that, answered she, you must have an excellent stomach if it can digest what I have been preparing. Be quick, replied the Caliph. But oh, heavens! what horrors! What do you intend? Come, come, returned Carathis, be not so squeamish, but help me to arrange every thing properly, and you shall see that what you reject with such symptoms of disgust will soon complete your felicity. Let us get ready the pile for the sacrifice of tonight, and think not of eating till that is performed. Know you not that all solemn rites are preceded by a rigorous abstinence? The Caliph, not daring to object, abandoned himself to grief, and the wind that ravaged his entrails, whilst his mother went forward with the requisite operations. Phials of serpents oil, mummies, and bones, were soon set in order on the balustrade of the tower. The pile began to rise; and in three hours was as many cubits high. At length, darkness approached, and Carathis having stripped herself to her inmost garment, clapped her hands in an impulse of ecstasy, and struck light with all her force. The mutes followed her example but Vathek, extenuated with hunger and impatience, was unable to support himself, and fell down in a swoon. The sparks had already kindled the dry wood; the venomous oil burst into a thousand blue flames; the mummies, dissolving, emitted a thick dun vapour; and the rhinoceros horns beginning to consume; all together diffused such a stench, that the Caliph, recovering, started from his trance and gazed wildly on the scene in full blaze around him. The oil gushed forth in a plentitude of streams; and the negresses, who supplied it without intermission, united their cries to those of the Princess. At last the fire became so violent, and the flames reflected from the polished marble so dazzling, that the Caliph, unable to withstand the heat and the blaze, effected his escape, and clambered up the imperial standard. In the mean time, the inhabitants of Samarah, scared at the light which shone over the city, arose in haste, ascended their roofs, beheld the tower on fire, and hurried halfnaked to the square. Their love to their sovereign immediately awoke; and apprehending him in danger of perishing in his tower, their whole thoughts were occupied with the means of his safety. Morakanabad flew from his retirement, wiped away his tears, and cried out for water like the rest. Bababalouk, whose olfactory nerves were more familiarized to magical odours, readily conjecturing that Carathis was engaged in her favourite amusements, strenuously exhorted them not to be alarmed. Him, however, they treated as an old poltroon; and forbore not to style him a rascally traitor. The camels and dromedaries were advancing with water, but no one knew by which way to enter the tower. Whilst the populace was obstinate in forcing the doors, a violent east wind drove such a volume of flame against them, as at first forced them off; but afterwards, rekindled their zeal. At the same time, the stench of the horns and mummies increasing, most of the crowd fell backward in a state of suffocation. Those that kept their feet mutually wondered at the cause of the smell, and admonished each other to retire. Morakanabad, more sick than the rest, remained in a piteous condition. Holding his nose with one hand, he persisted in his efforts with the other to burst open the doors, and obtain admission. A hundred and forty of the strongest and most resolute at length accomplished their purpose. Having gained the staircase by their violent exertions, they attained a great height in a quarter of an hour. Carathis, alarmed at the signs of her mutes, advanced to the staircase, went down a few steps, and heard several voices calling out from below You shall in a moment have water! Being rather alert, considering her age, she presently regained the top of the tower, and bade her son suspend the sacrifice for some minutes, adding We shall soon be enabled to render it more grateful. Certain dolts of your subjects, imagining, no doubt, that we were on fire, have been rash enough to break through those doors, which had hitherto remained inviolate, for the sake of bringing up water. They are very kind, you must allow, so soon to forget the wrongs you have done them but that is of little moment. Let us offer them to the Giaour. Let them come up our mutes, who neither want strength nor experience, will soon despatch them, exhausted as they are with fatigue. Be it so, answered the Caliph, provided we finish, and I dine. In fact, these good people, out of breath from ascending eleven thousand stairs in such haste, and chagrined at having spilt, by the way, the water they had taken, were no sooner arrived at the top than the blaze of the flames and the fumes of the mummies at once overpowered their senses. It was a pity! for they beheld not the agreeable smile with which the mutes and the negresses adjusted the cord to their necks these amiable personages rejoiced, however, no less at the scene. Never before had the ceremony of strangling been performed with so much facility. They all fell without the least resistance or struggle; so that Vathek, in the space of a few moments, found himself surrounded by the dead bodies of his most faithful subjects, all of which were thrown on the top of the pile. Carathis, whose presence of mind never forsook her, perceiving that she had carcases sufficient to complete her oblation, commanded the chains to be stretched across the staircase, and the iron doors barricaded, that no more might come up. No sooner were these orders obeyed, than the tower shook; the dead bodies vanished in the flames; which at once changed from a swarthy crimson to a bright rose colour. An ambient vapour emitted the most exquisite fragrance; the marble columns rang with harmonious sounds, and the liquefied horns diffused a delicious perfume. Carathis, in transports, anticipated the success of her enterprise; whilst the mutes and negresses, to whom these sweets had given the cholic, retired to their cells grumbling. Scarcely were they gone, when, instead of the pile, horns, mummies, and ashes, the Caliph both saw and felt, with a degree of pleasure which he could not express, a table, covered with the most magnificent repast flaggons of wine, and vases of exquisite sherbet, floating on snow. He availed himself, without scruple, of such an entertainment; and had already laid hands on a lamb stuffed with pistachios, whilst Carathis was privately drawing from a fillagreen urn, a parchment that seemed to be endless; and which had escaped the notice of her son. Totally occupied, in gratifying an importunate appetite, he left her to peruse it, without interruption; which having finished, she said to him, in an authoritative tone, Put an end to your gluttony, and hear the splendid promises with which you are favoured! She then read, as follows Vathek, my wellbeloved, thou hast surpassed my hopes my nostrils have been regaled by the savour of thy mummies, thy horns; and, still more, by the lives devoted on the pile. At the full of the moon, cause the bands of thy musicians, and thy tymbals, to be heard; depart from thy palace surrounded by all the pageants of majesty; thy most faithful slaves, thy best beloved wives; thy most magnificent litters; thy richest loaden camels; and set forward on thy way to Istakar. There await I thy coming. That is the region of wonders. There shalt thou receive the diadem of Gian Ben Gian,11 the talismans of Soliman, and the treasures of the preadimite Sultans there shalt thou be solaced with all kinds of delight. But, beware how thou enterest any dwelling on thy route, or thou shalt feel the effects of my anger. The Caliph, who, notwithstanding his habitual luxury, had never before dined with so much satisfaction, gave full scope to the joy of these golden tidings, and betook himself to drinking anew. Carathis, whose antipathy to wine was by no means insuperable, failed not to supply a reason for every bumper, which they ironically quaffed to the health of Mahomet. This infernal liquor completed their impious temerity, and prompted them to utter a profusion of blasphemies. They gave a loose to their wit, at the expense of the ass of Balaam, the dog of the seven sleepers, and the other animals admitted into the paradise of Mahomet. In this sprightly humour they descended the eleven thousand stairs, diverting themselves as they went at the anxious faces they saw on the square, through the oilets of the tower, and at length arrived at the royal apartments by the subterranean passage. Bababalouk was parading to and fro, and issuing his mandates with great pomp to the eunuchs, who were snuffing the lights and painting the eyes of the Circassians. No sooner did he catch sight of the Caliph and his mother than he exclaimed, Hah! you have then, I perceive, escaped from the flames; I was not, however, altogether out of doubt. Of what moment is it to us what you thought or think? cried Carathis go, speed, tell Morakanabad that we immediately want him; and take care how you stop by the way to make your insipid reflections. Morakanabad delayed not to obey the summons, and was received by Vathek and his mother with great solemnity. They told him with an air of composure and commiseration that the fire at the top of the tower was extinguished, but that it had cost the lives of the brave people who sought to assist them. Still more misfortunes! cried Morakanabad with a sigh. Ah, commander of the faithful, our holy prophet is certainly irritated against us! it behoves you to appease him. We will appease him hereafter, replied the Caliph, with a smile that augured nothing of good. You will have leisure sufficient for your supplications during my absence; for this country is the bane of my health. I am disgusted with the mountain of the Four Fountains, and am resolved to go and drink of the stream of Rocnabad.12 I long to refresh myself in the delightful valleys which it waters. Do you, with the advice of my mother, govern my dominions; and take care to supply whatever her experiments may demand; for you well know that our tower abounds in materials for the advancement of science. The tower but ill suited Morakanabads taste. Immense treasures had been lavished upon it, and nothing had he ever seen carried thither but female negroes, mutes, and abominable drugs. Nor did he know well what to think of Carathis, who like a chamelion could assume all possible colours. Her cursed eloquence had often driven the poor Mussulman to his last shifts. He considered, however, that if she possessed but few good qualities, her son had still fewer, and that the alternative, on the whole, would be in her favour. Consoled, therefore, with this reflection, he went in good spirits to soothe the populace, and make the proper arrangements for his masters journey. Vathek, to conciliate the spirits of the subterranean palace, resolved that his expedition should be uncommonly splendid. With this view he confiscated on all sides the property of his subjects, whilst his worthy mother stripped the seraglios she visited of the gems they contained. She collected all the sempstresses and embroiderers of Samarah, and other cities, to the distance of sixty leagues, to prepare pavilions, palanquins, sofas, canopies, and litters, for the train of the monarch. There was not left in Masulipatan a single piece of chintz; and so much muslin had been bought up to dress out Bababalouk and the other black eunuchs, that there remained not an ell in the whole Irak of Babylon. During these preparations, Carathis, who never lost sight of her great object, which was to obtain favour with the powers of darkness, made select parties of the fairest and most delicate ladies of the city; but in the midst of their gaiety she contrived to introduce serpents amongst them, and to break pots of scorpions under the table. They all bit to a wonder, and Carathis would have left them to bite, were it not that to fill up the time, she now and then amused herself in curing their wounds with an excellent anodyne of her own invention; for this good princess abhorred being indolent. Vathek, who was not altogether so active as his mother, devoted his time to the sole gratification of his senses, in the palaces which were severally dedicated to them. He disgusted himself no more with the divan or the mosque. One half of Samarah followed his example, whilst the other lamented the progress of corruption. In the midst of these transactions, the embassy returned which had been sent in pious times to Mecca. It consisted of the most reverend moullahs,13 who had fulfilled their commission, and brought back one of those precious besoms which are used to sweep the sacred caaba; a present truly worthy of the greatest potentate on earth! The Caliph happened at this instant to be engaged in an apartment by no means adapted to the reception of embassies, though adorned with a certain magnificence, not only to render it agreeable, but also because he resorted to it frequently, and staid a considerable time together. Whilst occupied in this retreat, he heard the voice of Bababalouk calling out from between the door and the tapestry that hung before it Here are the excellent Mahomet Ebn Edris al Shafei, and the seraphic Al Mouhadethin, who have brought the besom from Mecca, and with tears of joy entreat they may present it to your majesty in person. Let them bring the besom hither, it may be of use, said Vathek, who was still employed, not having quite racked off his wine. How! answered Bababalouk, half aloud and amazed. Obey, replied the Caliph, for it is my sovereign will; go instantly! vanish! for here will I receive the good folk who have thus filled thee with joy. The eunuch departed muttering, and bade the venerable train attend him. A sacred rapture was diffused amongst these reverend old men. Though fatigued with the length of their expedition, they followed Bababalouk with an alertness almost miraculous, and felt themselves highly flattered as they swept along the stately porticos, that the Caliph would not receive them like ambassadors in ordinary, in his hall of audience. Soon reaching the interior of the harem (where, through blinds of persian they perceived large soft eyes, dark and blue, that went and came like lightning) penetrated with respect and wonder, and full of their celestial mission, they advanced in procession towards the small corridors that appeared to terminate in nothing, but nevertheless led to the cell where the Caliph expected their coming. What! is the commander of the faithful sick? said Ebn Edris al Shafei, in a low voice to his companion. I rather think he is in his oratory, answered Al Mouhadethin. Vathek, who heard the dialogue, cried out What imports it you how I am employed? approach without delay. They advanced, and Bababalouk almost sunk with confusion,14 whilst the Caliph, without showing himself, put forth his hand from behind the tapestry that hung before the door, and demanded of them the besom. Having prostrated themselves as well as the corridor would permit, and even in a tolerable semicircle, the venerable Al Shafei, drawing forth the besom from the embroidered and perfumed scarfs in which it had been enveloped, and secured from the profane gaze of vulgar eyes, arose from his associates and advanced with an air of the most awful solemnity towards the supposed oratory; but with what astonishment! with what horror was he seized! Vathek, bursting out into a villainous laugh, snatched the besom from his trembling hand, and fixing upon it some cobwebs that hung suspended from the ceiling, gravely brushed away till not a single one remained. The old men, overpowered with amazement, were unable to lift their beards from the ground; for as Vathek had carelessly left the tapestry between them half drawn, they were witnesses to the whole transaction. Their tears gushed forth on the marble. Al Mouhadethin swooned through mortification and fatigue, whilst the Caliph, throwing himself backward on his seat, shouted and clapped his hands without mercy. At last, addressing himself to Bababalouk My dear black, said he, go, regale these pious poor souls with my good wine from Shiraz; and as they can boast of having seen more of my palace than any one besides, let them also visit my office courts, and lead them out by the back steps that go to my stables. Having said this, he threw the besom in their face, and went to enjoy the laugh with Carathis. Bababalouk did all in his power to console the ambassadors, but the two most infirm expired on the spot; the rest were carried to their beds, from whence, being heartbroken with sorrow and shame, they never arose. The succeeding night, Vathek, attended by his mother, ascended the tower to see if everything were ready for his journey, for he had great faith in the influence of the stars. The planets appeared in their most favourable aspects. The Caliph, to enjoy so flattering a sight, supped gaily on the roof, and fancied that he heard, during his repast, loud shouts of laughter resound through the sky, in a manner that inspired the fullest assurance. All was in motion at the palace; lights were kept burning through the whole of the night; the sound of implements, and of artisans finishing their work; the voices of women and their guardians who sung at their embroidery; all conspired to interrupt the stillness of nature, and infinitely delight the heart of Vathek, who imagined himself going in triumph to sit upon the throne of Soliman. The people were not less satisfied than himself; all assisted to accelerate the moment which should rescue them from the wayward caprices of so extravagant a master. The day preceding the departure of this infatuated prince was employed by Carathis in repeating to him the decrees of the mysterious parchment, which she had thoroughly gotten by heart; and in recommending him not to enter the habitation of any one by the way; for well thou knowest, added she, how liquorish thy taste is after good dishes and young damsels; let me therefore enjoin thee to be content with thy old cooks, who are the best in the world; and not to forget that in thy ambulatory seraglio there are three dozen pretty faces, which Bababalouk hath not yet unveiled. I, myself, have a great desire to watch over thy conduct, and visit the subterranean palace, which no doubt contains whatever can interest persons like us. There is nothing so pleasing as retiring to caverns; my taste for dead bodies and everything like mummy is decided; and I am confident thou wilt see the most exquisite of their kind. Forget me not then, but the moment thou art in possession of the talismans which are to open to thee the mineral kingdoms, and the centre of the earth itself, fail not to dispatch some trusty genius to take me and my cabinet, for the oil of the serpents I have pinched to death will be a pretty present to the Giaour, who cannot but be charmed with such dainties. Scarcely had Carathis ended this edifying discourse, when the sun, setting behind the mountain of the Four Fountains, gave place to the rising moon. This planet being that evening at full, appeared of unusual beauty and magnitude in the eyes of the women, the eunuchs, and the pages, who were all impatient to set forward. The city reechoed with shouts of joy and flourishing of trumpets. Nothing was visible but plumes nodding on pavilions, and aigrets shining in the mild lustre of the moon. The spacious square resembled an immense parterre, variegated with the most stately tulips of the east. Arrayed in the robes which were only worn at the most distinguished ceremonials, and supported by his vizier and Bababalouk, the Caliph descended the grand staircase of the tower in the sight of all his people. He could not forbear pausing at intervals to admire the superb appearance which everywhere courted his view, whilst the whole multitude, even to the camels with their sumptuous burdens, knelt down before him. For some time a general stillness prevailed, which nothing happened to disturb, but the shrill screams of some eunuchs in the rear. These vigilant guards having remarked certain cages of the ladies swagging somewhat awry, and discovered that a few adventurous gallants had contrived to get in, soon dislodged the enraptured culprits, and consigned them with good commendations, to the surgeons of the serail. The majesty of so magnificent a spectacle was not, however, violated by incidents like these. Vathek, meanwhile, saluted the moon with an idolatrous air, that neither pleased Morakanabad nor the doctors of the law, any more than the viziers and grandees of his court, who were all assembled to enjoy the last view of their sovereign. At length the clarions and trumpets from the top of the tower announced the prelude of departure. Though the instruments were in unison with each other, yet a singular dissonance was blended with their sounds. This proceeded from Carathis, who was singing her direful orisons to the Giaour, whilst the negresses and mutes supplied thorough bass without articulating a word. The good Mussulmans fancied that they heard the sullen hum of those nocturnal insects which presage evil, and importuned Vathek to beware how he ventured his sacred person. On a given signal the great standard of the Califat was displayed; twenty thousand lances shone around it; and the Caliph, treading royally on the cloth of gold which had been spread for his feet, ascended his litter amidst the general awe that possessed his subjects. The expedition commenced with the utmost order, and so entire a silence, that even the locusts were heard from the thickets on the plain of Catoul. Gaiety and good humour prevailing, six good leagues were past before the dawn; and the morning star was still glittering in the firmament when the whole of this numerous train had halted on the banks of the Tigris, where they encamped to repose for the rest of the day. The three days that followed were spent in the same manner, but on the fourth the heavens looked angry, lightnings broke forth in frequent flashes, reechoing peals of thunder succeeded, and the trembling Circassians clung with all their might to their ugly guardians. The Caliph himself was greatly inclined to take shelter in the large town of Gulchissar, the governor of which came forth to meet him, and tendered every kind of refreshment the place could supply. But having examined his tablets, he suffered the rain to soak him almost to the bone, notwithstanding the importunity of his first favourites. Though he began to regret the palace of the senses, yet he lost not sight of his enterprise, and his sanguine expectations confirmed his resolution. His geographers were ordered to attend him, but the weather proved so terrible, that these poor people exhibited a lamentable appearance; and as no long journeys had been undertaken since the time of Haroun al Raschid, their maps of the different countries were in a still worse plight than themselves. Every one was ignorant which way to turn; for Vathek, though well versed in the course of the heavens, no longer knew his situation on earth. He thundered even louder than the elements, and muttered forth certain hints of the bowstring which were not very soothing to literary ears. Disgusted at the toilsome weariness of the way, he determined to cross over the craggy heights, and follow the guidance of a peasant, who undertook to bring him, in four days, to Rocnabad. Remonstrances were all to no purpose, his resolution was fixed, and an invasion commenced on the province of the goats, who sped away in large troops before them. It was curious to view on these half calcined rocks camels richly caparisoned, and pavilions of gold and silk waving on their summits, which till then had never been covered, but with sapless thistles and fern. The females and eunuchs uttered shrill wailings at the sight of the precipices below them, and the dreary prospects that opened in the vast gorges of the mountains. Before they could reach the ascent of the steepest rock night overtook them, and a boisterous tempest arose, which having rent the awnings of the palanquins and cages, exposed to the raw gusts the poor ladies within, who had never before felt so piercing a cold. The dark clouds that overcast the face of the sky deepened the horrors of this disastrous night, insomuch that nothing could be heard distinctly but the mewling of pages, and lamentations of sultanas. To increase the general misfortune, the frightful uproar of wild beasts resounded at a distance, and there were soon perceived in the forest they were skirting the glaring of eyes which could belong only to devils or tigers. The pioneers, who as well as they could, had marked out a track, and a part of the advanced guard were devoured before they had been in the least apprised of their danger. The confusion that prevailed was extreme. Wolves, tigers, and other carnivorous animals, invited by the howling of their companions, flocked together from every quarter. The crushing of bones was heard on all sides, and a fearful rush of wings over head, for now vultures also began to be of the party. The terror at length reached the main body of the troops which surrounded the monarch and his harem, at the distance of two leagues from the scene. Vathek (voluptuously reposed in his capacious litter upon cushions of silk, with two little pages beside him, of complexions more fair than the enamel of Franguestan, who were occupied in keeping off flies) was soundly asleep, and contemplating in his dreams the treasures of Soliman. The shrieks, however, of his wives awoke him with a start, and instead of the Giaour with his key of gold, he beheld Bababalouk full of consternation.

Sire, exclaimed this good servant of the most potent of monarchs, misfortune has arrived at its height; wild beasts, who entertain no more reverence for your sacred person than for that of a dead ass, have beset your camels and their drivers thirty of the richest laden are already become their prey, as well as all your confectioners, your cooks, and purveyors, and unless our holy prophet should protect us, we shall have all eaten our last meal. At the mention of eating, the Caliph lost all patience. He began to bellow, and even beat himself, for there was no seeing in the dark. The rumour every instant increased, and Bababalouk finding no good could be done with his master stopped both his ears against the hurlyburly of the harem, and called out aloud Come, ladies and brothers! all hands to work! strike light in a moment! never shall it be said that the commander of the faithful served to regale these infidel brutes. Though there wanted not in this bevy of beauties a sufficient number of capricious and wayward, yet, on the present occasion they were all compliance. Fires were visible in a twinkling in all their cages. Ten thousand torches were lighted at once. The Caliph himself seized a large one of wax; every person followed his example; and by kindling ropes ends dipped in oil and fastened on poles, an amazing blaze was spread. The rocks were covered with the splendour of sunshine. The trails of sparks wafted by the wind, communicated to the dry fern, of which there was plenty. Serpents were observed to crawl forth from their retreats with amazement and hissings, whilst the horses snorted, stamped the ground, tossed their noses in the air, and plunged about without mercy. One of the forests of cedar that bordered their way took fire, and the branches that overhung the path extending their flames to the muslins and chintzes which covered the cages of the ladies, obliged them to jump out at the peril of their necks. Vathek, who vented on the occasion a thousand blasphemies, was himself compelled to touch with his sacred feet the naked earth. Never had such an incident happened before. Full of mortification, shame and despondence, and not knowing how to walk, the ladies fell into the dirt. Must I go on foot, said one. Must I wet my feet, cried another. Must I soil my dress, asked a third. Execrable Bababalouk, exclaimed all; Outcast of hell! what hadst thou to do with torches? Better were it to be eaten by tigers than to fall into our present condition; we are for ever undone. Not a porter is there in the army, nor a currier of camels but hath seen some part of our bodies, and what is worse, our very faces! On saying this, the most bashful amongst them hid their foreheads on the ground, whilst such as had more boldness flew at Bababalouk, but he, well apprised of their humour, and not wanting in shrewdness, betook himself to his heels along with his comrades, all dropping their torches and striking their tymbals. It was not less light than in the brightest of the dogdays, and the weather was hot in proportion; but how degrading was the spectacle, to behold the Caliph bespattered like an ordinary mortal! As the exercise of his faculties seemed to be suspended, one of his Ethiopian wives (for he delighted in variety) clasped him in her arms, threw him upon her shoulder like a sack of dates, and finding that the fire was hemming them in, set off with no small expedition, considering the weight of her burden. The other ladies who had just learned the use of their feet followed her; their guards galloped after; and the camel drivers brought up the rear as fast as their charge would permit. They soon reached the spot where the wild beasts had commenced the carnage, and which they had too much spirit to leave, notwithstanding the approaching tumult, and the luxurious supper they had made. Bababalouk nevertheless seized on a few of the plumpest, which were unable to budge from the place, and began to flay them with admirable adroitness. The cavalcade being got so far from the conflagration as that the heat felt rather grateful than violent, it was immediately resolved on to halt. The tattered chintzes were picked up; the scraps left by the wolves and tigers interred; and vengeance was taken on some dozens of vultures that were too much glutted to rise on the wing. The camels which had been left unmolested to make salammoniac being numbered, and the ladies once more inclosed in their cages, the imperial tent was pitched on the levellest ground they could find. Vathek, reposing upon a matress of down, and tolerably recovered from the jolting of the Ethiopian, who, to his feelings seemed the roughest trotting jade he had hitherto mounted, called out for something to eat; but alas! those delicate cakes which had been baked in silver ovens for his royal mouth, those rich manchets, amber comfits, flaggons of Schiraz wine, porcelain vases of snow, and grapes from the banks of the Tigris, were all irremediably lost; and nothing had Bababalouk to present in their stead, but a roasted wolf, vultures la daube, aromatic herbs of the most acrid poignancy, rotten truffles, boiled thistles, and such other wild plants as must ulcerate the throat and parch up the tongue. Nor was he better provided in the article of drink, for he could procure nothing to accompany these irritating viands but a few phials of abominable brandy, which had been secreted by the scullions in their slippers. Vathek made wry faces at so savage a repast, and Bababalouk answered them with shrugs and contortions. The Caliph however ate with tolerable appetite, and fell into a nap that lasted six hours. The splendour of the sun, reflected from the white cliffs of the mountains in spite of the curtains that inclosed him, at length disturbed his repose. He awoke terrified, and stung to the quick by those wormwoodcoloured flies which emit from their wings a suffocating stench. The miserable monarch was perplexed how to act, though his wits were not idle in seeking expedients, whilst Bababalouk lay snoring amidst a swarm of those insects, that busily thronged to pay court to his nose. The little pages, famished with hunger, had dropped their fans on the ground, and exerted their dying voices in bitter reproaches on the Caliph, who now for the first time heard the language of truth. Thus stimulated, he renewed his imprecations against the Giaour, and bestowed upon Mahomet some soothing expressions. Where am I? cried he; What are these dreadful rocks; these valleys of darkness? Are we arrived at the horrible Kaf?15 Is the Simurgh16 coming to pluck out my eyes as a punishment for undertaking this impious enterprise? Having said this, he bellowed like a calf, and turned himself towards an outlet in the side of his pavilion. But alas! what objects occurred to his view! on one side a plain of black sand that appeared to be unbounded, and on the other perpendicular crags bristled over with those abominable thistles which had so severely lacerated his tongue. He fancied, however, that he perceived amongst the brambles and briars some gigantic flowers, but was mistaken, for these were only the dangling palampores and variegated tatters of his gay retinue. As there were several clefts in the rock from whence water seemed to have flowed, Vathek applied his ear with the hope of catching the sound of some latent runnel, but could only distinguish the low murmurs of his people, who were repining at their journey, and complaining for the want of water. To what purpose, asked they, have we been brought hither? Hath our Caliph another tower to build? or have the relentless Afrits17 whom Carathis so much loves, fixed in this place their abode? At the name of Carathis, Vathek recollected the tablets he had received from his mother, who assured him they were fraught with preternatural qualities, and advised him to consult them as emergencies might require. Whilst he was engaged in turning them over, he heard a shout of joy, and a loud clapping of hands. The curtains of his pavilion were soon drawn back, and he beheld Bababalouk, followed by a troop of his favourites, conducting two dwarfs, each a cubit high, who brought between them a large basket of melons, oranges, and pomegranites. They were singing in the sweetest tones the words that follow We dwell on the top of these rocks, in a cabin of rushes and canes; the eagles envy us our nest; a small spring supplies us with abdest, and we daily repeat prayers which the prophet approves. We love you, O commander of the faithful! our master, the good emir Fakreddin, loves you also; he reveres in your person the vicegerent of Mahomet. Little as we are, in us he confides; he knows our hearts to be good, as our bodies are contemptible, and hath placed us here to aid those who are bewildered on these dreary mountains. Last night, whilst we were occupied within our cell in reading the holy koran, a sudden hurricane blew out our lights and rocked our habitation. For two whole hours a palpable darkness prevailed but we heard sounds at a distance which we conjectured to proceed from the bells of a cafila, passing over the rocks. Our ears were soon filled with deplorable shrieks, frightful roarings, and the sound of tymbals. Chilled with terror, we concluded that the Deggial18 with his exterminating angels had sent forth their plagues on the earth. In the midst of these melancholy reflections, we perceived flames of the deepest red glow in the horizon, and found ourselves in a few moments covered with flakes of fire. Amazed at so strange an appearance, we took up the volume dictated by the blessed intelligence, and kneeling by the light of the fire that surrounded us, we recited the verse which says Put no trust in any thing but the mercy of heaven; there is no help save in the holy prophet; the mountain of Kaf itself may tremble; it is the power of Alla only that cannot be moved. After having pronounced these words, we felt consolation, and our minds were hushed into a sacred repose. Silence ensued, and our ears clearly distinguished a voice in the air, saying Servants of my faithful servant, go down to the happy valley of Fakreddin; tell him that an illustrious opportunity now offers to satiate the thirst of his hospitable heart. The commander of true believers is this day bewildered amongst these mountains, and stands in need of thy aid. We obeyed with joy the angelic mission, and our master, filled with pious zeal, hath culled with his own hands these melons, oranges, and pomegranites. He is following us with a hundred dromedaries laden with the purest waters of his fountains, and is coming to kiss the fringe of your consecrated robe, and implore you to enter his humble habitation, which, placed amidst these barren wilds, resembles an emerald set in lead. The dwarfs having ended their address, remained still standing, and with hands crossed upon their bosoms, preserved a respectful silence. Vathek, in the midst of this curious harangue seized the basket, and long before it was finished, the fruits had dissolved in his mouth. As he continued to eat, his piety increased, and in the same breath which recited his prayers, he called for the koran and sugar. Such was the state of his mind when the tablets, which were thrown by at the approach of the dwarfs, again attracted his eye. He took them up, but was ready to drop on the ground when he beheld, in large red characters, these words inscribed by Carathis, which were indeed enough to make him tremble. Beware of thy old doctors, and their puny messengers of but one cubit high; distrust their pious frauds; and instead of eating their melons, impale on a spit the bearers of them. Shouldst thou be such a fool as to visit them, the portal of the subterranean palace will be shut in thy face, and with such force as shall shake thee asunder; thy body shall be spit upon, and bats will engender in thy belly. To what tends this ominous rhapsody? cries the Caliph; and must I then perish in these deserts with thirst, whilst I may refresh myself in the valley of melons and cucumbers? Accursed be the Giaour with his portal of ebony! he hath made me dance attendance too long already. Besides, who shall prescribe laws to me? I, forsooth, must not enter any ones habitation! Be it so, but what one can I enter that is not my own. Bababalouk, who lost not a syllable of this soliloquy, applauded it with all his heart; and the ladies, for the first time, agreed with him in opinion. The dwarfs were entertained, caressed, and seated with great ceremony on little cushions of satin. The symmetry of their persons was the subject of criticism; not an inch of them was suffered to pass unexamined. Nicknacks and dainties were offered in profusion, but all were declined with respectful gravity. They clambered up the sides of the Caliphs seat, and placing themselves each on one of his shoulders, began to whisper prayers in his ears. Their tongues quivered like the leaves of a poplar, and the patience of Vathek was almost exhausted, when the acclamations of the troops announced the approach of Fakreddin, who was come with a hundred old greybeards, and as many korans and dromedaries. They instantly set about their ablutions, and began to repeat the Bismillah. Vathek, to get rid of these officious monitors, followed their example, for his hands were burning. The good Emir, who was punctiliously religious, and likewise a great dealer in compliments, made an harangue five times more prolix and insipid than his harbingers had already delivered. The Caliph, unable any longer to refrain, exclaimed For the love of Mahomet, my dear Fakreddin, have done! let us proceed to your valley, and enjoy the fruits that heaven hath vouchsafed you. The hint of proceeding put all into motion. The venerable attendants of the emir set forward somewhat slowly, but Vathek having ordered his little pages, in private, to goad on the dromedaries, loud fits of laughter broke forth from the cages, for the unwieldy curvetting of these poor beasts, and the ridiculous distress of their superannuated riders afforded the ladies no small entertainment. They descended, however, unhurt into the valley, by the large steps which the emir had cut in the rock; and already the murmuring of streams and the rustling of leaves began to catch their attention. The cavalcade soon entered a path, which was skirted by flowering shrubs, and extended to a vast wood of palmtrees whose branches overspread a building of hewn stone. This edifice was crowned with nine domes, and adorned with as many portals of bronze, on which was engraven the following inscription This is the asylum of pilgrims, the refuge of travellers, and the depository of secrets for all parts of the world. Nine pages beautiful as the day, and clothed in robes of Egyptian linen, very long and very modest, were standing at each door. They received the whole retinue with an easy and inviting air. Four of the most amiable placed the Caliph on a magnificent taktrevan; four others, somewhat less graceful, took charge of Bababalouk, who capered for joy at the snug little cabin that fell to his share; the pages that remained, waited on the rest of the train. When every thing masculine was gone out of sight, the gate of a large inclosure on the right turned on its harmonious hinges, and a young female of a slender form came forth. Her light brown hair floated in the hazy breeze of the twilight. A troop of young maidens, like the Pleiades, attended her on tiptoe. They hastened to the pavilions that contained the sultanas; and the young lady gracefully bending said to them Charming princesses, every thing is ready; we have prepared beds for your repose, and strewed your apartments with jasamine; no insects will keep off slumber from visiting your eyelids; we will dispel them with a thousand plumes. Come then, amiable ladies! refresh your delicate feet and your ivory limbs in baths of rose water, and by the light of perfumed lamps your servants will amuse you with tales. The sultanas accepted with pleasure these obliging offers, and followed the young lady to the emirs harem, where we must for a moment leave them and return to the Caliph. Vathek found himself beneath a vast dome illuminated by a thousand lamps of rock crystal, as many vases of the same material filled with excellent sherbet sparkled on a large table, where a profusion of viands were spread. Amongst others were sweetbreads stewed in milk of almonds, saffron soups, and lamb la crme, of all of which the Caliph was amazingly fond. He took of each as much as he was able; testified his sense of the emirs friendship by the gaiety of his heart; and made the dwarfs dance against their will; for these little devotees durst not refuse the commander of the faithful. At last he spread himself on the sofa and slept sounder than he had ever before. Beneath this dome a general silence prevailed, for there was nothing to disturb it but the jaws of Bababalouk, who had untrussed himself to eat with greater advantage, being anxious to make amends for his fast in the mountains. As his spirits were too high to admit of his sleeping, and not loving to be idle, he proposed with himself to visit the harem, and repair to his charge of the ladies, to examine if they had been properly lubricated with the balm of Mecca, if their eyebrows and tresses were in order, and in a word, to perform all the little offices they might need. He sought for a long time together, but without being able to find out the door. He durst not speak aloud for fear of disturbing the Caliph, and not a soul was stirring in the precincts of the palace. He almost despaired of effecting his purpose, when a low whispering just reached his ear it came from the dwarfs, who were returned to their old occupation, and for the nine hundred and ninetyninth time in their lives were reading over the koran. They very politely invited Bababalouk to be of their party, but his head was full of other concerns. The dwarfs, though scandalized at his dissolute morals, directed him to the apartments he wanted to find. His way thither lay through a hundred dark corridors, along which he groped as he went, and at last began to catch, from the extremity of a passage, the charming gossiping of women, which not a little delighted his heart. Ah, ah! what not yet asleep? cried he, and taking long strides as he spoke, did you not suspect me of abjuring my charge? I stayed but to finish what my master had left. Two of the black eunuchs on hearing a voice so loud detached a party in haste, sabre in hand, to discover the cause, but presently was repeated on all sides Tis only Bababalouk, no one but Bababalouk! This circumspect guardian having gone up to a thin veil of carnation colour silk that hung before the doorway, distinguished by means of a softened splendour that shone through it, an oval bath of dark porphyry surrounded by curtains festooned in large folds. Through the apertures between them, as they were not drawn close, groups of young slaves were visible, amongst whom Bababalouk perceived his pupils indulgingly expanding their arms, as if to embrace the perfumed water, and refresh themselves after their fatigues. The looks of tender languor, their confidential whispers, and the enchanting smiles with which they were imparted, the exquisite fragrance of the roses, all combined to inspire a voluptuousness which even Bababalouk himself was scarce able to withstand. He summoned up, however, his usual solemnity, and in the peremptory tone of authority commanded the ladies instantly to leave the bath. Whilst he was issuing these mandates, the young Nouronihar, daughter of the emir, who was sprightly as an antelope, and full of wanton gaiety, beckoned one of her slaves to let down the great swing, which was suspended to the ceiling by cords of silk, and whilst this was doing winked to her companions in the bath, who chagrined to be forced from so soothing a state of indolence, began to twist it round Bababalouk, and teaze him with a thousand vagaries. When Nouronihar perceived that he was exhausted with fatigue, she accosted him with an arch air of respectful concern, and said My lord, it is not by any means decent that the chief eunuch of the Caliph our sovereign should thus continue standing, deign but to recline your graceful person upon this sofa, which will burst with vexation if it have not the honour to receive you. Caught by these flattering accents, Bababalouk gallantly replied Delight of the apple of my eye! I accept the invitation of thy honied lips, and to say truth, my senses are dazzled with the radiance that beams from thy charms. Repose, then, at your ease, replied the beauty, and placed him on the pretended sofa, which, quicker than lightning, gave way all at once. The rest of the women having aptly conceived her design, sprang naked from the bath and plied the swing with such unmerciful jerks, that it swept through the whole compass of a very lofty dome, and took from the poor victim all power of respiration. Sometimes his feet rased the surface of the water, and at others the skylight almost flattened his nose. In vain did he pierce the air with the cries of a voice that resembled the ringing of a cracked basin, for their peals of laughter were still more predominant. Nouronihar in the inebriety of youthful spirits being used only to eunuchs of ordinary harems, and having never seen any thing so royal and disgusting, was far more diverted than all of the rest. She began to parody some Persian verses, and sung with an accent most demurely piquant O gentle white dove as thou soarst through the air,Vouchsafe one kind glance on the mate of thy loveMelodious Philomel I am thy rose;Warble some couplet to ravish my heart! The sultanas and their slaves stimulated by these pleasantries persevered at the swing with such unremitted assiduity, that at length the cord which had secured it snapped suddenly asunder, and Bababalouk fell floundering like a turtle to the bottom of the bath. This accident occasioned a universal shout. Twelve little doors till now unobserved flew open at once, and the ladies in an instant made their escape, after throwing all the towels on his head, and putting out the lights that remained. The deplorable animal, in water to the chin, overwhelmed with darkness, and unable to extricate himself from the warp that embarrassed him, was still doomed to hear for his further consolation, the fresh bursts of merriment his disaster occasioned. He bustled but in vain to get from the bath, for the margin was become so slippery with the oil spilt in breaking the lamps, that at every effort he slid back with a plunge, which resounded aloud through the hollow of the dome. These cursed peals of laughter at every relapse were redoubled, and he, who thought the place infested rather by devils than women, resolved to cease groping, and abide in the bath, where he amused himself with soliloquies interspersed with imprecations, of which his malicious neighbours, reclining on down, suffered not an accent to escape. In this delectable plight the morning surprised him. The Caliph, wondering at his absence, had caused him to be everywhere sought for. At last he was drawn forth almost smothered from the whisp of linen, and wet even to the marrow. Limping, and chattering his teeth, he appeared before his master, who inquired what was the matter, and how he came soused in so strange a pickle. And why did you enter this cursed lodge? answered Bababalouk, gruffly. Ought a monarch like you to visit with his harem the abode of a grey bearded emir who knows nothing of life? And with what gracious damsels does the place too abound! Fancy to yourself how they have soaked me like a burnt crust, and made me dance like a jackpudding the livelong night through on their damnable swing. What an excellent lesson for your sultanas to follow, into whom I have instilled such reserve and decorum! Vathek, comprehending not a syllable of all this invective, obliged him to relate minutely the transaction; but instead of sympathising with the miserable sufferer, he laughed immoderately at the device of the swing, and the figure of Bababalouk mounting upon it. The stung eunuch could scarcely preserve the semblance of respect. Aye, laugh my lord! laugh, said he, but I wish this Nouronihar would play some trick on you; she is too wicked to spare even majesty itself. These words made for the present but a slight impression on the Caliph, but they not long after recurred to his mind. This conversation was cut short by Fakreddin, who came to request that Vathek would join in the prayers and ablutions to be solemnized on a spacious meadow, watered by innumerable streams. The Caliph found the waters refreshing, but the prayers abominably irksome. He diverted himself however with the multitude of Calenders,19 Santons,20 and Dervises21 who were continually coming and going, but especially with the Brahmins,22 Faquirs,23 and other enthusiasts, who had travelled from the heart of India, and halted on their way with the emir. These latter had each of them some mummery peculiar to himself. One dragged a huge chain where ever he went, another an ourangoutang, whilst a third was furnished with scourges, and all performed to a charm. Some clambered up trees, holding one foot in the air; others poised themselves over a fire, and without mercy fillipped their noses. There were some amongst them that cherished vermin, which were not ungrateful in requiting their caresses. These rambling fanatics revolted the hearts of the Dervises, the Calenders, and Santons; however the vehemence of their aversion soon subsided under the hope that the presence of the Caliph would cure their folly, and convert them to the Mussulman faith. But alas! how great was their disappointment! for Vathek, instead of preaching to them, treated them as buffoons; bade them present his compliments to Visnow and Ixhora, and discovered a predilection for a squat old man from the Isle of Serendib, who was more ridiculous than any of the rest. Come, said he, for the love of your gods, bestow a few slaps on your chops to amuse me. The old fellow offended at such an address began loudly to weep; but as he betrayed a villainous drivelling in his tears, the Caliph turned his back and listened to Bababalouk, who whispered, whilst he held the umbrella over him Your majesty should be cautious of this odd assembly, which hath been collected I know not for what. Is it necessary to exhibit such spectacles to a mighty potentate, with interludes of talapoins more mangy than dogs? Were I you, I would command a fire to be kindled, and at once purge the earth of the emir, his harem, and all his menagery. Tush, dolt, answered Vathek, and know that all this infinitely charms me. Nor shall I leave the meadow till I have visited every hive of these pious mendicants. Where ever the Caliph directed his course, objects of pity were sure to swarm round him the blind, the purblind, smarts without noses, damsels without ears, each to extol the munificence of Fakreddin, who, as well as his attendant greybeards, dealt about gratis plasters and cataplasms to all that applied. At noon a superb corps of cripples made its appearance; and soon after advanced by platoons on the plain the completest association of invalids that had ever been embodied till then. The blind went groping with the blind; the lame limped on together; and the maimed made gestures to each other with the only arm that remained. The sides of a considerable waterfall were crowded by the deaf, amongst whom were some from Pegu, with ears uncommonly handsome and large, but were still less able to hear than the rest. Nor were there wanting others in abundance with hump backs, wenny necks, and even horns of an exquisite polish. The emir, to aggrandize the solemnity of the festival in honour of his illustrious visitant, ordered the turf to be spread on all sides with skins and table cloths, upon which were served up for the good mussulmans pilaus of every hue, with other orthodox dishes, and by the express order of Vathek, who was shamefully tolerant, small plates of abominations for regaling the rest. This prince on seeing so many mouths put in motion began to think it time for employing his own. In spite, therefore, of every remonstrance from the chief of his eunuchs, he resolved to have a dinner dressed on the spot. The complaisant emir immediately gave orders for a table to be placed in the shade of the willows. The first service consisted of fish, which they drew from a river flowing over sands of gold, at the foot of a lofty hill these were broiled as fast as taken, and served up with a sauce of vinegar and small herbs that grew on Mount Sinai; for everything with the emir was excellent and pious. The dessert was not quite set on when the sound of lutes from the hill was repeated by the echoes of the neighbouring mountains. The Caliph with an emotion of pleasure and surprise, had no sooner raised up his head than a handful of jasamine dropped on his face. An abundance of tittering succeeded this frolic, and instantly appeared through the bushes the elegant forms of several young females, skipping and bounding like roes. The fragrance diffused from their hair struck the sense of Vathek, who in an ecstasy, suspending his repast, said to Bababalouk Are the Peries24 come down from their spheres? Note her in particular whose form is so perfect, venturously running on the brink of the precipice, and turning back her head as regardless of nothing but the graceful flow of her robe. With what captivating impatience doth she contend with the bushes for her veil? Could it be she who threw the jasamine at me? Aye, she it was; and you too would she throw from the top of the rock, answered Bababalouk, for that is my good friend Nouronihar, who so kindly lent me her swing. My dear lord and master, added he, twisting a twig that hung by the rind from a willow, let me correct her for her want of respect the emir will have no reason to complain, since (bating what I owe to his piety) he is much to be censured for keeping a troop of girls on the mountains, whose sharp air gives their blood too brisk a circulation. Peace, blasphemer! said the Caliph speak not thus of her who over her mountains leads my heart a willing captive. Contrive, rather, that my eyes may be fixed upon hersthat I may respire her sweet breath, as she bounds panting along these delightful wilds! On saying these words, Vathek extended his arms towards the hill, and directing his eyes with an anxiety unknown to him before, endeavoured to keep within view the object that enthralled his soul; but her course was as difficult to follow as the flight of one of those beautiful blue butterflies of Cachmere, which are at once so volatile and rare. The Caliph, not satisfied with seeing, wished also to hear Nouronihar, and eagerly turned to catch the sound of her voice. At last he distinguished her whispering to one of her companions behind the thicket from whence she had thrown the jasamine A Caliph, it must be owned, is a fine thing to see, but my little Gulchenrouz is much more amiable; one lock of his hair is of more value to me than the richest embroidery of the Indies. I had rather that his teeth should mischievously press my finger, than the richest ring of the imperial treasure. Where have you left him, Sutlememe? and why is he now not here? The agitated Caliph still wished to hear more, but she immediately retired with all her attendants. The fond monarch pursued her with his eyes till she was gone out of sight, and then continued like a bewildered and benighted traveller, from whom the clouds had obscured the constellation that guided his way. The curtain of night seemed dropped before himeverything appeared discoloured.

The falling waters filled his soul with dejection, and his tears trickled down the jasamines he had caught from Nouronihar, and placed in his inflamed bosom. He snatched up a shining pebble to remind him of the scene where he felt the first tumults of love. Two hours were elapsed, and evening drew on before he could resolve to depart from the place. He often, but in vain, attempted to go a soft languor enervated the powers of his mind. Extending himself on the brink of the stream, he turned his eyes towards the blue summits of the mountain, and exclaimed What concealest thou behind thee? what is passing in thy solitudes? Whither is she gone? O heaven! perhaps she is now wandering in the grottoes with her happy Gulchenrouz! In the mean time the damps began to descend, and the emir, solicitous for the health of the Caliph, ordered the imperial litter to be brought. Vathek, absorbed in his reveries, was imperceptibly removed and conveyed back to the saloon that received him the evening before. But let us leave the Caliph immersed in his new passion, and attend Nouronihar beyond the rocks, where she had again joined her beloved Gulchenrouz. This Gulchenrouz was the son of Ali Hassan, brother to the emir, and the most delicate and lovely creature in the world. Ali Hassan, who had been absent ten years on a voyage to the unknown seas, committed at his departure this child, the only survivor of many, to the care and protection of his brother. Gulchenrouz could write in various characters with precision, and paint upon vellum the most elegant arabesques that fancy could devise. His sweet voice accompanied the lute in the most enchanting manner; and when he sung the loves of Megnoun and Leileh, or some unfortunate lovers of ancient days, tears insensibly overflowed the cheeks of his auditors. The verses he composed (for like Megnoun, he too was a poet) inspired that unresisting languor so frequently fatal to the female heart. The women all doated upon him, for though he had passed his thirteenth year, they still detained him in the harem. His dancing was light as the gossamer waved by the zephyrs of spring; but his arms which twined so gracefully with those of the young girls in the dance, could neither dart the lance in the chase, nor curb the steeds that pastured his uncles domains. The bow, however, he drew with a certain aim, and would have excelled his competitors in the race, could he have broken the ties that bound him to Nouronihar. The two brothers had mutually engaged their children to each other; and Nouronihar loved her cousin more than her eyes. Both had the same tastes and amusements; the same long languishing looks; the same tresses; the same fair complexions; and when Gulchenrouz appeared in the dress of his cousin, he seemed to be more feminine than even herself. If at any time he left the harem to visit Fakreddin, it was with all the bashfulness of a fawn that consciously ventures from the lair of its dam; he was however wanton enough to mock the solemn old greybeards to whom he was subject, though sure to be rated without mercy in return. Whenever this happened, he would plunge into the recesses of the harem, and sobbing take refuge in the arms of Nouronihar, who loved even his faults beyond the virtues of others. It fell out this evening that after leaving the Caliph in the meadow, she ran with Gulchenrouz over the green sward of the mountain that sheltered the vale, where Fakreddin had chosen to reside. The sun was dilated on the edge of the horizon; and the young people, whose fancies were lively and inventive, imagined they beheld in the gorgeous clouds of the west the domes of Shadukiam and Ambreabad, where the Peries have fixed their abode. Nouronihar, sitting on the slope of the hill, supported on her knees the perfumed head of Gulchenrouz. The air was calm, and no sound stirred but the voices of other young girls who were drawing cool water from the streams below. The unexpected arrival of the Caliph, and the splendour that marked his appearance, had already filled with emotion the ardent soul of Nouronihar. Her vanity irresistibly prompted her to pique the princes attention, and this she before took good care to effect whilst he picked up the jasamine she had thrown upon him. But when Gulchenrouz asked after the flowers he had culled for her bosom, Nouronihar was all in confusion. She hastily kissed his forehead, arose in a flutter, and walked with unequal steps on the border of the precipice. Night advanced, and the pure gold of the setting sun had yielded to a sanguine red, the glow of which, like the reflection of a burning furnace, flushed Nouronihars animated countenance. Gulchenrouz alarmed at the agitation of his cousin, said to her with a supplicating accent Let us be gone; the sky looks portentious the tamarisks tremble more than common; and the raw wind chills my very heart. Come, let us be gone, tis a melancholy night. Then taking hold of her hand he drew it towards the path he besought her to go. Nouronihar unconsciously followed the attraction, for a thousand strange imaginations occupied her spirit. She passed the large round of honeysuckles, her favourite resort, without ever vouchsafing it a glance, yet Gulchenrouz could not help snatching off a few shoots in his way, though he ran as if a wild beast were behind. The young females seeing him approach in such haste, and according to custom expecting a dance, instantly assembled in a circle and took each other by the hand, but Gulchenrouz coming up out of breath, fell down at once on the grass. This accident struck with consternation the whole of this frolicsome party, whilst Nouronihar, half distracted, and overcome both by the violence of her exercise and the tumult of her thoughts, sunk feebly down at his side, cherished his cold hands in her bosom, and chafed his temples with a fragrant unguent. At length he came to himself, and wrapping up his head in the robe of his cousin, entreated that she would not return to the harem. He was afraid of being snapped at by Shaban his tutor, a wrinkled old eunuch of a surly disposition, for having interrupted the stated walk of Nouronihar, he dreaded lest the churl should take it amiss. The whole of this sprightly group, sitting round upon a mossy knole, began to entertain themselves with various pastimes, whilst their superintendents the eunuchs were gravely conversing at a distance. The nurse of the emirs daughter observing her pupil sit ruminating with her eyes on the ground, endeavoured to amuse her with diverting tales, to which Gulchenrouz, who had already forgotten his inquietudes, listened with a breathless attention. He laughed; he clapped his hands; and passed a hundred little tricks on the whole of the company, without omitting the eunuchs, whom he provoked to run after him, in spite of their age and decrepitude. During these occurrences the moon arose, the wind subsided, and the evening became so serene and inviting that a resolution was taken to sup on the spot. Sutlememe, who excelled in dressing a salad, having filled large bowls of porcelain with eggs of small birds, curds turned with citron juice, slices of cucumber, and the inmost leaves of delicate herbs, handed it round from one to another, and gave each their shares in a large spoon of cocknos. Gulchenrouz nestling as usual in the bosom of Nouronihar, pouted out his vermillion little lips against the offer of Sutlememe, and would take it only from the hand of his cousin, on whose mouth he hung like a bee inebriated with the quintessence of flowers. One of the eunuchs ran to fetch melons, whilst others were employed in showering down almonds from the branches that overhung this amiable party. In the midst of this festive scene there appeared a light on the top of the highest mountain, which attracted the notice of every eye. This light was not less bright than the moon when at full, and might have been taken for her had it not been that the moon was already risen. The phenomenon occasioned a general surprise, and no one could conjecture the cause. It could not be a fire, for the light was clear and bluish; nor had meteors ever been seen of that magnitude or splendour. This strange light faded for a moment, and immediately renewed its brightness. It first appeared motionless at the foot of the rock, whence it darted in an instant to sparkle in a thicket of palm trees, from thence it glided along the torrent, and at last fixed in a glen that was narrow and dark. The moment it had taken its direction, Gulchenrouz, whose heart always trembled at any thing sudden or rare, drew Nouronihar by the robe, and anxiously requested her to return to the harem. The women were importunate in seconding the entreaty, but the curiosity of the emirs daughter prevailed. She not only refused to go back, but resolved at all hazards to pursue the appearance. Whilst they were debating what was best to be done, the light shot forth so dazzling a blaze that they all fled away shrieking. Nouronihar followed them a few steps, but coming to the turn of a little bye path stopped, and went back alone. As she ran with an alertness peculiar to herself, it was not long before she came to the place where they had just been supping. The globe of fire now appeared stationary in the glen, and burned in majestic stillness. Nouronihar compressing her hands upon her bosom, hesitated for some moments to advance. The solitude of her situation was new; the silence of the night awful; and every object inspired sensations which till then she never had felt. The affright of Gulchenrouz recurred to her mind; and she a thousand times turned to go back, but this luminous appearance was always before her. Urged on by an irresistible impulse, she continued to approach it in defiance of every obstacle that opposed her progress. At length she arrived at the opening of the glen, but instead of coming up to the light, she found herself surrounded by darkness, except that at a considerable distance a faint spark glimmered by fits. She stopped a second time the sound of waterfalls mingling their murmurs, the hollow rustlings amongst the palm branches, and the funereal screams of the birds from their rifted trunks, all conspired to fill her with terror. She imagined every moment that she trod on some venomous reptile. All the stories of malignant Dives, and dismal Goules thronged into her memory, but her curiosity was notwithstanding more predominant than her fears. She therefore firmly entered a winding track that led towards the spark, but being a stranger to the path, she had not gone far till she began to repent of her rashness. Alas! said she, that I were but in those secure and illuminated apartments where my evenings glided on with Gulchenrouz! Dear child, how would thy heart flutter with terror wert thou wandering in these wild solitudes like me. At the close of this apostrophe she regained her road, and coming to steps hewn out in the rock ascended them undismayed. The light, which was now gradually enlarging, appeared above her on the summit of the mountain. At length she distinguished a plaintive and melodious union of voices proceeding from a sort of cavern, that resembled the dirges which are sung over tombs. A sound likewise like that which arises from the filling of baths, at the same time struck her ear. She continued ascending, and discovered large wax torches in full blaze planted here and there in the fissures of the rock. This preparation filled her with fear, whilst the subtle and potent odour which the torches exhaled caused her to sink almost lifeless at the entrance of the grot. Casting her eyes within in this kind of trance, she beheld a large cistern of gold filled with a water, whose vapour distilled on her face a dew of the essence of roses. A soft symphony resounded through the grot. On the sides of the cistern she noticed appendages of royalty; diadems and feathers of the heron, all sparkling with carbuncles. Whilst her attention was fixed on this display of magnificence, the music ceased, and a voice instantly demanded For what monarch were these torches kindled, this bath prepared, and these habiliments? which belong not only to the sovereigns of the earth, but even to the talismanic powers! To which a second voice answered They are for the charming daughter of the emir Fakreddin. What, replied the first, for that trifler who consumes her time with a giddy child, immersed in softness, and who at best can make but an enervated husband? And can she, rejoined the other voice, be amused with such empty trifles, whilst the Caliph, the sovereign of the world, he who is destined to enjoy the treasures of the preadimite sultans, a prince six feet high, and whose eyes pervade the inmost soul of a female, is inflamed with the love of her? no, she will be wise enough to answer that passion alone that can aggrandize her glory. No doubt she will, and despise the puppet of her fancy; then all the riches this place contains, as well as the carbuncle of Giamschid shall be hers. You judge right, returned the first voice, and I haste to Istakar to prepare the palace of subterranean fire for the reception of the bridal pair. The voices ceased, the torches were extinguished, the most entire darkness succeeded, and Nouronihar recovering with a start, found herself reclined on a sofa in the harem of her father. She clapped her hands, and immediately came together Gulchenrouz and her women, who, in despair at having lost her, had despatched eunuchs to seek her in every direction. Shaban appeared with the rest, and began to reprimand her with an air of consequence Little impertinent, said he, whence got you false keys? or are you beloved of some genius that hath given you a picklock? I will try the extent of your power; come, to your chamber! through the two skylights, and expect not the company of Gulchenrouz. Be expeditious! I will shut you up in the double tower. At these menaces Nouronihar indignantly raised her head, opened on Shaban her black eyes, which since the important dialogue of the enchanted grot were considerably enlarged, and said Go, speak thus to slaves! but learn to reverence her who is born to give laws, and subject all to her power. She was proceeding in the same style, but was interrupted by a sudden exclamation of, The Caliph! the Caliph! The curtains at once were thrown open, and the slaves prostrate in double rows, whilst poor little Gulchenrouz hid himself beneath the elevation of a sofa. At first appeared a file of black eunuchs trailing after them long trains of muslin embroidered with gold, and holding in their hands censers, which dispensed as they passed the grateful perfume of the wood of aloes. Next marched Bababalouk with a solemn strut, and tossing his head as not over pleased at the visit. Vathek came close after superbly robed; his gait was unembarrassed and noble, and his presence would have engaged admiration, though he had not been the sovereign of the world. He approached Nouronihar with a throbbing heart, and seemed enraptured at the full effulgence of her radiant eyes, of which he had before caught but a few glimpses; but she instantly depressed them, and her confusion augmented her beauty. Bababalouk, who was a thorough adept in coincidences of this nature, and knew that the worst game should be played with the best face, immediately made a signal for all to retire, and no sooner did he perceive beneath the sofa the little ones feet, than he drew him forth without ceremony, set him upon his shoulders, and lavished on him as he went off a thousand odious caresses. Gulchenrouz cried out, and resisted till his cheeks became the colour of the blossom of the pomegranite, and the tears that started into his eyes shot forth a gleam of indignation. He cast a significant glance at Nouronihar, which the Caliph noticing, asked Is that then your Gulchenrouz? Sovereign of the world, answered she, spare my cousin, whose innocence and gentleness deserve not your anger! Take comfort, said Vathek with a smile, he is in good hands. Bababalouk is fond of children, and never goes without sweetmeats and comfits. The daughter of Fakreddin was abashed; and suffered Gulchenrouz to be borne away without adding a word. The tumult of her bosom betrayed her confusion; and Vathek becoming still more impassioned, gave a loose to his frenzy, which had only not subdued the last faint strugglings of reluctance, when the emir suddenly bursting in, threw his face upon the ground at the feet of the Caliph, and said Commander of the faithful, abase not yourself to the meanness of your slave. No, emir, replied Vathek, I raise her to an equality with myself; I declare her my wife; and the glory of your race shall extend from one generation to another. Alas! my lord, said Fakreddin, as he plucked off the honours of his beard, cut short the days of your faithful servant rather than force him to depart from his word. Nouronihar, as her hands evince, is solemnly promised to Gulchenrouz, the son of my bother, Ali Hassan; they are united also in heart; their faith is mutually plighted; and affiances so sacred cannot be broken. What, then, replied the Caliph bluntly, would you surrender this divine beauty to a husband more womanish than herself? And can you imagine that I will suffer her charms to decay in hands so inefficient and nerveless? No! she is destined to live out her life within my embraces such is my will retire, and disturb not the night I devote to the homage of her charms. The irritated emir drew forth his sabre, presented it to Vathek, and stretching out his neck, said in a firm tone of voice Strike your unhappy host my lord! he has lived long enough, since he hath seen the prophets vicegerent violate the rights of hospitality. At his uttering these words, Nouronihar unable to support any longer the conflict of her passions, sunk down in a swoon. Vathek, both terrified for her life, and furious at an opposition to his will, bade Fakreddin assist his daughter, and withdrew, darting his terrible look at the unfortunate emir, who suddenly fell backward bathed in a sweat, cold as the damp of death. Gulchenrouz, who had escaped from the hands of Bababalouk, and was that instant returned, called out for help as loudly as he could, not having strength to afford it himself. Pale and panting, the poor child attempted to revive Nouronihar by caresses, and it happened that the thrilling warmth of his lips restored her to life. Fakreddin beginning also to recover from the look of the Caliph, with difficulty tottered to a seat, and after warily casting round his eye to see if this dangerous prince were gone, sent for Shaban and Sutlememe, and said to them apart My friends, violent evils require as violent remedies; the Caliph has brought desolation and horror into my family, and how shall we resist his power? Another of his looks will send me to my grave. Fetch then that narcotic powder which the Dervise brought me from Aracan. A dose of it, the effect of which will continue three days, must be administered to each of these children. The Caliph will believe them to be dead, for they will have all the appearance of death. We shall go as if to inter them in the cave of Meimoune, at the entrance of the great desert of sand, and near the cabin of my dwarfs. When all the spectators shall be withdrawn, you, Shaban, and four select eunuchs shall convey them to the lake, where provision shall be ready to support them a month; for, one day allotted to the surprise this event will occasion, five to the tears, a fortnight to reflection, and the rest to prepare for renewing his progress, will, according to my calculation, fill up the whole time that Vathek will tarry, and I shall then be freed from his intrusion. Your plan, said Sutlememe, is a good one, if it can but be effected. I have remarked that Nouronihar is well able to support the glances of the Caliph, and that he is far from being sparing of them to her; be assured therefore, notwithstanding her fondness for Gulchenrouz, she will never remain quiet while she knows him to be here, unless we can persuade her that both herself and Gulchenrouz are really dead, and that they were conveyed to those rocks for a limited season to expiate the little faults of which their love was the cause. We will add that we killed ourselves in despair, and that your dwarfs whom they never yet saw will preach to them delectable sermons. I will engage that every thing shall succeed to the bent of your wishes. Be it so, said Fakreddin; I approve your proposal; let us lose not a moment to give it effect. They forthwith hastened to seek for the powder, which being mixed in a sherbet was immediately drunk by Gulchenrouz and Nouronihar. Within the space of an hour both were seized with violent palpitations, and a general numbness gradually ensued. They arose from the floor, where they had remained ever since the Caliphs departure, and ascending to the sofa, reclined themselves at full length upon it, clasped in each others embraces. Cherish me, my dear Nouronihar, said Gulchenrouz; put thy hand upon my heart, for it feels as if it were frozen. Alas! thou art as cold as myself! hath the Caliph murdered us both with his terrible look? I am dying, cried she in a faltering voice; press me closer, I am ready to expire! Let us die then together, answered the little Gulchenrouz, whilst his breast laboured with a convulsive sigh; let me at least breathe forth my soul on thy lips. They spoke no more, and became as dead. Immediately the most piercing cries were heard through the harem, whilst Shaban and Sutlememe personated with great adroitness the parts of persons in despair. The emir, who was sufficiently mortified to be forced into such untoward expedients, and had now for the first time made a trial of his powder, was under no necessity of counterfeiting grief. The slaves, who had flocked together from all quarters, stood motionless at the spectacle before them. All lights were extinguished save two lamps, which shed a wan glimmering over the faces of these lovely flowers, that seemed to be faded in the springtime of life. Funeral vestments were prepared; their bodies were washed with rose water; their beautiful tresses were braided and incensed; and they were wrapped in symars whiter than alabaster. At the moment that their attendants were placing two wreaths of their favourite jasamines on their brows, the Caliph, who had just heard the tragical catastrophe, arrived. He looked not less pale and haggard than the goules that wander at night among graves. Forgetful of himself and every one else, he broke through the midst of the slaves, fell prostrate at the foot of the sofa, beat his bosom, called himself atrocious murderer, and invoked upon his head a thousand imprecations. With a trembling hand he raised the veil that covered the countenance of Nouronihar, and uttering a loud shriek fell lifeless on the floor. The chief of the eunuchs dragged him off with horrible grimaces, and repeated as he went Aye, I foresaw she would play you some ungracious turn. No sooner was the Caliph gone than the emir commanded biers to be brought, and forbade that any one should enter the harem. Every window was fastened; all instruments of music were broken; and the Imams began to recite their prayers. Towards the close of this melancholy day Vathek sobbed in silence, for they had been forced to compose with anodynes his convulsions of rage and desperation. At the dawn of the succeeding morning the wide folding doors of the palace were set open, and the funeral procession moved forward for the mountain. The wailful cries of La Ilah illa Alla, reached to the Caliph, who was eager to cicatrize himself and attend the ceremonial; nor could he have been dissuaded, had not his excessive weakness disabled him from walking. At the few first steps he fell on the ground, and his people were obliged to lay him on a bed, where he remained many days in such a state of insensibility as excited compassion in the emir himself. When the procession was arrived at the grot of Meimoune, Shaban and Sutlememe dismissed the whole of the train excepting the four confidential eunuchs who were appointed to remain. After resting some moments near the biers which had been left in the open air, they caused them to be carried to the brink of a small lake whose banks were overgrown with a hoary moss. This was the great resort of herons and storks, which preyed continually on little blue fishes. The dwarfs, instructed by the emir, soon repaired thither, and with the help of the eunuchs began to construct cabins of rushes and reeds, a work in which they had admirable skill. A magazine also was contrived for provisions, with a small oratory for themselves, and a pyramid of wood neatly piled, to furnish the necessary fuel, for the air was bleak in the hollows of the mountains. At evening two fires were kindled on the brink of the lake, and the two lovely bodies taken from their biers were carefully deposited upon a bed of dried leaves within the same cabin. The dwarfs began to recite the koran with their clear shrill voices, and Shaban and Sutlememe stood at some distance anxiously waiting the effects of the powder. At length Nouronihar and Gulchenrouz faintly stretched out their arms, and gradually opening their eyes began to survey with looks of increasing amazement every object around them. They even attempted to rise, but for want of strength fell back again. Sutlememe on this administered a cordial which the emir had taken care to provide. Gulchenrouz thoroughly aroused sneezed out aloud, and raising himself with an effort that expressed his surprise, left the cabin, and inhaled the fresh air with the greatest avidity. Yes, said he, I breathe again! again do I exist! I hear sounds! I behold a firmament spangled over with stars! Nouronihar catching these beloved accents extricated herself from the leaves, and ran to clasp Gulchenrouz to her bosom. The first objects she remarked were their long symars, their garlands of flowers, and their naked feet she hid her face in her hands to reflect. The vision of the enchanted bath, the despair of her father, and more vividly than both, the majestic figure of Vathek recurred to her memory. She recollected also, that herself and Gulchenrouz had been sick and dying; but all these images bewildered her mind. Not knowing where she was, she turned her eyes on all sides, as if to recognise the surrounding scene. This singular lake, those flames reflected from its glassy surface, the pale hues of its banks, the romantic cabins, the bullrushes that sadly waved their drooping heads, the storks whose melancholy cries blended with the shrill voices of the dwarfs, every thing conspired to persuade them that the angel of death had opened the portal of some other world. Gulchenrouz on his part, lost in wonder, clung to the neck of his cousin. He believed himself in the region of phantoms, and was terrified at the silence she preserved. At length addressing her Speak, said he; where are we! do you not see those spectres that are stirring the burning coals? Are they the Monker and Nakir, come to throw us into them? Does the fatal bridge cross this lake, whose solemn stillness perhaps conceals from us an abyss, in which for whole ages we shall be doomed incessantly to sink? No my children, said Sutlememe going towards them; take comfort, the exterminating angel who conducted our souls hither after yours, hath assured us that the chastisement of your indolent and voluptuous life shall be restricted to a certain series of years, which you must pass in this dreary abode, where the sun is scarcely visible, and where the soil yields neither fruits nor flowers. These, continued she, pointing to the dwarfs, will provide for our wants; for souls so mundane as ours retain too strong a tincture of their earthly extraction. Instead of meats, your food will be nothing but rice, and your bread shall be moistened in the fogs that brood over the surface of the lake. At this desolating prospect the poor children burst into tears, and prostrated themselves before the dwarfs, who perfectly supported their characters, and delivered an excellent discourse of a customary length upon the sacred camel, which after a thousand years was to convey them to the paradise of the faithful. The sermon being ended and ablutions performed, they praised Alla and the prophet, supped very indifferently, and retired to their withered leaves. Nouronihar and her little cousin consoled themselves on finding that, though dead, they yet lay in one cabin. Having slept well before, the remainder of the night was spent in conversation on what had befallen them; and both, from a dread of apparitions, betook themselves for protection to one anothers arms. In the morning, which was lowering and rainy, the dwarfs mounted high poles like minarets, and called them to prayers. The whole congregation, which consisted of Sutlememe, Shaban, the four eunuchs, and some storks, were already assembled. The two children came forth from their cabin with a slow and dejected pace. As their minds were in a tender and melancholy mood, their devotions were performed with fervour. No sooner were they finished than Gulchenrouz demanded of Sutlememe and the rest, how they happened to die so opportunely for his cousin and himself. We killed ourselves, returned Sutlememe, in despair at your death. On this, said Nouronihar, who notwithstanding what was past, had not yet forgotten her vision And the Caliph, is he also dead of his grief? and will he likewise come hither? The dwarfs, who were prepared with an answer, most demurely replied Vathek is damned beyond all redemption! I readily believe so, said Gulchenrouz; and am glad from my heart to hear it, for I am convinced it was his horrible look that sent us hither, to listen to sermons and mess upon rice. One week passed away on the side of the lake unmarked by any variety; Nouronihar ruminating on the grandeur of which death had deprived her, and Gulchenrouz applying to prayers and to panniers along with the dwarfs, who infinitely pleased him. Whilst this scene of innocence was exhibiting in the mountains, the Caliph presented himself to the emir in a new light. The instant he recovered the use of his senses, with a voice that made Bababalouk quake, he thundered out Perfidious Giaour! I renounce thee for ever! it is thou who hast slain my beloved Nouronihar! and I supplicate the pardon of Mahomet, who would have preserved her to me had I been more wise. Let water be brought to perform my ablutions, and let the pious Fakreddin be called to offer up his prayers with mine, and reconcile me to him. Afterwards we will go together and visit the sepulchre of the unfortunate Nouronihar. I am resolved to become a hermit, and consume the residue of my days on this mountain, in hope of expiating my crimes. Nouronihar was not altogether so content, for though she felt a fondness for Gulchenrouz, who to augment the attachment, had been left at full liberty with her, yet she still regarded him as but a bauble that bore no competition with the carbuncle of Giamschid. At times she indulged doubts on the mode of her being, and scarcely could believe that the dead had all the wants and the whims of the living. To gain satisfaction, however, on so perplexing a topic, she arose one morning whilst all were asleep with a breathless caution from the side of Gulchenrouz, and after having given him a soft kiss, began to follow the windings of the lake till it terminated with a rock whose top was accessible though lofty. This she clambered up with considerable toil, and having reached the summit, set forward in a run like a doe that unwittingly follows her hunter.

Though she skipped along with the alertness of an antelope, yet at intervals she was forced to desist, and rest beneath the tamarisks to recover her breath. Whilst she, thus reclined, was occupied with her little reflections on the apprehension that she had some knowledge of the place, Vathek, who finding himself that morning but ill at ease, had gone forth before the dawn, presented himself on a sudden to her view. Motionless with surprise, he durst not approach the figure before him, which lay shrouded up in a symar extended on the ground, trembling and pale, but yet lovely to behold. At length Nouronihar, with a mixture of pleasure and affliction, raising her fine eyes to him, said My lord, are you come hither to eat rice and hear sermons with me? Beloved phantom! cried Vathek, dost thou speak? hast thou the same graceful form? the same radiant features? art thou palpable likewise? and eagerly embracing her he added, here are limbs and a bosom animated with a gentle warmth! what can such a prodigy mean? Nouronihar with diffidence answered You know my lord that I died on the night you honoured me with your visit; my cousin maintains it was from one of your glances, but I cannot believe him, for to me they seem not so dreadful. Gulchenrouz died with me, and we were both brought into a region of desolation, where we are fed with a wretched diet. If you be dead also, and are come hither to join us, I pity your lot, for you will be stunned with the clang of the dwarfs and the storks. Besides, it is mortifying in the extreme that you as well as myself should have lost the treasures of the subterranean palace. At the mention of the subterranean palace, the Caliph suspended his caresses, which indeed had proceeded pretty far, to seek from Nouronihar an explanation of her meaning. She then recapitulated her visionwhat immediately followedand the history of her pretended death; adding also a description of the palace of expiation from whence she had fled; and all in a manner that would have extorted his laughter, had not the thoughts of Vathek been too deeply engaged. No sooner, however, had she ended, than he again clasped her to his bosom, and said Light of my eyes! the mystery is unravelled; we both are alive! Your father is a cheat, who for the sake of dividing hath deluded us both; and the Giaour, whose design, as far as I can discover, is that we shall proceed together, seems scarce a whit better. It shall be some time at least before he find us in his palace of fire. Your lovely little person in my estimation is far more precious than all the treasures of the preadimite sultans, and I wish to possess it at pleasure, and in open day for many a moon, before I go to burrow under ground like a mole. Forget this little trifler Gulchenrouz, and Ah, my lord, interposed Nouronihar, let me entreat that you do him no evil. No, no, replied Vathek, I have already bid you forbear to alarm yourself for him. He has been brought up too much on milk and sugar to stimulate my jealousy. We will leave him with the dwarfs, who by the bye are my old acquaintances; their company will suit him far better than yours. As to other matters, I will return no more to your fathers. I want not to have my ears dinned by him and his dotards with the violation of the rights of hospitality; as if it were less an honour for you to espouse the sovereign of the world, than a girl dressed up like a boy. Nouronihar could find nothing to oppose in a discourse so eloquent. She only wished the amorous monarch had discovered more ardour for the carbuncle of Giamschid; but flattered herself it would gradually increase, and therefore yielded to his will with the most bewitching submission. When the Caliph judged it proper he called for Bababalouk, who was asleep in the cave of Meimoune, and dreaming that the phantom of Nouronihar having mounted him once more on her swing, had just given him such a jerk that he one moment soared above the mountains, and the next sunk into the abyss. Starting from his sleep at the voice of his master, he ran gasping for breath, and had nearly fallen backward at the sight, as he believed, of the spectre, by whom he had so lately been haunted in his dream. Ah my lord, cried he, recoiling ten steps, and covering his eyes with both hands, do you then perform the office of a goule? Tis true you have dug up the dead, yet hope not to make her your prey; for after all she hath caused me to suffer, she is even wicked enough to prey upon you. Cease thy folly, said Vathek, and thou shalt soon be convinced that it is Nouronihar herself, alive and well, whom I clasp to my breast. Go only, and pitch my tents in the neighbouring valley. There will I fix my abode with this beautiful tulip, whose colours I soon shall restore. There exert thy best endeavours to procure whatever can augment the enjoyments of life, till I shall disclose to thee more of my will. The news of so unlucky an event soon reached the ears of the emir, who abandoned himself to grief and despair, and began, as did all his old greybeards, to begrime his visage with ashes. A total supineness ensued; travellers were no longer entertained, no more plasters were spread, and instead of the charitable activity that had distinguished this asylum, the whole of its inhabitants exhibited only faces of a half cubit long, and uttered groans that accorded with their forlorn situation. Though Fakreddin bewailed his daughter as lost to him for ever, yet Gulchenrouz was not forgotten. He despatched immediate instruction to Sutlememe, Shaban, and the dwarfs, enjoining them not to undeceive the child in respect to his state, but under some pretence to convey him far from the lofty rock at the extremity of the lake, to a place which he should appoint, as safer from danger; for he suspected that Vathek intended him evil. Gulchenrouz in the mean while was filled with amazement at not finding his cousin; nor were the dwarfs at all less surprised; but Sutlememe, who had more penetration, immediately guessed what had happened. Gulchenrouz was amused with the delusive hope of once more embracing Nouronihar in the interior recesses of the mountains, where the ground, strewed over with orange blossoms and jasamines, offered beds much more inviting than the withered leaves in their cabin, where they might accompany with their voices the sounds of their lutes, and chase butterflies in concert. Sutlememe was far gone in this sort of description when one of the four eunuchs beckoned her aside to apprise her of the arrival of a messenger from their fraternity, who had explained the secret of the flight of Nouronihar, and brought the commands of the emir. A council with Shaban and the dwarfs was immediately held. Their baggage being stowed in consequence of it, they embarked in a shallop and quietly sailed with the little one, who acquiesced in all their proposals. Their voyage proceeded in the same manner, till they came to the place where the lake sinks beneath the hollow of the rock, but as soon as the bark had entered it, and Gulchenrouz found himself surrounded with darkness, he was seized with a dreadful consternation, and incessantly uttered the most piercing outcries; for he now was persuaded he should actually be damned for having taken too many little freedoms in his lifetime with his cousin. But let us return to the Caliph, and her who ruled over his heart. Bababalouk had pitched the tents, and closed up the extremities of the valley with magnificent screens of India cloth, which were guarded by Ethiopian slaves with their drawn sabres. To preserve the verdure of this beautiful enclosure in its natural freshness, the white eunuchs went continually round it with their red water vessels. The waving of fans was heard near the imperial pavilion, where by the voluptuous light that glowed through the muslins, the Caliph enjoyed at full view all the attractions of Nouronihar. Inebriated with delight, he was all ear to her charming voice which accompanied the lute; while she was not less captivated with his descriptions of Samarah and the tower full of wonders, but especially with his relation of the adventure of the ball, and the chasm of the Giaour with its ebony portal. In this manner they conversed for a day and a night; they bathed together in a basin of black marble, which admirably relieved the fairness of Nouronihar. Bababalouk, whose good graces this beauty had regained, spared no attention that their repasts might be served up with the minutest exactness some exquisite rariety was ever placed before them; and he sent even to Schiraz for that fragrant and delicious wine which had been hoarded up in bottles prior to the birth of Mahomet. He had excavated little ovens in the rock to bake the nice manchets which were prepared by the hands of Nouronihar, from whence they had derived a flavour so grateful to Vathek, that he regarded the ragouts of his other wives as entirely maukish; whilst they would have died at the emirs of chagrin at finding themselves so neglected, if Fakreddin, notwithstanding his resentment, had not taken pity upon them. The sultana Dilara, who till then had been the favourite, took this dereliction of the Caliph to heart with a vehemence natural to her character; for during her continuance in favour she had imbibed from Vathek many of his extravagant fancies, and was fired with impatience to behold the superb tombs of Istakar, and the palace of forty columns; besides, having been brought up amongst the magi, she had fondly cherished the idea of the Caliphs devoting himself to the worship of fire; thus his voluptuous and desultory life with her rival was to her a double source of affliction. The transient piety of Vathek had occasioned her some serious alarms, but the present was an evil of far greater magnitude. She resolved therefore without hesitation to write to Carathis, and acquaint her that all things went ill; that they had eaten, slept, and revelled at an old emirs, whose sanctity was very formidable, and that after all the prospect of possessing the treasures of the preadimite sultans was no less remote than before. This letter was entrusted to the care of two woodmen who were at work on one of the great forests of the mountains, and being acquainted with the shortest cuts, arrived in ten days at Samarah. The princess Carathis was engaged at chess with Morakanabad, when the arrival of these woodfellers was announced. She, after some weeks of Vatheks absence, had forsaken the upper regions of her tower, because everything appeared in confusion among the stars, whom she consulted relative to the fate of her son. In vain did she renew her fumigations, and extend herself on the roof to obtain mystic visions, nothing more could she see in her dreams than pieces of brocade, nosegays of flowers, and other unmeaning gewgaws. These disappointments had thrown her into a state of dejection which no drug in her power was sufficient to remove. Her only resource was in Morakanabad, who was a good man, and endowed with a decent share of confidence, yet whilst in her company he never thought himself on roses. No person knew aught of Vathek, and a thousand ridiculous stories were propagated at his expense. The eagerness of Carathis may be easily guessed at receiving the letter, as well as her rage at reading the dissolute conduct of her son. Is it so, said she; either I will perish, or Vathek shall enter the palace of fire. Let me expire in flames, provided he may reign on the throne of Soliman! Having said this, and whirled herself round in a magical manner, which struck Morakanabad with such terror as caused him to recoil, she ordered her great camel Alboufaki to be brought, and the hideous Nerkes with the unrelenting Cafour to attend. I require no other retinue, said she to Morakanabad I am going on affairs of emergency, a truce therefore to parade! Take you care of the people, fleece them well in my absence, for we shall expend large sums, and one knows not what may betide. The night was uncommonly dark, and a pestilential blast ravaged the plain of Catoul that would have deterred any other traveller however urgent the call; but Carathis enjoyed most whatever filled others with dread. Nerkes concurred in opinion with her, and Cafour had a particular predilection for a pestilence. In the morning this accomplished caravan, with the woodfellers who directed their route, halted on the edge of an extensive marsh, from whence so noxious a vapour arose as would have destroyed any animal but Alboufaki, who naturally inhaled these malignant fogs. The peasants entreated their convoy not to sleep in this place. To sleep, cried Carathis, what an excellent thought! I never sleep but for visions; and as to my attendants, their occupations are too many to close the only eye they each have. The poor peasants, who were not over pleased with their party, remained openmouthed with surprise. Carathis alighted as well as her negresses, and severally stripping off their outer garments, they all ran in their drawers to cull from those spots where the sun shone fiercest, the venomous plants that grew on the marsh. This provision was made for the family of the emir, and whoever might retard the expedition to Istakar. The woodmen were overcome with fear when they beheld these three horrible phantoms run, and not much relishing the company of Alboufaki, stood aghast at the command of Carathis to set forward, notwithstanding it was noon, and the heat fierce enough to calcine even rocks. In spite, however, of every remonstrance, they were forced implicitly to submit. Alboufaki, who delighted in solitude, constantly snorted whenever he perceived himself near a habitation, and Carathis, who was apt to spoil him with indulgence, as constantly turned him aside; so that the peasants were precluded from procuring subsistence; for the milch goats and ewes which Providence had sent towards the district they traversed, to refresh travellers with their milk, all fled at the sight of the hideous animal and his strange riders. As to Carathis, she needed no common aliment; for her invention had previously furnished her with an opiate to stay her stomach, some of which she imparted to her mutes. At the fall of night Alboufaki making a sudden stop, stamped with his foot, which to Carathis, who understood his paces, was a certain indication that she was near the confines of some cemetery. The moon shed a bright light on the spot, which served to discover a long wall with a large door in it standing ajar, and so high that Alboufaki might easily enter. The miserable guides, who perceived their end approaching, humbly implored Carathis, as she had now so good an opportunity, to inter them, and immediately gave up the ghost. Nerkes and Cafour, whose wit was of a style peculiar to themselves, were by no means parsimonious of it on the folly of these poor people, nor could any thing have been found more suited to their taste than the site of the burying ground, and the sepulchres which its precincts contained. There were at least two thousand of them on the declivity of a hill; some in the form of pyramids, others like columns, and in short the variety of their shapes was endless. Carathis was too much immersed in her sublime contemplations to stop at the view, charming as it appeared in her eyes. Pondering the advantages that might accrue from her present situation, she could not forbear to exclaim So beautiful a cemetery must be haunted by Gouls, and they want not for intelligence! having heedlessly suffered my guides to expire, I will apply for directions to them, and as an inducement, will invite them to regale on these fresh corpses. After this short soliloquy, she beckoned to Nerkes and Cafour, and made signs with her fingers, as much as to say Go, knock against the sides of the tombs, and strike up your delightful warblings, that are so like to those of the guests whose company I wish to obtain. The negresses, full of joy at the behests of their mistress, and promising themselves much pleasure from the society of the Gouls, went with an air of conquest, and began their knockings at the tombs. As their strokes were repeated, a hollow noise was heard in the earth, the surface hove up into heaps, and the Gouls on all sides protruded their noses to inhale the effluvia which the carcasses of the woodmen began to emit. They assembled before a sarcophagus of white marble, where Carathis was seated between the bodies of her miserable guides. The princess received her visitants with distinguished politeness, and when supper was ended, proceeded with them to business. Having soon learnt from them every thing she wished to discover, it was her intention to set forward forthwith on her journey, but her negresses, who were forming tender connections with the Gouls, importuned her with all their fingers to wait, at least till the dawn. Carathis, however, being chastity in the abstract, and an implacable enemy to love and repose, at once rejected their prayer, mounted Alboufaki, and commanded them to take their seats in a moment. Four days and four nights she continued her route, without turning to the right hand or left; on the fifth she traversed the mountains and halfburnt forests, and arrived on the sixth before the beautiful screens which concealed from all eyes the voluptuous wanderings of her son. It was daybreak, and the guards were snoring on their posts in careless security, when the rough trot of Alboufaki awoke them in consternation. Imagining that a group of spectres ascended from the abyss was approaching, they all without ceremony took to their heels. Vathek was at that instant with Nouronihar in the bath, hearing tales and laughing at Bababalouk who related them; but no sooner did the outcry of his guards reach him, than he flounced from the water like a carp, and as soon threw himself back at the sight of Carathis, who advancing with her negresses upon Alboufaki, broke through the muslin awnings and veils of the pavilion. At this sudden apparition Nouronihar (for she was not at all times free from remorse) fancied that the moment of celestial vengeance was come, and clung about the Caliph in amorous despondence. Carathis, still seated on her camel, foamed with indignation at the spectacle which obtruded itself on her chaste view. She thundered forth without check or mercy Thou doubleheaded and four legged monster! what means all this winding and writhing? art thou not ashamed to be seen grasping this limber sapling, in preference to the sceptre of the preadimite sultans? Is it then for this paltry doxy that thou hast violated the conditions in the parchment of our Giaour? Is it on her thou hast lavished thy precious moments? Is this the fruit of the knowledge I have taught thee? Is this the end of thy journey? Tear thyself from the arms of this little simpleton; drown her in the water before me, and instantly follow my guidance. In the first ebullition of his fury, Vathek resolved to make a skeleton of Alboufaki, and to stuff the skins of Carathis and her blacks; but the ideas of the Giaour, the palace of Istakar, the sabres, and the talismans, flashing before his imagination with the simultaneousness of lightning, he became more moderate, and said to his mother in a civil but decisive tone Dread lady, you shall be obeyed; but I will not drown Nouronihar; she is sweeter to me than a Myrabolan comfit, and is enamoured of carbuncles, especially that of Giamschid, which hath also been promised to be conferred upon her; she therefore shall go along with us, for I intend to repose with her beneath the canopies of Soliman; I can sleep no more without her. Be it so, replied Carathis alighting, and at the same time committing Alboufaki to the charge of her women. Nouronihar, who had not yet quitted her hold, began to take courage, and said with an accent of fondness to the Caliph Dear sovereign of my soul! I will follow thee, if it be thy will beyond the Kaf, in the land of the Afrits. I will not hesitate to climb for thee the nest of the Simurgh, who, this lady excepted, is the most awful of created existences. We have here then, subjoined Carathis, a girl both of courage and science. Nouronihar had certainly both; but notwithstanding all her firmness, she could not help casting back a look of regret upon the graces of her little Gulchenrouz, and the days of tenderness she had participated with him. She even dropped a few tears, which Carathis observed, and inadvertently breathed out with a sigh Alas! my gentle cousin, what will become of him! Vathek at this apostrophe knitted up his brows, and Carathis enquired what it could mean. She is preposterously sighing after a stripling with languishing eyes and soft hair who loves her, said the Caliph. Where is he? asked Carathis. I must be acquainted with this pretty child; for, added she, lowering her voice, I design before I depart to regain the favour of the Giaour. There is nothing so delicious in his estimation as the heart of a delicate boy, palpitating with the first tumults of love. Vathek as he came from the bath commanded Bababalouk to collect the women and other moveables of his harem, embody his troops, and hold himself in readiness to march in three days; whilst Carathis retired alone to a tent, where the Giaour solaced her with encouraging visions; but at length waking, she found at her feet Nerkes and Cafour, who informed her by their signs, that having led Alboufaki to the borders of a lake, to browse on some moss that looked tolerably venomous, they had discovered certain blue fishes of the same kind with those in the reservoir on the top of the tower. Ah, ah, said she, I will go thither to them. These fish are past doubt of a species that by a small operation I can render oracular. They may tell me where this little Gulchenrouz is, whom I am bent upon sacrificing. Having thus spoken, she immediately set out with her swarthy retinue. It being but seldom that time is lost in the accomplishment of a wicked enterprise, Carathis and her negresses soon arrived at the lake, where, after burning the magical drugs with which they were always provided, they, stripping themselves naked, waded to their chins, Nerkes and Cafour waving torches around them, and Carathis pronouncing her barbarous incantations. The fishes with one accord thrust forth their heads from the water, which was violently rippled by the flutter of their fins, and at length finding themselves constrained by the potency of the charm, they opened their piteous mouths, said From gills to tail we are yours; what seek ye to know? Fishes, answered she, I conjure you by your glittering scales, tell me where now is Gulchenrouz? Beyond the rock, replied the shoal in full chorus will this content you? for we do not delight in expanding our mouths. It will, returned the princess I am not to learn that you like not long conversations; I will leave you therefore to repose, though I had other questions to propound. The instant she had spoken the water became smooth, and the fishes at once disappeared. Carathis, inflated with the venom of her projects, strode hastily over the rock, and found the amiable Gulchenrouz asleep in an arbour, whilst the two dwarfs were watching at his side, and ruminating their accustomed prayers. These diminutive personages possessed the gift of divining whenever an enemy to good Mussulmans approached; thus they anticipated the arrival of Carathis, who stopping short, said to herself How placidly doth he recline his lovely little head! how pale and languishing are his looks! it is just the very child of my wishes! The dwarfs interrupted this delectable soliloquy by leaping instantly upon her, and scratching her face with their utmost zeal. But Nerkes and Cafour betaking themselves to the succour of their mistress, pinched the dwarfs so severely in return, that they both gave up the ghost, imploring Mahomet to inflict his sorest vengeance upon this wicked woman and all her household. At the noise which this strange conflict occasioned in the valley, Gulchenrouz awoke, and bewildered with terror sprung impetuously upon an old figtree that rose against the acclivity of the rocks, from thence gained their summits, and ran for two hours without once looking back. At last, exhausted with fatigue, he fell as if dead into the arms of a good old Genius, whose fondness for the company of children had made it his sole occupation to protect them, and who, whilst performing his wonted rounds through the air, happening on the cruel Giaour at the instant of his growling in the horrible chasm, rescued the fifty little victims which the impiety of Vathek had devoted to his maw. These the Genius brought up in nests still higher than the clouds, and himself fixed his abode in a nest more capacious than the rest, from which he had expelled the possessors that had built it. These inviolable asylums were defended against the Dives and the Afrits by waving streamers, on which were inscribed in characters of gold that flashed like lightning, the names of Alla and the prophet. It was there that Gulchenrouz, who as yet remained undeceived with respect to his pretended death, thought himself in the mansions of eternal peace. He admitted without fear the congratulations of his little friends, who were all assembled in the nest of the venerable Genius, and vied with each other in kissing his serene forehead and beautiful eyelids. This he found to be the state congenial to his soulremote from the inquietudes of earththe impertinence of haremsthe brutality of eunuchsand the lubricity of women. In this peaceable society his days, months, and years glided on, nor was he less happy than the rest of his companions, for the Genius, instead of burdening his pupils with perishable riches, and the vain sciences of the world, conferred upon them the boon of perpetual childhood. Carathis, unaccustomed to the loss of her prey, vented a thousand execrations on her negresses for not seizing the child, instead of amusing themselves with pinching to death the dwarfs, from which they could gain no advantage. She returned into the valley murmuring, and finding that her son was not risen from the arms of Nouronihar, discharged her illhumour upon both. The idea, however, of departing next day for Istakar, and cultivating, through the good offices of the Giaour, an intimacy with Eblis himself, at length consoled her chagrin but fate had ordained it otherwise. In the evening, as Carathis was conversing with Dilara, who through her contrivance had become of the party, and whose taste resembled her own, Bababalouk came to acquaint her that the sky towards Samarah looked of a fiery red, and seemed to portend some alarming disaster. Immediately recurring to her astrolabes and instruments of magic, she took the altitude of the planets, and discovered by her calculations, to her great mortification, that a formidable revolt had taken place at Samarah; that Motavakel, availing himself of the disgust which was inveterate against his brother had incited commotions amongst the populace, made himself master of the palace, and actually invested the great tower, to which Morakanabad had retired with a handful of the few that still remained faithful to Vathek. What, exclaimed she, must I lose then my tower, my mutes, my negresses, my mummies, and worse than all, the laboratory, in which I have spent so many a night, without knowing, at least, if my hairbrained son will complete his adventure? No! I will not be the dupe! Immediately will I speed to support Morakanabad. By my formidable art the clouds shall sleet hailstones in the faces of the assailants, and shafts of redhot iron on their heads. I will spring mines of serpents and torpedoes from beneath them, and we shall soon see the stand they will make against such an explosion! Having thus spoken, Carathis hasted to her son, who was tranquilly banqueting with Nouronihar in his superb carnation coloured tent. Glutton that thou art, cried she, were it not for me, thou wouldst soon find thyself the commander only of pies. Thy faithful subjects have abjured the faith they swore to thee. Motavakel thy brother now reigns on the hill of pied horses; and had I not some slight resources in the tower, would not be easily persuaded to abdicate. But that time may not be lost, I shall only add four words strike tent tonight; set forward; and beware how thou loiterest again by the way. Though thou hast forfeited the conditions of the parchment, I am not yet without hope; for it cannot be denied that thou hast violated to admiration the laws of hospitality by seducing the daughter of the emir, after having partaken of his bread and his salt. Such a conduct cannot but be delightful to the Giaour; and if on thy march thou canst signalize thyself by an additional crime, all will still go well, and thou shalt enter the palace of Soliman in triumph. Adieu! Alboufaki and my negresses are waiting. The Caliph had nothing to offer in reply he wished his mother a prosperous journey, and eat on till he had finished his supper. At midnight the camp broke up, amidst the flourishing of trumpets and other martial instruments; but loud indeed must have been the sound of the tymbals, to overpower the blubbering of the emir and his longbeards, who by an excessive profusion of tears had so far exhausted the radical moisture, that their eyes shrivelled up in their sockets, and their hairs dropped off by the roots. Nouronihar, to whom such a symphony was painful, did not grieve to get out of hearing. She accompanied the Caliph in the imperial litter, where they amused themselves with imagining the splendour which was soon to surround them. The other women, overcome with dejection, were dolefully rocked in their cages, whilst Dilara consoled herself with anticipating the joy of celebrating the rites of fire on the stately terraces of Istakar. In four days they reached the spacious valley of Rocnabad. The season of spring was in all its vigour, and the grotesque branches of the almond trees in full blossom fantastically chequered the clear blue sky. The earth, variegated with hyacinths and jonquils, breathed forth a fragrance which diffused through the soul a divine repose. Myriads of bees, and scarce fewer of Santons had there taken up their abode. On the banks of the stream hives and oratories were alternately ranged, and their neatness and whiteness were set off by the deep green of the cypresses that spired up amongst them. These pious personages amused themselves with cultivating little gardens that abounded with flowers and fruits, especially muskmelons of the best flavour that Persia could boast. Sometimes dispersed over the meadow they entertained themselves with feeding peacocks whiter than snow, and turtles more blue than the sapphire. In this manner were they occupied when the harbingers of the imperial procession began to proclaim Inhabitants of Rocnabad, prostrate yourselves on the brink of your pure waters, and tender your thanksgivings to heaven that vouchsafeth to shew you a ray of its glory; for lo! the commander of the faithful draws near. The poor Santons, filled with holy energy, having bustled to light up wax torches in their oratories, and expand the koran on their ebony desks, went forth to meet the Caliph with baskets of honeycomb, dates, and melons. But whilst they were advancing in solemn procession and with measured steps, the horses, camels, and guards wantoned over their tulips and other flowers, and made a terrible havoc amongst them. The Santons could not help casting from one eye a look of pity on the ravages committing around them, whilst the other was fixed upon the Caliph and heaven.

Nouronihar, enraptured with the scenery of a place which brought back to her remembrance the pleasing solitudes where her infancy had passed, entreated Vathek to stop, but he, suspecting that each oratory might be deemed by the Giaour a distinct habitation, commanded his pioneers to level them all. The Santons stood motionless with horror at the barbarous mandate, and at last broke out into lamentations, but these were uttered with so ill a grace, that Vathek bade his eunuchs to kick them from his presence. He then descended from the litter with Nouronihar. They sauntered together in the meadow, and amused themselves with culling flowers, and passing a thousand pleasantries on each other. But the bees, who were staunch Mussulmans, thinking it their duty to revenge the insult on their dear masters the Santons, assembled so zealously to do it with effect, that the Caliph and Nouronihar were glad to find their tents prepared to receive them. Bababalouk, who in capacity of purveyor, had acquitted himself with applause, as to peacocks and turtles, lost no time in consigning some dozens to the spit, and as many more to be fricasseed. Whilst they were feasting, laughing, carousing, and blaspheming at pleasure on the banquet so liberally furnished, the Moullahs, the Sheiks, the Cadis, and Imans of Schiraz (who seemed not to have met the Santons) arrived, leading by bridles of ribband, inscribed from the koran, a train of asses which were loaded with the choicest fruits the country could boast. Having presented their offerings to the Caliph, they petitioned him to honour their city and mosques with his presence. Fancy not, said Vathek, that you can detain me. Your presents I condescend to accept, but beg you will let me be quiet, for I am not over fond of resisting temptation. Retire then. Yet, as it is not decent for personages so reverend to return on foot, and as you have not the appearance of expert riders, my eunuchs shall tie you on your asses with the precaution that your backs be not turned towards me, for they understand etiquette. In this deputation were some highstomached Sheiks, who taking Vathek for a fool, scrupled not to speak their opinion. These Bababalouk girded with double cords; and having well disciplined their asses with nettles behind, they all started with a preternatural alertness, plunging, kicking, and running foul of each other in the most ludicrous manner imaginable. Nouronihar and the Caliph mutually contended who should most enjoy so degrading a sight. They burst out in volleys of laughter to see the old men and their asses fall into the stream. The leg of one was fractured, the shoulder of another dislocated, the teeth of a third dashed out, and the rest suffered still worse. Two days more, undisturbed by fresh embassies, having been devoted to the pleasures of Rocnabad, the expedition proceeded, leaving Schiraz on the right, and verging towards a large plain, from whence were discernible on the edge of the horizon the dark summits of the mountains of Istakar. At this prospect the Caliph and Nouronihar were unable to repress their transports. They bounded from their litter to the ground, and broke forth into such wild exclamations as amazed all within hearing. Interrogating each other, they shouted, Are we not approaching the radiant palace of light, or gardens more delightful than those of Sheddad? Infatuated mortals! they thus indulged delusive conjecture, unable to fathom the decrees of the Most High! The good Genii who had not totally relinquished the superintendence of Vathek, repairing to Mahomet in the seventh heaven, said Merciful Prophet! stretch forth thy propitious arms towards thy vicegerent, who is ready to fall irretrievably into the snare which his enemies the Dives have prepared to destroy him. The Giaour is awaiting his arrival in the abominable palace of fire, where if he once set his foot his perdition will be inevitable. Mahomet answered with an air of indignation He hath too well deserved to be resigned to himself; but I permit you to try if one effort more will be effectual to divert him from pursuing his ruin. One of these beneficent Genii, assuming without delay the exterior of a shepherd, more renowned for his piety than all the Dervises and Santons of the region, took his station near a flock of white sheep on the slope of a hill, and began to pour forth from his flute such airs of pathetic melody, as subdued the very soul; and awakening remorse, drove far from it every frivolous fancy. At these energetic sounds, the sun hid himself beneath a gloomy cloud; and the waters of two little lakes, that were naturally clearer than chrystal, became a colour like blood. The whole of this superb assembly, was involuntarily drawn towards the declivity of the hill. With downcast eyes, they all stood abashed; each upbraiding himself with the evil he had done. The heart of Dilara palpitated; and the chief of the eunuchs, with a sigh of contrition, implored pardon of the women, whom, for his own satisfaction, he had so often tormented. Vathek and Nouronihar turned pale in their litter; and, regarding each other with haggard looks, reproached themselvesthe one with a thousand of the blackest crimes, a thousand projects of impious ambition; the other, with the desolation of her family, and the perdition of the amiable Gulchenrouz. Nouronihar persuaded herself that she heard in the fatal music the groans of her dying father; and Vathek, the sobs of the fifty children he had sacrificed to the Giaour. Amidst these complicated pangs of anguish, they perceived themselves impelled towards the shepherd, whose countenance was so commanding, that Vathek, for the first time, felt overawed; whilst Nouronihar concealed her face with her hands. The music paused, and the Genius, addressing the Caliph, said Deluded Prince! to whom Providence hath confided the care of innumerable subjects, is it thus that thou fulfillest thy mission? Thy crimes are already completed; and, art thou now hastening towards thy punishment? Thou knowest, that beyond these mountains, Eblis and his accursed Dives hold their infernal empire; and seduced by a malignant phantom, thou art proceeding to surrender thyself to them! This moment is the last of grace allowed thee! Abandon thy atrocious purpose. Return. Give back Nouronihar to her father, who still retains a few sparks of life. Destroy thy tower, with all its abominations. Drive Carathis from thy councils. Be just to thy subjects. Respect the ministers of the Prophet. Compensate for thy impieties by an exemplary life; and, instead of squandering thy days in voluptuous indulgence, lament thy crimes on the sepulchres of thy ancestors. Thou beholdest the clouds that obscure the sun; at the instant he recovers his splendour, if thy heart be not changed, the time of mercy assigned thee will be past for ever. Vathek, depressed with fear, was on the point of prostrating himself at the feet of the shepherd, whom he perceived to be of a nature superior to man, but his pride prevailing, he audaciously lifted his head, and glancing at him one of his terrible looks, said Whoever thou art, withhold thy useless admonitions. Thou wouldst either delude me, or art thyself deceived. If what I have done be so criminal as thou pretendest, there remains not for me a moment of grace. I have traversed a sea of blood, to acquire a power which will make thy equals tremble; deem not that I shall retire when in view of the port; or that I will relinquish her who is dearer to me than either my life or thy mercy. Let the sun appear! Let him illumine my career! It matters not where it may end. On uttering these words, which made even the Genius shudder, Vathek threw himself into the arms of Nouronihar, and commanded that his horses should be forced back to the road. There was no difficulty in obeying these orders, for the attraction had ceased, the sun shone forth in all his glory, and the shepherd vanished with a lamentable scream. The fatal impression of the music of the Genius remained, notwithstanding, in the hearts of Vatheks attendants. They viewed each other with looks of consternation. At the approach of night, almost all of them escaped; and, of this numerous assemblage, there only remained the chief of the eunuchs, some idolatrous slaves, Dilara, and a few other women, who, like herself, were votaries of the religion of the Magi. The Caliph, fired with the ambition of prescribing laws to the Intelligences of Darkness, was but little embarrassed at this dereliction. The impetuosity of his blood prevented him from sleeping; nor did he encamp any more as before. Nouronihar, whose impatience, if possible, exceeded his own, importuned him to hasten his march, and lavished on him a thousand caresses, to beguile all reflection. She fancied herself already more potent than Balkis;25 and pictured to her imagination the Genii falling prostrate at the foot of her throne. In this manner they advanced by moonlight, till they came within view of the two towering rocks, that form a kind of portal to the valley, at whose extremity rose the vast ruins of Istakar. Aloft on the mountain, glimmered the fronts of various royal mausoleums, the horror of which was deepened by the shadows of night. They passed through two villages, almost deserted; the only inhabitants remaining being a few feeble old men, who at the sight of horses and litters fell upon their knees, and cried out O heaven! is it then by these phantoms that we have been for six months tormented! Alas! it was from the terror of these spectres, and the noise beneath the mountains, that our people have fled, and left us at the mercy of maleficent spirits! The Caliph, to whom these complaints were but unpromising auguries, drove over the bodies of these wretched old men, and at length arrived at the foot of the terrace of black marble. There he descended from his litter, handing down Nouronihar; both, with beating hearts, stared wildly around them, and expected, with an apprehensive shudder, the approach of the Giaour. But nothing as yet announced his appearance. A deathlike stillness reigned over the mountain, and through the air. The moon dilated, on a vast platform, the shades of the lofty columns, which reached from the terrace almost to the clouds. The gloomy watchtowers, whose number could not be counted, were veiled by no roof and their capitals, of an architecture unknown in the records of the earth, served as an asylum for the birds of darkness, which, alarmed at the approach of such visitants, fled away croaking. The chief of the eunuchs, trembling with fear, besought Vathek that a fire might be kindled. No! replied he, there is no time left to think of such trifles; abide where thou art, and expect my commands. Having thus spoken, he presented his hand to Nouronihar, and ascending the steps of a vast staircase, reached the terrace, which was flagged with squares of marble, and resembled a smooth expanse of water, upon whose surface not a leaf ever dared to vegetate. On the right rose the watchtowers, ranged before the ruins of an immense palace, whose walls were embossed with various figures. In front stood forth the colossal forms of four creatures, composed of the leopard and the griffin; and though but of stone, inspired emotions of terror. Near these were distinguished by the splendour of the moon, which streamed full on the place, characters like those on the sabres of the Giaour, that possessed the same virtue of changing every moment. These, after vacillating for some time, at last fixed in Arabic letters, and prescribed to the Caliph the following words Vathek! thou hast violated the conditions of my parchment, and deservest to be sent back; but in favour to thy companion, and as the meed for what thou hast done to obtain it, Eblis permitteth that the portal of his palace shall be opened, and the subterranean fire will receive thee into the number of its adorers. He scarcely had read these words before the mountain, against which the terrace was reared, trembled; and the watchtowers were ready to topple headlong upon them. The rock yawned, and disclosed within it a staircase of polished marble, that seemed to approach the abyss. Upon each stair were planted two large torches, like those Nouronihar had seen in her vision, the camphorated vapour ascending from which gathered into a cloud under the hollow of the vault. This appearance, instead of terrifying, gave new courage to the daughter of Fakreddin. Scarcely deigning to bid adieu to the moon and the firmament, she abandoned without hesitation the pure atmosphere, to plunge into these infernal exhalations. The gait of those impious personages was haughty and determined. As they descended, by the effulgence of the torches, they gazed on each other with mutual admiration, and both appeared so resplendent, that they already esteemed themselves spiritual intelligences. The only circumstance that perplexed them, was their not arriving at the bottom of the stairs. On hastening their descent, with an ardent impetuosity, they felt their steps accelerated to such a degree, that they seemed not walking, but falling from a precipice. Their progress, however, was at length impeded by a vast portal of ebony, which the Caliph without difficulty recognized. Here the Giaour awaited them, with the key in his hand, Ye are welcome! said he to them, with a ghastly smile, in spite of Mahomet, and all his dependents. I will now admit you into that palace, where you have so highly merited a place. Whilst he was uttering these words, he touched the enamelled lock with his key, and the doors at once expanded with a noise still louder than the thunder of mountains, and as suddenly recoiled the moment they had entered. The Caliph and Nouronihar beheld each other with amazement, at finding themselves in a place which, though roofed with a vaulted ceiling, was so spacious and lofty, that at first they took it for an immeasurable plain. But their eyes at length growing to the grandeur of the objects at hand, they extended their view to those at a distance, and discovered rows of columns and arcades, which gradually diminished, till they terminated in a point, radiant as the sun, when he darts his last beams athwart the ocean. The pavement, strewed over with gold dust and saffron, exhaled so subtile an odour, as almost overpowered them. They, however, went on, and observed an infinity of censers, in which ambergris and the wood of aloes were continually burning. Between the several columns were placed tables, each spread with a profusion of viands, and wines of every species, sparkling in vases of chrystal. A throng of Genii, and other phantastic spirits, of each sex, danced lasciviously in troops, at the sound of music which issued from beneath. In the midst of this immense hall, a vast multitude was incessantly passing, who severally kept their right hands on their hearts, without once regarding any thing around them. They had all the livid paleness of death. Their eyes, deep sank in their sockets, resembled those phosphoric meteors, that glimmer by night in places of interment. Some stalked slowly on, absorbed in profound reverie; some shrieking with agony, ran furiously about, like tigers wounded with poisoned arrows; whilst others, grinding their teeth in rage, foamed along, more frantic than the wildest maniac. They all avoided each other, and though surrounded by a multitude that no one could number, each wandered at random unheedful of the rest, as if alone on a desert which no foot had trodden. Vathek and Nouronihar, frozen with terror at a sight so baleful, demanded of the Giaour what these appearances might mean, and why these ambulating spectres never withdrew their hands from their hearts. Perplex not yourselves, replied he bluntly, with so much at once, you will soon be acquainted with all; let us haste and present you to Eblis. They continued their way through the multitude, but notwithstanding their confidence at first, they were not sufficiently composed to examine with attention the various perspectives of halls, and of galleries, that opened on the right hand and left, which were all illuminated by torches and braziers, whose flames rose in pyramids, to the centre of the vault. At length they came to a place where long curtains, brocaded with crimson and gold, fell from all parts, in striking confusion. Here the choirs and dances were heard no longer. The light which glimmered came from afar. After some time Vathek and Nouronihar perceived a gleam brightening through the drapery, and entered a vast tabernacle, carpeted with the skins of leopards. An infinity of elders, with streaming beards, and afrits, in complete armour, had prostrated themselves before the ascent of a lofty eminence, on the top of which, upon a globe of fire, sat the formidable Eblis. His person was that of a young man, whose noble and regular features seemed to have been tarnished by malignant vapours. In his large eyes appeared both pride and despair; his flowing hair retained some resemblance to that of an angel of light. In his hand, which thunder had blasted, he swayed the iron sceptre, that causes the monster Ouranabad,26 the afrits, and all the powers of the abyss to tremble. At his presence the heart of the Caliph sank within him, and, for the first time, he fell prostrate on his face. Nouronihar, however, though greatly dismayed, could not help admiring the person of Eblis, for she expected to have seen some stupendous giant. Eblis, with a voice more mild than might be imagined, but such as transfused through the soul the deepest melancholy, said Creatures of clay, I receive you into mine empire. Ye are numbered amongst my adorers. Enjoy whatever this palace affordsthe treasures of the preadimite sultans, their bickering sabres, and those talismans that compel the Dives to open the subterranean expanses of the mountain of Kaf, which communicate with these. There, insatiable as your curiosity may be, shall you find sufficient to gratify it. You shall possess the exclusive privilege of entering the fortress of Aherman, and the halls of Argenk, where are portrayed all creatures endowed with intelligence, and the various animals that inhabited the earth prior to the creation of that contemptible being, whom ye denominate the Father of Mankind. Vathek and Nouronihar feeling themselves revived and encouraged by this harangue, eagerly said to the Giaour Bring us instantly to the place which contains these precious talismans. Come, answered this wicked Dive, with his malignant grin, come, and possess all that my sovereign hath promised, and more. He then conducted them into a long aisle adjoining the tabernacle, preceding them with hasty steps, and followed by his disciples with the utmost alacrity. They reached at length a hall of great extent, and covered with a lofty dome, around which appeared fifty portals of bronze, secured with as many fastenings of iron. A funereal gloom prevailed over the whole scene. Here, upon two beds of incorruptible cedar, lay recumbent the fleshless forms of the preadimite kings, who had been monarchs of the whole earth. They still possessed enough of life to be conscious of their deplorable condition. Their eyes retained a melancholy motion; they regarded each other with looks of the deepest dejection, each holding his right hand motionless on his heart. At their feet were inscribed the events of their several reigns, their power, their pride, and their crimes. Soliman Raad, Soliman Daki, and Soliman Di Gian Ben Gian, who, after having chained up the Dives in the dark caverns of Kaf, became so presumptuous, as to doubt of the Supreme Power. All these maintained great state, though not to be compared with the eminence of Soliman Ben Daoud. This king, so renowned for his wisdom, was on the loftiest elevation, and placed immediately under the dome. He appeared to possess more animation than the rest, though, from time to time, he laboured with profound sighs, and, like his companions, kept his right hand on his heart; yet his countenance was more composed, and he seemed to be listening to the sullen roar of a vast cataract, visible in part through the grated portals. This was the only sound that intruded on the silence of these doleful mansions. A range of brazen vases surrounded the elevation. Remove the covers from these cabalistic depositaries, said the Giaour to Vathek, and avail thyself of the talismans, which will break asunder all these gates of bronze, and not only render thee master of the treasures contained within them, but also of the spirits by which they are guarded. The Caliph, whom this ominous preliminary had entirely disconcerted, approached the vases with faltering footsteps, and was ready to sink with terror, when he heard the groans of Soliman. As he proceeded, a voice from the livid lips of the prophet articulated these words In my lifetime, I filled a magnificent throne, having on my right hand twelve thousand seats of gold, where the patriarchs and prophets heard my doctrines; on my left the sages and doctors, upon as many thrones of silver, were present at all my decisions. Whilst I thus administered justice to innumerable multitudes, the birds of the air librating over me, served as a canopy from the rays of the sun. My people flourished, and my palace rose to the clouds. I erected a temple to the Most High, which was the wonder of the universe; but I basely suffered myself to be seduced by the love of women, and a curiosity that could not be restrained by sublunary things. I listened to the counsels of Aherman, and the daughter of Pharaoh; and adored fire, and the host of heaven. I forsook the holy city, and commanded the Genii to rear the stupendous palace of Istakar, and the terrace of the watchtowers, each of which was consecrated to a star. There for a while I enjoyed myself in the zenith of glory and pleasure. Not only men, but supernatural existences were subject also to my will. I began to think, as these unhappy monarchs around had already thought, that the vengeance of heaven was asleep, when at once the thunder burst my structures asunder, and precipitated me hither; where, however, I do not remain like the other inhabitants totally destitute of hope, for an angel of light hath revealed, that in consideration of the piety of my early youth, my woes shall come to an end when this cataract shall for ever cease to flow. Till then I am in torments, ineffable torments, an unrelenting fire preys on my heart. Having uttered this exclamation, Soliman raised his hands towards heaven, in token of supplication, and the Caliph discerned through his bosom, which was transparent as crystal, his heart enveloped in flames. At a sight so full of horror, Nouronihar fell back like one petrified, into the arms of Vathek, who cried out with a convulsive sob O Giaour! whither hast thou brought us! Allow us to depart, and I will relinquish all thou hast promised. O Mahomet! remains there no more mercy! None! none! replied the malicious Dive. Know, miserable prince, thou art now in the abode of vengeance, and despair. Thy heart, also, will be kindled, like those of the other votaries of Eblis. A few days are allotted thee previous to this fatal period employ them as thou wilt. Recline on these heaps of gold command the Infernal Potentates range at thy pleasure through these immense subterranean domains. No barrier shall be shut against thee. As for me, I have fulfilled my mission. I now leave thee to thyself. At these words he vanished. The Caliph and Nouronihar remained in the most abject affliction. Their tears unable to flow, scarcely could they support themselves. At length, taking each other despondingly by the hand, they went faltering from this fatal hall, indifferent which way they turned their steps. Every portal opened at their approach. The Dives fell prostrate before them. Every reservoir of riches was disclosed to their view, but they no longer felt the incentives of curiosity, pride, or avarice. With like apathy they heard the chorus of Genii, and saw the stately banquets prepared to regale them. They went wandering on from chamber to chamber, hall to hall, and gallery to gallery; all without bounds or limit; all distinguishable by the same lowering gloom; all adorned with the same awful grandeur; all traversed by persons in search of repose and consolation, but who sought them in vain, for every one carried within him a heart tormented in flames. Shunned by these various sufferers, who seemed by their looks to be upbraiding the partners of their guilt, they withdrew from them, to wait in direful suspense the moment which should render them to each other the like objects of terror. What, exclaimed Nouronihar, will the time come, when I shall snatch my hand from thine! Ah! said Vathek, and shall my eyes ever cease to drink from thine long draughts of enjoyment! Shall the moments of our reciprocal ecstasies be reflected on with horror! It was not thou that broughtest me hither; the principles by which Carathis perverted my youth have been the sole cause of my perdition! Having given vent to these painful expressions, he called to an Afrit, who was stirring up one of the braziers, and bade him fetch the Princess Carathis from the palace of Samarah. After issuing these orders, the Caliph and Nouronihar continued walking amidst the silent crowd, till they heard voices at the end of the gallery. Presuming them to proceed from some unhappy beings, who like themselves were awaiting their final doom, they followed the sound, and found it to come from a small square chamber, where they discovered sitting on sofas, five young men of goodly figure, and a lovely female, who were all holding a melancholy conversation, by the glimmering of a lonely lamp. Each had a gloomy and forlorn air, and two of them were embracing each other with great tenderness. On seeing the Caliph and the daughter of Fakreddin enter they arose, saluted, and gave them place. Then he who had appeared the most considerable of the group, addressed himself thus to Vathek Strangers! who doubtless are in the same state of suspense as ourselves, as you do not yet bear your hand on your heart, if you are come hither to pass the interval allotted previous to the infliction of our common punishment, condescend to relate the adventures that have brought you to this fatal place; and we in return will acquaint you with ours; which deserves but too well to be heard. We will trace back our crimes to their source, though we are not permitted to repent. This is the only employment suited to wretches like us. The Caliph and Nouronihar assented to the proposal, and Vathek began, not without tears and lamentations, a sincere recital of every circumstance that had passed. When the afflicting narrative was closed, the young man entered on his own. Each person proceeded in order, and when the fourth prince had reached the midst of his adventures, a sudden noise interrupted him, which caused the vault to tremble, and to open. Immediately a cloud descended, which gradually dissipating, discovered Carathis, on the back of an Afrit, who grievously complained of his burden. She, instantly springing to the ground, advanced towards her son, and said What dost thou here, in this little square chamber? As the Dives are become subject to thy beck, I expected to have found thee on the throne of the preadimite kings. Execrable woman! answered the Caliph; cursed be the day thou gavest me birth! Go! follow this Afrit; let him conduct thee to the hall of the Prophet Soliman; there thou wilt learn to what these palaces are destined, and how much I ought to abhor the impious knowledge thou hast taught me. The height of power to which thou art arrived, has certainly turned thy brain, answered Carathis; but I ask no more, than permission to show my respect for the prophet. It is, however, proper thou shouldst know, that, as the Afrit has informed me neither of us shall return to Samarah, I requested his permission to arrange my affairs, and he politely consented. Availing myself, therefore, of the few moments allowed me, I set fire to the tower, and consumed in it the mutes, negresses, and serpents, which have rendered me so much good service; nor should I have been less kind to Morakanabad, had he not prevented me, by deserting at last to thy brother. As for Bababalouk, who had the folly to return to Samarah, and all the good brotherhood to provide husbands for thy wives, I undoubtedly would have put them to the torture, could I but have allowed them the time. Being, however, in a hurry, I only hung him, after having caught him in a snare with thy wives; whilst them I buried alive by the help of my negresses, who thus spent their last moments, greatly to their satisfaction. With respect to Dilara, who ever stood high in my favour, she hath evinced the greatness of her mind, by fixing herself near, in the service of one of the Magi, and, I think, will soon be our own. Vathek, too much cast down to express the indignation excited by such a discourse, ordered the Afrit to remove Carathis from his presence, and continued immersed in thought, which his companions durst not disturb. Carathis, however, eagerly entered the dome of Soliman, and, without regarding in the least the groans of the Prophet, undauntedly removed the covers of the vases, and violently seized on the talismans. Then, with a voice more loud than had hitherto been heard in these mansions, she compelled the Dives to disclose to her the most secret treasures, the most profound stores, which the Afrit himself had not seen. She passed by rapid descents known only to Eblis and his most favoured Potentates, and thus penetrated the very entrails of the earth, where breathes the Sansar, or icy wind of death. Nothing appalled her dauntless soul. She perceived, however, in all the inmates who bore their hands on their heart, a little singularity not much to her taste. As she was emerging from one of the abysses, Eblis stood forth to her view, but, notwithstanding he displayed the full effulgence of his infernal majesty, she preserved her countenance unaltered, and even paid her compliments with considerable firmness. This superb monarch thus answered Princess, whose knowledge and whose crimes have merited a conspicuous rank in my empire, thou doest well to employ the leisure that remains, for the flames and torments which are ready to seize on thy heart, will not fail to provide thee with full employment. He said this, and was lost in the curtains of his tabernacle. Carathis paused for a moment with surprise, but, resolved to follow the advice of Eblis, she assembled all the choirs of Genii, and all the Dives, to pay her homage. Thus marched she in triumph through a vapour of perfumes, amidst the acclamations of all the malignant spirits; with most of whom she had formed a previous acquaintance. She even attempted to dethrone one of the Solimans, for the purpose of usurping his place, when a voice, proceeding from the Abyss of Death, proclaimed All is accomplished! Instantaneously, the haughty forehead of the intrepid princess became corrugated with agony; she uttered a tremendous yell, and fixedno more to be withdrawnher right hand upon her heart, which was become a receptacle of eternal fire. In this delirium, forgetting all ambitious projects, and her thirst for that knowledge which should ever be hidden from mortals, she overturned the offerings of the Genii; and, having execrated the hour she was begotten, and the womb that had borne her, glanced off in a whirl that rendered her invisible, and continued to revolve without intermission. At almost the same instant, the same voice announced to the Caliph, Nouronihar, the five princes, and the princess, the awful and irrevocable decree.

Their hearts immediately took fire, and they at once lost the most precious of the gifts of heavenhope. These unhappy beings recoiled, with looks of the most furious distraction. Vathek beheld in the eyes of Nouronihar nothing but rage and vengeance; nor could she discern ought in his but aversion and despair. The two princes who were friends, and till that moment had preserved their attachment, shrunk back, gnashing their teeth with mutual and unchangeable hatred. Kalilah and his sister made reciprocal gestures of imprecation; whilst the two other princes testified their horror for each other by the most ghastly convulsions, and screams that could not be smothered. All severally plunged themselves into the accursed multitude, there to wander in an eternity of unabating anguish. Such was, and such should be, the punishment of unrestrained passions, and atrocious actions. Such is, and such should be, the chastisement of blind ambition, that would transgress those bounds which the Creator hath prescribed to human knowledge, and by aiming at discoveries reserved for pure intelligence, acquire that infatuated pride, which perceives not the condition appointed to man is, to be ignorant and humble. Thus the Caliph Vathek who, for the sake of empty pomp and forbidden power, hath sullied himself with a thousand crimes, became a prey to grief without end, and remorse without mitigation; whilst the humble and despised Gulchenrouz passed whole ages in undisturbed tranquillity, and the pure happiness of childhood. THE END I'm Julie, the woman who runs Global Grey the website where this ebook was published. These are my own formatted editions, and I hope you enjoyed reading this particular one. If you have this book because you bought it as part of a collection thank you so much for your support. If you downloaded it for free please consider (if you havent already) making a small donation to help keep the site running. If you bought this from Amazon or anywhere else, you have been ripped off by someone taking free ebooks from my site and selling them as their own. You should definitely get a refund Thanks for reading this and I hope you visit the site again new books are added regularly so you'll always find something of interest ) Notes [1] Caliph. This title amongst the Mahometans comprehends the concrete character of prophet, priest, and king; and is used to signify the Vicar of God on earth.Habescis State of the Ottoman Empire, p. 9. Herbelot, p. 985. [2] One of his eyes became so terrible. The author of Nighiaristan hath preserved a fact that supports this account; and there is no history of Vathek, in which his terrible eye is not mentioned. [3] Omar Ben Abdalaziz. This Caliph was eminent above all others for temperance and selfdenial; insomuch, that he is believed to have been raised to Mahomets bosom, as a reward for his abstinence in an age of corruption. Herbelot, p. 690. [4] Samarah. A city of the Babylonian Irak, supposed to have stood on the site where Nimrod erected his tower. Khondemir relates, in his life of Motassem, that this prince, to terminate the disputes which were perpetually happening between the inhabitants of Bagdat and his Turkish slaves, withdrew from thence; and, having fixed on a situation in the plain of Catoul, there founded Samarah. He is said to have had in the stables of this city a hundred and thirty thousand pied horses; each of which carried, by his order, a sack of earth to a place he had chosen. By this accumulation, an elevation was formed that commanded a view of all Samarah, and served for the foundation of his magnificent palace. Herbelot, p. 752, 808, 985. Anecdotes Arabes, p. 413. [5] Houris. The Virgins of Paradise, called, from their large black eyes, Hur al oyun. An intercourse with these, according to the institution of Mahomet, is to constitute the principal felicity of the faithful. Not formed of clay, like mortal women, they are deemed in the highest degree beautiful, and exempt from every inconvenience incident to the sex. Al Koran; passim. [6] Genii. Genn or Ginn, in the Arabic, signifies a Genius or Demona being of a higher order, and formed of more subtile matter than man. According to Oriental mythology, the Genii governed the world long before the creation of Adam. The Mahometans regarded them as an intermediate race between angels and men, and capable of salvation whence Mahomet pretended a commission to convert them. Consonant to this, we read that, When the servant of God stood up to invoke him, it wanted little but that the Genii had pressed on him in crowds, to hear him rehearse the Koran. Herbelot, p. 357. Al Koran ch. 72. [7] Accursed Giaour. Dives of this kind are frequently mentioned by Eastern writers. Consult their tales in general, and especially those of The Fisherman, Aladdin, and The Princess of China. [8] Bababalouk, the Chief of his Eunuchs. As it was the employment of the black eunuchs to wait upon, and guard the sultanas, to the general superintendence of the Harem was particularly committed to their chief. Habescis State of the Ottoman Empire, p. 1556. [9] The Divan. This was both the supreme council, and court of justice, at which the Caliphs of the race of the Abassides assisted in person to redress the injuries of every appellant. Herbelot, p. 298. [10] The Prime Vizier. Vazir, Vezir, or as we express it, Vizier, literally signifies a porter; and by metaphor, the minister who bears the principal burden of the state. [11] Gian Ben Gian. By this appellation was distinguished the monarch of that species of beings, whom the Arabians denominate Gian or Ginn, that is, Genii; and the Tarik Thabari, Peres, Feez, or Faeries. [12] Rocnabad. The stream thus denominated flows near the city of Schiraz. Its waters are uncommonly pure and limpid, and their banks swarded with the finest verdure. [13] Moullahs. Those among the Mahometans who were bred to the law had this title; and from their order the judges of cities and provinces were taken. [14] Bababalouk almost sunk with confusion, whilst, etc. The heinousness of Vatheks profanation can only be judged of by an orthodox Mussulman; or one who recollects the ablution and prayer indispensably required on the exoneration of nature. Sales Prelim. Disc. p. 139. Al Koran, ch. 4. Habescis State of the Ottoman Empire, p. 93. [15] Horrible Kaf. This mountain, which in reality is no other than Caucasus, was supposed to surround the earth, like a ring encompassing a finger. The sun was believed to rise from one of its eminences (as over Octa, by the Latin poets) and to set on the opposite; whence from Kaf to Kaf, signified from one extremity of the earth to the other. [16] The Simurgh. This is that wonderful bird of the East concerning which so many marvels are told. It was not only endowed with reason, but possessed also the knowledge of every language. This creature relates of itself, that it had seen the great revolution of seven thousand years, twelve times, commence and close; and, that in its duration, the world had been seven times void of inhabitants, and as often replenished. The Simurgh is represented as a great friend to the race of Adam, and not less inimical to the Dives. [17] Afrits. These were a kind of Medusa, or Lamia, supposed to be the most terrible and cruel of all the orders of the Dives. Herbelot, p. 66. [18] Deggial. This word signifies properly a liar and imposter, but is applied by Mahometan writers to their Antichrist. He is described as having but one eye and eyebrow, and on his forehead the radicals of cafer, or infidel, are said to be impressed. [19] Calenders. These were a sort of men amongst the Mahometans who abandoned father and mother, wife and children, relations and possessions, to wander through the world, under a pretence of religion, entirely subsisting on the fortuitous bounty of those they had the address to dupe. Herbelot, Suppl. p. 204. [20] Santons. A body of religionists who were also called Abdals, and pretended to be inspired with the most enthusiastic raptures of divine love. They were regarded by the vulgar as saints. Olearius, Tom. I. p. 971. Herbelot, p. 5. [21] Dervises. The term dervise signifies a poor man, and is the general appellation by which a religious sect amongst the Mahometans is named. [22] Brahmins. These constituted the principal caste of the Indians, according to whose doctrines Brahma, from whom they are called, is the first of the three created beings by whom the world was made. This Brahma is said to have communicated to the Indians four books, in which all the sciences and ceremonies of their religion are comprised. [23] Faquirs. This sect were a kind of religious anchorites, who spent their whole lives in the severest austerities and mortification. [24] Peries. The word Peri, in the Persian language, signifies that beautiful race of creatures which constitutes the link between angels and men. [25] Balkis. This was the Arabian name of the Queen of Sheba, who went from the South to hear the wisdom and admire the glory of Solomon. The Koran represents her as a worshipper of fire. Solomon is said not only to have entertained her with the greatest magnificence, but also to have raised her to his bed and his throne. Al Koran, ch. 27, and Sales notes. Herbelot, p. 182. [26] Ouranabad. This monster is represented as a fierce flying hydra, and belongs to the same class with the Rakshe, whose ordinary food was serpents and dragons; the Soham, which had the head of a horse, with four eyes, and the body of a flamecoloured dragon; the Syl, a basilisk with a face resembling the human, but so tremendous that no mortal could bear to behold it; the Ejder, and others. See these respective titles in Richardsons Dictionary, Persian, Arabic and English.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Treasure Island This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or reuse it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title Treasure Island Author Robert Louis Stevenson Illustrator Louis Rhead Release date February 26, 2006 [eBook 120] Most recently updated March 21, 2024 Language English START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TREASURE ISLAND TREASURE ISLAND by Robert Louis Stevenson Illustrated by Louis Rhead 0017m TREASURE ISLAND PART ONEThe Old Buccaneer I. The Old Seadog at the Admiral Benbow II. Black Dog Appears and Disappears III. The Black Spot IV. The Seachest V. The Last of the Blind Man VI. The Captains Papers PART TWOThe Seacook VII. I Go to Bristol VIII. At the Sign of the Spyglass IX. Powder and Arms X. The Voyage XI. What I Heard in the AppleBarrel XII. Council of War PART THREEMy Shore Adventure XIII. How I Began My Shore Adventure XIV. The First Blow XV. The Man of the Island PART FOURThe Stockade XVI. Narrative Continued by the Doctor How the Ship Was Abandoned XVII. Narrative Continued by the Doctor The Jollyboats Last Trip XVIII. Narrative Continued by the Doctor End of the First Days Fighting XIX. Narrative Resumed by Jim Hawkins The Garrison in the Stockade XX. Silvers Embassy XXI. The Attack PART FIVEMy Sea Adventure XXII. How I Began My Sea Adventure XXIII. The Ebbtide Runs XXIV. The Cruise of the Coracle XXV. I Strike the Jolly Roger XXVI. Israel Hands XXVII. Pieces of Eight PART SIXCaptain Silver XXVIII. In the Enemys Camp XXIX. The Black Spot Again XXX. On Parole XXXI. The TreasurehuntFlints Pointer XXXII. The TreasurehuntThe Voice Among the Trees XXXIII. The Fall of a Chieftain XXXIV. And Last 0021m 0022m TREASURE ISLAND To S.L.O., an American gentleman in accordance with whose classic taste the following narrative has been designed, it is now, in return for numerous delightful hours, and with the kindest wishes, dedicated by his affectionate friend, the author. TO THE HESITATING PURCHASER If sailor tales to sailor tunes, Storm and adventure, heat and cold, If schooners, islands, and maroons, And buccaneers, and buried gold, And all the old romance, retold Exactly in the ancient way, Can please, as me they pleased of old, The wiser youngsters of today So be it, and fall on! If not, If studious youth no longer crave, His ancient appetites forgot, Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave, Or Cooper of the wood and wave So be it, also! And may I And all my pirates share the grave Where these and their creations lie! 0028m TREASURE ISLAND PART ONEThe Old Buccaneer 0029m I The Old Seadog at the Admiral Benbow 9029m quire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17, and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof. I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his seachest following behind him in a handbarrowa tall, strong, heavy, nutbrown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old seasong that he sang so often afterwards Fifteen men on the dead mans chest Yohoho, and a bottle of rum! in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the door with a bit of stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared, called roughly for a glass of rum. This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard. This is a handy cove, says he at length; and a pleasant sittyated grogshop. Much company, mate? My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity. Well, then, said he, this is the berth for me. Here you, matey, he cried to the man who trundled the barrow; bring up alongside and help up my chest. Ill stay here a bit, he continued. Im a plain man; rum and bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch ships off. What you mought call me? You mought call me captain. Oh, I see what youre atthere; and he threw down three or four gold pieces on the threshold. You can tell me when Ive worked through that, says he, looking as fierce as a commander. And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike. The man who came with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning before at the Royal George, that he had inquired what inns there were along the coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of residence. And that was all we could learn of our guest. He was a very silent man by custom. All day he hung round the cove or upon the cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner of the parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very strong. Mostly he would not speak when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and blow through his nose like a foghorn; and we and the people who came about our house soon learned to let him be. Every day when he came back from his stroll he would ask if any seafaring men had gone by along the road. At first we thought it was the want of company of his own kind that made him ask this question, but at last we began to see he was desirous to avoid them. When a seaman did put up at the Admiral Benbow (as now and then some did, making by the coast road for Bristol) he would look in at him through the curtained door before he entered the parlour; and he was always sure to be as silent as a mouse when any such was present. For me, at least, there was no secret about the matter, for I was, in a way, a sharer in his alarms. He had taken me aside one day and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every month if I would only keep my weathereye open for a seafaring man with one leg and let him know the moment he appeared. Often enough when the first of the month came round and I applied to him for my wage, he would only blow through his nose at me and stare me down, but before the week was out he was sure to think better of it, bring me my fourpenny piece, and repeat his orders to look out for the seafaring man with one leg. How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. On stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house and the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and ditch was the worst of nightmares. And altogether I paid pretty dear for my monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these abominable fancies. But though I was so terrified by the idea of the seafaring man with one leg, I was far less afraid of the captain himself than anybody else who knew him. There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water than his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his wicked, old, wild seasongs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call for glasses round and force all the trembling company to listen to his stories or bear a chorus to his singing. Often I have heard the house shaking with Yohoho, and a bottle of rum, all the neighbours joining in for dear life, with the fear of death upon them, and each singing louder than the other to avoid remark. For in these fits he was the most overriding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table for silence all round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a question, or sometimes because none was put, and so he judged the company was not following his story. Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn till he had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed. His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories they wereabout hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main. By his own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in which he told these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the crimes that he described. My father was always saying the inn would be ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over and put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his presence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on looking back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country life, and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to admire him, calling him a true seadog and a real old salt and such like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England terrible at sea. In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us, for he kept on staying week after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had been long exhausted, and still my father never plucked up the heart to insist on having more. If ever he mentioned it, the captain blew through his nose so loudly that you might say he roared, and stared my poor father out of the room. I have seen him wringing his hands after such a rebuff, and I am sure the annoyance and the terror he lived in must have greatly hastened his early and unhappy death. All the time he lived with us the captain made no change whatever in his dress but to buy some stockings from a hawker. One of the cocks of his hat having fallen down, he let it hang from that day forth, though it was a great annoyance when it blew. I remember the appearance of his coat, which he patched himself upstairs in his room, and which, before the end, was nothing but patches. He never wrote or received a letter, and he never spoke with any but the neighbours, and with these, for the most part, only when drunk on rum. The great seachest none of us had ever seen open. He was only once crossed, and that was towards the end, when my poor father was far gone in a decline that took him off. Dr. Livesey came late one afternoon to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my mother, and went into the parlour to smoke a pipe until his horse should come down from the hamlet, for we had no stabling at the old Benbow. I followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright doctor, with his powder as white as snow and his bright, black eyes and pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all, with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting, far gone in rum, with his arms on the table. Suddenly hethe captain, that isbegan to pipe up his eternal song Fifteen men on the dead mans chest Yohoho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest Yohoho, and a bottle of rum! At first I had supposed the dead mans chest to be that identical big box of his upstairs in the front room, and the thought had been mingled in my nightmares with that of the onelegged seafaring man. But by this time we had all long ceased to pay any particular notice to the song; it was new, that night, to nobody but Dr. Livesey, and on him I observed it did not produce an agreeable effect, for he looked up for a moment quite angrily before he went on with his talk to old Taylor, the gardener, on a new cure for the rheumatics. In the meantime, the captain gradually brightened up at his own music, and at last flapped his hand upon the table before him in a way we all knew to mean silence. The voices stopped at once, all but Dr. Liveseys; he went on as before speaking clear and kind and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or two. The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again, glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous, low oath, Silence, there, between decks! Were you addressing me, sir? says the doctor; and when the ruffian had told him, with another oath, that this was so, I have only one thing to say to you, sir, replies the doctor, that if you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel! The old fellows fury was awful. He sprang to his feet, drew and opened a sailors claspknife, and balancing it open on the palm of his hand, threatened to pin the doctor to the wall. The doctor never so much as moved. He spoke to him as before, over his shoulder and in the same tone of voice, rather high, so that all the room might hear, but perfectly calm and steady If you do not put that knife this instant in your pocket, I promise, upon my honour, you shall hang at the next assizes. 0033m Then followed a battle of looks between them, but the captain soon knuckled under, put up his weapon, and resumed his seat, grumbling like a beaten dog. And now, sir, continued the doctor, since I now know theres such a fellow in my district, you may count Ill have an eye upon you day and night. Im not a doctor only; Im a magistrate; and if I catch a breath of complaint against you, if its only for a piece of incivility like tonights, Ill take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed out of this. Let that suffice. Soon after, Dr. Liveseys horse came to the door and he rode away, but the captain held his peace that evening, and for many evenings to come. 0037m II Black Dog Appears and Disappears 9037m t was not very long after this that there occurred the first of the mysterious events that rid us at last of the captain, though not, as you will see, of his affairs. It was a bitter cold winter, with long, hard frosts and heavy gales; and it was plain from the first that my poor father was little likely to see the spring. He sank daily, and my mother and I had all the inn upon our hands, and were kept busy enough without paying much regard to our unpleasant guest. It was one January morning, very earlya pinching, frosty morningthe cove all grey with hoarfrost, the ripple lapping softly on the stones, the sun still low and only touching the hilltops and shining far to seaward. The captain had risen earlier than usual and set out down the beach, his cutlass swinging under the broad skirts of the old blue coat, his brass telescope under his arm, his hat tilted back upon his head. I remember his breath hanging like smoke in his wake as he strode off, and the last sound I heard of him as he turned the big rock was a loud snort of indignation, as though his mind was still running upon Dr. Livesey. Well, mother was upstairs with father and I was laying the breakfasttable against the captains return when the parlour door opened and a man stepped in on whom I had never set my eyes before. He was a pale, tallowy creature, wanting two fingers of the left hand, and though he wore a cutlass, he did not look much like a fighter. I had always my eye open for seafaring men, with one leg or two, and I remember this one puzzled me. He was not sailorly, and yet he had a smack of the sea about him too. I asked him what was for his service, and he said he would take rum; but as I was going out of the room to fetch it, he sat down upon a table and motioned me to draw near. I paused where I was, with my napkin in my hand. Come here, sonny, says he. Come nearer here. I took a step nearer. Is this here table for my mate Bill? he asked with a kind of leer. I told him I did not know his mate Bill, and this was for a person who stayed in our house whom we called the captain. Well, said he, my mate Bill would be called the captain, as like as not. He has a cut on one cheek and a mighty pleasant way with him, particularly in drink, has my mate Bill. Well put it, for argument like, that your captain has a cut on one cheekand well put it, if you like, that that cheeks the right one. Ah, well! I told you. Now, is my mate Bill in this here house? I told him he was out walking. Which way, sonny? Which way is he gone? And when I had pointed out the rock and told him how the captain was likely to return, and how soon, and answered a few other questions, Ah, said he, thisll be as good as drink to my mate Bill. The expression of his face as he said these words was not at all pleasant, and I had my own reasons for thinking that the stranger was mistaken, even supposing he meant what he said. But it was no affair of mine, I thought; and besides, it was difficult to know what to do. The stranger kept hanging about just inside the inn door, peering round the corner like a cat waiting for a mouse. Once I stepped out myself into the road, but he immediately called me back, and as I did not obey quick enough for his fancy, a most horrible change came over his tallowy face, and he ordered me in with an oath that made me jump. As soon as I was back again he returned to his former manner, half fawning, half sneering, patted me on the shoulder, told me I was a good boy and he had taken quite a fancy to me. I have a son of my own, said he, as like you as two blocks, and hes all the pride of my art. But the great thing for boys is discipline, sonnydiscipline. Now, if you had sailed along of Bill, you wouldnt have stood there to be spoke to twicenot you. That was never Bills way, nor the way of sich as sailed with him. And here, sure enough, is my mate Bill, with a spyglass under his arm, bless his old art, to be sure. You and mell just go back into the parlour, sonny, and get behind the door, and well give Bill a little surprisebless his art, I say again. So saying, the stranger backed along with me into the parlour and put me behind him in the corner so that we were both hidden by the open door. I was very uneasy and alarmed, as you may fancy, and it rather added to my fears to observe that the stranger was certainly frightened himself. He cleared the hilt of his cutlass and loosened the blade in the sheath; and all the time we were waiting there he kept swallowing as if he felt what we used to call a lump in the throat. At last in strode the captain, slammed the door behind him, without looking to the right or left, and marched straight across the room to where his breakfast awaited him. Bill, said the stranger in a voice that I thought he had tried to make bold and big. The captain spun round on his heel and fronted us; all the brown had gone out of his face, and even his nose was blue; he had the look of a man who sees a ghost, or the evil one, or something worse, if anything can be; and upon my word, I felt sorry to see him all in a moment turn so old and sick. Come, Bill, you know me; you know an old shipmate, Bill, surely, said the stranger. The captain made a sort of gasp. Black Dog! said he. And who else? returned the other, getting more at his ease. Black Dog as ever was, come for to see his old shipmate Billy, at the Admiral Benbow inn. Ah, Bill, Bill, we have seen a sight of times, us two, since I lost them two talons, holding up his mutilated hand. Now, look here, said the captain; youve run me down; here I am; well, then, speak up; what is it? Thats you, Bill, returned Black Dog, youre in the right of it, Billy. Ill have a glass of rum from this dear child here, as Ive took such a liking to; and well sit down, if you please, and talk square, like old shipmates. When I returned with the rum, they were already seated on either side of the captains breakfasttableBlack Dog next to the door and sitting sideways so as to have one eye on his old shipmate and one, as I thought, on his retreat. He bade me go and leave the door wide open. None of your keyholes for me, sonny, he said; and I left them together and retired into the bar. For a long time, though I certainly did my best to listen, I could hear nothing but a low gattling; but at last the voices began to grow higher, and I could pick up a word or two, mostly oaths, from the captain. No, no, no, no; and an end of it! he cried once. And again, If it comes to swinging, swing all, say I. 0041a 0041m Then all of a sudden there was a tremendous explosion of oaths and other noisesthe chair and table went over in a lump, a clash of steel followed, and then a cry of pain, and the next instant I saw Black Dog in full flight, and the captain hotly pursuing, both with drawn cutlasses, and the former streaming blood from the left shoulder. Just at the door the captain aimed at the fugitive one last tremendous cut, which would certainly have split him to the chine had it not been intercepted by our big signboard of Admiral Benbow. You may see the notch on the lower side of the frame to this day. That blow was the last of the battle. Once out upon the road, Black Dog, in spite of his wound, showed a wonderful clean pair of heels and disappeared over the edge of the hill in half a minute. The captain, for his part, stood staring at the signboard like a bewildered man. Then he passed his hand over his eyes several times and at last turned back into the house. Jim, says he, rum; and as he spoke, he reeled a little, and caught himself with one hand against the wall. Are you hurt? cried I. Rum, he repeated. I must get away from here. Rum! Rum! I ran to fetch it, but I was quite unsteadied by all that had fallen out, and I broke one glass and fouled the tap, and while I was still getting in my own way, I heard a loud fall in the parlour, and running in, beheld the captain lying full length upon the floor. At the same instant my mother, alarmed by the cries and fighting, came running downstairs to help me. Between us we raised his head. He was breathing very loud and hard, but his eyes were closed and his face a horrible colour. Dear, deary me, cried my mother, what a disgrace upon the house! And your poor father sick! In the meantime, we had no idea what to do to help the captain, nor any other thought but that he had got his deathhurt in the scuffle with the stranger. I got the rum, to be sure, and tried to put it down his throat, but his teeth were tightly shut and his jaws as strong as iron. It was a happy relief for us when the door opened and Doctor Livesey came in, on his visit to my father. Oh, doctor, we cried, what shall we do? Where is he wounded? Wounded? A fiddlesticks end! said the doctor. No more wounded than you or I. The man has had a stroke, as I warned him. Now, Mrs. Hawkins, just you run upstairs to your husband and tell him, if possible, nothing about it. For my part, I must do my best to save this fellows trebly worthless life; Jim, you get me a basin. When I got back with the basin, the doctor had already ripped up the captains sleeve and exposed his great sinewy arm. It was tattooed in several places. Heres luck, A fair wind, and Billy Bones his fancy, were very neatly and clearly executed on the forearm; and up near the shoulder there was a sketch of a gallows and a man hanging from itdone, as I thought, with great spirit. Prophetic, said the doctor, touching this picture with his finger. And now, Master Billy Bones, if that be your name, well have a look at the colour of your blood. Jim, he said, are you afraid of blood? No, sir, said I. Well, then, said he, you hold the basin; and with that he took his lancet and opened a vein. A great deal of blood was taken before the captain opened his eyes and looked mistily about him. First he recognized the doctor with an unmistakable frown; then his glance fell upon me, and he looked relieved. But suddenly his colour changed, and he tried to raise himself, crying, Wheres Black Dog? There is no Black Dog here, said the doctor, except what you have on your own back. You have been drinking rum; you have had a stroke, precisely as I told you; and I have just, very much against my own will, dragged you headforemost out of the grave. Now, Mr. Bones Thats not my name, he interrupted. Much I care, returned the doctor. Its the name of a buccaneer of my acquaintance; and I call you by it for the sake of shortness, and what I have to say to you is this; one glass of rum wont kill you, but if you take one youll take another and another, and I stake my wig if you dont break off short, youll diedo you understand that?die, and go to your own place, like the man in the Bible. Come, now, make an effort. Ill help you to your bed for once. Between us, with much trouble, we managed to hoist him upstairs, and laid him on his bed, where his head fell back on the pillow as if he were almost fainting. Now, mind you, said the doctor, I clear my consciencethe name of rum for you is death. And with that he went off to see my father, taking me with him by the arm. This is nothing, he said as soon as he had closed the door. I have drawn blood enough to keep him quiet awhile; he should lie for a week where he isthat is the best thing for him and you; but another stroke would settle him. 0046m III The Black Spot 9046m bout noon I stopped at the captains door with some cooling drinks and medicines. He was lying very much as we had left him, only a little higher, and he seemed both weak and excited. Jim, he said, youre the only one here thats worth anything, and you know Ive been always good to you. Never a month but Ive given you a silver fourpenny for yourself. And now you see, mate, Im pretty low, and deserted by all; and Jim, youll bring me one noggin of rum, now, wont you, matey? The doctor I began. But he broke in cursing the doctor, in a feeble voice but heartily. Doctors is all swabs, he said; and that doctor there, why, what do he know about seafaring men? I been in places hot as pitch, and mates dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land aheaving like the sea with earthquakeswhat to the doctor know of lands like that?and I lived on rum, I tell you. Its been meat and drink, and man and wife, to me; and if Im not to have my rum now Im a poor old hulk on a lee shore, my bloodll be on you, Jim, and that doctor swab; and he ran on again for a while with curses. Look, Jim, how my fingers fidges, he continued in the pleading tone. I cant keep em still, not I. I havent had a drop this blessed day. That doctors a fool, I tell you. If I dont have a dram o rum, Jim, Ill have the horrors; I seen some on em already. I seen old Flint in the corner there, behind you; as plain as print, I seen him; and if I get the horrors, Im a man that has lived rough, and Ill raise Cain. Your doctor hisself said one glass wouldnt hurt me. Ill give you a golden guinea for a noggin, Jim. He was growing more and more excited, and this alarmed me for my father, who was very low that day and needed quiet; besides, I was reassured by the doctors words, now quoted to me, and rather offended by the offer of a bribe. I want none of your money, said I, but what you owe my father. Ill get you one glass, and no more. When I brought it to him, he seized it greedily and drank it out. Aye, aye, said he, thats some better, sure enough. And now, matey, did that doctor say how long I was to lie here in this old berth? A week at least, said I. Thunder! he cried. A week! I cant do that; theyd have the black spot on me by then. The lubbers is going about to get the wind of me this blessed moment; lubbers as couldnt keep what they got, and want to nail what is anothers. Is that seamanly behaviour, now, I want to know? But Im a saving soul. I never wasted good money of mine, nor lost it neither; and Ill trick em again. Im not afraid on em. Ill shake out another reef, matey, and daddle em again. As he was thus speaking, he had risen from bed with great difficulty, holding to my shoulder with a grip that almost made me cry out, and moving his legs like so much dead weight. His words, spirited as they were in meaning, contrasted sadly with the weakness of the voice in which they were uttered. He paused when he had got into a sitting position on the edge. That doctors done me, he murmured. My ears is singing. Lay me back. Before I could do much to help him he had fallen back again to his former place, where he lay for a while silent. Jim, he said at length, you saw that seafaring man today? Black Dog? I asked. Ah! Black Dog, says he. Hes a bad un; but theres worse that put him on. Now, if I cant get away nohow, and they tip me the black spot, mind you, its my old seachest theyre after; you get on a horseyou can, cant you? Well, then, you get on a horse, and go towell, yes, I will!to that eternal doctor swab, and tell him to pipe all handsmagistrates and sichand hell lay em aboard at the Admiral Benbowall old Flints crew, man and boy, all on em thats left. I was first mate, I was, old Flints first mate, and Im the ony one as knows the place. He gave it me at Savannah, when he lay adying, like as if I was to now, you see. But you wont peach unless they get the black spot on me, or unless you see that Black Dog again or a seafaring man with one leg, Jimhim above all. But what is the black spot, captain? I asked. Thats a summons, mate. Ill tell you if they get that. But you keep your weathereye open, Jim, and Ill share with you equals, upon my honour. He wandered a little longer, his voice growing weaker; but soon after I had given him his medicine, which he took like a child, with the remark, If ever a seaman wanted drugs, its me, he fell at last into a heavy, swoonlike sleep, in which I left him. What I should have done had all gone well I do not know. Probably I should have told the whole story to the doctor, for I was in mortal fear lest the captain should repent of his confessions and make an end of me. But as things fell out, my poor father died quite suddenly that evening, which put all other matters on one side. Our natural distress, the visits of the neighbours, the arranging of the funeral, and all the work of the inn to be carried on in the meanwhile kept me so busy that I had scarcely time to think of the captain, far less to be afraid of him. He got downstairs next morning, to be sure, and had his meals as usual, though he ate little and had more, I am afraid, than his usual supply of rum, for he helped himself out of the bar, scowling and blowing through his nose, and no one dared to cross him. On the night before the funeral he was as drunk as ever; and it was shocking, in that house of mourning, to hear him singing away at his ugly old seasong; but weak as he was, we were all in the fear of death for him, and the doctor was suddenly taken up with a case many miles away and was never near the house after my fathers death. I have said the captain was weak, and indeed he seemed rather to grow weaker than regain his strength. He clambered up and down stairs, and went from the parlour to the bar and back again, and sometimes put his nose out of doors to smell the sea, holding on to the walls as he went for support and breathing hard and fast like a man on a steep mountain. He never particularly addressed me, and it is my belief he had as good as forgotten his confidences; but his temper was more flighty, and allowing for his bodily weakness, more violent than ever. He had an alarming way now when he was drunk of drawing his cutlass and laying it bare before him on the table.

But with all that, he minded people less and seemed shut up in his own thoughts and rather wandering. Once, for instance, to our extreme wonder, he piped up to a different air, a kind of country lovesong that he must have learned in his youth before he had begun to follow the sea. So things passed until, the day after the funeral, and about three oclock of a bitter, foggy, frosty afternoon, I was standing at the door for a moment, full of sad thoughts about my father, when I saw someone drawing slowly near along the road. He was plainly blind, for he tapped before him with a stick and wore a great green shade over his eyes and nose; and he was hunched, as if with age or weakness, and wore a huge old tattered seacloak with a hood that made him appear positively deformed. I never saw in my life a more dreadfullooking figure. He stopped a little from the inn, and raising his voice in an odd singsong, addressed the air in front of him, Will any kind friend inform a poor blind man, who has lost the precious sight of his eyes in the gracious defence of his native country, Englandand God bless King George!where or in what part of this country he may now be? You are at the Admiral Benbow, Black Hill Cove, my good man, said I. I hear a voice, said he, a young voice. Will you give me your hand, my kind young friend, and lead me in? I held out my hand, and the horrible, softspoken, eyeless creature gripped it in a moment like a vise. I was so much startled that I struggled to withdraw, but the blind man pulled me close up to him with a single action of his arm. Now, boy, he said, take me in to the captain. Sir, said I, upon my word I dare not. Oh, he sneered, thats it! Take me in straight or Ill break your arm. And he gave it, as he spoke, a wrench that made me cry out. Sir, said I, it is for yourself I mean. The captain is not what he used to be. He sits with a drawn cutlass. Another gentleman Come, now, march, interrupted he; and I never heard a voice so cruel, and cold, and ugly as that blind mans. It cowed me more than the pain, and I began to obey him at once, walking straight in at the door and towards the parlour, where our sick old buccaneer was sitting, dazed with rum. The blind man clung close to me, holding me in one iron fist and leaning almost more of his weight on me than I could carry. Lead me straight up to him, and when Im in view, cry out, Heres a friend for you, Bill. If you dont, Ill do this, and with that he gave me a twitch that I thought would have made me faint. Between this and that, I was so utterly terrified of the blind beggar that I forgot my terror of the captain, and as I opened the parlour door, cried out the words he had ordered in a trembling voice. 0051m The poor captain raised his eyes, and at one look the rum went out of him and left him staring sober. The expression of his face was not so much of terror as of mortal sickness. He made a movement to rise, but I do not believe he had enough force left in his body. Now, Bill, sit where you are, said the beggar. If I cant see, I can hear a finger stirring. Business is business. Hold out your left hand. Boy, take his left hand by the wrist and bring it near to my right. We both obeyed him to the letter, and I saw him pass something from the hollow of the hand that held his stick into the palm of the captains, which closed upon it instantly. And now thats done, said the blind man; and at the words he suddenly left hold of me, and with incredible accuracy and nimbleness, skipped out of the parlour and into the road, where, as I still stood motionless, I could hear his stick go taptaptapping into the distance. It was some time before either I or the captain seemed to gather our senses, but at length, and about at the same moment, I released his wrist, which I was still holding, and he drew in his hand and looked sharply into the palm. Ten oclock! he cried. Six hours. Well do them yet, and he sprang to his feet. Even as he did so, he reeled, put his hand to his throat, stood swaying for a moment, and then, with a peculiar sound, fell from his whole height face foremost to the floor. I ran to him at once, calling to my mother. But haste was all in vain. The captain had been struck dead by thundering apoplexy. It is a curious thing to understand, for I had certainly never liked the man, though of late I had begun to pity him, but as soon as I saw that he was dead, I burst into a flood of tears. It was the second death I had known, and the sorrow of the first was still fresh in my heart. 0054m IV The Seachest 9054m lost no time, of course, in telling my mother all that I knew, and perhaps should have told her long before, and we saw ourselves at once in a difficult and dangerous position. Some of the mans moneyif he had anywas certainly due to us, but it was not likely that our captains shipmates, above all the two specimens seen by me, Black Dog and the blind beggar, would be inclined to give up their booty in payment of the dead mans debts. The captains order to mount at once and ride for Doctor Livesey would have left my mother alone and unprotected, which was not to be thought of. Indeed, it seemed impossible for either of us to remain much longer in the house; the fall of coals in the kitchen grate, the very ticking of the clock, filled us with alarms. The neighbourhood, to our ears, seemed haunted by approaching footsteps; and what between the dead body of the captain on the parlour floor and the thought of that detestable blind beggar hovering near at hand and ready to return, there were moments when, as the saying goes, I jumped in my skin for terror. Something must speedily be resolved upon, and it occurred to us at last to go forth together and seek help in the neighbouring hamlet. No sooner said than done. Bareheaded as we were, we ran out at once in the gathering evening and the frosty fog. The hamlet lay not many hundred yards away, though out of view, on the other side of the next cove; and what greatly encouraged me, it was in an opposite direction from that whence the blind man had made his appearance and whither he had presumably returned. We were not many minutes on the road, though we sometimes stopped to lay hold of each other and hearken. But there was no unusual soundnothing but the low wash of the ripple and the croaking of the inmates of the wood. It was already candlelight when we reached the hamlet, and I shall never forget how much I was cheered to see the yellow shine in doors and windows; but that, as it proved, was the best of the help we were likely to get in that quarter. Foryou would have thought men would have been ashamed of themselvesno soul would consent to return with us to the Admiral Benbow. The more we told of our troubles, the moreman, woman, and childthey clung to the shelter of their houses. The name of Captain Flint, though it was strange to me, was well enough known to some there and carried a great weight of terror. Some of the men who had been to fieldwork on the far side of the Admiral Benbow remembered, besides, to have seen several strangers on the road, and taking them to be smugglers, to have bolted away; and one at least had seen a little lugger in what we called Kitts Hole. For that matter, anyone who was a comrade of the captains was enough to frighten them to death. And the short and the long of the matter was, that while we could get several who were willing enough to ride to Dr. Liveseys, which lay in another direction, not one would help us to defend the inn. They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener; and so when each had said his say, my mother made them a speech. She would not, she declared, lose money that belonged to her fatherless boy; If none of the rest of you dare, she said, Jim and I dare. Back we will go, the way we came, and small thanks to you big, hulking, chickenhearted men. Well have that chest open, if we die for it. And Ill thank you for that bag, Mrs. Crossley, to bring back our lawful money in. Of course I said I would go with my mother, and of course they all cried out at our foolhardiness, but even then not a man would go along with us. All they would do was to give me a loaded pistol lest we were attacked, and to promise to have horses ready saddled in case we were pursued on our return, while one lad was to ride forward to the doctors in search of armed assistance. My heart was beating finely when we two set forth in the cold night upon this dangerous venture. A full moon was beginning to rise and peered redly through the upper edges of the fog, and this increased our haste, for it was plain, before we came forth again, that all would be as bright as day, and our departure exposed to the eyes of any watchers. We slipped along the hedges, noiseless and swift, nor did we see or hear anything to increase our terrors, till, to our relief, the door of the Admiral Benbow had closed behind us. I slipped the bolt at once, and we stood and panted for a moment in the dark, alone in the house with the dead captains body. Then my mother got a candle in the bar, and holding each others hands, we advanced into the parlour. He lay as we had left him, on his back, with his eyes open and one arm stretched out. Draw down the blind, Jim, whispered my mother; they might come and watch outside. And now, said she when I had done so, we have to get the key off that; and whos to touch it, I should like to know! and she gave a kind of sob as she said the words. I went down on my knees at once. On the floor close to his hand there was a little round of paper, blackened on the one side. I could not doubt that this was the black spot; and taking it up, I found written on the other side, in a very good, clear hand, this short message You have till ten tonight. He had till ten, Mother, said I; and just as I said it, our old clock began striking. This sudden noise startled us shockingly; but the news was good, for it was only six. Now, Jim, she said, that key. I felt in his pockets, one after another. A few small coins, a thimble, and some thread and big needles, a piece of pigtail tobacco bitten away at the end, his gully with the crooked handle, a pocket compass, and a tinder box were all that they contained, and I began to despair. Perhaps its round his neck, suggested my mother. Overcoming a strong repugnance, I tore open his shirt at the neck, and there, sure enough, hanging to a bit of tarry string, which I cut with his own gully, we found the key. At this triumph we were filled with hope and hurried upstairs without delay to the little room where he had slept so long and where his box had stood since the day of his arrival. It was like any other seamans chest on the outside, the initial B burned on the top of it with a hot iron, and the corners somewhat smashed and broken as by long, rough usage. Give me the key, said my mother; and though the lock was very stiff, she had turned it and thrown back the lid in a twinkling. A strong smell of tobacco and tar rose from the interior, but nothing was to be seen on the top except a suit of very good clothes, carefully brushed and folded. They had never been worn, my mother said. Under that, the miscellany begana quadrant, a tin canikin, several sticks of tobacco, two brace of very handsome pistols, a piece of bar silver, an old Spanish watch and some other trinkets of little value and mostly of foreign make, a pair of compasses mounted with brass, and five or six curious West Indian shells. I have often wondered since why he should have carried about these shells with him in his wandering, guilty, and hunted life. In the meantime, we had found nothing of any value but the silver and the trinkets, and neither of these were in our way. Underneath there was an old boatcloak, whitened with seasalt on many a harbourbar. My mother pulled it up with impatience, and there lay before us, the last things in the chest, a bundle tied up in oilcloth, and looking like papers, and a canvas bag that gave forth, at a touch, the jingle of gold. Ill show these rogues that Im an honest woman, said my mother. Ill have my dues, and not a farthing over. Hold Mrs. Crossleys bag. And she began to count over the amount of the captains score from the sailors bag into the one that I was holding. 0059m It was a long, difficult business, for the coins were of all countries and sizesdoubloons, and louis dors, and guineas, and pieces of eight, and I know not what besides, all shaken together at random. The guineas, too, were about the scarcest, and it was with these only that my mother knew how to make her count. When we were about halfway through, I suddenly put my hand upon her arm, for I had heard in the silent frosty air a sound that brought my heart into my mouththe taptapping of the blind mans stick upon the frozen road. It drew nearer and nearer, while we sat holding our breath. Then it struck sharp on the inn door, and then we could hear the handle being turned and the bolt rattling as the wretched being tried to enter; and then there was a long time of silence both within and without. At last the tapping recommenced, and, to our indescribable joy and gratitude, died slowly away again until it ceased to be heard. Mother, said I, take the whole and lets be going, for I was sure the bolted door must have seemed suspicious and would bring the whole hornets nest about our ears, though how thankful I was that I had bolted it, none could tell who had never met that terrible blind man. But my mother, frightened as she was, would not consent to take a fraction more than was due to her and was obstinately unwilling to be content with less. It was not yet seven, she said, by a long way; she knew her rights and she would have them; and she was still arguing with me when a little low whistle sounded a good way off upon the hill. That was enough, and more than enough, for both of us. Ill take what I have, she said, jumping to her feet. And Ill take this to square the count, said I, picking up the oilskin packet. Next moment we were both groping downstairs, leaving the candle by the empty chest; and the next we had opened the door and were in full retreat. We had not started a moment too soon. The fog was rapidly dispersing; already the moon shone quite clear on the high ground on either side; and it was only in the exact bottom of the dell and round the tavern door that a thin veil still hung unbroken to conceal the first steps of our escape. Far less than halfway to the hamlet, very little beyond the bottom of the hill, we must come forth into the moonlight. Nor was this all, for the sound of several footsteps running came already to our ears, and as we looked back in their direction, a light tossing to and fro and still rapidly advancing showed that one of the newcomers carried a lantern. My dear, said my mother suddenly, take the money and run on. I am going to faint. This was certainly the end for both of us, I thought. How I cursed the cowardice of the neighbours; how I blamed my poor mother for her honesty and her greed, for her past foolhardiness and present weakness! We were just at the little bridge, by good fortune; and I helped her, tottering as she was, to the edge of the bank, where, sure enough, she gave a sigh and fell on my shoulder. I do not know how I found the strength to do it at all, and I am afraid it was roughly done, but I managed to drag her down the bank and a little way under the arch. Farther I could not move her, for the bridge was too low to let me do more than crawl below it. So there we had to staymy mother almost entirely exposed and both of us within earshot of the inn. 0062m V The Last of the Blind Man 9062m y curiosity, in a sense, was stronger than my fear, for I could not remain where I was, but crept back to the bank again, whence, sheltering my head behind a bush of broom, I might command the road before our door. I was scarcely in position ere my enemies began to arrive, seven or eight of them, running hard, their feet beating out of time along the road and the man with the lantern some paces in front. Three men ran together, hand in hand; and I made out, even through the mist, that the middle man of this trio was the blind beggar. The next moment his voice showed me that I was right. Down with the door! he cried. Aye, aye, sir! answered two or three; and a rush was made upon the Admiral Benbow, the lanternbearer following; and then I could see them pause, and hear speeches passed in a lower key, as if they were surprised to find the door open. But the pause was brief, for the blind man again issued his commands. His voice sounded louder and higher, as if he were afire with eagerness and rage. In, in, in! he shouted, and cursed them for their delay. Four or five of them obeyed at once, two remaining on the road with the formidable beggar. There was a pause, then a cry of surprise, and then a voice shouting from the house, Bills dead. But the blind man swore at them again for their delay. Search him, some of you shirking lubbers, and the rest of you aloft and get the chest, he cried. I could hear their feet rattling up our old stairs, so that the house must have shook with it. Promptly afterwards, fresh sounds of astonishment arose; the window of the captains room was thrown open with a slam and a jingle of broken glass, and a man leaned out into the moonlight, head and shoulders, and addressed the blind beggar on the road below him. Pew, he cried, theyve been before us. Someones turned the chest out alow and aloft. Is it there? roared Pew. The moneys there. The blind man cursed the money. Flints fist, I mean, he cried. We dont see it here nohow, returned the man. Here, you below there, is it on Bill? cried the blind man again. At that another fellow, probably him who had remained below to search the captains body, came to the door of the inn. Bills been overhauled aready, said he; nothin left. Its these people of the innits that boy. I wish I had put his eyes out! cried the blind man, Pew. There were no time agothey had the door bolted when I tried it. Scatter, lads, and find em. Sure enough, they left their glim here, said the fellow from the window. Scatter and find em! Rout the house out! reiterated Pew, striking with his stick upon the road. Then there followed a great todo through all our old inn, heavy feet pounding to and fro, furniture thrown over, doors kicked in, until the very rocks reechoed and the men came out again, one after another, on the road and declared that we were nowhere to be found. And just the same whistle that had alarmed my mother and myself over the dead captains money was once more clearly audible through the night, but this time twice repeated. I had thought it to be the blind mans trumpet, so to speak, summoning his crew to the assault, but I now found that it was a signal from the hillside towards the hamlet, and from its effect upon the buccaneers, a signal to warn them of approaching danger. Theres Dirk again, said one. Twice! Well have to budge, mates. Budge, you skulk! cried Pew. Dirk was a fool and a coward from the firstyou wouldnt mind him. They must be close by; they cant be far; you have your hands on it. Scatter and look for them, dogs! Oh, shiver my soul, he cried, if I had eyes! This appeal seemed to produce some effect, for two of the fellows began to look here and there among the lumber, but halfheartedly, I thought, and with half an eye to their own danger all the time, while the rest stood irresolute on the road. You have your hands on thousands, you fools, and you hang a leg! Youd be as rich as kings if you could find it, and you know its here, and you stand there skulking. There wasnt one of you dared face Bill, and I did ita blind man! And Im to lose my chance for you! Im to be a poor, crawling beggar, sponging for rum, when I might be rolling in a coach! If you had the pluck of a weevil in a biscuit you would catch them still. Hang it, Pew, weve got the doubloons! grumbled one. They might have hid the blessed thing, said another. Take the Georges, Pew, and dont stand here squalling. Squalling was the word for it; Pews anger rose so high at these objections till at last, his passion completely taking the upper hand, he struck at them right and left in his blindness and his stick sounded heavily on more than one. 0065m These, in their turn, cursed back at the blind miscreant, threatened him in horrid terms, and tried in vain to catch the stick and wrest it from his grasp. This quarrel was the saving of us, for while it was still raging, another sound came from the top of the hill on the side of the hamletthe tramp of horses galloping. Almost at the same time a pistolshot, flash and report, came from the hedge side. And that was plainly the last signal of danger, for the buccaneers turned at once and ran, separating in every direction, one seaward along the cove, one slant across the hill, and so on, so that in half a minute not a sign of them remained but Pew. Him they had deserted, whether in sheer panic or out of revenge for his ill words and blows I know not; but there he remained behind, tapping up and down the road in a frenzy, and groping and calling for his comrades. Finally he took a wrong turn and ran a few steps past me, towards the hamlet, crying, Johnny, Black Dog, Dirk, and other names, you wont leave old Pew, matesnot old Pew! Just then the noise of horses topped the rise, and four or five riders came in sight in the moonlight and swept at full gallop down the slope. At this Pew saw his error, turned with a scream, and ran straight for the ditch, into which he rolled. But he was on his feet again in a second and made another dash, now utterly bewildered, right under the nearest of the coming horses. The rider tried to save him, but in vain. Down went Pew with a cry that rang high into the night; and the four hoofs trampled and spurned him and passed by. He fell on his side, then gently collapsed upon his face and moved no more. I leaped to my feet and hailed the riders. They were pulling up, at any rate, horrified at the accident; and I soon saw what they were. One, tailing out behind the rest, was a lad that had gone from the hamlet to Dr. Liveseys; the rest were revenue officers, whom he had met by the way, and with whom he had had the intelligence to return at once. Some news of the lugger in Kitts Hole had found its way to Supervisor Dance and set him forth that night in our direction, and to that circumstance my mother and I owed our preservation from death. Pew was dead, stone dead. As for my mother, when we had carried her up to the hamlet, a little cold water and salts and that soon brought her back again, and she was none the worse for her terror, though she still continued to deplore the balance of the money. In the meantime the supervisor rode on, as fast as he could, to Kitts Hole; but his men had to dismount and grope down the dingle, leading, and sometimes supporting, their horses, and in continual fear of ambushes; so it was no great matter for surprise that when they got down to the Hole the lugger was already under way, though still close in. He hailed her. A voice replied, telling him to keep out of the moonlight or he would get some lead in him, and at the same time a bullet whistled close by his arm. Soon after, the lugger doubled the point and disappeared. Mr. Dance stood there, as he said, like a fish out of water, and all he could do was to dispatch a man to B to warn the cutter. And that, said he, is just about as good as nothing. Theyve got off clean, and theres an end. Only, he added, Im glad I trod on Master Pews corns, for by this time he had heard my story. I went back with him to the Admiral Benbow, and you cannot imagine a house in such a state of smash; the very clock had been thrown down by these fellows in their furious hunt after my mother and myself; and though nothing had actually been taken away except the captains moneybag and a little silver from the till, I could see at once that we were ruined. Mr. Dance could make nothing of the scene. They got the money, you say? Well, then, Hawkins, what in fortune were they after? More money, I suppose? No, sir; not money, I think, replied I. In fact, sir, I believe I have the thing in my breast pocket; and to tell you the truth, I should like to get it put in safety. To be sure, boy; quite right, said he. Ill take it, if you like. I thought perhaps Dr. Livesey I began. Perfectly right, he interrupted very cheerily, perfectly righta gentleman and a magistrate. And, now I come to think of it, I might as well ride round there myself and report to him or squire. Master Pews dead, when alls done; not that I regret it, but hes dead, you see, and people will make it out against an officer of his Majestys revenue, if make it out they can. Now, Ill tell you, Hawkins, if you like, Ill take you along. I thanked him heartily for the offer, and we walked back to the hamlet where the horses were. By the time I had told mother of my purpose they were all in the saddle. Dogger, said Mr. Dance, you have a good horse; take up this lad behind you. As soon as I was mounted, holding on to Doggers belt, the supervisor gave the word, and the party struck out at a bouncing trot on the road to Dr. Liveseys house. 0070m VI The Captains Papers 9070m e rode hard all the way till we drew up before Dr. Liveseys door. The house was all dark to the front. Mr. Dance told me to jump down and knock, and Dogger gave me a stirrup to descend by. The door was opened almost at once by the maid. Is Dr. Livesey in? I asked. No, she said, he had come home in the afternoon but had gone up to the hall to dine and pass the evening with the squire. So there we go, boys, said Mr. Dance. This time, as the distance was short, I did not mount, but ran with Doggers stirrupleather to the lodge gates and up the long, leafless, moonlit avenue to where the white line of the hall buildings looked on either hand on great old gardens. Here Mr. Dance dismounted, and taking me along with him, was admitted at a word into the house. The servant led us down a matted passage and showed us at the end into a great library, all lined with bookcases and busts upon the top of them, where the squire and Dr. Livesey sat, pipe in hand, on either side of a bright fire. I had never seen the squire so near at hand. He was a tall man, over six feet high, and broad in proportion, and he had a bluff, roughandready face, all roughened and reddened and lined in his long travels. His eyebrows were very black, and moved readily, and this gave him a look of some temper, not bad, you would say, but quick and high. Come in, Mr. Dance, says he, very stately and condescending. Good evening, Dance, says the doctor with a nod. And good evening to you, friend Jim. What good wind brings you here? The supervisor stood up straight and stiff and told his story like a lesson; and you should have seen how the two gentlemen leaned forward and looked at each other, and forgot to smoke in their surprise and interest. When they heard how my mother went back to the inn, Dr. Livesey fairly slapped his thigh, and the squire cried Bravo! and broke his long pipe against the grate. Long before it was done, Mr. Trelawney (that, you will remember, was the squires name) had got up from his seat and was striding about the room, and the doctor, as if to hear the better, had taken off his powdered wig and sat there looking very strange indeed with his own closecropped black poll. At last Mr. Dance finished the story. Mr. Dance, said the squire, you are a very noble fellow. And as for riding down that black, atrocious miscreant, I regard it as an act of virtue, sir, like stamping on a cockroach. This lad Hawkins is a trump, I perceive. Hawkins, will you ring that bell? Mr. Dance must have some ale. And so, Jim, said the doctor, you have the thing that they were after, have you? Here it is, sir, said I, and gave him the oilskin packet. The doctor looked it all over, as if his fingers were itching to open it; but instead of doing that, he put it quietly in the pocket of his coat. Squire, said he, when Dance has had his ale he must, of course, be off on his Majestys service; but I mean to keep Jim Hawkins here to sleep at my house, and with your permission, I propose we should have up the cold pie and let him sup. As you will, Livesey, said the squire; Hawkins has earned better than cold pie. So a big pigeon pie was brought in and put on a sidetable, and I made a hearty supper, for I was as hungry as a hawk, while Mr. Dance was further complimented and at last dismissed. And now, squire, said the doctor. And now, Livesey, said the squire in the same breath. One at a time, one at a time, laughed Dr. Livesey. You have heard of this Flint, I suppose? Heard of him! cried the squire. Heard of him, you say! He was the bloodthirstiest buccaneer that sailed. Blackbeard was a child to Flint. The Spaniards were so prodigiously afraid of him that, I tell you, sir, I was sometimes proud he was an Englishman. Ive seen his topsails with these eyes, off Trinidad, and the cowardly son of a rumpuncheon that I sailed with put backput back, sir, into Port of Spain. Well, Ive heard of him myself, in England, said the doctor. But the point is, had he money? Money! cried the squire. Have you heard the story? What were these villains after but money? What do they care for but money? For what would they risk their rascal carcasses but money? That we shall soon know, replied the doctor. But you are so confoundedly hotheaded and exclamatory that I cannot get a word in. What I want to know is this Supposing that I have here in my pocket some clue to where Flint buried his treasure, will that treasure amount to much? Amount, sir! cried the squire. It will amount to this If we have the clue you talk about, I fit out a ship in Bristol dock, and take you and Hawkins here along, and Ill have that treasure if I search a year. Very well, said the doctor. Now, then, if Jim is agreeable, well open the packet; and he laid it before him on the table. The bundle was sewn together, and the doctor had to get out his instrument case and cut the stitches with his medical scissors. It contained two thingsa book and a sealed paper. First of all well try the book, observed the doctor. The squire and I were both peering over his shoulder as he opened it, for Dr. Livesey had kindly motioned me to come round from the sidetable, where I had been eating, to enjoy the sport of the search. On the first page there were only some scraps of writing, such as a man with a pen in his hand might make for idleness or practice. One was the same as the tattoo mark, Billy Bones his fancy; then there was Mr. W. Bones, mate, No more rum, Off Palm Key he got itt, and some other snatches, mostly single words and unintelligible. I could not help wondering who it was that had got itt, and what itt was that he got. A knife in his back as like as not. Not much instruction there, said Dr. Livesey as he passed on. The next ten or twelve pages were filled with a curious series of entries. There was a date at one end of the line and at the other a sum of money, as in common accountbooks, but instead of explanatory writing, only a varying number of crosses between the two. On the 12th of June, 1745, for instance, a sum of seventy pounds had plainly become due to someone, and there was nothing but six crosses to explain the cause. In a few cases, to be sure, the name of a place would be added, as Offe Caraccas, or a mere entry of latitude and longitude, as 62 17 20, 19 2 40. The record lasted over nearly twenty years, the amount of the separate entries growing larger as time went on, and at the end a grand total had been made out after five or six wrong additions, and these words appended, Bones, his pile. I cant make head or tail of this, said Dr. Livesey.

The thing is as clear as noonday, cried the squire. This is the blackhearted hounds accountbook. These crosses stand for the names of ships or towns that they sank or plundered. The sums are the scoundrels share, and where he feared an ambiguity, you see he added something clearer. Offe Caraccas, now; you see, here was some unhappy vessel boarded off that coast. God help the poor souls that manned hercoral long ago. Right! said the doctor. See what it is to be a traveller. Right! And the amounts increase, you see, as he rose in rank. There was little else in the volume but a few bearings of places noted in the blank leaves towards the end and a table for reducing French, English, and Spanish moneys to a common value. Thrifty man! cried the doctor. He wasnt the one to be cheated. And now, said the squire, for the other. 0075m The paper had been sealed in several places with a thimble by way of seal; the very thimble, perhaps, that I had found in the captains pocket. The doctor opened the seals with great care, and there fell out the map of an island, with latitude and longitude, soundings, names of hills and bays and inlets, and every particular that would be needed to bring a ship to a safe anchorage upon its shores. It was about nine miles long and five across, shaped, you might say, like a fat dragon standing up, and had two fine landlocked harbours, and a hill in the centre part marked The Spyglass. There were several additions of a later date, but above all, three crosses of red inktwo on the north part of the island, one in the southwestand beside this last, in the same red ink, and in a small, neat hand, very different from the captains tottery characters, these words Bulk of treasure here. Over on the back the same hand had written this further information Tall tree, Spyglass shoulder, bearing a point to the N. of N.N.E. Skeleton Island E.S.E. and by E. Ten feet. The bar silver is in the north cache; you can find it by the trend of the east hummock, ten fathoms south of the black crag with the face on it. The arms are easy found, in the sandhill, N. point of north inlet cape, bearing E. and a quarter N. J.F. That was all; but brief as it was, and to me incomprehensible, it filled the squire and Dr. Livesey with delight. Livesey, said the squire, you will give up this wretched practice at once. Tomorrow I start for Bristol. In three weeks timethree weeks!two weeksten dayswell have the best ship, sir, and the choicest crew in England. Hawkins shall come as cabinboy. Youll make a famous cabinboy, Hawkins. You, Livesey, are ships doctor; I am admiral. Well take Redruth, Joyce, and Hunter. Well have favourable winds, a quick passage, and not the least difficulty in finding the spot, and money to eat, to roll in, to play duck and drake with ever after. Trelawney, said the doctor, Ill go with you; and Ill go bail for it, so will Jim, and be a credit to the undertaking. Theres only one man Im afraid of. And whos that? cried the squire. Name the dog, sir! You, replied the doctor; for you cannot hold your tongue. We are not the only men who know of this paper. These fellows who attacked the inn tonightbold, desperate blades, for sureand the rest who stayed aboard that lugger, and more, I dare say, not far off, are, one and all, through thick and thin, bound that theyll get that money. We must none of us go alone till we get to sea. Jim and I shall stick together in the meanwhile; youll take Joyce and Hunter when you ride to Bristol, and from first to last, not one of us must breathe a word of what weve found. Livesey, returned the squire, you are always in the right of it. Ill be as silent as the grave. 0081m PART TWOThe Seacook 0083m VII I Go to Bristol 9083m t was longer than the squire imagined ere we were ready for the sea, and none of our first plansnot even Dr. Liveseys, of keeping me beside himcould be carried out as we intended. The doctor had to go to London for a physician to take charge of his practice; the squire was hard at work at Bristol; and I lived on at the hall under the charge of old Redruth, the gamekeeper, almost a prisoner, but full of seadreams and the most charming anticipations of strange islands and adventures. I brooded by the hour together over the map, all the details of which I well remembered. Sitting by the fire in the housekeepers room, I approached that island in my fancy from every possible direction; I explored every acre of its surface; I climbed a thousand times to that tall hill they call the Spyglass, and from the top enjoyed the most wonderful and changing prospects. Sometimes the isle was thick with savages, with whom we fought, sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us, but in all my fancies nothing occurred to me so strange and tragic as our actual adventures. So the weeks passed on, till one fine day there came a letter addressed to Dr. Livesey, with this addition, To be opened, in the case of his absence, by Tom Redruth or young Hawkins. Obeying this order, we found, or rather I foundfor the gamekeeper was a poor hand at reading anything but printthe following important news Old Anchor Inn, Bristol, March 1, 17. Dear LiveseyAs I do not know whether you are at the hall or still in London, I send this in double to both places. The ship is bought and fitted. She lies at anchor, ready for sea. You never imagined a sweeter schoonera child might sail hertwo hundred tons; name, Hispaniola. I got her through my old friend, Blandly, who has proved himself throughout the most surprising trump. The admirable fellow literally slaved in my interest, and so, I may say, did everyone in Bristol, as soon as they got wind of the port we sailed fortreasure, I mean. Redruth, said I, interrupting the letter, Dr. Livesey will not like that. The squire has been talking, after all. Well, whos a better right? growled the gamekeeper. A pretty rum go if squire aint to talk for Dr. Livesey, I should think. At that I gave up all attempts at commentary and read straight on Blandly himself found the Hispaniola, and by the most admirable management got her for the merest trifle. There is a class of men in Bristol monstrously prejudiced against Blandly. They go the length of declaring that this honest creature would do anything for money, that the Hispaniola belonged to him, and that he sold it me absurdly highthe most transparent calumnies. None of them dare, however, to deny the merits of the ship. So far there was not a hitch. The workpeople, to be sureriggers and what notwere most annoyingly slow; but time cured that. It was the crew that troubled me. I wished a round score of menin case of natives, buccaneers, or the odious Frenchand I had the worry of the deuce itself to find so much as half a dozen, till the most remarkable stroke of fortune brought me the very man that I required. I was standing on the dock, when, by the merest accident, I fell in talk with him. I found he was an old sailor, kept a publichouse, knew all the seafaring men in Bristol, had lost his health ashore, and wanted a good berth as cook to get to sea again. He had hobbled down there that morning, he said, to get a smell of the salt. I was monstrously touchedso would you have beenand, out of pure pity, I engaged him on the spot to be ships cook. Long John Silver, he is called, and has lost a leg; but that I regarded as a recommendation, since he lost it in his countrys service, under the immortal Hawke. He has no pension, Livesey. Imagine the abominable age we live in! Well, sir, I thought I had only found a cook, but it was a crew I had discovered. Between Silver and myself we got together in a few days a company of the toughest old salts imaginablenot pretty to look at, but fellows, by their faces, of the most indomitable spirit. I declare we could fight a frigate. Long John even got rid of two out of the six or seven I had already engaged. He showed me in a moment that they were just the sort of freshwater swabs we had to fear in an adventure of importance. I am in the most magnificent health and spirits, eating like a bull, sleeping like a tree, yet I shall not enjoy a moment till I hear my old tarpaulins tramping round the capstan. Seaward, ho! Hang the treasure! Its the glory of the sea that has turned my head. So now, Livesey, come post; do not lose an hour, if you respect me. Let young Hawkins go at once to see his mother, with Redruth for a guard; and then both come full speed to Bristol. John Trelawney Postscript.I did not tell you that Blandly, who, by the way, is to send a consort after us if we dont turn up by the end of August, had found an admirable fellow for sailing mastera stiff man, which I regret, but in all other respects a treasure. Long John Silver unearthed a very competent man for a mate, a man named Arrow. I have a boatswain who pipes, Livesey; so things shall go manowar fashion on board the good ship Hispaniola. I forgot to tell you that Silver is a man of substance; I know of my own knowledge that he has a bankers account, which has never been overdrawn. He leaves his wife to manage the inn; and as she is a woman of colour, a pair of old bachelors like you and I may be excused for guessing that it is the wife, quite as much as the health, that sends him back to roving. J. T. P.P.S.Hawkins may stay one night with his mother. J. T. You can fancy the excitement into which that letter put me. I was half beside myself with glee; and if ever I despised a man, it was old Tom Redruth, who could do nothing but grumble and lament. Any of the undergamekeepers would gladly have changed places with him; but such was not the squires pleasure, and the squires pleasure was like law among them all. Nobody but old Redruth would have dared so much as even to grumble. The next morning he and I set out on foot for the Admiral Benbow, and there I found my mother in good health and spirits. The captain, who had so long been a cause of so much discomfort, was gone where the wicked cease from troubling. The squire had had everything repaired, and the public rooms and the sign repainted, and had added some furnitureabove all a beautiful armchair for mother in the bar. He had found her a boy as an apprentice also so that she should not want help while I was gone. It was on seeing that boy that I understood, for the first time, my situation. I had thought up to that moment of the adventures before me, not at all of the home that I was leaving; and now, at sight of this clumsy stranger, who was to stay here in my place beside my mother, I had my first attack of tears. I am afraid I led that boy a dogs life, for as he was new to the work, I had a hundred opportunities of setting him right and putting him down, and I was not slow to profit by them. 0087m The night passed, and the next day, after dinner, Redruth and I were afoot again and on the road. I said goodbye to Mother and the cove where I had lived since I was born, and the dear old Admiral Benbowsince he was repainted, no longer quite so dear. One of my last thoughts was of the captain, who had so often strode along the beach with his cocked hat, his sabrecut cheek, and his old brass telescope. Next moment we had turned the corner and my home was out of sight. The mail picked us up about dusk at the Royal George on the heath. I was wedged in between Redruth and a stout old gentleman, and in spite of the swift motion and the cold night air, I must have dozed a great deal from the very first, and then slept like a log up hill and down dale through stage after stage, for when I was awakened at last it was by a punch in the ribs, and I opened my eyes to find that we were standing still before a large building in a city street and that the day had already broken a long time. Where are we? I asked. Bristol, said Tom. Get down. Mr. Trelawney had taken up his residence at an inn far down the docks to superintend the work upon the schooner. Thither we had now to walk, and our way, to my great delight, lay along the quays and beside the great multitude of ships of all sizes and rigs and nations. In one, sailors were singing at their work, in another there were men aloft, high over my head, hanging to threads that seemed no thicker than a spiders. Though I had lived by the shore all my life, I seemed never to have been near the sea till then. The smell of tar and salt was something new. I saw the most wonderful figureheads, that had all been far over the ocean. I saw, besides, many old sailors, with rings in their ears, and whiskers curled in ringlets, and tarry pigtails, and their swaggering, clumsy seawalk; and if I had seen as many kings or archbishops I could not have been more delighted. And I was going to sea myself, to sea in a schooner, with a piping boatswain and pigtailed singing seamen, to sea, bound for an unknown island, and to seek for buried treasure! While I was still in this delightful dream, we came suddenly in front of a large inn and met Squire Trelawney, all dressed out like a seaofficer, in stout blue cloth, coming out of the door with a smile on his face and a capital imitation of a sailors walk. Here you are, he cried, and the doctor came last night from London. Bravo! The ships company complete! Oh, sir, cried I, when do we sail? Sail! says he. We sail tomorrow! 0090m VIII At the Sign of the Spyglass 9090m hen I had done breakfasting the squire gave me a note addressed to John Silver, at the sign of the Spyglass, and told me I should easily find the place by following the line of the docks and keeping a bright lookout for a little tavern with a large brass telescope for sign. I set off, overjoyed at this opportunity to see some more of the ships and seamen, and picked my way among a great crowd of people and carts and bales, for the dock was now at its busiest, until I found the tavern in question. It was a bright enough little place of entertainment. The sign was newly painted; the windows had neat red curtains; the floor was cleanly sanded. There was a street on each side and an open door on both, which made the large, low room pretty clear to see in, in spite of clouds of tobacco smoke. The customers were mostly seafaring men, and they talked so loudly that I hung at the door, almost afraid to enter. As I was waiting, a man came out of a side room, and at a glance I was sure he must be Long John. His left leg was cut off close by the hip, and under the left shoulder he carried a crutch, which he managed with wonderful dexterity, hopping about upon it like a bird. He was very tall and strong, with a face as big as a hamplain and pale, but intelligent and smiling. Indeed, he seemed in the most cheerful spirits, whistling as he moved about among the tables, with a merry word or a slap on the shoulder for the more favoured of his guests. Now, to tell you the truth, from the very first mention of Long John in Squire Trelawneys letter I had taken a fear in my mind that he might prove to be the very onelegged sailor whom I had watched for so long at the old Benbow. But one look at the man before me was enough. I had seen the captain, and Black Dog, and the blind man, Pew, and I thought I knew what a buccaneer was likea very different creature, according to me, from this clean and pleasanttempered landlord. I plucked up courage at once, crossed the threshold, and walked right up to the man where he stood, propped on his crutch, talking to a customer. Mr. Silver, sir? I asked, holding out the note. Yes, my lad, said he; such is my name, to be sure. And who may you be? And then as he saw the squires letter, he seemed to me to give something almost like a start. Oh! said he, quite loud, and offering his hand. I see. You are our new cabinboy; pleased I am to see you. And he took my hand in his large firm grasp. Just then one of the customers at the far side rose suddenly and made for the door. It was close by him, and he was out in the street in a moment. But his hurry had attracted my notice, and I recognized him at glance. It was the tallowfaced man, wanting two fingers, who had come first to the Admiral Benbow. 0093m Oh, I cried, stop him! Its Black Dog! I dont care two coppers who he is, cried Silver. But he hasnt paid his score. Harry, run and catch him. One of the others who was nearest the door leaped up and started in pursuit. If he were Admiral Hawke he shall pay his score, cried Silver; and then, relinquishing my hand, Who did you say he was? he asked. Black what? Dog, sir, said I. Has Mr. Trelawney not told you of the buccaneers? He was one of them. So? cried Silver. In my house! Ben, run and help Harry. One of those swabs, was he? Was that you drinking with him, Morgan? Step up here. The man whom he called Morganan old, greyhaired, mahoganyfaced sailorcame forward pretty sheepishly, rolling his quid. Now, Morgan, said Long John very sternly, you never clapped your eyes on that BlackBlack Dog before, did you, now? Not I, sir, said Morgan with a salute. You didnt know his name, did you? No, sir. By the powers, Tom Morgan, its as good for you! exclaimed the landlord. If you had been mixed up with the like of that, you would never have put another foot in my house, you may lay to that. And what was he saying to you? I dont rightly know, sir, answered Morgan. Do you call that a head on your shoulders, or a blessed deadeye? cried Long John. Dont rightly know, dont you! Perhaps you dont happen to rightly know who you was speaking to, perhaps? Come, now, what was he jawingvyages, capns, ships? Pipe up! What was it? We was atalkin of keelhauling, answered Morgan. Keelhauling, was you? And a mighty suitable thing, too, and you may lay to that. Get back to your place for a lubber, Tom. And then, as Morgan rolled back to his seat, Silver added to me in a confidential whisper that was very flattering, as I thought, Hes quite an honest man, Tom Morgan, ony stupid. And now, he ran on again, aloud, lets seeBlack Dog? No, I dont know the name, not I. Yet I kind of think Iveyes, Ive seen the swab. He used to come here with a blind beggar, he used. That he did, you may be sure, said I. I knew that blind man too. His name was Pew. It was! cried Silver, now quite excited. Pew! That were his name for certain. Ah, he looked a shark, he did! If we run down this Black Dog, now, therell be news for Capn Trelawney! Bens a good runner; few seamen run better than Ben. He should run him down, hand over hand, by the powers! He talked o keelhauling, did he? Ill keelhaul him! All the time he was jerking out these phrases he was stumping up and down the tavern on his crutch, slapping tables with his hand, and giving such a show of excitement as would have convinced an Old Bailey judge or a Bow Street runner. My suspicions had been thoroughly reawakened on finding Black Dog at the Spyglass, and I watched the cook narrowly. But he was too deep, and too ready, and too clever for me, and by the time the two men had come back out of breath and confessed that they had lost the track in a crowd, and been scolded like thieves, I would have gone bail for the innocence of Long John Silver. See here, now, Hawkins, said he, heres a blessed hard thing on a man like me, now, aint it? Theres Capn Trelawneywhats he to think? Here I have this confounded son of a Dutchman sitting in my own house drinking of my own rum! Here you comes and tells me of it plain; and here I let him give us all the slip before my blessed deadlights! Now, Hawkins, you do me justice with the capn. Youre a lad, you are, but youre as smart as paint. I see that when you first come in. Now, here it is What could I do, with this old timber I hobble on? When I was an A B master mariner Id have come up alongside of him, hand over hand, and broached him to in a brace of old shakes, I would; but now And then, all of a sudden, he stopped, and his jaw dropped as though he had remembered something. The score! he burst out. Three goes o rum! Why, shiver my timbers, if I hadnt forgotten my score! And falling on a bench, he laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks. I could not help joining, and we laughed together, peal after peal, until the tavern rang again. Why, what a precious old seacalf I am! he said at last, wiping his cheeks. You and me should get on well, Hawkins, for Ill take my davy I should be rated ships boy. But come now, stand by to go about. This wont do. Dooty is dooty, messmates. Ill put on my old cockerel hat, and step along of you to Capn Trelawney, and report this here affair. For mind you, its serious, young Hawkins; and neither you nor mes come out of it with what I should make so bold as to call credit. Nor you neither, says you; not smartnone of the pair of us smart. But dash my buttons! That was a good un about my score. And he began to laugh again, and that so heartily, that though I did not see the joke as he did, I was again obliged to join him in his mirth. On our little walk along the quays, he made himself the most interesting companion, telling me about the different ships that we passed by, their rig, tonnage, and nationality, explaining the work that was going forwardhow one was discharging, another taking in cargo, and a third making ready for seaand every now and then telling me some little anecdote of ships or seamen or repeating a nautical phrase till I had learned it perfectly. I began to see that here was one of the best of possible shipmates. When we got to the inn, the squire and Dr. Livesey were seated together, finishing a quart of ale with a toast in it, before they should go aboard the schooner on a visit of inspection. Long John told the story from first to last, with a great deal of spirit and the most perfect truth. That was how it were, now, werent it, Hawkins? he would say, now and again, and I could always bear him entirely out. The two gentlemen regretted that Black Dog had got away, but we all agreed there was nothing to be done, and after he had been complimented, Long John took up his crutch and departed. All hands aboard by four this afternoon, shouted the squire after him. Aye, aye, sir, cried the cook, in the passage. Well, squire, said Dr. Livesey, I dont put much faith in your discoveries, as a general thing; but I will say this, John Silver suits me. The mans a perfect trump, declared the squire. And now, added the doctor, Jim may come on board with us, may he not? To be sure he may, says squire. Take your hat, Hawkins, and well see the ship. 0098m IX Powder and Arms 9098m he Hispaniola lay some way out, and we went under the figureheads and round the sterns of many other ships, and their cables sometimes grated underneath our keel, and sometimes swung above us. At last, however, we got alongside, and were met and saluted as we stepped aboard by the mate, Mr. Arrow, a brown old sailor with earrings in his ears and a squint. He and the squire were very thick and friendly, but I soon observed that things were not the same between Mr. Trelawney and the captain. This last was a sharplooking man who seemed angry with everything on board and was soon to tell us why, for we had hardly got down into the cabin when a sailor followed us. Captain Smollett, sir, axing to speak with you, said he. I am always at the captains orders. Show him in, said the squire. The captain, who was close behind his messenger, entered at once and shut the door behind him. Well, Captain Smollett, what have you to say? All well, I hope; all shipshape and seaworthy? Well, sir, said the captain, better speak plain, I believe, even at the risk of offence. I dont like this cruise; I dont like the men; and I dont like my officer. Thats short and sweet. Perhaps, sir, you dont like the ship? inquired the squire, very angry, as I could see. I cant speak as to that, sir, not having seen her tried, said the captain. She seems a clever craft; more I cant say. Possibly, sir, you may not like your employer, either? says the squire. But here Dr. Livesey cut in. Stay a bit, said he, stay a bit. No use of such questions as that but to produce ill feeling. The captain has said too much or he has said too little, and Im bound to say that I require an explanation of his words. You dont, you say, like this cruise. Now, why? I was engaged, sir, on what we call sealed orders, to sail this ship for that gentleman where he should bid me, said the captain. So far so good. But now I find that every man before the mast knows more than I do. I dont call that fair, now, do you? No, said Dr. Livesey, I dont. Next, said the captain, I learn we are going after treasurehear it from my own hands, mind you. Now, treasure is ticklish work; I dont like treasure voyages on any account, and I dont like them, above all, when they are secret and when (begging your pardon, Mr. Trelawney) the secret has been told to the parrot. Silvers parrot? asked the squire. Its a way of speaking, said the captain. Blabbed, I mean. Its my belief neither of you gentlemen know what you are about, but Ill tell you my way of itlife or death, and a close run. That is all clear, and, I dare say, true enough, replied Dr. Livesey. We take the risk, but we are not so ignorant as you believe us. Next, you say you dont like the crew. Are they not good seamen? I dont like them, sir, returned Captain Smollett. And I think I should have had the choosing of my own hands, if you go to that. Perhaps you should, replied the doctor. My friend should, perhaps, have taken you along with him; but the slight, if there be one, was unintentional. And you dont like Mr. Arrow? I dont, sir. I believe hes a good seaman, but hes too free with the crew to be a good officer. A mate should keep himself to himselfshouldnt drink with the men before the mast! Do you mean he drinks? cried the squire. No, sir, replied the captain, only that hes too familiar. Well, now, and the short and long of it, captain? asked the doctor. Tell us what you want. Well, gentlemen, are you determined to go on this cruise? Like iron, answered the squire. Very good, said the captain. Then, as youve heard me very patiently, saying things that I could not prove, hear me a few words more. They are putting the powder and the arms in the fore hold. Now, you have a good place under the cabin; why not put them there?first point. Then, you are bringing four of your own people with you, and they tell me some of them are to be berthed forward. Why not give them the berths here beside the cabin?second point. Any more? asked Mr. Trelawney. One more, said the captain. Theres been too much blabbing already. Far too much, agreed the doctor. Ill tell you what Ive heard myself, continued Captain Smollett that you have a map of an island, that theres crosses on the map to show where treasure is, and that the island lies And then he named the latitude and longitude exactly. I never told that, cried the squire, to a soul! The hands know it, sir, returned the captain. Livesey, that must have been you or Hawkins, cried the squire. It doesnt much matter who it was, replied the doctor. And I could see that neither he nor the captain paid much regard to Mr. Trelawneys protestations. Neither did I, to be sure, he was so loose a talker; yet in this case I believe he was really right and that nobody had told the situation of the island. Well, gentlemen, continued the captain, I dont know who has this map; but I make it a point, it shall be kept secret even from me and Mr. Arrow. Otherwise I would ask you to let me resign. I see, said the doctor. You wish us to keep this matter dark and to make a garrison of the stern part of the ship, manned with my friends own people, and provided with all the arms and powder on board. In other words, you fear a mutiny. Sir, said Captain Smollett, with no intention to take offence, I deny your right to put words into my mouth. No captain, sir, would be justified in going to sea at all if he had ground enough to say that. As for Mr. Arrow, I believe him thoroughly honest; some of the men are the same; all may be for what I know. But I am responsible for the ships safety and the life of every man Jack aboard of her. I see things going, as I think, not quite right. And I ask you to take certain precautions or let me resign my berth. And thats all. Captain Smollett, began the doctor with a smile, did ever you hear the fable of the mountain and the mouse? Youll excuse me, I dare say, but you remind me of that fable. When you came in here, Ill stake my wig, you meant more than this. Doctor, said the captain, you are smart. When I came in here I meant to get discharged. I had no thought that Mr. Trelawney would hear a word. No more I would, cried the squire. Had Livesey not been here I should have seen you to the deuce. As it is, I have heard you. I will do as you desire, but I think the worse of you. Thats as you please, sir, said the captain. Youll find I do my duty. And with that he took his leave. Trelawney, said the doctor, contrary to all my notions, I believed you have managed to get two honest men on board with youthat man and John Silver. Silver, if you like, cried the squire; but as for that intolerable humbug, I declare I think his conduct unmanly, unsailorly, and downright unEnglish. Well, says the doctor, we shall see. When we came on deck, the men had begun already to take out the arms and powder, yohoing at their work, while the captain and Mr. Arrow stood by superintending. The new arrangement was quite to my liking. The whole schooner had been overhauled; six berths had been made astern out of what had been the afterpart of the main hold; and this set of cabins was only joined to the galley and forecastle by a sparred passage on the port side. It had been originally meant that the captain, Mr. Arrow, Hunter, Joyce, the doctor, and the squire were to occupy these six berths. Now Redruth and I were to get two of them and Mr. Arrow and the captain were to sleep on deck in the companion, which had been enlarged on each side till you might almost have called it a roundhouse. Very low it was still, of course; but there was room to swing two hammocks, and even the mate seemed pleased with the arrangement. Even he, perhaps, had been doubtful as to the crew, but that is only guess, for as you shall hear, we had not long the benefit of his opinion. We were all hard at work, changing the powder and the berths, when the last man or two, and Long John along with them, came off in a shoreboat. The cook came up the side like a monkey for cleverness, and as soon as he saw what was doing, So ho, mates! says he. Whats this? Were achanging of the powder, Jack, answers one. Why, by the powers, cried Long John, if we do, well miss the morning tide! My orders! said the captain shortly. You may go below, my man. Hands will want supper. Aye, aye, sir, answered the cook, and touching his forelock, he disappeared at once in the direction of his galley. Thats a good man, captain, said the doctor. Very likely, sir, replied Captain Smollett. Easy with that, meneasy, he ran on, to the fellows who were shifting the powder; and then suddenly observing me examining the swivel we carried amidships, a long brass nine, Here you, ships boy, he cried, out o that! Off with you to the cook and get some work. 0103m And then as I was hurrying off I heard him say, quite loudly, to the doctor, Ill have no favourites on my ship. I assure you I was quite of the squires way of thinking, and hated the captain deeply. 0106m X The Voyage 9106m ll that night we were in a great bustle getting things stowed in their place, and boatfuls of the squires friends, Mr. Blandly and the like, coming off to wish him a good voyage and a safe return. We never had a night at the Admiral Benbow when I had half the work; and I was dogtired when, a little before dawn, the boatswain sounded his pipe and the crew began to man the capstanbars.

I might have been twice as weary, yet I would not have left the deck, all was so new and interesting to methe brief commands, the shrill note of the whistle, the men bustling to their places in the glimmer of the ships lanterns. Now, Barbecue, tip us a stave, cried one voice. The old one, cried another. Aye, aye, mates, said Long John, who was standing by, with his crutch under his arm, and at once broke out in the air and words I knew so well Fifteen men on the dead mans chest And then the whole crew bore chorus Yohoho, and a bottle of rum! And at the third Ho! drove the bars before them with a will. Even at that exciting moment it carried me back to the old Admiral Benbow in a second, and I seemed to hear the voice of the captain piping in the chorus. But soon the anchor was short up; soon it was hanging dripping at the bows; soon the sails began to draw, and the land and shipping to flit by on either side; and before I could lie down to snatch an hour of slumber the Hispaniola had begun her voyage to the Isle of Treasure. I am not going to relate that voyage in detail. It was fairly prosperous. The ship proved to be a good ship, the crew were capable seamen, and the captain thoroughly understood his business. But before we came the length of Treasure Island, two or three things had happened which require to be known. Mr. Arrow, first of all, turned out even worse than the captain had feared. He had no command among the men, and people did what they pleased with him. But that was by no means the worst of it, for after a day or two at sea he began to appear on deck with hazy eye, red cheeks, stuttering tongue, and other marks of drunkenness. Time after time he was ordered below in disgrace. Sometimes he fell and cut himself; sometimes he lay all day long in his little bunk at one side of the companion; sometimes for a day or two he would be almost sober and attend to his work at least passably. In the meantime, we could never make out where he got the drink. That was the ships mystery. Watch him as we pleased, we could do nothing to solve it; and when we asked him to his face, he would only laugh if he were drunk, and if he were sober deny solemnly that he ever tasted anything but water. He was not only useless as an officer and a bad influence amongst the men, but it was plain that at this rate he must soon kill himself outright, so nobody was much surprised, nor very sorry, when one dark night, with a head sea, he disappeared entirely and was seen no more. Overboard! said the captain. Well, gentlemen, that saves the trouble of putting him in irons. But there we were, without a mate; and it was necessary, of course, to advance one of the men. The boatswain, Job Anderson, was the likeliest man aboard, and though he kept his old title, he served in a way as mate. Mr. Trelawney had followed the sea, and his knowledge made him very useful, for he often took a watch himself in easy weather. And the coxswain, Israel Hands, was a careful, wily, old, experienced seaman who could be trusted at a pinch with almost anything. He was a great confidant of Long John Silver, and so the mention of his name leads me on to speak of our ships cook, Barbecue, as the men called him. Aboard ship he carried his crutch by a lanyard round his neck, to have both hands as free as possible. It was something to see him wedge the foot of the crutch against a bulkhead, and propped against it, yielding to every movement of the ship, get on with his cooking like someone safe ashore. Still more strange was it to see him in the heaviest of weather cross the deck. He had a line or two rigged up to help him across the widest spacesLong Johns earrings, they were called; and he would hand himself from one place to another, now using the crutch, now trailing it alongside by the lanyard, as quickly as another man could walk. Yet some of the men who had sailed with him before expressed their pity to see him so reduced. Hes no common man, Barbecue, said the coxswain to me. He had good schooling in his young days and can speak like a book when so minded; and bravea lions nothing alongside of Long John! I seen him grapple four and knock their heads togetherhim unarmed. All the crew respected and even obeyed him. He had a way of talking to each and doing everybody some particular service. To me he was unweariedly kind, and always glad to see me in the galley, which he kept as clean as a new pin, the dishes hanging up burnished and his parrot in a cage in one corner. Come away, Hawkins, he would say; come and have a yarn with John. Nobody more welcome than yourself, my son. Sit you down and hear the news. Heres Capn FlintI calls my parrot Capn Flint, after the famous buccaneerheres Capn Flint predicting success to our vyage. Wasnt you, Capn? And the parrot would say, with great rapidity, Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! till you wondered that it was not out of breath, or till John threw his handkerchief over the cage. Now, that bird, he would say, is, maybe, two hundred years old, Hawkinsthey live forever mostly; and if anybodys seen more wickedness, it must be the devil himself. Shes sailed with England, the great Capn England, the pirate. Shes been at Madagascar, and at Malabar, and Surinam, and Providence, and Portobello. She was at the fishing up of the wrecked plate ships. Its there she learned Pieces of eight, and little wonder; three hundred and fifty thousand of em, Hawkins! She was at the boarding of the Viceroy of the Indies out of Goa, she was; and to look at her you would think she was a babby. But you smelt powderdidnt you, Capn? Stand by to go about, the parrot would scream. Ah, shes a handsome craft, she is, the cook would say, and give her sugar from his pocket, and then the bird would peck at the bars and swear straight on, passing belief for wickedness. There, John would add, you cant touch pitch and not be mucked, lad. Heres this poor old innocent bird o mine swearing blue fire, and none the wiser, you may lay to that. She would swear the same, in a manner of speaking, before chaplain. And John would touch his forelock with a solemn way he had that made me think he was the best of men. In the meantime, the squire and Captain Smollett were still on pretty distant terms with one another. The squire made no bones about the matter; he despised the captain. The captain, on his part, never spoke but when he was spoken to, and then sharp and short and dry, and not a word wasted. He owned, when driven into a corner, that he seemed to have been wrong about the crew, that some of them were as brisk as he wanted to see and all had behaved fairly well. As for the ship, he had taken a downright fancy to her. Shell lie a point nearer the wind than a man has a right to expect of his own married wife, sir. But, he would add, all I say is, were not home again, and I dont like the cruise. The squire, at this, would turn away and march up and down the deck, chin in air. A trifle more of that man, he would say, and I shall explode. We had some heavy weather, which only proved the qualities of the Hispaniola. Every man on board seemed well content, and they must have been hard to please if they had been otherwise, for it is my belief there was never a ships company so spoiled since Noah put to sea. Double grog was going on the least excuse; there was duff on odd days, as, for instance, if the squire heard it was any mans birthday, and always a barrel of apples standing broached in the waist for anyone to help himself that had a fancy. Never knew good come of it yet, the captain said to Dr. Livesey. Spoil forecastle hands, make devils. Thats my belief. But good did come of the apple barrel, as you shall hear, for if it had not been for that, we should have had no note of warning and might all have perished by the hand of treachery. This was how it came about. We had run up the trades to get the wind of the island we were afterI am not allowed to be more plainand now we were running down for it with a bright lookout day and night. It was about the last day of our outward voyage by the largest computation; some time that night, or at latest before noon of the morrow, we should sight the Treasure Island. We were heading S.S.W. and had a steady breeze abeam and a quiet sea. The Hispaniola rolled steadily, dipping her bowsprit now and then with a whiff of spray. All was drawing alow and aloft; everyone was in the bravest spirits because we were now so near an end of the first part of our adventure. Now, just after sundown, when all my work was over and I was on my way to my berth, it occurred to me that I should like an apple. I ran on deck. The watch was all forward looking out for the island. The man at the helm was watching the luff of the sail and whistling away gently to himself, and that was the only sound excepting the swish of the sea against the bows and around the sides of the ship. 0111m In I got bodily into the apple barrel, and found there was scarce an apple left; but sitting down there in the dark, what with the sound of the waters and the rocking movement of the ship, I had either fallen asleep or was on the point of doing so when a heavy man sat down with rather a clash close by. The barrel shook as he leaned his shoulders against it, and I was just about to jump up when the man began to speak. It was Silvers voice, and before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the world, but lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiosity, for from these dozen words I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended upon me alone. 0114m XI What I Heard in the AppleBarrel 9114m o, not I, said Silver. Flint was capn; I was quartermaster, along of my timber leg. The same broadside I lost my leg, old Pew lost his deadlights. It was a master surgeon, him that ampytated meout of college and allLatin by the bucket, and what not; but he was hanged like a dog, and sundried like the rest, at Corso Castle. That was Roberts men, that was, and comed of changing names to their shipsRoyal Fortune and so on. Now, what a ship was christened, so let her stay, I says. So it was with the Cassandra, as brought us all safe home from Malabar, after England took the Viceroy of the Indies; so it was with the old Walrus, Flints old ship, as Ive seen amuck with the red blood and fit to sink with gold. Ah! cried another voice, that of the youngest hand on board, and evidently full of admiration. He was the flower of the flock, was Flint! Davis was a man too, by all accounts, said Silver. I never sailed along of him; first with England, then with Flint, thats my story; and now here on my own account, in a manner of speaking. I laid by nine hundred safe, from England, and two thousand after Flint. That aint bad for a man before the mastall safe in bank. Taint earning now, its saving does it, you may lay to that. Wheres all Englands men now? I dunno. Wheres Flints? Why, most on em aboard here, and glad to get the duffbeen begging before that, some on em. Old Pew, as had lost his sight, and might have thought shame, spends twelve hundred pound in a year, like a lord in Parliament. Where is he now? Well, hes dead now and under hatches; but for two year before that, shiver my timbers, the man was starving! He begged, and he stole, and he cut throats, and starved at that, by the powers! Well, it aint much use, after all, said the young seaman. Taint much use for fools, you may lay to itthat, nor nothing, cried Silver. But now, you look here youre young, you are, but youre as smart as paint. I see that when I set my eyes on you, and Ill talk to you like a man. You may imagine how I felt when I heard this abominable old rogue addressing another in the very same words of flattery as he had used to myself. I think, if I had been able, that I would have killed him through the barrel. Meantime, he ran on, little supposing he was overheard. Here it is about gentlemen of fortune. They lives rough, and they risk swinging, but they eat and drink like fightingcocks, and when a cruise is done, why, its hundreds of pounds instead of hundreds of farthings in their pockets. Now, the most goes for rum and a good fling, and to sea again in their shirts. But thats not the course I lay. I puts it all away, some here, some there, and none too much anywheres, by reason of suspicion. Im fifty, mark you; once back from this cruise, I set up gentleman in earnest. Time enough too, says you. Ah, but Ive lived easy in the meantime, never denied myself o nothing heart desires, and slep soft and ate dainty all my days but when at sea. And how did I begin? Before the mast, like you! Well, said the other, but all the other moneys gone now, aint it? You darent show face in Bristol after this. Why, where might you suppose it was? asked Silver derisively. At Bristol, in banks and places, answered his companion. It were, said the cook; it were when we weighed anchor. But my old missis has it all by now. And the Spyglass is sold, lease and goodwill and rigging; and the old girls off to meet me. I would tell you where, for I trust you, but itd make jealousy among the mates. And can you trust your missis? asked the other. Gentlemen of fortune, returned the cook, usually trusts little among themselves, and right they are, you may lay to it. But I have a way with me, I have. When a mate brings a slip on his cableone as knows me, I meanit wont be in the same world with old John. There was some that was feared of Pew, and some that was feared of Flint; but Flint his own self was feared of me. Feared he was, and proud. They was the roughest crew afloat, was Flints; the devil himself would have been feared to go to sea with them. Well now, I tell you, Im not a boasting man, and you seen yourself how easy I keep company, but when I was quartermaster, lambs wasnt the word for Flints old buccaneers. Ah, you may be sure of yourself in old Johns ship. Well, I tell you now, replied the lad, I didnt half a quarter like the job till I had this talk with you, John; but theres my hand on it now. And a brave lad you were, and smart too, answered Silver, shaking hands so heartily that all the barrel shook, and a finer figurehead for a gentleman of fortune I never clapped my eyes on. By this time I had begun to understand the meaning of their terms. By a gentleman of fortune they plainly meant neither more nor less than a common pirate, and the little scene that I had overheard was the last act in the corruption of one of the honest handsperhaps of the last one left aboard. But on this point I was soon to be relieved, for Silver giving a little whistle, a third man strolled up and sat down by the party. Dicks square, said Silver. Oh, I knowd Dick was square, returned the voice of the coxswain, Israel Hands. Hes no fool, is Dick. And he turned his quid and spat. But look here, he went on, heres what I want to know, Barbecue how long are we agoing to stand off and on like a blessed bumboat? Ive had amost enough o Capn Smollett; hes hazed me long enough, by thunder! I want to go into that cabin, I do. I want their pickles and wines, and that. Israel, said Silver, your head aint much account, nor ever was. But youre able to hear, I reckon; leastways, your ears is big enough. Now, heres what I say youll berth forward, and youll live hard, and youll speak soft, and youll keep sober till I give the word; and you may lay to that, my son. Well, I dont say no, do I? growled the coxswain. What I say is, when? Thats what I say. When! By the powers! cried Silver. Well now, if you want to know, Ill tell you when. The last moment I can manage, and thats when. Heres a firstrate seaman, Capn Smollett, sails the blessed ship for us. Heres this squire and doctor with a map and suchI dont know where it is, do I? No more do you, says you. Well then, I mean this squire and doctor shall find the stuff, and help us to get it aboard, by the powers. Then well see. If I was sure of you all, sons of double Dutchmen, Id have Capn Smollett navigate us halfway back again before I struck. Why, were all seamen aboard here, I should think, said the lad Dick. Were all forecastle hands, you mean, snapped Silver. We can steer a course, but whos to set one? Thats what all you gentlemen split on, first and last. If I had my way, Id have Capn Smollett work us back into the trades at least; then wed have no blessed miscalculations and a spoonful of water a day. But I know the sort you are. Ill finish with em at the island, as soons the blunts on board, and a pity it is. But youre never happy till youre drunk. Split my sides, Ive a sick heart to sail with the likes of you! Easy all, Long John, cried Israel. Whos acrossin of you? Why, how many tall ships, think ye, now, have I seen laid aboard? And how many brisk lads drying in the sun at Execution Dock? cried Silver. And all for this same hurry and hurry and hurry. You hear me? I seen a thing or two at sea, I have. If you would ony lay your course, and a pint to windward, you would ride in carriages, you would. But not you! I know you. Youll have your mouthful of rum tomorrow, and go hang. Everybody knowed you was a kind of a chapling, John; but theres others as could hand and steer as well as you, said Israel. They liked a bit o fun, they did. They wasnt so high and dry, nohow, but took their fling, like jolly companions every one. So? says Silver. Well, and where are they now? Pew was that sort, and he died a beggarman. Flint was, and he died of rum at Savannah. Ah, they was a sweet crew, they was! Ony, where are they? But, asked Dick, when we do lay em athwart, what are we to do with em, anyhow? Theres the man for me! cried the cook admiringly. Thats what I call business. Well, what would you think? Put em ashore like maroons? That would have been Englands way. Or cut em down like that much pork? That would have been Flints, or Billy Boness. Billy was the man for that, said Israel. Dead men dont bite, says he. Well, hes dead now hisself; he knows the long and short on it now; and if ever a rough hand come to port, it was Billy. Right you are, said Silver; rough and ready. But mark you here, Im an easy manIm quite the gentleman, says you; but this time its serious. Dooty is dooty, mates. I give my votedeath. When Im in Parlyment and riding in my coach, I dont want none of these sealawyers in the cabin acoming home, unlooked for, like the devil at prayers. Wait is what I say; but when the time comes, why, let her rip! John, cries the coxswain, youre a man! Youll say so, Israel when you see, said Silver. Only one thing I claimI claim Trelawney. Ill wring his calfs head off his body with these hands, Dick! he added, breaking off. You just jump up, like a sweet lad, and get me an apple, to wet my pipe like. You may fancy the terror I was in! I should have leaped out and run for it if I had found the strength, but my limbs and heart alike misgave me. I heard Dick begin to rise, and then someone seemingly stopped him, and the voice of Hands exclaimed, Oh, stow that! Dont you get sucking of that bilge, John. Lets have a go of the rum. Dick, said Silver, I trust you. Ive a gauge on the keg, mind. Theres the key; you fill a pannikin and bring it up. Terrified as I was, I could not help thinking to myself that this must have been how Mr. Arrow got the strong waters that destroyed him. Dick was gone but a little while, and during his absence Israel spoke straight on in the cooks ear. It was but a word or two that I could catch, and yet I gathered some important news, for besides other scraps that tended to the same purpose, this whole clause was audible Not another man of themll jine. Hence there were still faithful men on board. When Dick returned, one after another of the trio took the pannikin and drankone To luck, another with a Heres to old Flint, and Silver himself saying, in a kind of song, Heres to ourselves, and hold your luff, plenty of prizes and plenty of duff. 0117m Just then a sort of brightness fell upon me in the barrel, and looking up, I found the moon had risen and was silvering the mizzentop and shining white on the luff of the foresail; and almost at the same time the voice of the lookout shouted, Land ho! 0122m XII Council of War 9122m here was a great rush of feet across the deck. I could hear people tumbling up from the cabin and the forecastle, and slipping in an instant outside my barrel, I dived behind the foresail, made a double towards the stern, and came out upon the open deck in time to join Hunter and Dr. Livesey in the rush for the weather bow. There all hands were already congregated. A belt of fog had lifted almost simultaneously with the appearance of the moon. Away to the southwest of us we saw two low hills, about a couple of miles apart, and rising behind one of them a third and higher hill, whose peak was still buried in the fog. All three seemed sharp and conical in figure. So much I saw, almost in a dream, for I had not yet recovered from my horrid fear of a minute or two before. And then I heard the voice of Captain Smollett issuing orders. The Hispaniola was laid a couple of points nearer the wind and now sailed a course that would just clear the island on the east. And now, men, said the captain, when all was sheeted home, has any one of you ever seen that land ahead? I have, sir, said Silver. Ive watered there with a trader I was cook in. The anchorage is on the south, behind an islet, I fancy? asked the captain. Yes, sir; Skeleton Island they calls it. It were a main place for pirates once, and a hand we had on board knowed all their names for it. That hill to the norard they calls the Foremast Hill; there are three hills in a row running southardfore, main, and mizzen, sir. But the mainthats the big un, with the cloud on itthey usually calls the Spyglass, by reason of a lookout they kept when they was in the anchorage cleaning, for its there they cleaned their ships, sir, asking your pardon. I have a chart here, says Captain Smollett. See if thats the place. Long Johns eyes burned in his head as he took the chart, but by the fresh look of the paper I knew he was doomed to disappointment. This was not the map we found in Billy Boness chest, but an accurate copy, complete in all thingsnames and heights and soundingswith the single exception of the red crosses and the written notes. Sharp as must have been his annoyance, Silver had the strength of mind to hide it. Yes, sir, said he, this is the spot, to be sure, and very prettily drawed out. Who might have done that, I wonder? The pirates were too ignorant, I reckon. Aye, here it is Capt. Kidds Anchoragejust the name my shipmate called it. Theres a strong current runs along the south, and then away norard up the west coast. Right you was, sir, says he, to haul your wind and keep the weather of the island. Leastways, if such was your intention as to enter and careen, and there aint no better place for that in these waters. Thank you, my man, says Captain Smollett. Ill ask you later on to give us a help. You may go. I was surprised at the coolness with which John avowed his knowledge of the island, and I own I was halffrightened when I saw him drawing nearer to myself. He did not know, to be sure, that I had overheard his council from the apple barrel, and yet I had by this time taken such a horror of his cruelty, duplicity, and power that I could scarce conceal a shudder when he laid his hand upon my arm. Ah, says he, this here is a sweet spot, this islanda sweet spot for a lad to get ashore on. Youll bathe, and youll climb trees, and youll hunt goats, you will; and youll get aloft on them hills like a goat yourself. Why, it makes me young again. I was going to forget my timber leg, I was. Its a pleasant thing to be young and have ten toes, and you may lay to that. When you want to go a bit of exploring, you just ask old John, and hell put up a snack for you to take along. And clapping me in the friendliest way upon the shoulder, he hobbled off forward and went below. Captain Smollett, the squire, and Dr. Livesey were talking together on the quarterdeck, and anxious as I was to tell them my story, I durst not interrupt them openly. While I was still casting about in my thoughts to find some probable excuse, Dr. Livesey called me to his side. He had left his pipe below, and being a slave to tobacco, had meant that I should fetch it; but as soon as I was near enough to speak and not to be overheard, I broke immediately, Doctor, let me speak. Get the captain and squire down to the cabin, and then make some pretence to send for me. I have terrible news. The doctor changed countenance a little, but next moment he was master of himself. Thank you, Jim, said he quite loudly, that was all I wanted to know, as if he had asked me a question. And with that he turned on his heel and rejoined the other two. They spoke together for a little, and though none of them started, or raised his voice, or so much as whistled, it was plain enough that Dr. Livesey had communicated my request, for the next thing that I heard was the captain giving an order to Job Anderson, and all hands were piped on deck. My lads, said Captain Smollett, Ive a word to say to you. This land that we have sighted is the place we have been sailing for. Mr. Trelawney, being a very openhanded gentleman, as we all know, has just asked me a word or two, and as I was able to tell him that every man on board had done his duty, alow and aloft, as I never ask to see it done better, why, he and I and the doctor are going below to the cabin to drink your health and luck, and youll have grog served out for you to drink our health and luck. Ill tell you what I think of this I think it handsome. And if you think as I do, youll give a good seacheer for the gentleman that does it. The cheer followedthat was a matter of course; but it rang out so full and hearty that I confess I could hardly believe these same men were plotting for our blood. One more cheer for Capn Smollett, cried Long John when the first had subsided. 0125m And this also was given with a will. On the top of that the three gentlemen went below, and not long after, word was sent forward that Jim Hawkins was wanted in the cabin. I found them all three seated round the table, a bottle of Spanish wine and some raisins before them, and the doctor smoking away, with his wig on his lap, and that, I knew, was a sign that he was agitated. The stern window was open, for it was a warm night, and you could see the moon shining behind on the ships wake. Now, Hawkins, said the squire, you have something to say. Speak up. I did as I was bid, and as short as I could make it, told the whole details of Silvers conversation. Nobody interrupted me till I was done, nor did any one of the three of them make so much as a movement, but they kept their eyes upon my face from first to last. Jim, said Dr. Livesey, take a seat. And they made me sit down at table beside them, poured me out a glass of wine, filled my hands with raisins, and all three, one after the other, and each with a bow, drank my good health, and their service to me, for my luck and courage. Now, captain, said the squire, you were right, and I was wrong. I own myself an ass, and I await your orders. No more an ass than I, sir, returned the captain. I never heard of a crew that meant to mutiny but what showed signs before, for any man that had an eye in his head to see the mischief and take steps according. But this crew, he added, beats me. Captain, said the doctor, with your permission, thats Silver. A very remarkable man. Hed look remarkably well from a yardarm, sir, returned the captain. But this is talk; this dont lead to anything. I see three or four points, and with Mr. Trelawneys permission, Ill name them. You, sir, are the captain. It is for you to speak, says Mr. Trelawney grandly. First point, began Mr. Smollett. We must go on, because we cant turn back. If I gave the word to go about, they would rise at once. Second point, we have time before usat least until this treasures found. Third point, there are faithful hands. Now, sir, its got to come to blows sooner or later, and what I propose is to take time by the forelock, as the saying is, and come to blows some fine day when they least expect it. We can count, I take it, on your own home servants, Mr. Trelawney? As upon myself, declared the squire. Three, reckoned the captain; ourselves make seven, counting Hawkins here. Now, about the honest hands? Most likely Trelawneys own men, said the doctor; those he had picked up for himself before he lit on Silver. Nay, replied the squire. Hands was one of mine. I did think I could have trusted Hands, added the captain. And to think that theyre all Englishmen! broke out the squire. Sir, I could find it in my heart to blow the ship up. Well, gentlemen, said the captain, the best that I can say is not much. We must lay to, if you please, and keep a bright lookout. Its trying on a man, I know. It would be pleasanter to come to blows. But theres no help for it till we know our men. Lay to, and whistle for a wind, thats my view. Jim here, said the doctor, can help us more than anyone. The men are not shy with him, and Jim is a noticing lad. Hawkins, I put prodigious faith in you, added the squire. I began to feel pretty desperate at this, for I felt altogether helpless; and yet, by an odd train of circumstances, it was indeed through me that safety came. In the meantime, talk as we pleased, there were only seven out of the twentysix on whom we knew we could rely; and out of these seven one was a boy, so that the grown men on our side were six to their nineteen. 0131m PART THREEMy Shore Adventure 0133m XIII How I Began My Shore Adventure 9133m he appearance of the island when I came on deck next morning was altogether changed. Although the breeze had now utterly ceased, we had made a great deal of way during the night and were now lying becalmed about half a mile to the southeast of the low eastern coast. Greycoloured woods covered a large part of the surface. This even tint was indeed broken up by streaks of yellow sandbreak in the lower lands, and by many tall trees of the pine family, outtopping the otherssome singly, some in clumps; but the general colouring was uniform and sad. The hills ran up clear above the vegetation in spires of naked rock. All were strangely shaped, and the Spyglass, which was by three or four hundred feet the tallest on the island, was likewise the strangest in configuration, running up sheer from almost every side and then suddenly cut off at the top like a pedestal to put a statue on. The Hispaniola was rolling scuppers under in the ocean swell. The booms were tearing at the blocks, the rudder was banging to and fro, and the whole ship creaking, groaning, and jumping like a manufactory. I had to cling tight to the backstay, and the world turned giddily before my eyes, for though I was a good enough sailor when there was way on, this standing still and being rolled about like a bottle was a thing I never learned to stand without a qualm or so, above all in the morning, on an empty stomach. Perhaps it was thisperhaps it was the look of the island, with its grey, melancholy woods, and wild stone spires, and the surf that we could both see and hear foaming and thundering on the steep beachat least, although the sun shone bright and hot, and the shore birds were fishing and crying all around us, and you would have thought anyone would have been glad to get to land after being so long at sea, my heart sank, as the saying is, into my boots; and from the first look onward, I hated the very thought of Treasure Island. We had a dreary mornings work before us, for there was no sign of any wind, and the boats had to be got out and manned, and the ship warped three or four miles round the corner of the island and up the narrow passage to the haven behind Skeleton Island.

I volunteered for one of the boats, where I had, of course, no business. The heat was sweltering, and the men grumbled fiercely over their work. Anderson was in command of my boat, and instead of keeping the crew in order, he grumbled as loud as the worst. Well, he said with an oath, its not forever. I thought this was a very bad sign, for up to that day the men had gone briskly and willingly about their business; but the very sight of the island had relaxed the cords of discipline. All the way in, Long John stood by the steersman and conned the ship. He knew the passage like the palm of his hand, and though the man in the chains got everywhere more water than was down in the chart, John never hesitated once. Theres a strong scour with the ebb, he said, and this here passage has been dug out, in a manner of speaking, with a spade. We brought up just where the anchor was in the chart, about a third of a mile from each shore, the mainland on one side and Skeleton Island on the other. The bottom was clean sand. The plunge of our anchor sent up clouds of birds wheeling and crying over the woods, but in less than a minute they were down again and all was once more silent. The place was entirely landlocked, buried in woods, the trees coming right down to highwater mark, the shores mostly flat, and the hilltops standing round at a distance in a sort of amphitheatre, one here, one there. Two little rivers, or rather two swamps, emptied out into this pond, as you might call it; and the foliage round that part of the shore had a kind of poisonous brightness. From the ship we could see nothing of the house or stockade, for they were quite buried among trees; and if it had not been for the chart on the companion, we might have been the first that had ever anchored there since the island arose out of the seas. There was not a breath of air moving, nor a sound but that of the surf booming half a mile away along the beaches and against the rocks outside. A peculiar stagnant smell hung over the anchoragea smell of sodden leaves and rotting tree trunks. I observed the doctor sniffing and sniffing, like someone tasting a bad egg. I dont know about treasure, he said, but Ill stake my wig theres fever here. If the conduct of the men had been alarming in the boat, it became truly threatening when they had come aboard. They lay about the deck growling together in talk. The slightest order was received with a black look and grudgingly and carelessly obeyed. Even the honest hands must have caught the infection, for there was not one man aboard to mend another. Mutiny, it was plain, hung over us like a thundercloud. And it was not only we of the cabin party who perceived the danger. Long John was hard at work going from group to group, spending himself in good advice, and as for example no man could have shown a better. He fairly outstripped himself in willingness and civility; he was all smiles to everyone. If an order were given, John would be on his crutch in an instant, with the cheeriest Aye, aye, sir! in the world; and when there was nothing else to do, he kept up one song after another, as if to conceal the discontent of the rest. Of all the gloomy features of that gloomy afternoon, this obvious anxiety on the part of Long John appeared the worst. We held a council in the cabin. Sir, said the captain, if I risk another order, the whole shipll come about our ears by the run. You see, sir, here it is. I get a rough answer, do I not? Well, if I speak back, pikes will be going in two shakes; if I dont, Silver will see theres something under that, and the games up. Now, weve only one man to rely on. And who is that? asked the squire. Silver, sir, returned the captain; hes as anxious as you and I to smother things up. This is a tiff; hed soon talk em out of it if he had the chance, and what I propose to do is to give him the chance. Lets allow the men an afternoon ashore. If they all go, why well fight the ship. If they none of them go, well then, we hold the cabin, and God defend the right. If some go, you mark my words, sir, Silverll bring em aboard again as mild as lambs. It was so decided; loaded pistols were served out to all the sure men; Hunter, Joyce, and Redruth were taken into our confidence and received the news with less surprise and a better spirit than we had looked for, and then the captain went on deck and addressed the crew. My lads, said he, weve had a hot day and are all tired and out of sorts. A turn ashorell hurt nobodythe boats are still in the water; you can take the gigs, and as many as please may go ashore for the afternoon. Ill fire a gun half an hour before sundown. I believe the silly fellows must have thought they would break their shins over treasure as soon as they were landed, for they all came out of their sulks in a moment and gave a cheer that started the echo in a faraway hill and sent the birds once more flying and squalling round the anchorage. The captain was too bright to be in the way. He whipped out of sight in a moment, leaving Silver to arrange the party, and I fancy it was as well he did so. Had he been on deck, he could no longer so much as have pretended not to understand the situation. It was as plain as day. Silver was the captain, and a mighty rebellious crew he had of it. The honest handsand I was soon to see it proved that there were such on boardmust have been very stupid fellows. Or rather, I suppose the truth was this, that all hands were disaffected by the example of the ringleadersonly some more, some less; and a few, being good fellows in the main, could neither be led nor driven any further. It is one thing to be idle and skulk and quite another to take a ship and murder a number of innocent men. At last, however, the party was made up. Six fellows were to stay on board, and the remaining thirteen, including Silver, began to embark. Then it was that there came into my head the first of the mad notions that contributed so much to save our lives. If six men were left by Silver, it was plain our party could not take and fight the ship; and since only six were left, it was equally plain that the cabin party had no present need of my assistance. It occurred to me at once to go ashore. In a jiffy I had slipped over the side and curled up in the foresheets of the nearest boat, and almost at the same moment she shoved off. No one took notice of me, only the bow oar saying, Is that you, Jim? Keep your head down. But Silver, from the other boat, looked sharply over and called out to know if that were me; and from that moment I began to regret what I had done. 0137m The crews raced for the beach, but the boat I was in, having some start and being at once the lighter and the better manned, shot far ahead of her consort, and the bow had struck among the shoreside trees and I had caught a branch and swung myself out and plunged into the nearest thicket while Silver and the rest were still a hundred yards behind. Jim, Jim! I heard him shouting. But you may suppose I paid no heed; jumping, ducking, and breaking through, I ran straight before my nose till I could run no longer. 0140m XIV The First Blow 9140m was so pleased at having given the slip to Long John that I began to enjoy myself and look around me with some interest on the strange land that I was in. I had crossed a marshy tract full of willows, bulrushes, and odd, outlandish, swampy trees; and I had now come out upon the skirts of an open piece of undulating, sandy country, about a mile long, dotted with a few pines and a great number of contorted trees, not unlike the oak in growth, but pale in the foliage, like willows. On the far side of the open stood one of the hills, with two quaint, craggy peaks shining vividly in the sun. I now felt for the first time the joy of exploration. The isle was uninhabited; my shipmates I had left behind, and nothing lived in front of me but dumb brutes and fowls. I turned hither and thither among the trees. Here and there were flowering plants, unknown to me; here and there I saw snakes, and one raised his head from a ledge of rock and hissed at me with a noise not unlike the spinning of a top. Little did I suppose that he was a deadly enemy and that the noise was the famous rattle. Then I came to a long thicket of these oaklike treeslive, or evergreen, oaks, I heard afterwards they should be calledwhich grew low along the sand like brambles, the boughs curiously twisted, the foliage compact, like thatch. The thicket stretched down from the top of one of the sandy knolls, spreading and growing taller as it went, until it reached the margin of the broad, reedy fen, through which the nearest of the little rivers soaked its way into the anchorage. The marsh was steaming in the strong sun, and the outline of the Spyglass trembled through the haze. All at once there began to go a sort of bustle among the bulrushes; a wild duck flew up with a quack, another followed, and soon over the whole surface of the marsh a great cloud of birds hung screaming and circling in the air. I judged at once that some of my shipmates must be drawing near along the borders of the fen. Nor was I deceived, for soon I heard the very distant and low tones of a human voice, which, as I continued to give ear, grew steadily louder and nearer. This put me in a great fear, and I crawled under cover of the nearest liveoak and squatted there, hearkening, as silent as a mouse. Another voice answered, and then the first voice, which I now recognized to be Silvers, once more took up the story and ran on for a long while in a stream, only now and again interrupted by the other. By the sound they must have been talking earnestly, and almost fiercely; but no distinct word came to my hearing. At last the speakers seemed to have paused and perhaps to have sat down, for not only did they cease to draw any nearer, but the birds themselves began to grow more quiet and to settle again to their places in the swamp. And now I began to feel that I was neglecting my business, that since I had been so foolhardy as to come ashore with these desperadoes, the least I could do was to overhear them at their councils, and that my plain and obvious duty was to draw as close as I could manage, under the favourable ambush of the crouching trees. I could tell the direction of the speakers pretty exactly, not only by the sound of their voices but by the behaviour of the few birds that still hung in alarm above the heads of the intruders. Crawling on all fours, I made steadily but slowly towards them, till at last, raising my head to an aperture among the leaves, I could see clear down into a little green dell beside the marsh, and closely set about with trees, where Long John Silver and another of the crew stood face to face in conversation. The sun beat full upon them. Silver had thrown his hat beside him on the ground, and his great, smooth, blond face, all shining with heat, was lifted to the other mans in a kind of appeal. Mate, he was saying, its because I thinks gold dust of yougold dust, and you may lay to that! If I hadnt took to you like pitch, do you think Id have been here awarning of you? Alls upyou cant make nor mend; its to save your neck that Im aspeaking, and if one of the wild uns knew it, whered I be, Tomnow, tell me, whered I be? Silver, said the other manand I observed he was not only red in the face, but spoke as hoarse as a crow, and his voice shook too, like a taut ropeSilver, says he, youre old, and youre honest, or has the name for it; and youve money too, which lots of poor sailors hasnt; and youre brave, or Im mistook. And will you tell me youll let yourself be led away with that kind of a mess of swabs? Not you! As sure as God sees me, Id sooner lose my hand. If I turn agin my dooty And then all of a sudden he was interrupted by a noise. I had found one of the honest handswell, here, at that same moment, came news of another. Far away out in the marsh there arose, all of a sudden, a sound like the cry of anger, then another on the back of it; and then one horrid, longdrawn scream. The rocks of the Spyglass reechoed it a score of times; the whole troop of marshbirds rose again, darkening heaven, with a simultaneous whirr; and long after that death yell was still ringing in my brain, silence had reestablished its empire, and only the rustle of the redescending birds and the boom of the distant surges disturbed the languor of the afternoon. Tom had leaped at the sound, like a horse at the spur, but Silver had not winked an eye. He stood where he was, resting lightly on his crutch, watching his companion like a snake about to spring. John! said the sailor, stretching out his hand. Hands off! cried Silver, leaping back a yard, as it seemed to me, with the speed and security of a trained gymnast. Hands off, if you like, John Silver, said the other. Its a black conscience that can make you feared of me. But in heavens name, tell me, what was that? That? returned Silver, smiling away, but warier than ever, his eye a mere pinpoint in his big face, but gleaming like a crumb of glass. That? Oh, I reckon thatll be Alan. And at this point Tom flashed out like a hero. Alan! he cried. Then rest his soul for a true seaman! And as for you, John Silver, long youve been a mate of mine, but youre mate of mine no more. If I die like a dog, Ill die in my dooty. Youve killed Alan, have you? Kill me too, if you can. But I defies you. And with that, this brave fellow turned his back directly on the cook and set off walking for the beach. But he was not destined to go far. With a cry John seized the branch of a tree, whipped the crutch out of his armpit, and sent that uncouth missile hurtling through the air. It struck poor Tom, point foremost, and with stunning violence, right between the shoulders in the middle of his back. His hands flew up, he gave a sort of gasp, and fell. Whether he were injured much or little, none could ever tell. Like enough, to judge from the sound, his back was broken on the spot. But he had no time given him to recover. Silver, agile as a monkey even without leg or crutch, was on the top of him next moment and had twice buried his knife up to the hilt in that defenceless body. From my place of ambush, I could hear him pant aloud as he struck the blows. I do not know what it rightly is to faint, but I do know that for the next little while the whole world swam away from before me in a whirling mist; Silver and the birds, and the tall Spyglass hilltop, going round and round and topsyturvy before my eyes, and all manner of bells ringing and distant voices shouting in my ear. When I came again to myself the monster had pulled himself together, his crutch under his arm, his hat upon his head. Just before him Tom lay motionless upon the sward; but the murderer minded him not a whit, cleansing his bloodstained knife the while upon a wisp of grass. Everything else was unchanged, the sun still shining mercilessly on the steaming marsh and the tall pinnacle of the mountain, and I could scarce persuade myself that murder had been actually done and a human life cruelly cut short a moment since before my eyes. 0141m 0145m But now John put his hand into his pocket, brought out a whistle, and blew upon it several modulated blasts that rang far across the heated air. I could not tell, of course, the meaning of the signal, but it instantly awoke my fears. More men would be coming. I might be discovered. They had already slain two of the honest people; after Tom and Alan, might not I come next? Instantly I began to extricate myself and crawl back again, with what speed and silence I could manage, to the more open portion of the wood. As I did so, I could hear hails coming and going between the old buccaneer and his comrades, and this sound of danger lent me wings. As soon as I was clear of the thicket, I ran as I never ran before, scarce minding the direction of my flight, so long as it led me from the murderers; and as I ran, fear grew and grew upon me until it turned into a kind of frenzy. Indeed, could anyone be more entirely lost than I? When the gun fired, how should I dare to go down to the boats among those fiends, still smoking from their crime? Would not the first of them who saw me wring my neck like a snipes? Would not my absence itself be an evidence to them of my alarm, and therefore of my fatal knowledge? It was all over, I thought. Goodbye to the Hispaniola; goodbye to the squire, the doctor, and the captain! There was nothing left for me but death by starvation or death by the hands of the mutineers. All this while, as I say, I was still running, and without taking any notice, I had drawn near to the foot of the little hill with the two peaks and had got into a part of the island where the liveoaks grew more widely apart and seemed more like forest trees in their bearing and dimensions. Mingled with these were a few scattered pines, some fifty, some nearer seventy, feet high. The air too smelt more freshly than down beside the marsh. And here a fresh alarm brought me to a standstill with a thumping heart. 0150m XV The Man of the Island 9150m rom the side of the hill, which was here steep and stony, a spout of gravel was dislodged and fell rattling and bounding through the trees. My eyes turned instinctively in that direction, and I saw a figure leap with great rapidity behind the trunk of a pine. What it was, whether bear or man or monkey, I could in no wise tell. It seemed dark and shaggy; more I knew not. But the terror of this new apparition brought me to a stand. I was now, it seemed, cut off upon both sides; behind me the murderers, before me this lurking nondescript. And immediately I began to prefer the dangers that I knew to those I knew not. Silver himself appeared less terrible in contrast with this creature of the woods, and I turned on my heel, and looking sharply behind me over my shoulder, began to retrace my steps in the direction of the boats. Instantly the figure reappeared, and making a wide circuit, began to head me off. I was tired, at any rate; but had I been as fresh as when I rose, I could see it was in vain for me to contend in speed with such an adversary. From trunk to trunk the creature flitted like a deer, running manlike on two legs, but unlike any man that I had ever seen, stooping almost double as it ran. Yet a man it was, I could no longer be in doubt about that. I began to recall what I had heard of cannibals. I was within an ace of calling for help. But the mere fact that he was a man, however wild, had somewhat reassured me, and my fear of Silver began to revive in proportion. I stood still, therefore, and cast about for some method of escape; and as I was so thinking, the recollection of my pistol flashed into my mind. As soon as I remembered I was not defenceless, courage glowed again in my heart and I set my face resolutely for this man of the island and walked briskly towards him. He was concealed by this time behind another tree trunk; but he must have been watching me closely, for as soon as I began to move in his direction he reappeared and took a step to meet me. Then he hesitated, drew back, came forward again, and at last, to my wonder and confusion, threw himself on his knees and held out his clasped hands in supplication. At that I once more stopped. Who are you? I asked. Ben Gunn, he answered, and his voice sounded hoarse and awkward, like a rusty lock. Im poor Ben Gunn, I am; and I havent spoke with a Christian these three years. 0153m I could now see that he was a white man like myself and that his features were even pleasing. His skin, wherever it was exposed, was burnt by the sun; even his lips were black, and his fair eyes looked quite startling in so dark a face. Of all the beggarmen that I had seen or fancied, he was the chief for raggedness. He was clothed with tatters of old ships canvas and old seacloth, and this extraordinary patchwork was all held together by a system of the most various and incongruous fastenings, brass buttons, bits of stick, and loops of tarry gaskin. About his waist he wore an old brassbuckled leather belt, which was the one thing solid in his whole accoutrement. Three years! I cried. Were you shipwrecked? Nay, mate, said he; marooned. I had heard the word, and I knew it stood for a horrible kind of punishment common enough among the buccaneers, in which the offender is put ashore with a little powder and shot and left behind on some desolate and distant island. Marooned three years agone, he continued, and lived on goats since then, and berries, and oysters. Wherever a man is, says I, a man can do for himself. But, mate, my heart is sore for Christian diet. You mightnt happen to have a piece of cheese about you, now? No? Well, manys the long night Ive dreamed of cheesetoasted, mostlyand woke up again, and here I were. If ever I can get aboard again, said I, you shall have cheese by the stone. All this time he had been feeling the stuff of my jacket, smoothing my hands, looking at my boots, and generally, in the intervals of his speech, showing a childish pleasure in the presence of a fellow creature. But at my last words he perked up into a kind of startled slyness. If ever you can get aboard again, says you? he repeated. Why, now, whos to hinder you? Not you, I know, was my reply. And right you was, he cried. Now youwhat do you call yourself, mate? Jim, I told him. Jim, Jim, says he, quite pleased apparently. Well, now, Jim, Ive lived that rough as youd be ashamed to hear of. Now, for instance, you wouldnt think I had had a pious motherto look at me? he asked. Why, no, not in particular, I answered. Ah, well, said he, but I hadremarkable pious. And I was a civil, pious boy, and could rattle off my catechism that fast, as you couldnt tell one word from another. And heres what it come to, Jim, and it begun with chuckfarthen on the blessed gravestones! Thats what it begun with, but it went furthern that; and so my mother told me, and predicked the whole, she did, the pious woman! But it were Providence that put me here. Ive thought it all out in this here lonely island, and Im back on piety. You dont catch me tasting rum so much, but just a thimbleful for luck, of course, the first chance I have. Im bound Ill be good, and I see the way to. And, Jimlooking all round him and lowering his voice to a whisperIm rich. I now felt sure that the poor fellow had gone crazy in his solitude, and I suppose I must have shown the feeling in my face, for he repeated the statement hotly Rich! Rich! I says. And Ill tell you what Ill make a man of you, Jim. Ah, Jim, youll bless your stars, you will, you was the first that found me! And at this there came suddenly a lowering shadow over his face, and he tightened his grasp upon my hand and raised a forefinger threateningly before my eyes. Now, Jim, you tell me true that aint Flints ship? he asked. At this I had a happy inspiration. I began to believe that I had found an ally, and I answered him at once. Its not Flints ship, and Flint is dead; but Ill tell you true, as you ask methere are some of Flints hands aboard; worse luck for the rest of us. Not a manwith oneleg? he gasped. Silver? I asked. Ah, Silver! says he. That were his name. Hes the cook, and the ringleader too. He was still holding me by the wrist, and at that he give it quite a wring. If you was sent by Long John, he said, Im as good as pork, and I know it. But where was you, do you suppose? I had made my mind up in a moment, and by way of answer told him the whole story of our voyage and the predicament in which we found ourselves. He heard me with the keenest interest, and when I had done he patted me on the head. Youre a good lad, Jim, he said; and youre all in a clove hitch, aint you? Well, you just put your trust in Ben GunnBen Gunns the man to do it. Would you think it likely, now, that your squire would prove a liberalminded one in case of helphim being in a clove hitch, as you remark? I told him the squire was the most liberal of men. Aye, but you see, returned Ben Gunn, I didnt mean giving me a gate to keep, and a suit of livery clothes, and such; thats not my mark, Jim. What I mean is, would he be likely to come down to the toon of, say one thousand pounds out of money thats as good as a mans own already? I am sure he would, said I. As it was, all hands were to share. And a passage home? he added with a look of great shrewdness. Why, I cried, the squires a gentleman. And besides, if we got rid of the others, we should want you to help work the vessel home. Ah, said he, so you would. And he seemed very much relieved. Now, Ill tell you what, he went on. So much Ill tell you, and no more. I were in Flints ship when he buried the treasure; he and six alongsix strong seamen. They was ashore nigh on a week, and us standing off and on in the old Walrus. One fine day up went the signal, and here come Flint by himself in a little boat, and his head done up in a blue scarf. The sun was getting up, and mortal white he looked about the cutwater. But, there he was, you mind, and the six all deaddead and buried. How he done it, not a man aboard us could make out. It was battle, murder, and sudden death, leastwayshim against six. Billy Bones was the mate; Long John, he was quartermaster; and they asked him where the treasure was. Ah, says he, you can go ashore, if you like, and stay, he says; but as for the ship, shell beat up for more, by thunder! Thats what he said. Well, I was in another ship three years back, and we sighted this island. Boys, said I, heres Flints treasure; lets land and find it. The capn was displeased at that, but my messmates were all of a mind and landed. Twelve days they looked for it, and every day they had the worse word for me, until one fine morning all hands went aboard. As for you, Benjamin Gunn, says they, heres a musket, they says, and a spade, and pickaxe. You can stay here and find Flints money for yourself, they says. Well, Jim, three years have I been here, and not a bite of Christian diet from that day to this. But now, you look here; look at me. Do I look like a man before the mast? No, says you. Nor I werent, neither, I says. And with that he winked and pinched me hard. Just you mention them words to your squire, Jim, he went on. Nor he werent, neitherthats the words. Three years he were the man of this island, light and dark, fair and rain; and sometimes he would maybe think upon a prayer (says you), and sometimes he would maybe think of his old mother, so be as shes alive (youll say); but the most part of Gunns time (this is what youll say)the most part of his time was took up with another matter. And then youll give him a nip, like I do. And he pinched me again in the most confidential manner. Then, he continued, then youll up, and youll say this Gunn is a good man (youll say), and he puts a precious sight more confidencea precious sight, mind thatin a genleman born than in these genleman of fortune, having been one hisself. Well, I said, I dont understand one word that youve been saying. But thats neither here nor there; for how am I to get on board? Ah, said he, thats the hitch, for sure. Well, theres my boat, that I made with my two hands. I keep her under the white rock. If the worst come to the worst, we might try that after dark. Hi! he broke out. Whats that? For just then, although the sun had still an hour or two to run, all the echoes of the island awoke and bellowed to the thunder of a cannon. They have begun to fight! I cried. Follow me. And I began to run towards the anchorage, my terrors all forgotten, while close at my side the marooned man in his goatskins trotted easily and lightly. Left, left, says he; keep to your left hand, mate Jim! Under the trees with you! Theers where I killed my first goat. They dont come down here now; theyre all mastheaded on them mountings for the fear of Benjamin Gunn. Ah! And theres the cetemerycemetery, he must have meant. You see the mounds? I come here and prayed, nows and thens, when I thought maybe a Sunday would be about doo. It werent quite a chapel, but it seemed more solemn like; and then, says you, Ben Gunn was shorthandedno chapling, nor so much as a Bible and a flag, you says. So he kept talking as I ran, neither expecting nor receiving any answer. The cannonshot was followed after a considerable interval by a volley of small arms. Another pause, and then, not a quarter of a mile in front of me, I beheld the Union Jack flutter in the air above a wood. 0159m PART FOURThe Stockade 0161m XVI Narrative Continued by the Doctor How the Ship Was Abandoned 9161m t was about half past onethree bells in the sea phrasethat the two boats went ashore from the Hispaniola. The captain, the squire, and I were talking matters over in the cabin. Had there been a breath of wind, we should have fallen on the six mutineers who were left aboard with us, slipped our cable, and away to sea. But the wind was wanting; and to complete our helplessness, down came Hunter with the news that Jim Hawkins had slipped into a boat and was gone ashore with the rest. It never occurred to us to doubt Jim Hawkins, but we were alarmed for his safety. With the men in the temper they were in, it seemed an even chance if we should see the lad again. We ran on deck. The pitch was bubbling in the seams; the nasty stench of the place turned me sick; if ever a man smelt fever and dysentery, it was in that abominable anchorage. The six scoundrels were sitting grumbling under a sail in the forecastle; ashore we could see the gigs made fast and a man sitting in each, hard by where the river runs in. One of them was whistling Lillibullero. Waiting was a strain, and it was decided that Hunter and I should go ashore with the jollyboat in quest of information. The gigs had leaned to their right, but Hunter and I pulled straight in, in the direction of the stockade upon the chart. The two who were left guarding their boats seemed in a bustle at our appearance; Lillibullero stopped off, and I could see the pair discussing what they ought to do. Had they gone and told Silver, all might have turned out differently; but they had their orders, I suppose, and decided to sit quietly where they were and hark back again to Lillibullero. There was a slight bend in the coast, and I steered so as to put it between us; even before we landed we had thus lost sight of the gigs. I jumped out and came as near running as I durst, with a big silk handkerchief under my hat for coolness sake and a brace of pistols ready primed for safety. I had not gone a hundred yards when I reached the stockade. This was how it was a spring of clear water rose almost at the top of a knoll. Well, on the knoll, and enclosing the spring, they had clapped a stout loghouse fit to hold two score of people on a pinch and loopholed for musketry on either side. All round this they had cleared a wide space, and then the thing was completed by a paling six feet high, without door or opening, too strong to pull down without time and labour and too open to shelter the besiegers. The people in the loghouse had them in every way; they stood quiet in shelter and shot the others like partridges. All they wanted was a good watch and food; for, short of a complete surprise, they might have held the place against a regiment. What particularly took my fancy was the spring. For though we had a good enough place of it in the cabin of the Hispaniola, with plenty of arms and ammunition, and things to eat, and excellent wines, there had been one thing overlookedwe had no water. I was thinking this over when there came ringing over the island the cry of a man at the point of death. I was not new to violent deathI have served his Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland, and got a wound myself at Fontenoybut I know my pulse went dot and carry one. Jim Hawkins is gone, was my first thought.

It is something to have been an old soldier, but more still to have been a doctor. There is no time to dillydally in our work. And so now I made up my mind instantly, and with no time lost returned to the shore and jumped on board the jollyboat. By good fortune Hunter pulled a good oar. We made the water fly, and the boat was soon alongside and I aboard the schooner. I found them all shaken, as was natural. The squire was sitting down, as white as a sheet, thinking of the harm he had led us to, the good soul! And one of the six forecastle hands was little better. Theres a man, says Captain Smollett, nodding towards him, new to this work. He came nighhand fainting, doctor, when he heard the cry. Another touch of the rudder and that man would join us. I told my plan to the captain, and between us we settled on the details of its accomplishment. We put old Redruth in the gallery between the cabin and the forecastle, with three or four loaded muskets and a mattress for protection. Hunter brought the boat round under the sternport, and Joyce and I set to work loading her with powder tins, muskets, bags of biscuits, kegs of pork, a cask of cognac, and my invaluable medicine chest. In the meantime, the squire and the captain stayed on deck, and the latter hailed the coxswain, who was the principal man aboard. Mr. Hands, he said, here are two of us with a brace of pistols each. If any one of you six make a signal of any description, that mans dead. They were a good deal taken aback, and after a little consultation one and all tumbled down the fore companion, thinking no doubt to take us on the rear. But when they saw Redruth waiting for them in the sparred galley, they went about ship at once, and a head popped out again on deck. Down, dog! cries the captain. And the head popped back again; and we heard no more, for the time, of these six very fainthearted seamen. 0163m By this time, tumbling things in as they came, we had the jollyboat loaded as much as we dared. Joyce and I got out through the sternport, and we made for shore again as fast as oars could take us. This second trip fairly aroused the watchers along shore. Lillibullero was dropped again; and just before we lost sight of them behind the little point, one of them whipped ashore and disappeared. I had half a mind to change my plan and destroy their boats, but I feared that Silver and the others might be close at hand, and all might very well be lost by trying for too much. We had soon touched land in the same place as before and set to provision the block house. All three made the first journey, heavily laden, and tossed our stores over the palisade. Then, leaving Joyce to guard themone man, to be sure, but with half a dozen musketsHunter and I returned to the jollyboat and loaded ourselves once more. So we proceeded without pausing to take breath, till the whole cargo was bestowed, when the two servants took up their position in the block house, and I, with all my power, sculled back to the Hispaniola. That we should have risked a second boat load seems more daring than it really was. They had the advantage of numbers, of course, but we had the advantage of arms. Not one of the men ashore had a musket, and before they could get within range for pistol shooting, we flattered ourselves we should be able to give a good account of a halfdozen at least. The squire was waiting for me at the stern window, all his faintness gone from him. He caught the painter and made it fast, and we fell to loading the boat for our very lives. Pork, powder, and biscuit was the cargo, with only a musket and a cutlass apiece for the squire and me and Redruth and the captain. The rest of the arms and powder we dropped overboard in two fathoms and a half of water, so that we could see the bright steel shining far below us in the sun, on the clean, sandy bottom. By this time the tide was beginning to ebb, and the ship was swinging round to her anchor. Voices were heard faintly halloaing in the direction of the two gigs; and though this reassured us for Joyce and Hunter, who were well to the eastward, it warned our party to be off. Redruth retreated from his place in the gallery and dropped into the boat, which we then brought round to the ships counter, to be handier for Captain Smollett. Now, men, said he, do you hear me? There was no answer from the forecastle. Its to you, Abraham Grayits to you I am speaking. Still no reply. Gray, resumed Mr. Smollett, a little louder, I am leaving this ship, and I order you to follow your captain. I know you are a good man at bottom, and I dare say not one of the lot of yous as bad as he makes out. I have my watch here in my hand; I give you thirty seconds to join me in. There was a pause. Come, my fine fellow, continued the captain; dont hang so long in stays. Im risking my life and the lives of these good gentlemen every second. There was a sudden scuffle, a sound of blows, and out burst Abraham Gray with a knife cut on the side of the cheek, and came running to the captain like a dog to the whistle. Im with you, sir, said he. And the next moment he and the captain had dropped aboard of us, and we had shoved off and given way. We were clear out of the ship, but not yet ashore in our stockade. 0168m XVII Narrative Continued by the Doctor The Jollyboats Last Trip 9168m his fifth trip was quite different from any of the others. In the first place, the little gallipot of a boat that we were in was gravely overloaded. Five grown men, and three of themTrelawney, Redruth, and the captainover six feet high, was already more than she was meant to carry. Add to that the powder, pork, and breadbags. The gunwale was lipping astern. Several times we shipped a little water, and my breeches and the tails of my coat were all soaking wet before we had gone a hundred yards. The captain made us trim the boat, and we got her to lie a little more evenly. All the same, we were afraid to breathe. In the second place, the ebb was now makinga strong rippling current running westward through the basin, and then southard and seaward down the straits by which we had entered in the morning. Even the ripples were a danger to our overloaded craft, but the worst of it was that we were swept out of our true course and away from our proper landingplace behind the point. If we let the current have its way we should come ashore beside the gigs, where the pirates might appear at any moment. I cannot keep her head for the stockade, sir, said I to the captain. I was steering, while he and Redruth, two fresh men, were at the oars. The tide keeps washing her down. Could you pull a little stronger? Not without swamping the boat, said he. You must bear up, sir, if you pleasebear up until you see youre gaining. I tried and found by experiment that the tide kept sweeping us westward until I had laid her head due east, or just about right angles to the way we ought to go. Well never get ashore at this rate, said I. If its the only course that we can lie, sir, we must even lie it, returned the captain. We must keep upstream. You see, sir, he went on, if once we dropped to leeward of the landingplace, its hard to say where we should get ashore, besides the chance of being boarded by the gigs; whereas, the way we go the current must slacken, and then we can dodge back along the shore. The currents less aready, sir, said the man Gray, who was sitting in the foresheets; you can ease her off a bit. Thank you, my man, said I, quite as if nothing had happened, for we had all quietly made up our minds to treat him like one of ourselves. Suddenly the captain spoke up again, and I thought his voice was a little changed. The gun! said he. I have thought of that, said I, for I made sure he was thinking of a bombardment of the fort. They could never get the gun ashore, and if they did, they could never haul it through the woods. Look astern, doctor, replied the captain. We had entirely forgotten the long nine; and there, to our horror, were the five rogues busy about her, getting off her jacket, as they called the stout tarpaulin cover under which she sailed. Not only that, but it flashed into my mind at the same moment that the roundshot and the powder for the gun had been left behind, and a stroke with an axe would put it all into the possession of the evil ones abroad. Israel was Flints gunner, said Gray hoarsely. At any risk, we put the boats head direct for the landingplace. By this time we had got so far out of the run of the current that we kept steerage way even at our necessarily gentle rate of rowing, and I could keep her steady for the goal. But the worst of it was that with the course I now held we turned our broadside instead of our stern to the Hispaniola and offered a target like a barn door. I could hear as well as see that brandyfaced rascal Israel Hands plumping down a roundshot on the deck. Whos the best shot? asked the captain. Mr. Trelawney, out and away, said I. Mr. Trelawney, will you please pick me off one of these men, sir? Hands, if possible, said the captain. Trelawney was as cool as steel. He looked to the priming of his gun. Now, cried the captain, easy with that gun, sir, or youll swamp the boat. All hands stand by to trim her when he aims. The squire raised his gun, the rowing ceased, and we leaned over to the other side to keep the balance, and all was so nicely contrived that we did not ship a drop. They had the gun, by this time, slewed round upon the swivel, and Hands, who was at the muzzle with the rammer, was in consequence the most exposed. However, we had no luck, for just as Trelawney fired, down he stooped, the ball whistled over him, and it was one of the other four who fell. The cry he gave was echoed not only by his companions on board but by a great number of voices from the shore, and looking in that direction I saw the other pirates trooping out from among the trees and tumbling into their places in the boats. Here come the gigs, sir, said I. Give way, then, cried the captain. We mustnt mind if we swamp her now. If we cant get ashore, alls up. Only one of the gigs is being manned, sir, I added; the crew of the other most likely going round by shore to cut us off. Theyll have a hot run, sir, returned the captain. Jack ashore, you know. Its not them I mind; its the roundshot. Carpet bowls! My ladys maid couldnt miss. Tell us, squire, when you see the match, and well hold water. 0171m In the meanwhile we had been making headway at a good pace for a boat so overloaded, and we had shipped but little water in the process. We were now close in; thirty or forty strokes and we should beach her, for the ebb had already disclosed a narrow belt of sand below the clustering trees. The gig was no longer to be feared; the little point had already concealed it from our eyes. The ebbtide, which had so cruelly delayed us, was now making reparation and delaying our assailants. The one source of danger was the gun. If I durst, said the captain, Id stop and pick off another man. But it was plain that they meant nothing should delay their shot. They had never so much as looked at their fallen comrade, though he was not dead, and I could see him trying to crawl away. Ready! cried the squire. Hold! cried the captain, quick as an echo. And he and Redruth backed with a great heave that sent her stern bodily under water. The report fell in at the same instant of time. This was the first that Jim heard, the sound of the squires shot not having reached him. Where the ball passed, not one of us precisely knew, but I fancy it must have been over our heads and that the wind of it may have contributed to our disaster. At any rate, the boat sank by the stern, quite gently, in three feet of water, leaving the captain and myself, facing each other, on our feet. The other three took complete headers, and came up again drenched and bubbling. So far there was no great harm. No lives were lost, and we could wade ashore in safety. But there were all our stores at the bottom, and to make things worse, only two guns out of five remained in a state for service. Mine I had snatched from my knees and held over my head, by a sort of instinct. As for the captain, he had carried his over his shoulder by a bandoleer, and like a wise man, lock uppermost. The other three had gone down with the boat. To add to our concern, we heard voices already drawing near us in the woods along shore, and we had not only the danger of being cut off from the stockade in our halfcrippled state but the fear before us whether, if Hunter and Joyce were attacked by half a dozen, they would have the sense and conduct to stand firm. Hunter was steady, that we knew; Joyce was a doubtful casea pleasant, polite man for a valet and to brush ones clothes, but not entirely fitted for a man of war. With all this in our minds, we waded ashore as fast as we could, leaving behind us the poor jollyboat and a good half of all our powder and provisions. 0175m XVIII Narrative Continued by the Doctor End of the First Days Fighting 9175m e made our best speed across the strip of wood that now divided us from the stockade, and at every step we took the voices of the buccaneers rang nearer. Soon we could hear their footfalls as they ran and the cracking of the branches as they breasted across a bit of thicket. I began to see we should have a brush for it in earnest and looked to my priming. Captain, said I, Trelawney is the dead shot. Give him your gun; his own is useless. They exchanged guns, and Trelawney, silent and cool as he had been since the beginning of the bustle, hung a moment on his heel to see that all was fit for service. At the same time, observing Gray to be unarmed, I handed him my cutlass. It did all our hearts good to see him spit in his hand, knit his brows, and make the blade sing through the air. It was plain from every line of his body that our new hand was worth his salt. Forty paces farther we came to the edge of the wood and saw the stockade in front of us. We struck the enclosure about the middle of the south side, and almost at the same time, seven mutineersJob Anderson, the boatswain, at their headappeared in full cry at the southwestern corner. They paused as if taken aback, and before they recovered, not only the squire and I, but Hunter and Joyce from the block house, had time to fire. The four shots came in rather a scattering volley, but they did the business one of the enemy actually fell, and the rest, without hesitation, turned and plunged into the trees. After reloading, we walked down the outside of the palisade to see to the fallen enemy. He was stone deadshot through the heart. We began to rejoice over our good success when just at that moment a pistol cracked in the bush, a ball whistled close past my ear, and poor Tom Redruth stumbled and fell his length on the ground. Both the squire and I returned the shot, but as we had nothing to aim at, it is probable we only wasted powder. Then we reloaded and turned our attention to poor Tom. The captain and Gray were already examining him, and I saw with half an eye that all was over. I believe the readiness of our return volley had scattered the mutineers once more, for we were suffered without further molestation to get the poor old gamekeeper hoisted over the stockade and carried, groaning and bleeding, into the loghouse. Poor old fellow, he had not uttered one word of surprise, complaint, fear, or even acquiescence from the very beginning of our troubles till now, when we had laid him down in the loghouse to die. He had lain like a Trojan behind his mattress in the gallery; he had followed every order silently, doggedly, and well; he was the oldest of our party by a score of years; and now, sullen, old, serviceable servant, it was he that was to die. The squire dropped down beside him on his knees and kissed his hand, crying like a child. Be I going, doctor? he asked. Tom, my man, said I, youre going home. I wish I had had a lick at them with the gun first, he replied. Tom, said the squire, say you forgive me, wont you? Would that be respectful like, from me to you, squire? was the answer. Howsoever, so be it, amen! After a little while of silence, he said he thought somebody might read a prayer. Its the custom, sir, he added apologetically. And not long after, without another word, he passed away. In the meantime the captain, whom I had observed to be wonderfully swollen about the chest and pockets, had turned out a great many various storesthe British colours, a Bible, a coil of stoutish rope, pen, ink, the logbook, and pounds of tobacco. He had found a longish firtree lying felled and trimmed in the enclosure, and with the help of Hunter he had set it up at the corner of the loghouse where the trunks crossed and made an angle. Then, climbing on the roof, he had with his own hand bent and run up the colours. This seemed mightily to relieve him. He reentered the loghouse and set about counting up the stores as if nothing else existed. But he had an eye on Toms passage for all that, and as soon as all was over, came forward with another flag and reverently spread it on the body. Dont you take on, sir, he said, shaking the squires hand. Alls well with him; no fear for a hand thats been shot down in his duty to captain and owner. It maynt be good divinity, but its a fact. Then he pulled me aside. Dr. Livesey, he said, in how many weeks do you and squire expect the consort? I told him it was a question not of weeks but of months, that if we were not back by the end of August Blandly was to send to find us, but neither sooner nor later. You can calculate for yourself, I said. Why, yes, returned the captain, scratching his head; and making a large allowance, sir, for all the gifts of Providence, I should say we were pretty close hauled. How do you mean? I asked. Its a pity, sir, we lost that second load. Thats what I mean, replied the captain. As for powder and shot, well do. But the rations are short, very shortso short, Dr. Livesey, that were perhaps as well without that extra mouth. And he pointed to the dead body under the flag. Just then, with a roar and a whistle, a roundshot passed high above the roof of the loghouse and plumped far beyond us in the wood. Oho! said the captain. Blaze away! Youve little enough powder already, my lads. At the second trial, the aim was better, and the ball descended inside the stockade, scattering a cloud of sand but doing no further damage. Captain, said the squire, the house is quite invisible from the ship. It must be the flag they are aiming at. Would it not be wiser to take it in? Strike my colours! cried the captain. No, sir, not I; and as soon as he had said the words, I think we all agreed with him. For it was not only a piece of stout, seamanly, good feeling; it was good policy besides and showed our enemies that we despised their cannonade. All through the evening they kept thundering away. Ball after ball flew over or fell short or kicked up the sand in the enclosure, but they had to fire so high that the shot fell dead and buried itself in the soft sand. We had no ricochet to fear, and though one popped in through the roof of the loghouse and out again through the floor, we soon got used to that sort of horseplay and minded it no more than cricket. There is one good thing about all this, observed the captain; the wood in front of us is likely clear. The ebb has made a good while; our stores should be uncovered. Volunteers to go and bring in pork. Gray and Hunter were the first to come forward. Well armed, they stole out of the stockade, but it proved a useless mission. The mutineers were bolder than we fancied or they put more trust in Israels gunnery. For four or five of them were busy carrying off our stores and wading out with them to one of the gigs that lay close by, pulling an oar or so to hold her steady against the current. Silver was in the sternsheets in command; and every man of them was now provided with a musket from some secret magazine of their own. The captain sat down to his log, and here is the beginning of the entry Alexander Smollett, master; David Livesey, ships doctor; Abraham Gray, carpenters mate; John Trelawney, owner; John Hunter and Richard Joyce, owners servants, landsmenbeing all that is left faithful of the ships companywith stores for ten days at short rations, came ashore this day and flew British colours on the loghouse in Treasure Island. Thomas Redruth, owners servant, landsman, shot by the mutineers; James Hawkins, cabinboy And at the same time, I was wondering over poor Jim Hawkins fate. A hail on the land side. Somebody hailing us, said Hunter, who was on guard. Doctor! Squire! Captain! Hullo, Hunter, is that you? came the cries. And I ran to the door in time to see Jim Hawkins, safe and sound, come climbing over the stockade. 0179m 0182m XIX Narrative Resumed by Jim Hawkins The Garrison in the Stockade 9182m s soon as Ben Gunn saw the colours he came to a halt, stopped me by the arm, and sat down. Now, said he, theres your friends, sure enough. Far more likely its the mutineers, I answered. That! he cried. Why, in a place like this, where nobody puts in but genlemen of fortune, Silver would fly the Jolly Roger, you dont make no doubt of that. No, thats your friends. Theres been blows too, and I reckon your friends has had the best of it; and here they are ashore in the old stockade, as was made years and years ago by Flint. Ah, he was the man to have a headpiece, was Flint! Barring rum, his match were never seen. He were afraid of none, not he; ony SilverSilver was that genteel. Well, said I, that may be so, and so be it; all the more reason that I should hurry on and join my friends. Nay, mate, returned Ben, not you. Youre a good boy, or Im mistook; but youre ony a boy, all told. Now, Ben Gunn is fly. Rum wouldnt bring me there, where youre goingnot rum wouldnt, till I see your born genleman and gets it on his word of honour. And you wont forget my words; A precious sight (thats what youll say), a precious sight more confidenceand then nips him. And he pinched me the third time with the same air of cleverness. And when Ben Gunn is wanted, you know where to find him, Jim. Just wheer you found him today. And him that comes is to have a white thing in his hand, and hes to come alone. Oh! And youll say this Ben Gunn, says you, has reasons of his own. Well, said I, I believe I understand. You have something to propose, and you wish to see the squire or the doctor, and youre to be found where I found you. Is that all? And when? says you, he added. Why, from about noon observation to about six bells. Good, said I, and now may I go? You wont forget? he inquired anxiously. Precious sight, and reasons of his own, says you. Reasons of his own; thats the mainstay; as between man and man. Well, thenstill holding meI reckon you can go, Jim. And, Jim, if you was to see Silver, you wouldnt go for to sell Ben Gunn? Wild horses wouldnt draw it from you? No, says you. And if them pirates camp ashore, Jim, what would you say but thered be widders in the morning? Here he was interrupted by a loud report, and a cannonball came tearing through the trees and pitched in the sand not a hundred yards from where we two were talking. The next moment each of us had taken to his heels in a different direction. For a good hour to come frequent reports shook the island, and balls kept crashing through the woods. I moved from hidingplace to hidingplace, always pursued, or so it seemed to me, by these terrifying missiles. But towards the end of the bombardment, though still I durst not venture in the direction of the stockade, where the balls fell oftenest, I had begun, in a manner, to pluck up my heart again, and after a long detour to the east, crept down among the shoreside trees. The sun had just set, the sea breeze was rustling and tumbling in the woods and ruffling the grey surface of the anchorage; the tide, too, was far out, and great tracts of sand lay uncovered; the air, after the heat of the day, chilled me through my jacket. The Hispaniola still lay where she had anchored; but, sure enough, there was the Jolly Rogerthe black flag of piracyflying from her peak. Even as I looked, there came another red flash and another report that sent the echoes clattering, and one more roundshot whistled through the air. It was the last of the cannonade. I lay for some time watching the bustle which succeeded the attack. Men were demolishing something with axes on the beach near the stockadethe poor jollyboat, I afterwards discovered. Away, near the mouth of the river, a great fire was glowing among the trees, and between that point and the ship one of the gigs kept coming and going, the men, whom I had seen so gloomy, shouting at the oars like children. But there was a sound in their voices which suggested rum. At length I thought I might return towards the stockade. I was pretty far down on the low, sandy spit that encloses the anchorage to the east, and is joined at halfwater to Skeleton Island; and now, as I rose to my feet, I saw, some distance further down the spit and rising from among low bushes, an isolated rock, pretty high, and peculiarly white in colour. It occurred to me that this might be the white rock of which Ben Gunn had spoken and that some day or other a boat might be wanted and I should know where to look for one. Then I skirted among the woods until I had regained the rear, or shoreward side, of the stockade, and was soon warmly welcomed by the faithful party. I had soon told my story and began to look about me. The loghouse was made of unsquared trunks of pineroof, walls, and floor. The latter stood in several places as much as a foot or a foot and a half above the surface of the sand. There was a porch at the door, and under this porch the little spring welled up into an artificial basin of a rather odd kindno other than a great ships kettle of iron, with the bottom knocked out, and sunk to her bearings, as the captain said, among the sand. Little had been left besides the framework of the house, but in one corner there was a stone slab laid down by way of hearth and an old rusty iron basket to contain the fire. The slopes of the knoll and all the inside of the stockade had been cleared of timber to build the house, and we could see by the stumps what a fine and lofty grove had been destroyed. Most of the soil had been washed away or buried in drift after the removal of the trees; only where the streamlet ran down from the kettle a thick bed of moss and some ferns and little creeping bushes were still green among the sand. Very close around the stockadetoo close for defence, they saidthe wood still flourished high and dense, all of fir on the land side, but towards the sea with a large admixture of liveoaks. The cold evening breeze, of which I have spoken, whistled through every chink of the rude building and sprinkled the floor with a continual rain of fine sand. There was sand in our eyes, sand in our teeth, sand in our suppers, sand dancing in the spring at the bottom of the kettle, for all the world like porridge beginning to boil. Our chimney was a square hole in the roof; it was but a little part of the smoke that found its way out, and the rest eddied about the house and kept us coughing and piping the eye. Add to this that Gray, the new man, had his face tied up in a bandage for a cut he had got in breaking away from the mutineers and that poor old Tom Redruth, still unburied, lay along the wall, stiff and stark, under the Union Jack. If we had been allowed to sit idle, we should all have fallen in the blues, but Captain Smollett was never the man for that. All hands were called up before him, and he divided us into watches. The doctor and Gray and I for one; the squire, Hunter, and Joyce upon the other. Tired though we all were, two were sent out for firewood; two more were set to dig a grave for Redruth; the doctor was named cook; I was put sentry at the door; and the captain himself went from one to another, keeping up our spirits and lending a hand wherever it was wanted. From time to time the doctor came to the door for a little air and to rest his eyes, which were almost smoked out of his head, and whenever he did so, he had a word for me. That man Smollett, he said once, is a better man than I am. And when I say that it means a deal, Jim. Another time he came and was silent for a while. Then he put his head on one side, and looked at me. Is this Ben Gunn a man? he asked. I do not know, sir, said I. I am not very sure whether hes sane. If theres any doubt about the matter, he is, returned the doctor. A man who has been three years biting his nails on a desert island, Jim, cant expect to appear as sane as you or me. It doesnt lie in human nature. Was it cheese you said he had a fancy for? Yes, sir, cheese, I answered. Well, Jim, says he, just see the good that comes of being dainty in your food. Youve seen my snuffbox, havent you? And you never saw me take snuff, the reason being that in my snuffbox I carry a piece of Parmesan cheesea cheese made in Italy, very nutritious. Well, thats for Ben Gunn! Before supper was eaten we buried old Tom in the sand and stood round him for a while bareheaded in the breeze. A good deal of firewood had been got in, but not enough for the captains fancy, and he shook his head over it and told us we must get back to this tomorrow rather livelier. Then, when we had eaten our pork and each had a good stiff glass of brandy grog, the three chiefs got together in a corner to discuss our prospects. 0187m It appears they were at their wits end what to do, the stores being so low that we must have been starved into surrender long before help came. But our best hope, it was decided, was to kill off the buccaneers until they either hauled down their flag or ran away with the Hispaniola. From nineteen they were already reduced to fifteen, two others were wounded, and one at leastthe man shot beside the gunseverely wounded, if he were not dead. Every time we had a crack at them, we were to take it, saving our own lives, with the extremest care. And besides that, we had two able alliesrum and the climate. As for the first, though we were about half a mile away, we could hear them roaring and singing late into the night; and as for the second, the doctor staked his wig that, camped where they were in the marsh and unprovided with remedies, the half of them would be on their backs before a week. So, he added, if we are not all shot down first theyll be glad to be packing in the schooner. Its always a ship, and they can get to buccaneering again, I suppose. First ship that ever I lost, said Captain Smollett. I was dead tired, as you may fancy; and when I got to sleep, which was not till after a great deal of tossing, I slept like a log of wood. The rest had long been up and had already breakfasted and increased the pile of firewood by about half as much again when I was wakened by a bustle and the sound of voices. Flag of truce! I heard someone say; and then, immediately after, with a cry of surprise, Silver himself! And at that, up I jumped, and rubbing my eyes, ran to a loophole in the wall. 0190m XX Silvers Embassy 9190m ure enough, there were two men just outside the stockade, one of them waving a white cloth, the other, no less a person than Silver himself, standing placidly by. It was still quite early, and the coldest morning that I think I ever was abroad ina chill that pierced into the marrow. The sky was bright and cloudless overhead, and the tops of the trees shone rosily in the sun. But where Silver stood with his lieutenant, all was still in shadow, and they waded kneedeep in a low white vapour that had crawled during the night out of the morass. The chill and the vapour taken together told a poor tale of the island. It was plainly a damp, feverish, unhealthy spot. Keep indoors, men, said the captain.

Ten to one this is a trick. Then he hailed the buccaneer. Who goes? Stand, or we fire. Flag of truce, cried Silver. The captain was in the porch, keeping himself carefully out of the way of a treacherous shot, should any be intended. He turned and spoke to us, Doctors watch on the lookout. Dr. Livesey take the north side, if you please; Jim, the east; Gray, west. The watch below, all hands to load muskets. Lively, men, and careful. And then he turned again to the mutineers. And what do you want with your flag of truce? he cried. This time it was the other man who replied. Capn Silver, sir, to come on board and make terms, he shouted. Capn Silver! Dont know him. Whos he? cried the captain. And we could hear him adding to himself, Capn, is it? My heart, and heres promotion! Long John answered for himself. Me, sir. These poor lads have chosen me capn, after your desertion, sirlaying a particular emphasis upon the word desertion. Were willing to submit, if we can come to terms, and no bones about it. All I ask is your word, Capn Smollett, to let me safe and sound out of this here stockade, and one minute to get out o shot before a gun is fired. My man, said Captain Smollett, I have not the slightest desire to talk to you. If you wish to talk to me, you can come, thats all. If theres any treachery, itll be on your side, and the Lord help you. Thats enough, Capn, shouted Long John cheerily. A word from yous enough. I know a gentleman, and you may lay to that. We could see the man who carried the flag of truce attempting to hold Silver back. Nor was that wonderful, seeing how cavalier had been the captains answer. But Silver laughed at him aloud and slapped him on the back as if the idea of alarm had been absurd. Then he advanced to the stockade, threw over his crutch, got a leg up, and with great vigour and skill succeeded in surmounting the fence and dropping safely to the other side. I will confess that I was far too much taken up with what was going on to be of the slightest use as sentry; indeed, I had already deserted my eastern loophole and crept up behind the captain, who had now seated himself on the threshold, with his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and his eyes fixed on the water as it bubbled out of the old iron kettle in the sand. He was whistling Come, Lasses and Lads. Silver had terrible hard work getting up the knoll. What with the steepness of the incline, the thick tree stumps, and the soft sand, he and his crutch were as helpless as a ship in stays. But he stuck to it like a man in silence, and at last arrived before the captain, whom he saluted in the handsomest style. He was tricked out in his best; an immense blue coat, thick with brass buttons, hung as low as to his knees, and a fine laced hat was set on the back of his head. Here you are, my man, said the captain, raising his head. You had better sit down. You aint agoing to let me inside, Capn? complained Long John. Its a main cold morning, to be sure, sir, to sit outside upon the sand. Why, Silver, said the captain, if you had pleased to be an honest man, you might have been sitting in your galley. Its your own doing. Youre either my ships cookand then you were treated handsomeor Capn Silver, a common mutineer and pirate, and then you can go hang! Well, well, Capn, returned the seacook, sitting down as he was bidden on the sand, youll have to give me a hand up again, thats all. A sweet pretty place you have of it here. Ah, theres Jim! The top of the morning to you, Jim. Doctor, heres my service. Why, there you all are together like a happy family, in a manner of speaking. If you have anything to say, my man, better say it, said the captain. Right you were, Capn Smollett, replied Silver. Dooty is dooty, to be sure. Well now, you look here, that was a good lay of yours last night. I dont deny it was a good lay. Some of you pretty handy with a handspikeend. And Ill not deny neither but what some of my people was shookmaybe all was shook; maybe I was shook myself; maybe thats why Im here for terms. But you mark me, Capn, it wont do twice, by thunder! Well have to do sentrygo and ease off a point or so on the rum. Maybe you think we were all a sheet in the winds eye. But Ill tell you I was sober; I was ony dog tired; and if Id awoke a second sooner, Id a caught you at the act, I would. He wasnt dead when I got round to him, not he. Well? says Captain Smollett as cool as can be. All that Silver said was a riddle to him, but you would never have guessed it from his tone. As for me, I began to have an inkling. Ben Gunns last words came back to my mind. I began to suppose that he had paid the buccaneers a visit while they all lay drunk together round their fire, and I reckoned up with glee that we had only fourteen enemies to deal with. Well, here it is, said Silver. We want that treasure, and well have itthats our point! You would just as soon save your lives, I reckon; and thats yours. You have a chart, havent you? Thats as may be, replied the captain. Oh, well, you have, I know that, returned Long John. You neednt be so husky with a man; there aint a particle of service in that, and you may lay to it. What I mean is, we want your chart. Now, I never meant you no harm, myself. That wont do with me, my man, interrupted the captain. We know exactly what you meant to do, and we dont care, for now, you see, you cant do it. And the captain looked at him calmly and proceeded to fill a pipe. If Abe Gray Silver broke out. Avast there! cried Mr. Smollett. Gray told me nothing, and I asked him nothing; and whats more, I would see you and him and this whole island blown clean out of the water into blazes first. So theres my mind for you, my man, on that. This little whiff of temper seemed to cool Silver down. He had been growing nettled before, but now he pulled himself together. Like enough, said he. I would set no limits to what gentlemen might consider shipshape, or might not, as the case were. And seein as how you are about to take a pipe, Capn, Ill make so free as do likewise. And he filled a pipe and lighted it; and the two men sat silently smoking for quite a while, now looking each other in the face, now stopping their tobacco, now leaning forward to spit. It was as good as the play to see them. Now, resumed Silver, here it is. You give us the chart to get the treasure by, and drop shooting poor seamen and stoving of their heads in while asleep. You do that, and well offer you a choice. Either you come aboard along of us, once the treasure shipped, and then Ill give you my affydavy, upon my word of honour, to clap you somewhere safe ashore. Or if that aint to your fancy, some of my hands being rough and having old scores on account of hazing, then you can stay here, you can. Well divide stores with you, man for man; and Ill give my affydavy, as before to speak the first ship I sight, and send em here to pick you up. Now, youll own thats talking. Handsomer you couldnt look to get, now you. And I hoperaising his voicethat all hands in this here block house will overhaul my words, for what is spoke to one is spoke to all. Captain Smollett rose from his seat and knocked out the ashes of his pipe in the palm of his left hand. Is that all? he asked. Every last word, by thunder! answered John. Refuse that, and youve seen the last of me but musketballs. Very good, said the captain. Now youll hear me. If youll come up one by one, unarmed, Ill engage to clap you all in irons and take you home to a fair trial in England. If you wont, my name is Alexander Smollett, Ive flown my sovereigns colours, and Ill see you all to Davy Jones. You cant find the treasure. You cant sail the shiptheres not a man among you fit to sail the ship. You cant fight usGray, there, got away from five of you. Your ships in irons, Master Silver; youre on a lee shore, and so youll find. I stand here and tell you so; and theyre the last good words youll get from me, for in the name of heaven, Ill put a bullet in your back when next I meet you. Tramp, my lad. Bundle out of this, please, hand over hand, and double quick. Silvers face was a picture; his eyes started in his head with wrath. He shook the fire out of his pipe. Give me a hand up! he cried. Illustration Give me a hand up! he cried. Not I, returned the captain. Not I, returned the captain. Wholl give me a hand up? he roared. Not a man among us moved. Growling the foulest imprecations, he crawled along the sand till he got hold of the porch and could hoist himself again upon his crutch. Then he spat into the spring. There! he cried. Thats what I think of ye. Before an hours out, Ill stove in your old block house like a rum puncheon. Laugh, by thunder, laugh! Before an hours out, yell laugh upon the other side. Them that diell be the lucky ones. And with a dreadful oath he stumbled off, ploughed down the sand, was helped across the stockade, after four or five failures, by the man with the flag of truce, and disappeared in an instant afterwards among the trees. 0198m XXI The Attack 9198m s soon as Silver disappeared, the captain, who had been closely watching him, turned towards the interior of the house and found not a man of us at his post but Gray. It was the first time we had ever seen him angry. Quarters! he roared. And then, as we all slunk back to our places, Gray, he said, Ill put your name in the log; youve stood by your duty like a seaman. Mr. Trelawney, Im surprised at you, sir. Doctor, I thought you had worn the kings coat! If that was how you served at Fontenoy, sir, youd have been better in your berth. The doctors watch were all back at their loopholes, the rest were busy loading the spare muskets, and everyone with a red face, you may be certain, and a flea in his ear, as the saying is. The captain looked on for a while in silence. Then he spoke. My lads, said he, Ive given Silver a broadside. I pitched it in redhot on purpose; and before the hours out, as he said, we shall be boarded. Were outnumbered, I neednt tell you that, but we fight in shelter; and a minute ago I should have said we fought with discipline. Ive no manner of doubt that we can drub them, if you choose. Then he went the rounds and saw, as he said, that all was clear. On the two short sides of the house, east and west, there were only two loopholes; on the south side where the porch was, two again; and on the north side, five. There was a round score of muskets for the seven of us; the firewood had been built into four pilestables, you might sayone about the middle of each side, and on each of these tables some ammunition and four loaded muskets were laid ready to the hand of the defenders. In the middle, the cutlasses lay ranged. Toss out the fire, said the captain; the chill is past, and we mustnt have smoke in our eyes. The iron firebasket was carried bodily out by Mr. Trelawney, and the embers smothered among sand. Hawkins hasnt had his breakfast. Hawkins, help yourself, and back to your post to eat it, continued Captain Smollett. Lively, now, my lad; youll want it before youve done. Hunter, serve out a round of brandy to all hands. And while this was going on, the captain completed, in his own mind, the plan of the defence. Doctor, you will take the door, he resumed. See, and dont expose yourself; keep within, and fire through the porch. Hunter, take the east side, there. Joyce, you stand by the west, my man. Mr. Trelawney, you are the best shotyou and Gray will take this long north side, with the five loopholes; its there the danger is. If they can get up to it and fire in upon us through our own ports, things would begin to look dirty. Hawkins, neither you nor I are much account at the shooting; well stand by to load and bear a hand. As the captain had said, the chill was past. As soon as the sun had climbed above our girdle of trees, it fell with all its force upon the clearing and drank up the vapours at a draught. Soon the sand was baking and the resin melting in the logs of the block house. Jackets and coats were flung aside, shirts thrown open at the neck and rolled up to the shoulders; and we stood there, each at his post, in a fever of heat and anxiety. An hour passed away. Hang them! said the captain. This is as dull as the doldrums. Gray, whistle for a wind. And just at that moment came the first news of the attack. If you please, sir, said Joyce, if I see anyone, am I to fire? I told you so! cried the captain. Thank you, sir, returned Joyce with the same quiet civility. Nothing followed for a time, but the remark had set us all on the alert, straining ears and eyesthe musketeers with their pieces balanced in their hands, the captain out in the middle of the block house with his mouth very tight and a frown on his face. So some seconds passed, till suddenly Joyce whipped up his musket and fired. The report had scarcely died away ere it was repeated and repeated from without in a scattering volley, shot behind shot, like a string of geese, from every side of the enclosure. Several bullets struck the loghouse, but not one entered; and as the smoke cleared away and vanished, the stockade and the woods around it looked as quiet and empty as before. Not a bough waved, not the gleam of a musketbarrel betrayed the presence of our foes. Did you hit your man? asked the captain. No, sir, replied Joyce. I believe not, sir. Next best thing to tell the truth, muttered Captain Smollett. Load his gun, Hawkins. How many should say there were on your side, doctor? I know precisely, said Dr. Livesey. Three shots were fired on this side. I saw the three flashestwo close togetherone farther to the west. Three! repeated the captain. And how many on yours, Mr. Trelawney? But this was not so easily answered. There had come many from the northseven by the squires computation, eight or nine according to Gray. From the east and west only a single shot had been fired. It was plain, therefore, that the attack would be developed from the north and that on the other three sides we were only to be annoyed by a show of hostilities. But Captain Smollett made no change in his arrangements. If the mutineers succeeded in crossing the stockade, he argued, they would take possession of any unprotected loophole and shoot us down like rats in our own stronghold. Nor had we much time left to us for thought. Suddenly, with a loud huzza, a little cloud of pirates leaped from the woods on the north side and ran straight on the stockade. At the same moment, the fire was once more opened from the woods, and a rifle ball sang through the doorway and knocked the doctors musket into bits. The boarders swarmed over the fence like monkeys. Squire and Gray fired again and yet again; three men fell, one forwards into the enclosure, two back on the outside. But of these, one was evidently more frightened than hurt, for he was on his feet again in a crack and instantly disappeared among the trees. 0201m Two had bit the dust, one had fled, four had made good their footing inside our defences, while from the shelter of the woods seven or eight men, each evidently supplied with several muskets, kept up a hot though useless fire on the loghouse. The four who had boarded made straight before them for the building, shouting as they ran, and the men among the trees shouted back to encourage them. Several shots were fired, but such was the hurry of the marksmen that not one appears to have taken effect. In a moment, the four pirates had swarmed up the mound and were upon us. The head of Job Anderson, the boatswain, appeared at the middle loophole. At em, all handsall hands! he roared in a voice of thunder. At the same moment, another pirate grasped Hunters musket by the muzzle, wrenched it from his hands, plucked it through the loophole, and with one stunning blow, laid the poor fellow senseless on the floor. Meanwhile a third, running unharmed all around the house, appeared suddenly in the doorway and fell with his cutlass on the doctor. Our position was utterly reversed. A moment since we were firing, under cover, at an exposed enemy; now it was we who lay uncovered and could not return a blow. The loghouse was full of smoke, to which we owed our comparative safety. Cries and confusion, the flashes and reports of pistolshots, and one loud groan rang in my ears. Out, lads, out, and fight em in the open! Cutlasses! cried the captain. I snatched a cutlass from the pile, and someone, at the same time snatching another, gave me a cut across the knuckles which I hardly felt. I dashed out of the door into the clear sunlight. Someone was close behind, I knew not whom. Right in front, the doctor was pursuing his assailant down the hill, and just as my eyes fell upon him, beat down his guard and sent him sprawling on his back with a great slash across the face. Round the house, lads! Round the house! cried the captain; and even in the hurlyburly, I perceived a change in his voice. Mechanically, I obeyed, turned eastwards, and with my cutlass raised, ran round the corner of the house. Next moment I was face to face with Anderson. He roared aloud, and his hanger went up above his head, flashing in the sunlight. I had not time to be afraid, but as the blow still hung impending, leaped in a trice upon one side, and missing my foot in the soft sand, rolled headlong down the slope. When I had first sallied from the door, the other mutineers had been already swarming up the palisade to make an end of us. One man, in a red nightcap, with his cutlass in his mouth, had even got upon the top and thrown a leg across. Well, so short had been the interval that when I found my feet again all was in the same posture, the fellow with the red nightcap still halfway over, another still just showing his head above the top of the stockade. And yet, in this breath of time, the fight was over and the victory was ours. Gray, following close behind me, had cut down the big boatswain ere he had time to recover from his last blow. Another had been shot at a loophole in the very act of firing into the house and now lay in agony, the pistol still smoking in his hand. A third, as I had seen, the doctor had disposed of at a blow. Of the four who had scaled the palisade, one only remained unaccounted for, and he, having left his cutlass on the field, was now clambering out again with the fear of death upon him. Firefire from the house! cried the doctor. And you, lads, back into cover. But his words were unheeded, no shot was fired, and the last boarder made good his escape and disappeared with the rest into the wood. In three seconds nothing remained of the attacking party but the five who had fallen, four on the inside and one on the outside of the palisade. The doctor and Gray and I ran full speed for shelter. The survivors would soon be back where they had left their muskets, and at any moment the fire might recommence. The house was by this time somewhat cleared of smoke, and we saw at a glance the price we had paid for victory. Hunter lay beside his loophole, stunned; Joyce by his, shot through the head, never to move again; while right in the centre, the squire was supporting the captain, one as pale as the other. The captains wounded, said Mr. Trelawney. Have they run? asked Mr. Smollett. All that could, you may be bound, returned the doctor; but theres five of them will never run again. Five! cried the captain. Come, thats better. Five against three leaves us four to nine. Thats better odds than we had at starting. We were seven to nineteen then, or thought we were, and thats as bad to bear. The mutineers were soon only eight in number, for the man shot by Mr. Trelawney on board the schooner died that same evening of his wound. But this was, of course, not known till after by the faithful party. 0207m PART FIVEMy Sea Adventure 0209m XXII How I Began My Sea Adventure 9209m here was no return of the mutineersnot so much as another shot out of the woods. They had got their rations for that day, as the captain put it, and we had the place to ourselves and a quiet time to overhaul the wounded and get dinner. Squire and I cooked outside in spite of the danger, and even outside we could hardly tell what we were at, for horror of the loud groans that reached us from the doctors patients. Out of the eight men who had fallen in the action, only three still breathedthat one of the pirates who had been shot at the loophole, Hunter, and Captain Smollett; and of these, the first two were as good as dead; the mutineer indeed died under the doctors knife, and Hunter, do what we could, never recovered consciousness in this world. He lingered all day, breathing loudly like the old buccaneer at home in his apoplectic fit, but the bones of his chest had been crushed by the blow and his skull fractured in falling, and some time in the following night, without sign or sound, he went to his Maker. As for the captain, his wounds were grievous indeed, but not dangerous. No organ was fatally injured. Andersons ballfor it was Job that shot him firsthad broken his shoulderblade and touched the lung, not badly; the second had only torn and displaced some muscles in the calf. He was sure to recover, the doctor said, but in the meantime, and for weeks to come, he must not walk nor move his arm, nor so much as speak when he could help it. My own accidental cut across the knuckles was a fleabite. Doctor Livesey patched it up with plaster and pulled my ears for me into the bargain. After dinner the squire and the doctor sat by the captains side awhile in consultation; and when they had talked to their hearts content, it being then a little past noon, the doctor took up his hat and pistols, girt on a cutlass, put the chart in his pocket, and with a musket over his shoulder crossed the palisade on the north side and set off briskly through the trees. Gray and I were sitting together at the far end of the block house, to be out of earshot of our officers consulting; and Gray took his pipe out of his mouth and fairly forgot to put it back again, so thunderstruck he was at this occurrence. Why, in the name of Davy Jones, said he, is Dr. Livesey mad? Why no, says I. Hes about the last of this crew for that, I take it. Well, shipmate, said Gray, mad he may not be; but if hes not, you mark my words, I am. I take it, replied I, the doctor has his idea; and if I am right, hes going now to see Ben Gunn. I was right, as appeared later; but in the meantime, the house being stifling hot and the little patch of sand inside the palisade ablaze with midday sun, I began to get another thought into my head, which was not by any means so right. What I began to do was to envy the doctor walking in the cool shadow of the woods with the birds about him and the pleasant smell of the pines, while I sat grilling, with my clothes stuck to the hot resin, and so much blood about me and so many poor dead bodies lying all around that I took a disgust of the place that was almost as strong as fear. All the time I was washing out the block house, and then washing up the things from dinner, this disgust and envy kept growing stronger and stronger, till at last, being near a breadbag, and no one then observing me, I took the first step towards my escapade and filled both pockets of my coat with biscuit. I was a fool, if you like, and certainly I was going to do a foolish, overbold act; but I was determined to do it with all the precautions in my power. These biscuits, should anything befall me, would keep me, at least, from starving till far on in the next day. The next thing I laid hold of was a brace of pistols, and as I already had a powderhorn and bullets, I felt myself well supplied with arms. As for the scheme I had in my head, it was not a bad one in itself. I was to go down the sandy spit that divides the anchorage on the east from the open sea, find the white rock I had observed last evening, and ascertain whether it was there or not that Ben Gunn had hidden his boat, a thing quite worth doing, as I still believe. But as I was certain I should not be allowed to leave the enclosure, my only plan was to take French leave and slip out when nobody was watching, and that was so bad a way of doing it as made the thing itself wrong. But I was only a boy, and I had made my mind up. Well, as things at last fell out, I found an admirable opportunity. The squire and Gray were busy helping the captain with his bandages, the coast was clear, I made a bolt for it over the stockade and into the thickest of the trees, and before my absence was observed I was out of cry of my companions. This was my second folly, far worse than the first, as I left but two sound men to guard the house; but like the first, it was a help towards saving all of us. I took my way straight for the east coast of the island, for I was determined to go down the sea side of the spit to avoid all chance of observation from the anchorage. It was already late in the afternoon, although still warm and sunny. As I continued to thread the tall woods, I could hear from far before me not only the continuous thunder of the surf, but a certain tossing of foliage and grinding of boughs which showed me the sea breeze had set in higher than usual. Soon cool draughts of air began to reach me, and a few steps farther I came forth into the open borders of the grove, and saw the sea lying blue and sunny to the horizon and the surf tumbling and tossing its foam along the beach. I have never seen the sea quiet round Treasure Island. The sun might blaze overhead, the air be without a breath, the surface smooth and blue, but still these great rollers would be running along all the external coast, thundering and thundering by day and night; and I scarce believe there is one spot in the island where a man would be out of earshot of their noise. I walked along beside the surf with great enjoyment, till, thinking I was now got far enough to the south, I took the cover of some thick bushes and crept warily up to the ridge of the spit. Behind me was the sea, in front the anchorage. The sea breeze, as though it had the sooner blown itself out by its unusual violence, was already at an end; it had been succeeded by light, variable airs from the south and southeast, carrying great banks of fog; and the anchorage, under lee of Skeleton Island, lay still and leaden as when first we entered it. The Hispaniola, in that unbroken mirror, was exactly portrayed from the truck to the waterline, the Jolly Roger hanging from her peak. Alongside lay one of the gigs, Silver in the sternsheetshim I could always recognizewhile a couple of men were leaning over the stern bulwarks, one of them with a red capthe very rogue that I had seen some hours before stridelegs upon the palisade. Apparently they were talking and laughing, though at that distanceupwards of a mileI could, of course, hear no word of what was said. All at once there began the most horrid, unearthly screaming, which at first startled me badly, though I had soon remembered the voice of Captain Flint and even thought I could make out the bird by her bright plumage as she sat perched upon her masters wrist. Soon after, the jollyboat shoved off and pulled for shore, and the man with the red cap and his comrade went below by the cabin companion. Just about the same time, the sun had gone down behind the Spyglass, and as the fog was collecting rapidly, it began to grow dark in earnest. I saw I must lose no time if I were to find the boat that evening. The white rock, visible enough above the brush, was still some eighth of a mile further down the spit, and it took me a goodish while to get up with it, crawling, often on all fours, among the scrub. Night had almost come when I laid my hand on its rough sides. Right below it there was an exceedingly small hollow of green turf, hidden by banks and a thick underwood about kneedeep, that grew there very plentifully; and in the centre of the dell, sure enough, a little tent of goatskins, like what the gipsies carry about with them in England. I dropped into the hollow, lifted the side of the tent, and there was Ben Gunns boathomemade if ever anything was homemade; a rude, lopsided framework of tough wood, and stretched upon that a covering of goatskin, with the hair inside. The thing was extremely small, even for me, and I can hardly imagine that it could have floated with a fullsized man. There was one thwart set as low as possible, a kind of stretcher in the bows, and a double paddle for propulsion. 0213m I had not then seen a coracle, such as the ancient Britons made, but I have seen one since, and I can give you no fairer idea of Ben Gunns boat than by saying it was like the first and the worst coracle ever made by man. But the great advantage of the coracle it certainly possessed, for it was exceedingly light and portable. Well, now that I had found the boat, you would have thought I had had enough of truantry for once, but in the meantime I had taken another notion and become so obstinately fond of it that I would have carried it out, I believe, in the teeth of Captain Smollett himself. This was to slip out under cover of the night, cut the Hispaniola adrift, and let her go ashore where she fancied. I had quite made up my mind that the mutineers, after their repulse of the morning, had nothing nearer their hearts than to up anchor and away to sea; this, I thought, it would be a fine thing to prevent, and now that I had seen how they left their watchmen unprovided with a boat, I thought it might be done with little risk. Down I sat to wait for darkness, and made a hearty meal of biscuit. It was a night out of ten thousand for my purpose. The fog had now buried all heaven. As the last rays of daylight dwindled and disappeared, absolute blackness settled down on Treasure Island. And when, at last, I shouldered the coracle and groped my way stumblingly out of the hollow where I had supped, there were but two points visible on the whole anchorage. One was the great fire on shore, by which the defeated pirates lay carousing in the swamp. The other, a mere blur of light upon the darkness, indicated the position of the anchored ship. She had swung round to the ebbher bow was now towards methe only lights on board were in the cabin, and what I saw was merely a reflection on the fog of the strong rays that flowed from the stern window. The ebb had already run some time, and I had to wade through a long belt of swampy sand, where I sank several times above the ankle, before I came to the edge of the retreating water, and wading a little way in, with some strength and dexterity, set my coracle, keel downwards, on the surface. 0217m XXIII The Ebbtide Runs 9217m he coracleas I had ample reason to know before I was done with herwas a very safe boat for a person of my height and weight, both buoyant and clever in a seaway; but she was the most crossgrained, lopsided craft to manage. Do as you pleased, she always made more leeway than anything else, and turning round and round was the manoeuvre she was best at. Even Ben Gunn himself has admitted that she was queer to handle till you knew her way. Certainly I did not know her way. She turned in every direction but the one I was bound to go; the most part of the time we were broadside on, and I am very sure I never should have made the ship at all but for the tide. By good fortune, paddle as I pleased, the tide was still sweeping me down; and there lay the Hispaniola right in the fairway, hardly to be missed. First she loomed before me like a blot of something yet blacker than darkness, then her spars and hull began to take shape, and the next moment, as it seemed (for, the farther I went, the brisker grew the current of the ebb), I was alongside of her hawser and had laid hold. The hawser was as taut as a bowstring, and the current so strong she pulled upon her anchor. All round the hull, in the blackness, the rippling current bubbled and chattered like a little mountain stream.

One cut with my seagully and the Hispaniola would go humming down the tide. So far so good, but it next occurred to my recollection that a taut hawser, suddenly cut, is a thing as dangerous as a kicking horse. Ten to one, if I were so foolhardy as to cut the Hispaniola from her anchor, I and the coracle would be knocked clean out of the water. This brought me to a full stop, and if fortune had not again particularly favoured me, I should have had to abandon my design. But the light airs which had begun blowing from the southeast and south had hauled round after nightfall into the southwest. Just while I was meditating, a puff came, caught the Hispaniola, and forced her up into the current; and to my great joy, I felt the hawser slacken in my grasp, and the hand by which I held it dip for a second under water. With that I made my mind up, took out my gully, opened it with my teeth, and cut one strand after another, till the vessel swung only by two. Then I lay quiet, waiting to sever these last when the strain should be once more lightened by a breath of wind. All this time I had heard the sound of loud voices from the cabin, but to say truth, my mind had been so entirely taken up with other thoughts that I had scarcely given ear. Now, however, when I had nothing else to do, I began to pay more heed. One I recognized for the coxswains, Israel Hands, that had been Flints gunner in former days. The other was, of course, my friend of the red nightcap. Both men were plainly the worse of drink, and they were still drinking, for even while I was listening, one of them, with a drunken cry, opened the stern window and threw out something, which I divined to be an empty bottle. But they were not only tipsy; it was plain that they were furiously angry. Oaths flew like hailstones, and every now and then there came forth such an explosion as I thought was sure to end in blows. But each time the quarrel passed off and the voices grumbled lower for a while, until the next crisis came and in its turn passed away without result. On shore, I could see the glow of the great campfire burning warmly through the shoreside trees. Someone was singing, a dull, old, droning sailors song, with a droop and a quaver at the end of every verse, and seemingly no end to it at all but the patience of the singer. I had heard it on the voyage more than once and remembered these words But one man of her crew alive, What put to sea with seventyfive. And I thought it was a ditty rather too dolefully appropriate for a company that had met such cruel losses in the morning. But, indeed, from what I saw, all these buccaneers were as callous as the sea they sailed on. At last the breeze came; the schooner sidled and drew nearer in the dark; I felt the hawser slacken once more, and with a good, tough effort, cut the last fibres through. The breeze had but little action on the coracle, and I was almost instantly swept against the bows of the Hispaniola. At the same time, the schooner began to turn upon her heel, spinning slowly, end for end, across the current. I wrought like a fiend, for I expected every moment to be swamped; and since I found I could not push the coracle directly off, I now shoved straight astern. At length I was clear of my dangerous neighbour, and just as I gave the last impulsion, my hands came across a light cord that was trailing overboard across the stern bulwarks. Instantly I grasped it. Why I should have done so I can hardly say. It was at first mere instinct, but once I had it in my hands and found it fast, curiosity began to get the upper hand, and I determined I should have one look through the cabin window. I pulled in hand over hand on the cord, and when I judged myself near enough, rose at infinite risk to about half my height and thus commanded the roof and a slice of the interior of the cabin. By this time the schooner and her little consort were gliding pretty swiftly through the water; indeed, we had already fetched up level with the campfire. The ship was talking, as sailors say, loudly, treading the innumerable ripples with an incessant weltering splash; and until I got my eye above the windowsill I could not comprehend why the watchmen had taken no alarm. One glance, however, was sufficient; and it was only one glance that I durst take from that unsteady skiff. It showed me Hands and his companion locked together in deadly wrestle, each with a hand upon the others throat. 0223m I dropped upon the thwart again, none too soon, for I was near overboard. I could see nothing for the moment but these two furious, encrimsoned faces swaying together under the smoky lamp, and I shut my eyes to let them grow once more familiar with the darkness. The endless ballad had come to an end at last, and the whole diminished company about the campfire had broken into the chorus I had heard so often Fifteen men on the dead mans chest Yohoho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest Yohoho, and a bottle of rum! I was just thinking how busy drink and the devil were at that very moment in the cabin of the Hispaniola, when I was surprised by a sudden lurch of the coracle. At the same moment, she yawed sharply and seemed to change her course. The speed in the meantime had strangely increased. I opened my eyes at once. All round me were little ripples, combing over with a sharp, bristling sound and slightly phosphorescent. The Hispaniola herself, a few yards in whose wake I was still being whirled along, seemed to stagger in her course, and I saw her spars toss a little against the blackness of the night; nay, as I looked longer, I made sure she also was wheeling to the southward. I glanced over my shoulder, and my heart jumped against my ribs. There, right behind me, was the glow of the campfire. The current had turned at right angles, sweeping round along with it the tall schooner and the little dancing coracle; ever quickening, ever bubbling higher, ever muttering louder, it went spinning through the narrows for the open sea. Suddenly the schooner in front of me gave a violent yaw, turning, perhaps, through twenty degrees; and almost at the same moment one shout followed another from on board; I could hear feet pounding on the companion ladder and I knew that the two drunkards had at last been interrupted in their quarrel and awakened to a sense of their disaster. I lay down flat in the bottom of that wretched skiff and devoutly recommended my spirit to its Maker. At the end of the straits, I made sure we must fall into some bar of raging breakers, where all my troubles would be ended speedily; and though I could, perhaps, bear to die, I could not bear to look upon my fate as it approached. So I must have lain for hours, continually beaten to and fro upon the billows, now and again wetted with flying sprays, and never ceasing to expect death at the next plunge. Gradually weariness grew upon me; a numbness, an occasional stupor, fell upon my mind even in the midst of my terrors, until sleep at last supervened and in my seatossed coracle I lay and dreamed of home and the old Admiral Benbow. 0226m XXIV The Cruise of the Coracle 9226m t was broad day when I awoke and found myself tossing at the southwest end of Treasure Island. The sun was up but was still hid from me behind the great bulk of the Spyglass, which on this side descended almost to the sea in formidable cliffs. Haulbowline Head and Mizzenmast Hill were at my elbow, the hill bare and dark, the head bound with cliffs forty or fifty feet high and fringed with great masses of fallen rock. I was scarce a quarter of a mile to seaward, and it was my first thought to paddle in and land. That notion was soon given over. Among the fallen rocks the breakers spouted and bellowed; loud reverberations, heavy sprays flying and falling, succeeded one another from second to second; and I saw myself, if I ventured nearer, dashed to death upon the rough shore or spending my strength in vain to scale the beetling crags. Nor was that all, for crawling together on flat tables of rock or letting themselves drop into the sea with loud reports I beheld huge slimy monsterssoft snails, as it were, of incredible bignesstwo or three score of them together, making the rocks to echo with their barkings. I have understood since that they were sea lions, and entirely harmless. But the look of them, added to the difficulty of the shore and the high running of the surf, was more than enough to disgust me of that landingplace. I felt willing rather to starve at sea than to confront such perils. 0229m In the meantime I had a better chance, as I supposed, before me. North of Haulbowline Head, the land runs in a long way, leaving at low tide a long stretch of yellow sand. To the north of that, again, there comes another capeCape of the Woods, as it was marked upon the chartburied in tall green pines, which descended to the margin of the sea. I remembered what Silver had said about the current that sets northward along the whole west coast of Treasure Island, and seeing from my position that I was already under its influence, I preferred to leave Haulbowline Head behind me and reserve my strength for an attempt to land upon the kindlierlooking Cape of the Woods. There was a great, smooth swell upon the sea. The wind blowing steady and gentle from the south, there was no contrariety between that and the current, and the billows rose and fell unbroken. Had it been otherwise, I must long ago have perished; but as it was, it is surprising how easily and securely my little and light boat could ride. Often, as I still lay at the bottom and kept no more than an eye above the gunwale, I would see a big blue summit heaving close above me; yet the coracle would but bounce a little, dance as if on springs, and subside on the other side into the trough as lightly as a bird. I began after a little to grow very bold and sat up to try my skill at paddling. But even a small change in the disposition of the weight will produce violent changes in the behaviour of a coracle. And I had hardly moved before the boat, giving up at once her gentle dancing movement, ran straight down a slope of water so steep that it made me giddy, and struck her nose, with a spout of spray, deep into the side of the next wave. I was drenched and terrified, and fell instantly back into my old position, whereupon the coracle seemed to find her head again and led me as softly as before among the billows. It was plain she was not to be interfered with, and at that rate, since I could in no way influence her course, what hope had I left of reaching land? I began to be horribly frightened, but I kept my head, for all that. First, moving with all care, I gradually baled out the coracle with my seacap; then, getting my eye once more above the gunwale, I set myself to study how it was she managed to slip so quietly through the rollers. I found each wave, instead of the big, smooth glossy mountain it looks from shore or from a vessels deck, was for all the world like any range of hills on dry land, full of peaks and smooth places and valleys. The coracle, left to herself, turning from side to side, threaded, so to speak, her way through these lower parts and avoided the steep slopes and higher, toppling summits of the wave. Well, now, thought I to myself, it is plain I must lie where I am and not disturb the balance; but it is plain also that I can put the paddle over the side and from time to time, in smooth places, give her a shove or two towards land. No sooner thought upon than done. There I lay on my elbows in the most trying attitude, and every now and again gave a weak stroke or two to turn her head to shore. It was very tiring and slow work, yet I did visibly gain ground; and as we drew near the Cape of the Woods, though I saw I must infallibly miss that point, I had still made some hundred yards of easting. I was, indeed, close in. I could see the cool green treetops swaying together in the breeze, and I felt sure I should make the next promontory without fail. It was high time, for I now began to be tortured with thirst. The glow of the sun from above, its thousandfold reflection from the waves, the seawater that fell and dried upon me, caking my very lips with salt, combined to make my throat burn and my brain ache. The sight of the trees so near at hand had almost made me sick with longing, but the current had soon carried me past the point, and as the next reach of sea opened out, I beheld a sight that changed the nature of my thoughts. Right in front of me, not half a mile away, I beheld the Hispaniola under sail. I made sure, of course, that I should be taken; but I was so distressed for want of water that I scarce knew whether to be glad or sorry at the thought, and long before I had come to a conclusion, surprise had taken entire possession of my mind and I could do nothing but stare and wonder. The Hispaniola was under her mainsail and two jibs, and the beautiful white canvas shone in the sun like snow or silver. When I first sighted her, all her sails were drawing; she was lying a course about northwest, and I presumed the men on board were going round the island on their way back to the anchorage. Presently she began to fetch more and more to the westward, so that I thought they had sighted me and were going about in chase. At last, however, she fell right into the winds eye, was taken dead aback, and stood there awhile helpless, with her sails shivering. Clumsy fellows, said I; they must still be drunk as owls. And I thought how Captain Smollett would have set them skipping. Meanwhile the schooner gradually fell off and filled again upon another tack, sailed swiftly for a minute or so, and brought up once more dead in the winds eye. Again and again was this repeated. To and fro, up and down, north, south, east, and west, the Hispaniola sailed by swoops and dashes, and at each repetition ended as she had begun, with idly flapping canvas. It became plain to me that nobody was steering. And if so, where were the men? Either they were dead drunk or had deserted her, I thought, and perhaps if I could get on board I might return the vessel to her captain. The current was bearing coracle and schooner southward at an equal rate. As for the latters sailing, it was so wild and intermittent, and she hung each time so long in irons, that she certainly gained nothing, if she did not even lose. If only I dared to sit up and paddle, I made sure that I could overhaul her. The scheme had an air of adventure that inspired me, and the thought of the water breaker beside the fore companion doubled my growing courage. Up I got, was welcomed almost instantly by another cloud of spray, but this time stuck to my purpose and set myself, with all my strength and caution, to paddle after the unsteered Hispaniola. Once I shipped a sea so heavy that I had to stop and bail, with my heart fluttering like a bird, but gradually I got into the way of the thing and guided my coracle among the waves, with only now and then a blow upon her bows and a dash of foam in my face. I was now gaining rapidly on the schooner; I could see the brass glisten on the tiller as it banged about, and still no soul appeared upon her decks. I could not choose but suppose she was deserted. If not, the men were lying drunk below, where I might batten them down, perhaps, and do what I chose with the ship. For some time she had been doing the worse thing possible for mestanding still. She headed nearly due south, yawing, of course, all the time. Each time she fell off, her sails partly filled, and these brought her in a moment right to the wind again. I have said this was the worst thing possible for me, for helpless as she looked in this situation, with the canvas cracking like cannon and the blocks trundling and banging on the deck, she still continued to run away from me, not only with the speed of the current, but by the whole amount of her leeway, which was naturally great. But now, at last, I had my chance. The breeze fell for some seconds, very low, and the current gradually turning her, the Hispaniola revolved slowly round her centre and at last presented me her stern, with the cabin window still gaping open and the lamp over the table still burning on into the day. The mainsail hung drooped like a banner. She was stockstill but for the current. For the last little while I had even lost, but now redoubling my efforts, I began once more to overhaul the chase. I was not a hundred yards from her when the wind came again in a clap; she filled on the port tack and was off again, stooping and skimming like a swallow. My first impulse was one of despair, but my second was towards joy. Round she came, till she was broadside on to meround still till she had covered a half and then two thirds and then three quarters of the distance that separated us. I could see the waves boiling white under her forefoot. Immensely tall she looked to me from my low station in the coracle. And then, of a sudden, I began to comprehend. I had scarce time to thinkscarce time to act and save myself. I was on the summit of one swell when the schooner came stooping over the next. The bowsprit was over my head. I sprang to my feet and leaped, stamping the coracle under water. With one hand I caught the jibboom, while my foot was lodged between the stay and the brace; and as I still clung there panting, a dull blow told me that the schooner had charged down upon and struck the coracle and that I was left without retreat on the Hispaniola. 0234m XXV I Strike the Jolly Roger 9234m had scarce gained a position on the bowsprit when the flying jib flapped and filled upon the other tack, with a report like a gun. The schooner trembled to her keel under the reverse, but next moment, the other sails still drawing, the jib flapped back again and hung idle. This had nearly tossed me off into the sea; and now I lost no time, crawled back along the bowsprit, and tumbled head foremost on the deck. I was on the lee side of the forecastle, and the mainsail, which was still drawing, concealed from me a certain portion of the afterdeck. Not a soul was to be seen. The planks, which had not been swabbed since the mutiny, bore the print of many feet, and an empty bottle, broken by the neck, tumbled to and fro like a live thing in the scuppers. Suddenly the Hispaniola came right into the wind. The jibs behind me cracked aloud, the rudder slammed to, the whole ship gave a sickening heave and shudder, and at the same moment the mainboom swung inboard, the sheet groaning in the blocks, and showed me the lee afterdeck. There were the two watchmen, sure enough redcap on his back, as stiff as a handspike, with his arms stretched out like those of a crucifix and his teeth showing through his open lips; Israel Hands propped against the bulwarks, his chin on his chest, his hands lying open before him on the deck, his face as white, under its tan, as a tallow candle. For a while the ship kept bucking and sidling like a vicious horse, the sails filling, now on one tack, now on another, and the boom swinging to and fro till the mast groaned aloud under the strain. Now and again too there would come a cloud of light sprays over the bulwark and a heavy blow of the ships bows against the swell; so much heavier weather was made of it by this great rigged ship than by my homemade, lopsided coracle, now gone to the bottom of the sea. At every jump of the schooner, redcap slipped to and fro, butwhat was ghastly to beholdneither his attitude nor his fixed teethdisclosing grin was anyway disturbed by this rough usage. At every jump too, Hands appeared still more to sink into himself and settle down upon the deck, his feet sliding ever the farther out, and the whole body canting towards the stern, so that his face became, little by little, hid from me; and at last I could see nothing beyond his ear and the frayed ringlet of one whisker. At the same time, I observed, around both of them, splashes of dark blood upon the planks and began to feel sure that they had killed each other in their drunken wrath. While I was thus looking and wondering, in a calm moment, when the ship was still, Israel Hands turned partly round and with a low moan writhed himself back to the position in which I had seen him first. The moan, which told of pain and deadly weakness, and the way in which his jaw hung open went right to my heart. But when I remembered the talk I had overheard from the apple barrel, all pity left me. I walked aft until I reached the mainmast. Come aboard, Mr. Hands, I said ironically. He rolled his eyes round heavily, but he was too far gone to express surprise. All he could do was to utter one word, Brandy. It occurred to me there was no time to lose, and dodging the boom as it once more lurched across the deck, I slipped aft and down the companion stairs into the cabin. It was such a scene of confusion as you can hardly fancy. All the lockfast places had been broken open in quest of the chart. The floor was thick with mud where ruffians had sat down to drink or consult after wading in the marshes round their camp. The bulkheads, all painted in clear white and beaded round with gilt, bore a pattern of dirty hands. Dozens of empty bottles clinked together in corners to the rolling of the ship. One of the doctors medical books lay open on the table, half of the leaves gutted out, I suppose, for pipelights. In the midst of all this the lamp still cast a smoky glow, obscure and brown as umber. I went into the cellar; all the barrels were gone, and of the bottles a most surprising number had been drunk out and thrown away. Certainly, since the mutiny began, not a man of them could ever have been sober. Foraging about, I found a bottle with some brandy left, for Hands; and for myself I routed out some biscuit, some pickled fruits, a great bunch of raisins, and a piece of cheese. With these I came on deck, put down my own stock behind the rudder head and well out of the coxswains reach, went forward to the waterbreaker, and had a good deep drink of water, and then, and not till then, gave Hands the brandy. He must have drunk a gill before he took the bottle from his mouth. Aye, said he, by thunder, but I wanted some o that! I had sat down already in my own corner and begun to eat. Much hurt? I asked him. He grunted, or rather, I might say, he barked. If that doctor was aboard, he said, Id be right enough in a couple of turns, but I dont have no manner of luck, you see, and thats whats the matter with me. As for that swab, hes good and dead, he is, he added, indicating the man with the red cap. He warnt no seaman anyhow. And where mought you have come from? Well, said I, Ive come aboard to take possession of this ship, Mr. Hands; and youll please regard me as your captain until further notice. He looked at me sourly enough but said nothing. Some of the colour had come back into his cheeks, though he still looked very sick and still continued to slip out and settle down as the ship banged about. By the by, I continued, I cant have these colours, Mr. Hands; and by your leave, Ill strike em. Better none than these. 0237m And again dodging the boom, I ran to the colour lines, handed down their cursed black flag, and chucked it overboard. God save the king! said I, waving my cap. And theres an end to Captain Silver! He watched me keenly and slyly, his chin all the while on his breast. I reckon, he said at last, I reckon, Capn Hawkins, youll kind of want to get ashore now. Spose we talks. Why, yes, says I, with all my heart, Mr. Hands. Say on. And I went back to my meal with a good appetite. This man, he began, nodding feebly at the corpse OBrien were his name, a rank Irelanderthis man and me got the canvas on her, meaning for to sail her back. Well, hes dead now, he isas dead as bilge; and whos to sail this ship, I dont see. Without I gives you a hint, you aint that man, as fars I can tell. Now, look here, you gives me food and drink and a old scarf or ankecher to tie my wound up, you do, and Ill tell you how to sail her, and thats about square all round, I take it. Ill tell you one thing, says I Im not going back to Captain Kidds anchorage. I mean to get into North Inlet and beach her quietly there. To be sure you did, he cried. Why, I aint sich an infernal lubber after all. I can see, cant I? Ive tried my fling, I have, and Ive lost, and its you has the wind of me. North Inlet? Why, I havent no chice, not I! Id help you sail her up to Execution Dock, by thunder! So I would. Well, as it seemed to me, there was some sense in this. We struck our bargain on the spot. In three minutes I had the Hispaniola sailing easily before the wind along the coast of Treasure Island, with good hopes of turning the northern point ere noon and beating down again as far as North Inlet before high water, when we might beach her safely and wait till the subsiding tide permitted us to land. Then I lashed the tiller and went below to my own chest, where I got a soft silk handkerchief of my mothers. With this, and with my aid, Hands bound up the great bleeding stab he had received in the thigh, and after he had eaten a little and had a swallow or two more of the brandy, he began to pick up visibly, sat straighter up, spoke louder and clearer, and looked in every way another man. The breeze served us admirably. We skimmed before it like a bird, the coast of the island flashing by and the view changing every minute. Soon we were past the high lands and bowling beside low, sandy country, sparsely dotted with dwarf pines, and soon we were beyond that again and had turned the corner of the rocky hill that ends the island on the north. I was greatly elated with my new command, and pleased with the bright, sunshiny weather and these different prospects of the coast. I had now plenty of water and good things to eat, and my conscience, which had smitten me hard for my desertion, was quieted by the great conquest I had made. I should, I think, have had nothing left me to desire but for the eyes of the coxswain as they followed me derisively about the deck and the odd smile that appeared continually on his face. It was a smile that had in it something both of pain and weaknessa haggard old mans smile; but there was, besides that, a grain of derision, a shadow of treachery, in his expression as he craftily watched, and watched, and watched me at my work. 0241m XXVI Israel Hands 9241m he wind, serving us to a desire, now hauled into the west. We could run so much the easier from the northeast corner of the island to the mouth of the North Inlet. Only, as we had no power to anchor and dared not beach her till the tide had flowed a good deal farther, time hung on our hands. The coxswain told me how to lay the ship to; after a good many trials I succeeded, and we both sat in silence over another meal. Capn, said he at length with that same uncomfortable smile, heres my old shipmate, OBrien; spose you was to heave him overboard. I aint particlar as a rule, and I dont take no blame for settling his hash, but I dont reckon him ornamental now, do you? Im not strong enough, and I dont like the job; and there he lies, for me, said I. This heres an unlucky ship, this Hispaniola, Jim, he went on, blinking. Theres a power of men been killed in this Hispaniolaa sight o poor seamen dead and gone since you and me took ship to Bristol. I never seen sich dirty luck, not I. There was this here OBrien nowhes dead, aint he? Well now, Im no scholar, and youre a lad as can read and figure, and to put it straight, do you take it as a dead man is dead for good, or do he come alive again? You can kill the body, Mr. Hands, but not the spirit; you must know that already, I replied. OBrien there is in another world, and may be watching us. Ah! says he. Well, thats unfortnateappears as if killing parties was a waste of time. Howsomever, sperrits dont reckon for much, by what Ive seen. Ill chance it with the sperrits, Jim. And now, youve spoke up free, and Ill take it kind if youd step down into that there cabin and get me awell, ashiver my timbers! I cant hit the name on t; well, you get me a bottle of wine, Jimthis here brandys too strong for my head. Now, the coxswains hesitation seemed to be unnatural, and as for the notion of his preferring wine to brandy, I entirely disbelieved it. The whole story was a pretext. He wanted me to leave the deckso much was plain; but with what purpose I could in no way imagine. His eyes never met mine; they kept wandering to and fro, up and down, now with a look to the sky, now with a flitting glance upon the dead OBrien. All the time he kept smiling and putting his tongue out in the most guilty, embarrassed manner, so that a child could have told that he was bent on some deception. I was prompt with my answer, however, for I saw where my advantage lay and that with a fellow so densely stupid I could easily conceal my suspicions to the end. Some wine? I said. Far better. Will you have white or red? Well, I reckon its about the blessed same to me, shipmate, he replied; so its strong, and plenty of it, whats the odds? All right, I answered. Ill bring you port, Mr. Hands. But Ill have to dig for it. With that I scuttled down the companion with all the noise I could, slipped off my shoes, ran quietly along the sparred gallery, mounted the forecastle ladder, and popped my head out of the fore companion. I knew he would not expect to see me there, yet I took every precaution possible, and certainly the worst of my suspicions proved too true. He had risen from his position to his hands and knees, and though his leg obviously hurt him pretty sharply when he movedfor I could hear him stifle a groanyet it was at a good, rattling rate that he trailed himself across the deck. In half a minute he had reached the port scuppers and picked, out of a coil of rope, a long knife, or rather a short dirk, discoloured to the hilt with blood. He looked upon it for a moment, thrusting forth his under jaw, tried the point upon his hand, and then, hastily concealing it in the bosom of his jacket, trundled back again into his old place against the bulwark. This was all that I required to know. Israel could move about, he was now armed, and if he had been at so much trouble to get rid of me, it was plain that I was meant to be the victim. What he would do afterwardswhether he would try to crawl right across the island from North Inlet to the camp among the swamps or whether he would fire Long Tom, trusting that his own comrades might come first to help himwas, of course, more than I could say. Yet I felt sure that I could trust him in one point, since in that our interests jumped together, and that was in the disposition of the schooner. We both desired to have her stranded safe enough, in a sheltered place, and so that, when the time came, she could be got off again with as little labour and danger as might be; and until that was done I considered that my life would certainly be spared. While I was thus turning the business over in my mind, I had not been idle with my body. I had stolen back to the cabin, slipped once more into my shoes, and laid my hand at random on a bottle of wine, and now, with this for an excuse, I made my reappearance on the deck. Hands lay as I had left him, all fallen together in a bundle and with his eyelids lowered as though he were too weak to bear the light. He looked up, however, at my coming, knocked the neck off the bottle like a man who had done the same thing often, and took a good swig, with his favourite toast of Heres luck! Then he lay quiet for a little, and then, pulling out a stick of tobacco, begged me to cut him a quid. Cut me a junk o that, says he, for I havent no knife and hardly strength enough, so be as I had. Ah, Jim, Jim, I reckon Ive missed stays! Cut me a quid, asll likely be the last, lad, for Im for my long home, and no mistake.

Well, said I, Ill cut you some tobacco, but if I was you and thought myself so badly, I would go to my prayers like a Christian man. Why? said he. Now, you tell me why. Why? I cried. You were asking me just now about the dead. Youve broken your trust; youve lived in sin and lies and blood; theres a man you killed lying at your feet this moment, and you ask me why! For Gods mercy, Mr. Hands, thats why. I spoke with a little heat, thinking of the bloody dirk he had hidden in his pocket and designed, in his ill thoughts, to end me with. He, for his part, took a great draught of the wine and spoke with the most unusual solemnity. For thirty years, he said, Ive sailed the seas and seen good and bad, better and worse, fair weather and foul, provisions running out, knives going, and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men dont bite; thems my viewsamen, so be it. And now, you look here, he added, suddenly changing his tone, weve had about enough of this foolery. The tides made good enough by now. You just take my orders, Capn Hawkins, and well sail slap in and be done with it. All told, we had scarce two miles to run; but the navigation was delicate, the entrance to this northern anchorage was not only narrow and shoal, but lay east and west, so that the schooner must be nicely handled to be got in. I think I was a good, prompt subaltern, and I am very sure that Hands was an excellent pilot, for we went about and about and dodged in, shaving the banks, with a certainty and a neatness that were a pleasure to behold. Scarcely had we passed the heads before the land closed around us. The shores of North Inlet were as thickly wooded as those of the southern anchorage, but the space was longer and narrower and more like, what in truth it was, the estuary of a river. Right before us, at the southern end, we saw the wreck of a ship in the last stages of dilapidation. It had been a great vessel of three masts but had lain so long exposed to the injuries of the weather that it was hung about with great webs of dripping seaweed, and on the deck of it shore bushes had taken root and now flourished thick with flowers. It was a sad sight, but it showed us that the anchorage was calm. Now, said Hands, look there; theres a pet bit for to beach a ship in. Fine flat sand, never a cats paw, trees all around of it, and flowers ablowing like a garding on that old ship. And once beached, I inquired, how shall we get her off again? Why, so, he replied you take a line ashore there on the other side at low water, take a turn about one of them big pines; bring it back, take a turn around the capstan, and lie to for the tide. Come high water, all hands take a pull upon the line, and off she comes as sweet as natur. And now, boy, you stand by. Were near the bit now, and shes too much way on her. Starboard a littlesosteadystarboardlarboard a littlesteadysteady! So he issued his commands, which I breathlessly obeyed, till, all of a sudden, he cried, Now, my hearty, luff! And I put the helm hard up, and the Hispaniola swung round rapidly and ran stem on for the low, wooded shore. The excitement of these last manoeuvres had somewhat interfered with the watch I had kept hitherto, sharply enough, upon the coxswain. Even then I was still so much interested, waiting for the ship to touch, that I had quite forgot the peril that hung over my head and stood craning over the starboard bulwarks and watching the ripples spreading wide before the bows. I might have fallen without a struggle for my life had not a sudden disquietude seized upon me and made me turn my head. Perhaps I had heard a creak or seen his shadow moving with the tail of my eye; perhaps it was an instinct like a cats; but, sure enough, when I looked round, there was Hands, already halfway towards me, with the dirk in his right hand. We must both have cried out aloud when our eyes met, but while mine was the shrill cry of terror, his was a roar of fury like a charging bullys. At the same instant, he threw himself forward and I leapt sideways towards the bows. As I did so, I let go of the tiller, which sprang sharp to leeward, and I think this saved my life, for it struck Hands across the chest and stopped him, for the moment, dead. Before he could recover, I was safe out of the corner where he had me trapped, with all the deck to dodge about. Just forward of the mainmast I stopped, drew a pistol from my pocket, took a cool aim, though he had already turned and was once more coming directly after me, and drew the trigger. The hammer fell, but there followed neither flash nor sound; the priming was useless with seawater. I cursed myself for my neglect. Why had not I, long before, reprimed and reloaded my only weapons? Then I should not have been as now, a mere fleeing sheep before this butcher. Wounded as he was, it was wonderful how fast he could move, his grizzled hair tumbling over his face, and his face itself as red as a red ensign with his haste and fury. I had no time to try my other pistol, nor indeed much inclination, for I was sure it would be useless. One thing I saw plainly I must not simply retreat before him, or he would speedily hold me boxed into the bows, as a moment since he had so nearly boxed me in the stern. Once so caught, and nine or ten inches of the bloodstained dirk would be my last experience on this side of eternity. I placed my palms against the mainmast, which was of a goodish bigness, and waited, every nerve upon the stretch. Seeing that I meant to dodge, he also paused; and a moment or two passed in feints on his part and corresponding movements upon mine. It was such a game as I had often played at home about the rocks of Black Hill Cove, but never before, you may be sure, with such a wildly beating heart as now. Still, as I say, it was a boys game, and I thought I could hold my own at it against an elderly seaman with a wounded thigh. Indeed my courage had begun to rise so high that I allowed myself a few darting thoughts on what would be the end of the affair, and while I saw certainly that I could spin it out for long, I saw no hope of any ultimate escape. Well, while things stood thus, suddenly the Hispaniola struck, staggered, ground for an instant in the sand, and then, swift as a blow, canted over to the port side till the deck stood at an angle of fortyfive degrees and about a puncheon of water splashed into the scupper holes and lay, in a pool, between the deck and bulwark. We were both of us capsized in a second, and both of us rolled, almost together, into the scuppers, the dead redcap, with his arms still spread out, tumbling stiffly after us. So near were we, indeed, that my head came against the coxswains foot with a crack that made my teeth rattle. Blow and all, I was the first afoot again, for Hands had got involved with the dead body. The sudden canting of the ship had made the deck no place for running on; I had to find some new way of escape, and that upon the instant, for my foe was almost touching me. Quick as thought, I sprang into the mizzen shrouds, rattled up hand over hand, and did not draw a breath till I was seated on the crosstrees. I had been saved by being prompt; the dirk had struck not half a foot below me as I pursued my upward flight; and there stood Israel Hands with his mouth open and his face upturned to mine, a perfect statue of surprise and disappointment. Now that I had a moment to myself, I lost no time in changing the priming of my pistol, and then, having one ready for service, and to make assurance doubly sure, I proceeded to draw the load of the other and recharge it afresh from the beginning. My new employment struck Hands all of a heap; he began to see the dice going against him, and after an obvious hesitation, he also hauled himself heavily into the shrouds, and with the dirk in his teeth, began slowly and painfully to mount. It cost him no end of time and groans to haul his wounded leg behind him, and I had quietly finished my arrangements before he was much more than a third of the way up. Then, with a pistol in either hand, I addressed him. One more step, Mr. Hands, said I, and Ill blow your brains out! Dead men dont bite, you know, I added with a chuckle. He stopped instantly. I could see by the working of his face that he was trying to think, and the process was so slow and laborious that, in my newfound security, I laughed aloud. At last, with a swallow or two, he spoke, his face still wearing the same expression of extreme perplexity. In order to speak he had to take the dagger from his mouth, but in all else he remained unmoved. Jim, says he, I reckon were fouled, you and me, and well have to sign articles. Id have had you but for that there lurch, but I dont have no luck, not I; and I reckon Ill have to strike, which comes hard, you see, for a master mariner to a ships younker like you, Jim. I was drinking in his words and smiling away, as conceited as a cock upon a wall, when, all in a breath, back went his right hand over his shoulder. Something sang like an arrow through the air; I felt a blow and then a sharp pang, and there I was pinned by the shoulder to the mast. In the horrid pain and surprise of the momentI scarce can say it was by my own volition, and I am sure it was without a conscious aimboth my pistols went off, and both escaped out of my hands. They did not fall alone; with a choked cry, the coxswain loosed his grasp upon the shrouds and plunged head first into the water. 0219m 0247m 0251m XXVII Pieces of Eight 9251m wing to the cant of the vessel, the masts hung far out over the water, and from my perch on the crosstrees I had nothing below me but the surface of the bay. Hands, who was not so far up, was in consequence nearer to the ship and fell between me and the bulwarks. He rose once to the surface in a lather of foam and blood and then sank again for good. As the water settled, I could see him lying huddled together on the clean, bright sand in the shadow of the vessels sides. A fish or two whipped past his body. Sometimes, by the quivering of the water, he appeared to move a little, as if he were trying to rise. But he was dead enough, for all that, being both shot and drowned, and was food for fish in the very place where he had designed my slaughter. I was no sooner certain of this than I began to feel sick, faint, and terrified. The hot blood was running over my back and chest. The dirk, where it had pinned my shoulder to the mast, seemed to burn like a hot iron; yet it was not so much these real sufferings that distressed me, for these, it seemed to me, I could bear without a murmur; it was the horror I had upon my mind of falling from the crosstrees into that still green water, beside the body of the coxswain. I clung with both hands till my nails ached, and I shut my eyes as if to cover up the peril. Gradually my mind came back again, my pulses quieted down to a more natural time, and I was once more in possession of myself. It was my first thought to pluck forth the dirk, but either it stuck too hard or my nerve failed me, and I desisted with a violent shudder. Oddly enough, that very shudder did the business. The knife, in fact, had come the nearest in the world to missing me altogether; it held me by a mere pinch of skin, and this the shudder tore away. The blood ran down the faster, to be sure, but I was my own master again and only tacked to the mast by my coat and shirt. These last I broke through with a sudden jerk, and then regained the deck by the starboard shrouds. For nothing in the world would I have again ventured, shaken as I was, upon the overhanging port shrouds from which Israel had so lately fallen. I went below and did what I could for my wound; it pained me a good deal and still bled freely, but it was neither deep nor dangerous, nor did it greatly gall me when I used my arm. Then I looked around me, and as the ship was now, in a sense, my own, I began to think of clearing it from its last passengerthe dead man, OBrien. He had pitched, as I have said, against the bulwarks, where he lay like some horrible, ungainly sort of puppet, lifesize, indeed, but how different from lifes colour or lifes comeliness! In that position I could easily have my way with him, and as the habit of tragical adventures had worn off almost all my terror for the dead, I took him by the waist as if he had been a sack of bran and with one good heave, tumbled him overboard. He went in with a sounding plunge; the red cap came off and remained floating on the surface; and as soon as the splash subsided, I could see him and Israel lying side by side, both wavering with the tremulous movement of the water. OBrien, though still quite a young man, was very bald. There he lay, with that bald head across the knees of the man who had killed him and the quick fishes steering to and fro over both. I was now alone upon the ship; the tide had just turned. The sun was within so few degrees of setting that already the shadow of the pines upon the western shore began to reach right across the anchorage and fall in patterns on the deck. The evening breeze had sprung up, and though it was well warded off by the hill with the two peaks upon the east, the cordage had begun to sing a little softly to itself and the idle sails to rattle to and fro. I began to see a danger to the ship. The jibs I speedily doused and brought tumbling to the deck, but the mainsail was a harder matter. Of course, when the schooner canted over, the boom had swung outboard, and the cap of it and a foot or two of sail hung even under water. I thought this made it still more dangerous; yet the strain was so heavy that I half feared to meddle. At last I got my knife and cut the halyards. The peak dropped instantly, a great belly of loose canvas floated broad upon the water, and since, pull as I liked, I could not budge the downhall, that was the extent of what I could accomplish. For the rest, the Hispaniola must trust to luck, like myself. By this time the whole anchorage had fallen into shadowthe last rays, I remember, falling through a glade of the wood and shining bright as jewels on the flowery mantle of the wreck. It began to be chill; the tide was rapidly fleeting seaward, the schooner settling more and more on her beamends. I scrambled forward and looked over. It seemed shallow enough, and holding the cut hawser in both hands for a last security, I let myself drop softly overboard. The water scarcely reached my waist; the sand was firm and covered with ripple marks, and I waded ashore in great spirits, leaving the Hispaniola on her side, with her mainsail trailing wide upon the surface of the bay. About the same time, the sun went fairly down and the breeze whistled low in the dusk among the tossing pines. At least, and at last, I was off the sea, nor had I returned thence emptyhanded. There lay the schooner, clear at last from buccaneers and ready for our own men to board and get to sea again. I had nothing nearer my fancy than to get home to the stockade and boast of my achievements. Possibly I might be blamed a bit for my truantry, but the recapture of the Hispaniola was a clenching answer, and I hoped that even Captain Smollett would confess I had not lost my time. So thinking, and in famous spirits, I began to set my face homeward for the block house and my companions. I remembered that the most easterly of the rivers which drain into Captain Kidds anchorage ran from the twopeaked hill upon my left, and I bent my course in that direction that I might pass the stream while it was small. The wood was pretty open, and keeping along the lower spurs, I had soon turned the corner of that hill, and not long after waded to the midcalf across the watercourse. This brought me near to where I had encountered Ben Gunn, the maroon; and I walked more circumspectly, keeping an eye on every side. The dusk had come nigh hand completely, and as I opened out the cleft between the two peaks, I became aware of a wavering glow against the sky, where, as I judged, the man of the island was cooking his supper before a roaring fire. And yet I wondered, in my heart, that he should show himself so careless. For if I could see this radiance, might it not reach the eyes of Silver himself where he camped upon the shore among the marshes? Gradually the night fell blacker; it was all I could do to guide myself even roughly towards my destination; the double hill behind me and the Spyglass on my right hand loomed faint and fainter; the stars were few and pale; and in the low ground where I wandered I kept tripping among bushes and rolling into sandy pits. Suddenly a kind of brightness fell about me. I looked up; a pale glimmer of moonbeams had alighted on the summit of the Spyglass, and soon after I saw something broad and silvery moving low down behind the trees, and knew the moon had risen. With this to help me, I passed rapidly over what remained to me of my journey, and sometimes walking, sometimes running, impatiently drew near to the stockade. Yet, as I began to thread the grove that lies before it, I was not so thoughtless but that I slacked my pace and went a trifle warily. It would have been a poor end of my adventures to get shot down by my own party in mistake. The moon was climbing higher and higher, its light began to fall here and there in masses through the more open districts of the wood, and right in front of me a glow of a different colour appeared among the trees. It was red and hot, and now and again it was a little darkenedas it were, the embers of a bonfire smouldering. For the life of me I could not think what it might be. At last I came right down upon the borders of the clearing. The western end was already steeped in moonshine; the rest, and the block house itself, still lay in a black shadow chequered with long silvery streaks of light. On the other side of the house an immense fire had burned itself into clear embers and shed a steady, red reverberation, contrasted strongly with the mellow paleness of the moon. There was not a soul stirring nor a sound beside the noises of the breeze. I stopped, with much wonder in my heart, and perhaps a little terror also. It had not been our way to build great fires; we were, indeed, by the captains orders, somewhat niggardly of firewood, and I began to fear that something had gone wrong while I was absent. I stole round by the eastern end, keeping close in shadow, and at a convenient place, where the darkness was thickest, crossed the palisade. To make assurance surer, I got upon my hands and knees and crawled, without a sound, towards the corner of the house. As I drew nearer, my heart was suddenly and greatly lightened. It is not a pleasant noise in itself, and I have often complained of it at other times, but just then it was like music to hear my friends snoring together so loud and peaceful in their sleep. The seacry of the watch, that beautiful Alls well, never fell more reassuringly on my ear. In the meantime, there was no doubt of one thing; they kept an infamous bad watch. If it had been Silver and his lads that were now creeping in on them, not a soul would have seen daybreak. That was what it was, thought I, to have the captain wounded; and again I blamed myself sharply for leaving them in that danger with so few to mount guard. By this time I had got to the door and stood up. All was dark within, so that I could distinguish nothing by the eye. As for sounds, there was the steady drone of the snorers and a small occasional noise, a flickering or pecking that I could in no way account for. With my arms before me I walked steadily in. I should lie down in my own place (I thought with a silent chuckle) and enjoy their faces when they found me in the morning. 0255m My foot struck something yieldingit was a sleepers leg; and he turned and groaned, but without awaking. And then, all of a sudden, a shrill voice broke forth out of the darkness Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! and so forth, without pause or change, like the clacking of a tiny mill. Silvers green parrot, Captain Flint! It was she whom I had heard pecking at a piece of bark; it was she, keeping better watch than any human being, who thus announced my arrival with her wearisome refrain. I had no time left me to recover. At the sharp, clipping tone of the parrot, the sleepers awoke and sprang up; and with a mighty oath, the voice of Silver cried, Who goes? I turned to run, struck violently against one person, recoiled, and ran full into the arms of a second, who for his part closed upon and held me tight. Bring a torch, Dick, said Silver when my capture was thus assured. And one of the men left the loghouse and presently returned with a lighted brand. 0259m PART SIXCaptain Silver 0261m XXVIII In the Enemys Camp 9261m he red glare of the torch, lighting up the interior of the block house, showed me the worst of my apprehensions realized. The pirates were in possession of the house and stores there was the cask of cognac, there were the pork and bread, as before, and what tenfold increased my horror, not a sign of any prisoner. I could only judge that all had perished, and my heart smote me sorely that I had not been there to perish with them. There were six of the buccaneers, all told; not another man was left alive. Five of them were on their feet, flushed and swollen, suddenly called out of the first sleep of drunkenness. The sixth had only risen upon his elbow; he was deadly pale, and the bloodstained bandage round his head told that he had recently been wounded, and still more recently dressed. I remembered the man who had been shot and had run back among the woods in the great attack, and doubted not that this was he. The parrot sat, preening her plumage, on Long Johns shoulder. He himself, I thought, looked somewhat paler and more stern than I was used to. He still wore the fine broadcloth suit in which he had fulfilled his mission, but it was bitterly the worse for wear, daubed with clay and torn with the sharp briers of the wood. So, said he, heres Jim Hawkins, shiver my timbers! Dropped in, like, eh? Well, come, I take that friendly. And thereupon he sat down across the brandy cask and began to fill a pipe. Give me a loan of the link, Dick, said he; and then, when he had a good light, Thatll do, lad, he added; stick the glim in the wood heap; and you, gentlemen, bring yourselves to! You neednt stand up for Mr. Hawkins; hell excuse you, you may lay to that. And so, Jimstopping the tobaccohere you were, and quite a pleasant surprise for poor old John. I see you were smart when first I set my eyes on you, but this here gets away from me clean, it do. To all this, as may be well supposed, I made no answer. They had set me with my back against the wall, and I stood there, looking Silver in the face, pluckily enough, I hope, to all outward appearance, but with black despair in my heart. Silver took a whiff or two of his pipe with great composure and then ran on again. Now, you see, Jim, so be as you are here, says he, Ill give you a piece of my mind. Ive always liked you, I have, for a lad of spirit, and the picter of my own self when I was young and handsome. I always wanted you to jine and take your share, and die a gentleman, and now, my cock, youve got to. Capn Smolletts a fine seaman, as Ill own up to any day, but stiff on discipline. Dooty is dooty, says he, and right he is. Just you keep clear of the capn. The doctor himself is gone dead again youungrateful scamp was what he said; and the short and the long of the whole story is about here you cant go back to your own lot, for they wont have you; and without you start a third ships company all by yourself, which might be lonely, youll have to jine with Capn Silver. So far so good. My friends, then, were still alive, and though I partly believed the truth of Silvers statement, that the cabin party were incensed at me for my desertion, I was more relieved than distressed by what I heard. I dont say nothing as to your being in our hands, continued Silver, though there you are, and you may lay to it. Im all for argyment; I never seen good come out o threatening. If you like the service, well, youll jine; and if you dont, Jim, why, youre free to answer nofree and welcome, shipmate; and if fairer can be said by mortal seaman, shiver my sides! Am I to answer, then? I asked with a very tremulous voice. Through all this sneering talk, I was made to feel the threat of death that overhung me, and my cheeks burned and my heart beat painfully in my breast. Lad, said Silver, no ones apressing of you. Take your bearings. None of us wont hurry you, mate; time goes so pleasant in your company, you see. Well, says I, growing a bit bolder, if Im to choose, I declare I have a right to know whats what, and why youre here, and where my friends are. Wots wot? repeated one of the buccaneers in a deep growl. Ah, hed be a lucky one as knowed that! Youll perhaps batten down your hatches till youre spoke to, my friend, cried Silver truculently to this speaker. And then, in his first gracious tones, he replied to me, Yesterday morning, Mr. Hawkins, said he, in the dogwatch, down came Doctor Livesey with a flag of truce. Says he, Capn Silver, youre sold out. Ships gone. Well, maybe wed been taking a glass, and a song to help it round. I wont say no. Leastways, none of us had looked out. We looked out, and by thunder, the old ship was gone! I never seen a pack o fools look fishier; and you may lay to that, if I tells you that looked the fishiest. Well, says the doctor, lets bargain. We bargained, him and I, and here we are stores, brandy, block house, the firewood you was thoughtful enough to cut, and in a manner of speaking, the whole blessed boat, from crosstrees to kelson. As for them, theyve tramped; I dont know wheres they are. He drew again quietly at his pipe. And lest you should take it into that head of yours, he went on, that you was included in the treaty, heres the last word that was said How many are you, says I, to leave? Four, says he; four, and one of us wounded. As for that boy, I dont know where he is, confound him, says he, nor I dont much care. Were about sick of him. These was his words. Is that all? I asked. Well, its all that youre to hear, my son, returned Silver. And now I am to choose? And now you are to choose, and you may lay to that, said Silver. Well, said I, I am not such a fool but I know pretty well what I have to look for. Let the worst come to the worst, its little I care. Ive seen too many die since I fell in with you. But theres a thing or two I have to tell you, I said, and by this time I was quite excited; and the first is this here you are, in a bad wayship lost, treasure lost, men lost, your whole business gone to wreck; and if you want to know who did itit was I! I was in the apple barrel the night we sighted land, and I heard you, John, and you, Dick Johnson, and Hands, who is now at the bottom of the sea, and told every word you said before the hour was out. And as for the schooner, it was I who cut her cable, and it was I that killed the men you had aboard of her, and it was I who brought her where youll never see her more, not one of you. The laughs on my side; Ive had the top of this business from the first; I no more fear you than I fear a fly. Kill me, if you please, or spare me. But one thing Ill say, and no more; if you spare me, bygones are bygones, and when you fellows are in court for piracy, Ill save you all I can. It is for you to choose. Kill another and do yourselves no good, or spare me and keep a witness to save you from the gallows. I stopped, for, I tell you, I was out of breath, and to my wonder, not a man of them moved, but all sat staring at me like as many sheep. And while they were still staring, I broke out again, And now, Mr. Silver, I said, I believe youre the best man here, and if things go to the worst, Ill take it kind of you to let the doctor know the way I took it. Ill bear it in mind, said Silver with an accent so curious that I could not, for the life of me, decide whether he were laughing at my request or had been favourably affected by my courage. Ill put one to that, cried the old mahoganyfaced seamanMorgan by namewhom I had seen in Long Johns publichouse upon the quays of Bristol. It was him that knowed Black Dog. Well, and see here, added the seacook. Ill put another again to that, by thunder! For it was this same boy that faked the chart from Billy Bones. First and last, weve split upon Jim Hawkins! Then here goes! said Morgan with an oath. And he sprang up, drawing his knife as if he had been twenty. Avast, there! cried Silver. Who are you, Tom Morgan? Maybe you thought you was capn here, perhaps. By the powers, but Ill teach you better! Cross me, and youll go where many a good mans gone before you, first and last, these thirty year backsome to the yardarm, shiver my timbers, and some by the board, and all to feed the fishes. Theres never a man looked me between the eyes and seen a good day aterwards, Tom Morgan, you may lay to that. Morgan paused, but a hoarse murmur rose from the others. Toms right, said one. I stood hazing long enough from one, added another. Ill be hanged if Ill be hazed by you, John Silver. Did any of you gentlemen want to have it out with me? roared Silver, bending far forward from his position on the keg, with his pipe still glowing in his right hand. Put a name on what youre at; you aint dumb, I reckon. Him that wants shall get it. Have I lived this many years, and a son of a rum puncheon cock his hat athwart my hawse at the latter end of it? You know the way; youre all gentlemen o fortune, by your account. Well, Im ready. Take a cutlass, him that dares, and Ill see the colour of his inside, crutch and all, before that pipes empty. 0267m Not a man stirred; not a man answered. Thats your sort, is it? he added, returning his pipe to his mouth. Well, youre a gay lot to look at, anyway. Not much worth to fight, you aint. Praps you can understand King Georges English. Im capn here by lection. Im capn here because Im the best man by a long seamile. You wont fight, as gentlemen o fortune should; then, by thunder, youll obey, and you may lay to it! I like that boy, now; I never seen a better boy than that. Hes more a man than any pair of rats of you in this here house, and what I say is this let me see him thatll lay a hand on himthats what I say, and you may lay to it. There was a long pause after this. I stood straight up against the wall, my heart still going like a sledgehammer, but with a ray of hope now shining in my bosom. Silver leant back against the wall, his arms crossed, his pipe in the corner of his mouth, as calm as though he had been in church; yet his eye kept wandering furtively, and he kept the tail of it on his unruly followers. They, on their part, drew gradually together towards the far end of the block house, and the low hiss of their whispering sounded in my ear continuously, like a stream. One after another, they would look up, and the red light of the torch would fall for a second on their nervous faces; but it was not towards me, it was towards Silver that they turned their eyes. You seem to have a lot to say, remarked Silver, spitting far into the air. Pipe up and let me hear it, or lay to. Ax your pardon, sir, returned one of the men; youre pretty free with some of the rules; maybe youll kindly keep an eye upon the rest. This crews dissatisfied; this crew dont vally bullying a marlinspike; this crew has its rights like other crews, Ill make so free as that; and by your own rules, I take it we can talk together. I ax your pardon, sir, acknowledging you for to be capting at this present; but I claim my right, and steps outside for a council.

And with an elaborate seasalute, this fellow, a long, illlooking, yelloweyed man of five and thirty, stepped coolly towards the door and disappeared out of the house. One after another the rest followed his example, each making a salute as he passed, each adding some apology. According to rules, said one. Forecastle council, said Morgan. And so with one remark or another all marched out and left Silver and me alone with the torch. The seacook instantly removed his pipe. Now, look you here, Jim Hawkins, he said in a steady whisper that was no more than audible, youre within half a plank of death, and whats a long sight worse, of torture. Theyre going to throw me off. But, you mark, I stand by you through thick and thin. I didnt mean to; no, not till you spoke up. I was about desperate to lose that much blunt, and be hanged into the bargain. But I see you was the right sort. I says to myself, you stand by Hawkins, John, and Hawkinsll stand by you. Youre his last card, and by the living thunder, John, hes yours! Back to back, says I. You save your witness, and hell save your neck! I began dimly to understand. You mean alls lost? I asked. Aye, by gum, I do! he answered. Ship gone, neck gonethats the size of it. Once I looked into that bay, Jim Hawkins, and seen no schoonerwell, Im tough, but I gave out. As for that lot and their council, mark me, theyre outright fools and cowards. Ill save your lifeif so be as I canfrom them. But, see here, Jimtit for tatyou save Long John from swinging. I was bewildered; it seemed a thing so hopeless he was askinghe, the old buccaneer, the ringleader throughout. What I can do, that Ill do, I said. Its a bargain! cried Long John. You speak up plucky, and by thunder, Ive a chance! He hobbled to the torch, where it stood propped among the firewood, and took a fresh light to his pipe. Understand me, Jim, he said, returning. Ive a head on my shoulders, I have. Im on squires side now. I know youve got that ship safe somewheres. How you done it, I dont know, but safe it is. I guess Hands and OBrien turned soft. I never much believed in neither of them. Now you mark me. I ask no questions, nor I wont let others. I know when a games up, I do; and I know a lad thats staunch. Ah, you thats youngyou and me might have done a power of good together! He drew some cognac from the cask into a tin cannikin. Will you taste, messmate? he asked; and when I had refused Well, Ill take a dram myself, Jim, said he. I need a caulker, for theres trouble on hand. And talking o trouble, why did that doctor give me the chart, Jim? My face expressed a wonder so unaffected that he saw the needlessness of further questions. Ah, well, he did, though, said he. And theres something under that, no doubtsomething, surely, under that, Jimbad or good. And he took another swallow of the brandy, shaking his great fair head like a man who looks forward to the worst. 0271m XXIX The Black Spot Again 9271m he council of buccaneers had lasted some time, when one of them reentered the house, and with a repetition of the same salute, which had in my eyes an ironical air, begged for a moments loan of the torch. Silver briefly agreed, and this emissary retired again, leaving us together in the dark. Theres a breeze coming, Jim, said Silver, who had by this time adopted quite a friendly and familiar tone. I turned to the loophole nearest me and looked out. The embers of the great fire had so far burned themselves out and now glowed so low and duskily that I understood why these conspirators desired a torch. About halfway down the slope to the stockade, they were collected in a group; one held the light, another was on his knees in their midst, and I saw the blade of an open knife shine in his hand with varying colours in the moon and torchlight. The rest were all somewhat stooping, as though watching the manoeuvres of this last. I could just make out that he had a book as well as a knife in his hand, and was still wondering how anything so incongruous had come in their possession when the kneeling figure rose once more to his feet and the whole party began to move together towards the house. 0273m Here they come, said I; and I returned to my former position, for it seemed beneath my dignity that they should find me watching them. Well, let em come, ladlet em come, said Silver cheerily. Ive still a shot in my locker. The door opened, and the five men, standing huddled together just inside, pushed one of their number forward. In any other circumstances it would have been comical to see his slow advance, hesitating as he set down each foot, but holding his closed right hand in front of him. Step up, lad, cried Silver. I wont eat you. Hand it over, lubber. I know the rules, I do; I wont hurt a depytation. Thus encouraged, the buccaneer stepped forth more briskly, and having passed something to Silver, from hand to hand, slipped yet more smartly back again to his companions. The seacook looked at what had been given him. The black spot! I thought so, he observed. Where might you have got the paper? Why, hillo! Look here, now; this aint lucky! Youve gone and cut this out of a Bible. What fools cut a Bible? Ah, there! said Morgan. There! Wot did I say? No goodll come o that, I said. Well, youve about fixed it now, among you, continued Silver. Youll all swing now, I reckon. What softheaded lubber had a Bible? It was Dick, said one. Dick, was it? Then Dick can get to prayers, said Silver. Hes seen his slice of luck, has Dick, and you may lay to that. But here the long man with the yellow eyes struck in. Belay that talk, John Silver, he said. This crew has tipped you the black spot in full council, as in dooty bound; just you turn it over, as in dooty bound, and see whats wrote there. Then you can talk. Thanky, George, replied the seacook. You always was brisk for business, and has the rules by heart, George, as Im pleased to see. Well, what is it, anyway? Ah! Deposedthats it, is it? Very pretty wrote, to be sure; like print, I swear. Your hand o write, George? Why, you was gettin quite a leadin man in this here crew. Youll be capn next, I shouldnt wonder. Just oblige me with that torch again, will you? This pipe dont draw. Come, now, said George, you dont fool this crew no more. Youre a funny man, by your account; but youre over now, and youll maybe step down off that barrel and help vote. I thought you said you knowed the rules, returned Silver contemptuously. Leastways, if you dont, I do; and I wait hereand Im still your capn, mindtill you outs with your grievances and I reply; in the meantime, your black spot aint worth a biscuit. After that, well see. Oh, replied George, you dont be under no kind of apprehension; were all square, we are. First, youve made a hash of this cruiseyoull be a bold man to say no to that. Second, you let the enemy out o this here trap for nothing. Why did they want out? I dunno, but its pretty plain they wanted it. Third, you wouldnt let us go at them upon the march. Oh, we see through you, John Silver; you want to play booty, thats whats wrong with you. And then, fourth, theres this here boy. Is that all? asked Silver quietly. Enough, too, retorted George. Well all swing and sundry for your bungling. Well now, look here, Ill answer these four pints; one after another Ill answer em. I made a hash o this cruise, did I? Well now, you all know what I wanted, and you all know if that had been done that wed a been aboard the Hispaniola this night as ever was, every man of us alive, and fit, and full of good plumduff, and the treasure in the hold of her, by thunder! Well, who crossed me? Who forced my hand, as was the lawful capn? Who tipped me the black spot the day we landed and began this dance? Ah, its a fine danceIm with you thereand looks mighty like a hornpipe in a ropes end at Execution Dock by London town, it does. But who done it? Why, it was Anderson, and Hands, and you, George Merry! And youre the last above board of that same meddling crew; and you have the Davy Joness insolence to up and stand for capn over meyou, that sank the lot of us! By the powers! But this tops the stiffest yarn to nothing. Silver paused, and I could see by the faces of George and his late comrades that these words had not been said in vain. Thats for number one, cried the accused, wiping the sweat from his brow, for he had been talking with a vehemence that shook the house. Why, I give you my word, Im sick to speak to you. Youve neither sense nor memory, and I leave it to fancy where your mothers was that let you come to sea. Sea! Gentlemen o fortune! I reckon tailors is your trade. Go on, John, said Morgan. Speak up to the others. Ah, the others! returned John. Theyre a nice lot, aint they? You say this cruise is bungled. Ah! By gum, if you could understand how bad its bungled, you would see! Were that near the gibbet that my necks stiff with thinking on it. Youve seen em, maybe, hanged in chains, birds about em, seamen pinting em out as they go down with the tide. Whos that? says one. That! Why, thats John Silver. I knowed him well, says another. And you can hear the chains ajangle as you go about and reach for the other buoy. Now, thats about where we are, every mothers son of us, thanks to him, and Hands, and Anderson, and other ruination fools of you. And if you want to know about number four, and that boy, why, shiver my timbers, isnt he a hostage? Are we agoing to waste a hostage? No, not us; he might be our last chance, and I shouldnt wonder. Kill that boy? Not me, mates! And number three? Ah, well, theres a deal to say to number three. Maybe you dont count it nothing to have a real college doctor to see you every dayyou, John, with your head brokeor you, George Merry, that had the ague shakes upon you not six hours agone, and has your eyes the colour of lemon peel to this same moment on the clock? And maybe, perhaps, you didnt know there was a consort coming either? But there is, and not so long till then; and well see wholl be glad to have a hostage when it comes to that. And as for number two, and why I made a bargainwell, you came crawling on your knees to me to make iton your knees you came, you was that downheartedand youd have starved too if I hadntbut thats a trifle! You look therethats why! And he cast down upon the floor a paper that I instantly recognizednone other than the chart on yellow paper, with the three red crosses, that I had found in the oilcloth at the bottom of the captains chest. Why the doctor had given it to him was more than I could fancy. But if it were inexplicable to me, the appearance of the chart was incredible to the surviving mutineers. They leaped upon it like cats upon a mouse. It went from hand to hand, one tearing it from another; and by the oaths and the cries and the childish laughter with which they accompanied their examination, you would have thought, not only they were fingering the very gold, but were at sea with it, besides, in safety. Yes, said one, thats Flint, sure enough. J. F., and a score below, with a clove hitch to it; so he done ever. Mighty pretty, said George. But how are we to get away with it, and us no ship. Silver suddenly sprang up, and supporting himself with a hand against the wall Now I give you warning, George, he cried. One more word of your sauce, and Ill call you down and fight you. How? Why, how do I know? You had ought to tell me thatyou and the rest, that lost me my schooner, with your interference, burn you! But not you, you cant; you haint got the invention of a cockroach. But civil you can speak, and shall, George Merry, you may lay to that. Thats fair enow, said the old man Morgan. Fair! I reckon so, said the seacook. You lost the ship; I found the treasure. Whos the better man at that? And now I resign, by thunder! Elect whom you please to be your capn now; Im done with it. Silver! they cried. Barbecue forever! Barbecue for capn! So thats the toon, is it? cried the cook. George, I reckon youll have to wait another turn, friend; and lucky for you as Im not a revengeful man. But that was never my way. And now, shipmates, this black spot? Taint much good now, is it? Dicks crossed his luck and spoiled his Bible, and thats about all. Itll do to kiss the book on still, wont it? growled Dick, who was evidently uneasy at the curse he had brought upon himself. A Bible with a bit cut out! returned Silver derisively. Not it. It dont bind no moren a balladbook. Dont it, though? cried Dick with a sort of joy. Well, I reckon thats worth having too. Here, Jimheres a curosity for you, said Silver, and he tossed me the paper. It was around about the size of a crown piece. One side was blank, for it had been the last leaf; the other contained a verse or two of Revelationthese words among the rest, which struck sharply home upon my mind Without are dogs and murderers. The printed side had been blackened with wood ash, which already began to come off and soil my fingers; on the blank side had been written with the same material the one word Depposed. I have that curiosity beside me at this moment, but not a trace of writing now remains beyond a single scratch, such as a man might make with his thumbnail. That was the end of the nights business. Soon after, with a drink all round, we lay down to sleep, and the outside of Silvers vengeance was to put George Merry up for sentinel and threaten him with death if he should prove unfaithful. It was long ere I could close an eye, and heaven knows I had matter enough for thought in the man whom I had slain that afternoon, in my own most perilous position, and above all, in the remarkable game that I saw Silver now engaged uponkeeping the mutineers together with one hand and grasping with the other after every means, possible and impossible, to make his peace and save his miserable life. He himself slept peacefully and snored aloud, yet my heart was sore for him, wicked as he was, to think on the dark perils that environed and the shameful gibbet that awaited him. 0280m XXX On Parole 9280m was wakenedindeed, we were all wakened, for I could see even the sentinel shake himself together from where he had fallen against the doorpostby a clear, hearty voice hailing us from the margin of the wood Block house, ahoy! it cried. Heres the doctor. And the doctor it was. Although I was glad to hear the sound, yet my gladness was not without admixture. I remembered with confusion my insubordinate and stealthy conduct, and when I saw where it had brought meamong what companions and surrounded by what dangersI felt ashamed to look him in the face. He must have risen in the dark, for the day had hardly come; and when I ran to a loophole and looked out, I saw him standing, like Silver once before, up to the midleg in creeping vapour. You, doctor! Top o the morning to you, sir! cried Silver, broad awake and beaming with good nature in a moment. Bright and early, to be sure; and its the early bird, as the saying goes, that gets the rations. George, shake up your timbers, son, and help Dr. Livesey over the ships side. All adoin well, your patients wasall well and merry. So he pattered on, standing on the hilltop with his crutch under his elbow and one hand upon the side of the loghousequite the old John in voice, manner, and expression. Weve quite a surprise for you too, sir, he continued. Weve a little stranger herehe! he! A noo boarder and lodger, sir, and looking fit and taut as a fiddle; slep like a supercargo, he did, right alongside of Johnstem to stem we was, all night. Dr. Livesey was by this time across the stockade and pretty near the cook, and I could hear the alteration in his voice as he said, Not Jim? The very same Jim as ever was, says Silver. The doctor stopped outright, although he did not speak, and it was some seconds before he seemed able to move on. Well, well, he said at last, duty first and pleasure afterwards, as you might have said yourself, Silver. Let us overhaul these patients of yours. A moment afterwards he had entered the block house and with one grim nod to me proceeded with his work among the sick. He seemed under no apprehension, though he must have known that his life, among these treacherous demons, depended on a hair; and he rattled on to his patients as if he were paying an ordinary professional visit in a quiet English family. His manner, I suppose, reacted on the men, for they behaved to him as if nothing had occurred, as if he were still ships doctor and they still faithful hands before the mast. Youre doing well, my friend, he said to the fellow with the bandaged head, and if ever any person had a close shave, it was you; your head must be as hard as iron. Well, George, how goes it? Youre a pretty colour, certainly; why, your liver, man, is upside down. Did you take that medicine? Did he take that medicine, men? Aye, aye, sir, he took it, sure enough, returned Morgan. Because, you see, since I am mutineers doctor, or prison doctor as I prefer to call it, says Doctor Livesey in his pleasantest way, I make it a point of honour not to lose a man for King George (God bless him!) and the gallows. The rogues looked at each other but swallowed the homethrust in silence. Dick dont feel well, sir, said one. Dont he? replied the doctor. Well, step up here, Dick, and let me see your tongue. No, I should be surprised if he did! The mans tongue is fit to frighten the French. Another fever. Ah, there, said Morgan, that comed of spiling Bibles. That comesas you call itof being arrant asses, retorted the doctor, and not having sense enough to know honest air from poison, and the dry land from a vile, pestiferous slough. I think it most probablethough of course its only an opinionthat youll all have the deuce to pay before you get that malaria out of your systems. Camp in a bog, would you? Silver, Im surprised at you. Youre less of a fool than many, take you all round; but you dont appear to me to have the rudiments of a notion of the rules of health. Well, he added after he had dosed them round and they had taken his prescriptions, with really laughable humility, more like charity schoolchildren than bloodguilty mutineers and pirateswell, thats done for today. And now I should wish to have a talk with that boy, please. And he nodded his head in my direction carelessly. George Merry was at the door, spitting and spluttering over some badtasted medicine; but at the first word of the doctors proposal he swung round with a deep flush and cried No! and swore. Silver struck the barrel with his open hand. Silence! he roared and looked about him positively like a lion. Doctor, he went on in his usual tones, I was athinking of that, knowing as how you had a fancy for the boy. Were all humbly grateful for your kindness, and as you see, puts faith in you and takes the drugs down like that much grog. And I take it Ive found a way asll suit all. Hawkins, will you give me your word of honour as a young gentlemanfor a young gentleman you are, although poor bornyour word of honour not to slip your cable? I readily gave the pledge required. Then, doctor, said Silver, you just step outside o that stockade, and once youre there Ill bring the boy down on the inside, and I reckon you can yarn through the spars. Good day to you, sir, and all our dooties to the squire and Capn Smollett. The explosion of disapproval, which nothing but Silvers black looks had restrained, broke out immediately the doctor had left the house. Silver was roundly accused of playing doubleof trying to make a separate peace for himself, of sacrificing the interests of his accomplices and victims, and, in one word, of the identical, exact thing that he was doing. It seemed to me so obvious, in this case, that I could not imagine how he was to turn their anger. But he was twice the man the rest were, and his last nights victory had given him a huge preponderance on their minds. He called them all the fools and dolts you can imagine, said it was necessary I should talk to the doctor, fluttered the chart in their faces, asked them if they could afford to break the treaty the very day they were bound atreasurehunting. No, by thunder! he cried. Its us must break the treaty when the time comes; and till then Ill gammon that doctor, if I have to ile his boots with brandy. And then he bade them get the fire lit, and stalked out upon his crutch, with his hand on my shoulder, leaving them in a disarray, and silenced by his volubility rather than convinced. Slow, lad, slow, he said. They might round upon us in a twinkle of an eye if we was seen to hurry. Very deliberately, then, did we advance across the sand to where the doctor awaited us on the other side of the stockade, and as soon as we were within easy speaking distance Silver stopped. Youll make a note of this here also, doctor, says he, and the boyll tell you how I saved his life, and were deposed for it too, and you may lay to that. Doctor, when a mans steering as near the wind as meplaying chuckfarthing with the last breath in his body, likeyou wouldnt think it too much, mayhap, to give him one good word? Youll please bear in mind its not my life only nowits that boys into the bargain; and youll speak me fair, doctor, and give me a bit o hope to go on, for the sake of mercy. Silver was a changed man once he was out there and had his back to his friends and the block house; his cheeks seemed to have fallen in, his voice trembled; never was a soul more dead in earnest. Why, John, youre not afraid? asked Dr. Livesey. Doctor, Im no coward; no, not Inot so much! and he snapped his fingers. If I was I wouldnt say it. But Ill own up fairly, Ive the shakes upon me for the gallows. Youre a good man and a true; I never seen a better man! And youll not forget what I done good, not any more than youll forget the bad, I know. And I step asidesee hereand leave you and Jim alone. And youll put that down for me too, for its a long stretch, is that! So saying, he stepped back a little way, till he was out of earshot, and there sat down upon a treestump and began to whistle, spinning round now and again upon his seat so as to command a sight, sometimes of me and the doctor and sometimes of his unruly ruffians as they went to and fro in the sand between the firewhich they were busy rekindlingand the house, from which they brought forth pork and bread to make the breakfast. So, Jim, said the doctor sadly, here you are. As you have brewed, so shall you drink, my boy. Heaven knows, I cannot find it in my heart to blame you, but this much I will say, be it kind or unkind when Captain Smollett was well, you dared not have gone off; and when he was ill and couldnt help it, by George, it was downright cowardly! I will own that I here began to weep. Doctor, I said, you might spare me. I have blamed myself enough; my lifes forfeit anyway, and I should have been dead by now if Silver hadnt stood for me; and doctor, believe this, I can dieand I dare say I deserve itbut what I fear is torture. If they come to torture me Jim, the doctor interrupted, and his voice was quite changed, Jim, I cant have this. Whip over, and well run for it. Doctor, said I, I passed my word. I know, I know, he cried. We cant help that, Jim, now. Ill take it on my shoulders, holus bolus, blame and shame, my boy; but stay here, I cannot let you. Jump! One jump, and youre out, and well run for it like antelopes. 0285m No, I replied; you know right well you wouldnt do the thing yourselfneither you nor squire nor captain; and no more will I. Silver trusted me; I passed my word, and back I go. But, doctor, you did not let me finish. If they come to torture me, I might let slip a word of where the ship is, for I got the ship, part by luck and part by risking, and she lies in North Inlet, on the southern beach, and just below high water. At half tide she must be high and dry. The ship! exclaimed the doctor. Rapidly I described to him my adventures, and he heard me out in silence. There is a kind of fate in this, he observed when I had done. Every step, its you that saves our lives; and do you suppose by any chance that we are going to let you lose yours? That would be a poor return, my boy. You found out the plot; you found Ben Gunnthe best deed that ever you did, or will do, though you live to ninety. Oh, by Jupiter, and talking of Ben Gunn! Why, this is the mischief in person. Silver! he cried. Silver! Ill give you a piece of advice, he continued as the cook drew near again; dont you be in any great hurry after that treasure. Why, sir, I do my possible, which that aint, said Silver. I can only, asking your pardon, save my life and the boys by seeking for that treasure; and you may lay to that. Well, Silver, replied the doctor, if that is so, Ill go one step further look out for squalls when you find it. Sir, said Silver, as between man and man, thats too much and too little. What youre after, why you left the block house, why you given me that there chart, I dont know, now, do I? And yet I done your bidding with my eyes shut and never a word of hope! But no, this heres too much. If you wont tell me what you mean plain out, just say so and Ill leave the helm. No, said the doctor musingly; Ive no right to say more; its not my secret, you see, Silver, or, I give you my word, Id tell it you. But Ill go as far with you as I dare go, and a step beyond, for Ill have my wig sorted by the captain or Im mistaken! And first, Ill give you a bit of hope; Silver, if we both get alive out of this wolftrap, Ill do my best to save you, short of perjury. Silvers face was radiant. You couldnt say more, Im sure, sir, not if you was my mother, he cried. Well, thats my first concession, added the doctor. My second is a piece of advice keep the boy close beside you, and when you need help, halloo. Im off to seek it for you, and that itself will show you if I speak at random. Goodbye, Jim. And Dr. Livesey shook hands with me through the stockade, nodded to Silver, and set off at a brisk pace into the wood. 0289m XXXI The TreasurehuntFlints Pointer 9289m im, said Silver when we were alone, if I saved your life, you saved mine; and Ill not forget it. I seen the doctor waving you to run for itwith the tail of my eye, I did; and I seen you say no, as plain as hearing. Jim, thats one to you. This is the first glint of hope I had since the attack failed, and I owe it you. And now, Jim, were to go in for this here treasurehunting, with sealed orders too, and I dont like it; and you and me must stick close, back to back like, and well save our necks in spite o fate and fortune. Just then a man hailed us from the fire that breakfast was ready, and we were soon seated here and there about the sand over biscuit and fried junk. They had lit a fire fit to roast an ox, and it was now grown so hot that they could only approach it from the windward, and even there not without precaution. In the same wasteful spirit, they had cooked, I suppose, three times more than we could eat; and one of them, with an empty laugh, threw what was left into the fire, which blazed and roared again over this unusual fuel. I never in my life saw men so careless of the morrow; hand to mouth is the only word that can describe their way of doing; and what with wasted food and sleeping sentries, though they were bold enough for a brush and be done with it, I could see their entire unfitness for anything like a prolonged campaign. Even Silver, eating away, with Captain Flint upon his shoulder, had not a word of blame for their recklessness. And this the more surprised me, for I thought he had never shown himself so cunning as he did then. Aye, mates, said he, its lucky you have Barbecue to think for you with this here head. I got what I wanted, I did. Sure enough, they have the ship. Where they have it, I dont know yet; but once we hit the treasure, well have to jump about and find out. And then, mates, us that has the boats, I reckon, has the upper hand. Thus he kept running on, with his mouth full of the hot bacon; thus he restored their hope and confidence, and, I more than suspect, repaired his own at the same time. As for hostage, he continued, thats his last talk, I guess, with them he loves so dear. Ive got my piece o news, and thanky to him for that; but its over and done. Ill take him in a line when we go treasurehunting, for well keep him like so much gold, in case of accidents, you mark, and in the meantime. Once we got the ship and treasure both and off to sea like jolly companions, why then well talk Mr. Hawkins over, we will, and well give him his share, to be sure, for all his kindness. It was no wonder the men were in a good humour now. For my part, I was horribly cast down. Should the scheme he had now sketched prove feasible, Silver, already doubly a traitor, would not hesitate to adopt it. He had still a foot in either camp, and there was no doubt he would prefer wealth and freedom with the pirates to a bare escape from hanging, which was the best he had to hope on our side. Nay, and even if things so fell out that he was forced to keep his faith with Dr. Livesey, even then what danger lay before us! What a moment that would be when the suspicions of his followers turned to certainty and he and I should have to fight for dear lifehe a cripple and I a boyagainst five strong and active seamen! Add to this double apprehension the mystery that still hung over the behaviour of my friends, their unexplained desertion of the stockade, their inexplicable cession of the chart, or harder still to understand, the doctors last warning to Silver, Look out for squalls when you find it, and you will readily believe how little taste I found in my breakfast and with how uneasy a heart I set forth behind my captors on the quest for treasure. We made a curious figure, had anyone been there to see usall in soiled sailor clothes and all but me armed to the teeth. Silver had two guns slung about himone before and one behindbesides the great cutlass at his waist and a pistol in each pocket of his squaretailed coat. To complete his strange appearance, Captain Flint sat perched upon his shoulder and gabbling odds and ends of purposeless seatalk. I had a line about my waist and followed obediently after the seacook, who held the loose end of the rope, now in his free hand, now between his powerful teeth. For all the world, I was led like a dancing bear. 0291m The other men were variously burthened, some carrying picks and shovelsfor that had been the very first necessary they brought ashore from the Hispaniolaothers laden with pork, bread, and brandy for the midday meal. All the stores, I observed, came from our stock, and I could see the truth of Silvers words the night before. Had he not struck a bargain with the doctor, he and his mutineers, deserted by the ship, must have been driven to subsist on clear water and the proceeds of their hunting. Water would have been little to their taste; a sailor is not usually a good shot; and besides all that, when they were so short of eatables, it was not likely they would be very flush of powder. Well, thus equipped, we all set outeven the fellow with the broken head, who should certainly have kept in shadowand straggled, one after another, to the beach, where the two gigs awaited us. Even these bore trace of the drunken folly of the pirates, one in a broken thwart, and both in their muddy and unbailed condition. Both were to be carried along with us for the sake of safety; and so, with our numbers divided between them, we set forth upon the bosom of the anchorage. As we pulled over, there was some discussion on the chart. The red cross was, of course, far too large to be a guide; and the terms of the note on the back, as you will hear, admitted of some ambiguity. They ran, the reader may remember, thus Tall tree, Spyglass shoulder, bearing a point to the N. of N.N.E. Skeleton Island E.S.E. and by E. Ten feet. A tall tree was thus the principal mark.

Now, right before us the anchorage was bounded by a plateau from two to three hundred feet high, adjoining on the north the sloping southern shoulder of the Spyglass and rising again towards the south into the rough, cliffy eminence called the Mizzenmast Hill. The top of the plateau was dotted thickly with pinetrees of varying height. Every here and there, one of a different species rose forty or fifty feet clear above its neighbours, and which of these was the particular tall tree of Captain Flint could only be decided on the spot, and by the readings of the compass. Yet, although that was the case, every man on board the boats had picked a favourite of his own ere we were halfway over, Long John alone shrugging his shoulders and bidding them wait till they were there. We pulled easily, by Silvers directions, not to weary the hands prematurely, and after quite a long passage, landed at the mouth of the second riverthat which runs down a woody cleft of the Spyglass. Thence, bending to our left, we began to ascend the slope towards the plateau. At the first outset, heavy, miry ground and a matted, marish vegetation greatly delayed our progress; but by little and little the hill began to steepen and become stony under foot, and the wood to change its character and to grow in a more open order. It was, indeed, a most pleasant portion of the island that we were now approaching. A heavyscented broom and many flowering shrubs had almost taken the place of grass. Thickets of green nutmegtrees were dotted here and there with the red columns and the broad shadow of the pines; and the first mingled their spice with the aroma of the others. The air, besides, was fresh and stirring, and this, under the sheer sunbeams, was a wonderful refreshment to our senses. The party spread itself abroad, in a fan shape, shouting and leaping to and fro. About the centre, and a good way behind the rest, Silver and I followedI tethered by my rope, he ploughing, with deep pants, among the sliding gravel. From time to time, indeed, I had to lend him a hand, or he must have missed his footing and fallen backward down the hill. We had thus proceeded for about half a mile and were approaching the brow of the plateau when the man upon the farthest left began to cry aloud, as if in terror. Shout after shout came from him, and the others began to run in his direction. He cant a found the treasure, said old Morgan, hurrying past us from the right, for thats clean atop. Indeed, as we found when we also reached the spot, it was something very different. At the foot of a pretty big pine and involved in a green creeper, which had even partly lifted some of the smaller bones, a human skeleton lay, with a few shreds of clothing, on the ground. I believe a chill struck for a moment to every heart. He was a seaman, said George Merry, who, bolder than the rest, had gone up close and was examining the rags of clothing. Leastways, this is good seacloth. Aye, aye, said Silver; like enough; you wouldnt look to find a bishop here, I reckon. But what sort of a way is that for bones to lie? Taint in natur. Indeed, on a second glance, it seemed impossible to fancy that the body was in a natural position. But for some disarray (the work, perhaps, of the birds that had fed upon him or of the slowgrowing creeper that had gradually enveloped his remains) the man lay perfectly straighthis feet pointing in one direction, his hands, raised above his head like a divers, pointing directly in the opposite. Ive taken a notion into my old numbskull, observed Silver. Heres the compass; theres the tiptop pint o Skeleton Island, stickin out like a tooth. Just take a bearing, will you, along the line of them bones. It was done. The body pointed straight in the direction of the island, and the compass read duly E.S.E. and by E. I thought so, cried the cook; this here is a pinter. Right up there is our line for the Pole Star and the jolly dollars. But, by thunder! If it dont make me cold inside to think of Flint. This is one of his jokes, and no mistake. Him and these six was alone here; he killed em, every man; and this one he hauled here and laid down by compass, shiver my timbers! Theyre long bones, and the hairs been yellow. Aye, that would be Allardyce. You mind Allardyce, Tom Morgan? Aye, aye, returned Morgan; I mind him; he owed me money, he did, and took my knife ashore with him. Speaking of knives, said another, why dont we find hisn lying round? Flint warnt the man to pick a seamans pocket; and the birds, I guess, would leave it be. By the powers, and thats true! cried Silver. There aint a thing left here, said Merry, still feeling round among the bones; not a copper doit nor a baccy box. It dont look natral to me. No, by gum, it dont, agreed Silver; not natral, nor not nice, says you. Great guns! Messmates, but if Flint was living, this would be a hot spot for you and me. Six they were, and six are we; and bones is what they are now. I saw him dead with these here deadlights, said Morgan. Billy took me in. There he laid, with pennypieces on his eyes. Deadaye, sure enough hes dead and gone below, said the fellow with the bandage; but if ever sperrit walked, it would be Flints. Dear heart, but he died bad, did Flint! Aye, that he did, observed another; now he raged, and now he hollered for the rum, and now he sang. Fifteen Men were his only song, mates; and I tell you true, I never rightly liked to hear it since. It was main hot, and the windy was open, and I hear that old song comin out as clear as clearand the deathhaul on the man already. Come, come, said Silver; stow this talk. Hes dead, and he dont walk, that I know; leastways, he wont walk by day, and you may lay to that. Care killed a cat. Fetch ahead for the doubloons. We started, certainly; but in spite of the hot sun and the staring daylight, the pirates no longer ran separate and shouting through the wood, but kept side by side and spoke with bated breath. The terror of the dead buccaneer had fallen on their spirits. 0298m XXXII The TreasurehuntThe Voice Among the Trees 9298m artly from the damping influence of this alarm, partly to rest Silver and the sick folk, the whole party sat down as soon as they had gained the brow of the ascent. The plateau being somewhat tilted towards the west, this spot on which we had paused commanded a wide prospect on either hand. Before us, over the treetops, we beheld the Cape of the Woods fringed with surf; behind, we not only looked down upon the anchorage and Skeleton Island, but sawclear across the spit and the eastern lowlandsa great field of open sea upon the east. Sheer above us rose the Spyglass, here dotted with single pines, there black with precipices. There was no sound but that of the distant breakers, mounting from all round, and the chirp of countless insects in the brush. Not a man, not a sail, upon the sea; the very largeness of the view increased the sense of solitude. Silver, as he sat, took certain bearings with his compass. There are three tall trees, said he, about in the right line from Skeleton Island. Spyglass shoulder, I take it, means that lower pint there. Its childs play to find the stuff now. Ive half a mind to dine first. I dont feel sharp, growled Morgan. Thinkin o FlintI think it wereas done me. Ah, well, my son, you praise your stars hes dead, said Silver. He were an ugly devil, cried a third pirate with a shudder; that blue in the face too! That was how the rum took him, added Merry. Blue! Well, I reckon he was blue. Thats a true word. Ever since they had found the skeleton and got upon this train of thought, they had spoken lower and lower, and they had almost got to whispering by now, so that the sound of their talk hardly interrupted the silence of the wood. All of a sudden, out of the middle of the trees in front of us, a thin, high, trembling voice struck up the wellknown air and words Fifteen men on the dead mans chest Yohoho, and a bottle of rum! I never have seen men more dreadfully affected than the pirates. The colour went from their six faces like enchantment; some leaped to their feet, some clawed hold of others; Morgan grovelled on the ground. Its Flint, by ! cried Merry. The song had stopped as suddenly as it beganbroken off, you would have said, in the middle of a note, as though someone had laid his hand upon the singers mouth. Coming through the clear, sunny atmosphere among the green treetops, I thought it had sounded airily and sweetly; and the effect on my companions was the stranger. Come, said Silver, struggling with his ashen lips to get the word out; this wont do. Stand by to go about. This is a rum start, and I cant name the voice, but its someone skylarkingsomeone thats flesh and blood, and you may lay to that. His courage had come back as he spoke, and some of the colour to his face along with it. Already the others had begun to lend an ear to this encouragement and were coming a little to themselves, when the same voice broke out againnot this time singing, but in a faint distant hail that echoed yet fainter among the clefts of the Spyglass. Darby MGraw, it wailedfor that is the word that best describes the soundDarby MGraw! Darby MGraw! again and again and again; and then rising a little higher, and with an oath that I leave out Fetch aft the rum, Darby! 0301m The buccaneers remained rooted to the ground, their eyes starting from their heads. Long after the voice had died away they still stared in silence, dreadfully, before them. That fixes it! gasped one. Lets go. They was his last words, moaned Morgan, his last words above board. Dick had his Bible out and was praying volubly. He had been well brought up, had Dick, before he came to sea and fell among bad companions. Still Silver was unconquered. I could hear his teeth rattle in his head, but he had not yet surrendered. Nobody in this here island ever heard of Darby, he muttered; not one but us thats here. And then, making a great effort Shipmates, he cried, Im here to get that stuff, and Ill not be beat by man or devil. I never was feared of Flint in his life, and, by the powers, Ill face him dead. Theres seven hundred thousand pound not a quarter of a mile from here. When did ever a gentleman o fortune show his stern to that much dollars for a boozy old seaman with a blue mugand him dead too? But there was no sign of reawakening courage in his followers, rather, indeed, of growing terror at the irreverence of his words. Belay there, John! said Merry. Dont you cross a sperrit. And the rest were all too terrified to reply. They would have run away severally had they dared; but fear kept them together, and kept them close by John, as if his daring helped them. He, on his part, had pretty well fought his weakness down. Sperrit? Well, maybe, he said. But theres one thing not clear to me. There was an echo. Now, no man ever seen a sperrit with a shadow; well then, whats he doing with an echo to him, I should like to know? That aint in natur, surely? This argument seemed weak enough to me. But you can never tell what will affect the superstitious, and to my wonder, George Merry was greatly relieved. Well, thats so, he said. Youve a head upon your shoulders, John, and no mistake. Bout ship, mates! This here crew is on a wrong tack, I do believe. And come to think on it, it was like Flints voice, I grant you, but not just so clearaway like it, after all. It was liker somebody elses voice nowit was liker By the powers, Ben Gunn! roared Silver. Aye, and so it were, cried Morgan, springing on his knees. Ben Gunn it were! It dont make much odds, do it, now? asked Dick. Ben Gunns not here in the body any moren Flint. But the older hands greeted this remark with scorn. Why, nobody minds Ben Gunn, cried Merry; dead or alive, nobody minds him. It was extraordinary how their spirits had returned and how the natural colour had revived in their faces. Soon they were chatting together, with intervals of listening; and not long after, hearing no further sound, they shouldered the tools and set forth again, Merry walking first with Silvers compass to keep them on the right line with Skeleton Island. He had said the truth dead or alive, nobody minded Ben Gunn. Dick alone still held his Bible, and looked around him as he went, with fearful glances; but he found no sympathy, and Silver even joked him on his precautions. I told you, said heI told you you had spiled your Bible. If it aint no good to swear by, what do you suppose a sperrit would give for it? Not that! and he snapped his big fingers, halting a moment on his crutch. But Dick was not to be comforted; indeed, it was soon plain to me that the lad was falling sick; hastened by heat, exhaustion, and the shock of his alarm, the fever, predicted by Dr. Livesey, was evidently growing swiftly higher. It was fine open walking here, upon the summit; our way lay a little downhill, for, as I have said, the plateau tilted towards the west. The pines, great and small, grew wide apart; and even between the clumps of nutmeg and azalea, wide open spaces baked in the hot sunshine. Striking, as we did, pretty near northwest across the island, we drew, on the one hand, ever nearer under the shoulders of the Spyglass, and on the other, looked ever wider over that western bay where I had once tossed and trembled in the coracle. The first of the tall trees was reached, and by the bearings proved the wrong one. So with the second. The third rose nearly two hundred feet into the air above a clump of underwooda giant of a vegetable, with a red column as big as a cottage, and a wide shadow around in which a company could have manoeuvred. It was conspicuous far to sea both on the east and west and might have been entered as a sailing mark upon the chart. But it was not its size that now impressed my companions; it was the knowledge that seven hundred thousand pounds in gold lay somewhere buried below its spreading shadow. The thought of the money, as they drew nearer, swallowed up their previous terrors. Their eyes burned in their heads; their feet grew speedier and lighter; their whole soul was bound up in that fortune, that whole lifetime of extravagance and pleasure, that lay waiting there for each of them. Silver hobbled, grunting, on his crutch; his nostrils stood out and quivered; he cursed like a madman when the flies settled on his hot and shiny countenance; he plucked furiously at the line that held me to him and from time to time turned his eyes upon me with a deadly look. Certainly he took no pains to hide his thoughts, and certainly I read them like print. In the immediate nearness of the gold, all else had been forgotten his promise and the doctors warning were both things of the past, and I could not doubt that he hoped to seize upon the treasure, find and board the Hispaniola under cover of night, cut every honest throat about that island, and sail away as he had at first intended, laden with crimes and riches. Shaken as I was with these alarms, it was hard for me to keep up with the rapid pace of the treasurehunters. Now and again I stumbled, and it was then that Silver plucked so roughly at the rope and launched at me his murderous glances. Dick, who had dropped behind us and now brought up the rear, was babbling to himself both prayers and curses as his fever kept rising. This also added to my wretchedness, and to crown all, I was haunted by the thought of the tragedy that had once been acted on that plateau, when that ungodly buccaneer with the blue facehe who died at Savannah, singing and shouting for drinkhad there, with his own hand, cut down his six accomplices. This grove that was now so peaceful must then have rung with cries, I thought; and even with the thought I could believe I heard it ringing still. We were now at the margin of the thicket. Huzza, mates, all together! shouted Merry; and the foremost broke into a run. And suddenly, not ten yards further, we beheld them stop. A low cry arose. Silver doubled his pace, digging away with the foot of his crutch like one possessed; and next moment he and I had come also to a dead halt. Before us was a great excavation, not very recent, for the sides had fallen in and grass had sprouted on the bottom. In this were the shaft of a pick broken in two and the boards of several packingcases strewn around. On one of these boards I saw, branded with a hot iron, the name Walrusthe name of Flints ship. All was clear to probation. The cache had been found and rifled; the seven hundred thousand pounds were gone! 0306m XXXIII The Fall of a Chieftain 9306m here never was such an overturn in this world. Each of these six men was as though he had been struck. But with Silver the blow passed almost instantly. Every thought of his soul had been set fullstretch, like a racer, on that money; well, he was brought up, in a single second, dead; and he kept his head, found his temper, and changed his plan before the others had had time to realize the disappointment. Jim, he whispered, take that, and stand by for trouble. And he passed me a doublebarrelled pistol. At the same time, he began quietly moving northward, and in a few steps had put the hollow between us two and the other five. Then he looked at me and nodded, as much as to say, Here is a narrow corner, as, indeed, I thought it was. His looks were not quite friendly, and I was so revolted at these constant changes that I could not forbear whispering, So youve changed sides again. There was no time left for him to answer in. The buccaneers, with oaths and cries, began to leap, one after another, into the pit and to dig with their fingers, throwing the boards aside as they did so. Morgan found a piece of gold. He held it up with a perfect spout of oaths. It was a twoguinea piece, and it went from hand to hand among them for a quarter of a minute. Two guineas! roared Merry, shaking it at Silver. Thats your seven hundred thousand pounds, is it? Youre the man for bargains, aint you? Youre him that never bungled nothing, you woodenheaded lubber! Dig away, boys, said Silver with the coolest insolence; youll find some pignuts and I shouldnt wonder. Pignuts! repeated Merry, in a scream. Mates, do you hear that? I tell you now, that man there knew it all along. Look in the face of him and youll see it wrote there. Ah, Merry, remarked Silver, standing for capn again? Youre a pushing lad, to be sure. But this time everyone was entirely in Merrys favour. They began to scramble out of the excavation, darting furious glances behind them. One thing I observed, which looked well for us they all got out upon the opposite side from Silver. Well, there we stood, two on one side, five on the other, the pit between us, and nobody screwed up high enough to offer the first blow. Silver never moved; he watched them, very upright on his crutch, and looked as cool as ever I saw him. He was brave, and no mistake. At last Merry seemed to think a speech might help matters. Mates, says he, theres two of them alone there; ones the old cripple that brought us all here and blundered us down to this; the others that cub that I mean to have the heart of. Now, mates He was raising his arm and his voice, and plainly meant to lead a charge. But just thencrack! crack! crack!three musketshots flashed out of the thicket. Merry tumbled head foremost into the excavation; the man with the bandage spun round like a teetotum and fell all his length upon his side, where he lay dead, but still twitching; and the other three turned and ran for it with all their might. 0309m Before you could wink, Long John had fired two barrels of a pistol into the struggling Merry, and as the man rolled up his eyes at him in the last agony, George, said he, I reckon I settled you. At the same moment, the doctor, Gray, and Ben Gunn joined us, with smoking muskets, from among the nutmegtrees. Forward! cried the doctor. Double quick, my lads. We must head em off the boats. And we set off at a great pace, sometimes plunging through the bushes to the chest. I tell you, but Silver was anxious to keep up with us. The work that man went through, leaping on his crutch till the muscles of his chest were fit to burst, was work no sound man ever equalled; and so thinks the doctor. As it was, he was already thirty yards behind us and on the verge of strangling when we reached the brow of the slope. Doctor, he hailed, see there! No hurry! Sure enough there was no hurry. In a more open part of the plateau, we could see the three survivors still running in the same direction as they had started, right for Mizzenmast Hill. We were already between them and the boats; and so we four sat down to breathe, while Long John, mopping his face, came slowly up with us. Thank ye kindly, doctor, says he. You came in in about the nick, I guess, for me and Hawkins. And so its you, Ben Gunn! he added. Well, youre a nice one, to be sure. Im Ben Gunn, I am, replied the maroon, wriggling like an eel in his embarrassment. And, he added, after a long pause, how do, Mr. Silver? Pretty well, I thank ye, says you. Ben, Ben, murmured Silver, to think as youve done me! The doctor sent back Gray for one of the pickaxes deserted, in their flight, by the mutineers, and then as we proceeded leisurely downhill to where the boats were lying, related in a few words what had taken place. It was a story that profoundly interested Silver; and Ben Gunn, the halfidiot maroon, was the hero from beginning to end. Ben, in his long, lonely wanderings about the island, had found the skeletonit was he that had rifled it; he had found the treasure; he had dug it up (it was the haft of his pickaxe that lay broken in the excavation); he had carried it on his back, in many weary journeys, from the foot of the tall pine to a cave he had on the twopointed hill at the northeast angle of the island, and there it had lain stored in safety since two months before the arrival of the Hispaniola. When the doctor had wormed this secret from him on the afternoon of the attack, and when next morning he saw the anchorage deserted, he had gone to Silver, given him the chart, which was now uselessgiven him the stores, for Ben Gunns cave was well supplied with goats meat salted by himselfgiven anything and everything to get a chance of moving in safety from the stockade to the twopointed hill, there to be clear of malaria and keep a guard upon the money. As for you, Jim, he said, it went against my heart, but I did what I thought best for those who had stood by their duty; and if you were not one of these, whose fault was it? That morning, finding that I was to be involved in the horrid disappointment he had prepared for the mutineers, he had run all the way to the cave, and leaving the squire to guard the captain, had taken Gray and the maroon and started, making the diagonal across the island to be at hand beside the pine. Soon, however, he saw that our party had the start of him; and Ben Gunn, being fleet of foot, had been dispatched in front to do his best alone. Then it had occurred to him to work upon the superstitions of his former shipmates, and he was so far successful that Gray and the doctor had come up and were already ambushed before the arrival of the treasurehunters. Ah, said Silver, it were fortunate for me that I had Hawkins here. You would have let old John be cut to bits, and never given it a thought, doctor. Not a thought, replied Dr. Livesey cheerily. And by this time we had reached the gigs. The doctor, with the pickaxe, demolished one of them, and then we all got aboard the other and set out to go round by sea for North Inlet. This was a run of eight or nine miles. Silver, though he was almost killed already with fatigue, was set to an oar, like the rest of us, and we were soon skimming swiftly over a smooth sea. Soon we passed out of the straits and doubled the southeast corner of the island, round which, four days ago, we had towed the Hispaniola. As we passed the twopointed hill, we could see the black mouth of Ben Gunns cave and a figure standing by it, leaning on a musket. It was the squire, and we waved a handkerchief and gave him three cheers, in which the voice of Silver joined as heartily as any. Three miles farther, just inside the mouth of North Inlet, what should we meet but the Hispaniola, cruising by herself? The last flood had lifted her, and had there been much wind or a strong tide current, as in the southern anchorage, we should never have found her more, or found her stranded beyond help. As it was, there was little amiss beyond the wreck of the mainsail. Another anchor was got ready and dropped in a fathom and a half of water. We all pulled round again to Rum Cove, the nearest point for Ben Gunns treasurehouse; and then Gray, singlehanded, returned with the gig to the Hispaniola, where he was to pass the night on guard. A gentle slope ran up from the beach to the entrance of the cave. At the top, the squire met us. To me he was cordial and kind, saying nothing of my escapade either in the way of blame or praise. At Silvers polite salute he somewhat flushed. John Silver, he said, youre a prodigious villain and impostera monstrous imposter, sir. I am told I am not to prosecute you. Well, then, I will not. But the dead men, sir, hang about your neck like millstones. Thank you kindly, sir, replied Long John, again saluting. I dare you to thank me! cried the squire. It is a gross dereliction of my duty. Stand back. And thereupon we all entered the cave. It was a large, airy place, with a little spring and a pool of clear water, overhung with ferns. The floor was sand. Before a big fire lay Captain Smollett; and in a far corner, only duskily flickered over by the blaze, I beheld great heaps of coin and quadrilaterals built of bars of gold. That was Flints treasure that we had come so far to seek and that had cost already the lives of seventeen men from the Hispaniola. How many it had cost in the amassing, what blood and sorrow, what good ships scuttled on the deep, what brave men walking the plank blindfold, what shot of cannon, what shame and lies and cruelty, perhaps no man alive could tell. Yet there were still three upon that islandSilver, and old Morgan, and Ben Gunnwho had each taken his share in these crimes, as each had hoped in vain to share in the reward. Come in, Jim, said the captain. Youre a good boy in your line, Jim, but I dont think you and mell go to sea again. Youre too much of the born favourite for me. Is that you, John Silver? What brings you here, man? Come back to my dooty, sir, returned Silver. Ah! said the captain, and that was all he said. What a supper I had of it that night, with all my friends around me; and what a meal it was, with Ben Gunns salted goat and some delicacies and a bottle of old wine from the Hispaniola. Never, I am sure, were people gayer or happier. And there was Silver, sitting back almost out of the firelight, but eating heartily, prompt to spring forward when anything was wanted, even joining quietly in our laughterthe same bland, polite, obsequious seaman of the voyage out. 0314m XXXIV And Last 9314m he next morning we fell early to work, for the transportation of this great mass of gold near a mile by land to the beach, and thence three miles by boat to the Hispaniola, was a considerable task for so small a number of workmen. The three fellows still abroad upon the island did not greatly trouble us; a single sentry on the shoulder of the hill was sufficient to ensure us against any sudden onslaught, and we thought, besides, they had had more than enough of fighting. Therefore the work was pushed on briskly. Gray and Ben Gunn came and went with the boat, while the rest during their absences piled treasure on the beach. Two of the bars, slung in a ropes end, made a good load for a grown manone that he was glad to walk slowly with. For my part, as I was not much use at carrying, I was kept busy all day in the cave packing the minted money into breadbags. 0317m It was a strange collection, like Billy Boness hoard for the diversity of coinage, but so much larger and so much more varied that I think I never had more pleasure than in sorting them. English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Georges, and Louises, doubloons and double guineas and moidores and sequins, the pictures of all the kings of Europe for the last hundred years, strange Oriental pieces stamped with what looked like wisps of string or bits of spiders web, round pieces and square pieces, and pieces bored through the middle, as if to wear them round your necknearly every variety of money in the world must, I think, have found a place in that collection; and for number, I am sure they were like autumn leaves, so that my back ached with stooping and my fingers with sorting them out. Day after day this work went on; by every evening a fortune had been stowed aboard, but there was another fortune waiting for the morrow; and all this time we heard nothing of the three surviving mutineers. At lastI think it was on the third nightthe doctor and I were strolling on the shoulder of the hill where it overlooks the lowlands of the isle, when, from out the thick darkness below, the wind brought us a noise between shrieking and singing. It was only a snatch that reached our ears, followed by the former silence. Heaven forgive them, said the doctor; tis the mutineers! All drunk, sir, struck in the voice of Silver from behind us. Silver, I should say, was allowed his entire liberty, and in spite of daily rebuffs, seemed to regard himself once more as quite a privileged and friendly dependent. Indeed, it was remarkable how well he bore these slights and with what unwearying politeness he kept on trying to ingratiate himself with all. Yet, I think, none treated him better than a dog, unless it was Ben Gunn, who was still terribly afraid of his old quartermaster, or myself, who had really something to thank him for; although for that matter, I suppose, I had reason to think even worse of him than anybody else, for I had seen him meditating a fresh treachery upon the plateau. Accordingly, it was pretty gruffly that the doctor answered him. Drunk or raving, said he. Right you were, sir, replied Silver; and precious little odds which, to you and me. I suppose you would hardly ask me to call you a humane man, returned the doctor with a sneer, and so my feelings may surprise you, Master Silver. But if I were sure they were ravingas I am morally certain one, at least, of them is down with feverI should leave this camp, and at whatever risk to my own carcass, take them the assistance of my skill. Ask your pardon, sir, you would be very wrong, quoth Silver. You would lose your precious life, and you may lay to that. Im on your side now, hand and glove; and I shouldnt wish for to see the party weakened, let alone yourself, seeing as I know what I owes you. But these men down there, they couldnt keep their wordno, not supposing they wished to; and whats more, they couldnt believe as you could. No, said the doctor. Youre the man to keep your word, we know that. Well, that was about the last news we had of the three pirates. Only once we heard a gunshot a great way off and supposed them to be hunting. A council was held, and it was decided that we must desert them on the islandto the huge glee, I must say, of Ben Gunn, and with the strong approval of Gray. We left a good stock of powder and shot, the bulk of the salt goat, a few medicines, and some other necessaries, tools, clothing, a spare sail, a fathom or two of rope, and by the particular desire of the doctor, a handsome present of tobacco. That was about our last doing on the island.

Before that, we had got the treasure stowed and had shipped enough water and the remainder of the goat meat in case of any distress; and at last, one fine morning, we weighed anchor, which was about all that we could manage, and stood out of North Inlet, the same colours flying that the captain had flown and fought under at the palisade. The three fellows must have been watching us closer than we thought for, as we soon had proved. For coming through the narrows, we had to lie very near the southern point, and there we saw all three of them kneeling together on a spit of sand, with their arms raised in supplication. It went to all our hearts, I think, to leave them in that wretched state; but we could not risk another mutiny; and to take them home for the gibbet would have been a cruel sort of kindness. The doctor hailed them and told them of the stores we had left, and where they were to find them. But they continued to call us by name and appeal to us, for Gods sake, to be merciful and not leave them to die in such a place. At last, seeing the ship still bore on her course and was now swiftly drawing out of earshot, one of themI know not which it wasleapt to his feet with a hoarse cry, whipped his musket to his shoulder, and sent a shot whistling over Silvers head and through the mainsail. After that, we kept under cover of the bulwarks, and when next I looked out they had disappeared from the spit, and the spit itself had almost melted out of sight in the growing distance. That was, at least, the end of that; and before noon, to my inexpressible joy, the highest rock of Treasure Island had sunk into the blue round of sea. We were so short of men that everyone on board had to bear a handonly the captain lying on a mattress in the stern and giving his orders, for though greatly recovered he was still in want of quiet. We laid her head for the nearest port in Spanish America, for we could not risk the voyage home without fresh hands; and as it was, what with baffling winds and a couple of fresh gales, we were all worn out before we reached it. It was just at sundown when we cast anchor in a most beautiful landlocked gulf, and were immediately surrounded by shore boats full of Negroes and Mexican Indians and halfbloods selling fruits and vegetables and offering to dive for bits of money. The sight of so many goodhumoured faces (especially the blacks), the taste of the tropical fruits, and above all the lights that began to shine in the town made a most charming contrast to our dark and bloody sojourn on the island; and the doctor and the squire, taking me along with them, went ashore to pass the early part of the night. Here they met the captain of an English manofwar, fell in talk with him, went on board his ship, and, in short, had so agreeable a time that day was breaking when we came alongside the Hispaniola. Ben Gunn was on deck alone, and as soon as we came on board he began, with wonderful contortions, to make us a confession. Silver was gone. The maroon had connived at his escape in a shore boat some hours ago, and he now assured us he had only done so to preserve our lives, which would certainly have been forfeit if that man with the one leg had stayed aboard. But this was not all. The seacook had not gone emptyhanded. He had cut through a bulkhead unobserved and had removed one of the sacks of coin, worth perhaps three or four hundred guineas, to help him on his further wanderings. I think we were all pleased to be so cheaply quit of him. Well, to make a long story short, we got a few hands on board, made a good cruise home, and the Hispaniola reached Bristol just as Mr. Blandly was beginning to think of fitting out her consort. Five men only of those who had sailed returned with her. Drink and the devil had done for the rest, with a vengeance, although, to be sure, we were not quite in so bad a case as that other ship they sang about With one man of her crew alive, What put to sea with seventyfive. All of us had an ample share of the treasure and used it wisely or foolishly, according to our natures. Captain Smollett is now retired from the sea. Gray not only saved his money, but being suddenly smit with the desire to rise, also studied his profession, and he is now mate and part owner of a fine fullrigged ship, married besides, and the father of a family. As for Ben Gunn, he got a thousand pounds, which he spent or lost in three weeks, or to be more exact, in nineteen days, for he was back begging on the twentieth. Then he was given a lodge to keep, exactly as he had feared upon the island; and he still lives, a great favourite, though something of a butt, with the country boys, and a notable singer in church on Sundays and saints days. Of Silver we have heard no more. That formidable seafaring man with one leg has at last gone clean out of my life; but I dare say he met his old Negress, and perhaps still lives in comfort with her and Captain Flint. It is to be hoped so, I suppose, for his chances of comfort in another world are very small. The bar silver and the arms still lie, for all that I know, where Flint buried them; and certainly they shall lie there for me. Oxen and wainropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts or start upright in bed with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! 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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or reuse it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus Author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Release date November 23, 2012 [eBook 41445] Most recently updated October 23, 2024 Language English Original publication United Kingdom Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, Jones Credits Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at httpwww.pgdp.net Revised by Richard Tonsing. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS [Transcribers Note This text was produced from a photoreprint of the 1818 edition.] FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould me man? Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me? Paradise Lost. London PRINTED FOR LACKINGTON, HUGHES, HARDING, MAVOR, JONES, FINSBURY SQUARE. 1818. TO WILLIAM GODWIN, AUTHOR OF POLITICAL JUSTICE, CALEB WILLIAMS, c. THESE VOLUMES Are respectfully inscribed BY THE AUTHOR. PREFACE. The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. It was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it developes; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield. I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature, while I have not scrupled to innovate upon their combinations. The Iliad, the tragic poetry of Greece,Shakespeare, in the Tempest and Midsummer Nights Dream,and most especially Milton, in Paradise Lost, conform to this rule; and the most humble novelist, who seeks to confer or receive amusement from his labours, may, without presumption, apply to prose fiction a licence, or rather a rule, from the adoption of which so many exquisite combinations of human feeling have resulted in the highest specimens of poetry. The circumstance on which my story rests was suggested in casual conversation. It was commenced, partly as a source of amusement, and partly as an expedient for exercising any untried resources of mind. Other motives were mingled with these, as the work proceeded. I am by no means indifferent to the manner in which whatever moral tendencies exist in the sentiments or characters it contains shall affect the reader; yet my chief concern in this respect has been limited to the avoiding of the enervating effects of the novels of the present day, and to the exhibitions of the amiableness of domestic affection, and the excellence of universal virtue. The opinions which naturally spring from the character and situation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing always in my own conviction; nor is any inference justly to be drawn from the following pages as prejudicing any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind. It is a subject also of additional interest to the author, that this story was begun in the majestic region where the scene is principally laid, and in society which cannot cease to be regretted. I passed the summer of 1816 in the environs of Geneva. The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and occasionally amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands. These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation. Two other friends (a tale from the pen of one of whom would be far more acceptable to the public than any thing I can ever hope to produce) and myself agreed to write each a story, founded on some supernatural occurrence. The weather, however, suddenly became serene; and my two friends left me on a journey among the Alps, and lost, in the magnificent scenes which they present, all memory of their ghostly visions. The following tale is the only one which has been completed. FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS. LETTER I. To Mrs. Saville, England. St. Petersburgh, Dec. 11th, 17. You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday; and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare, and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking. I am already far north of London; and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves, and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my day dreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is for ever visible; its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendour. Therefor with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigatorsthere snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. Its productions and features may be without example, as the phnomena of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in those undiscovered solitudes. What may not be expected in a country of eternal light? I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle; and may regulate a thousand celestial observations, that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent for ever. I shall satiate my ardent curiosity with the sight of a part of the world never before visited, and may tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man. These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death, and to induce me to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when he embarks in a little boat, with his holiday mates, on an expedition of discovery up his native river. But, supposing all these conjectures to be false, you cannot contest the inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole to those countries, to reach which at present so many months are requisite; or by ascertaining the secret of the magnet, which, if at all possible, can only be effected by an undertaking such as mine. These reflections have dispelled the agitation with which I began my letter, and I feel my heart glow with an enthusiasm which elevates me to heaven; for nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose,a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye. This expedition has been the favourite dream of my early years. I have read with ardour the accounts of the various voyages which have been made in the prospect of arriving at the North Pacific Ocean through the seas which surround the pole. You may remember, that a history of all the voyages made for purposes of discovery composed the whole of our good uncle Thomass library. My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading. These volumes were my study day and night, and my familiarity with them increased that regret which I had felt, as a child, on learning that my fathers dying injunction had forbidden my uncle to allow me to embark in a seafaring life. These visions faded when I perused, for the first time, those poets whose effusions entranced my soul, and lifted it to heaven. I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated. You are well acquainted with my failure, and how heavily I bore the disappointment. But just at that time I inherited the fortune of my cousin, and my thoughts were turned into the channel of their earlier bent. Six years have passed since I resolved on my present undertaking. I can, even now, remember the hour from which I dedicated myself to this great enterprise. I commenced by inuring my body to hardship. I accompanied the whalefishers on several expeditions to the North Sea; I voluntarily endured cold, famine, thirst, and want of sleep; I often worked harder than the common sailors during the day, and devoted my nights to the study of mathematics, the theory of medicine, and those branches of physical science from which a naval adventurer might derive the greatest practical advantage. Twice I actually hired myself as an undermate in a Greenland whaler, and acquitted myself to admiration. I must own I felt a little proud, when my captain offered me the second dignity in the vessel, and entreated me to remain with the greatest earnestness; so valuable did he consider my services. And now, dear Margaret, do I not deserve to accomplish some great purpose. My life might have been passed in ease and luxury; but I preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in my path. Oh, that some encouraging voice would answer in the affirmative! My courage and my resolution is firm; but my hopes fluctuate, and my spirits are often depressed. I am about to proceed on a long and difficult voyage; the emergencies of which will demand all my fortitude I am required not only to raise the spirits of others, but sometimes to sustain my own, when theirs are failing. This is the most favourable period for travelling in Russia. They fly quickly over the snow in their sledges; the motion is pleasant, and, in my opinion, far more agreeable than that of an English stagecoach. The cold is not excessive, if you are wrapt in furs, a dress which I have already adopted; for there is a great difference between walking the deck and remaining seated motionless for hours, when no exercise prevents the blood from actually freezing in your veins. I have no ambition to lose my life on the postroad between St. Petersburgh and Archangel. I shall depart for the latter town in a fortnight or three weeks; and my intention is to hire a ship there, which can easily be done by paying the insurance for the owner, and to engage as many sailors as I think necessary among those who are accustomed to the whalefishing. I do not intend to sail until the month of June and when shall I return? Ah, dear sister, how can I answer this question? If I succeed, many, many months, perhaps years, will pass before you and I may meet. If I fail, you will see me again soon, or never. Farewell, my dear, excellent, Margaret. Heaven shower down blessings on you, and save me, that I may again and again testify my gratitude for all your love and kindness. Your affectionate brother, R. Walton. LETTER II. To Mrs. Saville, England. Archangel, 28th March, 17. How slowly the time passes here, encompassed as I am by frost and snow; yet a second step is taken towards my enterprise. I have hired a vessel, and am occupied in collecting my sailors; those whom I have already engaged appear to be men on whom I can depend, and are certainly possessed of dauntless courage. But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, Margaret when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me; whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother! I am too ardent in execution, and too impatient of difficulties. But it is a still greater evil to me that I am selfeducated for the first fourteen years of my life I ran wild on a common, and read nothing but our uncle Thomass books of voyages. At that age I became acquainted with the celebrated poets of our own country; but it was only when it had ceased to be in my power to derive its most important benefits from such a conviction, that I perceived the necessity of becoming acquainted with more languages than that of my native country. Now I am twentyeight, and am in reality more illiterate than many schoolboys of fifteen. It is true that I have thought more, and that my day dreams are more extended and magnificent; but they want (as the painters call it) keeping; and I greatly need a friend who would have sense enough not to despise me as romantic, and affection enough for me to endeavour to regulate my mind. Well, these are useless complaints; I shall certainly find no friend on the wide ocean, nor even here in Archangel, among merchants and seamen. Yet some feelings, unallied to the dross of human nature, beat even in these rugged bosoms. My lieutenant, for instance, is a man of wonderful courage and enterprise; he is madly desirous of glory. He is an Englishman, and in the midst of national and professional prejudices, unsoftened by cultivation, retains some of the noblest endowments of humanity. I first became acquainted with him on board a whale vessel finding that he was unemployed in this city, I easily engaged him to assist in my enterprise. The master is a person of an excellent disposition, and is remarkable in the ship for his gentleness, and the mildness of his discipline. He is, indeed, of so amiable a nature, that he will not hunt (a favourite, and almost the only amusement here), because he cannot endure to spill blood. He is, moreover, heroically generous. Some years ago he loved a young Russian lady, of moderate fortune; and having amassed a considerable sum in prizemoney, the father of the girl consented to the match. He saw his mistress once before the destined ceremony; but she was bathed in tears, and, throwing herself at his feet, entreated him to spare her, confessing at the same time that she loved another, but that he was poor, and that her father would never consent to the union. My generous friend reassured the suppliant, and on being informed of the name of her lover instantly abandoned his pursuit. He had already bought a farm with his money, on which he had designed to pass the remainder of his life; but he bestowed the whole on his rival, together with the remains of his prizemoney to purchase stock, and then himself solicited the young womans father to consent to her marriage with her lover. But the old man decidedly refused, thinking himself bound in honour to my friend; who, when he found the father inexorable, quitted his country, nor returned until he heard that his former mistress was married according to her inclinations. What a noble fellow! you will exclaim. He is so; but then he has passed all his life on board a vessel, and has scarcely an idea beyond the rope and the shroud. But do not suppose that, because I complain a little, or because I can conceive a consolation for my toils which I may never know, that I am wavering in my resolutions. Those are as fixed as fate; and my voyage is only now delayed until the weather shall permit my embarkation. The winter has been dreadfully severe; but the spring promises well, and it is considered as a remarkably early season; so that, perhaps, I may sail sooner than I expected. I shall do nothing rashly; you know me sufficiently to confide in my prudence and considerateness whenever the safety of others is committed to my care. I cannot describe to you my sensations on the near prospect of my undertaking. It is impossible to communicate to you a conception of the trembling sensation, half pleasurable and half fearful, with which I am preparing to depart. I am going to unexplored regions, to the land of mist and snow; but I shall kill no albatross, therefore do not be alarmed for my safety. Shall I meet you again, after having traversed immense seas, and returned by the most southern cape of Africa or America? I dare not expect such success, yet I cannot bear to look on the reverse of the picture. Continue to write to me by every opportunity I may receive your letters (though the chance is very doubtful) on some occasions when I need them most to support my spirits. I love you very tenderly. Remember me with affection, should you never hear from me again. Your affectionate brother, Robert Walton. LETTER III. To Mrs. Saville, England. July 7th, 17. My Dear Sister, I write a few lines in haste, to say that I am safe, and well advanced on my voyage. This letter will reach England by a merchantman now on its homeward voyage from Archangel; more fortunate than I, who may not see my native land, perhaps, for many years. I am, however, in good spirits my men are bold, and apparently firm of purpose; nor do the floating sheets of ice that continually pass us, indicating the dangers of the region towards which we are advancing, appear to dismay them. We have already reached a very high latitude; but it is the height of summer, and although not so warm as in England, the southern gales, which blow us speedily towards those shores which I so ardently desire to attain, breathe a degree of renovating warmth which I had not expected. No incidents have hitherto befallen us, that would make a figure in a letter. One or two stiff gales, and the breaking of a mast, are accidents which experienced navigators scarcely remember to record; and I shall be well content, if nothing worse happen to us during our voyage. Adieu, my dear Margaret. Be assured, that for my own sake, as well as yours, I will not rashly encounter danger. I will be cool, persevering, and prudent. Remember me to all my English friends. Most affectionately yours, R. W. LETTER IV. To Mrs. Saville, England. August 5th, 17. So strange an accident has happened to us, that I cannot forbear recording it, although it is very probable that you will see me before these papers can come into your possession. Last Monday (July 31st), we were nearly surrounded by ice, which closed in the ship on all sides, scarcely leaving her the sea room in which she floated. Our situation was somewhat dangerous, especially as we were compassed round by a very thick fog. We accordingly lay to, hoping that some change would take place in the atmosphere and weather. About two oclock the mist cleared away, and we beheld, stretched out in every direction, vast and irregular plains of ice, which seemed to have no end. Some of my comrades groaned, and my own mind began to grow watchful with anxious thoughts, when a strange sight suddenly attracted our attention, and diverted our solicitude from our own situation. We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north, at the distance of half a mile a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge, and guided the dogs. We watched the rapid progress of the traveller with our telescopes, until he was lost among the distant inequalities of the ice. This appearance excited our unqualified wonder. We were, as we believed, many hundred miles from any land; but this apparition seemed to denote that it was not, in reality, so distant as we had supposed. Shut in, however, by ice, it was impossible to follow his track, which we had observed with the greatest attention. About two hours after this occurrence, we heard the ground sea; and before night the ice broke, and freed our ship. We, however, lay to until the morning, fearing to encounter in the dark those large loose masses which float about after the breaking up of the ice. I profited of this time to rest for a few hours. In the morning, however, as soon as it was light, I went upon deck, and found all the sailors busy on one side of the vessel, apparently talking to some one in the sea. It was, in fact, a sledge, like that we had seen before, which had drifted towards us in the night, on a large fragment of ice. Only one dog remained alive; but there was a human being within it, whom the sailors were persuading to enter the vessel. He was not, as the other traveller seemed to be, a savage inhabitant of some undiscovered island, but an European. When I appeared on deck, the master said, Here is our captain, and he will not allow you to perish on the open sea. On perceiving me, the stranger addressed me in English, although with a foreign accent. Before I come on board your vessel, said he, will you have the kindness to inform me whither you are bound? You may conceive my astonishment on hearing such a question addressed to me from a man on the brink of destruction, and to whom I should have supposed that my vessel would have been a resource which he would not have exchanged for the most precious wealth the earth can afford. I replied, however, that we were on a voyage of discovery towards the northern pole. Upon hearing this he appeared satisfied, and consented to come on board. Good God! Margaret, if you had seen the man who thus capitulated for his safety, your surprise would have been boundless. His limbs were nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering. I never saw a man in so wretched a condition. We attempted to carry him into the cabin; but as soon as he had quitted the fresh air, he fainted. We accordingly brought him back to the deck, and restored him to animation by rubbing him with brandy, and forcing him to swallow a small quantity. As soon as he shewed signs of life, we wrapped him up in blankets, and placed him near the chimney of the kitchenstove. By slow degrees he recovered, and ate a little soup, which restored him wonderfully. Two days passed in this manner before he was able to speak; and I often feared that his sufferings had deprived him of understanding. When he had in some measure recovered, I removed him to my own cabin, and attended on him as much as my duty would permit. I never saw a more interesting creature his eyes have generally an expression of wildness, and even madness; but there are moments when, if any one performs an act of kindness towards him, or does him any the most trifling service, his whole countenance is lighted up, as it were, with a beam of benevolence and sweetness that I never saw equalled. But he is generally melancholy and despairing; and sometimes he gnashes his teeth, as if impatient of the weight of woes that oppresses him. When my guest was a little recovered, I had great trouble to keep off the men, who wished to ask him a thousand questions; but I would not allow him to be tormented by their idle curiosity, in a state of body and mind whose restoration evidently depended upon entire repose. Once, however, the lieutenant asked, Why he had come so far upon the ice in so strange a vehicle? His countenance instantly assumed an aspect of the deepest gloom; and he replied, To seek one who fled from me. And did the man whom you pursued travel in the same fashion? Yes. Then I fancy we have seen him; for, the day before we picked you up, we saw some dogs drawing a sledge, with a man in it, across the ice. This aroused the strangers attention; and he asked a multitude of questions concerning the route which the dmon, as he called him, had pursued. Soon after, when he was alone with me, he said, I have, doubtless, excited your curiosity, as well as that of these good people; but you are too considerate to make inquiries. Certainly; it would indeed be very impertinent and inhuman in me to trouble you with any inquisitiveness of mine. And yet you rescued me from a strange and perilous situation; you have benevolently restored me to life. Soon after this he inquired, if I thought that the breaking up of the ice had destroyed the other sledge? I replied, that I could not answer with any degree of certainty; for the ice had not broken until near midnight, and the traveller might have arrived at a place of safety before that time; but of this I could not judge. From this time the stranger seemed very eager to be upon deck, to watch for the sledge which had before appeared; but I have persuaded him to remain in the cabin, for he is far too weak to sustain the rawness of the atmosphere. But I have promised that some one should watch for him, and give him instant notice if any new object should appear in sight. Such is my journal of what relates to this strange occurrence up to the present day. The stranger has gradually improved in health, but is very silent, and appears uneasy when any one except myself enters his cabin. Yet his manners are so conciliating and gentle, that the sailors are all interested in him, although they have had very little communication with him. For my own part, I begin to love him as a brother; and his constant and deep grief fills me with sympathy and compassion. He must have been a noble creature in his better days, being even now in wreck so attractive and amiable. I said in one of my letters, my dear Margaret, that I should find no friend on the wide ocean; yet I have found a man who, before his spirit had been broken by misery, I should have been happy to have possessed as the brother of my heart. I shall continue my journal concerning the stranger at intervals, should I have any fresh incidents to record. August 13th, 17. My affection for my guest increases every day. He excites at once my admiration and my pity to an astonishing degree. How can I see so noble a creature destroyed by misery without feeling the most poignant grief? He is so gentle, yet so wise; his mind is so cultivated; and when he speaks, although his words are culled with the choicest art, yet they flow with rapidity and unparalleled eloquence. He is now much recovered from his illness, and is continually on the deck, apparently watching for the sledge that preceded his own. Yet, although unhappy, he is not so utterly occupied by his own misery, but that he interests himself deeply in the employments of others. He has asked me many questions concerning my design; and I have related my little history frankly to him. He appeared pleased with the confidence, and suggested several alterations in my plan, which I shall find exceedingly useful. There is no pedantry in his manner; but all he does appears to spring solely from the interest he instinctively takes in the welfare of those who surround him. He is often overcome by gloom, and then he sits by himself, and tries to overcome all that is sullen or unsocial in his humour. These paroxysms pass from him like a cloud from before the sun, though his dejection never leaves him. I have endeavoured to win his confidence; and I trust that I have succeeded. One day I mentioned to him the desire I had always felt of finding a friend who might sympathize with me, and direct me by his counsel. I said, I did not belong to that class of men who are offended by advice. I am selfeducated, and perhaps I hardly rely sufficiently upon my own powers. I wish therefore that my companion should be wiser and more experienced than myself, to confirm and support me; nor have I believed it impossible to find a true friend. I agree with you, replied the stranger, in believing that friendship is not only a desirable, but a possible acquisition. I once had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am entitled, therefore, to judge respecting friendship. You have hope, and the world before you, and have no cause for despair. But II have lost every thing, and cannot begin life anew. As he said this, his countenance became expressive of a calm settled grief, that touched me to the heart. But he was silent, and presently retired to his cabin. Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments; yet when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit, that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures. Will you laugh at the enthusiasm I express concerning this divine wanderer? If you do, you must have certainly lost that simplicity which was once your characteristic charm. Yet, if you will, smile at the warmth of my expressions, while I find every day new causes for repeating them. August 19th, 17. Yesterday the stranger said to me, You may easily perceive, Captain Walton, that I have suffered great and unparalleled misfortunes. I had determined, once, that the memory of these evils should die with me; but you have won me to alter my determination. You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been. I do not know that the relation of my misfortunes will be useful to you, yet, if you are inclined, listen to my tale. I believe that the strange incidents connected with it will afford a view of nature, which may enlarge your faculties and understanding. You will hear of powers and occurrences, such as you have been accustomed to believe impossible but I do not doubt that my tale conveys in its series internal evidence of the truth of the events of which it is composed. You may easily conceive that I was much gratified by the offered communication; yet I could not endure that he should renew his grief by a recital of his misfortunes. I felt the greatest eagerness to hear the promised narrative, partly from curiosity, and partly from a strong desire to ameliorate his fate, if it were in my power. I expressed these feelings in my answer. I thank you, he replied, for your sympathy, but it is useless; my fate is nearly fulfilled. I wait but for one event, and then I shall repose in peace. I understand your feeling, continued he, perceiving that I wished to interrupt him; but you are mistaken, my friend, if thus you will allow me to name you; nothing can alter my destiny listen to my history, and you will perceive how irrevocably it is determined. He then told me, that he would commence his narrative the next day when I should be at leisure. This promise drew from me the warmest thanks. I have resolved every night, when I am not engaged, to record, as nearly as possible in his own words, what he has related during the day. If I should be engaged, I will at least make notes. This manuscript will doubtless afford you the greatest pleasure but to me, who know him, and who hear it from his own lips, with what interest and sympathy shall I read it in some future day! FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS. CHAPTER I. I am by birth a Genevese; and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic.

My ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics; and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation. He was respected by all who knew him for his integrity and indefatigable attention to public business. He passed his younger days perpetually occupied by the affairs of his country; and it was not until the decline of life that he thought of marrying, and bestowing on the state sons who might carry his virtues and his name down to posterity. As the circumstances of his marriage illustrate his character, I cannot refrain from relating them. One of his most intimate friends was a merchant, who, from a flourishing state, fell, through numerous mischances, into poverty. This man, whose name was Beaufort, was of a proud and unbending disposition, and could not bear to live in poverty and oblivion in the same country where he had formerly been distinguished for his rank and magnificence. Having paid his debts, therefore, in the most honourable manner, he retreated with his daughter to the town of Lucerne, where he lived unknown and in wretchedness. My father loved Beaufort with the truest friendship, and was deeply grieved by his retreat in these unfortunate circumstances. He grieved also for the loss of his society, and resolved to seek him out and endeavour to persuade him to begin the world again through his credit and assistance. Beaufort had taken effectual measures to conceal himself; and it was ten months before my father discovered his abode. Overjoyed at this discovery, he hastened to the house, which was situated in a mean street, near the Reuss. But when he entered, misery and despair alone welcomed him. Beaufort had saved but a very small sum of money from the wreck of his fortunes; but it was sufficient to provide him with sustenance for some months, and in the mean time he hoped to procure some respectable employment in a merchants house. The interval was consequently spent in inaction; his grief only became more deep and rankling, when he had leisure for reflection; and at length it took so fast hold of his mind, that at the end of three months he lay on a bed of sickness, incapable of any exertion. His daughter attended him with the greatest tenderness; but she saw with despair that their little fund was rapidly decreasing, and that there was no other prospect of support. But Caroline Beaufort possessed a mind of an uncommon mould; and her courage rose to support her in her adversity. She procured plain work; she plaited straw; and by various means contrived to earn a pittance scarcely sufficient to support life. Several months passed in this manner. Her father grew worse; her time was more entirely occupied in attending him; her means of subsistence decreased; and in the tenth month her father died in her arms, leaving her an orphan and a beggar. This last blow overcame her; and she knelt by Beauforts coffin, weeping bitterly, when my father entered the chamber. He came like a protecting spirit to the poor girl, who committed herself to his care, and after the interment of his friend he conducted her to Geneva, and placed her under the protection of a relation. Two years after this event Caroline became his wife. When my father became a husband and a parent, he found his time so occupied by the duties of his new situation, that he relinquished many of his public employments, and devoted himself to the education of his children. Of these I was the eldest, and the destined successor to all his labours and utility. No creature could have more tender parents than mine. My improvement and health were their constant care, especially as I remained for several years their only child. But before I continue my narrative, I must record an incident which took place when I was four years of age. My father had a sister, whom he tenderly loved, and who had married early in life an Italian gentleman. Soon after her marriage, she had accompanied her husband into her native country, and for some years my father had very little communication with her. About the time I mentioned she died; and a few months afterwards he received a letter from her husband, acquainting him with his intention of marrying an Italian lady, and requesting my father to take charge of the infant Elizabeth, the only child of his deceased sister. It is my wish, he said, that you should consider her as your own daughter, and educate her thus. Her mothers fortune is secured to her, the documents of which I will commit to your keeping. Reflect upon this proposition; and decide whether you would prefer educating your niece yourself to her being brought up by a stepmother. My father did not hesitate, and immediately went to Italy, that he might accompany the little Elizabeth to her future home. I have often heard my mother say, that she was at that time the most beautiful child she had ever seen, and shewed signs even then of a gentle and affectionate disposition. These indications, and a desire to bind as closely as possible the ties of domestic love, determined my mother to consider Elizabeth as my future wife; a design which she never found reason to repent. From this time Elizabeth Lavenza became my playfellow, and, as we grew older, my friend. She was docile and good tempered, yet gay and playful as a summer insect. Although she was lively and animated, her feelings were strong and deep, and her disposition uncommonly affectionate. No one could better enjoy liberty, yet no one could submit with more grace than she did to constraint and caprice. Her imagination was luxuriant, yet her capability of application was great. Her person was the image of her mind; her hazel eyes, although as lively as a birds, possessed an attractive softness. Her figure was light and airy; and, though capable of enduring great fatigue, she appeared the most fragile creature in the world. While I admired her understanding and fancy, I loved to tend on her, as I should on a favourite animal; and I never saw so much grace both of person and mind united to so little pretension. Every one adored Elizabeth. If the servants had any request to make, it was always through her intercession. We were strangers to any species of disunion and dispute; for although there was a great dissimilitude in our characters, there was an harmony in that very dissimilitude. I was more calm and philosophical than my companion; yet my temper was not so yielding. My application was of longer endurance; but it was not so severe whilst it endured. I delighted in investigating the facts relative to the actual world; she busied herself in following the arial creations of the poets. The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own. My brothers were considerably younger than myself; but I had a friend in one of my schoolfellows, who compensated for this deficiency. Henry Clerval was the son of a merchant of Geneva, an intimate friend of my father. He was a boy of singular talent and fancy. I remember, when he was nine years old, he wrote a fairy tale, which was the delight and amazement of all his companions. His favourite study consisted in books of chivalry and romance; and when very young, I can remember, that we used to act plays composed by him out of these favourite books, the principal characters of which were Orlando, Robin Hood, Amadis, and St. George. No youth could have passed more happily than mine. My parents were indulgent, and my companions amiable. Our studies were never forced; and by some means we always had an end placed in view, which excited us to ardour in the prosecution of them. It was by this method, and not by emulation, that we were urged to application. Elizabeth was not incited to apply herself to drawing, that her companions might not outstrip her; but through the desire of pleasing her aunt, by the representation of some favourite scene done by her own hand. We learned Latin and English, that we might read the writings in those languages; and so far from study being made odious to us through punishment, we loved application, and our amusements would have been the labours of other children. Perhaps we did not read so many books, or learn languages so quickly, as those who are disciplined according to the ordinary methods; but what we learned was impressed the more deeply on our memories. In this description of our domestic circle I include Henry Clerval; for he was constantly with us. He went to school with me, and generally passed the afternoon at our house; for being an only child, and destitute of companions at home, his father was well pleased that he should find associates at our house; and we were never completely happy when Clerval was absent. I feel pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self. But, in drawing the picture of my early days, I must not omit to record those events which led, by insensible steps to my after tale of misery for when I would account to myself for the birth of that passion, which afterwards ruled my destiny, I find it arise, like a mountain river, from ignoble and almost forgotten sources; but, swelling as it proceeded, it became the torrent which, in its course, has swept away all my hopes and joys. Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate; I desire therefore, in this narration, to state those facts which led to my predilection for that science. When I was thirteen years of age, we all went on a party of pleasure to the baths near Thonon the inclemency of the weather obliged us to remain a day confined to the inn. In this house I chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa. I opened it with apathy; the theory which he attempts to demonstrate, and the wonderful facts which he relates, soon changed this feeling into enthusiasm. A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind; and, bounding with joy, I communicated my discovery to my father. I cannot help remarking here the many opportunities instructors possess of directing the attention of their pupils to useful knowledge, which they utterly neglect. My father looked carelessly at the titlepage of my book, and said, Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash. If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains, to explain to me, that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded, and that a modern system of science had been introduced, which possessed much greater powers than the ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical; under such circumstances, I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside, and, with my imagination warmed as it was, should probably have applied myself to the more rational theory of chemistry which has resulted from modern discoveries. It is even possible, that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin. But the cursory glance my father had taken of my volume by no means assured me that he was acquainted with its contents; and I continued to read with the greatest avidity. When I returned home, my first care was to procure the whole works of this author, and afterwards of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. I read and studied the wild fancies of these writers with delight; they appeared to me treasures known to few beside myself; and although I often wished to communicate these secret stores of knowledge to my father, yet his indefinite censure of my favourite Agrippa always withheld me. I disclosed my discoveries to Elizabeth, therefore, under a promise of strict secrecy; but she did not interest herself in the subject, and I was left by her to pursue my studies alone. It may appear very strange, that a disciple of Albertus Magnus should arise in the eighteenth century; but our family was not scientifical, and I had not attended any of the lectures given at the schools of Geneva. My dreams were therefore undisturbed by reality; and I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosophers stone and the elixir of life. But the latter obtained my most undivided attention wealth was an inferior object; but what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death! Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favourite authors, the fulfilment of which I most eagerly sought; and if my incantations were always unsuccessful, I attributed the failure rather to my own inexperience and mistake, than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors. The natural phnomena that take place every day before our eyes did not escape my examinations. Distillation, and the wonderful effects of steam, processes of which my favourite authors were utterly ignorant, excited my astonishment; but my utmost wonder was engaged by some experiments on an airpump, which I saw employed by a gentleman whom we were in the habit of visiting. The ignorance of the early philosophers on these and several other points served to decrease their credit with me but I could not entirely throw them aside, before some other system should occupy their place in my mind. When I was about fifteen years old, we had retired to our house near Belrive, when we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm. It advanced from behind the mountains of Jura; and the thunder burst at once with frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens. I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with curiosity and delight. As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak, which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump. When we visited it the next morning, we found the tree shattered in a singular manner. It was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribbands of wood. I never beheld any thing so utterly destroyed. The catastrophe of this tree excited my extreme astonishment; and I eagerly inquired of my father the nature and origin of thunder and lightning. He replied, Electricity; describing at the same time the various effects of that power. He constructed a small electrical machine, and exhibited a few experiments; he made also a kite, with a wire and string, which drew down that fluid from the clouds. This last stroke completed the overthrow of Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, who had so long reigned the lords of my imagination. But by some fatality I did not feel inclined to commence the study of any modern system; and this disinclination was influenced by the following circumstance. My father expressed a wish that I should attend a course of lectures upon natural philosophy, to which I cheerfully consented. Some accident prevented my attending these lectures until the course was nearly finished. The lecture, being therefore one of the last, was entirely incomprehensible to me. The professor discoursed with the greatest fluency of potassium and boron, of sulphates and oxyds, terms to which I could affix no idea; and I became disgusted with the science of natural philosophy, although I still read Pliny and Buffon with delight, authors, in my estimation, of nearly equal interest and utility. My occupations at this age were principally the mathematics, and most of the branches of study appertaining to that science. I was busily employed in learning languages; Latin was already familiar to me, and I began to read some of the easiest Greek authors without the help of a lexicon. I also perfectly understood English and German. This is the list of my accomplishments at the age of seventeen; and you may conceive that my hours were fully employed in acquiring and maintaining a knowledge of this various literature. Another task also devolved upon me, when I became the instructor of my brothers. Ernest was six years younger than myself, and was my principal pupil. He had been afflicted with ill health from his infancy, through which Elizabeth and I had been his constant nurses his disposition was gentle, but he was incapable of any severe application. William, the youngest of our family, was yet an infant, and the most beautiful little fellow in the world; his lively blue eyes, dimpled cheeks, and endearing manners, inspired the tenderest affection. Such was our domestic circle, from which care and pain seemed for ever banished. My father directed our studies, and my mother partook of our enjoyments. Neither of us possessed the slightest preeminence over the other; the voice of command was never heard amongst us; but mutual affection engaged us all to comply with and obey the slightest desire of each other. CHAPTER II. When I had attained the age of seventeen, my parents resolved that I should become a student at the university of Ingolstadt. I had hitherto attended the schools of Geneva; but my father thought it necessary, for the completion of my education, that I should be made acquainted with other customs than those of my native country. My departure was therefore fixed at an early date; but, before the day resolved upon could arrive, the first misfortune of my life occurredan omen, as it were, of my future misery. Elizabeth had caught the scarlet fever; but her illness was not severe, and she quickly recovered. During her confinement, many arguments had been urged to persuade my mother to refrain from attending upon her. She had, at first, yielded to our entreaties; but when she heard that her favourite was recovering, she could no longer debar herself from her society, and entered her chamber long before the danger of infection was past. The consequences of this imprudence were fatal. On the third day my mother sickened; her fever was very malignant, and the looks of her attendants prognosticated the worst event. On her deathbed the fortitude and benignity of this admirable woman did not desert her. She joined the hands of Elizabeth and myself My children, she said, my firmest hopes of future happiness were placed on the prospect of your union. This expectation will now be the consolation of your father. Elizabeth, my love, you must supply my place to your younger cousins. Alas! I regret that I am taken from you; and, happy and beloved as I have been, is it not hard to quit you all? But these are not thoughts befitting me; I will endeavour to resign myself cheerfully to death, and will indulge a hope of meeting you in another world. She died calmly; and her countenance expressed affection even in death. I need not describe the feelings of those whose dearest ties are rent by that most irreparable evil, the void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair that is exhibited on the countenance. It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she, whom we saw every day, and whose very existence appeared a part of our own, can have departed for everthat the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished, and the sound of a voice so familiar, and dear to the ear, can be hushed, never more to be heard. These are the reflections of the first days; but when the lapse of time proves the reality of the evil, then the actual bitterness of grief commences. Yet from whom has not that rude hand rent away some dear connexion; and why should I describe a sorrow which all have felt, and must feel? The time at length arrives, when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity; and the smile that plays upon the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished. My mother was dead, but we had still duties which we ought to perform; we must continue our course with the rest, and learn to think ourselves fortunate, whilst one remains whom the spoiler has not seized. My journey to Ingolstadt, which had been deferred by these events, was now again determined upon. I obtained from my father a respite of some weeks. This period was spent sadly; my mothers death, and my speedy departure, depressed our spirits; but Elizabeth endeavoured to renew the spirit of cheerfulness in our little society. Since the death of her aunt, her mind had acquired new firmness and vigour. She determined to fulfil her duties with the greatest exactness; and she felt that that most imperious duty, of rendering her uncle and cousins happy, had devolved upon her. She consoled me, amused her uncle, instructed my brothers; and I never beheld her so enchanting as at this time, when she was continually endeavouring to contribute to the happiness of others, entirely forgetful of herself. The day of my departure at length arrived. I had taken leave of all my friends, excepting Clerval, who spent the last evening with us. He bitterly lamented that he was unable to accompany me but his father could not be persuaded to part with him, intending that he should become a partner with him in business, in compliance with his favourite theory, that learning was superfluous in the commerce of ordinary life. Henry had a refined mind; he had no desire to be idle, and was well pleased to become his fathers partner, but he believed that a man might be a very good trader, and yet possess a cultivated understanding. We sat late, listening to his complaints, and making many little arrangements for the future. The next morning early I departed. Tears gushed from the eyes of Elizabeth; they proceeded partly from sorrow at my departure, and partly because she reflected that the same journey was to have taken place three months before, when a mothers blessing would have accompanied me. I threw myself into the chaise that was to convey me away, and indulged in the most melancholy reflections. I, who had ever been surrounded by amiable companions, continually engaged in endeavouring to bestow mutual pleasure, I was now alone. In the university, whither I was going, I must form my own friends, and be my own protector. My life had hitherto been remarkably secluded and domestic; and this had given me invincible repugnance to new countenances. I loved my brothers, Elizabeth, and Clerval; these were old familiar faces; but I believed myself totally unfitted for the company of strangers. Such were my reflections as I commenced my journey; but as I proceeded, my spirits and hopes rose. I ardently desired the acquisition of knowledge. I had often, when at home, thought it hard to remain during my youth cooped up in one place, and had longed to enter the world, and take my station among other human beings. Now my desires were complied with, and it would, indeed, have been folly to repent. I had sufficient leisure for these and many other reflections during my journey to Ingolstadt, which was long and fatiguing. At length the high white steeple of the town met my eyes. I alighted, and was conducted to my solitary apartment, to spend the evening as I pleased. The next morning I delivered my letters of introduction, and paid a visit to some of the principal professors, and among others to M. Krempe, professor of natural philosophy. He received me with politeness, and asked me several questions concerning my progress in the different branches of science appertaining to natural philosophy. I mentioned, it is true, with fear and trembling, the only authors I had ever read upon those subjects. The professor stared Have you, he said, really spent your time in studying such nonsense? I replied in the affirmative. Every minute, continued M. Krempe with warmth, every instant that you have wasted on those books is utterly and entirely lost. You have burdened your memory with exploded systems, and useless names. Good God! in what desert land have you lived, where no one was kind enough to inform you that these fancies, which you have so greedily imbibed, are a thousand years old, and as musty as they are ancient? I little expected in this enlightened and scientific age to find a disciple of Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus. My dear Sir, you must begin your studies entirely anew. So saying, he stept aside, and wrote down a list of several books treating of natural philosophy, which he desired me to procure, and dismissed me, after mentioning that in the beginning of the following week he intended to commence a course of lectures upon natural philosophy in its general relations, and that M. Waldman, a fellowprofessor, would lecture upon chemistry the alternate days that he missed. I returned home, not disappointed, for I had long considered those authors useless whom the professor had so strongly reprobated; but I did not feel much inclined to study the books which I procured at his recommendation. M. Krempe was a little squat man, with a gruff voice and repulsive countenance; the teacher, therefore, did not prepossess me in favour of his doctrine. Besides, I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different, when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth. Such were my reflections during the first two or three days spent almost in solitude. But as the ensuing week commenced, I thought of the information which M. Krempe had given me concerning the lectures. And although I could not consent to go and hear that little conceited fellow deliver sentences out of a pulpit, I recollected what he had said of M. Waldman, whom I had never seen, as he had hitherto been out of town. Partly from curiosity, and partly from idleness, I went into the lecturing room, which M. Waldman entered shortly after. This professor was very unlike his colleague. He appeared about fifty years of age, but with an aspect expressive of the greatest benevolence; a few gray hairs covered his temples, but those at the back of his head were nearly black. His person was short, but remarkably erect; and his voice the sweetest I had ever heard. He began his lecture by a recapitulation of the history of chemistry and the various improvements made by different men of learning, pronouncing with fervour the names of the most distinguished discoverers. He then took a cursory view of the present state of the science, and explained many of its elementary terms. After having made a few preparatory experiments, he concluded with a panegyric upon modern chemistry, the terms of which I shall never forget The ancient teachers of this science, said he, promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pour over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and shew how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows. I departed highly pleased with the professor and his lecture, and paid him a visit the same evening. His manners in private were even more mild and attractive than in public; for there was a certain dignity in his mien during his lecture, which in his own house was replaced by the greatest affability and kindness. He heard with attention my little narration concerning my studies, and smiled at the names of Cornelius Agrippa, and Paracelsus, but without the contempt that M. Krempe had exhibited. He said, that these were men to whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were indebted for most of the foundations of their knowledge. They had left to us, as an easier task, to give new names, and arrange in connected classifications, the facts which they in a great degree had been the instruments of bringing to light. The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind. I listened to his statement, which was delivered without any presumption or affectation; and then added, that his lecture had removed my prejudices against modern chemists; and I, at the same time, requested his advice concerning the books I ought to procure. I am happy, said M. Waldman, to have gained a disciple; and if your application equals your ability, I have no doubt of your success. Chemistry is that branch of natural philosophy in which the greatest improvements have been and may be made; it is on that account that I have made it my peculiar study; but at the same time I have not neglected the other branches of science. A man would make but a very sorry chemist, if he attended to that department of human knowledge alone. If your wish is to become really a man of science, and not merely a petty experimentalist, I should advise you to apply to every branch of natural philosophy, including mathematics. He then took me into his laboratory, and explained to me the uses of his various machines; instructing me as to what I ought to procure, and promising me the use of his own, when I should have advanced far enough in the science not to derange their mechanism. He also gave me the list of books which I had requested; and I took my leave. Thus ended a day memorable to me; it decided my future destiny. CHAPTER III. From this day natural philosophy, and particularly chemistry, in the most comprehensive sense of the term, became nearly my sole occupation. I read with ardour those works, so full of genius and discrimination, which modern inquirers have written on these subjects. I attended the lectures, and cultivated the acquaintance, of the men of science of the university; and I found even in M. Krempe a great deal of sound sense and real information, combined, it is true, with a repulsive physiognomy and manners, but not on that account the less valuable. In M. Waldman I found a true friend. His gentleness was never tinged by dogmatism; and his instructions were given with an air of frankness and good nature, that banished every idea of pedantry. It was, perhaps, the amiable character of this man that inclined me more to that branch of natural philosophy which he professed, than an intrinsic love for the science itself. But this state of mind had place only in the first steps towards knowledge the more fully I entered into the science, the more exclusively I pursued it for its own sake. That application, which at first had been a matter of duty and resolution, now became so ardent and eager, that the stars often disappeared in the light of morning whilst I was yet engaged in my laboratory. As I applied so closely, it may be easily conceived that I improved rapidly. My ardour was indeed the astonishment of the students; and my proficiency, that of the masters. Professor Krempe often asked me, with a sly smile, how Cornelius Agrippa went on? whilst M. Waldman expressed the most heartfelt exultation in my progress. Two years passed in this manner, during which I paid no visit to Geneva, but was engaged, heart and soul, in the pursuit of some discoveries, which I hoped to make. None but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science. In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder.

A mind of moderate capacity, which closely pursues one study, must infallibly arrive at great proficiency in that study; and I, who continually sought the attainment of one object of pursuit, and was solely wrapt up in this, improved so rapidly, that, at the end of two years, I made some discoveries in the improvement of some chemical instruments, which procured me great esteem and admiration at the university. When I had arrived at this point, and had become as well acquainted with the theory and practice of natural philosophy as depended on the lessons of any of the professors at Ingolstadt, my residence there being no longer conducive to my improvements, I thought of returning to my friends and my native town, when an incident happened that protracted my stay. One of the phnonema which had peculiarly attracted my attention was the structure of the human frame, and, indeed, any animal endued with life. Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed? It was a bold question, and one which has ever been considered as a mystery; yet with how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries. I revolved these circumstances in my mind, and determined thenceforth to apply myself more particularly to those branches of natural philosophy which relate to physiology. Unless I had been animated by an almost supernatural enthusiasm, my application to this study would have been irksome, and almost intolerable. To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death. I became acquainted with the science of anatomy but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body. In my education my father had taken the greatest precautions that my mind should be impressed with no supernatural horrors. I do not ever remember to have trembled at a tale of superstition, or to have feared the apparition of a spirit. Darkness had no effect upon my fancy; and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm. Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay, and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel houses. My attention was fixed upon every object the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused, examining and analysing all the minuti of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon mea light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so many men of genius, who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret. Remember, I am not recording the vision of a madman. The sun does not more certainly shine in the heavens, than that which I now affirm is true. Some miracle might have produced it, yet the stages of the discovery were distinct and probable. After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter. The astonishment which I had at first experienced on this discovery soon gave place to delight and rapture. After so much time spent in painful labour, to arrive at once at the summit of my desires, was the most gratifying consummation of my toils. But this discovery was so great and overwhelming, that all the steps by which I had been progressively led to it were obliterated, and I beheld only the result. What had been the study and desire of the wisest men since the creation of the world, was now within my grasp. Not that, like a magic scene, it all opened upon me at once the information I had obtained was of a nature rather to direct my endeavours so soon as I should point them towards the object of my search, than to exhibit that object already accomplished. I was like the Arabian who had been buried with the dead, and found a passage to life aided only by one glimmering, and seemingly ineffectual light. I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted; that cannot be listen patiently until the end of my story, and you will easily perceive why I am reserved upon that subject. I will not lead you on, unguarded and ardent as I then was, to your destruction and infallible misery. Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow. When I found so astonishing a power placed within my hands, I hesitated a long time concerning the manner in which I should employ it. Although I possessed the capacity of bestowing animation, yet to prepare a frame for the reception of it, with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins, still remained a work of inconceivable difficulty and labour. I doubted at first whether I should attempt the creation of a being like myself or one of simpler organization; but my imagination was too much exalted by my first success to permit me to doubt of my ability to give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man. The materials at present within my command hardly appeared adequate to so arduous an undertaking; but I doubted not that I should ultimately succeed. I prepared myself for a multitude of reverses; my operations might be incessantly baffled, and at last my work be imperfect yet, when I considered the improvement which every day takes place in science and mechanics, I was encouraged to hope my present attempts would at least lay the foundations of future success. Nor could I consider the magnitude and complexity of my plan as any argument of its impracticability. It was with these feelings that I began the creation of a human being. As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably large. After having formed this determination, and having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials, I began. No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success. Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs. Pursuing these reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption. These thoughts supported my spirits, while I pursued my undertaking with unremitting ardour. My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated with confinement. Sometimes, on the very brink of certainty, I failed; yet still I clung to the hope which the next day or the next hour might realize. One secret which I alone possessed was the hope to which I had dedicated myself; and the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a resistless, and almost frantic impulse, urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit. It was indeed but a passing trance, that only made me feel with renewed acuteness so soon as, the unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old habits. I collected bones from charnel houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughterhouse furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion. The summer months passed while I was thus engaged, heart and soul, in one pursuit. It was a most beautiful season; never did the fields bestow a more plentiful harvest, or the vines yield a more luxuriant vintage but my eyes were insensible to the charms of nature. And the same feelings which made me neglect the scenes around me caused me also to forget those friends who were so many miles absent, and whom I had not seen for so long a time. I knew my silence disquieted them; and I well remembered the words of my father I know that while you are pleased with yourself, you will think of us with affection, and we shall hear regularly from you. You must pardon me, if I regard any interruption in your correspondence as a proof that your other duties are equally neglected. I knew well therefore what would be my fathers feelings; but I could not tear my thoughts from my employment, loathsome in itself, but which had taken an irresistible hold of my imagination. I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed. I then thought that my father would be unjust if he ascribed my neglect to vice, or faultiness on my part; but I am now convinced that he was justified in conceiving that I should not be altogether free from blame. A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Csar would have spared his country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed. But I forget that I am moralizing in the most interesting part of my tale; and your looks remind me to proceed. My father made no reproach in his letters; and only took notice of my silence by inquiring into my occupations more particularly than before. Winter, spring, and summer, passed away during my labours; but I did not watch the blossom or the expanding leavessights which before always yielded me supreme delight, so deeply was I engrossed in my occupation. The leaves of that year had withered before my work drew near to a close; and now every day shewed me more plainly how well I had succeeded. But my enthusiasm was checked by my anxiety, and I appeared rather like one doomed by slavery to toil in the mines, or any other unwholesome trade, than an artist occupied by his favourite employment. Every night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a most painful degree; a disease that I regretted the more because I had hitherto enjoyed most excellent health, and had always boasted of the firmness of my nerves. But I believed that exercise and amusement would soon drive away such symptoms; and I promised myself both of these, when my creation should be complete. CHAPTER IV. It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the halfextinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips. The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room, and continued a long time traversing my bedchamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep. At length lassitude succeeded to the tumult I had before endured; and I threw myself on the bed in my clothes, endeavouring to seek a few moments of forgetfulness. But it was in vain I slept indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the graveworms crawling in the folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror; a cold dew covered my forehead, my teeth chattered, and every limb became convulsed; when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the windowshutters, I beheld the wretchthe miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and rushed down stairs. I took refuge in the courtyard belonging to the house which I inhabited; where I remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life. Oh! no mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived. I passed the night wretchedly. Sometimes my pulse beat so quickly and hardly, that I felt the palpitation of every artery; at others, I nearly sank to the ground through languor and extreme weakness. Mingled with this horror, I felt the bitterness of disappointment dreams that had been my food and pleasant rest for so long a space, were now become a hell to me; and the change was so rapid, the overthrow so complete! Morning, dismal and wet, at length dawned, and discovered to my sleepless and aching eyes the church of Ingolstadt, its white steeple and clock, which indicated the sixth hour. The porter opened the gates of the court, which had that night been my asylum, and I issued into the streets, pacing them with quick steps, as if I sought to avoid the wretch whom I feared every turning of the street would present to my view. I did not dare return to the apartment which I inhabited, but felt impelled to hurry on, although wetted by the rain, which poured from a black and comfortless sky. I continued walking in this manner for some time, endeavouring, by bodily exercise, to ease the load that weighed upon my mind. I traversed the streets, without any clear conception of where I was, or what I was doing. My heart palpitated in the sickness of fear; and I hurried on with irregular steps, not daring to look about me Like one who, on a lonely road, Doth walk in fear and dread, And, having once turnd round, walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread. Continuing thus, I came at length opposite to the inn at which the various diligences and carriages usually stopped. Here I paused, I knew not why; but I remained some minutes with my eyes fixed on a coach that was coming towards me from the other end of the street. As it drew nearer, I observed that it was the Swiss diligence it stopped just where I was standing; and, on the door being opened, I perceived Henry Clerval, who, on seeing me, instantly sprung out. My dear Frankenstein, exclaimed he, how glad I am to see you! how fortunate that you should be here at the very moment of my alighting! Nothing could equal my delight on seeing Clerval; his presence brought back to my thoughts my father, Elizabeth, and all those scenes of home so dear to my recollection. I grasped his hand, and in a moment forgot my horror and misfortune; I felt suddenly, and for the first time during many months, calm and serene joy. I welcomed my friend, therefore, in the most cordial manner, and we walked towards my college. Clerval continued talking for some time about our mutual friends, and his own good fortune in being permitted to come to Ingolstadt. You may easily believe, said he, how great was the difficulty to persuade my father that it was not absolutely necessary for a merchant not to understand any thing except bookkeeping; and, indeed, I believe I left him incredulous to the last, for his constant answer to my unwearied entreaties was the same as that of the Dutch schoolmaster in the Vicar of Wakefield I have ten thousand florins a year without Greek, I eat heartily without Greek. But his affection for me at length overcame his dislike of learning, and he has permitted me to undertake a voyage of discovery to the land of knowledge. It gives me the greatest delight to see you; but tell me how you left my father, brothers, and Elizabeth. Very well, and very happy, only a little uneasy that they hear from you so seldom. By the bye, I mean to lecture you a little upon their account myself.But, my dear Frankenstein, continued he, stopping short, and gazing full in my face, I did not before remark how very ill you appear; so thin and pale; you look as if you had been watching for several nights. You have guessed right; I have lately been so deeply engaged in one occupation, that I have not allowed myself sufficient rest, as you see but I hope, I sincerely hope, that all these employments are now at an end, and that I am at length free. I trembled excessively; I could not endure to think of, and far less to allude to the occurrences of the preceding night. I walked with a quick pace, and we soon arrived at my college. I then reflected, and the thought made me shiver, that the creature whom I had left in my apartment might still be there, alive, and walking about. I dreaded to behold this monster; but I feared still more that Henry should see him. Entreating him therefore to remain a few minutes at the bottom of the stairs, I darted up towards my own room. My hand was already on the lock of the door before I recollected myself. I then paused; and a cold shivering came over me. I threw the door forcibly open, as children are accustomed to do when they expect a spectre to stand in waiting for them on the other side; but nothing appeared. I stepped fearfully in the apartment was empty; and my bedroom was also freed from its hideous guest. I could hardly believe that so great a goodfortune could have befallen me; but when I became assured that my enemy had indeed fled, I clapped my hands for joy, and ran down to Clerval. We ascended into my room, and the servant presently brought breakfast; but I was unable to contain myself. It was not joy only that possessed me; I felt my flesh tingle with excess of sensitiveness, and my pulse beat rapidly. I was unable to remain for a single instant in the same place; I jumped over the chairs, clapped my hands, and laughed aloud. Clerval at first attributed my unusual spirits to joy on his arrival; but when he observed me more attentively, he saw a wildness in my eyes for which he could not account; and my loud, unrestrained, heartless laughter, frightened and astonished him. My dear Victor, cried he, what, for Gods sake, is the matter? Do not laugh in that manner. How ill you are! What is the cause of all this? Do not ask me, cried I, putting my hands before my eyes, for I thought I saw the dreaded spectre glide into the room; he can tell.Oh, save me! save me! I imagined that the monster seized me; I struggled furiously, and fell down in a fit. Poor Clerval! what must have been his feelings? A meeting, which he anticipated with such joy, so strangely turned to bitterness. But I was not the witness of his grief; for I was lifeless, and did not recover my senses for a long, long time. This was the commencement of a nervous fever, which confined me for several months. During all that time Henry was my only nurse. I afterwards learned that, knowing my fathers advanced age, and unfitness for so long a journey, and how wretched my sickness would make Elizabeth, he spared them this grief by concealing the extent of my disorder. He knew that I could not have a more kind and attentive nurse than himself; and, firm in the hope he felt of my recovery, he did not doubt that, instead of doing harm, he performed the kindest action that he could towards them. But I was in reality very ill; and surely nothing but the unbounded and unremitting attentions of my friend could have restored me to life. The form of the monster on whom I had bestowed existence was for ever before my eyes, and I raved incessantly concerning him. Doubtless my words surprised Henry he at first believed them to be the wanderings of my disturbed imagination; but the pertinacity with which I continually recurred to the same subject persuaded him that my disorder indeed owed its origin to some uncommon and terrible event. By very slow degrees, and with frequent relapses, that alarmed and grieved my friend, I recovered. I remember the first time I became capable of observing outward objects with any kind of pleasure, I perceived that the fallen leaves had disappeared, and that the young buds were shooting forth from the trees that shaded my window. It was a divine spring; and the season contributed greatly to my convalescence. I felt also sentiments of joy and affection revive in my bosom; my gloom disappeared, and in a short time I became as cheerful as before I was attacked by the fatal passion. Dearest Clerval, exclaimed I, how kind, how very good you are to me. This whole winter, instead of being spent in study, as you promised yourself, has been consumed in my sick room. How shall I ever repay you? I feel the greatest remorse for the disappointment of which I have been the occasion; but you will forgive me. You will repay me entirely, if you do not discompose yourself, but get well as fast as you can; and since you appear in such good spirits, I may speak to you on one subject, may I not? I trembled. One subject! what could it be? Could he allude to an object on whom I dared not even think? Compose yourself, said Clerval, who observed my change of colour, I will not mention it, if it agitates you; but your father and cousin would be very happy if they received a letter from you in your own handwriting. They hardly know how ill you have been, and are uneasy at your long silence. Is that all? my dear Henry. How could you suppose that my first thought would not fly towards those dear, dear friends whom I love, and who are so deserving of my love. If this is your present temper, my friend, you will perhaps be glad to see a letter that has been lying here some days for you it is from your cousin, I believe. CHAPTER V. Clerval then put the following letter into my hands. To V. Frankenstein. My Dear Cousin, I cannot describe to you the uneasiness we have all felt concerning your health. We cannot help imagining that your friend Clerval conceals the extent of your disorder for it is now several months since we have seen your handwriting; and all this time you have been obliged to dictate your letters to Henry. Surely, Victor, you must have been exceedingly ill; and this makes us all very wretched, as much so nearly as after the death of your dear mother. My uncle was almost persuaded that you were indeed dangerously ill, and could hardly be restrained from undertaking a journey to Ingolstadt. Clerval always writes that you are getting better; I eagerly hope that you will confirm this intelligence soon in your own handwriting; for indeed, indeed, Victor, we are all very miserable on this account. Relieve us from this fear, and we shall be the happiest creatures in the world. Your fathers health is now so vigorous, that he appears ten years younger since last winter. Ernest also is so much improved, that you would hardly know him he is now nearly sixteen, and has lost that sickly appearance which he had some years ago; he is grown quite robust and active. My uncle and I conversed a long time last night about what profession Ernest should follow. His constant illness when young has deprived him of the habits of application; and now that he enjoys good health, he is continually in the open air, climbing the hills, or rowing on the lake. I therefore proposed that he should be a farmer; which you know, Cousin, is a favourite scheme of mine. A farmers is a very healthy happy life; and the least hurtful, or rather the most beneficial profession of any. My uncle had an idea of his being educated as an advocate, that through his interest he might become a judge. But, besides that he is not at all fitted for such an occupation, it is certainly more creditable to cultivate the earth for the sustenance of man, than to be the confidant, and sometimes the accomplice, of his vices; which is the profession of a lawyer. I said, that the employments of a prosperous farmer, if they were not a more honourable, they were at least a happier species of occupation than that of a judge, whose misfortune it was always to meddle with the dark side of human nature. My uncle smiled, and said, that I ought to be an advocate myself, which put an end to the conversation on that subject. And now I must tell you a little story that will please, and perhaps amuse you. Do you not remember Justine Moritz? Probably you do not; I will relate her history, therefore, in a few words. Madame Moritz, her mother, was a widow with four children, of whom Justine was the third. This girl had always been the favourite of her father; but, through a strange perversity, her mother could not endure her, and, after the death of M. Moritz, treated her very ill. My aunt observed this; and, when Justine was twelve years of age, prevailed on her mother to allow her to live at her house. The republican institutions of our country have produced simpler and happier manners than those which prevail in the great monarchies that surround it. Hence there is less distinction between the several classes of its inhabitants; and the lower orders being neither so poor nor so despised, their manners are more refined and moral. A servant in Geneva does not mean the same thing as a servant in France and England. Justine, thus received in our family, learned the duties of a servant; a condition which, in our fortunate country, does not include the idea of ignorance, and a sacrifice of the dignity of a human being. After what I have said, I dare say you well remember the heroine of my little tale for Justine was a great favourite of yours; and I recollect you once remarked, that if you were in an illhumour, one glance from Justine could dissipate it, for the same reason that Ariosto gives concerning the beauty of Angelicashe looked so frankhearted and happy. My aunt conceived a great attachment for her, by which she was induced to give her an education superior to that which she had at first intended. This benefit was fully repaid; Justine was the most grateful little creature in the world I do not mean that she made any professions, I never heard one pass her lips; but you could see by her eyes that she almost adored her protectress. Although her disposition was gay, and in many respects inconsiderate, yet she paid the greatest attention to every gesture of my aunt. She thought her the model of all excellence, and endeavoured to imitate her phraseology and manners, so that even now she often reminds me of her. When my dearest aunt died, every one was too much occupied in their own grief to notice poor Justine, who had attended her during her illness with the most anxious affection. Poor Justine was very ill; but other trials were reserved for her. One by one, her brothers and sister died; and her mother, with the exception of her neglected daughter, was left childless. The conscience of the woman was troubled; she began to think that the deaths of her favourites was a judgment from heaven to chastise her partiality. She was a Roman Catholic; and I believe her confessor confirmed the idea which she had conceived. Accordingly, a few months after your departure for Ingolstadt, Justine was called home by her repentant mother. Poor girl! she wept when she quitted our house she was much altered since the death of my aunt; grief had given softness and a winning mildness to her manners, which had before been remarkable for vivacity. Nor was her residence at her mothers house of a nature to restore her gaiety. The poor woman was very vacillating in her repentance. She sometimes begged Justine to forgive her unkindness, but much oftener accused her of having caused the deaths of her brothers and sister. Perpetual fretting at length threw Madame Moritz into a decline, which at first increased her irritability, but she is now at peace for ever. She died on the first approach of cold weather, at the beginning of this last winter. Justine has returned to us; and I assure you I love her tenderly. She is very clever and gentle, and extremely pretty; as I mentioned before, her mien and her expressions continually remind me of my dear aunt. I must say also a few words to you, my dear cousin, of little darling William. I wish you could see him; he is very tall of his age, with sweet laughing blue eyes, dark eyelashes, and curling hair.

When he smiles, two little dimples appear on each cheek, which are rosy with health. He has already had one or two little wives, but Louisa Biron is his favourite, a pretty little girl of five years of age. Now, dear Victor, I dare say you wish to be indulged in a little gossip concerning the good people of Geneva. The pretty Miss Mansfield has already received the congratulatory visits on her approaching marriage with a young Englishman, John Melbourne, Esq. Her ugly sister, Manon, married M. Duvillard, the rich banker, last autumn. Your favourite schoolfellow, Louis Manoir, has suffered several misfortunes since the departure of Clerval from Geneva. But he has already recovered his spirits, and is reported to be on the point of marrying a very lively pretty Frenchwoman, Madame Tavernier. She is a widow, and much older than Manoir; but she is very much admired, and a favourite with every body. I have written myself into good spirits, dear cousin; yet I cannot conclude without again anxiously inquiring concerning your health. Dear Victor, if you are not very ill, write yourself, and make your father and all of us happy; orI cannot bear to think of the other side of the question; my tears already flow. Adieu, my dearest cousin. Elizabeth Lavenza. Geneva, March 18th, 17. Dear, dear Elizabeth! I exclaimed when I had read her letter, I will write instantly, and relieve them from the anxiety they must feel. I wrote, and this exertion greatly fatigued me; but my convalescence had commenced, and proceeded regularly. In another fortnight I was able to leave my chamber. One of my first duties on my recovery was to introduce Clerval to the several professors of the university. In doing this, I underwent a kind of rough usage, ill befitting the wounds that my mind had sustained. Ever since the fatal night, the end of my labours, and the beginning of my misfortunes, I had conceived a violent antipathy even to the name of natural philosophy. When I was otherwise quite restored to health, the sight of a chemical instrument would renew all the agony of my nervous symptoms. Henry saw this, and had removed all my apparatus from my view. He had also changed my apartment; for he perceived that I had acquired a dislike for the room which had previously been my laboratory. But these cares of Clerval were made of no avail when I visited the professors. M. Waldman inflicted torture when he praised, with kindness and warmth, the astonishing progress I had made in the sciences. He soon perceived that I disliked the subject; but, not guessing the real cause, he attributed my feelings to modesty, and changed the subject from my improvement to the science itself, with a desire, as I evidently saw, of drawing me out. What could I do? He meant to please, and he tormented me. I felt as if he had placed carefully, one by one, in my view those instruments which were to be afterwards used in putting me to a slow and cruel death. I writhed under his words, yet dared not exhibit the pain I felt. Clerval, whose eyes and feelings were always quick in discerning the sensations of others, declined the subject, alleging, in excuse, his total ignorance; and the conversation took a more general turn. I thanked my friend from my heart, but I did not speak. I saw plainly that he was surprised, but he never attempted to draw my secret from me; and although I loved him with a mixture of affection and reverence that knew no bounds, yet I could never persuade myself to confide to him that event which was so often present to my recollection, but which I feared the detail to another would only impress more deeply. M. Krempe was not equally docile; and in my condition at that time, of almost insupportable sensitiveness, his harsh blunt encomiums gave me even more pain than the benevolent approbation of M. Waldman. Dn the fellow! cried he; why, M. Clerval, I assure you he has outstript us all. Aye, stare if you please; but it is nevertheless true. A youngster who, but a few years ago, believed Cornelius Agrippa as firmly as the gospel, has now set himself at the head of the university; and if he is not soon pulled down, we shall all be out of countenance.Aye, aye, continued he, observing my face expressive of suffering, M. Frankenstein is modest; an excellent quality in a young man. Young men should be diffident of themselves, you know, M. Clerval; I was myself when young but that wears out in a very short time. M. Krempe had now commenced an eulogy on himself, which happily turned the conversation from a subject that was so annoying to me. Clerval was no natural philosopher. His imagination was too vivid for the minuti of science. Languages were his principal study; and he sought, by acquiring their elements, to open a field for selfinstruction on his return to Geneva. Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew, gained his attention, after he had made himself perfectly master of Greek and Latin. For my own part, idleness had ever been irksome to me; and now that I wished to fly from reflection, and hated my former studies, I felt great relief in being the fellowpupil with my friend, and found not only instruction but consolation in the works of the orientalists. Their melancholy is soothing, and their joy elevating to a degree I never experienced in studying the authors of any other country. When you read their writings, life appears to consist in a warm sun and garden of roses,in the smiles and frowns of a fair enemy, and the fire that consumes your own heart. How different from the manly and heroical poetry of Greece and Rome. Summer passed away in these occupations, and my return to Geneva was fixed for the latter end of autumn; but being delayed by several accidents, winter and snow arrived, the roads were deemed impassable, and my journey was retarded until the ensuing spring. I felt this delay very bitterly; for I longed to see my native town, and my beloved friends. My return had only been delayed so long from an unwillingness to leave Clerval in a strange place, before he had become acquainted with any of its inhabitants. The winter, however, was spent cheerfully; and although the spring was uncommonly late, when it came, its beauty compensated for its dilatoriness. The month of May had already commenced, and I expected the letter daily which was to fix the date of my departure, when Henry proposed a pedestrian tour in the environs of Ingolstadt that I might bid a personal farewell to the country I had so long inhabited. I acceded with pleasure to this proposition I was fond of exercise, and Clerval had always been my favourite companion in the rambles of this nature that I had taken among the scenes of my native country. We passed a fortnight in these perambulations my health and spirits had long been restored, and they gained additional strength from the salubrious air I breathed, the natural incidents of our progress, and the conversation of my friend. Study had before secluded me from the intercourse of my fellowcreatures, and rendered me unsocial; but Clerval called forth the better feelings of my heart; he again taught me to love the aspect of nature, and the cheerful faces of children. Excellent friend! how sincerely did you love me, and endeavour to elevate my mind, until it was on a level with your own. A selfish pursuit had cramped and narrowed me, until your gentleness and affection warmed and opened my senses; I became the same happy creature who, a few years ago, loving and beloved by all, had no sorrow or care. When happy, inanimate nature had the power of bestowing on me the most delightful sensations. A serene sky and verdant fields filled me with ecstacy. The present season was indeed divine; the flowers of spring bloomed in the hedges, while those of summer were already in bud I was undisturbed by thoughts which during the preceding year had pressed upon me, notwithstanding my endeavours to throw them off, with an invincible burden. Henry rejoiced in my gaiety, and sincerely sympathized in my feelings he exerted himself to amuse me, while he expressed the sensations that filled his soul. The resources of his mind on this occasion were truly astonishing his conversation was full of imagination; and very often, in imitation of the Persian and Arabic writers, he invented tales of wonderful fancy and passion. At other times he repeated my favourite poems, or drew me out into arguments, which he supported with great ingenuity. We returned to our college on a Sunday afternoon the peasants were dancing, and every one we met appeared gay and happy. My own spirits were high, and I bounded along with feelings of unbridled joy and hilarity. CHAPTER VI. On my return, I found the following letter from my father To V. Frankenstein. My Dear Victor, You have probably waited impatiently for a letter to fix the date of your return to us; and I was at first tempted to write only a few lines, merely mentioning the day on which I should expect you. But that would be a cruel kindness, and I dare not do it. What would be your surprise, my son, when you expected a happy and gay welcome, to behold, on the contrary, tears and wretchedness? And how, Victor, can I relate our misfortune? Absence cannot have rendered you callous to our joys and griefs; and how shall I inflict pain on an absent child? I wish to prepare you for the woeful news, but I know it is impossible; even now your eye skims over the page, to seek the words which are to convey to you the horrible tidings. William is dead!that sweet child, whose smiles delighted and warmed my heart, who was so gentle, yet so gay! Victor, he is murdered! I will not attempt to console you; but will simply relate the circumstances of the transaction. Last Thursday (May 7th) I, my niece, and your two brothers, went to walk in Plainpalais. The evening was warm and serene, and we prolonged our walk farther than usual. It was already dusk before we thought of returning; and then we discovered that William and Ernest, who had gone on before, were not to be found. We accordingly rested on a seat until they should return. Presently Ernest came, and inquired if we had seen his brother he said, that they had been playing together, that William had run away to hide himself, and that he vainly sought for him, and afterwards waited for him a long time, but that he did not return. This account rather alarmed us, and we continued to search for him until night fell, when Elizabeth conjectured that he might have returned to the house. He was not there. We returned again, with torches; for I could not rest, when I thought that my sweet boy had lost himself, and was exposed to all the damps and dews of night Elizabeth also suffered extreme anguish. About five in the morning I discovered my lovely boy, whom the night before I had seen blooming and active in health, stretched on the grass livid and motionless the print of the murderers finger was on his neck. He was conveyed home, and the anguish that was visible in my countenance betrayed the secret to Elizabeth. She was very earnest to see the corpse. At first I attempted to prevent her; but she persisted, and entering the room where it lay, hastily examined the neck of the victim, and clasping her hands exclaimed, O God! I have murdered my darling infant! She fainted, and was restored with extreme difficulty. When she again lived, it was only to weep and sigh. She told me, that that same evening William had teazed her to let him wear a very valuable miniature that she possessed of your mother. This picture is gone, and was doubtless the temptation which urged the murderer to the deed. We have no trace of him at present, although our exertions to discover him are unremitted; but they will not restore my beloved William. Come, dearest Victor; you alone can console Elizabeth. She weeps continually, and accuses herself unjustly as the cause of his death; her words pierce my heart. We are all unhappy; but will not that be an additional motive for you, my son, to return and be our comforter? Your dear mother! Alas, Victor! I now say, Thank God she did not live to witness the cruel, miserable death of her youngest darling! Come, Victor; not brooding thoughts of vengeance against the assassin, but with feelings of peace and gentleness, that will heal, instead of festering the wounds of our minds. Enter the house of mourning, my friend, but with kindness and affection for those who love you, and not with hatred for your enemies. Your affectionate and afflicted father, Alphonse Frankenstein. Geneva, May 12th, 17. Clerval, who had watched my countenance as I read this letter, was surprised to observe the despair that succeeded to the joy I at first expressed on receiving news from my friends. I threw the letter on the table, and covered my face with my hands. My dear Frankenstein, exclaimed Henry, when he perceived me weep with bitterness, are you always to be unhappy? My dear friend, what has happened? I motioned to him to take up the letter, while I walked up and down the room in the extremest agitation. Tears also gushed from the eyes of Clerval, as he read the account of my misfortune. I can offer you no consolation, my friend, said he; your disaster is irreparable. What do you intend to do? To go instantly to Geneva come with me, Henry, to order the horses. During our walk, Clerval endeavoured to raise my spirits. He did not do this by common topics of consolation, but by exhibiting the truest sympathy. Poor William! said he, that dear child; he now sleeps with his angel mother. His friends mourn and weep, but he is at rest he does not now feel the murderers grasp; a sod covers his gentle form, and he knows no pain. He can no longer be a fit subject for pity; the survivors are the greatest sufferers, and for them time is the only consolation. Those maxims of the Stoics, that death was no evil, and that the mind of man ought to be superior to despair on the eternal absence of a beloved object, ought not to be urged. Even Cato wept over the dead body of his brother. Clerval spoke thus as we hurried through the streets; the words impressed themselves on my mind, and I remembered them afterwards in solitude. But now, as soon as the horses arrived, I hurried into a cabriole, and bade farewell to my friend. My journey was very melancholy. At first I wished to hurry on, for I longed to console and sympathize with my loved and sorrowing friends; but when I drew near my native town, I slackened my progress. I could hardly sustain the multitude of feelings that crowded into my mind. I passed through scenes familiar to my youth, but which I had not seen for nearly six years. How altered every thing might be during that time? One sudden and desolating change had taken place; but a thousand little circumstances might have by degrees worked other alterations which, although they were done more tranquilly, might not be the less decisive. Fear overcame me; I dared not advance, dreading a thousand nameless evils that made me tremble, although I was unable to define them. I remained two days at Lausanne, in this painful state of mind. I contemplated the lake the waters were placid; all around was calm, and the snowy mountains, the palaces of nature, were not changed. By degrees the calm and heavenly scene restored me, and I continued my journey towards Geneva. The road ran by the side of the lake, which became narrower as I approached my native town. I discovered more distinctly the black sides of Jura, and the bright summit of Mont Blnc; I wept like a child Dear mountains! my own beautiful lake! how do you welcome your wanderer? Your summits are clear; the sky and lake are blue and placid. Is this to prognosticate peace, or to mock at my unhappiness? I fear, my friend, that I shall render myself tedious by dwelling on these preliminary circumstances; but they were days of comparative happiness, and I think of them with pleasure. My country, my beloved country! who but a native can tell the delight I took in again beholding thy streams, thy mountains, and, more than all, thy lovely lake. Yet, as I drew nearer home, grief and fear again overcame me. Night also closed around; and when I could hardly see the dark mountains, I felt still more gloomily. The picture appeared a vast and dim scene of evil, and I foresaw obscurely that I was destined to become the most wretched of human beings. Alas! I prophesied truly, and failed only in one single circumstance, that in all the misery I imagined and dreaded, I did not conceive the hundredth part of the anguish I was destined to endure. It was completely dark when I arrived in the environs of Geneva; the gates of the town were already shut; and I was obliged to pass the night at Secheron, a village half a league to the east of the city. The sky was serene; and, as I was unable to rest, I resolved to visit the spot where my poor William had been murdered. As I could not pass through the town, I was obliged to cross the lake in a boat to arrive at Plainpalais. During this short voyage I saw the lightnings playing on the summit of Mont Blnc in the most beautiful figures. The storm appeared to approach rapidly; and, on landing, I ascended a low hill, that I might observe its progress. It advanced; the heavens were clouded, and I soon felt the rain coming slowly in large drops, but its violence quickly increased. I quitted my seat, and walked on, although the darkness and storm increased every minute, and the thunder burst with a terrific crash over my head. It was echoed from Salve, the Juras, and the Alps of Savoy; vivid flashes of lightning dazzled my eyes, illuminating the lake, making it appear like a vast sheet of fire; then for an instant every thing seemed of a pitchy darkness, until the eye recovered itself from the preceding flash. The storm, as is often the case in Switzerland, appeared at once in various parts of the heavens. The most violent storm hung exactly north of the town, over that part of the lake which lies between the promontory of Belrive and the village of Copt. Another storm enlightened Jura with faint flashes; and another darkened and sometimes disclosed the Mle, a peaked mountain to the east of the lake. While I watched the storm, so beautiful yet terrific, I wandered on with a hasty step. This noble war in the sky elevated my spirits; I clasped my hands, and exclaimed aloud, William, dear angel! this is thy funeral, this thy dirge! As I said these words, I perceived in the gloom a figure which stole from behind a clump of trees near me; I stood fixed, gazing intently I could not be mistaken. A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy dmon to whom I had given life. What did he there? Could he be (I shuddered at the conception) the murderer of my brother? No sooner did that idea cross my imagination, than I became convinced of its truth; my teeth chattered, and I was forced to lean against a tree for support. The figure passed me quickly, and I lost it in the gloom. Nothing in human shape could have destroyed that fair child. He was the murderer! I could not doubt it. The mere presence of the idea was an irresistible proof of the fact. I thought of pursuing the devil; but it would have been in vain, for another flash discovered him to me hanging among the rocks of the nearly perpendicular ascent of Mont Salve, a hill that bounds Plainpalais on the south. He soon reached the summit, and disappeared. I remained motionless. The thunder ceased; but the rain still continued, and the scene was enveloped in an impenetrable darkness. I revolved in my mind the events which I had until now sought to forget the whole train of my progress towards the creation; the appearance of the work of my own hands alive at my bed side; its departure. Two years had now nearly elapsed since the night on which he first received life; and was this his first crime? Alas! I had turned loose into the world a depraved wretch, whose delight was in carnage and misery; had he not murdered my brother? No one can conceive the anguish I suffered during the remainder of the night, which I spent, cold and wet, in the open air. But I did not feel the inconvenience of the weather; my imagination was busy in scenes of evil and despair. I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror, such as the deed which he had now done, nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me. Day dawned; and I directed my steps towards the town. The gates were open; and I hastened to my fathers house. My first thought was to discover what I knew of the murderer, and cause instant pursuit to be made. But I paused when I reflected on the story that I had to tell. A being whom I myself had formed, and endued with life, had met me at midnight among the precipices of an inaccessible mountain. I remembered also the nervous fever with which I had been seized just at the time that I dated my creation, and which would give an air of delirium to a tale otherwise so utterly improbable. I well knew that if any other had communicated such a relation to me, I should have looked upon it as the ravings of insanity. Besides, the strange nature of the animal would elude all pursuit, even if I were so far credited as to persuade my relatives to commence it. Besides, of what use would be pursuit? Who could arrest a creature capable of scaling the overhanging sides of Mont Salve? These reflections determined me, and I resolved to remain silent. It was about five in the morning when I entered my fathers house. I told the servants not to disturb the family, and went into the library to attend their usual hour of rising. Six years had elapsed, passed as a dream but for one indelible trace, and I stood in the same place where I had last embraced my father before my departure for Ingolstadt. Beloved and respectable parent! He still remained to me. I gazed on the picture of my mother, which stood over the mantlepiece. It was an historical subject, painted at my fathers desire, and represented Caroline Beaufort in an agony of despair, kneeling by the coffin of her dead father. Her garb was rustic, and her cheek pale; but there was an air of dignity and beauty, that hardly permitted the sentiment of pity. Below this picture was a miniature of William; and my tears flowed when I looked upon it. While I was thus engaged, Ernest entered he had heard me arrive, and hastened to welcome me. He expressed a sorrowful delight to see me Welcome, my dearest Victor, said he. Ah! I wish you had come three months ago, and then you would have found us all joyous and delighted. But we are now unhappy; and, I am afraid, tears instead of smiles will be your welcome. Our father looks so sorrowful this dreadful event seems to have revived in his mind his grief on the death of Mamma. Poor Elizabeth also is quite inconsolable. Ernest began to weep as he said these words. Do not, said I, welcome me thus; try to be more calm, that I may not be absolutely miserable the moment I enter my fathers house after so long an absence. But, tell me, how does my father support his misfortunes? and how is my poor Elizabeth? She indeed requires consolation; she accused herself of having caused the death of my brother, and that made her very wretched. But since the murderer has been discovered The murderer discovered! Good God! how can that be? who could attempt to pursue him? It is impossible; one might as well try to overtake the winds, or confine a mountainstream with a straw. I do not know what you mean; but we were all very unhappy when she was discovered. No one would believe it at first; and even now Elizabeth will not be convinced, notwithstanding all the evidence. Indeed, who would credit that Justine Moritz, who was so amiable, and fond of all the family, could all at once become so extremely wicked? Justine Moritz! Poor, poor girl, is she the accused? But it is wrongfully; every one knows that; no one believes it, surely, Ernest? No one did at first; but several circumstances came out, that have almost forced conviction upon us and her own behaviour has been so confused, as to add to the evidence of facts a weight that, I fear, leaves no hope for doubt. But she will be tried today, and you will then hear all. He related that, the morning on which the murder of poor William had been discovered, Justine had been taken ill, and confined to her bed; and, after several days, one of the servants, happening to examine the apparel she had worn on the night of the murder, had discovered in her pocket the picture of my mother, which had been judged to be the temptation of the murderer. The servant instantly shewed it to one of the others, who, without saying a word to any of the family, went to a magistrate; and, upon their deposition, Justine was apprehended. On being charged with the fact, the poor girl confirmed the suspicion in a great measure by her extreme confusion of manner. This was a strange tale, but it did not shake my faith; and I replied earnestly, You are all mistaken; I know the murderer. Justine, poor, good Justine, is innocent. At that instant my father entered. I saw unhappiness deeply impressed on his countenance, but he endeavoured to welcome me cheerfully; and, after we had exchanged our mournful greeting, would have introduced some other topic than that of our disaster, had not Ernest exclaimed, Good God, Papa! Victor says that he knows who was the murderer of poor William. We do also, unfortunately, replied my father; for indeed I had rather have been for ever ignorant than have discovered so much depravity and ingratitude in one I valued so highly. My dear father, you are mistaken; Justine is innocent. If she is, God forbid that she should suffer as guilty. She is to be tried today, and I hope, I sincerely hope, that she will be acquitted. This speech calmed me. I was firmly convinced in my own mind that Justine, and indeed every human being, was guiltless of this murder. I had no fear, therefore, that any circumstantial evidence could be brought forward strong enough to convict her; and, in this assurance, I calmed myself, expecting the trial with eagerness, but without prognosticating an evil result. We were soon joined by Elizabeth. Time had made great alterations in her form since I had last beheld her. Six years before she had been a pretty, goodhumoured girl, whom every one loved and caressed. She was now a woman in stature and expression of countenance, which was uncommonly lovely. An open and capacious forehead gave indications of a good understanding, joined to great frankness of disposition. Her eyes were hazel, and expressive of mildness, now through recent affliction allied to sadness. Her hair was of a rich, dark auburn, her complexion fair, and her figure slight and graceful. She welcomed me with the greatest affection. Your arrival, my dear cousin, said she, fills me with hope. You perhaps will find some means to justify my poor guiltless Justine. Alas! who is safe, if she be convicted of crime? I rely on her innocence as certainly as I do upon my own. Our misfortune is doubly hard to us; we have not only lost that lovely darling boy, but this poor girl, whom I sincerely love, is to be torn away by even a worse fate. If she is condemned, I never shall know joy more. But she will not, I am sure she will not; and then I shall be happy again, even after the sad death of my little William. She is innocent, my Elizabeth, said I, and that shall be proved; fear nothing, but let your spirits be cheered by the assurance of her acquittal. How kind you are! every one else believes in her guilt, and that made me wretched; for I knew that it was impossible and to see every one else prejudiced in so deadly a manner, rendered me hopeless and despairing. She wept. Sweet niece, said my father, dry your tears. If she is, as you believe, innocent, rely on the justice of our judges, and the activity with which I shall prevent the slightest shadow of partiality. CHAPTER VII. We passed a few sad hours, until eleven oclock, when the trial was to commence. My father and the rest of the family being obliged to attend as witnesses, I accompanied them to the court. During the whole of this wretched mockery of justice, I suffered living torture. It was to be decided, whether the result of my curiosity and lawless devices would cause the death of two of my fellowbeings one a smiling babe, full of innocence and joy; the other far more dreadfully murdered, with every aggravation of infamy that could make the murder memorable in horror. Justine also was a girl of merit, and possessed qualities which promised to render her life happy now all was to be obliterated in an ignominious grave; and I the cause! A thousand times rather would I have confessed myself guilty of the crime ascribed to Justine; but I was absent when it was committed, and such a declaration would have been considered as the ravings of a madman, and would not have exculpated her who suffered through me. The appearance of Justine was calm. She was dressed in mourning; and her countenance, always engaging, was rendered, by the solemnity of her feelings, exquisitely beautiful. Yet she appeared confident in innocence, and did not tremble, although gazed on and execrated by thousands; for all the kindness which her beauty might otherwise have excited, was obliterated in the minds of the spectators by the imagination of the enormity she was supposed to have committed. She was tranquil, yet her tranquillity was evidently constrained; and as her confusion had before been adduced as a proof of her guilt, she worked up her mind to an appearance of courage. When she entered the court, she threw her eyes round it, and quickly discovered where we were seated. A tear seemed to dim her eye when she saw us; but she quickly recovered herself, and a look of sorrowful affection seemed to attest her utter guiltlessness. The trial began; and after the advocate against her had stated the charge, several witnesses were called. Several strange facts combined against her, which might have staggered any one who had not such proof of her innocence as I had. She had been out the whole of the night on which the murder had been committed, and towards morning had been perceived by a marketwoman not far from the spot where the body of the murdered child had been afterwards found. The woman asked her what she did there; but she looked very strangely, and only returned a confused and unintelligible answer. She returned to the house about eight oclock; and when one inquired where she had passed the night, she replied, that she had been looking for the child, and demanded earnestly, if any thing had been heard concerning him. When shewn the body, she fell into violent hysterics, and kept her bed for several days. The picture was then produced, which the servant had found in her pocket; and when Elizabeth, in a faltering voice, proved that it was the same which, an hour before the child had been missed, she had placed round his neck, a murmur of horror and indignation filled the court. Justine was called on for her defence. As the trial had proceeded, her countenance had altered. Surprise, horror, and misery, were strongly expressed. Sometimes she struggled with her tears; but when she was desired to plead, she collected her powers, and spoke in an audible although variable voice God knows, she said, how entirely I am innocent.

But I do not pretend that my protestations should acquit me I rest my innocence on a plain and simple explanation of the facts which have been adduced against me; and I hope the character I have always borne will incline my judges to a favourable interpretation, where any circumstance appears doubtful or suspicious. She then related that, by the permission of Elizabeth, she had passed the evening of the night on which the murder had been committed, at the house of an aunt at Chne, a village situated at about a league from Geneva. On her return, at about nine oclock, she met a man, who asked her if she had seen any thing of the child who was lost. She was alarmed by this account, and passed several hours in looking for him, when the gates of Geneva were shut, and she was forced to remain several hours of the night in a barn belonging to a cottage, being unwilling to call up the inhabitants, to whom she was well known. Unable to rest or sleep, she quitted her asylum early, that she might again endeavour to find my brother. If she had gone near the spot where his body lay, it was without her knowledge. That she had been bewildered when questioned by the marketwoman, was not surprising, since she had passed a sleepless night, and the fate of poor William was yet uncertain. Concerning the picture she could give no account. I know, continued the unhappy victim, how heavily and fatally this one circumstance weighs against me, but I have no power of explaining it; and when I have expressed my utter ignorance, I am only left to conjecture concerning the probabilities by which it might have been placed in my pocket. But here also I am checked. I believe that I have no enemy on earth, and none surely would have been so wicked as to destroy me wantonly. Did the murderer place it there? I know of no opportunity afforded him for so doing; or if I had, why should he have stolen the jewel, to part with it again so soon? I commit my cause to the justice of my judges, yet I see no room for hope. I beg permission to have a few witnesses examined concerning my character; and if their testimony shall not overweigh my supposed guilt, I must be condemned, although I would pledge my salvation on my innocence. Several witnesses were called, who had known her for many years, and they spoke well of her; but fear, and hatred of the crime of which they supposed her guilty, rendered them timorous, and unwilling to come forward. Elizabeth saw even this last resource, her excellent dispositions and irreproachable conduct, about to fail the accused, when, although violently agitated, she desired permission to address the court. I am, said she, the cousin of the unhappy child who was murdered, or rather his sister, for I was educated by and have lived with his parents ever since and even long before his birth. It may therefore be judged indecent in me to come forward on this occasion; but when I see a fellowcreature about to perish through the cowardice of her pretended friends, I wish to be allowed to speak, that I may say what I know of her character. I am well acquainted with the accused. I have lived in the same house with her, at one time for five, and at another for nearly two years. During all that period she appeared to me the most amiable and benevolent of human creatures. She nursed Madame Frankenstein, my aunt, in her last illness with the greatest affection and care; and afterwards attended her own mother during a tedious illness, in a manner that excited the admiration of all who knew her. After which she again lived in my uncles house, where she was beloved by all the family. She was warmly attached to the child who is now dead, and acted towards him like a most affectionate mother. For my own part, I do not hesitate to say, that, notwithstanding all the evidence produced against her, I believe and rely on her perfect innocence. She had no temptation for such an action as to the bauble on which the chief proof rests, if she had earnestly desired it, I should have willingly given it to her; so much do I esteem and value her. Excellent Elizabeth! A murmur of approbation was heard; but it was excited by her generous interference, and not in favour of poor Justine, on whom the public indignation was turned with renewed violence, charging her with the blackest ingratitude. She herself wept as Elizabeth spoke, but she did not answer. My own agitation and anguish was extreme during the whole trial. I believed in her innocence; I knew it. Could the dmon, who had (I did not for a minute doubt) murdered my brother, also in his hellish sport have betrayed the innocent to death and ignominy. I could not sustain the horror of my situation; and when I perceived that the popular voice, and the countenances of the judges, had already condemned my unhappy victim, I rushed out of the court in agony. The tortures of the accused did not equal mine; she was sustained by innocence, but the fangs of remorse tore my bosom, and would not forego their hold. I passed a night of unmingled wretchedness. In the morning I went to the court; my lips and throat were parched. I dared not ask the fatal question; but I was known, and the officer guessed the cause of my visit. The ballots had been thrown; they were all black, and Justine was condemned. I cannot pretend to describe what I then felt. I had before experienced sensations of horror; and I have endeavoured to bestow upon them adequate expressions, but words cannot convey an idea of the heartsickening despair that I then endured. The person to whom I addressed myself added, that Justine had already confessed her guilt. That evidence, he observed, was hardly required in so glaring a case, but I am glad of it; and, indeed, none of our judges like to condemn a criminal upon circumstantial evidence, be it ever so decisive. When I returned home, Elizabeth eagerly demanded the result. My cousin, replied I, it is decided as you may have expected; all judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer, than that one guilty should escape. But she has confessed. This was a dire blow to poor Elizabeth, who had relied with firmness upon Justines innocence. Alas! said she, how shall I ever again believe in human benevolence? Justine, whom I loved and esteemed as my sister, how could she put on those smiles of innocence only to betray; her mild eyes seemed incapable of any severity or illhumour, and yet she has committed a murder. Soon after we heard that the poor victim had expressed a wish to see my cousin. My father wished her not to go; but said, that he left it to her own judgment and feelings to decide. Yes, said Elizabeth, I will go, although she is guilty; and you, Victor, shall accompany me I cannot go alone. The idea of this visit was torture to me, yet I could not refuse. We entered the gloomy prisonchamber, and beheld Justine sitting on some straw at the further end; her hands were manacled, and her head rested on her knees. She rose on seeing us enter; and when we were left alone with her, she threw herself at the feet of Elizabeth, weeping bitterly. My cousin wept also. Oh, Justine! said she, why did you rob me of my last consolation. I relied on your innocence; and although I was then very wretched, I was not so miserable as I am now. And do you also believe that I am so very, very wicked? Do you also join with my enemies to crush me? Her voice was suffocated with sobs. Rise, my poor girl, said Elizabeth, why do you kneel, if you are innocent? I am not one of your enemies; I believed you guiltless, notwithstanding every evidence, until I heard that you had yourself declared your guilt. That report, you say, is false; and be assured, dear Justine, that nothing can shake my confidence in you for a moment, but your own confession. I did confess; but I confessed a lie. I confessed, that I might obtain absolution; but now that falsehood lies heavier at my heart than all my other sins. The God of heaven forgive me! Ever since I was condemned, my confessor has besieged me; he threatened and menaced, until I almost began to think that I was the monster that he said I was. He threatened excommunication and hell fire in my last moments, if I continued obdurate. Dear lady, I had none to support me; all looked on me as a wretch doomed to ignominy and perdition. What could I do? In an evil hour I subscribed to a lie; and now only am I truly miserable. She paused, weeping, and then continuedI thought with horror, my sweet lady, that you should believe your Justine, whom your blessed aunt had so highly honoured, and whom you loved, was a creature capable of a crime which none but the devil himself could have perpetrated. Dear William! dearest blessed child! I soon shall see you again in heaven, where we shall all be happy; and that consoles me, going as I am to suffer ignominy and death. Oh, Justine! forgive me for having for one moment distrusted you. Why did you confess? But do not mourn, my dear girl; I will every where proclaim your innocence, and force belief. Yet you must die; you, my playfellow, my companion, my more than sister. I never can survive so horrible a misfortune. Dear, sweet Elizabeth, do not weep. You ought to raise me with thoughts of a better life, and elevate me from the petty cares of this world of injustice and strife. Do not you, excellent friend, drive me to despair. I will try to comfort you; but this, I fear, is an evil too deep and poignant to admit of consolation, for there is no hope. Yet heaven bless thee, my dearest Justine, with resignation, and a confidence elevated beyond this world. Oh! how I hate its shews and mockeries! when one creature is murdered, another is immediately deprived of life in a slow torturing manner; then the executioners, their hands yet reeking with the blood of innocence, believe that they have done a great deed. They call this retribution. Hateful name! When that word is pronounced, I know greater and more horrid punishments are going to be inflicted than the gloomiest tyrant has ever invented to satiate his utmost revenge. Yet this is not consolation for you, my Justine, unless indeed that you may glory in escaping from so miserable a den. Alas! I would I were in peace with my aunt and my lovely William, escaped from a world which is hateful to me, and the visages of men which I abhor. Justine smiled languidly. This, dear lady, is despair, and not resignation. I must not learn the lesson that you would teach me. Talk of something else, something that will bring peace, and not increase of misery. During this conversation I had retired to a corner of the prisonroom, where I could conceal the horrid anguish that possessed me. Despair! Who dared talk of that? The poor victim, who on the morrow was to pass the dreary boundary between life and death, felt not as I did, such deep and bitter agony. I gnashed my teeth, and ground them together, uttering a groan that came from my inmost soul. Justine started. When she saw who it was, she approached me, and said, Dear Sir, you are very kind to visit me; you, I hope, do not believe that I am guilty. I could not answer. No, Justine, said Elizabeth; he is more convinced of your innocence than I was; for even when he heard that you had confessed, he did not credit it. I truly thank him. In these last moments I feel the sincerest gratitude towards those who think of me with kindness. How sweet is the affection of others to such a wretch as I am! It removes more than half my misfortune; and I feel as if I could die in peace, now that my innocence is acknowledged by you, dear lady, and your cousin. Thus the poor sufferer tried to comfort others and herself. She indeed gained the resignation she desired. But I, the true murderer, felt the neverdying worm alive in my bosom, which allowed of no hope or consolation. Elizabeth also wept, and was unhappy; but hers also was the misery of innocence, which, like a cloud that passes over the fair moon, for a while hides, but cannot tarnish its brightness. Anguish and despair had penetrated into the core of my heart; I bore a hell within me, which nothing could extinguish. We staid several hours with Justine; and it was with great difficulty that Elizabeth could tear herself away. I wish, cried she, that I were to die with you; I cannot live in this world of misery. Justine assumed an air of cheerfulness, while she with difficulty repressed her bitter tears. She embraced Elizabeth, and said, in a voice of halfsuppressed emotion, Farewell, sweet lady, dearest Elizabeth, my beloved and only friend; may heaven in its bounty bless and preserve you; may this be the last misfortune that you will ever suffer. Live, and be happy, and make others so. As we returned, Elizabeth said, You know not, my dear Victor, how much I am relieved, now that I trust in the innocence of this unfortunate girl. I never could again have known peace, if I had been deceived in my reliance on her. For the moment that I did believe her guilty, I felt an anguish that I could not have long sustained. Now my heart is lightened. The innocent suffers; but she whom I thought amiable and good has not betrayed the trust I reposed in her, and I am consoled. Amiable cousin! such were your thoughts, mild and gentle as your own dear eyes and voice. But II was a wretch, and none ever conceived of the misery that I then endured. END OF VOL. I. FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. II. Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould me man? Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me? Paradise Lost. London PRINTED FOR LACKINGTON, HUGHES, HARDING, MAVOR, JONES, FINSBURY SQUARE. 1818. CHAPTER I. Nothing is more painful to the human mind, than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows, and deprives the soul both of hope and fear. Justine died; she rested; and I was alive. The blood flowed freely in my veins, but a weight of despair and remorse pressed on my heart, which nothing could remove. Sleep fled from my eyes; I wandered like an evil spirit, for I had committed deeds of mischief beyond description horrible, and more, much more, (I persuaded myself) was yet behind. Yet my heart overflowed with kindness, and the love of virtue. I had begun life with benevolent intentions, and thirsted for the moment when I should put them in practice, and make myself useful to my fellowbeings. Now all was blasted instead of that serenity of conscience, which allowed me to look back upon the past with selfsatisfaction, and from thence to gather promise of new hopes, I was seized by remorse and the sense of guilt, which hurried me away to a hell of intense tortures, such as no language can describe. This state of mind preyed upon my health, which had entirely recovered from the first shock it had sustained. I shunned the face of man; all sound of joy or complacency was torture to me; solitude was my only consolationdeep, dark, deathlike solitude. My father observed with pain the alteration perceptible in my disposition and habits, and endeavoured to reason with me on the folly of giving way to immoderate grief. Do you think, Victor, said he, that I do not suffer also? No one could love a child more than I loved your brother; (tears came into his eyes as he spoke); but is it not a duty to the survivors, that we should refrain from augmenting their unhappiness by an appearance of immoderate grief? It is also a duty owed to yourself; for excessive sorrow prevents improvement or enjoyment, or even the discharge of daily usefulness, without which no man is fit for society. This advice, although good, was totally inapplicable to my case; I should have been the first to hide my grief, and console my friends, if remorse had not mingled its bitterness with my other sensations. Now I could only answer my father with a look of despair, and endeavour to hide myself from his view. About this time we retired to our house at Belrive. This change was particularly agreeable to me. The shutting of the gates regularly at ten oclock, and the impossibility of remaining on the lake after that hour, had rendered our residence within the walls of Geneva very irksome to me. I was now free. Often, after the rest of the family had retired for the night, I took the boat, and passed many hours upon the water. Sometimes, with my sails set, I was carried by the wind; and sometimes, after rowing into the middle of the lake, I left the boat to pursue its own course, and gave way to my own miserable reflections. I was often tempted, when all was at peace around me, and I the only unquiet thing that wandered restless in a scene so beautiful and heavenly, if I except some bat, or the frogs, whose harsh and interrupted croaking was heard only when I approached the shoreoften, I say, I was tempted to plunge into the silent lake, that the waters might close over me and my calamities for ever. But I was restrained, when I thought of the heroic and suffering Elizabeth, whom I tenderly loved, and whose existence was bound up in mine. I thought also of my father, and surviving brother should I by my base desertion leave them exposed and unprotected to the malice of the fiend whom I had let loose among them? At these moments I wept bitterly, and wished that peace would revisit my mind only that I might afford them consolation and happiness. But that could not be. Remorse extinguished every hope. I had been the author of unalterable evils; and I lived in daily fear, lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate some new wickedness. I had an obscure feeling that all was not over, and that he would still commit some signal crime, which by its enormity should almost efface the recollection of the past. There was always scope for fear, so long as any thing I loved remained behind. My abhorrence of this fiend cannot be conceived. When I thought of him, I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed, and I ardently wished to extinguish that life which I had so thoughtlessly bestowed. When I reflected on his crimes and malice, my hatred and revenge burst all bounds of moderation. I would have made a pilgrimage to the highest peak of the Andes, could I, when there, have precipitated him to their base. I wished to see him again, that I might wreak the utmost extent of anger on his head, and avenge the deaths of William and Justine. Our house was the house of mourning. My fathers health was deeply shaken by the horror of the recent events. Elizabeth was sad and desponding; she no longer took delight in her ordinary occupations; all pleasure seemed to her sacrilege toward the dead; eternal woe and tears she then thought was the just tribute she should pay to innocence so blasted and destroyed. She was no longer that happy creature, who in earlier youth wandered with me on the banks of the lake, and talked with ecstacy of our future prospects. She had become grave, and often conversed of the inconstancy of fortune, and the instability of human life. When I reflect, my dear cousin, said she, on the miserable death of Justine Moritz, I no longer see the world and its works as they before appeared to me. Before, I looked upon the accounts of vice and injustice, that I read in books or heard from others, as tales of ancient days, or imaginary evils; at least they were remote, and more familiar to reason than to the imagination; but now misery has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each others blood. Yet I am certainly unjust. Every body believed that poor girl to be guilty; and if she could have committed the crime for which she suffered, assuredly she would have been the most depraved of human creatures. For the sake of a few jewels, to have murdered the son of her benefactor and friend, a child whom she had nursed from its birth, and appeared to love as if it had been her own! I could not consent to the death of any human being; but certainly I should have thought such a creature unfit to remain in the society of men. Yet she was innocent. I know, I feel she was innocent; you are of the same opinion, and that confirms me. Alas! Victor, when falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness? I feel as if I were walking on the edge of a precipice, towards which thousands are crowding, and endeavouring to plunge me into the abyss. William and Justine were assassinated, and the murderer escapes; he walks about the world free, and perhaps respected. But even if I were condemned to suffer on the scaffold for the same crimes, I would not change places with such a wretch. I listened to this discourse with the extremest agony. I, not in deed, but in effect, was the true murderer. Elizabeth read my anguish in my countenance, and kindly taking my hand said, My dearest cousin, you must calm yourself. These events have affected me, God knows how deeply; but I am not so wretched as you are. There is an expression of despair, and sometimes of revenge, in your countenance, that makes me tremble. Be calm, my dear Victor; I would sacrifice my life to your peace. We surely shall be happy quiet in our native country, and not mingling in the world, what can disturb our tranquillity? She shed tears as she said this, distrusting the very solace that she gave; but at the same time she smiled, that she might chase away the fiend that lurked in my heart. My father, who saw in the unhappiness that was painted in my face only an exaggeration of that sorrow which I might naturally feel, thought that an amusement suited to my taste would be the best means of restoring to me my wonted serenity. It was from this cause that he had removed to the country; and, induced by the same motive, he now proposed that we should all make an excursion to the valley of Chamounix. I had been there before, but Elizabeth and Ernest never had; and both had often expressed an earnest desire to see the scenery of this place, which had been described to them as so wonderful and sublime. Accordingly we departed from Geneva on this tour about the middle of the month of August, nearly two months after the death of Justine. The weather was uncommonly fine; and if mine had been a sorrow to be chased away by any fleeting circumstance, this excursion would certainly have had the effect intended by my father. As it was, I was somewhat interested in the scene; it sometimes lulled, although it could not extinguish my grief. During the first day we travelled in a carriage. In the morning we had seen the mountains at a distance, towards which we gradually advanced. We perceived that the valley through which we wound, and which was formed by the river Arve, whose course we followed, closed in upon us by degrees; and when the sun had set, we beheld immense mountains and precipices overhanging us on every side, and heard the sound of the river raging among rocks, and the dashing of waterfalls around. The next day we pursued our journey upon mules; and as we ascended still higher, the valley assumed a more magnificent and astonishing character. Ruined castles hanging on the precipices of piny mountains; the impetuous Arve, and cottages every here and there peeping forth from among the trees, formed a scene of singular beauty. But it was augmented and rendered sublime by the mighty Alps, whose white and shining pyramids and domes towered above all, as belonging to another earth, the habitations of another race of beings. We passed the bridge of Pelissier, where the ravine, which the river forms, opened before us, and we began to ascend the mountain that overhangs it. Soon after we entered the valley of Chamounix. This valley is more wonderful and sublime, but not so beautiful and picturesque as that of Servox, through which we had just passed. The high and snowy mountains were its immediate boundaries; but we saw no more ruined castles and fertile fields. Immense glaciers approached the road; we heard the rumbling thunder of the falling avalanche, and marked the smoke of its passage. Mont Blnc, the supreme and magnificent Mont Blnc, raised itself from the surrounding aiguilles, and its tremendous dome overlooked the valley. During this journey, I sometimes joined Elizabeth, and exerted myself to point out to her the various beauties of the scene. I often suffered my mule to lag behind, and indulged in the misery of reflection. At other times I spurred on the animal before my companions, that I might forget them, the world, and, more than all, myself. When at a distance, I alighted, and threw myself on the grass, weighed down by horror and despair. At eight in the evening I arrived at Chamounix. My father and Elizabeth were very much fatigued; Ernest, who accompanied us, was delighted, and in high spirits the only circumstance that detracted from his pleasure was the south wind, and the rain it seemed to promise for the next day. We retired early to our apartments, but not to sleep; at least I did not. I remained many hours at the window, watching the pallid lightning that played above Mont Blnc, and listening to the rushing of the Arve, which ran below my window. CHAPTER II. The next day, contrary to the prognostications of our guides, was fine, although clouded. We visited the source of the Arveiron, and rode about the valley until evening. These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling; and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquillized it. In some degree, also, they diverted my mind from the thoughts over which it had brooded for the last month. I returned in the evening, fatigued, but less unhappy, and conversed with my family with more cheerfulness than had been my custom for some time. My father was pleased, and Elizabeth overjoyed. My dear cousin, said she, you see what happiness you diffuse when you are happy; do not relapse again! The following morning the rain poured down in torrents, and thick mists hid the summits of the mountains. I rose early, but felt unusually melancholy. The rain depressed me; my old feelings recurred, and I was miserable. I knew how disappointed my father would be at this sudden change, and I wished to avoid him until I had recovered myself so far as to be enabled to conceal those feelings that overpowered me. I knew that they would remain that day at the inn; and as I had ever inured myself to rain, moisture, and cold, I resolved to go alone to the summit of Montanvert. I remembered the effect that the view of the tremendous and evermoving glacier had produced upon my mind when I first saw it. It had then filled me with a sublime ecstacy that gave wings to the soul, and allowed it to soar from the obscure world to light and joy. The sight of the awful and majestic in nature had indeed always the effect of solemnizing my mind, and causing me to forget the passing cares of life. I determined to go alone, for I was well acquainted with the path, and the presence of another would destroy the solitary grandeur of the scene. The ascent is precipitous, but the path is cut into continual and short windings, which enable you to surmount the perpendicularity of the mountain. It is a scene terrifically desolate. In a thousand spots the traces of the winter avalanche may be perceived, where trees lie broken and strewed on the ground; some entirely destroyed, others bent, leaning upon the jutting rocks of the mountain, or transversely upon other trees. The path, as you ascend higher, is intersected by ravines of snow, down which stones continually roll from above; one of them is particularly dangerous, as the slightest sound, such as even speaking in a loud voice, produces a concussion of air sufficient to draw destruction upon the head of the speaker. The pines are not tall or luxuriant, but they are sombre, and add an air of severity to the scene. I looked on the valley beneath; vast mists were rising from the rivers which ran through it, and curling in thick wreaths around the opposite mountains, whose summits were hid in the uniform clouds, while rain poured from the dark sky, and added to the melancholy impression I received from the objects around me. Alas! why does man boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders them more necessary beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows, and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us. We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep. We rise; one wandring thought pollutes the day. We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh, or weep, Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away; It is the same for, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free. Mans yesterday may neer be like his morrow; Nought may endure but mutability! It was nearly noon when I arrived at the top of the ascent. For some time I sat upon the rock that overlooks the sea of ice. A mist covered both that and the surrounding mountains. Presently a breeze dissipated the cloud, and I descended upon the glacier. The surface is very uneven, rising like the waves of a troubled sea, descending low, and interspersed by rifts that sink deep. The field of ice is almost a league in width, but I spent nearly two hours in crossing it. The opposite mountain is a bare perpendicular rock. From the side where I now stood Montanvert was exactly opposite, at the distance of a league; and above it rose Mont Blnc, in awful majesty. I remained in a recess of the rock, gazing on this wonderful and stupendous scene. The sea, or rather the vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains, whose arial summits hung over its recesses. Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds. My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy; I exclaimedWandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion, away from the joys of life. As I said this, I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed. He bounded over the crevices in the ice, among which I had walked with caution; his stature also, as he approached, seemed to exceed that of man. I was troubled a mist came over my eyes, and I felt a faintness seize me; but I was quickly restored by the cold gale of the mountains. I perceived, as the shape came nearer, (sight tremendous and abhorred!) that it was the wretch whom I had created. I trembled with rage and horror, resolving to wait his approach, and then close with him in mortal combat. He approached; his countenance bespoke bitter anguish, combined with disdain and malignity, while its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes. But I scarcely observed this; anger and hatred had at first deprived me of utterance, and I recovered only to overwhelm him with words expressive of furious detestation and contempt. Devil! I exclaimed, do you dare approach me? and do not you fear the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head? Begone, vile insect! or rather stay, that I may trample you to dust! and, oh, that I could, with the extinction of your miserable existence, restore those victims whom you have so diabolically murdered! I expected this reception, said the dmon. All men hate the wretched; how then must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind.

If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends. Abhorred monster! fiend that thou art! the tortures of hell are too mild a vengeance for thy crimes. Wretched devil! you reproach me with your creation; come on then, that I may extinguish the spark which I so negligently bestowed. My rage was without bounds; I sprang on him, impelled by all the feelings which can arm one being against the existence of another. He easily eluded me, and said, Be calm! I entreat you to hear me, before you give vent to your hatred on my devoted head. Have I not suffered enough, that you seek to increase my misery? Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it. Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself; my height is superior to thine; my joints more supple. But I will not be tempted to set myself in opposition to thee. I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous. Begone! I will not hear you. There can be no community between you and me; we are enemies. Begone, or let us try our strength in a fight, in which one must fall. How can I move thee? Will no entreaties cause thee to turn a favourable eye upon thy creature, who implores thy goodness and compassion? Believe me, Frankenstein I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity but am I not alone, miserably alone? You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellowcreatures, who owe me nothing? they spurn and hate me. The desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge. I have wandered here many days; the caves of ice, which I only do not fear, are a dwelling to me, and the only one which man does not grudge. These bleak skies I hail, for they are kinder to me than your fellowbeings. If the multitude of mankind knew of my existence, they would do as you do, and arm themselves for my destruction. Shall I not then hate them who abhor me? I will keep no terms with my enemies. I am miserable, and they shall share my wretchedness. Yet it is in your power to recompense me, and deliver them from an evil which it only remains for you to make so great, that not only you and your family, but thousands of others, shall be swallowed up in the whirlwinds of its rage. Let your compassion be moved, and do not disdain me. Listen to my tale when you have heard that, abandon or commiserate me, as you shall judge that I deserve. But hear me. The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they may be, to speak in their own defence before they are condemned. Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man! Yet I ask you not to spare me listen to me; and then, if you can, and if you will, destroy the work of your hands. Why do you call to my remembrance circumstances of which I shudder to reflect, that I have been the miserable origin and author? Cursed be the day, abhorred devil, in which you first saw light! Cursed (although I curse myself) be the hands that formed you! You have made me wretched beyond expression. You have left me no power to consider whether I am just to you, or not. Begone! relieve me from the sight of your detested form. Thus I relieve thee, my creator, he said, and placed his hated hands before my eyes, which I flung from me with violence; thus I take from thee a sight which you abhor. Still thou canst listen to me, and grant me thy compassion. By the virtues that I once possessed, I demand this from you. Hear my tale; it is long and strange, and the temperature of this place is not fitting to your fine sensations; come to the hut upon the mountain. The sun is yet high in the heavens; before it descends to hide itself behind yon snowy precipices, and illuminate another world, you will have heard my story, and can decide. On you it rests, whether I quit for ever the neighbourhood of man, and lead a harmless life, or become the scourge of your fellowcreatures, and the author of your own speedy ruin. As he said this, he led the way across the ice I followed. My heart was full, and I did not answer him; but, as I proceeded, I weighed the various arguments that he had used, and determined at least to listen to his tale. I was partly urged by curiosity, and compassion confirmed my resolution. I had hitherto supposed him to be the murderer of my brother, and I eagerly sought a confirmation or denial of this opinion. For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator towards his creature were, and that I ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness. These motives urged me to comply with his demand. We crossed the ice, therefore, and ascended the opposite rock. The air was cold, and the rain again began to descend we entered the hut, the fiend with an air of exultation, I with a heavy heart, and depressed spirits. But I consented to listen; and, seating myself by the fire which my odious companion had lighted, he thus began his tale. CHAPTER III. It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original ra of my being all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct. A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt, at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses. By degrees, I remember, a stronger light pressed upon my nerves, so that I was obliged to shut my eyes. Darkness then came over me, and troubled me; but hardly had I felt this, when, by opening my eyes, as I now suppose, the light poured in upon me again. I walked, and, I believe, descended; but I presently found a great alteration in my sensations. Before, dark and opaque bodies had surrounded me, impervious to my touch or sight; but I now found that I could wander on at liberty, with no obstacles which I could not either surmount or avoid. The light became more and more oppressive to me; and, the heat wearying me as I walked, I sought a place where I could receive shade. This was the forest near Ingolstadt; and here I lay by the side of a brook resting from my fatigue, until I felt tormented by hunger and thirst. This roused me from my nearly dormant state, and I ate some berries which I found hanging on the trees, or lying on the ground. I slaked my thirst at the brook; and then lying down, was overcome by sleep. It was dark when I awoke; I felt cold also, and halffrightened as it were instinctively, finding myself so desolate. Before I had quitted your apartment, on a sensation of cold, I had covered myself with some clothes; but these were insufficient to secure me from the dews of night. I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish, nothing; but, feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept. Soon a gentle light stole over the heavens, and gave me a sensation of pleasure. I started up, and beheld a radiant form rise from among the trees. I gazed with a kind of wonder. It moved slowly, but it enlightened my path; and I again went out in search of berries. I was still cold, when under one of the trees I found a huge cloak, with which I covered myself, and sat down upon the ground. No distinct ideas occupied my mind; all was confused. I felt light, and hunger, and thirst, and darkness; innumerable sounds rung in my ears, and on all sides various scents saluted me the only object that I could distinguish was the bright moon, and I fixed my eyes on that with pleasure. Several changes of day and night passed, and the orb of night had greatly lessened when I began to distinguish my sensations from each other. I gradually saw plainly the clear stream that supplied me with drink, and the trees that shaded me with their foliage. I was delighted when I first discovered that a pleasant sound, which often saluted my ears, proceeded from the throats of the little winged animals who had often intercepted the light from my eyes. I began also to observe, with greater accuracy, the forms that surrounded me, and to perceive the boundaries of the radiant roof of light which canopied me. Sometimes I tried to imitate the pleasant songs of the birds, but was unable. Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again. The moon had disappeared from the night, and again, with a lessened form, shewed itself, while I still remained in the forest. My sensations had, by this time, become distinct, and my mind received every day additional ideas. My eyes became accustomed to the light, and to perceive objects in their right forms; I distinguished the insect from the herb, and, by degrees, one herb from another. I found that the sparrow uttered none but harsh notes, whilst those of the blackbird and thrush were sweet and enticing. One day, when I was oppressed by cold, I found a fire which had been left by some wandering beggars, and was overcome with delight at the warmth I experienced from it. In my joy I thrust my hand into the live embers, but quickly drew it out again with a cry of pain. How strange, I thought, that the same cause should produce such opposite effects! I examined the materials of the fire, and to my joy found it to be composed of wood. I quickly collected some branches; but they were wet, and would not burn. I was pained at this, and sat still watching the operation of the fire. The wet wood which I had placed near the heat dried, and itself became inflamed. I reflected on this; and, by touching the various branches, I discovered the cause, and busied myself in collecting a great quantity of wood, that I might dry it, and have a plentiful supply of fire. When night came on, and brought sleep with it, I was in the greatest fear lest my fire should be extinguished. I covered it carefully with dry wood and leaves, and placed wet branches upon it; and then, spreading my cloak, I lay on the ground, and sunk into sleep. It was morning when I awoke, and my first care was to visit the fire. I uncovered it, and a gentle breeze quickly fanned it into a flame. I observed this also, and contrived a fan of branches, which roused the embers when they were nearly extinguished. When night came again, I found, with pleasure, that the fire gave light as well as heat; and that the discovery of this element was useful to me in my food; for I found some of the offals that the travellers had left had been roasted, and tasted much more savoury than the berries I gathered from the trees. I tried, therefore, to dress my food in the same manner, placing it on the live embers. I found that the berries were spoiled by this operation, and the nuts and roots much improved. Food, however, became scarce; and I often spent the whole day searching in vain for a few acorns to assuage the pangs of hunger. When I found this, I resolved to quit the place that I had hitherto inhabited, to seek for one where the few wants I experienced would be more easily satisfied. In this emigration, I exceedingly lamented the loss of the fire which I had obtained through accident, and knew not how to reproduce it. I gave several hours to the serious consideration of this difficulty; but I was obliged to relinquish all attempt to supply it; and, wrapping myself up in my cloak, I struck across the wood towards the setting sun. I passed three days in these rambles, and at length discovered the open country. A great fall of snow had taken place the night before, and the fields were of one uniform white; the appearance was disconsolate, and I found my feet chilled by the cold damp substance that covered the ground. It was about seven in the morning, and I longed to obtain food and shelter; at length I perceived a small hut, on a rising ground, which had doubtless been built for the convenience of some shepherd. This was a new sight to me; and I examined the structure with great curiosity. Finding the door open, I entered. An old man sat in it, near a fire, over which he was preparing his breakfast. He turned on hearing a noise; and, perceiving me, shrieked loudly, and, quitting the hut, ran across the fields with a speed of which his debilitated form hardly appeared capable. His appearance, different from any I had ever before seen, and his flight, somewhat surprised me. But I was enchanted by the appearance of the hut here the snow and rain could not penetrate; the ground was dry; and it presented to me then as exquisite and divine a retreat as Pandmonium appeared to the dmons of hell after their sufferings in the lake of fire. I greedily devoured the remnants of the shepherds breakfast, which consisted of bread, cheese, milk, and wine; the latter, however, I did not like. Then overcome by fatigue, I lay down among some straw, and fell asleep. It was noon when I awoke; and, allured by the warmth of the sun, which shone brightly on the white ground, I determined to recommence my travels; and, depositing the remains of the peasants breakfast in a wallet I found, I proceeded across the fields for several hours, until at sunset I arrived at a village. How miraculous did this appear! the huts, the neater cottages, and stately houses, engaged my admiration by turns. The vegetables in the gardens, the milk and cheese that I saw placed at the windows of some of the cottages, allured my appetite. One of the best of these I entered; but I had hardly placed my foot within the door, before the children shrieked, and one of the women fainted. The whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked me, until, grievously bruised by stones and many other kinds of missile weapons, I escaped to the open country, and fearfully took refuge in a low hovel, quite bare, and making a wretched appearance after the palaces I had beheld in the village. This hovel, however, joined a cottage of a neat and pleasant appearance; but, after my late dearlybought experience, I dared not enter it. My place of refuge was constructed of wood, but so low, that I could with difficulty sit upright in it. No wood, however, was placed on the earth, which formed the floor, but it was dry; and although the wind entered it by innumerable chinks, I found it an agreeable asylum from the snow and rain. Here then I retreated, and lay down, happy to have found a shelter, however miserable, from the inclemency of the season, and still more from the barbarity of man. As soon as morning dawned, I crept from my kennel, that I might view the adjacent cottage, and discover if I could remain in the habitation I had found. It was situated against the back of the cottage, and surrounded on the sides which were exposed by a pigstye and a clear pool of water. One part was open, and by that I had crept in; but now I covered every crevice by which I might be perceived with stones and wood, yet in such a manner that I might move them on occasion to pass out all the light I enjoyed came through the stye, and that was sufficient for me. Having thus arranged my dwelling, and carpeted it with clean straw, I retired; for I saw the figure of a man at a distance, and I remembered too well my treatment the night before, to trust myself in his power. I had first, however, provided for my sustenance for that day, by a loaf of coarse bread, which I purloined, and a cup with which I could drink, more conveniently than from my hand, of the pure water which flowed by my retreat. The floor was a little raised, so that it was kept perfectly dry, and by its vicinity to the chimney of the cottage it was tolerably warm. Being thus provided, I resolved to reside in this hovel, until something should occur which might alter my determination. It was indeed a paradise, compared to the bleak forest, my former residence, the raindropping branches, and dank earth. I ate my breakfast with pleasure, and was about to remove a plank to procure myself a little water, when I heard a step, and, looking through a small chink, I beheld a young creature, with a pail on her head, passing before my hovel. The girl was young and of gentle demeanour, unlike what I have since found cottagers and farmhouse servants to be. Yet she was meanly dressed, a coarse blue petticoat and a linen jacket being her only garb; her fair hair was plaited, but not adorned; she looked patient, yet sad. I lost sight of her; and in about a quarter of an hour she returned, bearing the pail, which was now partly filled with milk. As she walked along, seemingly incommoded by the burden, a young man met her, whose countenance expressed a deeper despondence. Uttering a few sounds with an air of melancholy, he took the pail from her head, and bore it to the cottage himself. She followed, and they disappeared. Presently I saw the young man again, with some tools in his hand, cross the field behind the cottage; and the girl was also busied, sometimes in the house, and sometimes in the yard. On examining my dwelling, I found that one of the windows of the cottage had formerly occupied a part of it, but the panes had been filled up with wood. In one of these was a small and almost imperceptible chink, through which the eye could just penetrate. Through this crevice, a small room was visible, whitewashed and clean, but very bare of furniture. In one corner, near a small fire, sat an old man, leaning his head on his hands in a disconsolate attitude. The young girl was occupied in arranging the cottage; but presently she took something out of a drawer, which employed her hands, and she sat down beside the old man, who, taking up an instrument, began to play, and to produce sounds, sweeter than the voice of the thrush or the nightingale. It was a lovely sight, even to me, poor wretch! who had never beheld aught beautiful before. The silver hair and benevolent countenance of the aged cottager, won my reverence; while the gentle manners of the girl enticed my love. He played a sweet mournful air, which I perceived drew tears from the eyes of his amiable companion, of which the old man took no notice, until she sobbed audibly; he then pronounced a few sounds, and the fair creature, leaving her work, knelt at his feet. He raised her, and smiled with such kindness and affection, that I felt sensations of a peculiar and overpowering nature they were a mixture of pain and pleasure, such as I had never before experienced, either from hunger or cold, warmth or food; and I withdrew from the window, unable to bear these emotions. Soon after this the young man returned, bearing on his shoulders a load of wood. The girl met him at the door, helped to relieve him of his burden, and, taking some of the fuel into the cottage, placed it on the fire; then she and the youth went apart into a nook of the cottage, and he shewed her a large loaf and a piece of cheese. She seemed pleased; and went into the garden for some roots and plants, which she placed in water, and then upon the fire. She afterwards continued her work, whilst the young man went into the garden, and appeared busily employed in digging and pulling up roots. After he had been employed thus about an hour, the young woman joined him, and they entered the cottage together. The old man had, in the mean time, been pensive; but, on the appearance of his companions, he assumed a more cheerful air, and they sat down to eat. The meal was quickly dispatched. The young woman was again occupied in arranging the cottage; the old man walked before the cottage in the sun for a few minutes, leaning on the arm of the youth. Nothing could exceed in beauty the contrast between these two excellent creatures. One was old, with silver hairs and a countenance beaming with benevolence and love the younger was slight and graceful in his figure, and his features were moulded with the finest symmetry; yet his eyes and attitude expressed the utmost sadness and despondency. The old man returned to the cottage; and the youth, with tools different from those he had used in the morning, directed his steps across the fields. Night quickly shut in; but, to my extreme wonder, I found that the cottagers had a means of prolonging light, by the use of tapers, and was delighted to find, that the setting of the sun did not put an end to the pleasure I experienced in watching my human neighbours. In the evening, the young girl and her companion were employed in various occupations which I did not understand; and the old man again took up the instrument, which produced the divine sounds that had enchanted me in the morning. So soon as he had finished, the youth began, not to play, but to utter sounds that were monotonous, and neither resembling the harmony of the old mans instrument or the songs of the birds; I since found that he read aloud, but at that time I knew nothing of the science of words or letters. The family, after having been thus occupied for a short time, extinguished their lights, and retired, as I conjectured, to rest. CHAPTER IV. I lay on my straw, but I could not sleep. I thought of the occurrences of the day. What chiefly struck me was the gentle manners of these people; and I longed to join them, but dared not. I remembered too well the treatment I had suffered the night before from the barbarous villagers, and resolved, whatever course of conduct I might hereafter think it right to pursue, that for the present I would remain quietly in my hovel, watching, and endeavouring to discover the motives which influenced their actions. The cottagers arose the next morning before the sun. The young woman arranged the cottage, and prepared the food; and the youth departed after the first meal. This day was passed in the same routine as that which preceded it. The young man was constantly employed out of doors, and the girl in various laborious occupations within. The old man, whom I soon perceived to be blind, employed his leisure hours on his instrument, or in contemplation. Nothing could exceed the love and respect which the younger cottagers exhibited towards their venerable companion. They performed towards him every little office of affection and duty with gentleness; and he rewarded them by his benevolent smiles. They were not entirely happy. The young man and his companion often went apart, and appeared to weep. I saw no cause for their unhappiness; but I was deeply affected by it. If such lovely creatures were miserable, it was less strange that I, an imperfect and solitary being, should be wretched. Yet why were these gentle beings unhappy? They possessed a delightful house (for such it was in my eyes), and every luxury; they had a fire to warm them when chill, and delicious viands when hungry; they were dressed in excellent clothes; and, still more, they enjoyed one anothers company and speech, interchanging each day looks of affection and kindness. What did their tears imply? Did they really express pain? I was at first unable to solve these questions; but perpetual attention, and time, explained to me many appearances which were at first enigmatic. A considerable period elapsed before I discovered one of the causes of the uneasiness of this amiable family; it was poverty and they suffered that evil in a very distressing degree. Their nourishment consisted entirely of the vegetables of their garden, and the milk of one cow, who gave very little during the winter, when its masters could scarcely procure food to support it. They often, I believe, suffered the pangs of hunger very poignantly, especially the two younger cottagers; for several times they placed food before the old man, when they reserved none for themselves. This trait of kindness moved me sensibly. I had been accustomed, during the night, to steal a part of their store for my own consumption; but when I found that in doing this I inflicted pain on the cottagers, I abstained, and satisfied myself with berries, nuts, and roots, which I gathered from a neighbouring wood. I discovered also another means through which I was enabled to assist their labours. I found that the youth spent a great part of each day in collecting wood for the family fire; and, during the night, I often took his tools, the use of which I quickly discovered, and brought home firing sufficient for the consumption of several days. I remember, the first time that I did this, the young woman, when she opened the door in the morning, appeared greatly astonished on seeing a great pile of wood on the outside. She uttered some words in a loud voice, and the youth joined her, who also expressed surprise. I observed, with pleasure, that he did not go to the forest that day, but spent it in repairing the cottage, and cultivating the garden. By degrees I made a discovery of still greater moment. I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds. I perceived that the words they spoke sometimes produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of the hearers. This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it. But I was baffled in every attempt I made for this purpose. Their pronunciation was quick; and the words they uttered, not having any apparent connexion with visible objects, I was unable to discover any clue by which I could unravel the mystery of their reference. By great application, however, and after having remained during the space of several revolutions of the moon in my hovel, I discovered the names that were given to some of the most familiar objects of discourse I learned and applied the words fire, milk, bread, and wood. I learned also the names of the cottagers themselves. The youth and his companion had each of them several names, but the old man had only one, which was father. The girl was called sister, or Agatha; and the youth Felix, brother, or son. I cannot describe the delight I felt when I learned the ideas appropriated to each of these sounds, and was able to pronounce them. I distinguished several other words, without being able as yet to understand or apply them; such as good, dearest, unhappy. I spent the winter in this manner. The gentle manners and beauty of the cottagers greatly endeared them to me when they were unhappy, I felt depressed; when they rejoiced, I sympathized in their joys. I saw few human beings beside them; and if any other happened to enter the cottage, their harsh manners and rude gait only enhanced to me the superior accomplishments of my friends. The old man, I could perceive, often endeavoured to encourage his children, as sometimes I found that he called them, to cast off their melancholy. He would talk in a cheerful accent, with an expression of goodness that bestowed pleasure even upon me. Agatha listened with respect, her eyes sometimes filled with tears, which she endeavoured to wipe away unperceived; but I generally found that her countenance and tone were more cheerful after having listened to the exhortations of her father. It was not thus with Felix. He was always the saddest of the groupe; and, even to my unpractised senses, he appeared to have suffered more deeply than his friends. But if his countenance was more sorrowful, his voice was more cheerful than that of his sister, especially when he addressed the old man. I could mention innumerable instances, which, although slight, marked the dispositions of these amiable cottagers. In the midst of poverty and want, Felix carried with pleasure to his sister the first little white flower that peeped out from beneath the snowy ground. Early in the morning before she had risen, he cleared away the snow that obstructed her path to the milkhouse, drew water from the well, and brought the wood from the outhouse, where, to his perpetual astonishment, he found his store always replenished by an invisible hand. In the day, I believe, he worked sometimes for a neighbouring farmer, because he often went forth, and did not return until dinner, yet brought no wood with him. At other times he worked in the garden; but, as there was little to do in the frosty season, he read to the old man and Agatha. This reading had puzzled me extremely at first; but, by degrees, I discovered that he uttered many of the same sounds when he read as when he talked. I conjectured, therefore, that he found on the paper signs for speech which he understood, and I ardently longed to comprehend these also; but how was that possible, when I did not even understand the sounds for which they stood as signs? I improved, however, sensibly in this science, but not sufficiently to follow up any kind of conversation, although I applied my whole mind to the endeavour for I easily perceived that, although I eagerly longed to discover myself to the cottagers, I ought not to make the attempt until I had first become master of their language; which knowledge might enable me to make them overlook the deformity of my figure; for with this also the contrast perpetually presented to my eyes had made me acquainted. I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagerstheir grace, beauty, and delicate complexions but how was I terrified, when I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification. Alas! I did not yet entirely know the fatal effects of this miserable deformity. As the sun became warmer, and the light of day longer, the snow vanished, and I beheld the bare trees and the black earth. From this time Felix was more employed; and the heartmoving indications of impending famine disappeared. Their food, as I afterwards found, was coarse, but it was wholesome; and they procured a sufficiency of it. Several new kinds of plants sprung up in the garden, which they dressed; and these signs of comfort increased daily as the season advanced. The old man, leaning on his son, walked each day at noon, when it did not rain, as I found it was called when the heavens poured forth its waters. This frequently took place; but a high wind quickly dried the earth, and the season became far more pleasant than it had been. My mode of life in my hovel was uniform. During the morning I attended the motions of the cottagers; and when they were dispersed in various occupations, I slept the remainder of the day was spent in observing my friends. When they had retired to rest, if there was any moon, or the night was starlight, I went into the woods, and collected my own food and fuel for the cottage. When I returned, as often as it was necessary, I cleared their path from the snow, and performed those offices that I had seen done by Felix. I afterwards found that these labours, performed by an invisible hand, greatly astonished them; and once or twice I heard them, on these occasions, utter the words good spirit, wonderful; but I did not then understand the signification of these terms. My thoughts now became more active, and I longed to discover the motives and feelings of these lovely creatures; I was inquisitive to know why Felix appeared so miserable, and Agatha so sad. I thought (foolish wretch!) that it might be in my power to restore happiness to these deserving people.

When I slept, or was absent, the forms of the venerable blind father, the gentle Agatha, and the excellent Felix, flitted before me. I looked upon them as superior beings, who would be the arbiters of my future destiny. I formed in my imagination a thousand pictures of presenting myself to them, and their reception of me. I imagined that they would be disgusted, until, by my gentle demeanour and conciliating words, I should first win their favour, and afterwards their love. These thoughts exhilarated me, and led me to apply with fresh ardour to the acquiring the art of language. My organs were indeed harsh, but supple; and although my voice was very unlike the soft music of their tones, yet I pronounced such words as I understood with tolerable ease. It was as the ass and the lapdog; yet surely the gentle ass, whose intentions were affectionate, although his manners were rude, deserved better treatment than blows and execration. The pleasant showers and genial warmth of spring greatly altered the aspect of the earth. Men, who before this change seemed to have been hid in caves, dispersed themselves, and were employed in various arts of cultivation. The birds sang in more cheerful notes, and the leaves began to bud forth on the trees. Happy, happy earth! fit habitation for gods, which, so short a time before, was bleak, damp, and unwholesome. My spirits were elevated by the enchanting appearance of nature; the past was blotted from my memory, the present was tranquil, and the future gilded by bright rays of hope, and anticipations of joy. CHAPTER V. I now hasten to the more moving part of my story. I shall relate events that impressed me with feelings which, from what I was, have made me what I am. Spring advanced rapidly; the weather became fine, and the skies cloudless. It surprised me, that what before was desert and gloomy should now bloom with the most beautiful flowers and verdure. My senses were gratified and refreshed by a thousand scents of delight, and a thousand sights of beauty. It was on one of these days, when my cottagers periodically rested from labourthe old man played on his guitar, and the children listened to himI observed that the countenance of Felix was melancholy beyond expression he sighed frequently; and once his father paused in his music, and I conjectured by his manner that he inquired the cause of his sons sorrow. Felix replied in a cheerful accent, and the old man was recommencing his music, when some one tapped at the door. It was a lady on horseback, accompanied by a countryman as a guide. The lady was dressed in a dark suit, and covered with a thick black veil. Agatha asked a question; to which the stranger only replied by pronouncing, in a sweet accent, the name of Felix. Her voice was musical, but unlike that of either of my friends. On hearing this word, Felix came up hastily to the lady; who, when she saw him, threw up her veil, and I beheld a countenance of angelic beauty and expression. Her hair of a shining raven black, and curiously braided; her eyes were dark, but gentle, although animated; her features of a regular proportion, and her complexion wondrously fair, each cheek tinged with a lovely pink. Felix seemed ravished with delight when he saw her, every trait of sorrow vanished from his face, and it instantly expressed a degree of ecstatic joy, of which I could hardly have believed it capable; his eyes sparkled, as his cheek flushed with pleasure; and at that moment I thought him as beautiful as the stranger. She appeared affected by different feelings; wiping a few tears from her lovely eyes, she held out her hand to Felix, who kissed it rapturously, and called her, as well as I could distinguish, his sweet Arabian. She did not appear to understand him, but smiled. He assisted her to dismount, and, dismissing her guide, conducted her into the cottage. Some conversation took place between him and his father; and the young stranger knelt at the old mans feet, and would have kissed his hand, but he raised her, and embraced her affectionately. I soon perceived, that although the stranger uttered articulate sounds, and appeared to have a language of her own, she was neither understood by, or herself understood, the cottagers. They made many signs which I did not comprehend; but I saw that her presence diffused gladness through the cottage, dispelling their sorrow as the sun dissipates the morning mists. Felix seemed peculiarly happy, and with smiles of delight welcomed his Arabian. Agatha, the evergentle Agatha, kissed the hands of the lovely stranger; and, pointing to her brother, made signs which appeared to me to mean that he had been sorrowful until she came. Some hours passed thus, while they, by their countenances, expressed joy, the cause of which I did not comprehend. Presently I found, by the frequent recurrence of one sound which the stranger repeated after them, that she was endeavouring to learn their language; and the idea instantly occurred to me, that I should make use of the same instructions to the same end. The stranger learned about twenty words at the first lesson, most of them indeed were those which I had before understood, but I profited by the others. As night came on, Agatha and the Arabian retired early. When they separated, Felix kissed the hand of the stranger, and said, Good night, sweet Safie. He sat up much longer, conversing with his father; and, by the frequent repetition of her name, I conjectured that their lovely guest was the subject of their conversation. I ardently desired to understand them, and bent every faculty towards that purpose, but found it utterly impossible. The next morning Felix went out to his work; and, after the usual occupations of Agatha were finished, the Arabian sat at the feet of the old man, and, taking his guitar, played some airs so entrancingly beautiful, that they at once drew tears of sorrow and delight from my eyes. She sang, and her voice flowed in a rich cadence, swelling or dying away, like a nightingale of the woods. When she had finished, she gave the guitar to Agatha, who at first declined it. She played a simple air, and her voice accompanied it in sweet accents, but unlike the wondrous strain of the stranger. The old man appeared enraptured, and said some words, which Agatha endeavoured to explain to Safie, and by which he appeared to wish to express that she bestowed on him the greatest delight by her music. The days now passed as peaceably as before, with the sole alteration, that joy had taken place of sadness in the countenances of my friends. Safie was always gay and happy; she and I improved rapidly in the knowledge of language, so that in two months I began to comprehend most of the words uttered by my protectors. In the meanwhile also the black ground was covered with herbage, and the green banks interspersed with innumerable flowers, sweet to the scent and the eyes, stars of pale radiance among the moonlight woods; the sun became warmer, the nights clear and balmy; and my nocturnal rambles were an extreme pleasure to me, although they were considerably shortened by the late setting and early rising of the sun; for I never ventured abroad during daylight, fearful of meeting with the same treatment as I had formerly endured in the first village which I entered. My days were spent in close attention, that I might more speedily master the language; and I may boast that I improved more rapidly than the Arabian, who understood very little, and conversed in broken accents, whilst I comprehended and could imitate almost every word that was spoken. While I improved in speech, I also learned the science of letters, as it was taught to the stranger; and this opened before me a wide field for wonder and delight. The book from which Felix instructed Safie was Volneys Ruins of Empires. I should not have understood the purport of this book, had not Felix, in reading it, given very minute explanations. He had chosen this work, he said, because the declamatory style was framed in imitation of the eastern authors. Through this work I obtained a cursory knowledge of history, and a view of the several empires at present existing in the world; it gave me an insight into the manners, governments, and religions of the different nations of the earth. I heard of the slothful Asiatics; of the stupendous genius and mental activity of the Grecians; of the wars and wonderful virtue of the early Romansof their subsequent degenerationof the decline of that mighty empire; of chivalry, Christianity, and kings. I heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere, and wept with Safie over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants. These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle, and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike. To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased, and I turned away with disgust and loathing. Every conversation of the cottagers now opened new wonders to me. While I listened to the instructions which Felix bestowed upon the Arabian, the strange system of human society was explained to me. I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty; of rank, descent, and noble blood. The words induced me to turn towards myself. I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellowcreatures were, high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these acquisitions; but without either he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profit of the chosen few. And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant; but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endowed with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they, and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs. When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned? I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had for ever remained in my native wood, nor known or felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat! Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling; but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that was deatha state which I feared yet did not understand. I admired virtue and good feelings, and loved the gentle manners and amiable qualities of my cottagers; but I was shut out from intercourse with them, except through means which I obtained by stealth, when I was unseen and unknown, and which rather increased than satisfied the desire I had of becoming one among my fellows. The gentle words of Agatha, and the animated smiles of the charming Arabian, were not for me. The mild exhortations of the old man, and the lively conversation of the loved Felix, were not for me. Miserable, unhappy wretch! Other lessons were impressed upon me even more deeply. I heard of the difference of sexes; of the birth and growth of children; how the father doated on the smiles of the infant, and the lively sallies of the older child; how all the life and cares of the mother were wrapt up in the precious charge; how the mind of youth expanded and gained knowledge; of brother, sister, and all the various relationships which bind one human being to another in mutual bonds. But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me, or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans. I will soon explain to what these feelings tended; but allow me now to return to the cottagers, whose story excited in me such various feelings of indignation, delight, and wonder, but which all terminated in additional love and reverence for my protectors (for so I loved, in an innocent, half painful selfdeceit, to call them). CHAPTER VI. Some time elapsed before I learned the history of my friends. It was one which could not fail to impress itself deeply on my mind, unfolding as it did a number of circumstances each interesting and wonderful to one so utterly inexperienced as I was. The name of the old man was De Lacey. He was descended from a good family in France, where he had lived for many years in affluence, respected by his superiors, and beloved by his equals. His son was bred in the service of his country; and Agatha had ranked with ladies of the highest distinction. A few months before my arrival, they had lived in a large and luxurious city, called Paris, surrounded by friends, and possessed of every enjoyment which virtue, refinement of intellect, or taste, accompanied by a moderate fortune, could afford. The father of Safie had been the cause of their ruin. He was a Turkish merchant, and had inhabited Paris for many years, when, for some reason which I could not learn, he became obnoxious to the government. He was seized and cast into prison the very day that Safie arrived from Constantinople to join him. He was tried, and condemned to death. The injustice of his sentence was very flagrant; all Paris was indignant; and it was judged that his religion and wealth, rather than the crime alleged against him, had been the cause of his condemnation. Felix had been present at the trial; his horror and indignation were uncontrollable, when he heard the decision of the court. He made, at that moment, a solemn vow to deliver him, and then looked around for the means. After many fruitless attempts to gain admittance to the prison, he found a strongly grated window in an unguarded part of the building, which lighted the dungeon of the unfortunate Mahometan; who, loaded with chains, waited in despair the execution of the barbarous sentence. Felix visited the grate at night, and made known to the prisoner his intentions in his favour. The Turk, amazed and delighted, endeavoured to kindle the zeal of his deliverer by promises of reward and wealth. Felix rejected his offers with contempt; yet when he saw the lovely Safie, who was allowed to visit her father, and who, by her gestures, expressed her lively gratitude, the youth could not help owning to his own mind, that the captive possessed a treasure which would fully reward his toil and hazard. The Turk quickly perceived the impression that his daughter had made on the heart of Felix, and endeavoured to secure him more entirely in his interests by the promise of her hand in marriage, so soon as he should be conveyed to a place of safety. Felix was too delicate to accept this offer; yet he looked forward to the probability of that event as to the consummation of his happiness. During the ensuing days, while the preparations were going forward for the escape of the merchant, the zeal of Felix was warmed by several letters that he received from this lovely girl, who found means to express her thoughts in the language of her lover by the aid of an old man, a servant of her fathers, who understood French. She thanked him in the most ardent terms for his intended services towards her father; and at the same time she gently deplored her own fate. I have copies of these letters; for I found means, during my residence in the hovel, to procure the implements of writing; and the letters were often in the hands of Felix or Agatha. Before I depart, I will give them to you, they will prove the truth of my tale; but at present, as the sun is already far declined, I shall only have time to repeat the substance of them to you. Safie related, that her mother was a Christian Arab, seized and made a slave by the Turks; recommended by her beauty, she had won the heart of the father of Safie, who married her. The young girl spoke in high and enthusiastic terms of her mother, who, born in freedom spurned the bondage to which she was now reduced. She instructed her daughter in the tenets of her religion, and taught her to aspire to higher powers of intellect, and an independence of spirit, forbidden to the female followers of Mahomet. This lady died; but her lessons were indelibly impressed on the mind of Safie, who sickened at the prospect of again returning to Asia, and the being immured within the walls of a harem, allowed only to occupy herself with puerile amusements, ill suited to the temper of her soul, now accustomed to grand ideas and a noble emulation for virtue. The prospect of marrying a Christian, and remaining in a country where women were allowed to take a rank in society, was enchanting to her. The day for the execution of the Turk was fixed; but, on the night previous to it, he had quitted prison, and before morning was distant many leagues from Paris. Felix had procured passports in the name of his father, sister, and himself. He had previously communicated his plan to the former, who aided the deceit by quitting his house, under the pretence of a journey, and concealed himself, with his daughter, in an obscure part of Paris. Felix conducted the fugitives through France to Lyons, and across Mont Cenis to Leghorn, where the merchant had decided to wait a favourable opportunity of passing into some part of the Turkish dominions. Safie resolved to remain with her father until the moment of his departure, before which time the Turk renewed his promise that she should be united to his deliverer; and Felix remained with them in expectation of that event; and in the mean time he enjoyed the society of the Arabian, who exhibited towards him the simplest and tenderest affection. They conversed with one another through the means of an interpreter, and sometimes with the interpretation of looks; and Safie sang to him the divine airs of her native country. The Turk allowed this intimacy to take place, and encouraged the hopes of the youthful lovers, while in his heart he had formed far other plans. He loathed the idea that his daughter should be united to a Christian; but he feared the resentment of Felix if he should appear lukewarm; for he knew that he was still in the power of his deliverer, if he should choose to betray him to the Italian state which they inhabited. He revolved a thousand plans by which he should be enabled to prolong the deceit until it might be no longer necessary, and secretly to take his daughter with him when he departed. His plans were greatly facilitated by the news which arrived from Paris. The government of France were greatly enraged at the escape of their victim, and spared no pains to detect and punish his deliverer. The plot of Felix was quickly discovered, and De Lacey and Agatha were thrown into prison. The news reached Felix, and roused him from his dream of pleasure. His blind and aged father, and his gentle sister, lay in a noisome dungeon, while he enjoyed the free air, and the society of her whom he loved. This idea was torture to him. He quickly arranged with the Turk, that if the latter should find a favourable opportunity for escape before Felix could return to Italy, Safie should remain as a boarder at a convent at Leghorn; and then, quitting the lovely Arabian, he hastened to Paris, and delivered himself up to the vengeance of the law, hoping to free De Lacey and Agatha by this proceeding. He did not succeed. They remained confined for five months before the trial took place; the result of which deprived them of their fortune, and condemned them to a perpetual exile from their native country. They found a miserable asylum in the cottage in Germany, where I discovered them. Felix soon learned that the treacherous Turk, for whom he and his family endured such unheardof oppression, on discovering that his deliverer was thus reduced to poverty and impotence, became a traitor to good feeling and honour, and had quitted Italy with his daughter, insultingly sending Felix a pittance of money to aid him, as he said, in some plan of future maintenance. Such were the events that preyed on the heart of Felix, and rendered him, when I first saw him, the most miserable of his family. He could have endured poverty, and when this distress had been the meed of his virtue, he would have gloried in it but the ingratitude of the Turk, and the loss of his beloved Safie, were misfortunes more bitter and irreparable. The arrival of the Arabian now infused new life into his soul. When the news reached Leghorn, that Felix was deprived of his wealth and rank, the merchant commanded his daughter to think no more of her lover, but to prepare to return with him to her native country. The generous nature of Safie was outraged by this command; she attempted to expostulate with her father, but he left her angrily, reiterating his tyrannical mandate. A few days after, the Turk entered his daughters apartment, and told her hastily, that he had reason to believe that his residence at Leghorn had been divulged, and that he should speedily be delivered up to the French government; he had, consequently, hired a vessel to convey him to Constantinople, for which city he should sail in a few hours. He intended to leave his daughter under the care of a confidential servant, to follow at her leisure with the greater part of his property, which had not yet arrived at Leghorn. When alone, Safie resolved in her own mind the plan of conduct that it would become her to pursue in this emergency. A residence in Turkey was abhorrent to her; her religion and feelings were alike adverse to it. By some papers of her fathers, which fell into her hands, she heard of the exile of her lover, and learnt the name of the spot where he then resided. She hesitated some time, but at length she formed her determination. Taking with her some jewels that belonged to her, and a small sum of money, she quitted Italy, with an attendant, a native of Leghorn, but who understood the common language of Turkey, and departed for Germany. She arrived in safety at a town about twenty leagues from the cottage of De Lacey, when her attendant fell dangerously ill. Safie nursed her with the most devoted affection; but the poor girl died, and the Arabian was left alone, unacquainted with the language of the country, and utterly ignorant of the customs of the world. She fell, however, into good hands. The Italian had mentioned the name of the spot for which they were bound; and, after her death, the woman of the house in which they had lived took care that Safie should arrive in safety at the cottage of her lover. CHAPTER VII. Such was the history of my beloved cottagers. It impressed me deeply. I learned, from the views of social life which it developed, to admire their virtues, and to deprecate the vices of mankind. As yet I looked upon crime as a distant evil; benevolence and generosity were ever present before me, inciting within me a desire to become an actor in the busy scene where so many admirable qualities were called forth and displayed. But, in giving an account of the progress of my intellect, I must not omit a circumstance which occurred in the beginning of the month of August of the same year. One night, during my accustomed visit to the neighbouring wood, where I collected my own food, and brought home firing for my protectors, I found on the ground a leathern portmanteau, containing several articles of dress and some books. I eagerly seized the prize, and returned with it to my hovel. Fortunately the books were written in the language the elements of which I had acquired at the cottage; they consisted of Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarchs Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter. The possession of these treasures gave me extreme delight; I now continually studied and exercised my mind upon these histories, whilst my friends were employed in their ordinary occupations. I can hardly describe to you the effect of these books. They produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings, that sometimes raised me to ecstacy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection. In the Sorrows of Werter, besides the interest of its simple and affecting story, so many opinions are canvassed, and so many lights thrown upon what had hitherto been to me obscure subjects, that I found in it a neverending source of speculation and astonishment. The gentle and domestic manners it described, combined with lofty sentiments and feelings, which had for their object something out of self, accorded well with my experience among my protectors, and with the wants which were for ever alive in my own bosom. But I thought Werter himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined; his character contained no pretension, but it sunk deep. The disquisitions upon death and suicide were calculated to fill me with wonder. I did not pretend to enter into the merits of the case, yet I inclined towards the opinions of the hero, whose extinction I wept, without precisely understanding it. As I read, however, I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition. I found myself similar, yet at the same time strangely unlike the beings concerning whom I read, and to whose conversation I was a listener. I sympathized with, and partly understood them, but I was unformed in mind; I was dependent on none, and related to none. The path of my departure was free; and there was none to lament my annihilation. My person was hideous, and my stature gigantic what did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them. The volume of Plutarchs Lives which I possessed, contained the histories of the first founders of the ancient republics. This book had a far different effect upon me from the Sorrows of Werter. I learned from Werters imaginations despondency and gloom but Plutarch taught me high thoughts; he elevated me above the wretched sphere of my own reflections, to admire and love the heroes of past ages. Many things I read surpassed my understanding and experience. I had a very confused knowledge of kingdoms, wide extents of country, mighty rivers, and boundless seas. But I was perfectly unacquainted with towns, and large assemblages of men. The cottage of my protectors had been the only school in which I had studied human nature; but this book developed new and mightier scenes of action. I read of men concerned in public affairs governing or massacring their species. I felt the greatest ardour for virtue rise within me, and abhorrence for vice, as far as I understood the signification of those terms, relative as they were, as I applied them, to pleasure and pain alone. Induced by these feelings, I was of course led to admire peaceable lawgivers, Numa, Solon, and Lycurgus, in preference to Romulus and Theseus. The patriarchal lives of my protectors caused these impressions to take a firm hold on my mind; perhaps, if my first introduction to humanity had been made by a young soldier, burning for glory and slaughter, I should have been imbued with different sensations. But Paradise Lost excited different and far deeper emotions. I read it, as I had read the other volumes which had fallen into my hands, as a true history. It moved every feeling of wonder and awe, that the picture of an omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting. I often referred the several situations, as their similarity struck me, to my own. Like Adam, I was created apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with, and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature but I was wretched, helpless, and alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition; for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me. Another circumstance strengthened and confirmed these feelings. Soon after my arrival in the hovel, I discovered some papers in the pocket of the dress which I had taken from your laboratory. At first I had neglected them; but now that I was able to decypher the characters in which they were written, I began to study them with diligence. It was your journal of the four months that preceded my creation. You minutely described in these papers every step you took in the progress of your work; this history was mingled with accounts of domestic occurrences. You, doubtless, recollect these papers. Here they are. Every thing is related in them which bears reference to my accursed origin; the whole detail of that series of disgusting circumstances which produced it is set in view; the minutest description of my odious and loathsome person is given, in language which painted your own horrors, and rendered mine ineffaceable. I sickened as I read. Hateful day when I received life! I exclaimed in agony. Cursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God in pity made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellowdevils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and detested. These were the reflections of my hours of despondency and solitude; but when I contemplated the virtues of the cottagers, their amiable and benevolent dispositions, I persuaded myself that when they should become acquainted with my admiration of their virtues, they would compassionate me, and overlook my personal deformity. Could they turn from their door one, however monstrous, who solicited their compassion and friendship? I resolved, at least, not to despair, but in every way to fit myself for an interview with them which would decide my fate. I postponed this attempt for some months longer; for the importance attached to its success inspired me with a dread lest I should fail. Besides, I found that my understanding improved so much with every days experience, that I was unwilling to commence this undertaking until a few more months should have added to my wisdom. Several changes, in the mean time, took place in the cottage. The presence of Safie diffused happiness among its inhabitants; and I also found that a greater degree of plenty reigned there. Felix and Agatha spent more time in amusement and conversation, and were assisted in their labours by servants. They did not appear rich, but they were contented and happy; their feelings were serene and peaceful, while mine became every day more tumultuous. Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was.

I cherished hope, it is true; but it vanished, when I beheld my person reflected in water, or my shadow in the moonshine, even as that frail image and that inconstant shade. I endeavoured to crush these fears, and to fortify myself for the trial which in a few months I resolved to undergo; and sometimes I allowed my thoughts, unchecked by reason, to ramble in the fields of Paradise, and dared to fancy amiable and lovely creatures sympathizing with my feelings and cheering my gloom; their angelic countenances breathed smiles of consolation. But it was all a dream no Eve soothed my sorrows, or shared my thoughts; I was alone. I remembered Adams supplication to his Creator; but where was mine? he had abandoned me, and, in the bitterness of my heart, I cursed him. Autumn passed thus. I saw, with surprise and grief, the leaves decay and fall, and nature again assume the barren and bleak appearance it had worn when I first beheld the woods and the lovely moon. Yet I did not heed the bleakness of the weather; I was better fitted by my conformation for the endurance of cold than heat. But my chief delights were the sight of the flowers, the birds, and all the gay apparel of summer; when those deserted me, I turned with more attention towards the cottagers. Their happiness was not decreased by the absence of summer. They loved, and sympathized with one another; and their joys, depending on each other, were not interrupted by the casualties that took place around them. The more I saw of them, the greater became my desire to claim their protection and kindness; my heart yearned to be known and loved by these amiable creatures to see their sweet looks turned towards me with affection, was the utmost limit of my ambition. I dared not think that they would turn them from me with disdain and horror. The poor that stopped at their door were never driven away. I asked, it is true, for greater treasures than a little food or rest; I required kindness and sympathy; but I did not believe myself utterly unworthy of it. The winter advanced, and an entire revolution of the seasons had taken place since I awoke into life. My attention, at this time, was solely directed towards my plan of introducing myself into the cottage of my protectors. I revolved many projects; but that on which I finally fixed was, to enter the dwelling when the blind old man should be alone. I had sagacity enough to discover, that the unnatural hideousness of my person was the chief object of horror with those who had formerly beheld me. My voice, although harsh, had nothing terrible in it; I thought, therefore, that if, in the absence of his children, I could gain the goodwill and mediation of the old De Lacy, I might, by his means, be tolerated by my younger protectors. One day, when the sun shone on the red leaves that strewed the ground, and diffused cheerfulness, although it denied warmth, Safie, Agatha, and Felix, departed on a long country walk, and the old man, at his own desire, was left alone in the cottage. When his children had departed, he took up his guitar, and played several mournful, but sweet airs, more sweet and mournful than I had ever heard him play before. At first his countenance was illuminated with pleasure, but, as he continued, thoughtfulness and sadness succeeded; at length, laying aside the instrument, he sat absorbed in reflection. My heart beat quick; this was the hour and moment of trial, which would decide my hopes, or realize my fears. The servants were gone to a neighbouring fair. All was silent in and around the cottage it was an excellent opportunity; yet, when I proceeded to execute my plan, my limbs failed me, and I sunk to the ground. Again I rose; and, exerting all the firmness of which I was master, removed the planks which I had placed before my hovel to conceal my retreat. The fresh air revived me, and, with renewed determination, I approached the door of their cottage. I knocked. Who is there? said the old manCome in. I entered; Pardon this intrusion, said I, I am a traveller in want of a little rest; you would greatly oblige me, if you would allow me to remain a few minutes before the fire. Enter, said De Lacy; and I will try in what manner I can relieve your wants; but, unfortunately, my children are from home, and, as I am blind, I am afraid I shall find it difficult to procure food for you. Do not trouble yourself, my kind host, I have food; it is warmth and rest only that I need. I sat down, and a silence ensued. I knew that every minute was precious to me, yet I remained irresolute in what manner to commence the interview; when the old man addressed me By your language, stranger, I suppose you are my countryman;are you French? No; but I was educated by a French family, and understand that language only. I am now going to claim the protection of some friends, whom I sincerely love, and of whose favour I have some hopes. Are these Germans? No, they are French. But let us change the subject. I am an unfortunate and deserted creature; I look around, and I have no relation or friend upon earth. These amiable people to whom I go have never seen me, and know little of me. I am full of fears; for if I fail there, I am an outcast in the world for ever. Do not despair. To be friendless is indeed to be unfortunate; but the hearts of men, when unprejudiced by any obvious selfinterest, are full of brotherly love and charity. Rely, therefore, on your hopes; and if these friends are good and amiable, do not despair. They are kindthey are the most excellent creatures in the world; but, unfortunately, they are prejudiced against me. I have good dispositions; my life has been hitherto harmless, and, in some degree, beneficial; but a fatal prejudice clouds their eyes, and where they ought to see a feeling and kind friend, they behold only a detestable monster. That is indeed unfortunate; but if you are really blameless, cannot you undeceive them? I am about to undertake that task; and it is on that account that I feel so many overwhelming terrors. I tenderly love these friends; I have, unknown to them, been for many months in the habits of daily kindness towards them; but they believe that I wish to injure them, and it is that prejudice which I wish to overcome. Where do these friends reside? Near this spot. The old man paused, and then continued, If you will unreservedly confide to me the particulars of your tale, I perhaps may be of use in undeceiving them. I am blind, and cannot judge of your countenance, but there is something in your words which persuades me that you are sincere. I am poor, and an exile; but it will afford me true pleasure to be in any way serviceable to a human creature. Excellent man! I thank you, and accept your generous offer. You raise me from the dust by this kindness; and I trust that, by your aid, I shall not be driven from the society and sympathy of your fellowcreatures. Heaven forbid! even if you were really criminal; for that can only drive you to desperation, and not instigate you to virtue. I also am unfortunate; I and my family have been condemned, although innocent judge, therefore, if I do not feel for your misfortunes. How can I thank you, my best and only benefactor? from your lips first have I heard the voice of kindness directed towards me; I shall be for ever grateful; and your present humanity assures me of success with those friends whom I am on the point of meeting. May I know the names and residence of those friends? I paused. This, I thought, was the moment of decision, which was to rob me of, or bestow happiness on me for ever. I struggled vainly for firmness sufficient to answer him, but the effort destroyed all my remaining strength; I sank on the chair, and sobbed aloud. At that moment I heard the steps of my younger protectors. I had not a moment to lose; but, seizing the hand of the old man, I cried, Now is the time!save and protect me! You and your family are the friends whom I seek. Do not you desert me in the hour of trial! Great God! exclaimed the old man, who are you? At that instant the cottage door was opened, and Felix, Safie, and Agatha entered. Who can describe their horror and consternation on beholding me? Agatha fainted; and Safie, unable to attend to her friend, rushed out of the cottage. Felix darted forward, and with supernatural force tore me from his father, to whose knees I clung in a transport of fury, he dashed me to the ground, and struck me violently with a stick. I could have torn him limb from limb, as the lion rends the antelope. But my heart sunk within me as with bitter sickness, and I refrained. I saw him on the point of repeating his blow, when, overcome by pain and anguish, I quitted the cottage, and in the general tumult escaped unperceived to my hovel. CHAPTER VIII. Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live? Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed? I know not; despair had not yet taken possession of me; my feelings were those of rage and revenge. I could with pleasure have destroyed the cottage and its inhabitants, and have glutted myself with their shrieks and misery. When night came, I quitted my retreat, and wandered in the wood; and now, no longer restrained by the fear of discovery, I gave vent to my anguish in fearful howlings. I was like a wild beast that had broken the toils; destroying the objects that obstructed me, and ranging through the wood with a staglike swiftness. Oh! what a miserable night I passed! the cold stars shone in mockery, and the bare trees waved their branches above me now and then the sweet voice of a bird burst forth amidst the universal stillness. All, save I, were at rest or in enjoyment I, like the arch fiend, bore a hell within me; and, finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin. But this was a luxury of sensation that could not endure; I became fatigued with excess of bodily exertion, and sank on the damp grass in the sick impotence of despair. There was none among the myriads of men that existed who would pity or assist me; and should I feel kindness towards my enemies? No from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and, more than all, against him who had formed me, and sent me forth to this insupportable misery. The sun rose; I heard the voices of men, and knew that it was impossible to return to my retreat during that day. Accordingly I hid myself in some thick underwood, determining to devote the ensuing hours to reflection on my situation. The pleasant sunshine, and the pure air of day, restored me to some degree of tranquillity; and when I considered what had passed at the cottage, I could not help believing that I had been too hasty in my conclusions. I had certainly acted imprudently. It was apparent that my conversation had interested the father in my behalf, and I was a fool in having exposed my person to the horror of his children. I ought to have familiarized the old De Lacy to me, and by degrees have discovered myself to the rest of his family, when they should have been prepared for my approach. But I did not believe my errors to be irretrievable; and, after much consideration, I resolved to return to the cottage, seek the old man, and by my representations win him to my party. These thoughts calmed me, and in the afternoon I sank into a profound sleep; but the fever of my blood did not allow me to be visited by peaceful dreams. The horrible scene of the preceding day was for ever acting before my eyes; the females were flying, and the enraged Felix tearing me from his fathers feet. I awoke exhausted; and, finding that it was already night, I crept forth from my hidingplace, and went in search of food. When my hunger was appeased, I directed my steps towards the wellknown path that conducted to the cottage. All there was at peace. I crept into my hovel, and remained in silent expectation of the accustomed hour when the family arose. That hour past, the sun mounted high in the heavens, but the cottagers did not appear. I trembled violently, apprehending some dreadful misfortune. The inside of the cottage was dark, and I heard no motion; I cannot describe the agony of this suspence. Presently two countrymen passed by; but, pausing near the cottage, they entered into conversation, using violent gesticulations; but I did not understand what they said, as they spoke the language of the country, which differed from that of my protectors. Soon after, however, Felix approached with another man I was surprised, as I knew that he had not quitted the cottage that morning, and waited anxiously to discover, from his discourse, the meaning of these unusual appearances. Do you consider, said his companion to him, that you will be obliged to pay three months rent, and to lose the produce of your garden? I do not wish to take any unfair advantage, and I beg therefore that you will take some days to consider of your determination. It is utterly useless, replied Felix, we can never again inhabit your cottage. The life of my father is in the greatest danger, owing to the dreadful circumstance that I have related. My wife and my sister will never recover their horror. I entreat you not to reason with me any more. Take possession of your tenement, and let me fly from this place. Felix trembled violently as he said this. He and his companion entered the cottage, in which they remained for a few minutes, and then departed. I never saw any of the family of De Lacy more. I continued for the remainder of the day in my hovel in a state of utter and stupid despair. My protectors had departed, and had broken the only link that held me to the world. For the first time the feelings of revenge and hatred filled my bosom, and I did not strive to controul them; but, allowing myself to be borne away by the stream, I bent my mind towards injury and death. When I thought of my friends, of the mild voice of De Lacy, the gentle eyes of Agatha, and the exquisite beauty of the Arabian, these thoughts vanished, and a gush of tears somewhat soothed me. But again, when I reflected that they had spurned and deserted me, anger returned, a rage of anger; and, unable to injure any thing human, I turned my fury towards inanimate objects. As night advanced, I placed a variety of combustibles around the cottage; and, after having destroyed every vestige of cultivation in the garden, I waited with forced impatience until the moon had sunk to commence my operations. As the night advanced, a fierce wind arose from the woods, and quickly dispersed the clouds that had loitered in the heavens the blast tore along like a mighty avalanche, and produced a kind of insanity in my spirits, that burst all bounds of reason and reflection. I lighted the dry branch of a tree, and danced with fury around the devoted cottage, my eyes still fixed on the western horizon, the edge of which the moon nearly touched. A part of its orb was at length hid, and I waved my brand; it sunk, and, with a loud scream, I fired the straw, and heath, and bushes, which I had collected. The wind fanned the fire, and the cottage was quickly enveloped by the flames, which clung to it, and licked it with their forked and destroying tongues. As soon as I was convinced that no assistance could save any part of the habitation, I quitted the scene, and sought for refuge in the woods. And now, with the world before me, whither should I bend my steps? I resolved to fly far from the scene of my misfortunes; but to me, hated and despised, every country must be equally horrible. At length the thought of you crossed my mind. I learned from your papers that you were my father, my creator; and to whom could I apply with more fitness than to him who had given me life? Among the lessons that Felix had bestowed upon Safie geography had not been omitted I had learned from these the relative situations of the different countries of the earth. You had mentioned Geneva as the name of your native town; and towards this place I resolved to proceed. But how was I to direct myself? I knew that I must travel in a southwesterly direction to reach my destination; but the sun was my only guide. I did not know the names of the towns that I was to pass through, nor could I ask information from a single human being; but I did not despair. From you only could I hope for succour, although towards you I felt no sentiment but that of hatred. Unfeeling, heartless creator! you had endowed me with perceptions and passions, and then cast me abroad an object for the scorn and horror of mankind. But on you only had I any claim for pity and redress, and from you I determined to seek that justice which I vainly attempted to gain from any other being that wore the human form. My travels were long, and the sufferings I endured intense. It was late in autumn when I quitted the district where I had so long resided. I travelled only at night, fearful of encountering the visage of a human being. Nature decayed around me, and the sun became heatless; rain and snow poured around me; mighty rivers were frozen; the surface of the earth was hard, and chill, and bare, and I found no shelter. Oh, earth! how often did I imprecate curses on the cause of my being! The mildness of my nature had fled, and all within me was turned to gall and bitterness. The nearer I approached to your habitation, the more deeply did I feel the spirit of revenge enkindled in my heart. Snow fell, and the waters were hardened, but I rested not. A few incidents now and then directed me, and I possessed a map of the country; but I often wandered wide from my path. The agony of my feelings allowed me no respite no incident occurred from which my rage and misery could not extract its food; but a circumstance that happened when I arrived on the confines of Switzerland, when the sun had recovered its warmth, and the earth again began to look green, confirmed in an especial manner the bitterness and horror of my feelings. I generally rested during the day, and travelled only when I was secured by night from the view of man. One morning, however, finding that my path lay through a deep wood, I ventured to continue my journey after the sun had risen; the day, which was one of the first of spring, cheered even me by the loveliness of its sunshine and the balminess of the air. I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away by them; and, forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy. Soft tears again bedewed my cheeks, and I even raised my humid eyes with thankfulness towards the blessed sun which bestowed such joy upon me. I continued to wind among the paths of the wood, until I came to its boundary, which was skirted by a deep and rapid river, into which many of the trees bent their branches, now budding with the fresh spring. Here I paused, not exactly knowing what path to pursue, when I heard the sound of voices, that induced me to conceal myself under the shade of a cypress. I was scarcely hid, when a young girl came running towards the spot where I was concealed, laughing as if she ran from some one in sport. She continued her course along the precipitous sides of the river, when suddenly her foot slipt, and she fell into the rapid stream. I rushed from my hidingplace, and, with extreme labour from the force of the current, saved her, and dragged her to shore. She was senseless; and I endeavoured, by every means in my power, to restore animation, when I was suddenly interrupted by the approach of a rustic, who was probably the person from whom she had playfully fled. On seeing me, he darted towards me, and, tearing the girl from my arms, hastened towards the deeper parts of the wood. I followed speedily, I hardly knew why; but when the man saw me draw near, he aimed a gun, which he carried, at my body, and fired. I sunk to the ground, and my injurer, with increased swiftness, escaped into the wood. This was then the reward of my benevolence! I had saved a human being from destruction, and, as a recompense, I now writhed under the miserable pain of a wound, which shattered the flesh and bone. The feelings of kindness and gentleness, which I had entertained but a few moments before, gave place to hellish rage and gnashing of teeth. Inflamed by pain, I vowed eternal hatred and vengeance to all mankind. But the agony of my wound overcame me; my pulses paused, and I fainted. For some weeks I led a miserable life in the woods, endeavouring to cure the wound which I had received. The ball had entered my shoulder, and I knew not whether it had remained there or passed through; at any rate I had no means of extracting it. My sufferings were augmented also by the oppressive sense of the injustice and ingratitude of their infliction. My daily vows rose for revengea deep and deadly revenge, such as would alone compensate for the outrages and anguish I had endured. After some weeks my wound healed, and I continued my journey. The labours I endured were no longer to be alleviated by the bright sun or gentle breezes of spring; all joy was but a mockery, which insulted my desolate state, and made me feel more painfully that I was not made for the enjoyment of pleasure. But my toils now drew near a close; and, two months from this time, I reached the environs of Geneva. It was evening when I arrived, and I retired to a hidingplace among the fields that surround it, to meditate in what manner I should apply to you. I was oppressed by fatigue and hunger, and far too unhappy to enjoy the gentle breezes of evening, or the prospect of the sun setting behind the stupendous mountains of Jura. At this time a slight sleep relieved me from the pain of reflection, which was disturbed by the approach of a beautiful child, who came running into the recess I had chosen with all the sportiveness of infancy. Suddenly, as I gazed on him, an idea seized me, that this little creature was unprejudiced, and had lived too short a time to have imbibed a horror of deformity. If, therefore, I could seize him, and educate him as my companion and friend, I should not be so desolate in this peopled earth. Urged by this impulse, I seized on the boy as he passed, and drew him towards me. As soon as he beheld my form, he placed his hands before his eyes, and uttered a shrill scream I drew his hand forcibly from his face, and said, Child, what is the meaning of this? I do not intend to hurt you; listen to me. He struggled violently; Let me go, he cried; monster! ugly wretch! you wish to eat me, and tear me to piecesYou are an ogreLet me go, or I will tell my papa. Boy, you will never see your father again; you must come with me. Hideous monster! let me go; My papa is a Syndiche is M. Frankensteinhe would punish you. You dare not keep me. Frankenstein! you belong then to my enemyto him towards whom I have sworn eternal revenge; you shall be my first victim. The child still struggled, and loaded me with epithets which carried despair to my heart I grasped his throat to silence him, and in a moment he lay dead at my feet. I gazed on my victim, and my heart swelled with exultation and hellish triumph clapping my hands, I exclaimed, I, too, can create desolation; my enemy is not impregnable; this death will carry despair to him, and a thousand other miseries shall torment and destroy him. As I fixed my eyes on the child, I saw something glittering on his breast. I took it; it was a portrait of a most lovely woman. In spite of my malignity, it softened and attracted me. For a few moments I gazed with delight on her dark eyes, fringed by deep lashes, and her lovely lips; but presently my rage returned I remembered that I was for ever deprived of the delights that such beautiful creatures could bestow; and that she whose resemblance I contemplated would, in regarding me, have changed that air of divine benignity to one expressive of disgust and affright. Can you wonder that such thoughts transported me with rage? I only wonder that at that moment, instead of venting my sensations in exclamations and agony, I did not rush among mankind, and perish in the attempt to destroy them. While I was overcome by these feelings, I left the spot where I had committed the murder, and was seeking a more secluded hidingplace, when I perceived a woman passing near me. She was young, not indeed so beautiful as her whose portrait I held, but of an agreeable aspect, and blooming in the loveliness of youth and health. Here, I thought, is one of those whose smiles are bestowed on all but me; she shall not escape thanks to the lessons of Felix, and the sanguinary laws of man, I have learned how to work mischief. I approached her unperceived, and placed the portrait securely in one of the folds of her dress. For some days I haunted the spot where these scenes had taken place; sometimes wishing to see you, sometimes resolved to quit the world and its miseries for ever. At length I wandered towards these mountains, and have ranged through their immense recesses, consumed by a burning passion which you alone can gratify. We may not part until you have promised to comply with my requisition. I am alone, and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects. This being you must create. CHAPTER IX. The being finished speaking, and fixed his looks upon me in expectation of a reply. But I was bewildered, perplexed, and unable to arrange my ideas sufficiently to understand the full extent of his proposition. He continued You must create a female for me, with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being. This you alone can do; and I demand it of you as a right which you must not refuse. The latter part of his tale had kindled anew in me the anger that had died away while he narrated his peaceful life among the cottagers, and, as he said this, I could no longer suppress the rage that burned within me. I do refuse it, I replied; and no torture shall ever extort a consent from me. You may render me the most miserable of men, but you shall never make me base in my own eyes. Shall I create another like yourself, whose joint wickedness might desolate the world. Begone! I have answered you; you may torture me, but I will never consent. You are in the wrong, replied the fiend; and, instead of threatening, I am content to reason with you. I am malicious because I am miserable; am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator, would tear me to pieces, and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me? You would not call it murder, if you could precipitate me into one of those icerifts, and destroy my frame, the work of your own hands. Shall I respect man, when he contemns me? Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and, instead of injury, I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union. Yet mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery. I will revenge my injuries if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear; and chiefly towards you my archenemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. Have a care I will work at your destruction, nor finish until I desolate your heart, so that you curse the hour of your birth. A fiendish rage animated him as he said this; his face was wrinkled into contortions too horrible for human eyes to behold; but presently he calmed himself, and proceeded I intended to reason. This passion is detrimental to me; for you do not reflect that you are the cause of its excess. If any being felt emotions of benevolence towards me, I should return them an hundred and an hundred fold; for that one creatures sake, I would make peace with the whole kind! But I now indulge in dreams of bliss that cannot be realized. What I ask of you is reasonable and moderate; I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself the gratification is small, but it is all that I can receive, and it shall content me. It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another. Our lives will not be happy, but they will be harmless, and free from the misery I now feel. Oh! my creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing; do not deny me my request! I was moved. I shuddered when I thought of the possible consequences of my consent; but I felt that there was some justice in his argument. His tale, and the feelings he now expressed, proved him to be a creature of fine sensations; and did I not, as his maker, owe him all the portion of happiness that it was in my power to bestow? He saw my change of feeling, and continued If you consent, neither you nor any other human being shall ever see us again I will go to the vast wilds of South America. My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment. My companion will be of the same nature as myself, and will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man, and will ripen our food. The picture I present to you is peaceful and human, and you must feel that you could deny it only in the wantonness of power and cruelty. Pitiless as you have been towards me, I now see compassion in your eyes let me seize the favourable moment, and persuade you to promise what I so ardently desire. You propose, replied I, to fly from the habitations of man, to dwell in those wilds where the beasts of the field will be your only companions. How can you, who long for the love and sympathy of man, persevere in this exile? You will return, and again seek their kindness, and you will meet with their detestation; your evil passions will be renewed, and you will then have a companion to aid you in the task of destruction. This may not be; cease to argue the point, for I cannot consent. How inconstant are your feelings! but a moment ago you were moved by my representations, and why do you again harden yourself to my complaints? I swear to you, by the earth which I inhabit, and by you that made me, that, with the companion you bestow, I will quit the neighbourhood of man, and dwell, as it may chance, in the most savage of places. My evil passions will have fled, for I shall meet with sympathy; my life will flow quietly away, and, in my dying moments, I shall not curse my maker. His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him; but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred. I tried to stifle these sensations; I thought, that as I could not sympathize with him, I had no right to withhold from him the small portion of happiness which was yet in my power to bestow. You swear, I said, to be harmless; but have you not already shewn a degree of malice that should reasonably make me distrust you? May not even this be a feint that will increase your triumph by affording a wider scope for your revenge? How is this? I thought I had moved your compassion, and yet you still refuse to bestow on me the only benefit that can soften my heart, and render me harmless. If I have no ties and no affections, hatred and vice must be my portion; the love of another will destroy the cause of my crimes, and I shall become a thing, of whose existence every one will be ignorant.

My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being, and become linked to the chain of existence and events, from which I am now excluded. I paused some time to reflect on all he had related, and the various arguments which he had employed. I thought of the promise of virtues which he had displayed on the opening of his existence, and the subsequent blight of all kindly feeling by the loathing and scorn which his protectors had manifested towards him. His power and threats were not omitted in my calculations a creature who could exist in the ice caves of the glaciers, and hide himself from pursuit among the ridges of inaccessible precipices, was a being possessing faculties it would be vain to cope with. After a long pause of reflection, I concluded, that the justice due both to him and my fellowcreatures demanded of me that I should comply with his request. Turning to him, therefore, I said I consent to your demand, on your solemn oath to quit Europe for ever, and every other place in the neighbourhood of man, as soon as I shall deliver into your hands a female who will accompany you in your exile. I swear, he cried, by the sun, and by the blue sky of heaven, that if you grant my prayer, while they exist you shall never behold me again. Depart to your home, and commence your labours I shall watch their progress with unutterable anxiety; and fear not but that when you are ready I shall appear. Saying this, he suddenly quitted me, fearful, perhaps, of any change in my sentiments. I saw him descend the mountain with greater speed than the flight of an eagle, and quickly lost him among the undulations of the sea of ice. His tale had occupied the whole day; and the sun was upon the verge of the horizon when he departed. I knew that I ought to hasten my descent towards the valley, as I should soon be encompassed in darkness; but my heart was heavy, and my steps slow. The labour of winding among the little paths of the mountains, and fixing my feet firmly as I advanced, perplexed me, occupied as I was by the emotions which the occurrences of the day had produced. Night was far advanced, when I came to the halfway restingplace, and seated myself beside the fountain. The stars shone at intervals, as the clouds passed from over them; the dark pines rose before me, and every here and there a broken tree lay on the ground it was a scene of wonderful solemnity, and stirred strange thoughts within me. I wept bitterly; and, clasping my hands in agony, I exclaimed, Oh! stars, and clouds, and winds, ye are all about to mock me if ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory; let me become as nought; but if not, depart, depart and leave me in darkness. These were wild and miserable thoughts; but I cannot describe to you how the eternal twinkling of the stars weighed upon me, and how I listened to every blast of wind, as if it were a dull ugly siroc on its way to consume me. Morning dawned before I arrived at the village of Chamounix; but my presence, so haggard and strange, hardly calmed the fears of my family, who had waited the whole night in anxious expectation of my return. The following day we returned to Geneva. The intention of my father in coming had been to divert my mind, and to restore me to my lost tranquillity; but the medicine had been fatal. And, unable to account for the excess of misery I appeared to suffer, he hastened to return home, hoping the quiet and monotony of a domestic life would by degrees alleviate my sufferings from whatsoever cause they might spring. For myself, I was passive in all their arrangements; and the gentle affection of my beloved Elizabeth was inadequate to draw me from the depth of my despair. The promise I had made to the dmon weighed upon my mind, like Dantes iron cowl on the heads of the hellish hypocrites. All pleasures of earth and sky passed before me like a dream, and that thought only had to me the reality of life. Can you wonder, that sometimes a kind of insanity possessed me, or that I saw continually about me a multitude of filthy animals inflicting on me incessant torture, that often extorted screams and bitter groans? By degrees, however, these feelings became calmed. I entered again into the everyday scene of life, if not with interest, at least with some degree of tranquillity. END OF VOL. II. FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. III. Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould me man? Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me? Paradise Lost. London PRINTED FOR LACKINGTON, HUGHES, HARDING, MAVOR, JONES, FINSBURY SQUARE. 1818. CHAPTER I. Day after day, week after week, passed away on my return to Geneva; and I could not collect the courage to recommence my work. I feared the vengeance of the disappointed fiend, yet I was unable to overcome my repugnance to the task which was enjoined me. I found that I could not compose a female without again devoting several months to profound study and laborious disquisition. I had heard of some discoveries having been made by an English philosopher, the knowledge of which was material to my success, and I sometimes thought of obtaining my fathers consent to visit England for this purpose; but I clung to every pretence of delay, and could not resolve to interrupt my returning tranquillity. My health, which had hitherto declined, was now much restored; and my spirits, when unchecked by the memory of my unhappy promise, rose proportionably. My father saw this change with pleasure, and he turned his thoughts towards the best method of eradicating the remains of my melancholy, which every now and then would return by fits, and with a devouring blackness overcast the approaching sunshine. At these moments I took refuge in the most perfect solitude. I passed whole days on the lake alone in a little boat, watching the clouds, and listening to the rippling of the waves, silent and listless. But the fresh air and bright sun seldom failed to restore me to some degree of composure; and, on my return, I met the salutations of my friends with a readier smile and a more cheerful heart. It was after my return from one of these rambles that my father, calling me aside, thus addressed me I am happy to remark, my dear son, that you have resumed your former pleasures, and seem to be returning to yourself. And yet you are still unhappy, and still avoid our society. For some time I was lost in conjecture as to the cause of this; but yesterday an idea struck me, and if it is well founded, I conjure you to avow it. Reserve on such a point would be not only useless, but draw down treble misery on us all. I trembled violently at this exordium, and my father continued I confess, my son, that I have always looked forward to your marriage with your cousin as the tie of our domestic comfort, and the stay of my declining years. You were attached to each other from your earliest infancy; you studied together, and appeared, in dispositions and tastes, entirely suited to one another. But so blind is the experience of man, that what I conceived to be the best assistants to my plan may have entirely destroyed it. You, perhaps, regard her as your sister, without any wish that she might become your wife. Nay, you may have met with another whom you may love; and, considering yourself as bound in honour to your cousin, this struggle may occasion the poignant misery which you appear to feel. My dear father, reassure yourself. I love my cousin tenderly and sincerely. I never saw any woman who excited, as Elizabeth does, my warmest admiration and affection. My future hopes and prospects are entirely bound up in the expectation of our union. The expression of your sentiments on this subject, my dear Victor, gives me more pleasure than I have for some time experienced. If you feel thus, we shall assuredly be happy, however present events may cast a gloom over us. But it is this gloom, which appears to have taken so strong a hold of your mind, that I wish to dissipate. Tell me, therefore, whether you object to an immediate solemnization of the marriage. We have been unfortunate, and recent events have drawn us from that everyday tranquillity befitting my years and infirmities. You are younger; yet I do not suppose, possessed as you are of a competent fortune, that an early marriage would at all interfere with any future plans of honour and utility that you may have formed. Do not suppose, however, that I wish to dictate happiness to you, or that a delay on your part would cause me any serious uneasiness. Interpret my words with candour, and answer me, I conjure you, with confidence and sincerity. I listened to my father in silence, and remained for some time incapable of offering any reply. I revolved rapidly in my mind a multitude of thoughts, and endeavoured to arrive at some conclusion. Alas! to me the idea of an immediate union with my cousin was one of horror and dismay. I was bound by a solemn promise, which I had not yet fulfilled, and dared not break; or, if I did, what manifold miseries might not impend over me and my devoted family! Could I enter into a festival with this deadly weight yet hanging round my neck, and bowing me to the ground. I must perform my engagement, and let the monster depart with his mate, before I allowed myself to enjoy the delight of an union from which I expected peace. I remembered also the necessity imposed upon me of either journeying to England, or entering into a long correspondence with those philosophers of that country, whose knowledge and discoveries were of indispensable use to me in my present undertaking. The latter method of obtaining the desired intelligence was dilatory and unsatisfactory besides, any variation was agreeable to me, and I was delighted with the idea of spending a year or two in change of scene and variety of occupation, in absence from my family; during which period some event might happen which would restore me to them in peace and happiness my promise might be fulfilled, and the monster have departed; or some accident might occur to destroy him, and put an end to my slavery for ever. These feelings dictated my answer to my father. I expressed a wish to visit England; but, concealing the true reasons of this request, I clothed my desires under the guise of wishing to travel and see the world before I sat down for life within the walls of my native town. I urged my entreaty with earnestness, and my father was easily induced to comply; for a more indulgent and less dictatorial parent did not exist upon earth. Our plan was soon arranged. I should travel to Strasburgh, where Clerval would join me. Some short time would be spent in the towns of Holland, and our principal stay would be in England. We should return by France; and it was agreed that the tour should occupy the space of two years. My father pleased himself with the reflection, that my union with Elizabeth should take place immediately on my return to Geneva. These two years, said he, will pass swiftly, and it will be the last delay that will oppose itself to your happiness. And, indeed, I earnestly desire that period to arrive, when we shall all be united, and neither hopes or fears arise to disturb our domestic calm. I am content, I replied, with your arrangement. By that time we shall both have become wiser, and I hope happier, than we at present are. I sighed; but my father kindly forbore to question me further concerning the cause of my dejection. He hoped that new scenes, and the amusement of travelling, would restore my tranquillity. I now made arrangements for my journey; but one feeling haunted me, which filled me with fear and agitation. During my absence I should leave my friends unconscious of the existence of their enemy, and unprotected from his attacks, exasperated as he might be by my departure. But he had promised to follow me wherever I might go; and would he not accompany me to England? This imagination was dreadful in itself, but soothing, inasmuch as it supposed the safety of my friends. I was agonized with the idea of the possibility that the reverse of this might happen. But through the whole period during which I was the slave of my creature, I allowed myself to be governed by the impulses of the moment; and my present sensations strongly intimated that the fiend would follow me, and exempt my family from the danger of his machinations. It was in the latter end of August that I departed, to pass two years of exile. Elizabeth approved of the reasons of my departure, and only regretted that she had not the same opportunities of enlarging her experience, and cultivating her understanding. She wept, however, as she bade me farewell, and entreated me to return happy and tranquil. We all, said she, depend upon you; and if you are miserable, what must be our feelings? I threw myself into the carriage that was to convey me away, hardly knowing whither I was going, and careless of what was passing around. I remembered only, and it was with a bitter anguish that I reflected on it, to order that my chemical instruments should be packed to go with me for I resolved to fulfil my promise while abroad, and return, if possible, a free man. Filled with dreary imaginations, I passed through many beautiful and majestic scenes; but my eyes were fixed and unobserving. I could only think of the bourne of my travels, and the work which was to occupy me whilst they endured. After some days spent in listless indolence, during which I traversed many leagues, I arrived at Strasburgh, where I waited two days for Clerval. He came. Alas, how great was the contrast between us! He was alive to every new scene; joyful when he saw the beauties of the setting sun, and more happy when he beheld it rise, and recommence a new day. He pointed out to me the shifting colours of the landscape, and the appearances of the sky. This is what it is to live; he cried, now I enjoy existence! But you, my dear Frankenstein, wherefore are you desponding and sorrowful? In truth, I was occupied by gloomy thoughts, and neither saw the descent of the evening star, nor the golden sunrise reflected in the Rhine.And you, my friend, would be far more amused with the journal of Clerval, who observed the scenery with an eye of feeling and delight, than to listen to my reflections. I, a miserable wretch, haunted by a curse that shut up every avenue to enjoyment. We had agreed to descend the Rhine in a boat from Strasburgh to Rotterdam, whence we might take shipping for London. During this voyage, we passed by many willowy islands, and saw several beautiful towns. We staid a day at Manheim, and, on the fifth from our departure from Strasburgh, arrived at Mayence. The course of the Rhine below Mayence becomes much more picturesque. The river descends rapidly, and winds between hills, not high, but steep, and of beautiful forms. We saw many ruined castles standing on the edges of precipices, surrounded by black woods, high and inaccessible. This part of the Rhine, indeed, presents a singularly variegated landscape. In one spot you view rugged hills, ruined castles overlooking tremendous precipices, with the dark Rhine rushing beneath; and, on the sudden turn of a promontory, flourishing vineyards, with green sloping banks, and a meandering river, and populous towns, occupy the scene. We travelled at the time of the vintage, and heard the song of the labourers, as we glided down the stream. Even I, depressed in mind, and my spirits continually agitated by gloomy feelings, even I was pleased. I lay at the bottom of the boat, and, as I gazed on the cloudless blue sky, I seemed to drink in a tranquillity to which I had long been a stranger. And if these were my sensations, who can describe those of Henry? He felt as if he had been transported to Fairyland, and enjoyed a happiness seldom tasted by man. I have seen, he said, the most beautiful scenes of my own country; I have visited the lakes of Lucerne and Uri, where the snowy mountains descend almost perpendicularly to the water, casting black and impenetrable shades, which would cause a gloomy and mournful appearance, were it not for the most verdant islands that relieve the eye by their gay appearance; I have seen this lake agitated by a tempest, when the wind tore up whirlwinds of water, and gave you an idea of what the waterspout must be on the great ocean, and the waves dash with fury the base of the mountain, where the priest and his mistress were overwhelmed by an avalanche, and where their dying voices are still said to be heard amid the pauses of the nightly wind; I have seen the mountains of La Valais, and the Pays de Vaud but this country, Victor, pleases me more than all those wonders. The mountains of Switzerland are more majestic and strange; but there is a charm in the banks of this divine river, that I never before saw equalled. Look at that castle which overhangs yon precipice; and that also on the island, almost concealed amongst the foliage of those lovely trees; and now that group of labourers coming from among their vines; and that village halfhid in the recess of the mountain. Oh, surely, the spirit that inhabits and guards this place has a soul more in harmony with man, than those who pile the glacier, or retire to the inaccessible peaks of the mountains of our own country. Clerval! beloved friend! even now it delights me to record your words, and to dwell on the praise of which you are so eminently deserving. He was a being formed in the very poetry of nature. His wild and enthusiastic imagination was chastened by the sensibility of his heart. His soul overflowed with ardent affections, and his friendship was of that devoted and wondrous nature that the worldlyminded teach us to look for only in the imagination. But even human sympathies were not sufficient to satisfy his eager mind. The scenery of external nature, which others regard only with admiration, he loved with ardour The sounding cataract Haunted him like a passion the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to him An appetite; a feeling, and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, or any interest Unborrowed from the eye. And where does he now exist? Is this gentle and lovely being lost for ever? Has this mind so replete with ideas, imaginations fanciful and magnificent, which formed a world, whose existence depended on the life of its creator; has this mind perished? Does it now only exist in my memory? No, it is not thus; your form so divinely wrought, and beaming with beauty, has decayed, but your spirit still visits and consoles your unhappy friend. Pardon this gush of sorrow; these ineffectual words are but a slight tribute to the unexampled worth of Henry, but they soothe my heart, overflowing with the anguish which his remembrance creates. I will proceed with my tale. Beyond Cologne we descended to the plains of Holland; and we resolved to post the remainder of our way; for the wind was contrary, and the stream of the river was too gentle to aid us. Our journey here lost the interest arising from beautiful scenery; but we arrived in a few days at Rotterdam, whence we proceeded by sea to England. It was on a clear morning, in the latter days of December, that I first saw the white cliffs of Britain. The banks of the Thames presented a new scene; they were flat, but fertile, and almost every town was marked by the remembrance of some story. We saw Tilbury Fort, and remembered the Spanish armada; Gravesend, Woolwich, and Greenwich, places which I had heard of even in my country. At length we saw the numerous steeples of London, St. Pauls towering above all, and the Tower famed in English history. CHAPTER II. London was our present point of rest; we determined to remain several months in this wonderful and celebrated city. Clerval desired the intercourse of the men of genius and talent who flourished at this time; but this was with me a secondary object; I was principally occupied with the means of obtaining the information necessary for the completion of my promise, and quickly availed myself of the letters of introduction that I had brought with me, addressed to the most distinguished natural philosophers. If this journey had taken place during my days of study and happiness, it would have afforded me inexpressible pleasure. But a blight had come over my existence, and I only visited these people for the sake of the information they might give me on the subject in which my interest was so terribly profound. Company was irksome to me; when alone, I could fill my mind with the sights of heaven and earth; the voice of Henry soothed me, and I could thus cheat myself into a transitory peace. But busy uninteresting joyous faces brought back despair to my heart. I saw an insurmountable barrier placed between me and my fellowmen; this barrier was sealed with the blood of William and Justine; and to reflect on the events connected with those names filled my soul with anguish. But in Clerval I saw the image of my former self; he was inquisitive, and anxious to gain experience and instruction. The difference of manners which he observed was to him an inexhaustible source of instruction and amusement. He was for ever busy; and the only check to his enjoyments was my sorrowful and dejected mien. I tried to conceal this as much as possible, that I might not debar him from the pleasures natural to one who was entering on a new scene of life, undisturbed by any care or bitter recollection. I often refused to accompany him, alleging another engagement, that I might remain alone. I now also began to collect the materials necessary for my new creation, and this was to me like the torture of single drops of water continually falling on the head. Every thought that was devoted to it was an extreme anguish, and every word that I spoke in allusion to it caused my lips to quiver, and my heart to palpitate. After passing some months in London, we received a letter from a person in Scotland, who had formerly been our visitor at Geneva. He mentioned the beauties of his native country, and asked us if those were not sufficient allurements to induce us to prolong our journey as far north as Perth, where he resided. Clerval eagerly desired to accept this invitation; and I, although I abhorred society, wished to view again mountains and streams, and all the wondrous works with which Nature adorns her chosen dwellingplaces. We had arrived in England at the beginning of October, and it was now February. We accordingly determined to commence our journey towards the north at the expiration of another month. In this expedition we did not intend to follow the great road to Edinburgh, but to visit Windsor, Oxford, Matlock, and the Cumberland lakes, resolving to arrive at the completion of this tour about the end of July. I packed my chemical instruments, and the materials I had collected, resolving to finish my labours in some obscure nook in the northern highlands of Scotland. We quitted London on the 27th of March, and remained a few days at Windsor, rambling in its beautiful forest. This was a new scene to us mountaineers; the majestic oaks, the quantity of game, and the herds of stately deer, were all novelties to us. From thence we proceeded to Oxford. As we entered this city, our minds were filled with the remembrance of the events that had been transacted there more than a century and a half before. It was here that Charles I. had collected his forces. This city had remained faithful to him, after the whole nation had forsaken his cause to join the standard of parliament and liberty. The memory of that unfortunate king, and his companions, the amiable Falkland, the insolent Gower, his queen, and son, gave a peculiar interest to every part of the city, which they might be supposed to have inhabited. The spirit of elder days found a dwelling here, and we delighted to trace its footsteps. If these feelings had not found an imaginary gratification, the appearance of the city had yet in itself sufficient beauty to obtain our admiration. The colleges are ancient and picturesque; the streets are almost magnificent; and the lovely Isis, which flows beside it through meadows of exquisite verdure, is spread forth into a placid expanse of waters, which reflects its majestic assemblage of towers, and spires, and domes, embosomed among aged trees. I enjoyed this scene; and yet my enjoyment was embittered both by the memory of the past, and the anticipation of the future. I was formed for peaceful happiness. During my youthful days discontent never visited my mind; and if I was ever overcome by ennui, the sight of what is beautiful in nature, or the study of what is excellent and sublime in the productions of man, could always interest my heart, and communicate elasticity to my spirits. But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit, what I shall soon cease to bea miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others, and abhorrent to myself. We passed a considerable period at Oxford, rambling among its environs, and endeavouring to identify every spot which might relate to the most animating epoch of English history. Our little voyages of discovery were often prolonged by the successive objects that presented themselves. We visited the tomb of the illustrious Hampden, and the field on which that patriot fell. For a moment my soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable fears to contemplate the divine ideas of liberty and selfsacrifice, of which these sights were the monuments and the remembrancers. For an instant I dared to shake off my chains, and look around me with a free and lofty spirit; but the iron had eaten into my flesh, and I sank again, trembling and hopeless, into my miserable self. We left Oxford with regret, and proceeded to Matlock, which was our next place of rest. The country in the neighbourhood of this village resembled, to a greater degree, the scenery of Switzerland; but every thing is on a lower scale, and the green hills want the crown of distant white Alps, which always attend on the piny mountains of my native country. We visited the wondrous cave, and the little cabinets of natural history, where the curiosities are disposed in the same manner as in the collections at Servox and Chamounix. The latter name made me tremble, when pronounced by Henry; and I hastened to quit Matlock, with which that terrible scene was thus associated. From Derby still journeying northward, we passed two months in Cumberland and Westmoreland. I could now almost fancy myself among the Swiss mountains. The little patches of snow which yet lingered on the northern sides of the mountains, the lakes, and the dashing of the rocky streams, were all familiar and dear sights to me. Here also we made some acquaintances, who almost contrived to cheat me into happiness. The delight of Clerval was proportionably greater than mine; his mind expanded in the company of men of talent, and he found in his own nature greater capacities and resources than he could have imagined himself to have possessed while he associated with his inferiors. I could pass my life here, said he to me; and among these mountains I should scarcely regret Switzerland and the Rhine. But he found that a travellers life is one that includes much pain amidst its enjoyments. His feelings are for ever on the stretch; and when he begins to sink into repose, he finds himself obliged to quit that on which he rests in pleasure for something new, which again engages his attention, and which also he forsakes for other novelties. We had scarcely visited the various lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, and conceived an affection for some of the inhabitants, when the period of our appointment with our Scotch friend approached, and we left them to travel on. For my own part I was not sorry. I had now neglected my promise for some time, and I feared the effects of the dmons disappointment. He might remain in Switzerland, and wreak his vengeance on my relatives. This idea pursued me, and tormented me at every moment from which I might otherwise have snatched repose and peace. I waited for my letters with feverish impatience if they were delayed, I was miserable, and overcome by a thousand fears; and when they arrived, and I saw the superscription of Elizabeth or my father, I hardly dared to read and ascertain my fate. Sometimes I thought that the fiend followed me, and might expedite my remissness by murdering my companion. When these thoughts possessed me, I would not quit Henry for a moment, but followed him as his shadow, to protect him from the fancied rage of his destroyer. I felt as if I had committed some great crime, the consciousness of which haunted me. I was guiltless, but I had indeed drawn down a horrible curse upon my head, as mortal as that of crime. I visited Edinburgh with languid eyes and mind; and yet that city might have interested the most unfortunate being. Clerval did not like it so well as Oxford; for the antiquity of the latter city was more pleasing to him. But the beauty and regularity of the new town of Edinburgh, its romantic castle, and its environs, the most delightful in the world, Arthurs Seat, St. Bernards Well, and the Pentland Hills, compensated him for the change, and filled him with cheerfulness and admiration. But I was impatient to arrive at the termination of my journey. We left Edinburgh in a week, passing through Coupar, St. Andrews, and along the banks of the Tay, to Perth, where our friend expected us. But I was in no mood to laugh and talk with strangers, or enter into their feelings or plans with the good humour expected from a guest; and accordingly I told Clerval that I wished to make the tour of Scotland alone. Do you, said I, enjoy yourself, and let this be our rendezvous. I may be absent a month or two; but do not interfere with my motions, I entreat you leave me to peace and solitude for a short time; and when I return, I hope it will be with a lighter heart, more congenial to your own temper. Henry wished to dissuade me; but, seeing me bent on this plan, ceased to remonstrate. He entreated me to write often. I had rather be with you, he said, in your solitary rambles, than with these Scotch people, whom I do not know hasten then, my dear friend, to return, that I may again feel myself somewhat at home, which I cannot do in your absence. Having parted from my friend, I determined to visit some remote spot of Scotland, and finish my work in solitude. I did not doubt but that the monster followed me, and would discover himself to me when I should have finished, that he might receive his companion. With this resolution I traversed the northern highlands, and fixed on one of the remotest of the Orkneys as the scene labours. It was a place fitted for such a work, being hardly more than a rock, whose high sides were continually beaten upon by the waves. The soil was barren, scarcely affording pasture for a few miserable cows, and oatmeal for its inhabitants, which consisted of five persons, whose gaunt and scraggy limbs gave tokens of their miserable fare. Vegetables and bread, when they indulged in such luxuries, and even fresh water, was to be procured from the main land, which was about five miles distant. On the whole island there were but three miserable huts, and one of these was vacant when I arrived. This I hired. It contained but two rooms, and these exhibited all the squalidness of the most miserable penury. The thatch had fallen in, the walls were unplastered, and the door was off its hinges.

I ordered it to be repaired, bought some furniture, and took possession; an incident which would, doubtless, have occasioned some surprise, had not all the senses of the cottagers been benumbed by want and squalid poverty. As it was, I lived ungazed at and unmolested, hardly thanked for the pittance of food and clothes which I gave; so much does suffering blunt even the coarsest sensations of men. In this retreat I devoted the morning to labour; but in the evening, when the weather permitted, I walked on the stony beach of the sea, to listen to the waves as they roared, and dashed at my feet. It was a monotonous, yet everchanging scene. I thought of Switzerland; it was far different from this desolate and appalling landscape. Its hills are covered with vines, and its cottages are scattered thickly in the plains. Its fair lakes reflect a blue and gentle sky; and, when troubled by the winds, their tumult is but as the play of a lively infant, when compared to the roarings of the giant ocean. In this manner I distributed my occupations when I first arrived; but, as I proceeded in my labour, it became every day more horrible and irksome to me. Sometimes I could not prevail on myself to enter my laboratory for several days; and at other times I toiled day and night in order to complete my work. It was indeed a filthy process in which I was engaged. During my first experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had blinded me to the horror of my employment; my mind was intently fixed on the sequel of my labour, and my eyes were shut to the horror of my proceedings. But now I went to it in cold blood, and my heart often sickened at the work of my hands. Thus situated, employed in the most detestable occupation, immersed in a solitude where nothing could for an instant call my attention from the actual scene in which I was engaged, my spirits became unequal; I grew restless and nervous. Every moment I feared to meet my persecutor. Sometimes I sat with my eyes fixed on the ground, fearing to raise them lest they should encounter the object which I so much dreaded to behold. I feared to wander from the sight of my fellowcreatures, lest when alone he should come to claim his companion. In the mean time I worked on, and my labour was already considerably advanced. I looked towards its completion with a tremulous and eager hope, which I dared not trust myself to question, but which was intermixed with obscure forebodings of evil, that made my heart sicken in my bosom. CHAPTER III. I sat one evening in my laboratory; the sun had set, and the moon was just rising from the sea; I had not sufficient light for my employment, and I remained idle, in a pause of consideration of whether I should leave my labour for the night, or hasten its conclusion by an unremitting attention to it. As I sat, a train of reflection occurred to me, which led me to consider the effects of what I was now doing. Three years before I was engaged in the same manner, and had created a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated my heart, and filled it for ever with the bitterest remorse. I was now about to form another being, of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighbourhood of man, and hide himself in deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation. They might even hate each other; the creature who already lived loathed his own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence for it when it came before his eyes in the female form? She also might turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she might quit him, and he be again alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one of his own species. Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dmon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I a right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? I had before been moved by the sophisms of the being I had created; I had been struck senseless by his fiendish threats but now, for the first time, the wickedness of my promise burst upon me; I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price perhaps of the existence of the whole human race. I trembled, and my heart failed within me; when, on looking up, I saw, by the light of the moon, the dmon at the casement. A ghastly grin wrinkled his lips as he gazed on me, where I sat fulfilling the task which he had allotted to me. Yes, he had followed me in my travels; he had loitered in forests, hid himself in caves, or taken refuge in wide and desert heaths; and he now came to mark my progress, and claim the fulfilment of my promise. As I looked on him, his countenance expressed the utmost extent of malice and treachery. I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating another like to him, and, trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged. The wretch saw me destroy the creature on whose future existence he depended for happiness, and, with a howl of devilish despair and revenge, withdrew. I left the room, and, locking the door, made a solemn vow in my own heart never to resume my labours; and then, with trembling steps, I sought my own apartment. I was alone; none were near me to dissipate the gloom, and relieve me from the sickening oppression of the most terrible reveries. Several hours past, and I remained near my window gazing on the sea; it was almost motionless, for the winds were hushed, and all nature reposed under the eye of the quiet moon. A few fishing vessels alone specked the water, and now and then the gentle breeze wafted the sound of voices, as the fishermen called to one another. I felt the silence, although I was hardly conscious of its extreme profundity until my ear was suddenly arrested by the paddling of oars near the shore, and a person landed close to my house. In a few minutes after, I heard the creaking of my door, as if some one endeavoured to open it softly. I trembled from head to foot; I felt a presentiment of who it was, and wished to rouse one of the peasants who dwelt in a cottage not far from mine; but I was overcome by the sensation of helplessness, so often felt in frightful dreams, when you in vain endeavour to fly from an impending danger, and was rooted to the spot. Presently I heard the sound of footsteps along the passage; the door opened, and the wretch whom I dreaded appeared. Shutting the door, he approached me, and said, in a smothered voice You have destroyed the work which you began; what is it that you intend? Do you dare to break your promise? I have endured toil and misery I left Switzerland with you; I crept along the shores of the Rhine, among its willow islands, and over the summits of its hills. I have dwelt many months in the heaths of England, and among the deserts of Scotland. I have endured incalculable fatigue, and cold, and hunger; do you dare destroy my hopes? Begone! I do break my promise; never will I create another like yourself, equal in deformity and wickedness. Slave, I before reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy of my condescension. Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you. You are my creator, but I am your master;obey! The hour of my weakness is past, and the period of your power is arrived. Your threats cannot move me to do an act of wickedness; but they confirm me in a resolution of not creating you a companion in vice. Shall I, in cool blood, set loose upon the earth a dmon, whose delight is in death and wretchedness. Begone! I am firm, and your words will only exasperate my rage. The monster saw my determination in my face, and gnashed his teeth in the impotence of anger. Shall each man, cried he, find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. Man, you may hate; but beware! Your hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must ravish from you your happiness for ever. Are you to be happy, while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness? You can blast my other passions; but revenge remainsrevenge, henceforth dearer than light or food! I may die; but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery. Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict. Devil, cease; and do not poison the air with these sounds of malice. I have declared my resolution to you, and I am no coward to bend beneath words. Leave me; I am inexorable. It is well. I go; but remember, I shall be with you on your weddingnight. I started forward, and exclaimed, Villain! before you sign my deathwarrant, be sure that you are yourself safe. I would have seized him; but he eluded me, and quitted the house with precipitation in a few moments I saw him in his boat, which shot across the waters with an arrowy swiftness, and was soon lost amidst the waves. All was again silent; but his words rung in my ears. I burned with rage to pursue the murderer of my peace, and precipitate him into the ocean. I walked up and down my room hastily and perturbed, while my imagination conjured up a thousand images to torment and sting me. Why had I not followed him, and closed with him in mortal strife? But I had suffered him to depart, and he had directed his course towards the main land. I shuddered to think who might be the next victim sacrificed to his insatiate revenge. And then I thought again of his wordsI will be with you on your weddingnight. That then was the period fixed for the fulfilment of my destiny. In that hour I should die, and at once satisfy and extinguish his malice. The prospect did not move me to fear; yet when I thought of my beloved Elizabeth,of her tears and endless sorrow, when she should find her lover so barbarously snatched from her,tears, the first I had shed for many months, streamed from my eyes, and I resolved not to fall before my enemy without a bitter struggle. The night passed away, and the sun rose from the ocean; my feelings became calmer, if it may be called calmness, when the violence of rage sinks into the depths of despair. I left the house, the horrid scene of the last nights contention, and walked on the beach of the sea, which I almost regarded as an insuperable barrier between me and my fellowcreatures; nay, a wish that such should prove the fact stole across me. I desired that I might pass my life on that barren rock, wearily it is true, but uninterrupted by any sudden shock of misery. If I returned, it was to be sacrificed, or to see those whom I most loved die under the grasp of a dmon whom I had myself created. I walked about the isle like a restless spectre, separated from all it loved, and miserable in the separation. When it became noon, and the sun rose higher, I lay down on the grass, and was overpowered by a deep sleep. I had been awake the whole of the preceding night, my nerves were agitated, and my eyes inflamed by watching and misery. The sleep into which I now sunk refreshed me; and when I awoke, I again felt as if I belonged to a race of human beings like myself, and I began to reflect upon what had passed with greater composure; yet still the words of the fiend rung in my ears like a deathknell, they appeared like a dream, yet distinct and oppressive as a reality. The sun had far descended, and I still sat on the shore, satisfying my appetite, which had become ravenous, with an oaten cake, when I saw a fishingboat land close to me, and one of the men brought me a packet; it contained letters from Geneva, and one from Clerval, entreating me to join him. He said that nearly a year had elapsed since we had quitted Switzerland, and France was yet unvisited. He entreated me, therefore, to leave my solitary isle, and meet him at Perth, in a week from that time, when we might arrange the plan of our future proceedings. This letter in a degree recalled me to life, and I determined to quit my island at the expiration of two days. Yet, before I departed, there was a task to perform, on which I shuddered to reflect I must pack my chemical instruments; and for that purpose I must enter the room which had been the scene of my odious work, and I must handle those utensils, the sight of which was sickening to me. The next morning, at daybreak, I summoned sufficient courage, and unlocked the door of my laboratory. The remains of the halffinished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being. I paused to collect myself, and then entered the chamber. With trembling hand I conveyed the instruments out of the room; but I reflected that I ought not to leave the relics of my work to excite the horror and suspicion of the peasants, and I accordingly put them into a basket, with a great quantity of stones, and laying them up, determined to throw them into the sea that very night; and in the mean time I sat upon the beach, employed in cleaning and arranging my chemical apparatus. Nothing could be more complete than the alteration that had taken place in my feelings since the night of the appearance of the dmon. I had before regarded my promise with a gloomy despair, as a thing that, with whatever consequences, must be fulfilled; but I now felt as if a film had been taken from before my eyes, and that I, for the first time, saw clearly. The idea of renewing my labours did not for one instant occur to me; the threat I had heard weighed on my thoughts, but I did not reflect that a voluntary act of mine could avert it. I had resolved in my own mind, that to create another like the fiend I had first made would be an act of the basest and most atrocious selfishness; and I banished from my mind every thought that could lead to a different conclusion. Between two and three in the morning the moon rose; and I then, putting my basket aboard a little skiff, sailed out about four miles from the shore. The scene was perfectly solitary a few boats were returning towards land, but I sailed away from them. I felt as if I was about the commission of a dreadful crime, and avoided with shuddering anxiety any encounter with my fellowcreatures. At one time the moon, which had before been clear, was suddenly overspread by a thick cloud, and I took advantage of the moment of darkness, and cast my basket into the sea; I listened to the gurgling sound as it sunk, and then sailed away from the spot. The sky became clouded; but the air was pure, although chilled by the northeast breeze that was then rising. But it refreshed me, and filled me with such agreeable sensations, that I resolved to prolong my stay on the water, and fixing the rudder in a direct position, stretched myself at the bottom of the boat. Clouds hid the moon, every thing was obscure, and I heard only the sound of the boat, as its keel cut through the waves; the murmur lulled me, and in a short time I slept soundly. I do not know how long I remained in this situation, but when I awoke I found that the sun had already mounted considerably. The wind was high, and the waves continually threatened the safety of my little skiff. I found that the wind was northeast, and must have driven me far from the coast from which I had embarked. I endeavoured to change my course, but quickly found that if I again made the attempt the boat would be instantly filled with water. Thus situated, my only resource was to drive before the wind. I confess that I felt a few sensations of terror. I had no compass with me, and was so little acquainted with the geography of this part of the world that the sun was of little benefit to me. I might be driven into the wide Atlantic, and feel all the tortures of starvation, or be swallowed up in the immeasurable waters that roared and buffeted around me. I had already been out many hours, and felt the torment of a burning thirst, a prelude to my other sufferings. I looked on the heavens, which were covered by clouds that flew before the wind only to be replaced by others I looked upon the sea, it was to be my grave. Fiend, I exclaimed, your task is already fulfilled! I thought of Elizabeth, of my father, and of Clerval; and sunk into a reverie, so despairing and frightful, that even now, when the scene is on the point of closing before me for ever, I shudder to reflect on it. Some hours passed thus; but by degrees, as the sun declined towards the horizon, the wind died away into a gentle breeze, and the sea became free from breakers. But these gave place to a heavy swell; I felt sick, and hardly able to hold the rudder, when suddenly I saw a line of high land towards the south. Almost spent, as I was, by fatigue, and the dreadful suspense I endured for several hours, this sudden certainty of life rushed like a flood of warm joy to my heart, and tears gushed from my eyes. How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery! I constructed another sail with a part of my dress, and eagerly steered my course towards the land. It had a wild and rocky appearance; but as I approached nearer, I easily perceived the traces of cultivation. I saw vessels near the shore, and found myself suddenly transported back to the neighbourhood of civilized man. I eagerly traced the windings of the land, and hailed a steeple which I at length saw issuing from behind a small promontory. As I was in a state of extreme debility, I resolved to sail directly towards the town as a place where I could most easily procure nourishment. Fortunately I had money with me. As I turned the promontory, I perceived a small neat town and a good harbour, which I entered, my heart bounding with joy at my unexpected escape. As I was occupied in fixing the boat and arranging the sails, several people crowded towards the spot. They seemed very much surprised at my appearance; but, instead of offering me any assistance, whispered together with gestures that at any other time might have produced in me a slight sensation of alarm. As it was, I merely remarked that they spoke English; and I therefore addressed them in that language My good friends, said I, will you be so kind as to tell me the name of this town, and inform me where I am? You will know that soon enough, replied a man with a gruff voice. May be you are come to a place that will not prove much to your taste; but you will not be consulted as to your quarters, I promise you. I was exceedingly surprised on receiving so rude an answer from a stranger; and I was also disconcerted on perceiving the frowning and angry countenances of his companions. Why do you answer me so roughly? I replied surely it is not the custom of Englishmen to receive strangers so inhospitably. I do not know, said the man, what the custom of the English may be; but it is the custom of the Irish to hate villains. While this strange dialogue continued, I perceived the crowd rapidly increase. Their faces expressed a mixture of curiosity and anger, which annoyed, and in some degree alarmed me. I inquired the way to the inn; but no one replied. I then moved forward, and a murmuring sound arose from the crowd as they followed and surrounded me; when an illlooking man approaching, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, Come, Sir, you must follow me to Mr. Kirwins, to give an account of yourself. Who is Mr. Kirwin? Why am I to give an account of myself? Is not this a free country? Aye, Sir, free enough for honest folks. Mr. Kirwin is a magistrate; and you are to give an account of the death of a gentleman who was found murdered here last night. This answer startled me; but I presently recovered myself. I was innocent; that could easily be proved accordingly I followed my conductor in silence, and was led to one of the best houses in the town. I was ready to sink from fatigue and hunger; but, being surrounded by a crowd, I thought it politic to rouse all my strength, that no physical debility might be construed into apprehension or conscious guilt. Little did I then expect the calamity that was in a few moments to overwhelm me, and extinguish in horror and despair all fear of ignominy or death. I must pause here; for it requires all my fortitude to recall the memory of the frightful events which I am about to relate, in proper detail, to my recollection. CHAPTER IV. I was soon introduced into the presence of the magistrate, an old benevolent man, with calm and mild manners. He looked upon me, however, with some degree of severity; and then, turning towards my conductors, he asked who appeared as witnesses on this occasion. About half a dozen men came forward; and one being selected by the magistrate, he deposed, that he had been out fishing the night before with his son and brotherinlaw, Daniel Nugent, when, about ten oclock, they observed a strong northerly blast rising, and they accordingly put in for port. It was a very dark night, as the moon had not yet risen; they did not land at the harbour, but, as they had been accustomed, at a creek about two miles below. He walked on first, carrying a part of the fishing tackle, and his companions followed him at some distance. As he was proceeding along the sands, he struck his foot against something, and fell all his length on the ground. His companions came up to assist him; and, by the light of their lantern, they found that he had fallen on the body of a man, who was to all appearance dead. Their first supposition was, that it was the corpse of some person who had been drowned, and was thrown on shore by the waves; but, upon examination, they found that the clothes were not wet, and even that the body was not then cold. They instantly carried it to the cottage of an old woman near the spot, and endeavoured, but in vain, to restore it to life. He appeared to be a handsome young man, about five and twenty years of age. He had apparently been strangled; for there was no sign of any violence, except the black mark of fingers on his neck. The first part of this deposition did not in the least interest me; but when the mark of the fingers was mentioned, I remembered the murder of my brother, and felt myself extremely agitated; my limbs trembled, and a mist came over my eyes, which obliged me to lean on a chair for support. The magistrate observed me with a keen eye, and of course drew an unfavourable augury from my manner. The son confirmed his fathers account but when Daniel Nugent was called, he swore positively that, just before the fall of his companion, he saw a boat, with a single man in it, at a short distance from the shore; and, as far as he could judge by the light of a few stars, it was the same boat in which I had just landed. A woman deposed, that she lived near the beach, and was standing at the door of her cottage, waiting for the return of the fishermen, about an hour before she heard of the discovery of the body, when she saw a boat, with only one man in it, push off from that part of the shore where the corpse was afterwards found. Another woman confirmed the account of the fishermen having brought the body into her house; it was not cold. They put it into a bed, and rubbed it; and Daniel went to the town for an apothecary, but life was quite gone. Several other men were examined concerning my landing; and they agreed, that, with the strong north wind that had arisen during the night, it was very probable that I had beaten about for many hours, and had been obliged to return nearly to the same spot from which I had departed. Besides, they observed that it appeared that I had brought the body from another place, and it was likely, that as I did not appear to know the shore, I might have put into the harbour ignorant of the distance of the town of from the place where I had deposited the corpse. Mr. Kirwin, on hearing this evidence, desired that I should be taken into the room where the body lay for interment that it might be observed what effect the sight of it would produce upon me. This idea was probably suggested by the extreme agitation I had exhibited when the mode of the murder had been described. I was accordingly conducted, by the magistrate and several other persons, to the inn. I could not help being struck by the strange coincidences that had taken place during this eventful night; but, knowing that I had been conversing with several persons in the island I had inhabited about the time that the body had been found, I was perfectly tranquil as to the consequences of the affair. I entered the room where the corpse lay, and was led up to the coffin. How can I describe my sensations on beholding it? I feel yet parched with horror, nor can I reflect on that terrible moment without shuddering and agony, that faintly reminds me of the anguish of the recognition. The trial, the presence of the magistrate and witnesses, passed like a dream from my memory, when I saw the lifeless form of Henry Clerval stretched before me. I gasped for breath; and, throwing myself on the body, I exclaimed, Have my murderous machinations deprived you also, my dearest Henry, of life? Two I have already destroyed; other victims await their destiny but you, Clerval, my friend, my benefactor The human frame could no longer support the agonizing suffering that I endured, and I was carried out of the room in strong convulsions. A fever succeeded to this. I lay for two months on the point of death my ravings, as I afterwards heard, were frightful; I called myself the murderer of William, of Justine, and of Clerval. Sometimes I entreated my attendants to assist me in the destruction of the fiend by whom I was tormented; and, at others, I felt the fingers of the monster already grasping my neck, and screamed aloud with agony and terror. Fortunately, as I spoke my native language, Mr. Kirwin alone understood me; but my gestures and bitter cries were sufficient to affright the other witnesses. Why did I not die? More miserable than man ever was before, why did I not sink into forgetfulness and rest? Death snatches away many blooming children, the only hopes of their doating parents how many brides and youthful lovers have been one day in the bloom of health and hope, and the next a prey for worms and the decay of the tomb! Of what materials was I made, that I could thus resist so many shocks, which, like the turning of the wheel, continually renewed the torture. But I was doomed to live; and, in two months, found myself as awaking from a dream, in a prison, stretched on a wretched bed, surrounded by gaolers, turnkeys, bolts, and all the miserable apparatus of a dungeon. It was morning, I remember, when I thus awoke to understanding I had forgotten the particulars of what had happened, and only felt as if some great misfortune had suddenly overwhelmed me; but when I looked around, and saw the barred windows, and the squalidness of the room in which I was, all flashed across my memory, and I groaned bitterly. This sound disturbed an old woman who was sleeping in a chair beside me. She was a hired nurse, the wife of one of the turnkeys, and her countenance expressed all those bad qualities which often characterize that class. The lines of her face were hard and rude, like that of persons accustomed to see without sympathizing in sights of misery. Her tone expressed her entire indifference; she addressed me in English, and the voice struck me as one that I had heard during my sufferings Are you better now, Sir? said she. I replied in the same language, with a feeble voice, I believe I am; but if it be all true, if indeed I did not dream, I am sorry that I am still alive to feel this misery and horror. For that matter, replied the old woman, if you mean about the gentleman you murdered, I believe that it were better for you if you were dead, for I fancy it will go hard with you; but you will be hung when the next sessions come on. However, thats none of my business, I am sent to nurse you, and get you well; I do my duty with a safe conscience, it were well if every body did the same. I turned with loathing from the woman who could utter so unfeeling a speech to a person just saved, on the very edge of death; but I felt languid, and unable to reflect on all that had passed. The whole series of my life appeared to me as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality. As the images that floated before me became more distinct, I grew feverish; a darkness pressed around me; no one was near me who soothed me with the gentle voice of love; no dear hand supported me. The physician came and prescribed medicines, and the old woman prepared them for me; but utter carelessness was visible in the first, and the expression of brutality was strongly marked in the visage of the second. Who could be interested in the fate of a murderer, but the hangman who would gain his fee? These were my first reflections; but I soon learned that Mr. Kirwin had shewn me extreme kindness. He had caused the best room in the prison to be prepared for me (wretched indeed was the best); and it was he who had provided a physician and a nurse. It is true, he seldom came to see me; for, although he ardently desired to relieve the sufferings of every human creature, he did not wish to be present at the agonies and miserable ravings of a murderer. He came, therefore, sometimes to see that I was not neglected; but his visits were short, and at long intervals. One day, when I was gradually recovering, I was seated in a chair, my eyes half open, and my cheeks livid like those in death, I was overcome by gloom and misery, and often reflected I had better seek death than remain miserably pent up only to be let loose in a world replete with wretchedness. At one time I considered whether I should not declare myself guilty, and suffer the penalty of the law, less innocent than poor Justine had been. Such were my thoughts, when the door of my apartment was opened, and Mr. Kirwin entered. His countenance expressed sympathy and compassion; he drew a chair close to mine, and addressed me in French I fear that this place is very shocking to you; can I do any thing to make you more comfortable? I thank you; but all that you mention is nothing to me on the whole earth there is no comfort which I am capable of receiving. I know that the sympathy of a stranger can be but of little relief to one borne down as you are by so strange a misfortune. But you will, I hope, soon quit this melancholy abode; for, doubtless, evidence can easily be brought to free you from the criminal charge. That is my least concern I am, by a course of strange events, become the most miserable of mortals. Persecuted and tortured as I am and have been, can death be any evil to me? Nothing indeed could be more unfortunate and agonizing than the strange chances that have lately occurred. You were thrown, by some surprising accident, on this shore, renowned for its hospitality seized immediately, and charged with murder. The first sight that was presented to your eyes was the body of your friend, murdered in so unaccountable a manner, and placed, as it were, by some fiend across your path. As Mr.

Kirwin said this, notwithstanding the agitation I endured on this retrospect of my sufferings, I also felt considerable surprise at the knowledge he seemed to possess concerning me. I suppose some astonishment was exhibited in my countenance; for Mr. Kirwin hastened to say It was not until a day or two after your illness that I thought of examining your dress, that I might discover some trace by which I could send to your relations an account of your misfortune and illness. I found several letters, and, among others, one which I discovered from its commencement to be from your father. I instantly wrote to Geneva nearly two months have elapsed since the departure of my letter.But you are ill; even now you tremble you are unfit for agitation of any kind. This suspense is a thousand times worse than the most horrible event tell me what new scene of death has been acted, and whose murder I am now to lament. Your family is perfectly well, said Mr. Kirwin, with gentleness; and some one, a friend, is come to visit you. I know not by what chain of thought the idea presented itself, but it instantly darted into my mind that the murderer had come to mock at my misery, and taunt me with the death of Clerval, as a new incitement for me to comply with his hellish desires. I put my hand before my eyes, and cried out in agony Oh! take him away! I cannot see him; for Gods sake, do not let him enter! Mr. Kirwin regarded me with a troubled countenance. He could not help regarding my exclamation as a presumption of my guilt, and said, in rather a severe tone I should have thought, young man, that the presence of your father would have been welcome, instead of inspiring such violent repugnance. My father! cried I, while every feature and every muscle was relaxed from anguish to pleasure. Is my father, indeed, come? How kind, how very kind. But where is he, why does he not hasten to me? My change of manner surprised and pleased the magistrate; perhaps he thought that my former exclamation was a momentary return of delirium, and now he instantly resumed his former benevolence. He rose, and quitted the room with my nurse, and in a moment my father entered it. Nothing, at this moment, could have given me greater pleasure than the arrival of my father. I stretched out my hand to him, and cried Are you then safeand Elizabethand Ernest? My father calmed me with assurances of their welfare, and endeavoured, by dwelling on these subjects so interesting to my heart, to raise my desponding spirits; but he soon felt that a prison cannot be the abode of cheerfulness. What a place is this that you inhabit, my son! said he, looking mournfully at the barred windows, and wretched appearance of the room. You travelled to seek happiness, but a fatality seems to pursue you. And poor Clerval The name of my unfortunate and murdered friend was an agitation too great to be endured in my weak state; I shed tears. Alas! yes, my father, replied I; some destiny of the most horrible kind hangs over me, and I must live to fulfil it, or surely I should have died on the coffin of Henry. We were not allowed to converse for any length of time, for the precarious state of my health rendered every precaution necessary that could insure tranquillity. Mr. Kirwin came in, and insisted that my strength should not be exhausted by too much exertion. But the appearance of my father was to me like that of my good angel, and I gradually recovered my health. As my sickness quitted me, I was absorbed by a gloomy and black melancholy, that nothing could dissipate. The image of Clerval was for ever before me, ghastly and murdered. More than once the agitation into which these reflections threw me made my friends dread a dangerous relapse. Alas! why did they preserve so miserable and detested a life? It was surely that I might fulfil my destiny, which is now drawing to a close. Soon, oh, very soon, will death extinguish these throbbings, and relieve me from the mighty weight of anguish that bears me to the dust; and, in executing the award of justice, I shall also sink to rest. Then the appearance of death was distant, although the wish was ever present to my thoughts; and I often sat for hours motionless and speechless, wishing for some mighty revolution that might bury me and my destroyer in its ruins. The season of the assizes approached. I had already been three months in prison; and although I was still weak, and in continual danger of a relapse, I was obliged to travel nearly a hundred miles to the countytown, where the court was held. Mr. Kirwin charged himself with every care of collecting witnesses, and arranging my defence. I was spared the disgrace of appearing publicly as a criminal, as the case was not brought before the court that decides on life and death. The grand jury rejected the bill, on its being proved that I was on the Orkney Islands at the hour the body of my friend was found, and a fortnight after my removal I was liberated from prison. My father was enraptured on finding me freed from the vexations of a criminal charge, that I was again allowed to breathe the fresh atmosphere, and allowed to return to my native country. I did not participate in these feelings; for to me the walls of a dungeon or a palace were alike hateful. The cup of life was poisoned for ever; and although the sun shone upon me, as upon the happy and gay of heart, I saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me. Sometimes they were the expressive eyes of Henry, languishing in death, the dark orbs nearly covered by the lids, and the long black lashes that fringed them; sometimes it was the watery clouded eyes of the monster, as I first saw them in my chamber at Ingolstadt. My father tried to awaken in me the feelings of affection. He talked of Geneva, which I should soon visitof Elizabeth, and Ernest; but these words only drew deep groans from me. Sometimes, indeed, I felt a wish for happiness; and thought, with melancholy delight, of my beloved cousin; or longed, with a devouring maladie du pays, to see once more the blue lake and rapid Rhone, that had been so dear to me in early childhood but my general state of feeling was a torpor, in which a prison was as welcome a residence as the divinest scene in nature; and these fits were seldom interrupted, but by paroxysms of anguish and despair. At these moments I often endeavoured to put an end to the existence I loathed; and it required unceasing attendance and vigilance to restrain me from committing some dreadful act of violence. I remember, as I quitted the prison, I heard one of the men say, He may be innocent of the murder, but he has certainly a bad conscience. These words struck me. A bad conscience! yes, surely I had one. William, Justine, and Clerval, had died through my infernal machinations; And whose death, cried I, is to finish the tragedy? Ah! my father, do not remain in this wretched country; take me where I may forget myself, my existence, and all the world. My father easily acceded to my desire; and, after having taken leave of Mr. Kirwin, we hastened to Dublin. I felt as if I was relieved from a heavy weight, when the packet sailed with a fair wind from Ireland, and I had quitted for ever the country which had been to me the scene of so much misery. It was midnight. My father slept in the cabin; and I lay on the deck, looking at the stars, and listening to the dashing of the waves. I hailed the darkness that shut Ireland from my sight, and my pulse beat with a feverish joy, when I reflected that I should soon see Geneva. The past appeared to me in the light of a frightful dream; yet the vessel in which I was, the wind that blew me from the detested shore of Ireland, and the sea which surrounded me, told me too forcibly that I was deceived by no vision, and that Clerval, my friend and dearest companion, had fallen a victim to me and the monster of my creation. I repassed, in my memory, my whole life; my quiet happiness while residing with my family in Geneva, the death of my mother, and my departure for Ingolstadt. I remembered shuddering at the mad enthusiasm that hurried me on to the creation of my hideous enemy, and I called to mind the night during which he first lived. I was unable to pursue the train of thought; a thousand feelings pressed upon me, and I wept bitterly. Ever since my recovery from the fever I had been in the custom of taking every night a small quantity of laudanum; for it was by means of this drug only that I was enabled to gain the rest necessary for the preservation of life. Oppressed by the recollection of my various misfortunes, I now took a double dose, and soon slept profoundly. But sleep did not afford me respite from thought and misery; my dreams presented a thousand objects that scared me. Towards morning I was possessed by a kind of nightmare; I felt the fiends grasp in my neck, and could not free myself from it; groans and cries rung in my ears. My father, who was watching over me, perceiving my restlessness, awoke me, and pointed to the port of Holyhead, which we were now entering. CHAPTER V. We had resolved not to go to London, but to cross the country to Portsmouth, and thence to embark for Havre. I preferred this plan principally because I dreaded to see again those places in which I had enjoyed a few moments of tranquillity with my beloved Clerval. I thought with horror of seeing again those persons whom we had been accustomed to visit together, and who might make inquiries concerning an event, the very remembrance of which made me again feel the pang I endured when I gazed on his lifeless form in the inn at . As for my father, his desires and exertions were bounded to the again seeing me restored to health and peace of mind. His tenderness and attentions were unremitting; my grief and gloom was obstinate, but he would not despair. Sometimes he thought that I felt deeply the degradation of being obliged to answer a charge of murder, and he endeavoured to prove to me the futility of pride. Alas! my father, said I, how little do you know me. Human beings, their feelings and passions, would indeed be degraded, if such a wretch as I felt pride. Justine, poor unhappy Justine, was as innocent as I, and she suffered the same charge; she died for it; and I am the cause of thisI murdered her. William, Justine, and Henrythey all died by my hands. My father had often, during my imprisonment, heard me make the same assertion; when I thus accused myself, he sometimes seemed to desire an explanation, and at others he appeared to consider it as caused by delirium, and that, during my illness, some idea of this kind had presented itself to my imagination, the remembrance of which I preserved in my convalescence. I avoided explanation, and maintained a continual silence concerning the wretch I had created. I had a feeling that I should be supposed mad, and this for ever chained my tongue, when I would have given the whole world to have confided the fatal secret. Upon this occasion my father said, with an expression of unbounded wonder, What do you mean, Victor? are you mad? My dear son, I entreat you never to make such an assertion again. I am not mad, I cried energetically; the sun and the heavens, who have viewed my operations, can bear witness of my truth. I am the assassin of those most innocent victims; they died by my machinations. A thousand times would I have shed my own blood, drop by drop, to have saved their lives; but I could not, my father, indeed I could not sacrifice the whole human race. The conclusion of this speech convinced my father that my ideas were deranged, and he instantly changed the subject of our conversation, and endeavoured to alter the course of my thoughts. He wished as much as possible to obliterate the memory of the scenes that had taken place in Ireland, and never alluded to them, or suffered me to speak of my misfortunes. As time passed away I became more calm misery had her dwelling in my heart, but I no longer talked in the same incoherent manner of my own crimes; sufficient for me was the consciousness of them. By the utmost selfviolence, I curbed the imperious voice of wretchedness, which sometimes desired to declare itself to the whole world; and my manners were calmer and more composed than they had ever been since my journey to the sea of ice. We arrived at Havre on the 8th of May, and instantly proceeded to Paris, where my father had some business which detained us a few weeks. In this city, I received the following letter from Elizabeth To Victor Frankenstein. My Dearest Friend, It gave me the greatest pleasure to receive a letter from my uncle dated at Paris; you are no longer at a formidable distance, and I may hope to see you in less than a fortnight. My poor cousin, how much you must have suffered! I expect to see you looking even more ill than when you quitted Geneva. This winter has been passed most miserably, tortured as I have been by anxious suspense; yet I hope to see peace in your countenance, and to find that your heart is not totally devoid of comfort and tranquillity. Yet I fear that the same feelings now exist that made you so miserable a year ago, even perhaps augmented by time. I would not disturb you at this period, when so many misfortunes weigh upon you; but a conversation that I had with my uncle previous to his departure renders some explanation necessary before we meet. Explanation! you may possibly say; what can Elizabeth have to explain? If you really say this, my questions are answered, and I have no more to do than to sign myself your affectionate cousin. But you are distant from me, and it is possible that you may dread, and yet be pleased with this explanation; and, in a probability of this being the case, I dare not any longer postpone writing what, during your absence, I have often wished to express to you, but have never had the courage to begin. You well know, Victor, that our union had been the favourite plan of your parents ever since our infancy. We were told this when young, and taught to look forward to it as an event that would certainly take place. We were affectionate playfellows during childhood, and, I believe, dear and valued friends to one another as we grew older. But as brother and sister often entertain a lively affection towards each other, without desiring a more intimate union, may not such also be our case? Tell me, dearest Victor. Answer me, I conjure you, by our mutual happiness, with simple truthDo you not love another? You have travelled; you have spent several years of your life at Ingolstadt; and I confess to you, my friend, that when I saw you last autumn so unhappy, flying to solitude, from the society of every creature, I could not help supposing that you might regret our connexion, and believe yourself bound in honour to fulfil the wishes of your parents, although they opposed themselves to your inclinations. But this is false reasoning. I confess to you, my cousin, that I love you, and that in my airy dreams of futurity you have been my constant friend and companion. But it is your happiness I desire as well as my own, when I declare to you, that our marriage would render me eternally miserable, unless it were the dictate of your own free choice. Even now I weep to think, that, borne down as you are by the cruelest misfortunes, you may stifle, by the word honour, all hope of that love and happiness which would alone restore you to yourself. I, who have so interested an affection for you, may increase your miseries tenfold, by being an obstacle to your wishes. Ah, Victor, be assured that your cousin and playmate has too sincere a love for you not to be made miserable by this supposition. Be happy, my friend; and if you obey me in this one request, remain satisfied that nothing on earth will have the power to interrupt my tranquillity. Do not let this letter disturb you; do not answer it tomorrow, or the next day, or even until you come, if it will give you pain. My uncle will send me news of your health; and if I see but one smile on your lips when we meet, occasioned by this or any other exertion of mine, I shall need no other happiness. Elizabeth Lavenza. Geneva, May 18th, 17. This letter revived in my memory what I had before forgotten, the threat of the fiendI will be with you on your weddingnight! Such was my sentence, and on that night would the dmon employ every art to destroy me, and tear me from the glimpse of happiness which promised partly to console my sufferings. On that night he had determined to consummate his crimes by my death. Well, be it so; a deadly struggle would then assuredly take place, in which if he was victorious, I should be at peace, and his power over me be at an end. If he were vanquished, I should be a free man. Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free. Such would be my liberty, except that in my Elizabeth I possessed a treasure; alas! balanced by those horrors of remorse and guilt, which would pursue me until death. Sweet and beloved Elizabeth! I read and reread her letter, and some softened feelings stole into my heart, and dared to whisper paradisaical dreams of love and joy; but the apple was already eaten, and the angels arm bared to drive me from all hope. Yet I would die to make her happy. If the monster executed his threat, death was inevitable; yet, again, I considered whether my marriage would hasten my fate. My destruction might indeed arrive a few months sooner; but if my torturer should suspect that I postponed it, influenced by his menaces, he would surely find other, and perhaps more dreadful means of revenge. He had vowed to be with me on my weddingnight, yet he did not consider that threat as binding him to peace in the mean time; for, as if to shew me that he was not yet satiated with blood, he had murdered Clerval immediately after the enunciation of his threats. I resolved, therefore, that if my immediate union with my cousin would conduce either to hers or my fathers happiness, my adversarys designs against my life should not retard it a single hour. In this state of mind I wrote to Elizabeth. My letter was calm and affectionate. I fear, my beloved girl, I said, little happiness remains for us on earth; yet all that I may one day enjoy is concentered in you. Chase away your idle fears; to you alone do I consecrate my life, and my endeavours for contentment. I have one secret, Elizabeth, a dreadful one; when revealed to you, it will chill your frame with horror, and then, far from being surprised at my misery, you will only wonder that I survive what I have endured. I will confide this tale of misery and terror to you the day after our marriage shall take place; for, my sweet cousin, there must be perfect confidence between us. But until then, I conjure you, do not mention or allude to it. This I most earnestly entreat, and I know you will comply. In about a week after the arrival of Elizabeths letter, we returned to Geneva. My cousin welcomed me with warm affection; yet tears were in her eyes, as she beheld my emaciated frame and feverish cheeks. I saw a change in her also. She was thinner, and had lost much of that heavenly vivacity that had before charmed me; but her gentleness, and soft looks of compassion, made her a more fit companion for one blasted and miserable as I was. The tranquillity which I now enjoyed did not endure. Memory brought madness with it; and when I thought on what had passed, a real insanity possessed me; sometimes I was furious, and burnt with rage, sometimes low and despondent. I neither spoke or looked, but sat motionless, bewildered by the multitude of miseries that overcame me. Elizabeth alone had the power to draw me from these fits; her gentle voice would soothe me when transported by passion, and inspire me with human feelings when sunk in torpor. She wept with me, and for me. When reason returned, she would remonstrate, and endeavour to inspire me with resignation. Ah! it is well for the unfortunate to be resigned, but for the guilty there is no peace. The agonies of remorse poison the luxury there is otherwise sometimes found in indulging the excess of grief. Soon after my arrival my father spoke of my immediate marriage with my cousin. I remained silent. Have you, then, some other attachment? None on earth. I love Elizabeth, and look forward to our union with delight. Let the day therefore be fixed; and on it I will consecrate myself, in life or death, to the happiness of my cousin. My dear Victor, do not speak thus. Heavy misfortunes have befallen us; but let us only cling closer to what remains, and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall have softened your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of whom we have been so cruelly deprived. Such were the lessons of my father. But to me the remembrance of the threat returned nor can you wonder, that, omnipotent as the fiend had yet been in his deeds of blood, I should almost regard him as invincible; and that when he had pronounced the words, I shall be with you on your weddingnight, I should regard the threatened fate as unavoidable. But death was no evil to me, if the loss of Elizabeth were balanced with it; and I therefore, with a contented and even cheerful countenance, agreed with my father, that if my cousin would consent, the ceremony should take place in ten days, and thus put, as I imagined, the seal to my fate. Great God! if for one instant I had thought what might be the hellish intention of my fiendish adversary, I would rather have banished myself for ever from my native country, and wandered a friendless outcast over the earth, than have consented to this miserable marriage. But, as if possessed of magic powers, the monster had blinded me to his real intentions; and when I thought that I prepared only my own death, I hastened that of a far dearer victim. As the period fixed for our marriage drew nearer, whether from cowardice or a prophetic feeling, I felt my heart sink within me. But I concealed my feelings by an appearance of hilarity, that brought smiles and joy to the countenance of my father, but hardly deceived the everwatchful and nicer eye of Elizabeth. She looked forward to our union with placid contentment, not unmingled with a little fear, which past misfortunes had impressed, that what now appeared certain and tangible happiness, might soon dissipate into an airy dream, and leave no trace but deep and everlasting regret. Preparations were made for the event; congratulatory visits were received; and all wore a smiling appearance. I shut up, as well as I could, in my own heart the anxiety that preyed there, and entered with seeming earnestness into the plans of my father, although they might only serve as the decorations of my tragedy. A house was purchased for us near Cologny, by which we should enjoy the pleasures of the country, and yet be so near Geneva as to see my father every day; who would still reside within the walls, for the benefit of Ernest, that he might follow his studies at the schools. In the mean time I took every precaution to defend my person, in case the fiend should openly attack me. I carried pistols and a dagger constantly about me, and was ever on the watch to prevent artifice; and by these means gained a greater degree of tranquillity. Indeed, as the period approached, the threat appeared more as a delusion, not to be regarded as worthy to disturb my peace, while the happiness I hoped for in my marriage wore a greater appearance of certainty, as the day fixed for its solemnization drew nearer, and I heard it continually spoken of as an occurrence which no accident could possibly prevent. Elizabeth seemed happy; my tranquil demeanour contributed greatly to calm her mind. But on the day that was to fulfil my wishes and my destiny, she was melancholy, and a presentiment of evil pervaded her; and perhaps also she thought of the dreadful secret, which I had promised to reveal to her the following day. My father was in the mean time overjoyed, and, in the bustle of preparation, only observed in the melancholy of his niece the diffidence of a bride. After the ceremony was performed, a large party assembled at my fathers; but it was agreed that Elizabeth and I should pass the afternoon and night at Evian, and return to Cologny the next morning. As the day was fair, and the wind favourable, we resolved to go by water. Those were the last moments of my life during which I enjoyed the feeling of happiness. We passed rapidly along the sun was hot, but we were sheltered from its rays by a kind of canopy, while we enjoyed the beauty of the scene, sometimes on one side of the lake, where we saw Mont Salve, the pleasant banks of Montalgre, and at a distance, surmounting all, the beautiful Mont Blnc, and the assemblage of snowy mountains that in vain endeavour to emulate her; sometimes coasting the opposite banks, we saw the mighty Jura opposing its dark side to the ambition that would quit its native country, and an almost insurmountable barrier to the invader who should wish to enslave it. I took the hand of Elizabeth You are sorrowful, my love. Ah! if you knew what I have suffered, and what I may yet endure, you would endeavour to let me taste the quiet, and freedom from despair, that this one day at least permits me to enjoy. Be happy, my dear Victor, replied Elizabeth; there is, I hope, nothing to distress you; and be assured that if a lively joy is not painted in my face, my heart is contented. Something whispers to me not to depend too much on the prospect that is opened before us; but I will not listen to such a sinister voice. Observe how fast we move along, and how the clouds which sometimes obscure, and sometimes rise above the dome of Mont Blnc, render this scene of beauty still more interesting. Look also at the innumerable fish that are swimming in the clear waters, where we can distinguish every pebble that lies at the bottom. What a divine day! how happy and serene all nature appears! Thus Elizabeth endeavoured to divert her thoughts and mine from all reflection upon melancholy subjects. But her temper was fluctuating; joy for a few instants shone in her eyes, but it continually gave place to distraction and reverie. The sun sunk lower in the heavens; we passed the river Drance, and observed its path through the chasms of the higher, and the glens of the lower hills. The Alps here come closer to the lake, and we approached the amphitheatre of mountains which forms its eastern boundary. The spire of Evian shone under the woods that surrounded it, and the range of mountain above mountain by which it was overhung. The wind, which had hitherto carried us along with amazing rapidity, sunk at sunset to a light breeze; the soft air just ruffled the water, and caused a pleasant motion among the trees as we approached the shore, from which it wafted the most delightful scent of flowers and hay. The sun sunk beneath the horizon as we landed; and as I touched the shore, I felt those cares and fears revive, which soon were to clasp me, and cling to me for ever. CHAPTER VI. It was eight oclock when we landed; we walked for a short time on the shore, enjoying the transitory light, and then retired to the inn, and contemplated the lovely scene of waters, woods, and mountains, obscured in darkness, yet still displaying their black outlines. The wind, which had fallen in the south, now rose with great violence in the west. The moon had reached her summit in the heavens, and was beginning to descend; the clouds swept across it swifter than the flight of the vulture, and dimmed her rays, while the lake reflected the scene of the busy heavens, rendered still busier by the restless waves that were beginning to rise. Suddenly a heavy storm of rain descended. I had been calm during the day; but so soon as night obscured the shapes of objects, a thousand fears arose in my mind. I was anxious and watchful, while my right hand grasped a pistol which was hidden in my bosom; every sound terrified me; but I resolved that I would sell my life dearly, and not relax the impending conflict until my own life, or that of my adversary, were extinguished. Elizabeth observed my agitation for some time in timid and fearful silence; at length she said, What is it that agitates you, my dear Victor? What is it you fear? Oh! peace, peace, my love, replied I, this night, and all will be safe but this night is dreadful, very dreadful. I passed an hour in this state of mind, when suddenly I reflected how dreadful the combat which I momentarily expected would be to my wife, and I earnestly entreated her to retire, resolving not to join her until I had obtained some knowledge as to the situation of my enemy. She left me, and I continued some time walking up and down the passages of the house, and inspecting every corner that might afford a retreat to my adversary. But I discovered no trace of him, and was beginning to conjecture that some fortunate chance had intervened to prevent the execution of his menaces; when suddenly I heard a shrill and dreadful scream. It came from the room into which Elizabeth had retired. As I heard it, the whole truth rushed into my mind, my arms dropped, the motion of every muscle and fibre was suspended; I could feel the blood trickling in my veins, and tingling in the extremities of my limbs. This state lasted but for an instant; the scream was repeated, and I rushed into the room. Great God! why did I not then expire! Why am I here to relate the destruction of the best hope, and the purest creature of earth. She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair. Every where I turn I see the same figureher bloodless arms and relaxed form flung by the murderer on its bridal bier. Could I behold this, and live? Alas! life is obstinate, and clings closest where it is most hated. For a moment only did I lose recollection; I fainted. When I recovered, I found myself surrounded by the people of the inn; their countenances expressed a breathless terror but the horror of others appeared only as a mockery, a shadow of the feelings that oppressed me. I escaped from them to the room where lay the body of Elizabeth, my love, my wife, so lately living, so dear, so worthy. She had been moved from the posture in which I had first beheld her; and now, as she lay, her head upon her arm, and a handkerchief thrown across her face and neck, I might have supposed her asleep. I rushed towards her, and embraced her with ardour; but the deathly languor and coldness of the limbs told me, that what I now held in my arms had ceased to be the Elizabeth whom I had loved and cherished. The murderous mark of the fiends grasp was on her neck, and the breath had ceased to issue from her lips. While I still hung over her in the agony of despair, I happened to look up. The windows of the room had before been darkened; and I felt a kind of panic on seeing the pale yellow light of the moon illuminate the chamber. The shutters had been thrown back; and, with a sensation of horror not to be described, I saw at the open window a figure the most hideous and abhorred. A grin was on the face of the monster; he seemed to jeer, as with his fiendish finger he pointed towards the corpse of my wife. I rushed towards the window, and drawing a pistol from my bosom, shot; but he eluded me, leaped from his station, and, running with the swiftness of lightning, plunged into the lake. The report of the pistol brought a crowd into the room.

I pointed to the spot where he had disappeared, and we followed the track with boats; nets were cast, but in vain. After passing several hours, we returned hopeless, most of my companions believing it to have been a form conjured by my fancy. After having landed, they proceeded to search the country, parties going in different directions among the woods and vines. I did not accompany them; I was exhausted a film covered my eyes, and my skin was parched with the heat of fever. In this state I lay on a bed, hardly conscious of what had happened; my eyes wandered round the room, as if to seek something that I had lost. At length I remembered that my father would anxiously expect the return of Elizabeth and myself, and that I must return alone. This reflection brought tears into my eyes, and I wept for a long time; but my thoughts rambled to various subjects, reflecting on my misfortunes, and their cause. I was bewildered in a cloud of wonder and horror. The death of William, the execution of Justine, the murder of Clerval, and lastly of my wife; even at that moment I knew not that my only remaining friends were safe from the malignity of the fiend; my father even now might be writhing under his grasp, and Ernest might be dead at his feet. This idea made me shudder, and recalled me to action. I started up, and resolved to return to Geneva with all possible speed. There were no horses to be procured, and I must return by the lake; but the wind was unfavourable, and the rain fell in torrents. However, it was hardly morning, and I might reasonably hope to arrive by night. I hired men to row, and took an oar myself, for I had always experienced relief from mental torment in bodily exercise. But the overflowing misery I now felt, and the excess of agitation that I endured, rendered me incapable of any exertion. I threw down the oar; and, leaning my head upon my hands, gave way to every gloomy idea that arose. If I looked up, I saw the scenes which were familiar to me in my happier time, and which I had contemplated but the day before in the company of her who was now but a shadow and a recollection. Tears streamed from my eyes. The rain had ceased for a moment, and I saw the fish play in the waters as they had done a few hours before; they had then been observed by Elizabeth. Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. The sun might shine, or the clouds might lour; but nothing could appear to me as it had done the day before. A fiend had snatched from me every hope of future happiness no creature had ever been so miserable as I was; so frightful an event is single in the history of man. But why should I dwell upon the incidents that followed this last overwhelming event. Mine has been a tale of horrors; I have reached their acme, and what I must now relate can but be tedious to you. Know that, one by one, my friends were snatched away; I was left desolate. My own strength is exhausted; and I must tell, in a few words, what remains of my hideous narration. I arrived at Geneva. My father and Ernest yet lived; but the former sunk under the tidings that I bore. I see him now, excellent and venerable old man! his eyes wandered in vacancy, for they had lost their charm and their delighthis niece, his more than daughter, whom he doated on with all that affection which a man feels, who, in the decline of life, having few affections, clings more earnestly to those that remain. Cursed, cursed be the fiend that brought misery on his grey hairs, and doomed him to waste in wretchedness! He could not live under the horrors that were accumulated around him; an apoplectic fit was brought on, and in a few days he died in my arms. What then became of me? I know not; I lost sensation, and chains and darkness were the only objects that pressed upon me. Sometimes, indeed, I dreamt that I wandered in flowery meadows and pleasant vales with the friends of my youth; but awoke, and found myself in a dungeon. Melancholy followed, but by degrees I gained a clear conception of my miseries and situation, and was then released from my prison. For they had called me mad; and during many months, as I understood, a solitary cell had been my habitation. But liberty had been a useless gift to me had I not, as I awakened to reason, at the same time awakened to revenge. As the memory of past misfortunes pressed upon me, I began to reflect on their causethe monster whom I had created, the miserable dmon whom I had sent abroad into the world for my destruction. I was possessed by a maddening rage when I thought of him, and desired and ardently prayed that I might have him within my grasp to wreak a great and signal revenge on his cursed head. Nor did my hate long confine itself to useless wishes; I began to reflect on the best means of securing him; and for this purpose, about a month after my release, I repaired to a criminal judge in the town, and told him that I had an accusation to make; that I knew the destroyer of my family; and that I required him to exert his whole authority for the apprehension of the murderer. The magistrate listened to me with attention and kindness Be assured, sir, said he, no pains or exertions on my part shall be spared to discover the villain. I thank you, replied I; listen, therefore, to the deposition that I have to make. It is indeed a tale so strange, that I should fear you would not credit it, were there not something in truth which, however wonderful, forces conviction. The story is too connected to be mistaken for a dream, and I have no motive for falsehood. My manner, as I thus addressed him, was impressive, but calm; I had formed in my own heart a resolution to pursue my destroyer to death; and this purpose quieted my agony, and provisionally reconciled me to life. I now related my history briefly, but with firmness and precision, marking the dates with accuracy, and never deviating into invective or exclamation. The magistrate appeared at first perfectly incredulous, but as I continued he became more attentive and interested; I saw him sometimes shudder with horror, at others a lively surprise, unmingled with disbelief, was painted on his countenance. When I had concluded my narration, I said. This is the being whom I accuse, and for whose detection and punishment I call upon you to exert your whole power. It is your duty as a magistrate, and I believe and hope that your feelings as a man will not revolt from the execution of those functions on this occasion. This address caused a considerable change in the physiognomy of my auditor. He had heard my story with that half kind of belief that is given to a tale of spirits and supernatural events; but when he was called upon to act officially in consequence, the whole tide of his incredulity returned. He, however, answered mildly, I would willingly afford you every aid in your pursuit; but the creature of whom you speak appears to have powers which would put all my exertions to defiance. Who can follow an animal which can traverse the sea of ice, and inhabit caves and dens, where no man would venture to intrude? Besides, some months have elapsed since the commission of his crimes, and no one can conjecture to what place he has wandered, or what region he may now inhabit. I do not doubt that he hovers near the spot which I inhabit; and if he has indeed taken refuge in the Alps, he may be hunted like the chamois, and destroyed as a beast of prey. But I perceive your thoughts you do not credit my narrative, and do not intend to pursue my enemy with the punishment which is his desert. As I spoke, rage sparkled in my eyes; the magistrate was intimidated; You are mistaken, said he, I will exert myself; and if it is in my power to seize the monster, be assured that he shall suffer punishment proportionate to his crimes. But I fear, from what you have yourself described to be his properties, that this will prove impracticable, and that, while every proper measure is pursued, you should endeavour to make up your mind to disappointment. That cannot be; but all that I can say will be of little avail. My revenge is of no moment to you; yet, while I allow it to be a vice, I confess that it is the devouring and only passion of my soul. My rage is unspeakable, when I reflect that the murderer, whom I have turned loose upon society, still exists. You refuse my just demand I have but one resource; and I devote myself, either in my life or death, to his destruction. I trembled with excess of agitation as I said this; there was a phrenzy in my manner, and something, I doubt not, of that haughty fierceness, which the martyrs of old are said to have possessed. But to a Genevan magistrate, whose mind was occupied by far other ideas than those of devotion and heroism, this elevation of mind had much the appearance of madness. He endeavoured to soothe me as a nurse does a child, and reverted to my tale as the effects of delirium. Man, I cried, how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom! Cease; you know not what it is you say. I broke from the house angry and disturbed, and retired to meditate on some other mode of action. CHAPTER VII. My present situation was one in which all voluntary thought was swallowed up and lost. I was hurried away by fury; revenge alone endowed me with strength and composure; it modelled my feelings, and allowed me to be calculating and calm, at periods when otherwise delirium or death would have been my portion. My first resolution was to quit Geneva for ever; my country, which, when I was happy and beloved, was dear to me, now, in my adversity, became hateful. I provided myself with a sum of money, together with a few jewels which had belonged to my mother, and departed. And now my wanderings began, which are to cease but with life. I have traversed a vast portion of the earth, and have endured all the hardships which travellers, in deserts and barbarous countries, are wont to meet. How I have lived I hardly know; many times have I stretched my failing limbs upon the sandy plain, and prayed for death. But revenge kept me alive; I dared not die, and leave my adversary in being. When I quitted Geneva, my first labour was to gain some clue by which I might trace the steps of my fiendish enemy. But my plan was unsettled; and I wandered many hours around the confines of the town, uncertain what path I should pursue. As night approached, I found myself at the entrance of the cemetery where William, Elizabeth, and my father, reposed. I entered it, and approached the tomb which marked their graves. Every thing was silent, except the leaves of the trees, which were gently agitated by the wind; the night was nearly dark; and the scene would have been solemn and affecting even to an uninterested observer. The spirits of the departed seemed to flit around, and to cast a shadow, which was felt but seen not, around the head of the mourner. The deep grief which this scene had at first excited quickly gave way to rage and despair. They were dead, and I lived; their murderer also lived, and to destroy him I must drag out my weary existence. I knelt on the grass, and kissed the earth, and with quivering lips exclaimed, By the sacred earth on which I kneel, by the shades that wander near me, by the deep and eternal grief that I feel, I swear; and by thee, O Night, and by the spirits that preside over thee, I swear to pursue the dmon, who caused this misery, until he or I shall perish in mortal conflict. For this purpose I will preserve my life to execute this dear revenge, will I again behold the sun, and tread the green herbage of earth, which otherwise should vanish from my eyes for ever. And I call on you, spirits of the dead; and on you, wandering ministers of vengeance, to aid and conduct me in my work. Let the cursed and hellish monster drink deep of agony; let him feel the despair that now torments me. I had begun my adjuration with solemnity, and an awe which almost assured me that the shades of my murdered friends heard and approved my devotion; but the furies possessed me as I concluded, and rage choaked my utterance. I was answered through the stillness of night by a loud and fiendish laugh. It rung on my ears long and heavily; the mountains reechoed it, and I felt as if all hell surrounded me with mockery and laughter. Surely in that moment I should have been possessed by phrenzy, and have destroyed my miserable existence, but that my vow was heard, and that I was reserved for vengeance. The laughter died away when a wellknown and abhorred voice, apparently close to my ear, addressed me in an audible whisperI am satisfied miserable wretch! you have determined to live, and I am satisfied. I darted towards the spot from which the sound proceeded; but the devil eluded my grasp. Suddenly the broad disk of the moon arose, and shone full upon his ghastly and distorted shape, as he fled with more than mortal speed. I pursued him; and for many months this has been my task. Guided by a slight clue, I followed the windings of the Rhone, but vainly. The blue Mediterranean appeared; and, by a strange chance, I saw the fiend enter by night, and hide himself in a vessel bound for the Black Sea. I took my passage in the same ship; but he escaped, I know not how. Amidst the wilds of Tartary and Russia, although he still evaded me, I have ever followed in his track. Sometimes the peasants, scared by this horrid apparition, informed me of his path; sometimes he himself, who feared that if I lost all trace I should despair and die, often left some mark to guide me. The snows descended on my head, and I saw the print of his huge step on the white plain. To you first entering on life, to whom care is new, and agony unknown, how can you understand what I have felt, and still feel? Cold, want, and fatigue, were the least pains which I was destined to endure; I was cursed by some devil, and carried about with me my eternal hell; yet still a spirit of good followed and directed my steps, and, when I most murmured, would suddenly extricate me from seemingly insurmountable difficulties. Sometimes, when nature, overcome by hunger, sunk under the exhaustion, a repast was prepared for me in the desert, that restored and inspirited me. The fare was indeed coarse, such as the peasants of the country ate; but I may not doubt that it was set there by the spirits that I had invoked to aid me. Often, when all was dry, the heavens cloudless, and I was parched by thirst, a slight cloud would bedim the sky, shed the few drops that revived me, and vanish. I followed, when I could, the courses of the rivers; but the dmon generally avoided these, as it was here that the population of the country chiefly collected. In other places human beings were seldom seen; and I generally subsisted on the wild animals that crossed my path. I had money with me, and gained the friendship of the villagers by distributing it, or bringing with me some food that I had killed, which, after taking a small part, I always presented to those who had provided me with fire and utensils for cooking. My life, as it passed thus, was indeed hateful to me, and it was during sleep alone that I could taste joy. O blessed sleep! often, when most miserable, I sank to repose, and my dreams lulled me even to rapture. The spirits that guarded me had provided these moments, or rather hours, of happiness, that I might retain strength to fulfil my pilgrimage. Deprived of this respite, I should have sunk under my hardships. During the day I was sustained and inspirited by the hope of night for in sleep I saw my friends, my wife, and my beloved country; again I saw the benevolent countenance of my father, heard the silver tones of my Elizabeths voice, and beheld Clerval enjoying health and youth. Often, when wearied by a toilsome march, I persuaded myself that I was dreaming until night should come, and that I should then enjoy reality in the arms of my dearest friends. What agonizing fondness did I feel for them! how did I cling to their dear forms, as sometimes they haunted even my waking hours, and persuade myself that they still lived! At such moments vengeance, that burned within me, died in my heart, and I pursued my path towards the destruction of the dmon, more as a task enjoined by heaven, as the mechanical impulse of some power of which I was unconscious, than as the ardent desire of my soul. What his feelings were whom I pursued, I cannot know. Sometimes, indeed, he left marks in writing on the barks of the trees, or cut in stone, that guided me, and instigated my fury. My reign is not yet over, (these words were legible in one of these inscriptions); you live, and my power is complete. Follow me; I seek the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost, to which I am impassive. You will find near this place, if you follow not too tardily, a dead hare; eat, and be refreshed. Come on, my enemy; we have yet to wrestle for our lives; but many hard and miserable hours must you endure, until that period shall arrive. Scoffing devil! Again do I vow vengeance; again do I devote thee, miserable fiend, to torture and death. Never will I omit my search, until he or I perish; and then with what ecstacy shall I join my Elizabeth, and those who even now prepare for me the reward of my tedious toil and horrible pilgrimage. As I still pursued my journey to the northward, the snows thickened, and the cold increased in a degree almost too severe to support. The peasants were shut up in their hovels, and only a few of the most hardy ventured forth to seize the animals whom starvation had forced from their hiding places to seek for prey. The rivers were covered with ice, and no fish could be procured; and thus I was cut off from my chief article of maintenance. The triumph of my enemy increased with the difficulty of my labours. One inscription that he left was in these words Prepare! your toils only begin wrap yourself in furs, and provide food, for we shall soon enter upon a journey where your sufferings will satisfy my everlasting hatred. My courage and perseverance were invigorated by these scoffing words; I resolved not to fail in my purpose; and, calling on heaven to support me, I continued with unabated fervour to traverse immense deserts, until the ocean appeared at a distance, and formed the utmost boundary of the horizon. Oh! how unlike it was to the blue seas of the south! Covered with ice, it was only to be distinguished from land by its superior wildness and ruggedness. The Greeks wept for joy when they beheld the Mediterranean from the hills of Asia, and hailed with rapture the boundary of their toils. I did not weep; but I knelt down, and, with a full heart, thanked my guiding spirit for conducting me in safety to the place where I hoped, notwithstanding my adversarys gibe, to meet and grapple with him. Some weeks before this period I had procured a sledge and dogs, and thus traversed the snows with inconceivable speed. I know not whether the fiend possessed the same advantages; but I found that, as before I had daily lost ground in the pursuit, I now gained on him; so much so, that when I first saw the ocean, he was but one days journey in advance, and I hoped to intercept him before he should reach the beach. With new courage, therefore, I pressed on, and in two days arrived at a wretched hamlet on the seashore. I inquired of the inhabitants concerning the fiend, and gained accurate information. A gigantic monster, they said, had arrived the night before, armed with a gun and many pistols; putting to flight the inhabitants of a solitary cottage, through fear of his terrific appearance. He had carried off their store of winter food, and, placing it in a sledge, to draw which he had seized on a numerous drove of trained dogs, he had harnessed them, and the same night, to the joy of the horrorstruck villagers, had pursued his journey across the sea in a direction that led to no land; and they conjectured that he must speedily be destroyed by the breaking of the ice, or frozen by the eternal frosts. On hearing this information, I suffered a temporary access of despair. He had escaped me; and I must commence a destructive and almost endless journey across the mountainous ices of the ocean,amidst cold that few of the inhabitants could long endure, and which I, the native of a genial and sunny climate, could not hope to survive. Yet at the idea that the fiend should live and be triumphant, my rage and vengeance returned, and, like a mighty tide, overwhelmed every other feeling. After a slight repose, during which the spirits of the dead hovered round, and instigated me to toil and revenge, I prepared for my journey. I exchanged my land sledge for one fashioned for the inequalities of the frozen ocean; and, purchasing a plentiful stock of provisions, I departed from land. I cannot guess how many days have passed since then; but I have endured misery, which nothing but the eternal sentiment of a just retribution burning within my heart could have enabled me to support. Immense and rugged mountains of ice often barred up my passage, and I often heard the thunder of the ground sea, which threatened my destruction. But again the frost came, and made the paths of the sea secure. By the quantity of provision which I had consumed I should guess that I had passed three weeks in this journey; and the continual protraction of hope, returning back upon the heart, often wrung bitter drops of despondency and grief from my eyes. Despair had indeed almost secured her prey, and I should soon have sunk beneath this misery; when once, after the poor animals that carried me had with incredible toil gained the summit of a sloping ice mountain, and one sinking under his fatigue died, I viewed the expanse before me with anguish, when suddenly my eye caught a dark speck upon the dusky plain. I strained my sight to discover what it could be, and uttered a wild cry of ecstacy when I distinguished a sledge, and the distorted proportions of a wellknown form within. Oh! with what a burning gush did hope revisit my heart! warm tears filled my eyes, which I hastily wiped away, that they might not intercept the view I had of the dmon; but still my sight was dimmed by the burning drops, until, giving way to the emotions that oppressed me, I wept aloud. But this was not the time for delay; I disencumbered the dogs of their dead companion, gave them a plentiful portion of food; and, after an hours rest, which was absolutely necessary, and yet which was bitterly irksome to me, I continued my route. The sledge was still visible; nor did I again lose sight of it, except at the moments when for a short time some ice rock concealed it with its intervening crags. I indeed perceptibly gained on it; and when, after nearly two days journey, I beheld my enemy at no more than a mile distant, my heart bounded within me. But now, when I appeared almost within grasp of my enemy, my hopes were suddenly extinguished, and I lost all trace of him more utterly than I had ever done before. A ground sea was heard; the thunder of its progress, as the waters rolled and swelled beneath me, became every moment more ominous and terrific. I pressed on, but in vain. The wind arose; the sea roared; and, as with the mighty shock of an earthquake, it split, and cracked with a tremendous and overwhelming sound. The work was soon finished in a few minutes a tumultuous sea rolled between me and my enemy, and I was left drifting on a scattered piece of ice, that was continually lessening, and thus preparing for me a hideous death. In this manner many appalling hours passed; several of my dogs died; and I myself was about to sink under the accumulation of distress, when I saw your vessel riding at anchor, and holding forth to me hopes of succour and life. I had no conception that vessels ever came so far north, and was astounded at the sight. I quickly destroyed part of my sledge to construct oars; and by these means was enabled, with infinite fatigue, to move my iceraft in the direction of your ship. I had determined, if you were going southward, still to trust myself to the mercy of the seas, rather than abandon my purpose. I hoped to induce you to grant me a boat with which I could still pursue my enemy. But your direction was northward. You took me on board when my vigour was exhausted, and I should soon have sunk under my multiplied hardships into a death, which I still dread,for my task is unfulfilled. Oh! when will my guiding spirit, in conducting me to the dmon, allow me the rest I so much desire; or must I die, and he yet live? If I do, swear to me, Walton, that he shall not escape; that you will seek him, and satisfy my vengeance in his death. Yet, do I dare ask you to undertake my pilgrimage, to endure the hardships that I have undergone? No; I am not so selfish. Yet, when I am dead, if he should appear; if the ministers of vengeance should conduct him to you, swear that he shall not liveswear that he shall not triumph over my accumulated woes, and live to make another such a wretch as I am. He is eloquent and persuasive; and once his words had even power over my heart but trust him not. His soul is as hellish as his form, full of treachery and fiendlike malice. Hear him not; call on the manes of William, Justine, Clerval, Elizabeth, my father, and of the wretched Victor, and thrust your sword into his heart. I will hover near, and direct the steel aright. Walton, in continuation. August 26th, 17. You have read this strange and terrific story, Margaret; and do you not feel your blood congealed with horror, like that which even now curdles mine? Sometimes, seized with sudden agony, he could not continue his tale; at others, his voice broken, yet piercing, uttered with difficulty the words so replete with agony. His fine and lovely eyes were now lighted up with indignation, now subdued to downcast sorrow, and quenched in infinite wretchedness. Sometimes he commanded his countenance and tones, and related the most horrible incidents with a tranquil voice, suppressing every mark of agitation; then, like a volcano bursting forth, his face would suddenly change to an expression of the wildest rage, as he shrieked out imprecations on his persecutor. His tale is connected, and told with an appearance of the simplest truth; yet I own to you that the letters of Felix and Safie, which he shewed me, and the apparition of the monster, seen from our ship, brought to me a greater conviction of the truth of his narrative than his asseverations, however earnest and connected. Such a monster has then really existence; I cannot doubt it; yet I am lost in surprise and admiration. Sometimes I endeavoured to gain from Frankenstein the particulars of his creatures formation; but on this point he was impenetrable. Are you mad, my friend? said he, or whither does your senseless curiosity lead you? Would you also create for yourself and the world a demoniacal enemy? Or to what do your questions tend? Peace, peace! learn my miseries, and do not seek to increase your own. Frankenstein discovered that I made notes concerning his history he asked to see them, and then himself corrected and augmented them in many places; but principally in giving the life and spirit to the conversations he held with his enemy. Since you have preserved my narration, said he, I would not that a mutilated one should go down to posterity. Thus has a week passed away, while I have listened to the strangest tale that ever imagination formed. My thoughts, and every feeling of my soul, have been drunk up by the interest for my guest, which this tale, and his own elevated and gentle manners have created. I wish to soothe him; yet can I counsel one so infinitely miserable, so destitute of every hope of consolation, to live? Oh, no! the only joy that he can now know will be when he composes his shattered feelings to peace and death. Yet he enjoys one comfort, the offspring of solitude and delirium he believes, that, when in dreams he holds converse with his friends, and derives from that communion consolation for his miseries, or excitements to his vengeance, that they are not the creations of his fancy, but the real beings who visit him from the regions of a remote world. This faith gives a solemnity to his reveries that render them to me almost as imposing and interesting as truth. Our conversations are not always confined to his own history and misfortunes. On every point of general literature he displays unbounded knowledge, and a quick and piercing apprehension. His eloquence is forcible and touching; nor can I hear him, when he relates a pathetic incident, or endeavours to move the passions of pity or love, without tears. What a glorious creature must he have been in the days of his prosperity, when he is thus noble and godlike in ruin. He seems to feel his own worth, and the greatness of his fall. When younger, said he, I felt as if I were destined for some great enterprise. My feelings are profound; but I possessed a coolness of judgment that fitted me for illustrious achievements. This sentiment of the worth of my nature supported me, when others would have been oppressed; for I deemed it criminal to throw away in useless grief those talents that might be useful to my fellowcreatures. When I reflected on the work I had completed, no less a one than the creation of a sensitive and rational animal, I could not rank myself with the herd of common projectors. But this feeling, which supported me in the commencement of my career, now serves only to plunge me lower in the dust. All my speculations and hopes are as nothing; and, like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell. My imagination was vivid, yet my powers of analysis and application were intense; by the union of these qualities I conceived the idea, and executed the creation of a man. Even now I cannot recollect, without passion, my reveries while the work was incomplete. I trod heaven in my thoughts, now exulting in my powers, now burning with the idea of their effects. From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty ambition; but how am I sunk! Oh! my friend, if you had known me as I once was, you would not recognize me in this state of degradation. Despondency rarely visited my heart; a high destiny seemed to bear me on, until I fell, never, never again to rise. Must I then lose this admirable being? I have longed for a friend; I have sought one who would sympathize with and love me. Behold, on these desert seas I have found such a one; but, I fear, I have gained him only to know his value, and lose him. I would reconcile him to life, but he repulses the idea. I thank you, Walton, he said, for your kind intentions towards so miserable a wretch; but when you speak of new ties, and fresh affections, think you that any can replace those who are gone? Can any man be to me as Clerval was; or any woman another Elizabeth? Even where the affections are not strongly moved by any superior excellence, the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds, which hardly any later friend can obtain. They know our infantine dispositions, which, however they may be afterwards modified, are never eradicated; and they can judge of our actions with more certain conclusions as to the integrity of our motives. A sister or a brother can never, unless indeed such symptoms have been shewn early, suspect the other of fraud or false dealing, when another friend, however strongly he may be attached, may, in spite of himself, be invaded with suspicion. But I enjoyed friends, dear not only through habit and association, but from their own merits; and, wherever I am, the soothing voice of my Elizabeth, and the conversation of Clerval, will be ever whispered in my ear. They are dead; and but one feeling in such a solitude can persuade me to preserve my life.

If I were engaged in any high undertaking or design, fraught with extensive utility to my fellowcreatures, then could I live to fulfil it. But such is not my destiny; I must pursue and destroy the being to whom I gave existence; then my lot on earth will be fulfilled, and I may die. September 2d. My Beloved Sister, I write to you, encompassed by peril, and ignorant whether I am ever doomed to see again dear England, and the dearer friends that inhabit it. I am surrounded by mountains of ice, which admit of no escape, and threaten every moment to crush my vessel. The brave fellows, whom I have persuaded to be my companions, look towards me for aid; but I have none to bestow. There is something terribly appalling in our situation, yet my courage and hopes do not desert me. We may survive; and if we do not, I will repeat the lessons of my Seneca, and die with a good heart. Yet what, Margaret, will be the state of your mind? You will not hear of my destruction, and you will anxiously await my return. Years will pass, and you will have visitings of despair, and yet be tortured by hope. Oh! my beloved sister, the sickening failings of your heartfelt expectations are, in prospect, more terrible to me than my own death. But you have a husband, and lovely children; you may be happy heaven bless you, and make you so! My unfortunate guest regards me with the tenderest compassion. He endeavours to fill me with hope; and talks as if life were a possession which he valued. He reminds me how often the same accidents have happened to other navigators, who have attempted this sea, and, in spite of myself, he fills me with cheerful auguries. Even the sailors feel the power of his eloquence when he speaks, they no longer despair he rouses their energies, and, while they hear his voice, they believe these vast mountains of ice are molehills, which will vanish before the resolutions of man. These feelings are transitory; each days expectation delayed fills them with fear, and I almost dread a mutiny caused by this despair. September 5th. A scene has just passed of such uncommon interest, that although it is highly probable that these papers may never reach you, yet I cannot forbear recording it. We are still surrounded by mountains of ice, still in imminent danger of being crushed in their conflict. The cold is excessive, and many of my unfortunate comrades have already found a grave amidst this scene of desolation. Frankenstein has daily declined in health a feverish fire still glimmers in his eyes; but he is exhausted, and, when suddenly roused to any exertion, he speedily sinks again into apparent lifelessness. I mentioned in my last letter the fears I entertained of a mutiny. This morning, as I sat watching the wan countenance of my friendhis eyes half closed, and his limbs hanging listlessly,I was roused by half a dozen of the sailors, who desired admission into the cabin. They entered; and their leader addressed me. He told me that he and his companions had been chosen by the other sailors to come in deputation to me, to make me a demand, which, in justice, I could not refuse. We were immured in ice, and should probably never escape; but they feared that if, as was possible, the ice should dissipate, and a free passage be opened, I should be rash enough to continue my voyage, and lead them into fresh dangers, after they might happily have surmounted this. They desired, therefore, that I should engage with a solemn promise, that if the vessel should be freed, I would instantly direct my coarse southward. This speech troubled me. I had not despaired; nor had I yet conceived the idea of returning, if set free. Yet could I, in justice, or even in possibility, refuse this demand? I hesitated before I answered; when Frankenstein, who had at first been silent, and, indeed, appeared hardly to have force enough to attend, now roused himself; his eyes sparkled, and his cheeks flushed with momentary vigour. Turning towards the men, he said What do you mean? What do you demand of your captain? Are you then so easily turned from your design? Did you not call this a glorious expedition? and wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror; because, at every new incident, your fortitude was to be called forth, and your courage exhibited; because danger and death surrounded, and these dangers you were to brave and overcome. For this was it a glorious, for this was it an honourable undertaking. You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species; your name adored, as belonging to brave men who encountered death for honour and the benefit of mankind. And now, behold, with the first imagination of danger, or, if you will, the first mighty and terrific trial of your courage, you shrink away, and are content to be handed down as men who had not strength enough to endure cold and peril; and so, poor souls, they were chilly, and returned to their warm firesides. Why, that requires not this preparation; ye need not have come thus far, and dragged your captain to the shame of a defeat, merely to prove yourselves cowards. Oh! be men, or be more than men. Be steady to your purposes, and firm as a rock. This ice is not made of such stuff as your hearts might be; it is mutable, cannot withstand you, if you say that it shall not. Do not return to your families with the stigma of disgrace marked on your brows. Return as heroes who have fought and conquered, and who know not what it is to turn their backs on the foe. He spoke this with a voice so modulated to the different feelings expressed in his speech, with an eye so full of lofty design and heroism, that can you wonder that these men were moved. They looked at one another, and were unable to reply. I spoke; I told them to retire, and consider of what had been said that I would not lead them further north, if they strenuously desired the contrary; but that I hoped that, with reflection, their courage would return. They retired, and I turned towards my friend; but he was sunk in languor, and almost deprived of life. How all this will terminate, I know not; but I had rather die, than return shamefully,my purpose unfulfilled. Yet I fear such will be my fate; the men, unsupported by ideas of glory and honour, can never willingly continue to endure their present hardships. September 7th. The die is cast; I have consented to return, if we are not destroyed. Thus are my hopes blasted by cowardice and indecision; I come back ignorant and disappointed. It requires more philosophy than I possess, to bear this injustice with patience. September 12th. It is past; I am returning to England. I have lost my hopes of utility and glory;I have lost my friend. But I will endeavour to detail these bitter circumstances to you, my dear sister; and, while I am wafted towards England, and towards you, I will not despond. September 19th, the ice began to move, and roarings like thunder were heard at a distance, as the islands split and cracked in every direction. We were in the most imminent peril; but, as we could only remain passive, my chief attention was occupied by my unfortunate guest, whose illness increased in such a degree, that he was entirely confined to his bed. The ice cracked behind us, and was driven with force towards the north; a breeze sprung from the west, and on the 11th the passage towards the south became perfectly free. When the sailors saw this, and that their return to their native country was apparently assured, a shout of tumultuous joy broke from them, loud and longcontinued. Frankenstein, who was dozing, awoke, and asked the cause of the tumult. They shout, I said, because they will soon return to England. Do you then really return? Alas! yes; I cannot withstand their demands. I cannot lead them unwillingly to danger, and I must return. Do so, if you will; but I will not. You may give up your purpose; but mine is assigned to me by heaven, and I dare not. I am weak; but surely the spirits who assist my vengeance will endow me with sufficient strength. Saying this, he endeavoured to spring from the bed, but the exertion was too great for him; he fell back, and fainted. It was long before he was restored; and I often thought that life was entirely extinct. At length he opened his eyes, but he breathed with difficulty, and was unable to speak. The surgeon gave him a composing draught, and ordered us to leave him undisturbed. In the mean time he told me, that my friend had certainly not many hours to live. His sentence was pronounced; and I could only grieve, and be patient. I sat by his bed watching him; his eyes were closed, and I thought he slept; but presently he called to me in a feeble voice, and, bidding me come near, saidAlas! the strength I relied on is gone; I feel that I shall soon die, and he, my enemy and persecutor, may still be in being. Think not, Walton, that in the last moments of my existence I feel that burning hatred, and ardent desire of revenge, I once expressed, but I feel myself justified in desiring the death of my adversary. During these last days I have been occupied in examining my past conduct; nor do I find it blameable. In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature, and was bound towards him, to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and wellbeing. This was my duty; but there was another still paramount to that. My duties towards my fellowcreatures had greater claims to my attention, because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery. Urged by this view, I refused, and I did right in refusing, to create a companion for the first creature. He shewed unparalleled malignity and selfishness, in evil he destroyed my friends; he devoted to destruction beings who possessed exquisite sensations, happiness, and wisdom; nor do I know where this thirst for vengeance may end. Miserable himself, that he may render no other wretched, he ought to die. The task of his destruction was mine, but I have failed. When actuated by selfish and vicious motives, I asked you to undertake my unfinished work; and I renew this request now, when I am only induced by reason and virtue. Yet I cannot ask you to renounce your country and friends, to fulfil this task; and now, that you are returning to England, you will have little chance of meeting with him. But the consideration of these points, and the wellbalancing of what you may esteem your duties, I leave to you; my judgment and ideas are already disturbed by the near approach of death. I dare not ask you to do what I think right, for I may still be misled by passion. That he should live to be an instrument of mischief disturbs me; in other respects this hour, when I momentarily expect my release, is the only happy one which I have enjoyed for several years. The forms of the beloved dead flit before me, and I hasten to their arms. Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquillity, and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed. His voice became fainter as he spoke; and at length, exhausted by his effort, he sunk into silence. About half an hour afterwards he attempted again to speak, but was unable; he pressed my hand feebly, and his eyes closed for ever, while the irradiation of a gentle smile passed away from his lips. Margaret, what comment can I make on the untimely extinction of this glorious spirit? What can I say, that will enable you to understand the depth of my sorrow? All that I should express would be inadequate and feeble. My tears flow; my mind is overshadowed by a cloud of disappointment. But I journey towards England, and I may there find consolation. I am interrupted. What do these sounds portend? It is midnight; the breeze blows fairly, and the watch on deck scarcely stir. Again; there is a sound as of a human voice, but hoarser; it comes from the cabin where the remains of Frankenstein still lie. I must arise, and examine. Good night, my sister. Great God! what a scene has just taken place! I am yet dizzy with the remembrance of it. I hardly know whether I shall have the power to detail it; yet the tale which I have recorded would be incomplete without this final and wonderful catastrophe. I entered the cabin, where lay the remains of my illfated and admirable friend. Over him hung a form which I cannot find words to describe; gigantic in stature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions. As he hung over the coffin, his face was concealed by long locks of ragged hair; but one vast hand was extended, in colour and apparent texture like that of a mummy. When he heard the sound of my approach, he ceased to utter exclamations of grief and horror, and sprung towards the window. Never did I behold a vision so horrible as his face, of such loathsome, yet appalling hideousness. I shut my eyes involuntarily, and endeavoured to recollect what were my duties with regard to this destroyer. I called on him to stay. He paused, looking on me with wonder; and, again turning towards the lifeless form of his creator, he seemed to forget my presence, and every feature and gesture seemed instigated by the wildest rage of some uncontrollable passion. That is also my victim! he exclaimed; in his murder my crimes are consummated; the miserable series of my being is wound to its close! Oh, Frankenstein! generous and selfdevoted being! what does it avail that I now ask thee to pardon me? I, who irretrievably destroyed thee by destroying all thou lovedst. Alas! he is cold; he may not answer me. His voice seemed suffocated; and my first impulses, which had suggested to me the duty of obeying the dying request of my friend, in destroying his enemy, were now suspended by a mixture of curiosity and compassion. I approached this tremendous being; I dared not again raise my looks upon his face, there was something so scaring and unearthly in his ugliness. I attempted to speak, but the words died away on my lips. The monster continued to utter wild and incoherent selfreproaches. At length I gathered resolution to address him, in a pause of the tempest of his passion Your repentance, I said, is now superfluous. If you had listened to the voice of conscience, and heeded the stings of remorse, before you had urged your diabolical vengeance to this extremity, Frankenstein would yet have lived. And do you dream? said the dmon; do you think that I was then dead to agony and remorse?He, he continued, pointing to the corpse, he suffered not more in the consummation of the deed;oh! not the tenthousandth portion of the anguish that was mine during the lingering detail of its execution. A frightful selfishness hurried me on, while my heart was poisoned with remorse. Think ye that the groans of Clerval were music to my ears? My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy; and, when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine. After the murder of Clerval, I returned to Switzerland, heartbroken and overcome. I pitied Frankenstein; my pity amounted to horror I abhorred myself. But when I discovered that he, the author at once of my existence and of its unspeakable torments, dared to hope for happiness; that while he accumulated wretchedness and despair upon me, he sought his own enjoyment in feelings and passions from the indulgence of which I was for ever barred, then impotent envy and bitter indignation filled me with an insatiable thirst for vengeance. I recollected my threat, and resolved that it should be accomplished. I knew that I was preparing for myself a deadly torture; but I was the slave, not the master of an impulse, which I detested, yet could not disobey. Yet when she died!nay, then I was not miserable. I had cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil thenceforth became my good. Urged thus far, I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I had willingly chosen. The completion of my demoniacal design became an insatiable passion. And now it is ended; there is my last victim! I was at first touched by the expressions of his misery; yet when I called to mind what Frankenstein had said of his powers of eloquence and persuasion, and when I again cast my eyes on the lifeless form of my friend, indignation was rekindled within me. Wretch! I said, it is well that you come here to whine over the desolation that you have made. You throw a torch into a pile of buildings, and when they are consumed you sit among the ruins, and lament the fall. Hypocritical fiend! if he whom you mourn still lived, still would he be the object, again would he become the prey of your accursed vengeance. It is not pity that you feel; you lament only because the victim of your malignity is withdrawn from your power. Oh, it is not thusnot thus, interrupted the being; yet such must be the impression conveyed to you by what appears to be the purport of my actions. Yet I seek not a fellowfeeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated. But now, that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone, while my sufferings shall endure when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings, who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of bringing forth. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now vice has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No crime, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I call over the frightful catalogue of my deeds, I cannot believe that I am he whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendant visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am quite alone. You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes and his misfortunes. But, in the detail which he gave you of them, he could not sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured, wasting in impotent passions. For whilst I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were for ever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me? Why do you not hate Felix, who drove his friend from his door with contumely? Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice. But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept, and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived, and long for the moment when they will meet my eyes, when it will haunt my thoughts, no more. Fear not that I shall be the instrument of future mischief. My work is nearly complete. Neither yours nor any mans death is needed to consummate the series of my being, and accomplish that which must be done; but it requires my own. Do not think that I shall be slow to perform this sacrifice. I shall quit your vessel on the iceraft which brought me hither, and shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been. I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish. I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel the winds play on my cheeks. Light, feeling, and sense, will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness. Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer, and heard the rustling of the leaves and the chirping of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes, and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death? Farewell! I leave you, and in you the last of human kind whom these eyes will ever behold. Farewell, Frankenstein! If thou wert yet alive, and yet cherished a desire of revenge against me, it would be better satiated in my life than in my destruction. But it was not so; thou didst seek my extinction, that I might not cause greater wretchedness; and if yet, in some mode unknown to me, thou hast not yet ceased to think and feel, thou desirest not my life for my own misery. Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine; for the bitter sting of remorse may not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall close them for ever. But soon, he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell. He sprung from the cabinwindow, as he said this, upon the iceraft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance. THE END. END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS Updated editions will replace the previous onethe old editions will be renamed. 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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or reuse it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Author Robert Louis Stevenson Release date June 27, 2008 [eBook 43] Most recently updated November 9, 2024 Language English Credits David Widger START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson Contents STORY OF THE DOOR SEARCH FOR MR. HYDE DR. JEKYLL WAS QUITE AT EASE THE CAREW MURDER CASE INCIDENT OF THE LETTER INCIDENT OF DR. LANYON INCIDENT AT THE WINDOW THE LAST NIGHT DR. LANYONS NARRATIVE HENRY JEKYLLS FULL STATEMENT OF THE CASE STORY OF THE DOOR Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these silent symbols of the afterdinner face, but more often and loudly in the acts of his life. He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years. But he had an approved tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove. I incline to Cains heresy, he used to say quaintly I let my brother go to the devil in his own way. In this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of downgoing men. And to such as these, so long as they came about his chambers, he never marked a shade of change in his demeanour. No doubt the feat was easy to Mr. Utterson; for he was undemonstrative at the best, and even his friendship seemed to be founded in a similar catholicity of goodnature. It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle readymade from the hands of opportunity; and that was the lawyers way. His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object. Hence, no doubt the bond that united him to Mr. Richard Enfield, his distant kinsman, the wellknown man about town. It was a nut to crack for many, what these two could see in each other, or what subject they could find in common. It was reported by those who encountered them in their Sunday walks, that they said nothing, looked singularly dull and would hail with obvious relief the appearance of a friend. For all that, the two men put the greatest store by these excursions, counted them the chief jewel of each week, and not only set aside occasions of pleasure, but even resisted the calls of business, that they might enjoy them uninterrupted. It chanced on one of these rambles that their way led them down a bystreet in a busy quarter of London. The street was small and what is called quiet, but it drove a thriving trade on the weekdays. The inhabitants were all doing well, it seemed and all emulously hoping to do better still, and laying out the surplus of their grains in coquetry; so that the shop fronts stood along that thoroughfare with an air of invitation, like rows of smiling saleswomen. Even on Sunday, when it veiled its more florid charms and lay comparatively empty of passage, the street shone out in contrast to its dingy neighbourhood, like a fire in a forest; and with its freshly painted shutters, wellpolished brasses, and general cleanliness and gaiety of note, instantly caught and pleased the eye of the passenger. Two doors from one corner, on the left hand going east the line was broken by the entry of a court; and just at that point a certain sinister block of building thrust forward its gable on the street. It was two storeys high; showed no window, nothing but a door on the lower storey and a blind forehead of discoloured wall on the upper; and bore in every feature, the marks of prolonged and sordid negligence. The door, which was equipped with neither bell nor knocker, was blistered and distained. Tramps slouched into the recess and struck matches on the panels; children kept shop upon the steps; the schoolboy had tried his knife on the mouldings; and for close on a generation, no one had appeared to drive away these random visitors or to repair their ravages. Mr. Enfield and the lawyer were on the other side of the bystreet; but when they came abreast of the entry, the former lifted up his cane and pointed. Did you ever remark that door? he asked; and when his companion had replied in the affirmative, It is connected in my mind, added he, with a very odd story. Indeed? said Mr. Utterson, with a slight change of voice, and what was that? Well, it was this way, returned Mr. Enfield I was coming home from some place at the end of the world, about three oclock of a black winter morning, and my way lay through a part of town where there was literally nothing to be seen but lamps. Street after street and all the folks asleepstreet after street, all lighted up as if for a procession and all as empty as a churchtill at last I got into that state of mind when a man listens and listens and begins to long for the sight of a policeman. All at once, I saw two figures one a little man who was stumping along eastward at a good walk, and the other a girl of maybe eight or ten who was running as hard as she was able down a cross street. Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man trampled calmly over the childs body and left her screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasnt like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut. I gave a few halloa, took to my heels, collared my gentleman, and brought him back to where there was already quite a group about the screaming child. He was perfectly cool and made no resistance, but gave me one look, so ugly that it brought out the sweat on me like running. The people who had turned out were the girls own family; and pretty soon, the doctor, for whom she had been sent put in his appearance. Well, the child was not much the worse, more frightened, according to the sawbones; and there you might have supposed would be an end to it. But there was one curious circumstance. I had taken a loathing to my gentleman at first sight. So had the childs family, which was only natural. But the doctors case was what struck me. He was the usual cut and dry apothecary, of no particular age and colour, with a strong Edinburgh accent and about as emotional as a bagpipe. Well, sir, he was like the rest of us; every time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that sawbones turn sick and white with the desire to kill him. I knew what was in his mind, just as he knew what was in mine; and killing being out of the question, we did the next best. We told the man we could and would make such a scandal out of this as should make his name stink from one end of London to the other. If he had any friends or any credit, we undertook that he should lose them. And all the time, as we were pitching it in red hot, we were keeping the women off him as best we could for they were as wild as harpies. I never saw a circle of such hateful faces; and there was the man in the middle, with a kind of black sneering coolnessfrightened too, I could see thatbut carrying it off, sir, really like Satan. If you choose to make capital out of this accident, said he, I am naturally helpless. No gentleman but wishes to avoid a scene, says he. Name your figure. Well, we screwed him up to a hundred pounds for the childs family; he would have clearly liked to stick out; but there was something about the lot of us that meant mischief, and at last he struck. The next thing was to get the money; and where do you think he carried us but to that place with the door?whipped out a key, went in, and presently came back with the matter of ten pounds in gold and a cheque for the balance on Couttss, drawn payable to bearer and signed with a name that I cant mention, though its one of the points of my story, but it was a name at least very well known and often printed. The figure was stiff; but the signature was good for more than that if it was only genuine. I took the liberty of pointing out to my gentleman that the whole business looked apocryphal, and that a man does not, in real life, walk into a cellar door at four in the morning and come out with another mans cheque for close upon a hundred pounds. But he was quite easy and sneering. Set your mind at rest, says he, I will stay with you till the banks open and cash the cheque myself. So we all set off, the doctor, and the childs father, and our friend and myself, and passed the rest of the night in my chambers; and next day, when we had breakfasted, went in a body to the bank. I gave in the cheque myself, and said I had every reason to believe it was a forgery. Not a bit of it. The cheque was genuine. Tuttut! said Mr. Utterson. I see you feel as I do, said Mr. Enfield. Yes, its a bad story. For my man was a fellow that nobody could have to do with, a really damnable man; and the person that drew the cheque is the very pink of the proprieties, celebrated too, and (what makes it worse) one of your fellows who do what they call good. Blackmail, I suppose; an honest man paying through the nose for some of the capers of his youth. Black Mail House is what I call the place with the door, in consequence. Though even that, you know, is far from explaining all, he added, and with the words fell into a vein of musing. From this he was recalled by Mr. Utterson asking rather suddenly And you dont know if the drawer of the cheque lives there? A likely place, isnt it? returned Mr. Enfield. But I happen to have noticed his address; he lives in some square or other. And you never asked about theplace with the door? said Mr. Utterson. No, sir; I had a delicacy, was the reply. I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgment. You start a question, and its like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden and the family have to change their name. No sir, I make it a rule of mine the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask. A very good rule, too, said the lawyer. But I have studied the place for myself, continued Mr. Enfield. It seems scarcely a house. There is no other door, and nobody goes in or out of that one but, once in a great while, the gentleman of my adventure. There are three windows looking on the court on the first floor; none below; the windows are always shut but theyre clean. And then there is a chimney which is generally smoking; so somebody must live there. And yet its not so sure; for the buildings are so packed together about the court, that its hard to say where one ends and another begins. The pair walked on again for a while in silence; and then Enfield, said Mr. Utterson, thats a good rule of yours. Yes, I think it is, returned Enfield. But for all that, continued the lawyer, theres one point I want to ask. I want to ask the name of that man who walked over the child. Well, said Mr. Enfield, I cant see what harm it would do. It was a man of the name of Hyde. Hm, said Mr. Utterson. What sort of a man is he to see? He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldnt specify the point. Hes an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I cant describe him. And its not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment. Mr. Utterson again walked some way in silence and obviously under a weight of consideration. You are sure he used a key? he inquired at last. My dear sir... began Enfield, surprised out of himself. Yes, I know, said Utterson; I know it must seem strange. The fact is, if I do not ask you the name of the other party, it is because I know it already. You see, Richard, your tale has gone home. If you have been inexact in any point you had better correct it. I think you might have warned me, returned the other with a touch of sullenness. But I have been pedantically exact, as you call it. The fellow had a key; and whats more, he has it still. I saw him use it not a week ago. Mr. Utterson sighed deeply but said never a word; and the young man presently resumed. Here is another lesson to say nothing, said he. I am ashamed of my long tongue. Let us make a bargain never to refer to this again. With all my heart, said the lawyer. I shake hands on that, Richard. SEARCH FOR MR. HYDE That evening Mr. Utterson came home to his bachelor house in sombre spirits and sat down to dinner without relish. It was his custom of a Sunday, when this meal was over, to sit close by the fire, a volume of some dry divinity on his reading desk, until the clock of the neighbouring church rang out the hour of twelve, when he would go soberly and gratefully to bed. On this night however, as soon as the cloth was taken away, he took up a candle and went into his business room. There he opened his safe, took from the most private part of it a document endorsed on the envelope as Dr. Jekylls Will and sat down with a clouded brow to study its contents. The will was holograph, for Mr. Utterson though he took charge of it now that it was made, had refused to lend the least assistance in the making of it; it provided not only that, in case of the decease of Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S., etc., all his possessions were to pass into the hands of his friend and benefactor Edward Hyde, but that in case of Dr. Jekylls disappearance or unexplained absence for any period exceeding three calendar months, the said Edward Hyde should step into the said Henry Jekylls shoes without further delay and free from any burthen or obligation beyond the payment of a few small sums to the members of the doctors household. This document had long been the lawyers eyesore. It offended him both as a lawyer and as a lover of the sane and customary sides of life, to whom the fanciful was the immodest. And hitherto it was his ignorance of Mr. Hyde that had swelled his indignation; now, by a sudden turn, it was his knowledge. It was already bad enough when the name was but a name of which he could learn no more. It was worse when it began to be clothed upon with detestable attributes; and out of the shifting, insubstantial mists that had so long baffled his eye, there leaped up the sudden, definite presentment of a fiend. I thought it was madness, he said, as he replaced the obnoxious paper in the safe, and now I begin to fear it is disgrace. With that he blew out his candle, put on a greatcoat, and set forth in the direction of Cavendish Square, that citadel of medicine, where his friend, the great Dr. Lanyon, had his house and received his crowding patients. If anyone knows, it will be Lanyon, he had thought. The solemn butler knew and welcomed him; he was subjected to no stage of delay, but ushered direct from the door to the diningroom where Dr. Lanyon sat alone over his wine. This was a hearty, healthy, dapper, redfaced gentleman, with a shock of hair prematurely white, and a boisterous and decided manner. At sight of Mr. Utterson, he sprang up from his chair and welcomed him with both hands. The geniality, as was the way of the man, was somewhat theatrical to the eye; but it reposed on genuine feeling. For these two were old friends, old mates both at school and college, both thorough respectors of themselves and of each other, and what does not always follow, men who thoroughly enjoyed each others company. After a little rambling talk, the lawyer led up to the subject which so disagreeably preoccupied his mind. I suppose, Lanyon, said he, you and I must be the two oldest friends that Henry Jekyll has? I wish the friends were younger, chuckled Dr. Lanyon. But I suppose we are. And what of that? I see little of him now. Indeed? said Utterson. I thought you had a bond of common interest. We had, was the reply. But it is more than ten years since Henry Jekyll became too fanciful for me. He began to go wrong, wrong in mind; and though of course I continue to take an interest in him for old sakes sake, as they say, I see and I have seen devilish little of the man. Such unscientific balderdash, added the doctor, flushing suddenly purple, would have estranged Damon and Pythias. This little spirit of temper was somewhat of a relief to Mr. Utterson. They have only differed on some point of science, he thought; and being a man of no scientific passions (except in the matter of conveyancing), he even added It is nothing worse than that! He gave his friend a few seconds to recover his composure, and then approached the question he had come to put. Did you ever come across a protg of hisone Hyde? he asked. Hyde? repeated Lanyon. No. Never heard of him. Since my time. That was the amount of information that the lawyer carried back with him to the great, dark bed on which he tossed to and fro, until the small hours of the morning began to grow large. It was a night of little ease to his toiling mind, toiling in mere darkness and besieged by questions. Six oclock struck on the bells of the church that was so conveniently near to Mr. Uttersons dwelling, and still he was digging at the problem. Hitherto it had touched him on the intellectual side alone; but now his imagination also was engaged, or rather enslaved; and as he lay and tossed in the gross darkness of the night and the curtained room, Mr. Enfields tale went by before his mind in a scroll of lighted pictures. He would be aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city; then of the figure of a man walking swiftly; then of a child running from the doctors; and then these met, and that human Juggernaut trod the child down and passed on regardless of her screams. Or else he would see a room in a rich house, where his friend lay asleep, dreaming and smiling at his dreams; and then the door of that room would be opened, the curtains of the bed plucked apart, the sleeper recalled, and lo! there would stand by his side a figure to whom power was given, and even at that dead hour, he must rise and do its bidding. The figure in these two phases haunted the lawyer all night; and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly and still the more swiftly, even to dizziness, through wider labyrinths of lamplighted city, and at every street corner crush a child and leave her screaming. And still the figure had no face by which he might know it; even in his dreams, it had no face, or one that baffled him and melted before his eyes; and thus it was that there sprang up and grew apace in the lawyers mind a singularly strong, almost an inordinate, curiosity to behold the features of the real Mr. Hyde. If he could but once set eyes on him, he thought the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll altogether away, as was the habit of mysterious things when well examined. He might see a reason for his friends strange preference or bondage (call it which you please) and even for the startling clause of the will. At least it would be a face worth seeing the face of a man who was without bowels of mercy a face which had but to show itself to raise up, in the mind of the unimpressionable Enfield, a spirit of enduring hatred. From that time forward, Mr. Utterson began to haunt the door in the bystreet of shops. In the morning before office hours, at noon when business was plenty and time scarce, at night under the face of the fogged city moon, by all lights and at all hours of solitude or concourse, the lawyer was to be found on his chosen post. If he be Mr. Hyde, he had thought, I shall be Mr. Seek. And at last his patience was rewarded. It was a fine dry night; frost in the air; the streets as clean as a ballroom floor; the lamps, unshaken by any wind, drawing a regular pattern of light and shadow. By ten oclock, when the shops were closed, the bystreet was very solitary and, in spite of the low growl of London from all round, very silent. Small sounds carried far; domestic sounds out of the houses were clearly audible on either side of the roadway; and the rumour of the approach of any passenger preceded him by a long time. Mr. Utterson had been some minutes at his post, when he was aware of an odd light footstep drawing near. In the course of his nightly patrols, he had long grown accustomed to the quaint effect with which the footfalls of a single person, while he is still a great way off, suddenly spring out distinct from the vast hum and clatter of the city. Yet his attention had never before been so sharply and decisively arrested; and it was with a strong, superstitious prevision of success that he withdrew into the entry of the court. The steps drew swiftly nearer, and swelled out suddenly louder as they turned the end of the street. The lawyer, looking forth from the entry, could soon see what manner of man he had to deal with. He was small and very plainly dressed and the look of him, even at that distance, went somehow strongly against the watchers inclination. But he made straight for the door, crossing the roadway to save time; and as he came, he drew a key from his pocket like one approaching home. Mr. Utterson stepped out and touched him on the shoulder as he passed. Mr. Hyde, I think? Mr. Hyde shrank back with a hissing intake of the breath. But his fear was only momentary; and though he did not look the lawyer in the face, he answered coolly enough That is my name. What do you want? I see you are going in, returned the lawyer. I am an old friend of Dr. JekyllsMr. Utterson of Gaunt Streetyou must have heard of my name; and meeting you so conveniently, I thought you might admit me. You will not find Dr. Jekyll; he is from home, replied Mr. Hyde, blowing in the key. And then suddenly, but still without looking up, How did you know me? he asked. On your side, said Mr. Utterson will you do me a favour? With pleasure, replied the other. What shall it be? Will you let me see your face? asked the lawyer. Mr. Hyde appeared to hesitate, and then, as if upon some sudden reflection, fronted about with an air of defiance; and the pair stared at each other pretty fixedly for a few seconds. Now I shall know you again, said Mr. Utterson. It may be useful. Yes, returned Mr. Hyde, It is as well we have met; and propos, you should have my address. And he gave a number of a street in Soho. Good God! thought Mr. Utterson, can he, too, have been thinking of the will? But he kept his feelings to himself and only grunted in acknowledgment of the address. And now, said the other, how did you know me? By description, was the reply. Whose description? We have common friends, said Mr. Utterson. Common friends, echoed Mr. Hyde, a little hoarsely. Who are they? Jekyll, for instance, said the lawyer. He never told you, cried Mr. Hyde, with a flush of anger. I did not think you would have lied. Come, said Mr. Utterson, that is not fitting language. The other snarled aloud into a savage laugh; and the next moment, with extraordinary quickness, he had unlocked the door and disappeared into the house. The lawyer stood awhile when Mr. Hyde had left him, the picture of disquietude. Then he began slowly to mount the street, pausing every step or two and putting his hand to his brow like a man in mental perplexity. The problem he was thus debating as he walked, was one of a class that is rarely solved. Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him. There must be something else, said the perplexed gentleman. There is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell? or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satans signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend. Round the corner from the bystreet, there was a square of ancient, handsome houses, now for the most part decayed from their high estate and let in flats and chambers to all sorts and conditions of men; mapengravers, architects, shady lawyers and the agents of obscure enterprises. One house, however, second from the corner, was still occupied entire; and at the door of this, which wore a great air of wealth and comfort, though it was now plunged in darkness except for the fanlight, Mr. Utterson stopped and knocked. A welldressed, elderly servant opened the door. Is Dr. Jekyll at home, Poole? asked the lawyer. I will see, Mr. Utterson, said Poole, admitting the visitor, as he spoke, into a large, lowroofed, comfortable hall paved with flags, warmed (after the fashion of a country house) by a bright, open fire, and furnished with costly cabinets of oak. Will you wait here by the fire, sir? or shall I give you a light in the diningroom? Here, thank you, said the lawyer, and he drew near and leaned on the tall fender. This hall, in which he was now left alone, was a pet fancy of his friend the doctors; and Utterson himself was wont to speak of it as the pleasantest room in London. But tonight there was a shudder in his blood; the face of Hyde sat heavy on his memory; he felt (what was rare with him) a nausea and distaste of life; and in the gloom of his spirits, he seemed to read a menace in the flickering of the firelight on the polished cabinets and the uneasy starting of the shadow on the roof. He was ashamed of his relief, when Poole presently returned to announce that Dr. Jekyll was gone out. I saw Mr. Hyde go in by the old dissecting room, Poole, he said. Is that right, when Dr. Jekyll is from home? Quite right, Mr. Utterson, sir, replied the servant. Mr. Hyde has a key. Your master seems to repose a great deal of trust in that young man, Poole, resumed the other musingly. Yes, sir, he does indeed, said Poole. We have all orders to obey him. I do not think I ever met Mr. Hyde? asked Utterson. O, dear no, sir. He never dines here, replied the butler. Indeed we see very little of him on this side of the house; he mostly comes and goes by the laboratory. Well, goodnight, Poole. Goodnight, Mr. Utterson. And the lawyer set out homeward with a very heavy heart. Poor Harry Jekyll, he thought, my mind misgives me he is in deep waters! He was wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ay, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace punishment coming, pede claudo, years after memory has forgotten and selflove condoned the fault. And the lawyer, scared by the thought, brooded awhile on his own past, groping in all the corners of memory, lest by chance some JackintheBox of an old iniquity should leap to light there. His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into a sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing yet avoided. And then by a return on his former subject, he conceived a spark of hope. This Master Hyde, if he were studied, thought he, must have secrets of his own; black secrets, by the look of him; secrets compared to which poor Jekylls worst would be like sunshine. Things cannot continue as they are. It turns me cold to think of this creature stealing like a thief to Harrys bedside; poor Harry, what a wakening! And the danger of it; for if this Hyde suspects the existence of the will, he may grow impatient to inherit. Ay, I must put my shoulders to the wheelif Jekyll will but let me, he added, if Jekyll will only let me. For once more he saw before his minds eye, as clear as transparency, the strange clauses of the will. DR. JEKYLL WAS QUITE AT EASE A fortnight later, by excellent good fortune, the doctor gave one of his pleasant dinners to some five or six old cronies, all intelligent, reputable men and all judges of good wine; and Mr. Utterson so contrived that he remained behind after the others had departed. This was no new arrangement, but a thing that had befallen many scores of times. Where Utterson was liked, he was liked well. Hosts loved to detain the dry lawyer, when the lighthearted and loosetongued had already their foot on the threshold; they liked to sit a while in his unobtrusive company, practising for solitude, sobering their minds in the mans rich silence after the expense and strain of gaiety. To this rule, Dr. Jekyll was no exception; and as he now sat on the opposite side of the firea large, wellmade, smoothfaced man of fifty, with something of a slyish cast perhaps, but every mark of capacity and kindnessyou could see by his looks that he cherished for Mr. Utterson a sincere and warm affection. I have been wanting to speak to you, Jekyll, began the latter. You know that will of yours? A close observer might have gathered that the topic was distasteful; but the doctor carried it off gaily. My poor Utterson, said he, you are unfortunate in such a client. I never saw a man so distressed as you were by my will; unless it were that hidebound pedant, Lanyon, at what he called my scientific heresies. O, I know hes a good fellowyou neednt frownan excellent fellow, and I always mean to see more of him; but a hidebound pedant for all that; an ignorant, blatant pedant. I was never more disappointed in any man than Lanyon. You know I never approved of it, pursued Utterson, ruthlessly disregarding the fresh topic. My will? Yes, certainly, I know that, said the doctor, a trifle sharply. You have told me so. Well, I tell you so again, continued the lawyer. I have been learning something of young Hyde. The large handsome face of Dr. Jekyll grew pale to the very lips, and there came a blackness about his eyes. I do not care to hear more, said he. This is a matter I thought we had agreed to drop. What I heard was abominable, said Utterson. It can make no change. You do not understand my position, returned the doctor, with a certain incoherency of manner. I am painfully situated, Utterson; my position is a very strangea very strange one. It is one of those affairs that cannot be mended by talking. Jekyll, said Utterson, you know me I am a man to be trusted.

Make a clean breast of this in confidence; and I make no doubt I can get you out of it. My good Utterson, said the doctor, this is very good of you, this is downright good of you, and I cannot find words to thank you in. I believe you fully; I would trust you before any man alive, ay, before myself, if I could make the choice; but indeed it isnt what you fancy; it is not as bad as that; and just to put your good heart at rest, I will tell you one thing the moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Hyde. I give you my hand upon that; and I thank you again and again; and I will just add one little word, Utterson, that Im sure youll take in good part this is a private matter, and I beg of you to let it sleep. Utterson reflected a little, looking in the fire. I have no doubt you are perfectly right, he said at last, getting to his feet. Well, but since we have touched upon this business, and for the last time I hope, continued the doctor, there is one point I should like you to understand. I have really a very great interest in poor Hyde. I know you have seen him; he told me so; and I fear he was rude. But I do sincerely take a great, a very great interest in that young man; and if I am taken away, Utterson, I wish you to promise me that you will bear with him and get his rights for him. I think you would, if you knew all; and it would be a weight off my mind if you would promise. I cant pretend that I shall ever like him, said the lawyer. I dont ask that, pleaded Jekyll, laying his hand upon the others arm; I only ask for justice; I only ask you to help him for my sake, when I am no longer here. Utterson heaved an irrepressible sigh. Well, said he, I promise. THE CAREW MURDER CASE Nearly a year later, in the month of October, 18, London was startled by a crime of singular ferocity and rendered all the more notable by the high position of the victim. The details were few and startling. A maid servant living alone in a house not far from the river, had gone upstairs to bed about eleven. Although a fog rolled over the city in the small hours, the early part of the night was cloudless, and the lane, which the maids window overlooked, was brilliantly lit by the full moon. It seems she was romantically given, for she sat down upon her box, which stood immediately under the window, and fell into a dream of musing. Never (she used to say, with streaming tears, when she narrated that experience), never had she felt more at peace with all men or thought more kindly of the world. And as she so sat she became aware of an aged beautiful gentleman with white hair, drawing near along the lane; and advancing to meet him, another and very small gentleman, to whom at first she paid less attention. When they had come within speech (which was just under the maids eyes) the older man bowed and accosted the other with a very pretty manner of politeness. It did not seem as if the subject of his address were of great importance; indeed, from his pointing, it sometimes appeared as if he were only inquiring his way; but the moon shone on his face as he spoke, and the girl was pleased to watch it, it seemed to breathe such an innocent and oldworld kindness of disposition, yet with something high too, as of a wellfounded selfcontent. Presently her eye wandered to the other, and she was surprised to recognise in him a certain Mr. Hyde, who had once visited her master and for whom she had conceived a dislike. He had in his hand a heavy cane, with which he was trifling; but he answered never a word, and seemed to listen with an illcontained impatience. And then all of a sudden he broke out in a great flame of anger, stamping with his foot, brandishing the cane, and carrying on (as the maid described it) like a madman. The old gentleman took a step back, with the air of one very much surprised and a trifle hurt; and at that Mr. Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with apelike fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway. At the horror of these sights and sounds, the maid fainted. It was two oclock when she came to herself and called for the police. The murderer was gone long ago; but there lay his victim in the middle of the lane, incredibly mangled. The stick with which the deed had been done, although it was of some rare and very tough and heavy wood, had broken in the middle under the stress of this insensate cruelty; and one splintered half had rolled in the neighbouring gutterthe other, without doubt, had been carried away by the murderer. A purse and gold watch were found upon the victim but no cards or papers, except a sealed and stamped envelope, which he had been probably carrying to the post, and which bore the name and address of Mr. Utterson. This was brought to the lawyer the next morning, before he was out of bed; and he had no sooner seen it and been told the circumstances, than he shot out a solemn lip. I shall say nothing till I have seen the body, said he; this may be very serious. Have the kindness to wait while I dress. And with the same grave countenance he hurried through his breakfast and drove to the police station, whither the body had been carried. As soon as he came into the cell, he nodded. Yes, said he, I recognise him. I am sorry to say that this is Sir Danvers Carew. Good God, sir, exclaimed the officer, is it possible? And the next moment his eye lighted up with professional ambition. This will make a deal of noise, he said. And perhaps you can help us to the man. And he briefly narrated what the maid had seen, and showed the broken stick. Mr. Utterson had already quailed at the name of Hyde; but when the stick was laid before him, he could doubt no longer; broken and battered as it was, he recognised it for one that he had himself presented many years before to Henry Jekyll. Is this Mr. Hyde a person of small stature? he inquired. Particularly small and particularly wickedlooking, is what the maid calls him, said the officer. Mr. Utterson reflected; and then, raising his head, If you will come with me in my cab, he said, I think I can take you to his house. It was by this time about nine in the morning, and the first fog of the season. A great chocolatecoloured pall lowered over heaven, but the wind was continually charging and routing these embattled vapours; so that as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr. Utterson beheld a marvelous number of degrees and hues of twilight; for here it would be dark like the backend of evening; and there would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown, like the light of some strange conflagration; and here, for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths. The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful reinvasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyers eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare. The thoughts of his mind, besides, were of the gloomiest dye; and when he glanced at the companion of his drive, he was conscious of some touch of that terror of the law and the laws officers, which may at times assail the most honest. As the cab drew up before the address indicated, the fog lifted a little and showed him a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French eating house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and twopenny salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many women of many different nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a morning glass; and the next moment the fog settled down again upon that part, as brown as umber, and cut him off from his blackguardly surroundings. This was the home of Henry Jekylls favourite; of a man who was heir to a quarter of a million sterling. An ivoryfaced and silveryhaired old woman opened the door. She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy but her manners were excellent. Yes, she said, this was Mr. Hydes, but he was not at home; he had been in that night very late, but he had gone away again in less than an hour; there was nothing strange in that; his habits were very irregular, and he was often absent; for instance, it was nearly two months since she had seen him till yesterday. Very well, then, we wish to see his rooms, said the lawyer; and when the woman began to declare it was impossible, I had better tell you who this person is, he added. This is Inspector Newcomen of Scotland Yard. A flash of odious joy appeared upon the womans face. Ah! said she, he is in trouble! What has he done? Mr. Utterson and the inspector exchanged glances. He dont seem a very popular character, observed the latter. And now, my good woman, just let me and this gentleman have a look about us. In the whole extent of the house, which but for the old woman remained otherwise empty, Mr. Hyde had only used a couple of rooms; but these were furnished with luxury and good taste. A closet was filled with wine; the plate was of silver, the napery elegant; a good picture hung upon the walls, a gift (as Utterson supposed) from Henry Jekyll, who was much of a connoisseur; and the carpets were of many plies and agreeable in colour. At this moment, however, the rooms bore every mark of having been recently and hurriedly ransacked; clothes lay about the floor, with their pockets inside out; lockfast drawers stood open; and on the hearth there lay a pile of grey ashes, as though many papers had been burned. From these embers the inspector disinterred the butt end of a green cheque book, which had resisted the action of the fire; the other half of the stick was found behind the door; and as this clinched his suspicions, the officer declared himself delighted. A visit to the bank, where several thousand pounds were found to be lying to the murderers credit, completed his gratification. You may depend upon it, sir, he told Mr. Utterson I have him in my hand. He must have lost his head, or he never would have left the stick or, above all, burned the cheque book. Why, moneys life to the man. We have nothing to do but wait for him at the bank, and get out the handbills. This last, however, was not so easy of accomplishment; for Mr. Hyde had numbered few familiarseven the master of the servant maid had only seen him twice; his family could nowhere be traced; he had never been photographed; and the few who could describe him differed widely, as common observers will. Only on one point were they agreed; and that was the haunting sense of unexpressed deformity with which the fugitive impressed his beholders. INCIDENT OF THE LETTER It was late in the afternoon, when Mr. Utterson found his way to Dr. Jekylls door, where he was at once admitted by Poole, and carried down by the kitchen offices and across a yard which had once been a garden, to the building which was indifferently known as the laboratory or dissecting rooms. The doctor had bought the house from the heirs of a celebrated surgeon; and his own tastes being rather chemical than anatomical, had changed the destination of the block at the bottom of the garden. It was the first time that the lawyer had been received in that part of his friends quarters; and he eyed the dingy, windowless structure with curiosity, and gazed round with a distasteful sense of strangeness as he crossed the theatre, once crowded with eager students and now lying gaunt and silent, the tables laden with chemical apparatus, the floor strewn with crates and littered with packing straw, and the light falling dimly through the foggy cupola. At the further end, a flight of stairs mounted to a door covered with red baize; and through this, Mr. Utterson was at last received into the doctors cabinet. It was a large room fitted round with glass presses, furnished, among other things, with a chevalglass and a business table, and looking out upon the court by three dusty windows barred with iron. The fire burned in the grate; a lamp was set lighted on the chimney shelf, for even in the houses the fog began to lie thickly; and there, close up to the warmth, sat Dr. Jekyll, looking deathly sick. He did not rise to meet his visitor, but held out a cold hand and bade him welcome in a changed voice. And now, said Mr. Utterson, as soon as Poole had left them, you have heard the news? The doctor shuddered. They were crying it in the square, he said. I heard them in my diningroom. One word, said the lawyer. Carew was my client, but so are you, and I want to know what I am doing. You have not been mad enough to hide this fellow? Utterson, I swear to God, cried the doctor, I swear to God I will never set eyes on him again. I bind my honour to you that I am done with him in this world. It is all at an end. And indeed he does not want my help; you do not know him as I do; he is safe, he is quite safe; mark my words, he will never more be heard of. The lawyer listened gloomily; he did not like his friends feverish manner. You seem pretty sure of him, said he; and for your sake, I hope you may be right. If it came to a trial, your name might appear. I am quite sure of him, replied Jekyll; I have grounds for certainty that I cannot share with any one. But there is one thing on which you may advise me. I haveI have received a letter; and I am at a loss whether I should show it to the police. I should like to leave it in your hands, Utterson; you would judge wisely, I am sure; I have so great a trust in you. You fear, I suppose, that it might lead to his detection? asked the lawyer. No, said the other. I cannot say that I care what becomes of Hyde; I am quite done with him. I was thinking of my own character, which this hateful business has rather exposed. Utterson ruminated awhile; he was surprised at his friends selfishness, and yet relieved by it. Well, said he, at last, let me see the letter. The letter was written in an odd, upright hand and signed Edward Hyde and it signified, briefly enough, that the writers benefactor, Dr. Jekyll, whom he had long so unworthily repaid for a thousand generosities, need labour under no alarm for his safety, as he had means of escape on which he placed a sure dependence. The lawyer liked this letter well enough; it put a better colour on the intimacy than he had looked for; and he blamed himself for some of his past suspicions. Have you the envelope? he asked. I burned it, replied Jekyll, before I thought what I was about. But it bore no postmark. The note was handed in. Shall I keep this and sleep upon it? asked Utterson. I wish you to judge for me entirely, was the reply. I have lost confidence in myself. Well, I shall consider, returned the lawyer. And now one word more it was Hyde who dictated the terms in your will about that disappearance? The doctor seemed seized with a qualm of faintness; he shut his mouth tight and nodded. I knew it, said Utterson. He meant to murder you. You had a fine escape. I have had what is far more to the purpose, returned the doctor solemnly I have had a lessonO God, Utterson, what a lesson I have had! And he covered his face for a moment with his hands. On his way out, the lawyer stopped and had a word or two with Poole. By the bye, said he, there was a letter handed in today what was the messenger like? But Poole was positive nothing had come except by post; and only circulars by that, he added. This news sent off the visitor with his fears renewed. Plainly the letter had come by the laboratory door; possibly, indeed, it had been written in the cabinet; and if that were so, it must be differently judged, and handled with the more caution. The newsboys, as he went, were crying themselves hoarse along the footways Special edition. Shocking murder of an M.P. That was the funeral oration of one friend and client; and he could not help a certain apprehension lest the good name of another should be sucked down in the eddy of the scandal. It was, at least, a ticklish decision that he had to make; and selfreliant as he was by habit, he began to cherish a longing for advice. It was not to be had directly; but perhaps, he thought, it might be fished for. Presently after, he sat on one side of his own hearth, with Mr. Guest, his head clerk, upon the other, and midway between, at a nicely calculated distance from the fire, a bottle of a particular old wine that had long dwelt unsunned in the foundations of his house. The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like carbuncles; and through the muffle and smother of these fallen clouds, the procession of the towns life was still rolling in through the great arteries with a sound as of a mighty wind. But the room was gay with firelight. In the bottle the acids were long ago resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time, as the colour grows richer in stained windows; and the glow of hot autumn afternoons on hillside vineyards, was ready to be set free and to disperse the fogs of London. Insensibly the lawyer melted. There was no man from whom he kept fewer secrets than Mr. Guest; and he was not always sure that he kept as many as he meant. Guest had often been on business to the doctors; he knew Poole; he could scarce have failed to hear of Mr. Hydes familiarity about the house; he might draw conclusions was it not as well, then, that he should see a letter which put that mystery to right? and above all since Guest, being a great student and critic of handwriting, would consider the step natural and obliging? The clerk, besides, was a man of counsel; he could scarce read so strange a document without dropping a remark; and by that remark Mr. Utterson might shape his future course. This is a sad business about Sir Danvers, he said. Yes, sir, indeed. It has elicited a great deal of public feeling, returned Guest. The man, of course, was mad. I should like to hear your views on that, replied Utterson. I have a document here in his handwriting; it is between ourselves, for I scarce know what to do about it; it is an ugly business at the best. But there it is; quite in your way a murderers autograph. Guests eyes brightened, and he sat down at once and studied it with passion. No sir, he said not mad; but it is an odd hand. And by all accounts a very odd writer, added the lawyer. Just then the servant entered with a note. Is that from Dr. Jekyll, sir? inquired the clerk. I thought I knew the writing. Anything private, Mr. Utterson? Only an invitation to dinner. Why? Do you want to see it? One moment. I thank you, sir; and the clerk laid the two sheets of paper alongside and sedulously compared their contents. Thank you, sir, he said at last, returning both; its a very interesting autograph. There was a pause, during which Mr. Utterson struggled with himself. Why did you compare them, Guest? he inquired suddenly. Well, sir, returned the clerk, theres a rather singular resemblance; the two hands are in many points identical only differently sloped. Rather quaint, said Utterson. It is, as you say, rather quaint, returned Guest. I wouldnt speak of this note, you know, said the master. No, sir, said the clerk. I understand. But no sooner was Mr. Utterson alone that night, than he locked the note into his safe, where it reposed from that time forward. What! he thought. Henry Jekyll forge for a murderer! And his blood ran cold in his veins. INCIDENT OF DR. LANYON Time ran on; thousands of pounds were offered in reward, for the death of Sir Danvers was resented as a public injury; but Mr. Hyde had disappeared out of the ken of the police as though he had never existed. Much of his past was unearthed, indeed, and all disreputable tales came out of the mans cruelty, at once so callous and violent; of his vile life, of his strange associates, of the hatred that seemed to have surrounded his career; but of his present whereabouts, not a whisper. From the time he had left the house in Soho on the morning of the murder, he was simply blotted out; and gradually, as time drew on, Mr. Utterson began to recover from the hotness of his alarm, and to grow more at quiet with himself. The death of Sir Danvers was, to his way of thinking, more than paid for by the disappearance of Mr. Hyde. Now that that evil influence had been withdrawn, a new life began for Dr. Jekyll. He came out of his seclusion, renewed relations with his friends, became once more their familiar guest and entertainer; and whilst he had always been known for charities, he was now no less distinguished for religion. He was busy, he was much in the open air, he did good; his face seemed to open and brighten, as if with an inward consciousness of service; and for more than two months, the doctor was at peace. On the 8th of January Utterson had dined at the doctors with a small party; Lanyon had been there; and the face of the host had looked from one to the other as in the old days when the trio were inseparable friends. On the 12th, and again on the 14th, the door was shut against the lawyer. The doctor was confined to the house, Poole said, and saw no one. On the 15th, he tried again, and was again refused; and having now been used for the last two months to see his friend almost daily, he found this return of solitude to weigh upon his spirits. The fifth night he had in Guest to dine with him; and the sixth he betook himself to Dr. Lanyons. There at least he was not denied admittance; but when he came in, he was shocked at the change which had taken place in the doctors appearance. He had his deathwarrant written legibly upon his face. The rosy man had grown pale; his flesh had fallen away; he was visibly balder and older; and yet it was not so much these tokens of a swift physical decay that arrested the lawyers notice, as a look in the eye and quality of manner that seemed to testify to some deepseated terror of the mind. It was unlikely that the doctor should fear death; and yet that was what Utterson was tempted to suspect. Yes, he thought; he is a doctor, he must know his own state and that his days are counted; and the knowledge is more than he can bear. And yet when Utterson remarked on his ill looks, it was with an air of great firmness that Lanyon declared himself a doomed man. I have had a shock, he said, and I shall never recover. It is a question of weeks. Well, life has been pleasant; I liked it; yes, sir, I used to like it. I sometimes think if we knew all, we should be more glad to get away. Jekyll is ill, too, observed Utterson. Have you seen him? But Lanyons face changed, and he held up a trembling hand. I wish to see or hear no more of Dr. Jekyll, he said in a loud, unsteady voice. I am quite done with that person; and I beg that you will spare me any allusion to one whom I regard as dead. Tut, tut! said Mr. Utterson; and then after a considerable pause, Cant I do anything? he inquired. We are three very old friends, Lanyon; we shall not live to make others. Nothing can be done, returned Lanyon; ask himself. He will not see me, said the lawyer. I am not surprised at that, was the reply. Some day, Utterson, after I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you. And in the meantime, if you can sit and talk with me of other things, for Gods sake, stay and do so; but if you cannot keep clear of this accursed topic, then in Gods name, go, for I cannot bear it. As soon as he got home, Utterson sat down and wrote to Jekyll, complaining of his exclusion from the house, and asking the cause of this unhappy break with Lanyon; and the next day brought him a long answer, often very pathetically worded, and sometimes darkly mysterious in drift. The quarrel with Lanyon was incurable. I do not blame our old friend, Jekyll wrote, but I share his view that we must never meet. I mean from henceforth to lead a life of extreme seclusion; you must not be surprised, nor must you doubt my friendship, if my door is often shut even to you. You must suffer me to go my own dark way. I have brought on myself a punishment and a danger that I cannot name. If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also. I could not think that this earth contained a place for sufferings and terrors so unmanning; and you can do but one thing, Utterson, to lighten this destiny, and that is to respect my silence. Utterson was amazed; the dark influence of Hyde had been withdrawn, the doctor had returned to his old tasks and amities; a week ago, the prospect had smiled with every promise of a cheerful and an honoured age; and now in a moment, friendship, and peace of mind, and the whole tenor of his life were wrecked. So great and unprepared a change pointed to madness; but in view of Lanyons manner and words, there must lie for it some deeper ground. A week afterwards Dr. Lanyon took to his bed, and in something less than a fortnight he was dead. The night after the funeral, at which he had been sadly affected, Utterson locked the door of his business room, and sitting there by the light of a melancholy candle, drew out and set before him an envelope addressed by the hand and sealed with the seal of his dead friend. PRIVATE for the hands of G. J. Utterson ALONE, and in case of his predecease to be destroyed unread, so it was emphatically superscribed; and the lawyer dreaded to behold the contents. I have buried one friend today, he thought what if this should cost me another? And then he condemned the fear as a disloyalty, and broke the seal. Within there was another enclosure, likewise sealed, and marked upon the cover as not to be opened till the death or disappearance of Dr. Henry Jekyll. Utterson could not trust his eyes. Yes, it was disappearance; here again, as in the mad will which he had long ago restored to its author, here again were the idea of a disappearance and the name of Henry Jekyll bracketted. But in the will, that idea had sprung from the sinister suggestion of the man Hyde; it was set there with a purpose all too plain and horrible. Written by the hand of Lanyon, what should it mean? A great curiosity came on the trustee, to disregard the prohibition and dive at once to the bottom of these mysteries; but professional honour and faith to his dead friend were stringent obligations; and the packet slept in the inmost corner of his private safe. It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it; and it may be doubted if, from that day forth, Utterson desired the society of his surviving friend with the same eagerness. He thought of him kindly; but his thoughts were disquieted and fearful. He went to call indeed; but he was perhaps relieved to be denied admittance; perhaps, in his heart, he preferred to speak with Poole upon the doorstep and surrounded by the air and sounds of the open city, rather than to be admitted into that house of voluntary bondage, and to sit and speak with its inscrutable recluse. Poole had, indeed, no very pleasant news to communicate. The doctor, it appeared, now more than ever confined himself to the cabinet over the laboratory, where he would sometimes even sleep; he was out of spirits, he had grown very silent, he did not read; it seemed as if he had something on his mind. Utterson became so used to the unvarying character of these reports, that he fell off little by little in the frequency of his visits. INCIDENT AT THE WINDOW It chanced on Sunday, when Mr. Utterson was on his usual walk with Mr. Enfield, that their way lay once again through the bystreet; and that when they came in front of the door, both stopped to gaze on it. Well, said Enfield, that storys at an end at least. We shall never see more of Mr. Hyde. I hope not, said Utterson. Did I ever tell you that I once saw him, and shared your feeling of repulsion? It was impossible to do the one without the other, returned Enfield. And by the way, what an ass you must have thought me, not to know that this was a back way to Dr. Jekylls! It was partly your own fault that I found it out, even when I did. So you found it out, did you? said Utterson. But if that be so, we may step into the court and take a look at the windows. To tell you the truth, I am uneasy about poor Jekyll; and even outside, I feel as if the presence of a friend might do him good. The court was very cool and a little damp, and full of premature twilight, although the sky, high up overhead, was still bright with sunset. The middle one of the three windows was halfway open; and sitting close beside it, taking the air with an infinite sadness of mien, like some disconsolate prisoner, Utterson saw Dr. Jekyll. What! Jekyll! he cried. I trust you are better. I am very low, Utterson, replied the doctor drearily, very low. It will not last long, thank God. You stay too much indoors, said the lawyer. You should be out, whipping up the circulation like Mr. Enfield and me. (This is my cousinMr. EnfieldDr. Jekyll.) Come now; get your hat and take a quick turn with us. You are very good, sighed the other. I should like to very much; but no, no, no, it is quite impossible; I dare not. But indeed, Utterson, I am very glad to see you; this is really a great pleasure; I would ask you and Mr. Enfield up, but the place is really not fit. Why, then, said the lawyer, goodnaturedly, the best thing we can do is to stay down here and speak with you from where we are. That is just what I was about to venture to propose, returned the doctor with a smile. But the words were hardly uttered, before the smile was struck out of his face and succeeded by an expression of such abject terror and despair, as froze the very blood of the two gentlemen below. They saw it but for a glimpse for the window was instantly thrust down; but that glimpse had been sufficient, and they turned and left the court without a word. In silence, too, they traversed the bystreet; and it was not until they had come into a neighbouring thoroughfare, where even upon a Sunday there were still some stirrings of life, that Mr. Utterson at last turned and looked at his companion. They were both pale; and there was an answering horror in their eyes. God forgive us, God forgive us, said Mr. Utterson. But Mr. Enfield only nodded his head very seriously, and walked on once more in silence. THE LAST NIGHT Mr. Utterson was sitting by his fireside one evening after dinner, when he was surprised to receive a visit from Poole. Bless me, Poole, what brings you here? he cried; and then taking a second look at him, What ails you? he added; is the doctor ill? Mr. Utterson, said the man, there is something wrong. Take a seat, and here is a glass of wine for you, said the lawyer. Now, take your time, and tell me plainly what you want. You know the doctors ways, sir, replied Poole, and how he shuts himself up. Well, hes shut up again in the cabinet; and I dont like it, sirI wish I may die if I like it. Mr. Utterson, sir, Im afraid. Now, my good man, said the lawyer, be explicit. What are you afraid of? Ive been afraid for about a week, returned Poole, doggedly disregarding the question, and I can bear it no more. The mans appearance amply bore out his words; his manner was altered for the worse; and except for the moment when he had first announced his terror, he had not once looked the lawyer in the face. Even now, he sat with the glass of wine untasted on his knee, and his eyes directed to a corner of the floor. I can bear it no more, he repeated. Come, said the lawyer, I see you have some good reason, Poole; I see there is something seriously amiss. Try to tell me what it is. I think theres been foul play, said Poole, hoarsely. Foul play! cried the lawyer, a good deal frightened and rather inclined to be irritated in consequence. What foul play! What does the man mean? I darent say, sir, was the answer; but will you come along with me and see for yourself? Mr.

Uttersons only answer was to rise and get his hat and greatcoat; but he observed with wonder the greatness of the relief that appeared upon the butlers face, and perhaps with no less, that the wine was still untasted when he set it down to follow. It was a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and flying wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture. The wind made talking difficult, and flecked the blood into the face. It seemed to have swept the streets unusually bare of passengers, besides; for Mr. Utterson thought he had never seen that part of London so deserted. He could have wished it otherwise; never in his life had he been conscious of so sharp a wish to see and touch his fellowcreatures; for struggle as he might, there was borne in upon his mind a crushing anticipation of calamity. The square, when they got there, was full of wind and dust, and the thin trees in the garden were lashing themselves along the railing. Poole, who had kept all the way a pace or two ahead, now pulled up in the middle of the pavement, and in spite of the biting weather, took off his hat and mopped his brow with a red pockethandkerchief. But for all the hurry of his coming, these were not the dews of exertion that he wiped away, but the moisture of some strangling anguish; for his face was white and his voice, when he spoke, harsh and broken. Well, sir, he said, here we are, and God grant there be nothing wrong. Amen, Poole, said the lawyer. Thereupon the servant knocked in a very guarded manner; the door was opened on the chain; and a voice asked from within, Is that you, Poole? Its all right, said Poole. Open the door. The hall, when they entered it, was brightly lighted up; the fire was built high; and about the hearth the whole of the servants, men and women, stood huddled together like a flock of sheep. At the sight of Mr. Utterson, the housemaid broke into hysterical whimpering; and the cook, crying out Bless God! its Mr. Utterson, ran forward as if to take him in her arms. What, what? Are you all here? said the lawyer peevishly. Very irregular, very unseemly; your master would be far from pleased. Theyre all afraid, said Poole. Blank silence followed, no one protesting; only the maid lifted her voice and now wept loudly. Hold your tongue! Poole said to her, with a ferocity of accent that testified to his own jangled nerves; and indeed, when the girl had so suddenly raised the note of her lamentation, they had all started and turned towards the inner door with faces of dreadful expectation. And now, continued the butler, addressing the knifeboy, reach me a candle, and well get this through hands at once. And then he begged Mr. Utterson to follow him, and led the way to the back garden. Now, sir, said he, you come as gently as you can. I want you to hear, and I dont want you to be heard. And see here, sir, if by any chance he was to ask you in, dont go. Mr. Uttersons nerves, at this unlookedfor termination, gave a jerk that nearly threw him from his balance; but he recollected his courage and followed the butler into the laboratory building through the surgical theatre, with its lumber of crates and bottles, to the foot of the stair. Here Poole motioned him to stand on one side and listen; while he himself, setting down the candle and making a great and obvious call on his resolution, mounted the steps and knocked with a somewhat uncertain hand on the red baize of the cabinet door. Mr. Utterson, sir, asking to see you, he called; and even as he did so, once more violently signed to the lawyer to give ear. A voice answered from within Tell him I cannot see anyone, it said complainingly. Thank you, sir, said Poole, with a note of something like triumph in his voice; and taking up his candle, he led Mr. Utterson back across the yard and into the great kitchen, where the fire was out and the beetles were leaping on the floor. Sir, he said, looking Mr. Utterson in the eyes, Was that my masters voice? It seems much changed, replied the lawyer, very pale, but giving look for look. Changed? Well, yes, I think so, said the butler. Have I been twenty years in this mans house, to be deceived about his voice? No, sir; masters made away with; he was made away with eight days ago, when we heard him cry out upon the name of God; and whos in there instead of him, and why it stays there, is a thing that cries to Heaven, Mr. Utterson! This is a very strange tale, Poole; this is rather a wild tale my man, said Mr. Utterson, biting his finger. Suppose it were as you suppose, supposing Dr. Jekyll to have beenwell, murdered, what could induce the murderer to stay? That wont hold water; it doesnt commend itself to reason. Well, Mr. Utterson, you are a hard man to satisfy, but Ill do it yet, said Poole. All this last week (you must know) him, or it, whatever it is that lives in that cabinet, has been crying night and day for some sort of medicine and cannot get it to his mind. It was sometimes his waythe masters, that isto write his orders on a sheet of paper and throw it on the stair. Weve had nothing else this week back; nothing but papers, and a closed door, and the very meals left there to be smuggled in when nobody was looking. Well, sir, every day, ay, and twice and thrice in the same day, there have been orders and complaints, and I have been sent flying to all the wholesale chemists in town. Every time I brought the stuff back, there would be another paper telling me to return it, because it was not pure, and another order to a different firm. This drug is wanted bitter bad, sir, whatever for. Have you any of these papers? asked Mr. Utterson. Poole felt in his pocket and handed out a crumpled note, which the lawyer, bending nearer to the candle, carefully examined. Its contents ran thus Dr. Jekyll presents his compliments to Messrs. Maw. He assures them that their last sample is impure and quite useless for his present purpose. In the year 18, Dr. J. purchased a somewhat large quantity from Messrs. M. He now begs them to search with most sedulous care, and should any of the same quality be left, forward it to him at once. Expense is no consideration. The importance of this to Dr. J. can hardly be exaggerated. So far the letter had run composedly enough, but here with a sudden splutter of the pen, the writers emotion had broken loose. For Gods sake, he added, find me some of the old. This is a strange note, said Mr. Utterson; and then sharply, How do you come to have it open? The man at Maws was main angry, sir, and he threw it back to me like so much dirt, returned Poole. This is unquestionably the doctors hand, do you know? resumed the lawyer. I thought it looked like it, said the servant rather sulkily; and then, with another voice, But what matters hand of write? he said. Ive seen him! Seen him? repeated Mr. Utterson. Well? Thats it! said Poole. It was this way. I came suddenly into the theatre from the garden. It seems he had slipped out to look for this drug or whatever it is; for the cabinet door was open, and there he was at the far end of the room digging among the crates. He looked up when I came in, gave a kind of cry, and whipped upstairs into the cabinet. It was but for one minute that I saw him, but the hair stood upon my head like quills. Sir, if that was my master, why had he a mask upon his face? If it was my master, why did he cry out like a rat, and run from me? I have served him long enough. And then... The man paused and passed his hand over his face. These are all very strange circumstances, said Mr. Utterson, but I think I begin to see daylight. Your master, Poole, is plainly seized with one of those maladies that both torture and deform the sufferer; hence, for aught I know, the alteration of his voice; hence the mask and the avoidance of his friends; hence his eagerness to find this drug, by means of which the poor soul retains some hope of ultimate recoveryGod grant that he be not deceived! There is my explanation; it is sad enough, Poole, ay, and appalling to consider; but it is plain and natural, hangs well together, and delivers us from all exorbitant alarms. Sir, said the butler, turning to a sort of mottled pallor, that thing was not my master, and theres the truth. My masterhere he looked round him and began to whisperis a tall, fine build of a man, and this was more of a dwarf. Utterson attempted to protest. O, sir, cried Poole, do you think I do not know my master after twenty years? Do you think I do not know where his head comes to in the cabinet door, where I saw him every morning of my life? No, sir, that thing in the mask was never Dr. JekyllGod knows what it was, but it was never Dr. Jekyll; and it is the belief of my heart that there was murder done. Poole, replied the lawyer, if you say that, it will become my duty to make certain. Much as I desire to spare your masters feelings, much as I am puzzled by this note which seems to prove him to be still alive, I shall consider it my duty to break in that door. Ah, Mr. Utterson, thats talking! cried the butler. And now comes the second question, resumed Utterson Who is going to do it? Why, you and me, sir, was the undaunted reply. Thats very well said, returned the lawyer; and whatever comes of it, I shall make it my business to see you are no loser. There is an axe in the theatre, continued Poole; and you might take the kitchen poker for yourself. The lawyer took that rude but weighty instrument into his hand, and balanced it. Do you know, Poole, he said, looking up, that you and I are about to place ourselves in a position of some peril? You may say so, sir, indeed, returned the butler. It is well, then that we should be frank, said the other. We both think more than we have said; let us make a clean breast. This masked figure that you saw, did you recognise it? Well, sir, it went so quick, and the creature was so doubled up, that I could hardly swear to that, was the answer. But if you mean, was it Mr. Hyde?why, yes, I think it was! You see, it was much of the same bigness; and it had the same quick, light way with it; and then who else could have got in by the laboratory door? You have not forgot, sir, that at the time of the murder he had still the key with him? But thats not all. I dont know, Mr. Utterson, if you ever met this Mr. Hyde? Yes, said the lawyer, I once spoke with him. Then you must know as well as the rest of us that there was something queer about that gentlemansomething that gave a man a turnI dont know rightly how to say it, sir, beyond this that you felt in your marrow kind of cold and thin. I own I felt something of what you describe, said Mr. Utterson. Quite so, sir, returned Poole. Well, when that masked thing like a monkey jumped from among the chemicals and whipped into the cabinet, it went down my spine like ice. O, I know its not evidence, Mr. Utterson; Im booklearned enough for that; but a man has his feelings, and I give you my bibleword it was Mr. Hyde! Ay, ay, said the lawyer. My fears incline to the same point. Evil, I fear, foundedevil was sure to comeof that connection. Ay truly, I believe you; I believe poor Harry is killed; and I believe his murderer (for what purpose, God alone can tell) is still lurking in his victims room. Well, let our name be vengeance. Call Bradshaw. The footman came at the summons, very white and nervous. Pull yourself together, Bradshaw, said the lawyer. This suspense, I know, is telling upon all of you; but it is now our intention to make an end of it. Poole, here, and I are going to force our way into the cabinet. If all is well, my shoulders are broad enough to bear the blame. Meanwhile, lest anything should really be amiss, or any malefactor seek to escape by the back, you and the boy must go round the corner with a pair of good sticks and take your post at the laboratory door. We give you ten minutes to get to your stations. As Bradshaw left, the lawyer looked at his watch. And now, Poole, let us get to ours, he said; and taking the poker under his arm, led the way into the yard. The scud had banked over the moon, and it was now quite dark. The wind, which only broke in puffs and draughts into that deep well of building, tossed the light of the candle to and fro about their steps, until they came into the shelter of the theatre, where they sat down silently to wait. London hummed solemnly all around; but nearer at hand, the stillness was only broken by the sounds of a footfall moving to and fro along the cabinet floor. So it will walk all day, sir, whispered Poole; ay, and the better part of the night. Only when a new sample comes from the chemist, theres a bit of a break. Ah, its an ill conscience thats such an enemy to rest! Ah, sir, theres blood foully shed in every step of it! But hark again, a little closerput your heart in your ears, Mr. Utterson, and tell me, is that the doctors foot? The steps fell lightly and oddly, with a certain swing, for all they went so slowly; it was different indeed from the heavy creaking tread of Henry Jekyll. Utterson sighed. Is there never anything else? he asked. Poole nodded. Once, he said. Once I heard it weeping! Weeping? how that? said the lawyer, conscious of a sudden chill of horror. Weeping like a woman or a lost soul, said the butler. I came away with that upon my heart, that I could have wept too. But now the ten minutes drew to an end. Poole disinterred the axe from under a stack of packing straw; the candle was set upon the nearest table to light them to the attack; and they drew near with bated breath to where that patient foot was still going up and down, up and down, in the quiet of the night. Jekyll, cried Utterson, with a loud voice, I demand to see you. He paused a moment, but there came no reply. I give you fair warning, our suspicions are aroused, and I must and shall see you, he resumed; if not by fair means, then by foulif not of your consent, then by brute force! Utterson, said the voice, for Gods sake, have mercy! Ah, thats not Jekylls voiceits Hydes! cried Utterson. Down with the door, Poole! Poole swung the axe over his shoulder; the blow shook the building, and the red baize door leaped against the lock and hinges. A dismal screech, as of mere animal terror, rang from the cabinet. Up went the axe again, and again the panels crashed and the frame bounded; four times the blow fell; but the wood was tough and the fittings were of excellent workmanship; and it was not until the fifth, that the lock burst and the wreck of the door fell inwards on the carpet. The besiegers, appalled by their own riot and the stillness that had succeeded, stood back a little and peered in. There lay the cabinet before their eyes in the quiet lamplight, a good fire glowing and chattering on the hearth, the kettle singing its thin strain, a drawer or two open, papers neatly set forth on the business table, and nearer the fire, the things laid out for tea; the quietest room, you would have said, and, but for the glazed presses full of chemicals, the most commonplace that night in London. Right in the middle there lay the body of a man sorely contorted and still twitching. They drew near on tiptoe, turned it on its back and beheld the face of Edward Hyde. He was dressed in clothes far too large for him, clothes of the doctors bigness; the cords of his face still moved with a semblance of life, but life was quite gone; and by the crushed phial in the hand and the strong smell of kernels that hung upon the air, Utterson knew that he was looking on the body of a selfdestroyer. We have come too late, he said sternly, whether to save or punish. Hyde is gone to his account; and it only remains for us to find the body of your master. The far greater proportion of the building was occupied by the theatre, which filled almost the whole ground storey and was lighted from above, and by the cabinet, which formed an upper storey at one end and looked upon the court. A corridor joined the theatre to the door on the bystreet; and with this the cabinet communicated separately by a second flight of stairs. There were besides a few dark closets and a spacious cellar. All these they now thoroughly examined. Each closet needed but a glance, for all were empty, and all, by the dust that fell from their doors, had stood long unopened. The cellar, indeed, was filled with crazy lumber, mostly dating from the times of the surgeon who was Jekylls predecessor; but even as they opened the door they were advertised of the uselessness of further search, by the fall of a perfect mat of cobweb which had for years sealed up the entrance. Nowhere was there any trace of Henry Jekyll, dead or alive. Poole stamped on the flags of the corridor. He must be buried here, he said, hearkening to the sound. Or he may have fled, said Utterson, and he turned to examine the door in the bystreet. It was locked; and lying near by on the flags, they found the key, already stained with rust. This does not look like use, observed the lawyer. Use! echoed Poole. Do you not see, sir, it is broken? much as if a man had stamped on it. Ay, continued Utterson, and the fractures, too, are rusty. The two men looked at each other with a scare. This is beyond me, Poole, said the lawyer. Let us go back to the cabinet. They mounted the stair in silence, and still with an occasional awestruck glance at the dead body, proceeded more thoroughly to examine the contents of the cabinet. At one table, there were traces of chemical work, various measured heaps of some white salt being laid on glass saucers, as though for an experiment in which the unhappy man had been prevented. That is the same drug that I was always bringing him, said Poole; and even as he spoke, the kettle with a startling noise boiled over. This brought them to the fireside, where the easychair was drawn cosily up, and the tea things stood ready to the sitters elbow, the very sugar in the cup. There were several books on a shelf; one lay beside the tea things open, and Utterson was amazed to find it a copy of a pious work, for which Jekyll had several times expressed a great esteem, annotated, in his own hand with startling blasphemies. Next, in the course of their review of the chamber, the searchers came to the chevalglass, into whose depths they looked with an involuntary horror. But it was so turned as to show them nothing but the rosy glow playing on the roof, the fire sparkling in a hundred repetitions along the glazed front of the presses, and their own pale and fearful countenances stooping to look in. This glass has seen some strange things, sir, whispered Poole. And surely none stranger than itself, echoed the lawyer in the same tones. For what did Jekyllhe caught himself up at the word with a start, and then conquering the weaknesswhat could Jekyll want with it? he said. You may say that! said Poole. Next they turned to the business table. On the desk, among the neat array of papers, a large envelope was uppermost, and bore, in the doctors hand, the name of Mr. Utterson. The lawyer unsealed it, and several enclosures fell to the floor. The first was a will, drawn in the same eccentric terms as the one which he had returned six months before, to serve as a testament in case of death and as a deed of gift in case of disappearance; but in place of the name of Edward Hyde, the lawyer, with indescribable amazement read the name of Gabriel John Utterson. He looked at Poole, and then back at the paper, and last of all at the dead malefactor stretched upon the carpet. My head goes round, he said. He has been all these days in possession; he had no cause to like me; he must have raged to see himself displaced; and he has not destroyed this document. He caught up the next paper; it was a brief note in the doctors hand and dated at the top. O Poole! the lawyer cried, he was alive and here this day. He cannot have been disposed of in so short a space; he must be still alive, he must have fled! And then, why fled? and how? and in that case, can we venture to declare this suicide? O, we must be careful. I foresee that we may yet involve your master in some dire catastrophe. Why dont you read it, sir? asked Poole. Because I fear, replied the lawyer solemnly. God grant I have no cause for it! And with that he brought the paper to his eyes and read as follows My dear Utterson,When this shall fall into your hands, I shall have disappeared, under what circumstances I have not the penetration to foresee, but my instinct and all the circumstances of my nameless situation tell me that the end is sure and must be early. Go then, and first read the narrative which Lanyon warned me he was to place in your hands; and if you care to hear more, turn to the confession of Your unworthy and unhappy friend, HENRY JEKYLL. There was a third enclosure? asked Utterson. Here, sir, said Poole, and gave into his hands a considerable packet sealed in several places. The lawyer put it in his pocket. I would say nothing of this paper. If your master has fled or is dead, we may at least save his credit. It is now ten; I must go home and read these documents in quiet; but I shall be back before midnight, when we shall send for the police. They went out, locking the door of the theatre behind them; and Utterson, once more leaving the servants gathered about the fire in the hall, trudged back to his office to read the two narratives in which this mystery was now to be explained. DR. LANYONS NARRATIVE On the ninth of January, now four days ago, I received by the evening delivery a registered envelope, addressed in the hand of my colleague and old school companion, Henry Jekyll. I was a good deal surprised by this; for we were by no means in the habit of correspondence; I had seen the man, dined with him, indeed, the night before; and I could imagine nothing in our intercourse that should justify formality of registration. The contents increased my wonder; for this is how the letter ran 10th December, 18. Dear Lanyon,You are one of my oldest friends; and although we may have differed at times on scientific questions, I cannot remember, at least on my side, any break in our affection. There was never a day when, if you had said to me, Jekyll, my life, my honour, my reason, depend upon you, I would not have sacrificed my left hand to help you. Lanyon, my life, my honour, my reason, are all at your mercy; if you fail me tonight, I am lost. You might suppose, after this preface, that I am going to ask you for something dishonourable to grant. Judge for yourself. I want you to postpone all other engagements for tonightay, even if you were summoned to the bedside of an emperor; to take a cab, unless your carriage should be actually at the door; and with this letter in your hand for consultation, to drive straight to my house. Poole, my butler, has his orders; you will find him waiting your arrival with a locksmith. The door of my cabinet is then to be forced; and you are to go in alone; to open the glazed press (letter E) on the left hand, breaking the lock if it be shut; and to draw out, with all its contents as they stand, the fourth drawer from the top or (which is the same thing) the third from the bottom. In my extreme distress of mind, I have a morbid fear of misdirecting you; but even if I am in error, you may know the right drawer by its contents some powders, a phial and a paper book. This drawer I beg of you to carry back with you to Cavendish Square exactly as it stands. That is the first part of the service now for the second. You should be back, if you set out at once on the receipt of this, long before midnight; but I will leave you that amount of margin, not only in the fear of one of those obstacles that can neither be prevented nor foreseen, but because an hour when your servants are in bed is to be preferred for what will then remain to do. At midnight, then, I have to ask you to be alone in your consulting room, to admit with your own hand into the house a man who will present himself in my name, and to place in his hands the drawer that you will have brought with you from my cabinet. Then you will have played your part and earned my gratitude completely. Five minutes afterwards, if you insist upon an explanation, you will have understood that these arrangements are of capital importance; and that by the neglect of one of them, fantastic as they must appear, you might have charged your conscience with my death or the shipwreck of my reason. Confident as I am that you will not trifle with this appeal, my heart sinks and my hand trembles at the bare thought of such a possibility. Think of me at this hour, in a strange place, labouring under a blackness of distress that no fancy can exaggerate, and yet well aware that, if you will but punctually serve me, my troubles will roll away like a story that is told. Serve me, my dear Lanyon and save Your friend, H.J. P.S.I had already sealed this up when a fresh terror struck upon my soul. It is possible that the postoffice may fail me, and this letter not come into your hands until tomorrow morning. In that case, dear Lanyon, do my errand when it shall be most convenient for you in the course of the day; and once more expect my messenger at midnight. It may then already be too late; and if that night passes without event, you will know that you have seen the last of Henry Jekyll. Upon the reading of this letter, I made sure my colleague was insane; but till that was proved beyond the possibility of doubt, I felt bound to do as he requested. The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of its importance; and an appeal so worded could not be set aside without a grave responsibility. I rose accordingly from table, got into a hansom, and drove straight to Jekylls house. The butler was awaiting my arrival; he had received by the same post as mine a registered letter of instruction, and had sent at once for a locksmith and a carpenter. The tradesmen came while we were yet speaking; and we moved in a body to old Dr. Denmans surgical theatre, from which (as you are doubtless aware) Jekylls private cabinet is most conveniently entered. The door was very strong, the lock excellent; the carpenter avowed he would have great trouble and have to do much damage, if force were to be used; and the locksmith was near despair. But this last was a handy fellow, and after two hours work, the door stood open. The press marked E was unlocked; and I took out the drawer, had it filled up with straw and tied in a sheet, and returned with it to Cavendish Square. Here I proceeded to examine its contents. The powders were neatly enough made up, but not with the nicety of the dispensing chemist; so that it was plain they were of Jekylls private manufacture; and when I opened one of the wrappers I found what seemed to me a simple crystalline salt of a white colour. The phial, to which I next turned my attention, might have been about half full of a bloodred liquor, which was highly pungent to the sense of smell and seemed to me to contain phosphorus and some volatile ether. At the other ingredients I could make no guess. The book was an ordinary version book and contained little but a series of dates. These covered a period of many years, but I observed that the entries ceased nearly a year ago and quite abruptly. Here and there a brief remark was appended to a date, usually no more than a single word double occurring perhaps six times in a total of several hundred entries; and once very early in the list and followed by several marks of exclamation, total failure!!! All this, though it whetted my curiosity, told me little that was definite. Here were a phial of some salt, and the record of a series of experiments that had led (like too many of Jekylls investigations) to no end of practical usefulness. How could the presence of these articles in my house affect either the honour, the sanity, or the life of my flighty colleague? If his messenger could go to one place, why could he not go to another? And even granting some impediment, why was this gentleman to be received by me in secret? The more I reflected the more convinced I grew that I was dealing with a case of cerebral disease; and though I dismissed my servants to bed, I loaded an old revolver, that I might be found in some posture of selfdefence. Twelve oclock had scarce rung out over London, ere the knocker sounded very gently on the door. I went myself at the summons, and found a small man crouching against the pillars of the portico. Are you come from Dr. Jekyll? I asked. He told me yes by a constrained gesture; and when I had bidden him enter, he did not obey me without a searching backward glance into the darkness of the square. There was a policeman not far off, advancing with his bulls eye open; and at the sight, I thought my visitor started and made greater haste. These particulars struck me, I confess, disagreeably; and as I followed him into the bright light of the consulting room, I kept my hand ready on my weapon. Here, at last, I had a chance of clearly seeing him. I had never set eyes on him before, so much was certain. He was small, as I have said; I was struck besides with the shocking expression of his face, with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity and great apparent debility of constitution, andlast but not leastwith the odd, subjective disturbance caused by his neighbourhood. This bore some resemblance to incipient rigour, and was accompanied by a marked sinking of the pulse. At the time, I set it down to some idiosyncratic, personal distaste, and merely wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms; but I have since had reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper in the nature of man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than the principle of hatred. This person (who had thus, from the first moment of his entrance, struck in me what I can only describe as a disgustful curiosity) was dressed in a fashion that would have made an ordinary person laughable; his clothes, that is to say, although they were of rich and sober fabric, were enormously too large for him in every measurementthe trousers hanging on his legs and rolled up to keep them from the ground, the waist of the coat below his haunches, and the collar sprawling wide upon his shoulders. Strange to relate, this ludicrous accoutrement was far from moving me to laughter. Rather, as there was something abnormal and misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that now faced mesomething seizing, surprising and revoltingthis fresh disparity seemed but to fit in with and to reinforce it; so that to my interest in the mans nature and character, there was added a curiosity as to his origin, his life, his fortune and status in the world. These observations, though they have taken so great a space to be set down in, were yet the work of a few seconds. My visitor was, indeed, on fire with sombre excitement. Have you got it? he cried. Have you got it? And so lively was his impatience that he even laid his hand upon my arm and sought to shake me. I put him back, conscious at his touch of a certain icy pang along my blood. Come, sir, said I. You forget that I have not yet the pleasure of your acquaintance. Be seated, if you please. And I showed him an example, and sat down myself in my customary seat and with as fair an imitation of my ordinary manner to a patient, as the lateness of the hour, the nature of my preoccupations, and the horror I had of my visitor, would suffer me to muster. I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanyon, he replied civilly enough. What you say is very well founded; and my impatience has shown its heels to my politeness. I come here at the instance of your colleague, Dr. Henry Jekyll, on a piece of business of some moment; and I understood...

He paused and put his hand to his throat, and I could see, in spite of his collected manner, that he was wrestling against the approaches of the hysteriaI understood, a drawer... But here I took pity on my visitors suspense, and some perhaps on my own growing curiosity. There it is, sir, said I, pointing to the drawer, where it lay on the floor behind a table and still covered with the sheet. He sprang to it, and then paused, and laid his hand upon his heart; I could hear his teeth grate with the convulsive action of his jaws; and his face was so ghastly to see that I grew alarmed both for his life and reason. Compose yourself, said I. He turned a dreadful smile to me, and as if with the decision of despair, plucked away the sheet. At sight of the contents, he uttered one loud sob of such immense relief that I sat petrified. And the next moment, in a voice that was already fairly well under control, Have you a graduated glass? he asked. I rose from my place with something of an effort and gave him what he asked. He thanked me with a smiling nod, measured out a few minims of the red tincture and added one of the powders. The mixture, which was at first of a reddish hue, began, in proportion as the crystals melted, to brighten in colour, to effervesce audibly, and to throw off small fumes of vapour. Suddenly and at the same moment, the ebullition ceased and the compound changed to a dark purple, which faded again more slowly to a watery green. My visitor, who had watched these metamorphoses with a keen eye, smiled, set down the glass upon the table, and then turned and looked upon me with an air of scrutiny. And now, said he, to settle what remains. Will you be wise? will you be guided? will you suffer me to take this glass in my hand and to go forth from your house without further parley? or has the greed of curiosity too much command of you? Think before you answer, for it shall be done as you decide. As you decide, you shall be left as you were before, and neither richer nor wiser, unless the sense of service rendered to a man in mortal distress may be counted as a kind of riches of the soul. Or, if you shall so prefer to choose, a new province of knowledge and new avenues to fame and power shall be laid open to you, here, in this room, upon the instant; and your sight shall be blasted by a prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan. Sir, said I, affecting a coolness that I was far from truly possessing, you speak enigmas, and you will perhaps not wonder that I hear you with no very strong impression of belief. But I have gone too far in the way of inexplicable services to pause before I see the end. It is well, replied my visitor. Lanyon, you remember your vows what follows is under the seal of our profession. And now, you who have so long been bound to the most narrow and material views, you who have denied the virtue of transcendental medicine, you who have derided your superiorsbehold! He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a changehe seemed to swellhis face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alterand the next moment, I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arms raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror. O God! I screamed, and O God! again and again; for there before my eyespale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from deaththere stood Henry Jekyll! What he told me in the next hour, I cannot bring my mind to set on paper. I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my soul sickened at it; and yet now when that sight has faded from my eyes, I ask myself if I believe it, and I cannot answer. My life is shaken to its roots; sleep has left me; the deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day and night; and I feel that my days are numbered, and that I must die; and yet I shall die incredulous. As for the moral turpitude that man unveiled to me, even with tears of penitence, I cannot, even in memory, dwell on it without a start of horror. I will say but one thing, Utterson, and that (if you can bring your mind to credit it) will be more than enough. The creature who crept into my house that night was, on Jekylls own confession, known by the name of Hyde and hunted for in every corner of the land as the murderer of Carew. HASTIE LANYON. HENRY JEKYLLS FULL STATEMENT OF THE CASE I was born in the year 18 to a large fortune, endowed besides with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future. And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life. Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound mans dual nature. In this case, I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress. Though so profound a doubledealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering. And it chanced that the direction of my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members. With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. I, for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one direction and in one direction only. It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound togetherthat in the agonised womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then were they dissociated? I was so far in my reflections when, as I have said, a side light began to shine upon the subject from the laboratory table. I began to perceive more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling immateriality, the mistlike transience, of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired. Certain agents I found to have the power to shake and pluck back that fleshly vestment, even as a wind might toss the curtains of a pavilion. For two good reasons, I will not enter deeply into this scientific branch of my confession. First, because I have been made to learn that the doom and burthen of our life is bound for ever on mans shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure. Second, because, as my narrative will make, alas! too evident, my discoveries were incomplete. Enough then, that I not only recognised my natural body from the mere aura and effulgence of certain of the powers that made up my spirit, but managed to compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted, none the less natural to me because they were the expression, and bore the stamp, of lower elements in my soul. I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of practice. I knew well that I risked death; for any drug that so potently controlled and shook the very fortress of identity, might, by the least scruple of an overdose or at the least inopportunity in the moment of exhibition, utterly blot out that immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to change. But the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at last overcame the suggestions of alarm. I had long since prepared my tincture; I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale chemists, a large quantity of a particular salt which I knew, from my experiments, to be the last ingredient required; and late one accursed night, I compounded the elements, watched them boil and smoke together in the glass, and when the ebullition had subsided, with a strong glow of courage, drank off the potion. The most racking pangs succeeded a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. I stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of these sensations; and in the act, I was suddenly aware that I had lost in stature. There was no mirror, at that date, in my room; that which stands beside me as I write, was brought there later on and for the very purpose of these transformations. The night however, was far gone into the morningthe morning, black as it was, was nearly ripe for the conception of the daythe inmates of my house were locked in the most rigorous hours of slumber; and I determined, flushed as I was with hope and triumph, to venture in my new shape as far as to my bedroom. I crossed the yard, wherein the constellations looked down upon me, I could have thought, with wonder, the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping vigilance had yet disclosed to them; I stole through the corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming to my room, I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde. I must here speak by theory alone, saying not that which I know, but that which I suppose to be most probable. The evil side of my nature, to which I had now transferred the stamping efficacy, was less robust and less developed than the good which I had just deposed. Again, in the course of my life, which had been, after all, nine tenths a life of effort, virtue and control, it had been much less exercised and much less exhausted. And hence, as I think, it came about that Edward Hyde was so much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll. Even as good shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and plainly on the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must still believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay. And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine. And in so far I was doubtless right. I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil. I lingered but a moment at the mirror the second and conclusive experiment had yet to be attempted; it yet remained to be seen if I had lost my identity beyond redemption and must flee before daylight from a house that was no longer mine; and hurrying back to my cabinet, I once more prepared and drank the cup, once more suffered the pangs of dissolution, and came to myself once more with the character, the stature and the face of Henry Jekyll. That night I had come to the fatal crossroads. Had I approached my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been otherwise, and from these agonies of death and birth, I had come forth an angel instead of a fiend. The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prisonhouse of my disposition; and like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within ran forth. At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and the thing that was projected was Edward Hyde. Hence, although I had now two characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair. The movement was thus wholly toward the worse. Even at that time, I had not conquered my aversions to the dryness of a life of study. I would still be merrily disposed at times; and as my pleasures were (to say the least) undignified, and I was not only well known and highly considered, but growing towards the elderly man, this incoherency of my life was daily growing more unwelcome. It was on this side that my new power tempted me until I fell in slavery. I had but to drink the cup, to doff at once the body of the noted professor, and to assume, like a thick cloak, that of Edward Hyde. I smiled at the notion; it seemed to me at the time to be humourous; and I made my preparations with the most studious care. I took and furnished that house in Soho, to which Hyde was tracked by the police; and engaged as a housekeeper a creature whom I knew well to be silent and unscrupulous. On the other side, I announced to my servants that a Mr. Hyde (whom I described) was to have full liberty and power about my house in the square; and to parry mishaps, I even called and made myself a familiar object, in my second character. I next drew up that will to which you so much objected; so that if anything befell me in the person of Dr. Jekyll, I could enter on that of Edward Hyde without pecuniary loss. And thus fortified, as I supposed, on every side, I began to profit by the strange immunities of my position. Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his pleasures. I was the first that could plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete. Think of itI did not even exist! Let me but escape into my laboratory door, give me but a second or two to mix and swallow the draught that I had always standing ready; and whatever he had done, Edward Hyde would pass away like the stain of breath upon a mirror; and there in his stead, quietly at home, trimming the midnight lamp in his study, a man who could afford to laugh at suspicion, would be Henry Jekyll. The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn toward the monstrous. When I would come back from these excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious depravity. This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centered on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone. Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience slumbered. Into the details of the infamy at which I thus connived (for even now I can scarce grant that I committed it) I have no design of entering; I mean but to point out the warnings and the successive steps with which my chastisement approached. I met with one accident which, as it brought on no consequence, I shall no more than mention. An act of cruelty to a child aroused against me the anger of a passerby, whom I recognised the other day in the person of your kinsman; the doctor and the childs family joined him; there were moments when I feared for my life; and at last, in order to pacify their too just resentment, Edward Hyde had to bring them to the door, and pay them in a cheque drawn in the name of Henry Jekyll. But this danger was easily eliminated from the future, by opening an account at another bank in the name of Edward Hyde himself; and when, by sloping my own hand backward, I had supplied my double with a signature, I thought I sat beyond the reach of fate. Some two months before the murder of Sir Danvers, I had been out for one of my adventures, had returned at a late hour, and woke the next day in bed with somewhat odd sensations. It was in vain I looked about me; in vain I saw the decent furniture and tall proportions of my room in the square; in vain that I recognised the pattern of the bed curtains and the design of the mahogany frame; something still kept insisting that I was not where I was, that I had not wakened where I seemed to be, but in the little room in Soho where I was accustomed to sleep in the body of Edward Hyde. I smiled to myself, and in my psychological way, began lazily to inquire into the elements of this illusion, occasionally, even as I did so, dropping back into a comfortable morning doze. I was still so engaged when, in one of my more wakeful moments, my eyes fell upon my hand. Now the hand of Henry Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was professional in shape and size; it was large, firm, white and comely. But the hand which I now saw, clearly enough, in the yellow light of a midLondon morning, lying half shut on the bedclothes, was lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde. I must have stared upon it for near half a minute, sunk as I was in the mere stupidity of wonder, before terror woke up in my breast as sudden and startling as the crash of cymbals; and bounding from my bed I rushed to the mirror. At the sight that met my eyes, my blood was changed into something exquisitely thin and icy. Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde. How was this to be explained? I asked myself; and then, with another bound of terrorhow was it to be remedied? It was well on in the morning; the servants were up; all my drugs were in the cabineta long journey down two pairs of stairs, through the back passage, across the open court and through the anatomical theatre, from where I was then standing horrorstruck. It might indeed be possible to cover my face; but of what use was that, when I was unable to conceal the alteration in my stature? And then with an overpowering sweetness of relief, it came back upon my mind that the servants were already used to the coming and going of my second self. I had soon dressed, as well as I was able, in clothes of my own size had soon passed through the house, where Bradshaw stared and drew back at seeing Mr. Hyde at such an hour and in such a strange array; and ten minutes later, Dr. Jekyll had returned to his own shape and was sitting down, with a darkened brow, to make a feint of breakfasting. Small indeed was my appetite. This inexplicable incident, this reversal of my previous experience, seemed, like the Babylonian finger on the wall, to be spelling out the letters of my judgment; and I began to reflect more seriously than ever before on the issues and possibilities of my double existence. That part of me which I had the power of projecting, had lately been much exercised and nourished; it had seemed to me of late as though the body of Edward Hyde had grown in stature, as though (when I wore that form) I were conscious of a more generous tide of blood; and I began to spy a danger that, if this were much prolonged, the balance of my nature might be permanently overthrown, the power of voluntary change be forfeited, and the character of Edward Hyde become irrevocably mine. The power of the drug had not been always equally displayed. Once, very early in my career, it had totally failed me; since then I had been obliged on more than one occasion to double, and once, with infinite risk of death, to treble the amount; and these rare uncertainties had cast hitherto the sole shadow on my contentment. Now, however, and in the light of that mornings accident, I was led to remark that whereas, in the beginning, the difficulty had been to throw off the body of Jekyll, it had of late gradually but decidedly transferred itself to the other side. All things therefore seemed to point to this; that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse. Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. My two natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between them. Jekyll (who was composite) now with the most sensitive apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll had more than a fathers interest; Hyde had more than a sons indifference. To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and forever, despised and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still another consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it. Yes, I preferred the elderly and discontented doctor, surrounded by friends and cherishing honest hopes; and bade a resolute farewell to the liberty, the comparative youth, the light step, leaping impulses and secret pleasures, that I had enjoyed in the disguise of Hyde. I made this choice perhaps with some unconscious reservation, for I neither gave up the house in Soho, nor destroyed the clothes of Edward Hyde, which still lay ready in my cabinet. For two months, however, I was true to my determination; for two months, I led a life of such severity as I had never before attained to, and enjoyed the compensations of an approving conscience. But time began at last to obliterate the freshness of my alarm; the praises of conscience began to grow into a thing of course; I began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught. I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers that he runs through his brutish, physical insensibility; neither had I, long as I had considered my position, made enough allowance for the complete moral insensibility and insensate readiness to evil, which were the leading characters of Edward Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was punished. My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring. I was conscious, even when I took the draught, of a more unbridled, a more furious propensity to ill. It must have been this, I suppose, that stirred in my soul that tempest of impatience with which I listened to the civilities of my unhappy victim; I declare, at least, before God, no man morally sane could have been guilty of that crime upon so pitiful a provocation; and that I struck in no more reasonable spirit than that in which a sick child may break a plaything. But I had voluntarily stripped myself of all those balancing instincts by which even the worst of us continues to walk with some degree of steadiness among temptations; and in my case, to be tempted, however slightly, was to fall. Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a transport of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every blow; and it was not till weariness had begun to succeed, that I was suddenly, in the top fit of my delirium, struck through the heart by a cold thrill of terror. A mist dispersed; I saw my life to be forfeit; and fled from the scene of these excesses, at once glorying and trembling, my lust of evil gratified and stimulated, my love of life screwed to the topmost peg. I ran to the house in Soho, and (to make assurance doubly sure) destroyed my papers; thence I set out through the lamplit streets, in the same divided ecstasy of mind, gloating on my crime, lightheadedly devising others in the future, and yet still hastening and still hearkening in my wake for the steps of the avenger. Hyde had a song upon his lips as he compounded the draught, and as he drank it, pledged the dead man. The pangs of transformation had not done tearing him, before Henry Jekyll, with streaming tears of gratitude and remorse, had fallen upon his knees and lifted his clasped hands to God. The veil of selfindulgence was rent from head to foot. I saw my life as a whole I followed it up from the days of childhood, when I had walked with my fathers hand, and through the selfdenying toils of my professional life, to arrive again and again, with the same sense of unreality, at the damned horrors of the evening. I could have screamed aloud; I sought with tears and prayers to smother down the crowd of hideous images and sounds with which my memory swarmed against me; and still, between the petitions, the ugly face of my iniquity stared into my soul. As the acuteness of this remorse began to die away, it was succeeded by a sense of joy. The problem of my conduct was solved. Hyde was thenceforth impossible; whether I would or not, I was now confined to the better part of my existence; and O, how I rejoiced to think of it! with what willing humility I embraced anew the restrictions of natural life! with what sincere renunciation I locked the door by which I had so often gone and come, and ground the key under my heel! The next day, came the news that the murder had not been overlooked, that the guilt of Hyde was patent to the world, and that the victim was a man high in public estimation. It was not only a crime, it had been a tragic folly. I think I was glad to know it; I think I was glad to have my better impulses thus buttressed and guarded by the terrors of the scaffold. Jekyll was now my city of refuge; let but Hyde peep out an instant, and the hands of all men would be raised to take and slay him. I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past; and I can say with honesty that my resolve was fruitful of some good. You know yourself how earnestly, in the last months of the last year, I laboured to relieve suffering; you know that much was done for others, and that the days passed quietly, almost happily for myself. Nor can I truly say that I wearied of this beneficent and innocent life; I think instead that I daily enjoyed it more completely; but I was still cursed with my duality of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for licence. Not that I dreamed of resuscitating Hyde; the bare idea of that would startle me to frenzy no, it was in my own person that I was once more tempted to trifle with my conscience; and it was as an ordinary secret sinner that I at last fell before the assaults of temptation. There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to my evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul. And yet I was not alarmed; the fall seemed natural, like a return to the old days before I had made my discovery. It was a fine, clear, January day, wet under foot where the frost had melted, but cloudless overhead; and the Regents Park was full of winter chirrupings and sweet with spring odours. I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin. After all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active goodwill with the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment of that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most deadly shuddering. These passed away, and left me faint; and then as in its turn faintness subsided, I began to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a greater boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my shrunken limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy. I was once more Edward Hyde.

A moment before I had been safe of all mens respect, wealthy, belovedthe cloth laying for me in the diningroom at home; and now I was the common quarry of mankind, hunted, houseless, a known murderer, thrall to the gallows. My reason wavered, but it did not fail me utterly. I have more than once observed that in my second character, my faculties seemed sharpened to a point and my spirits more tensely elastic; thus it came about that, where Jekyll perhaps might have succumbed, Hyde rose to the importance of the moment. My drugs were in one of the presses of my cabinet; how was I to reach them? That was the problem that (crushing my temples in my hands) I set myself to solve. The laboratory door I had closed. If I sought to enter by the house, my own servants would consign me to the gallows. I saw I must employ another hand, and thought of Lanyon. How was he to be reached? how persuaded? Supposing that I escaped capture in the streets, how was I to make my way into his presence? and how should I, an unknown and displeasing visitor, prevail on the famous physician to rifle the study of his colleague, Dr. Jekyll? Then I remembered that of my original character, one part remained to me I could write my own hand; and once I had conceived that kindling spark, the way that I must follow became lighted up from end to end. Thereupon, I arranged my clothes as best I could, and summoning a passing hansom, drove to an hotel in Portland Street, the name of which I chanced to remember. At my appearance (which was indeed comical enough, however tragic a fate these garments covered) the driver could not conceal his mirth. I gnashed my teeth upon him with a gust of devilish fury; and the smile withered from his facehappily for himyet more happily for myself, for in another instant I had certainly dragged him from his perch. At the inn, as I entered, I looked about me with so black a countenance as made the attendants tremble; not a look did they exchange in my presence; but obsequiously took my orders, led me to a private room, and brought me wherewithal to write. Hyde in danger of his life was a creature new to me; shaken with inordinate anger, strung to the pitch of murder, lusting to inflict pain. Yet the creature was astute; mastered his fury with a great effort of the will; composed his two important letters, one to Lanyon and one to Poole; and that he might receive actual evidence of their being posted, sent them out with directions that they should be registered. Thenceforward, he sat all day over the fire in the private room, gnawing his nails; there he dined, sitting alone with his fears, the waiter visibly quailing before his eye; and thence, when the night was fully come, he set forth in the corner of a closed cab, and was driven to and fro about the streets of the city. He, I sayI cannot say, I. That child of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred. And when at last, thinking the driver had begun to grow suspicious, he discharged the cab and ventured on foot, attired in his misfitting clothes, an object marked out for observation, into the midst of the nocturnal passengers, these two base passions raged within him like a tempest. He walked fast, hunted by his fears, chattering to himself, skulking through the less frequented thoroughfares, counting the minutes that still divided him from midnight. Once a woman spoke to him, offering, I think, a box of lights. He smote her in the face, and she fled. When I came to myself at Lanyons, the horror of my old friend perhaps affected me somewhat I do not know; it was at least but a drop in the sea to the abhorrence with which I looked back upon these hours. A change had come over me. It was no longer the fear of the gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that racked me. I received Lanyons condemnation partly in a dream; it was partly in a dream that I came home to my own house and got into bed. I slept after the prostration of the day, with a stringent and profound slumber which not even the nightmares that wrung me could avail to break. I awoke in the morning shaken, weakened, but refreshed. I still hated and feared the thought of the brute that slept within me, and I had not of course forgotten the appalling dangers of the day before; but I was once more at home, in my own house and close to my drugs; and gratitude for my escape shone so strong in my soul that it almost rivalled the brightness of hope. I was stepping leisurely across the court after breakfast, drinking the chill of the air with pleasure, when I was seized again with those indescribable sensations that heralded the change; and I had but the time to gain the shelter of my cabinet, before I was once again raging and freezing with the passions of Hyde. It took on this occasion a double dose to recall me to myself; and alas! six hours after, as I sat looking sadly in the fire, the pangs returned, and the drug had to be readministered. In short, from that day forth it seemed only by a great effort as of gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the drug, that I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all hours of the day and night, I would be taken with the premonitory shudder; above all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always as Hyde that I awakened. Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought the horror of my other self. But when I slept, or when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I would leap almost without transition (for the pangs of transformation grew daily less marked) into the possession of a fancy brimming with images of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and a body that seemed not strong enough to contain the raging energies of life. The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was coheir with him to death and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life. The hatred of Hyde for Jekyll was of a different order. His terror of the gallows drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded. Hence the apelike tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin. But his love of life is wonderful; I go further I, who sicken and freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him. It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong this description; no one has ever suffered such torments, let that suffice; and yet even to these, habit broughtno, not alleviationbut a certain callousness of soul, a certain acquiescence of despair; and my punishment might have gone on for years, but for the last calamity which has now fallen, and which has finally severed me from my own face and nature. My provision of the salt, which had never been renewed since the date of the first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh supply and mixed the draught; the ebullition followed, and the first change of colour, not the second; I drank it and it was without efficiency. You will learn from Poole how I have had London ransacked; it was in vain; and I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught. About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement under the influence of the last of the old powders. This, then, is the last time, short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts or see his own face (now how sadly altered!) in the glass. Nor must I delay too long to bring my writing to an end; for if my narrative has hitherto escaped destruction, it has been by a combination of great prudence and great good luck. Should the throes of change take me in the act of writing it, Hyde will tear it in pieces; but if some time shall have elapsed after I have laid it by, his wonderful selfishness and circumscription to the moment will probably save it once again from the action of his apelike spite. And indeed the doom that is closing on us both has already changed and crushed him. Half an hour from now, when I shall again and forever reindue that hated personality, I know how I shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair, or continue, with the most strained and fearstruck ecstasy of listening, to pace up and down this room (my last earthly refuge) and give ear to every sound of menace. Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will he find courage to release himself at the last moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself. Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end. END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE Updated editions will replace the previous onethe old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. 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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Dracula This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or reuse it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title Dracula Author Bram Stoker Release date May 30, 2014 [eBook 45839] Most recently updated October 24, 2024 Language English Credits Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Reiner Ruf, James Adcock and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at httpwww.pgdp.net START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DRACULA The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. Under the Sunset. The Snakes Pass. The Watters Mou. The Shoulder of Shasta. DRACULA BY BRAM STOKER Constable London First published by Archibald Constable and Company, 1897 TO MY DEAR FRIEND HOMMYBEG CONTENTS. Page CHAPTER I. Jonathan Harkers Journal 1 CHAPTER II. Jonathan Harkers Journal 15 CHAPTER III. Jonathan Harkers Journal 28 CHAPTER IV. Jonathan Harkers Journal 41 CHAPTER V. LettersLucy and Mina 55 CHAPTER VI. Mina Murrays Journal 64 CHAPTER VII. Cutting from The Dailygraph, 8 August 77 CHAPTER VIII. Mina Murrays Journal 91 CHAPTER IX. Mina Murrays Journal 106 CHAPTER X. Mina Murrays Journal 120 CHAPTER XI. Lucy Westenras Diary 135 CHAPTER XII. Dr. Sewards Diary 148 CHAPTER XIII. Dr. Sewards Diary 166 CHAPTER XIV. Mina Harkers Journal 182 CHAPTER XV. Dr. Sewards Diary 198 CHAPTER XVI. Dr. Sewards Diary 212 CHAPTER XVII. Dr. Sewards Diary 223 CHAPTER XVIII. Dr. Sewards Diary 237 CHAPTER XIX. Jonathan Harkers Journal 254 CHAPTER XX. Jonathan Harkers Journal 267 CHAPTER XXI. Dr. Sewards Diary 282 CHAPTER XXII. Jonathan Harkers Journal 297 CHAPTER XXIII. Dr. Sewards Diary 310 CHAPTER XXIV. Dr. Sewards Phonograph Diary, spoken by Van Helsing 324 CHAPTER XXV. Dr. Sewards Diary 339 CHAPTER XXVI. Dr. Sewards Diary 354 CHAPTER XXVII. Mina Harkers Journal 372 How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of laterday belief may stand forth as simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them. DRACULA. CHAPTER I. JONATHAN HARKERS JOURNAL. (Kept in shorthand.) 3 May. Bistritz.Left Munich at 8.35 p.m. on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6.46, but train was an hour late. BudaPesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most Western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule. We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh. Here I stopped for the night at the Hotel Royale. I had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem., get recipe for Mina.) I asked the waiter, and he said it was called paprika hendl, and that, as it was a national dish, I should be able to get it anywhere along the Carpathians. I found my smattering of German very useful here; indeed, I dont know how I should be able to get on without it. Having some time at my disposal when in London, I had visited the British Museum, and made search among the books and maps of the library regarding Transylvania; it had struck me that some foreknowledge of the country could hardly fail to have some importance in dealing with a noble of that country. I find that the district he named is in the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe. I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly wellknown place. I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Mina. In the population of Transylvania there are four distinct nationalities Saxons in the south, and mixed with them the Wallachs, who are the descendants of the Dacians; Magyars in the west; and Szekelys in the east and north. I am going among the latter, who claim to be descended from Attila and the Huns. This may be so, for when the Magyars conquered the country in the eleventh century they found the Huns settled in it. I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool; if so my stay may be very interesting. (Mem., I must ask the Count all about them.) I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had all sorts of queer dreams. There was a dog howling all night under my window, which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika, for I had to drink up all the water in my carafe, and was still thirsty. Towards morning I slept and was wakened by the continuous knocking at my door, so I guess I must have been sleeping soundly then. I had for breakfast more paprika, and a sort of porridge of maize flour which they said was mamaliga, and eggplant stuffed with forcemeat, a very excellent dish, which they call impletata. (Mem., get recipe for this also.) I had to hurry breakfast, for the train started a little before eight, or rather it ought to have done so, for after rushing to the station at 7.30 I had to sit in the carriage for more than an hour before we began to move. It seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China? All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals; sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each side of them to be subject to great floods. It takes a lot of water, and running strong, to sweep the outside edge of a river clear. At every station there were groups of people, sometimes crowds, and in all sorts of attire. Some of them were just like the peasants at home or those I saw coming through France and Germany, with short jackets and round hats and homemade trousers; but others were very picturesque. The women looked pretty, except when you got near them, but they were very clumsy about the waist. They had all full white sleeves of some kind or other, and most of them had big belts with a lot of strips of something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet, but of course petticoats under them. The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who are more barbarian than the rest, with their big cowboy hats, great baggy dirtywhite trousers, white linen shirts, and enormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails. They wore high boots, with their trousers tucked into them, and had long black hair and heavy black moustaches. They are very picturesque, but do not look prepossessing. On the stage they would be set down at once as some old Oriental band of brigands. They are, however, I am told, very harmless and rather wanting in natural selfassertion. It was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz, which is a very interesting old place. Being practically on the frontierfor the Borgo Pass leads from it into Bukovinait has had a very stormy existence, and it certainly shows marks of it. Fifty years ago a series of great fires took place, which made terrible havoc on five separate occasions. At the very beginning of the seventeenth century it underwent a siege of three weeks and lost 13,000 people, the casualties of war proper being assisted by famine and disease. Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found, to my delight, to be thoroughly oldfashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country. I was evidently expected, for when I got near the door I faced a cheerylooking elderly woman in the usual peasant dresswhite undergarment with long double apron, front and back, of coloured stuff fitting almost too tight for modesty. When I came close she bowed, and said The Herr Englishman? Yes, I said, Jonathan Harker. She smiled, and gave some message to an elderly man in white shirtsleeves, who had followed her to the door. He went, but immediately returned with a letter MY FRIEND,Welcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting you. Sleep well tonight. At three tomorrow the diligence will start for Bukovina; a place on it is kept for you. At the Borgo Pass my carriage will await you and will bring you to me. I trust that your journey from London has been a happy one, and that you will enjoy your stay in my beautiful land. Your friend, DRACULA. 4 May.I found that my landlord had got a letter from the Count, directing him to secure the best place on the coach for me; but on making inquiries as to details he seemed somewhat reticent, and pretended that he could not understand my German. This could not be true, because up to then he had understood it perfectly; at least, he answered my questions exactly as if he did. He and his wife, the old lady who had received me, looked at each other in a frightened sort of way. He mumbled out that the money had been sent in a letter, and that was all he knew. When I asked him if he knew Count Dracula, and could tell me anything of his castle, both he and his wife crossed themselves, and, saying that they knew nothing at all, simply refused to speak further. It was so near the time of starting that I had no time to ask any one else, for it was all very mysterious and not by any means comforting. Just before I was leaving, the old lady came up to my room and said in a very hysterical way Must you go? Oh! young Herr, must you go? She was in such an excited state that she seemed to have lost her grip of what German she knew, and mixed it all up with some other language which I did not know at all. I was just able to follow her by asking many questions. When I told her that I must go at once, and that I was engaged on important business, she asked again Do you know what day it is? I answered that it was the fourth of May. She shook her head as she said again Oh, yes! I know that, I know that! but do you know what day it is? On my saying that I did not understand, she went on It is the eve of St. Georges Day. Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway? Do you know where you are going, and what you are going to? She was in such evident distress that I tried to comfort her, but without effect. Finally she went down on her knees and implored me not to go; at least to wait a day or two before starting. It was all very ridiculous, but I did not feel comfortable. However, there was business to be done, and I could allow nothing to interfere with it. I therefore tried to raise her up, and said, as gravely as I could, that I thanked her, but my duty was imperative, and that I must go. She then rose and dried her eyes, and taking a crucifix from her neck offered it to me. I did not know what to do, for, as an English Churchman, I have been taught to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous, and yet it seemed so ungracious to refuse an old lady meaning so well and in such a state of mind. She saw, I suppose, the doubt in my face, for she put the rosary round my neck, and said, For your mothers sake, and went out of the room. I am writing up this part of the diary whilst I am waiting for the coach, which is, of course, late; and the crucifix is still round my neck. Whether it is the old ladys fear, or the many ghostly traditions of this place, or the crucifix itself, I do not know, but I am not feeling nearly as easy in my mind as usual. If this book should ever reach Mina before I do, let it bring my goodbye. Here comes the coach! 5 May. The Castle.The grey of the morning has passed, and the sun is high over the distant horizon, which seems jagged, whether with trees or hills I know not, for it is so far off that big things and little are mixed. I am not sleepy, and, as I am not to be called till I awake, naturally I write till sleep comes. There are many odd things to put down, and, lest who reads them may fancy that I dined too well before I left Bistritz, let me put down my dinner exactly. I dined on what they call robber steakbits of bacon, onion, and beef, seasoned with red pepper, and strung on sticks and roasted over the fire, in the simple style of the London catsmeat! The wine was Golden Mediasch, which produces a queer sting on the tongue, which is, however, not disagreeable. I had only a couple of glasses of this, and nothing else. When I got on the coach the driver had not taken his seat, and I saw him talking with the landlady. They were evidently talking of me, for every now and then they looked at me, and some of the people who were sitting on the bench outside the doorwhich they call by a name meaning wordbearercame and listened, and then they looked at me, most of them pityingly. I could hear a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for there were many nationalities in the crowd; so I quietly got my polyglot dictionary from my bag and looked them out. I must say they were not cheering to me, for amongst them were OrdogSatan, pokolhell, stregoicawitch, vrolok and vlkoslakboth of which mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other Servian for something that is either werewolf or vampire. (Mem., I must ask the Count about these superstitions.) When we started, the crowd round the inn door, which had by this time swelled to a considerable size, all made the sign of the cross and pointed two fingers towards me. With some difficulty I got a fellowpassenger to tell me what they meant; he would not answer at first, but on learning that I was English, he explained that it was a charm or guard against the evil eye. This was not very pleasant for me, just starting for an unknown place to meet an unknown man; but every one seemed so kindhearted, and so sorrowful, and so sympathetic that I could not but be touched. I shall never forget the last glimpse which I had of the innyard and its crowd of picturesque figures, all crossing themselves, as they stood round the wide archway, with its background of rich foliage of oleander and orange trees in green tubs clustered in the centre of the yard. Then our driver, whose wide linen drawers covered the whole front of the boxseatgotza they call themcracked his big whip over his four small horses, which ran abreast, and we set off on our journey. I soon lost sight and recollection of ghostly fears in the beauty of the scene as we drove along, although had I known the language, or rather languages, which my fellowpassengers were speaking, I might not have been able to throw them off so easily. Before us lay a green sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills, crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses, the blank gable end to the road. There was everywhere a bewildering mass of fruit blossomapple, plum, pear, cherry; and as we drove by I could see the green grass under the trees spangled with the fallen petals. In and out amongst these green hills of what they call here the Mittel Land ran the road, losing itself as it swept round the grassy curve, or was shut out by the straggling ends of pine woods, which here and there ran down the hillsides like tongues of flame. The road was rugged, but still we seemed to fly over it with a feverish haste. I could not understand then what the haste meant, but the driver was evidently bent on losing no time in reaching Borgo Prund. I was told that this road is in summertime excellent, but that it had not yet been put in order after the winter snows. In this respect it is different from the general run of roads in the Carpathians, for it is an old tradition that they are not to be kept in too good order. Of old the Hospadars would not repair them, lest the Turk should think that they were preparing to bring in foreign troops, and so hasten the war which was always really at loading point. Beyond the green swelling hills of the Mittel Land rose mighty slopes of forest up to the lofty steeps of the Carpathians themselves. Right and left of us they towered, with the afternoon sun falling upon them and bringing out all the glorious colours of this beautiful range, deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks, green and brown where grass and rock mingled, and an endless perspective of jagged rock and pointed crags, till these were themselves lost in the distance, where the snowy peaks rose grandly. Here and there seemed mighty rifts in the mountains, through which, as the sun began to sink, we saw now and again the white gleam of falling water. One of my companions touched my arm as we swept round the base of a hill and opened up the lofty, snowcovered peak of a mountain, which seemed, as we wound on our serpentine way, to be right before us Look! Isten szek!Gods seat!and he crossed himself reverently. As we wound on our endless way, and the sun sank lower and lower behind us, the shadows of the evening began to creep round us. This was emphasised by the fact that the snowy mountaintop still held the sunset, and seemed to glow out with a delicate cool pink. Here and there we passed Cszeks and Slovaks, all in picturesque attire, but I noticed that goitre was painfully prevalent. By the roadside were many crosses, and as we swept by, my companions all crossed themselves. Here and there was a peasant man or woman kneeling before a shrine, who did not even turn round as we approached, but seemed in the selfsurrender of devotion to have neither eyes nor ears for the outer world. There were many things new to me for instance, hayricks in the trees and here and there very beautiful masses of weeping birch, their white stems shining like silver through the delicate green of the leaves. Now and again we passed a leiterwagonthe ordinary peasants cart, with its long, snakelike vertebra, calculated to suit the inequalities of the road. On this were sure to be seated quite a group of homecoming peasants, the Cszeks with their white, and the Slovaks with their coloured, sheepskins, the latter carrying lancefashion their long staves, with axe at end. As the evening fell it began to get very cold, and the growing twilight seemed to merge into one dark mistiness the gloom of the trees, oak, beech, and pine, though in the valleys which ran deep between the spurs of the hills, as we ascended through the Pass, the dark firs stood out here and there against the background of latelying snow. Sometimes, as the road was cut through the pine woods that seemed in the darkness to be closing down upon us, great masses of greyness, which here and there bestrewed the trees, produced a peculiarly weird and solemn effect, which carried on the thoughts and grim fancies engendered earlier in the evening, when the falling sunset threw into strange relief the ghostlike clouds which amongst the Carpathians seem to wind ceaselessly through the valleys. Sometimes the hills were so steep that, despite our drivers haste, the horses could only go slowly. I wished to get down and walk up them, as we do at home, but the driver would not hear of it. No, no, he said; you must not walk here; the dogs are too fierce! and then he added, with what he evidently meant for grim pleasantryfor he looked round to catch the approving smile of the restand you may have enough of such matters before you go to sleep. The only stop he would make was a moments pause to light his lamps. When it grew dark there seemed to be some excitement amongst the passengers, and they kept speaking to him, one after the other, as though urging him to further speed. He lashed the horses unmercifully with his long whip, and with wild cries of encouragement urged them on to further exertions. Then through the darkness I could see a sort of patch of grey light ahead of us, as though there were a cleft in the hills. The excitement of the passengers grew greater; the crazy coach rocked on its great leather springs, and swayed like a boat tossed on a stormy sea. I had to hold on. The road grew more level, and we appeared to fly along. Then the mountains seemed to come nearer to us on each side and to frown down upon us; we were entering the Borgo Pass. One by one several of the passengers offered me gifts, which they pressed upon me with earnestness which would take no denial; these were certainly of an odd and varied kind, but each was given in simple good faith, with a kindly word, and a blessing, and that strange mixture of fearmeaning movements which I had seen outside the hotel at Bistritzthe sign of the cross and the guard against the evil eye. Then, as we flew along, the driver leaned forward, and on each side the passengers, craning over the edge of the coach, peered eagerly into the darkness. It was evident that something very exciting was either happening or expected, but though I asked each passenger, no one would give me the slightest explanation. This state of excitement kept on for some little time; and at last we saw before us the Pass opening out on the eastern side. There were dark, rolling clouds overhead, and in the air the heavy, oppressive sense of thunder. It seemed as though the mountain range had separated two atmospheres, and that now we had got into the thunderous one. I was now myself looking out for the conveyance which was to take me to the Count. Each moment I expected to see the glare of lamps through the blackness; but all was dark. The only light was the flickering rays of our own lamps, in which steam from our harddriven horses rose in a white cloud. We could now see the sandy road lying white before us, but there was on it no sign of a vehicle. The passengers drew back with a sigh of gladness, which seemed to mock my own disappointment. I was already thinking what I had best do, when the driver, looking at his watch, said to the others something which I could hardly hear, it was spoken so quietly and in so low a tone; I thought it was, An hour less than the time. Then, turning to me, he said in German worse than my own There is no carriage here. The Herr is not expected, after all. He will now come on to Bukovina, and return tomorrow or the next day; better the next day. Whilst he was speaking the horses began to neigh and snort and plunge wildly, so that the driver had to hold them up. Then, amongst a chorus of screams from the peasants and a universal crossing of themselves, a calche, with four horses, drove up behind us, overtook us, and drew up beside the coach. I could see from the flash of our lamps, as the rays fell on them, that the horses were coalblack and splendid animals. They were driven by a tall man, with a long brown beard and a great black hat, which seemed to hide his face from us. I could only see the gleam of a pair of very bright eyes, which seemed red in the lamplight, as he turned to us. He said to the driver You are early tonight, my friend. The man stammered in reply The English Herr was in a hurry, to which the stranger replied That is why, I suppose, you wished him to go on to Bukovina. You cannot deceive me, my friend; I know too much, and my horses are swift. As he spoke he smiled, and the lamplight fell on a hardlooking mouth, with very red lips and sharplooking teeth, as white as ivory. One of my companions whispered to another the line from Burgers Lenore Denn die Todten reiten schnell. (For the dead travel fast.) The strange driver evidently heard the words, for he looked up with a gleaming smile. The passenger turned his face away, at the same time putting out his two fingers and crossing himself. Give me the Herrs luggage, said the driver; and with exceeding alacrity my bags were handed out and put in the calche. Then I descended from the side of the coach, as the calche was close alongside, the driver helping me with a hand which caught my arm in a grip of steel; his strength must have been prodigious. Without a word he shook his reins, the horses turned, and we swept into the darkness of the Pass. As I looked back I saw the steam from the horses of the coach by the light of the lamps, and projected against it the figures of my late companions crossing themselves. Then the driver cracked his whip and called to his horses, and off they swept on their way to Bukovina. As they sank into the darkness I felt a strange chill, and a lonely feeling came over me; but a cloak was thrown over my shoulders, and a rug across my knees, and the driver said in excellent German The night is chill, mein Herr, and my master the Count bade me take all care of you. There is a flask of slivovitz [the plum brandy of the country] underneath the seat, if you should require it. I did not take any, but it was a comfort to know it was there, all the same. I felt a little strange, and not a little frightened. I think had there been any alternative I should have taken it, instead of prosecuting that unknown night journey. The carriage went at a hard pace straight along, then we made a complete turn and went along another straight road. It seemed to me that we were simply going over and over the same ground again; and so I took note of some salient point, and found that this was so. I would have liked to have asked the driver what this all meant, but I really feared to do so, for I thought that, placed as I was, any protest would have had no effect in case there had been an intention to delay. By and by, however, as I was curious to know how time was passing, I struck a match, and by its flame looked at my watch; it was within a few minutes of midnight. This gave me a sort of shock, for I suppose the general superstition about midnight was increased by my recent experiences. I waited with a sick feeling of suspense. Then a dog began to howl somewhere in a farmhouse far down the roada long, agonised wailing, as if from fear. The sound was taken up by another dog, and then another and another, till, borne on the wind which now sighed softly through the Pass, a wild howling began, which seemed to come from all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp it through the gloom of the night. At the first howl the horses began to strain and rear, but the driver spoke to them soothingly, and they quieted down, but shivered and sweated as though after a runaway from sudden fright. Then, far off in the distance, from the mountains on each side of us began a louder and sharper howlingthat of wolveswhich affected both the horses and myself in the same wayfor I was minded to jump from the calche and run, whilst they reared again and plunged madly, so that the driver had to use all his great strength to keep them from bolting. In a few minutes, however, my own ears got accustomed to the sound, and the horses so far became quiet that the driver was able to descend and to stand before them. He petted and soothed them, and whispered something in their ears, as I have heard of horsetamers doing, and with extraordinary effect, for under his caresses they became quite manageable again, though they still trembled. The driver again took his seat, and shaking his reins, started off at a great pace. This time, after going to the far side of the Pass, he suddenly turned down a narrow roadway which ran sharply to the right. Soon we were hemmed in with trees, which in places arched right over the roadway till we passed as through a tunnel; and again great frowning rocks guarded us boldly on either side. Though we were in shelter, we could hear the rising wind, for it moaned and whistled through the rocks, and the branches of the trees crashed together as we swept along. It grew colder and colder still, and fine powdery snow began to fall, so that soon we and all around us were covered with a white blanket. The keen wind still carried the howling of the dogs, though this grew fainter as we went on our way. The baying of the wolves sounded nearer and nearer, as though they were closing round on us from every side. I grew dreadfully afraid, and the horses shared my fear; but the driver was not in the least disturbed. He kept turning his head to left and right, but I could not see anything through the darkness. Suddenly, away on our left, I saw a faint flickering blue flame. The driver saw it at the same moment; he at once checked the horses and, jumping to the ground, disappeared into the darkness. I did not know what to do, the less as the howling of the wolves grew closer; but while I wondered the driver suddenly appeared again, and without a word took his seat, and we resumed our journey. I think I must have fallen asleep and kept dreaming of the incident, for it seemed to be repeated endlessly, and now, looking back, it is like a sort of awful nightmare. Once the flame appeared so near the road that even in the darkness around us I could watch the drivers motions. He went rapidly to where the blue flame roseit must have been very faint, for it did not seem to illumine the place around it at alland gathering a few stones, formed them into some device. Once there appeared a strange optical effect when he stood between me and the flame he did not obstruct it, for I could see its ghostly flicker all the same. This startled me, but as the effect was only momentary, I took it that my eyes deceived me straining through the darkness. Then for a time there were no blue flames, and we sped onwards through the gloom, with the howling of the wolves around us, as though they were following in a moving circle. At last there came a time when the driver went further afield than he had yet done, and during his absence the horses began to tremble worse than ever and to snort and scream with fright. I could not see any cause for it, for the howling of the wolves had ceased altogether; but just then the moon, sailing through the black clouds, appeared behind the jagged crest of a beetling, pineclad rock, and by its light I saw around us a ring of wolves, with white teeth and lolling red tongues, with long, sinewy limbs and shaggy hair. They were a hundred times more terrible in the grim silence which held them than even when they howled. For myself, I felt a sort of paralysis of fear. It is only when a man feels himself face to face with such horrors that he can understand their true import. All at once the wolves began to howl as though the moonlight had had some peculiar effect on them. The horses jumped about and reared, and looked helplessly round with eyes that rolled in a way painful to see; but the living ring of terror encompassed them on every side, and they had perforce to remain within it. I called to the coachman to come, for it seemed to me that our only chance was to try to break out through the ring and to aid his approach. I shouted and beat the side of the calche, hoping by the noise to scare the wolves from that side, so as to give him a chance of reaching the trap.

How he came there, I know not, but I heard his voice raised in a tone of imperious command, and looking towards the sound, saw him stand in the roadway. As he swept his long arms, as though brushing aside some impalpable obstacle, the wolves fell back and back further still. Just then a heavy cloud passed across the face of the moon, so that we were again in darkness. When I could see again the driver was climbing into the calche, and the wolves had disappeared. This was all so strange and uncanny that a dreadful fear came upon me, and I was afraid to speak or move. The time seemed interminable as we swept on our way, now in almost complete darkness, for the rolling clouds obscured the moon. We kept on ascending, with occasional periods of quick descent, but in the main always ascending. Suddenly I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky. CHAPTER II. JONATHAN HARKERS JOURNALcontinued. 5 May.I must have been asleep, for certainly if I had been fully awake I must have noticed the approach to such a remarkable place. In the gloom the courtyard looked of considerable size, and as several dark ways led from it under great round arches it perhaps seemed bigger than it really is. I have not yet been able to see it by daylight. When the calche stopped the driver jumped down, and held out his hand to assist me to alight. Again I could not but notice his prodigious strength. His hand actually seemed like a steel vice that could have crushed mine if he had chosen. Then he took out my traps, and placed them on the ground beside me as I stood close to a great door, old and studded with large iron nails, and set in a projecting doorway of massive stone. I could see even in the dim light that the stone was massively carved, but that the carving had been much worn by time and weather. As I stood, the driver jumped again into his seat and shook the reins; the horses started forward, and trap and all disappeared down one of the dark openings. I stood in silence where I was, for I did not know what to do. Of bell or knocker there was no sign; through these frowning walls and dark window openings it was not likely that my voice could penetrate. The time I waited seemed endless, and I felt doubts and fears crowding upon me. What sort of place had I come to, and among what kind of people? What sort of grim adventure was it on which I had embarked? Was this a customary incident in the life of a solicitors clerk sent out to explain the purchase of a London estate to a foreigner? Solicitors clerk! Mina would not like that. Solicitor,for just before leaving London I got word that my examination was successful; and I am now a fullblown solicitor! I began to rub my eyes and pinch myself to see if I were awake. It all seemed like a horrible nightmare to me, and I expected that I should suddenly awake, and find myself at home, with the dawn struggling in through the windows, as I had now and again felt in the morning after a day of overwork. But my flesh answered the pinching test, and my eyes were not to be deceived. I was indeed awake and among the Carpathians. All I could do now was to be patient, and to wait the coming of the morning. Just as I had come to this conclusion I heard a heavy step approaching behind the great door, and saw through the chinks the gleam of a coming light. Then there was the sound of rattling chains and the clanking of massive bolts drawn back. A key was turned with the loud grating noise of long disuse, and the great door swung back. Within, stood a tall old man, cleanshaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver lamp, in which the flame burned without chimney or globe of any kind, throwing long, quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open door. The old man motioned me in with his right hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange intonation Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will! He made no motion of stepping to meet me, but stood like a statue, as though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The instant, however, that I had stepped over the threshold, he moved impulsively forward, and holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince, an effect which was not lessened by the fact that it seemed as cold as icemore like the hand of a dead than a living man. Again he said Welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring! The strength of the handshake was so much akin to that which I had noticed in the driver, whose face I had not seen, that for a moment I doubted if it were not the same person to whom I was speaking; so, to make sure, I said interrogatively Count Dracula? He bowed in a courtly way as he replied I am Dracula; and I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in; the night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest. As he was speaking he put the lamp on a bracket on the wall, and stepping out, took my luggage; he had carried it in before I could forestall him. I protested but he insisted Nay, sir, you are my guest. It is late, and my people are not available. Let me see to your comfort myself. He insisted on carrying my traps along the passage, and then up a great winding stair, and along another great passage, on whose stone floor our steps rang heavily. At the end of this he threw open a heavy door, and I rejoiced to see within a welllit room in which a table was spread for supper, and on whose mighty hearth a great fire of logs flamed and flared. The Count halted, putting down my bags, closed the door, and crossing the room, opened another door, which led into a small octagonal room lit by a single lamp, and seemingly without a window of any sort. Passing through this, he opened another door, and motioned me to enter. It was a welcome sight; for here was a great bedroom well lighted and warmed with another log fire, which sent a hollow roar up the wide chimney. The Count himself left my luggage inside and withdrew, saying, before he closed the door You will need, after your journey, to refresh yourself by making your toilet. I trust you will find all you wish. When you are ready come into the other room, where you will find your supper prepared. The light and warmth and the Counts courteous welcome seemed to have dissipated all my doubts and fears. Having then reached my normal state, I discovered that I was halffamished with hunger; so making a hasty toilet, I went into the other room. I found supper already laid out. My host, who stood on one side of the great fireplace, leaning against the stonework, made a graceful wave of his hand to the table, and said I pray you, be seated and sup how you please. You will, I trust, excuse me that I do not join you; but I have dined already, and I do not sup. I handed to him the sealed letter which Mr. Hawkins had entrusted to me. He opened it and read it gravely; then, with a charming smile, he handed it to me to read. One passage of it, at least, gave me a thrill of pleasure I much regret that an attack of gout, from which malady I am a constant sufferer, forbids absolutely any travelling on my part for some time to come; but I am happy to say I can send a sufficient substitute, one in whom I have every possible confidence. He is a young man, full of energy and talent in his own way, and of a very faithful disposition. He is discreet and silent, and has grown into manhood in my service. He shall be ready to attend on you when you will during his stay, and shall take your instructions in all matters. The Count himself came forward and took off the cover of a dish, and I fell to at once on an excellent roast chicken. This, with some cheese and a salad and a bottle of old Tokay, of which I had two glasses, was my supper. During the time I was eating it the Count asked me many questions as to my journey, and I told him by degrees all I had experienced. By this time I had finished my supper, and by my hosts desire had drawn up a chair by the fire and begun to smoke a cigar which he offered me, at the same time excusing himself that he did not smoke. I had now an opportunity of observing him, and found him of a very marked physiognomy. His face was a stronga very strongaquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruellooking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor. Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine; but seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather coarsebroad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point. As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal. The Count, evidently noticing it, drew back; and with a grim sort of smile, which showed more than he had yet done his protuberant teeth, sat himself down again on his own side of the fireplace. We were both silent for a while; and as I looked towards the window I saw the first dim streak of the coming dawn. There seemed a strange stillness over everything; but as I listened I heard, as if from down below in the valley, the howling of many wolves. The Counts eyes gleamed, and he said Listen to themthe children of the night. What music they make! Seeing, I suppose, some expression in my face strange to him, he added Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter. Then he rose and said But you must be tired. Your bedroom is all ready, and tomorrow you shall sleep as late as you will. I have to be away till the afternoon; so sleep well and dream well! and, with a courteous bow, he opened for me himself the door to the octagonal room, and I entered my bedroom.... I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things which I dare not confess to my own soul. God keep me, if only for the sake of those dear to me! 7 May.It is again early morning, but I have rested and enjoyed the last twentyfour hours. I slept till late in the day, and awoke of my own accord. When I had dressed myself I went into the room where we had supped, and found a cold breakfast laid out, with coffee kept hot by the pot being placed on the hearth. There was a card on the table, on which was written I have to be absent for a while. Do not wait for me.D. So I set to and enjoyed a hearty meal. When I had done, I looked for a bell, so that I might let the servants know I had finished; but I could not find one. There are certainly odd deficiencies in the house, considering the extraordinary evidences of wealth which are round me. The table service is of gold, and so beautifully wrought that it must be of immense value. The curtains and upholstery of the chairs and sofas and the hangings of my bed are of the costliest and most beautiful fabrics, and must have been of fabulous value when they were made, for they are centuries old, though in excellent order. I saw something like them in Hampton Court, but there they were worn and frayed and motheaten. But still in none of the rooms is there a mirror. There is not even a toilet glass on my table, and I had to get the little shaving glass from my bag before I could either shave or brush my hair. I have not yet seen a servant anywhere, or heard a sound near the castle except for the howling of wolves. When I had finished my mealI do not know whether to call it breakfast or dinner, for it was between five and six oclock when I had itI looked about for something to read, for I did not like to go about the castle until I had asked the Counts permission. There was absolutely nothing in the room, book, newspaper, or even writing materials; so I opened another door in the room and found a sort of library. The door opposite mine I tried, but found it locked. In the library I found, to my great delight, a vast number of English books, whole shelves full of them, and bound volumes of magazines and newspapers. A table in the centre was littered with English magazines and newspapers, though none of them were of very recent date. The books were of the most varied kindhistory, geography, politics, political economy, botany, geology, lawall relating to England and English life and customs and manners. There were even such books of reference as the London Directory, the Red and Blue books, Whitakers Almanack, the Army and Navy Lists, andit somehow gladdened my heart to see itthe Law List. Whilst I was looking at the books, the door opened, and the Count entered. He saluted me in a hearty way, and hoped that I had had a good nights rest. Then he went on I am glad you found your way in here, for I am sure there is much that will interest you. These friendsand he laid his hand on some of the bookshave been good friends to me, and for some years past, ever since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours of pleasure. Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her. I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is. But alas! as yet I only know your tongue through books. To you, my friend, I look that I know it to speak. But, Count, I said, you know and speak English thoroughly! He bowed gravely. I thank you, my friend, for your all too flattering estimate, but yet I fear that I am but a little way on the road I would travel. True, I know the grammar and the words, but yet I know not how to speak them. Indeed, I said, you speak excellently. Not so, he answered. Well I know that, did I move and speak in your London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger. That is not enough for me. Here I am noble; I am boyar; the common people know me, and I am master. But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him notand to know not is to care not for. I am content if I am like the rest, so that no man stops if he sees me, or pause in his speaking if he hear my words, to say, Ha, ha! a stranger! I have been so long master that I would be master stillor at least that none other should be master of me. You come to me not alone as agent of my friend Peter Hawkins, of Exeter, to tell me all about my new estate in London. You shall, I trust, rest here with me a while, so that by our talking I may learn the English intonation; and I would that you tell me when I make error, even of the smallest, in my speaking. I am sorry that I had to be away so long today; but you will, I know, forgive one who has so many important affairs in hand. Of course I said all I could about being willing, and asked if I might come into that room when I chose. He answered Yes, certainly, and added You may go anywhere you wish in the castle, except where the doors are locked, where of course you will not wish to go. There is reason that all things are as they are, and did you see with my eyes and know with my knowledge, you would perhaps better understand. I said I was sure of this, and then he went on We are in Transylvania; and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things. Nay, from what you have told me of your experiences already, you know something of what strange things here may be. This led to much conversation. And as it was evident that he wanted to talk, if only for talkings sake, I asked him many questions regarding things that had already happened to me or come within my notice. Sometimes he sheered off the subject, or turned the conversation by pretending not to understand; but generally he answered all I asked most frankly. Then as time went on, and I had got somewhat bolder, I asked him of some of the strange things of the preceding night, as, for instance, why the coachman went to the places where we had seen the blue flames. Was it indeed true that they showed where gold was hidden? He then explained to me that it was commonly believed that on a certain night of the yearlast night, in fact, when all evil spirits are supposed to have unchecked swaya blue flame is seen over any place where treasure has been concealed. That treasure has been hidden, he went on, in the region through which you came last night, there can be but little doubt; for it was the ground fought over for centuries by the Wallachian, the Saxon, and the Turk. Why, there is hardly a foot of soil in all this region that has not been enriched by the blood of men, patriots or invaders. In old days there were stirring times, when the Austrian and the Hungarian came up in hordes, and the patriots went out to meet themmen and women, the aged and the children tooand waited their coming on the rocks above the passes, that they might sweep destruction on them with their artificial avalanches. When the invader was triumphant he found but little, for whatever there was had been sheltered in the friendly soil. But how, said I, can it have remained so long undiscovered, when there is a sure index to it if men will but take the trouble to look? The Count smiled, and as his lips ran back over his gums, the long, sharp, canine teeth showed out strangely; he answered Because your peasant is at heart a coward and a fool! Those flames only appear on one night. And on that night no man of this land will, if he can help it, stir without his doors. And, dear sir, even if he did he would not know what to do. Why, even the peasant that you tell me of who marked the place of the flame would not know where to look in daylight even for his own work. You would not, I dare be sworn, be able to find these places again? There you are right, I said. I know no more than the dead where even to look for them. Then we drifted into other matters. Come, he said at last, tell me of London and of the house which you have procured for me. With an apology for my remissness, I went into my own room to get the papers from my bag. Whilst I was placing them in order I heard a rattling of china and silver in the next room, and as I passed through, noticed that the table had been cleared and the lamp lit, for it was by this time deep into the dark. The lamps were also lit in the study or library, and I found the Count lying on the sofa, reading, of all things in the world, an English Bradshaws Guide. When I came in he cleared the books and papers from the table; and with him I went into plans and deeds and figures of all sorts. He was interested in everything, and asked me a myriad questions about the place and its surroundings. He clearly had studied beforehand all he could get on the subject of the neighbourhood, for he evidently at the end knew very much more than I did. When I remarked this, he answered Well, but, my friend, is it not needful that I should? When I go there I shall be all alone, and my friend Harker Jonathannay, pardon me, I fall into my countrys habit of putting your patronymic firstmy friend Jonathan Harker will not be by my side to correct and aid me. He will be in Exeter, miles away, probably working at papers of the law with my other friend, Peter Hawkins. So! We went thoroughly into the business of the purchase of the estate at Purfleet. When I had told him the facts and got his signature to the necessary papers, and had written a letter with them ready to post to Mr. Hawkins, he began to ask me how I had come across so suitable a place. I read to him the notes which I had made at the time, and which I inscribe here At Purfleet, on a byroad, I came across just such a place as seemed to be required, and where was displayed a dilapidated notice that the place was for sale. It is surrounded by a high wall, of ancient structure, built of heavy stones, and has not been repaired for a large number of years. The closed gates were of heavy old oak and iron, all eaten with rust. The estate is called Carfax, no doubt a corruption of the old Quatre Face, as the house is foursided, agreeing with the cardinal points of the compass. It contains in all some twenty acres, quite surrounded by the solid stone wall above mentioned. There are many trees on it, which make it in places gloomy, and there is a deep, darklooking pond or small lake, evidently fed by some springs, as the water is clear and flows away in a fairsized stream. The house is very large and of all periods back, I should say, to medival times, for one part is of stone immensely thick, with only a few windows high up and heavily barred with iron. It looks like part of a keep, and is close to an old chapel or church. I could not enter it, as I had not the key of the door leading to it from the house, but I have taken with my Kodak views of it from various points. The house has been added to, but in a very straggling way, and I can only guess at the amount of ground it covers, which must be very great. There are but few houses close at hand, one being a very large house only recently added to and formed into a private lunatic asylum. It is not, however, visible from the grounds. When I had finished, he said I am glad that it is old and big. I myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me. A house cannot be made habitable in a day; and, after all, how few days go to make up a century. I rejoice that there is a chapel of old times. We Transylvanian nobles love not to think that our bones may be amongst the common dead. I seek not gaiety nor mirth, not the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and sparkling waters which please the young and gay. I am no longer young; and my heart, through weary years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth. Moreover, the walls of my castle are broken; the shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements. I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may. Somehow his words and his look did not seem to accord, or else it was that his cast of face made his smile look malignant and saturnine. Presently, with an excuse, he left me, asking me to put all my papers together. He was some little time away, and I began to look at some of the books around me. One was an atlas, which I found opened naturally at England, as if that map had been much used. On looking at it I found in certain places little rings marked, and on examining these I noticed that one was near London on the east side, manifestly where his new estate was situated; the other two were Exeter, and Whitby on the Yorkshire coast. It was the better part of an hour when the Count returned. Aha! he said; still at your books? Good! But you must not work always. Come; I am informed that your supper is ready. He took my arm, and we went into the next room, where I found an excellent supper ready on the table. The Count again excused himself, as he had dined out on his being away from home. But he sat as on the previous night, and chatted whilst I ate. After supper I smoked, as on the last evening, and the Count stayed with me, chatting and asking questions on every conceivable subject, hour after hour. I felt that it was getting very late indeed, but I did not say anything, for I felt under obligation to meet my hosts wishes in every way. I was not sleepy, as the long sleep yesterday had fortified me; but I could not help experiencing that chill which comes over one at the coming of dawn, which is like, in its way, the turn of the tide. They say that people who are near death die generally at the change to the dawn or at the turn of the tide; any one who has, when tired, and tied as it were to his post, experienced this change in the atmosphere can well believe it. All at once we heard the crow of a cock coming up with preternatural shrillness through the clear morning air; Count Dracula, jumping to his feet, said Why, there is the morning again! How remiss I am to let you stay up so long. You must make your conversation regarding my dear new country of England less interesting, so that I may not forget how time flies by us, and, with a courtly bow, he left me. I went into my own room and drew the curtains, but there was little to notice; my window opened into the courtyard; all I could see was the warm grey quickening sky. So I pulled the curtains again, and have written of this day. 8 May.I began to fear as I wrote in this book that I was getting too diffuse; but now I am glad that I went into detail from the first, for there is something so strange about this place and all in it that I cannot but feel uneasy. I wish I were safe out of it, or that I had never come. It may be that this strange nightexistence is telling on me; but would that that were all! If there were any one to talk to I could bear it, but there is no one. I have only the Count to speak with, and he!I fear I am myself the only living soul within the place. Let me be prosaic so far as facts can be; it will help me to bear up, and imagination must not run riot with me. If it does I am lost. Let me say at once how I standor seem to. I only slept a few hours when I went to bed, and feeling that I could not sleep any more, got up. I had hung my shaving glass by the window, and was just beginning to shave. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder, and heard the Counts voice saying to me, Good morning. I started, for it amazed me that I had not seen him, since the reflection of the glass covered the whole room behind me. In starting I had cut myself slightly, but did not notice it at the moment. Having answered the Counts salutation, I turned to the glass again to see how I had been mistaken. This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror! The whole room behind me was displayed; but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself. This was startling, and, coming on the top of so many strange things, was beginning to increase that vague feeling of uneasiness which I always have when the Count is near; but at that instant I saw that the cut had bled a little, and the blood was trickling over my chin. I laid down the razor, turning as I did so half round to look for some sticking plaster. When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat. I drew away, and his hand touched the string of beads which held the crucifix. It made an instant change in him, for the fury passed so quickly that I could hardly believe that it was ever there. Take care, he said, take care how you cut yourself. It is more dangerous than you think in this country. Then seizing the shaving glass, he went on And this is the wretched thing that has done the mischief. It is a foul bauble of mans vanity. Away with it! and opening the heavy window with one wrench of his terrible hand, he flung out the glass, which was shattered into a thousand pieces on the stones of the courtyard far below. Then he withdrew without a word. It is very annoying, for I do not see how I am to shave, unless in my watchcase or the bottom of the shavingpot, which is fortunately of metal. When I went into the diningroom, breakfast was prepared; but I could not find the Count anywhere. So I breakfasted alone. It is strange that as yet I have not seen the Count eat or drink. He must be a very peculiar man! After breakfast I did a little exploring in the castle. I went out on the stairs and found a room looking towards the south. The view was magnificent, and from where I stood there was every opportunity of seeing it. The castle is on the very edge of a terrible precipice. A stone falling from the window would fall a thousand feet without touching anything! As far as the eye can reach is a sea of green treetops, with occasionally a deep rift where there is a chasm. Here and there are silver threads where the rivers wind in deep gorges through the forests. But I am not in heart to describe beauty, for when I had seen the view I explored further; doors, doors, doors everywhere, and all locked and bolted. In no place save from the windows in the castle walls is there an available exit. The castle is a veritable prison, and I am a prisoner! CHAPTER III. JONATHAN HARKERS JOURNAL (continued). WHEN I found that I was a prisoner a sort of wild feeling came over me. I rushed up and down the stairs, trying every door and peering out of every window I could find; but after a little the conviction of my helplessness overpowered all other things. When I look back after a few hours I think I must have been mad for the time, for I behaved much as a rat does in a trap. When, however, the conviction had come to me that I was helpless I sat down quietlyas quietly as I have ever done anything in my lifeand began to think over what was best to be done. I am thinking still, and as yet have come to no definite conclusion. Of one thing only am I certain that it is no use making my ideas known to the Count. He knows well that I am imprisoned; and as he has done it himself, and has doubtless his own motives for it, he would only deceive me if I trusted him fully with the facts. So far as I can see, my only plan will be to keep my knowledge and my fears to myself, and my eyes open. I am, I know, either being deceived, like a baby, by my own fears, or else I am in desperate straits; and if the latter be so, I need, and shall need, all my brains to get through. I had hardly come to this conclusion when I heard the great door below shut, and knew that the Count had returned. He did not come at once into the library, so I went cautiously to my own room and found him making the bed. This was odd, but only confirmed what I had all along thoughtthat there were no servants in the house. When later I saw him through the chink of the hinges of the door laying the table in the diningroom, I was assured of it; for if he does himself all these menial offices, surely it is proof that there is no one else to do them. This gave me a fright, for if there is no one else in the castle, it must have been the Count himself who was the driver of the coach that brought me here. This is a terrible thought; for if so, what does it mean that he could control the wolves, as he did, by only holding up his hand in silence. How was it that all the people at Bistritz and on the coach had some terrible fear for me? What meant the giving of the crucifix, of the garlic, of the wild rose, of the mountain ash? Bless that good, good woman who hung the crucifix round my neck! for it is a comfort and a strength to me whenever I touch it. It is odd that a thing which I have been taught to regard with disfavour and as idolatrous should in a time of loneliness and trouble be of help.

Is it that there is something in the essence of the thing itself, or that it is a medium, a tangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy and comfort? Some time, if it may be, I must examine this matter and try to make up my mind about it. In the meantime I must find out all I can about Count Dracula, as it may help me to understand. Tonight he may talk of himself, if I turn the conversation that way. I must be very careful, however, not to awake his suspicion. Midnight.I have had a long talk with the Count. I asked him a few questions on Transylvanian history, and he warmed up to the subject wonderfully. In his speaking of things and people, and especially of battles, he spoke as if he had been present at them all. This he afterwards explained by saying that to a boyar the pride of his house and name is his own pride, that their glory is his glory, that their fate is his fate. Whenever he spoke of his house he always said we, and spoke almost in the plural, like a king speaking. I wish I could put down all he said exactly as he said it, for to me it was most fascinating. It seemed to have in it a whole history of the country. He grew excited as he spoke, and walked about the room pulling his great white moustache and grasping anything on which he laid his hands as though he would crush it by main strength. One thing he said which I shall put down as nearly as I can; for it tells in its way the story of his race We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship. Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, ay, and of Asia and Africa, too, till the peoples thought that the werewolves themselves had come. Here, too, when they came, they found the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia, had mated with the devils in the desert. Fools, fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins? He held up his arms. Is it a wonder that we were a conquering race; that we were proud; that when the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar, or the Turk poured his thousands on our frontiers, we drove them back? Is it strange that when Arpad and his legions swept through the Hungarian fatherland he found us here when he reached the frontier; that the Honfoglalas was completed there? And when the Hungarian flood swept eastward, the Szekelys were claimed as kindred by the victorious Magyars, and to us for centuries was trusted the guarding of the frontier of Turkeyland; ay, and more than that, endless duty of the frontier guard, for, as the Turks say, water sleeps, and enemy is sleepless. Who more gladly than we throughout the Four Nations received the bloody sword, or at its warlike call flocked quicker to the standard of the King? When was redeemed that great shame of my nation, the shame of Cassova, when the flags of the Wallach and the Magyar went down beneath the Crescent; who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed! Woe was it that his own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them! Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race who in a later age again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkeyland; who, when he was beaten back, came again, and again, and again, though he had to come alone from the bloody field where his troops were being slaughtered, since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph? They said that he thought only of himself. Bah! what good are peasants without a leader? Where ends the war without a brain and heart to conduct it? Again, when, after the battle of Mohacs, we threw off the Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were amongst their leaders, for our spirit would not brook that we were not free. Ah, young sir, the Szekelysand the Dracula as their hearts blood, their brains, and their swordscan boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach. The warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace; and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told. It was by this time close on morning, and we went to bed. (Mem. this diary seems horribly like the beginning of the Arabian Nights, for everything has to break off at cockcrowor like the ghost of Hamlets father.) 12 May.Let me begin with factsbare, meagre facts, verified by books and figures, and of which there can be no doubt. I must not confuse them with experiences which will have to rest on my own observation or my memory of them. Last evening when the Count came from his room he began by asking me questions on legal matters and on the doing of certain kinds of business. I had spent the day wearily over books, and, simply to keep my mind occupied, went over some of the matters I had been examined in at Lincolns Inn. There was a certain method in the Counts inquires, so I shall try to put them down in sequence; the knowledge may somehow or some time be useful to me. First, he asked if a man in England might have two solicitors, or more. I told him he might have a dozen if he wished, but that it would not be wise to have more than one solicitor engaged in one transaction, as only one could act at a time, and that to change would be certain to militate against his interest. He seemed thoroughly to understand, and went on to ask if there would be any practical difficulty in having one man to attend, say, to banking, and another to look after shipping, in case local help were needed in a place far from the home of the banking solicitor. I asked him to explain more fully, so that I might not by any chance mislead him, so he said I shall illustrate. Your friend and mine, Mr. Peter Hawkins, from under the shadow of your beautiful cathedral at Exeter, which is far from London, buys for me through your good self my place at London. Good! Now here let me say frankly, lest you should think it strange that I have sought the services of one so far off from London instead of some one resident there, that my motive was that no local interest might be served save my wish only; and as one of London resident might, perhaps, have some purpose of himself or friend to serve I went thus afield to seek my agent, whose labours should be only to my interest. Now, suppose I, who have much of affairs, wish to ship goods, say, to Newcastle, or Durham, or Harwich, or Dover, might it not be that it could with more ease be done by consigning to one in these ports? I answered that certainly it would be most easy, but that we solicitors had a system of agency one for the other, so that local work could be done locally on instruction from any solicitor, so that the client, simply placing himself in the hands of one man, could have his wishes carried out by him without further trouble. But, said he, I could be at liberty to direct myself. Is it not so? Of course, I replied; and such is often done by men of business, who do not like the whole of their affairs to be known by any one person. Good! he said, and then went on to ask about the means of making consignments and the forms to be gone through, and of all sorts of difficulties which might arise, but by forethought could be guarded against. I explained all these things to him to the best of my ability, and he certainly left me under the impression that he would have made a wonderful solicitor, for there was nothing that he did not think of or foresee. For a man who was never in the country, and who did not evidently do much in the way of business, his knowledge and acumen were wonderful. When he had satisfied himself on these points of which he had spoken, and I had verified all as well as I could by the books available, he suddenly stood up and said Have you written since your first letter to our friend Mr. Peter Hawkins, or to any other? It was with some bitterness in my heart that I answered that I had not, that as yet I had not seen any opportunity of sending letters to anybody. Then write now, my young friend, he said, laying a heavy hand on my shoulder; write to our friend and to any other; and say, if it will please you, that you shall stay with me until a month from now. Do you wish me to stay so long? I asked, for my heart grew cold at the thought. I desire it much; nay, I will take no refusal. When your master, employer, what you will, engaged that some one should come on his behalf, it was understood that my needs only were to be consulted. I have not stinted. Is it not so? What could I do but bow acceptance? It was Mr. Hawkinss interest, not mine, and I had to think of him, not myself; and besides, while Count Dracula was speaking, there was that in his eyes and in his bearing which made me remember that I was a prisoner, and that if I wished it I could have no choice. The Count saw his victory in my bow, and his mastery in the trouble of my face, for he began at once to use them, but in his own smooth, resistless way I pray you, my good young friend, that you will not discourse of things other than business in your letters. It will doubtless please your friends to know that you are well, and that you look forward to getting home to them. Is it not so? As he spoke he handed me three sheets of notepaper and three envelopes. They were all of the thinnest foreign post, and looking at them, then at him, and noticing his quiet smile, with the sharp, canine teeth lying over the red underlip, I understood as well as if he had spoken that I should be careful what I wrote, for he would be able to read it. So I determined to write only formal notes now, but to write fully to Mr. Hawkins in secret, and also to Mina, for to her I could write in shorthand, which would puzzle the Count, if he did see it. When I had written my two letters I sat quiet, reading a book whilst the Count wrote several notes, referring as he wrote them to some books on his table. Then he took up my two and placed them with his own, and put by his writing materials, after which, the instant the door had closed behind him, I leaned over and looked at the letters, which were face down on the table. I felt no compunction in doing so, for under the circumstances I felt that I should protect myself in every way I could. One of the letters was directed to Samuel F. Billington, No. 7, The Crescent, Whitby; another to Herr Leutner, Varna; the third was to Coutts Co., London, and the fourth to Herren Klopstock Billreuth, bankers, BudaPesth. The second and fourth were unsealed. I was just about to look at them when I saw the doorhandle move. I sank back in my seat, having just had time to replace the letters as they had been and to resume my book before the Count, holding still another letter in his hand, entered the room. He took up the letters on the table and stamped them carefully, and then, turning to me, said I trust you will forgive me, but I have much work to do in private this evening. You will, I hope, find all things as you wish. At the door he turned, and after a moments pause said Let me advise you, my dear young friendnay, let me warn you with all seriousness, that should you leave these rooms you will not by any chance go to sleep in any other part of the castle. It is old, and has many memories, and there are bad dreams for those who sleep unwisely. Be warned! Should sleep now or ever overcome you, or be like to do, then haste to your own chamber or to these rooms, for your rest will then be safe. But if you be not careful in this respect, thenHe finished his speech in a gruesome way, for he motioned with his hands as if he were washing them. I quite understood; my only doubt was as to whether any dream could be more terrible than the unnatural, horrible net of gloom and mystery which seemed closing round me. Later.I endorse the last words written, but this time there is no doubt in question. I shall not fear to sleep in any place where he is not. I have placed the crucifix over the head of my bedI imagine that my rest is thus freer from dreams; and there it shall remain. When he left me I went to my room. After a little while, not hearing any sound, I came out and went up the stone stair to where I could look out towards the south. There was some sense of freedom in the vast expanse, inaccessible though it was to me, as compared with the narrow darkness of the courtyard. Looking out on this, I felt that I was indeed in prison, and I seemed to want a breath of fresh air, though it were of the night. I am beginning to feel this nocturnal existence tell on me. It is destroying my nerve. I start at my own shadow, and am full of all sorts of horrible imaginings. God knows that there is ground for any terrible fear in this accursed place! I looked out over the beautiful expanse, bathed in soft yellow moonlight till it was almost as light as day. In the soft light the distant hills became melted, and the shadows in the valleys and gorges of velvety blackness. The mere beauty seemed to cheer me; there was peace and comfort in every breath I drew. As I leaned from the window my eye was caught by something moving a storey below me, and somewhat to my left, where I imagined, from the lie of the rooms, that the windows of the Counts own room would look out. The window at which I stood was tall and deep, stonemullioned, and though weatherworn, was still complete; but it was evidently many a day since the case had been there. I drew back behind the stonework, and looked carefully out. What I saw was the Counts head coming out from the window. I did not see the face, but I knew the man by the neck and the movement of his back and arms. In any case, I could not mistake the hands which I had had so many opportunities of studying. I was at first interested and somewhat amused, for it is wonderful how small a matter will interest and amuse a man when he is a prisoner. But my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down, with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings. At first I could not believe my eyes. I thought it was some trick of the moonlight, some weird effect of shadow; but I kept looking, and it could be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes grasp the corners of the stones, worn clear of the mortar by the stress of years, and by thus using every projection and inequality move downwards with considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall. What manner of man is this, or what manner of creature is it in the semblance of man? I feel the dread of this horrible place overpowering me; I am in fearin awful fearand there is no escape for me; I am encompassed about with terrors that I dare not think of.... 15 May.Once more have I seen the Count go out in his lizard fashion. He moved downwards in a sidelong way, some hundred feet down, and a good deal to the left. He vanished into some hole or window. When his head had disappeared I leaned out to try and see more, but without availthe distance was too great to allow a proper angle of sight. I knew he had left the castle now, and thought to use the opportunity to explore more than I had dared to do as yet. I went back to the room, and taking a lamp, tried all the doors. They were all locked as I had expected, and the locks were comparatively new; but I went down the stone stairs to the hall where I had entered originally. I found I could pull back the bolts easily enough and unhook the great chains; but the door was locked, and the key was gone! That key must be in the Counts room; I must watch should his door be unlocked, so that I may get it and escape. I went on to make a thorough examination of the various stairs and passages, and to try the doors that opened from them. One or two small rooms near the hall were open, but there was nothing to see in them except old furniture, dusty with age and motheaten. At last, however, I found one door at the top of a stairway which, though it seemed to be locked, gave a little under pressure. I tried it harder, and found that it was not really locked, but that the resistance came from the fact that the hinges had fallen somewhat, and the heavy door rested on the floor. Here was an opportunity which I might not have again, so I exerted myself, and with many efforts forced it back so that I could enter. I was now in a wing of the castle further to the right than the rooms I knew and a story lower down. From the windows I could see that the suite of rooms lay along to the south of the castle, the windows of the end room looking out both west and south. On the latter side, as well as to the former, there was a great precipice. The castle was built on the corner of a great rock, so that on three sides it was quite impregnable, and great windows were placed here where sling, or bow, or culverin could not reach, and consequently light and comfort, impossible to a position which had to be guarded, were secured. To the west was a great valley, and then, rising far away, great jagged mountain fastnesses, rising peak on peak, the sheer rock studded with mountain ash and thorn, whose roots clung in cracks and crevices and crannies of the stone. This was evidently the portion of the castle occupied in bygone days, for the furniture had more air of comfort than any I had seen. The windows were curtainless, and the yellow moonlight, flooding in through the diamond panes, enabled one to see even colours, whilst it softened the wealth of dust which lay over all and disguised in some measure the ravages of time and the moth. My lamp seemed to be of little effect in the brilliant moonlight, but I was glad to have it with me, for there was a dread loneliness in the place which chilled my heart and made my nerves tremble. Still, it was better than living alone in the rooms which I had come to hate from the presence of the Count, and after trying a little to school my nerves, I found a soft quietude come over me. Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her illspelt loveletter, and writing in my diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last. It is nineteenth century uptodate with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have powers of their own which mere modernity cannot kill. Later the Morning of 16 May.God preserve my sanity, for to this I am reduced. Safety and the assurance of safety are things of the past. Whilst I live on here there is but one thing to hope for that I may not go mad, if, indeed, I be not mad already. If I be sane, then surely it is maddening to think that of all the foul things that lurk in this hateful place the Count is the least dreadful to me; that to him alone I can look for safety, even though this be only whilst I can serve his purpose. Great God! merciful God! Let me be calm, for out of that way lies madness indeed. I begin to get new lights on certain things which have puzzled me. Up to now I never quite knew what Shakespeare meant when he made Hamlet say My tablets! quick, my tablets! Tis meet that I put it down, etc., for now, feeling as though my own brain was unhinged or as if the shock had come which must end in its undoing, I turn to my diary for repose. The habit of entering accurately must help to soothe me. The Counts mysterious warning frightened me at the time; it frightens me more now when I think of it, for in future he has a fearful hold upon me. I shall fear to doubt what he may say! When I had written in my diary and had fortunately replaced the book and pen in my pocket, I felt sleepy. The Counts warning came into my mind, but I took a pleasure in disobeying it. The sense of sleep was upon me, and with it the obstinacy which sleep brings as outrider. The soft moonlight soothed, and the wide expanse without gave a sense of freedom which refreshed me. I determined not to return tonight to the gloomhaunted rooms, but to sleep here, where of old ladies had sat and sung and lived sweet lives whilst their gentle breasts were sad for their menfolk away in the midst of remorseless wars. I drew a great couch out of its place near the corner, so that, as I lay, I could look at the lovely view to east and south, and unthinking of and uncaring for the dust, composed myself for sleep. I suppose I must have fallen asleep; I hope so, but I fear, for all that followed was startlingly realso real that now, sitting here in the broad, full sunlight of the morning, I cannot in the least believe that it was all sleep. I was not alone. The room was the same, unchanged in any way since I came into it; I could see along the floor, in the brilliant moonlight, my own footsteps marked where I had disturbed the long accumulation of dust. In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time that I must be dreaming when I saw them, for, though the moonlight was behind them, they threw no shadow on the floor. They came close to me and looked at me for some time and then whispered together. Two were dark, and had high aquiline noses, like the Count, and great dark, piercing eyes, that seemed to be almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon. The other was fair, as fair as can be, with great, wavy masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires. I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where. All three had brilliant white teeth, that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Minas eyes and cause her pain; but it is the truth. They whispered together, and then they all three laughedsuch a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of waterglasses when played on by a cunning hand. The fair girl shook her head coquettishly, and the other two urged her on. One said Go on! You are first, and we shall follow; yours is the right to begin. The other added He is young and strong; there are kisses for us all. I lay quiet, looking out under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation. The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honeysweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood. I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The fair girl went on her knees and bent over me, fairly gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as ones flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearernearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waitedwaited with beating heart. But at that instant another sensation swept through me as quick as lightning. I was conscious of the presence of the Count, and of his being as if lapped in a storm of fury. As my eyes opened involuntarily I saw his strong hand grasp the slender neck of the fair woman and with giants power draw it back, the blue eyes transformed with fury, the white teeth champing with rage, and the fair cheeks blazing red with passion. But the Count! Never did I imagine such wrath and fury, even in the demons of the pit. His eyes were positively blazing. The red light in them was lurid, as if the flames of hellfire blazed behind them. His face was deathly pale, and the lines of it were hard like drawn wires; the thick eyebrows that met over the nose now seemed like a heaving bar of whitehot metal. With a fierce sweep of his arm, he hurled the woman from him, and then motioned to the others, as though he were beating them back; it was the same imperious gesture that I had seen used to the wolves. In a voice which, though low and almost a whisper, seemed to cut through the air and then ring round the room, as he said How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him, or youll have to deal with me. The fair girl, with a laugh of ribald coquetry, turned to answer him You yourself never loved; you never love! On this the other women joined, and such a mirthless, hard, soulless laughter rang through the room that it almost made me faint to hear; it seemed like the pleasure of fiends. Then the Count turned, after looking at my face attentively, and said in a soft whisper Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so? Well, now I promise you that when I am done with him, you shall kiss him at your will. Now go! go! I must awaken him, for there is work to be done. Are we to have nothing tonight? said one of them, with a low laugh, as she pointed to the bag which he had thrown upon the floor, and which moved as though there were some living thing within it. For answer he nodded his head. One of the women jumped forward and opened it. If my ears did not deceive me there was a gasp and a low wail, as of a halfsmothered child. The women closed round, whilst I was aghast with horror; but as I looked they disappeared, and with them the dreadful bag. There was no door near them, and they could not have passed me without my noticing. They simply seemed to fade into the rays of the moonlight and pass out through the window, for I could see outside the dim, shadowy forms for a moment before they entirely faded away. Then the horror overcame me, and I sank down unconscious. CHAPTER IV. JONATHAN HARKERS JOURNALcontinued. I AWOKE in my own bed. If it be that I had not dreamt, the Count must have carried me here. I tried to satisfy myself on the subject, but could not arrive at any unquestionable result. To be sure, there were certain small evidences, such as that my clothes were folded and laid by in a manner which was not my habit. My watch was still unwound, and I am rigorously accustomed to wind it the last thing before going to bed, and many such details. But these things are no proof, for they may have been evidences that my mind was not as usual, and, from some cause or another, I had certainly been much upset. I must watch for proof. Of one thing I am glad if it was that the Count carried me here and undressed me, he must have been hurried in his task, for my pockets are intact. I am sure this diary would have been a mystery to him which he would not have brooked. He would have taken or destroyed it. As I look round this room, although it has been to me so full of fear, it is now a sort of sanctuary, for nothing can be more dreadful than those awful women, who werewho arewaiting to suck my blood. 18 May.I have been down to look at that room again in daylight, for I must know the truth. When I got to the doorway at the top of the stairs, I found it closed. It had been so forcibly driven against the jamb that part of the woodwork was splintered. I could see that the bolt of the lock had not been shot, but the door is fastened from the inside. I fear it was no dream, and must act on this surmise. 19 May.I am surely in the toils. Last night the Count asked me in the suavest tones to write three letters, one saying that my work here was nearly done and that I should start for home within a few days, another that I was starting on the next morning from the time of the letter, and the third that I had left the castle and arrived at Bistritz. I would fain have rebelled, but felt that in the present state of things it would be madness to quarrel openly with the Count whilst I am so absolutely in his power; and to refuse would be to excite his suspicion and to arouse his anger. He knows that I know too much, and that I must not live, lest I be dangerous to him; my only chance is to prolong my opportunities. Something may occur which will give me a chance to escape. I saw in his eyes something of that gathering wrath which was manifest when he hurled that fair woman from him. He explained to me that posts were few and uncertain, and that my writing now would ensure ease of mind to my friends; and he assured me with so much impressiveness that he would countermand the later letters, which would be held over at Bistritz until due time in case chance would admit of my prolonging my stay, that to oppose him would have been to create new suspicion. I therefore pretended to fall in with his views, and asked him what dates I should put on the letters. He calculated a minute, and then said The first should be June 12, the second June 19, and the third June 29. I know now the span of my life. God help me! 28 May.There is a chance of escape, or at any rate of being able to send word home. A band of Szgany have come to the castle, and are encamped in the courtyard. These Szgany are gipsies; I have notes of them in my book. They are peculiar to this part of the world, though allied to the ordinary gipsies all the world over. There are thousands of them in Hungary and Transylvania, who are almost outside all law. They attach themselves as a rule to some great noble or boyar, and call themselves by his name. They are fearless and without religion, save superstition, and they talk only their own varieties of the Romany tongue. I shall write some letters home, and shall try to get them to have them posted. I have already spoken to them through my window to begin an acquaintanceship. They took their hats off and made obeisance and many signs, which, however, I could not understand any more than I could their spoken language.... I have written the letters. Minas is in shorthand, and I simply ask Mr. Hawkins to communicate with her. To her I have explained my situation, but without the horrors which I may only surmise. It would shock and frighten her to death were I to expose my heart to her. Should the letters not carry, then the Count shall not yet know my secret or the extent of my knowledge.... I have given the letters; I threw them through the bars of my window with a gold piece, and made what signs I could to have them posted. The man who took them pressed them to his heart and bowed, and then put them in his cap. I could do no more. I stole back to the study and began to read. As the Count did not come in, I have written here.... The Count has come.

He sat down beside me, and said in his smoothest voice as he opened two letters The Szgany has given me these, of which, though I know not whence they come, I shall, of course, take care. See!he must have looked at itone is from you, and to my friend Peter Hawkins; the otherhere he caught sight of the strange symbols as he opened the envelope, and the dark look came into his face, and his eyes blazed wickedlythe other is a vile thing, an outrage upon friendship and hospitality! It is not signed. Well! so it cannot matter to us. And he calmly held letter and envelope in the flame of the lamp till they were consumed. Then he went on The letter to Hawkinsthat I shall, of course, send on, since it is yours. Your letters are sacred to me. Your pardon, my friend, that unknowingly I did break the seal. Will you not cover it again? He held out the letter to me, and with a courteous bow handed me a clean envelope. I could only redirect it and hand it to him in silence. When he went out of the room I could hear the key turn softly. A minute later I went over and tried it, and the door was locked. When, an hour or two after, the Count came quietly into the room, his coming wakened me, for I had gone to sleep on the sofa. He was very courteous and very cheery in his manner, and seeing that I had been sleeping, he said So, my friend, you are tired? Get to bed. There is the surest rest. I may not have the pleasure to talk tonight, since there are many labours to me; but you will sleep, I pray. I passed to my room and went to bed, and, strange to say, slept without dreaming. Despair has its own calms. 31 May.This morning when I woke I thought I would provide myself with some paper and envelopes from my bag and keep them in my pocket, so that I might write in case I should get an opportunity; but again a surprise, again a shock! Every scrap of paper was gone, and with it all my notes, my memoranda relating to railways and travel, my letter of credit, in fact, all that might be useful to me were I once outside the castle. I sat and pondered a while, and then some thought occurred to me, and I made search of my portmanteau and in the wardrobe where I had placed my clothes. The suit in which I had travelled was gone, and also my overcoat and rug; I could find no trace of them anywhere. This looked like some new scheme of villainy.... 17 June.This morning, as I was sitting on the edge of my bed cudgelling my brains, I heard without a cracking of whips and pounding and scraping of horses feet up the rocky path beyond the courtyard. With joy I hurried to the window, and saw drive into the yard two great leiterwaggons, each drawn by eight sturdy horses, and at the head of each pair a Slovak, with his wide hat, great, nailstudded belt, dirty sheepskin, and high boots. They had also their long staves in hand. I ran to the door, intending to descend and try and join them through the main hall, as I thought that way might be opened for them. Again a shock my door was fastened on the outside. Then I ran to the window and cried to them. They looked up at me stupidly and pointed, but just then the hetman of the Szgany came out, and seeing them pointing to my window, said something, at which they laughed. Henceforth, no effort of mine, no piteous cry or agonised entreaty, would make them even look at me. They resolutely turned away. The leiterwaggons contained great, square boxes, with handles of thick rope; these were evidently empty by the ease with which the Slovaks handled them, and by their resonance as they were roughly moved. When they were all unloaded and backed in a great heap in one corner of the yard, the Slovaks were given some money by the Szgany, and spitting on it for luck, lazily went each to his horses head. Shortly afterwards I heard the cracking of their whips die away in the distance. 24 June, before morning.Last night the Count left me early, and locked himself into his own room. As soon as I dared, I ran up the winding stair, and looked out of the window which opened south. I thought I would watch for the Count, for there is something going on. The Szgany are quartered somewhere in the castle, and are doing work of some kind. I know it, for now and then I hear a faraway, muffled sound as of mattock and spade, and, whatever it is, it must be to the end of some ruthless villainy. I had been at the window somewhat less than half an hour, when I saw something coming out of the Counts window. I drew back and watched carefully, and saw the whole man emerge. It was a new shock to me to find that he had on the suit of clothes which I had worn whilst travelling here, and slung over his shoulder the terrible bag which I had seen the women take away. There could be no doubt as to his quest, and in my garb, too! This, then, is his new scheme of evil that he will allow others to see me, as they think, so that he may both leave evidence that I have been seen in the towns or villages posting my own letters, and that any wickedness which he may do shall by the local people be attributed to me. It makes me rage to think that this can go on, and whilst I am shut up here, a veritable prisoner, but without that protection of the law which is even a criminals right and consolation. I thought I would watch for the Counts return, and for a long time sat doggedly at the window. Then I began to notice that there were some quaint little specks floating in the rays of the moonlight. They were like the tiniest grains of dust, and they whirled round and gathered in clusters in a nebulous sort of way. I watched them with a sense of soothing, and a sort of calm stole over me. I leaned back in the embrasure in a more comfortable position, so that I could enjoy more fully the aerial gambolling. Something made me start up, a low, piteous howling of dogs somewhere far below in the valley, which was hidden from my sight. Louder it seemed to ring in my ears, and the floating motes of dust to take new shapes to the sound as they danced in the moonlight. I felt myself struggling to awake to some call of my instincts; nay, my very soul was struggling, and my halfremembered sensibilities were striving to answer the call. I was becoming hypnotised! Quicker and quicker danced the dust, and the moonbeams seemed to quiver as they went by me into the mass of gloom beyond. More and more they gathered till they seemed to take dim phantom shapes. And then I started, broad awake and in full possession of my senses, and ran screaming from the place. The phantom shapes, which were becoming gradually materialised from the moonbeams, were those of the three ghostly women to whom I was doomed. I fled, and felt somewhat safer in my own room, where there was no moonlight and where the lamp was burning brightly. When a couple of hours had passed I heard something stirring in the Counts room, something like a sharp wail quickly suppressed; and then there was silence, deep, awful silence, which chilled me. With a beating heart, I tried the door; but I was locked in my prison, and could do nothing. I sat down and simply cried. As I sat I heard a sound in the courtyard withoutthe agonised cry of a woman. I rushed to the window, and throwing it up, peered out between the bars. There, indeed, was a woman with dishevelled hair, holding her hands over her heart as one distressed with running. She was leaning against a corner of the gateway. When she saw my face at the window she threw herself forward, and shouted in a voice laden with menace Monster, give me my child! She threw herself on her knees, and raising up her hands, cried the same words in tones which wrung my heart. Then she tore her hair and beat her breast, and abandoned herself to all the violences of extravagant emotion. Finally, she threw herself forward, and, though I could not see her, I could hear the beating of her naked hands against the door. Somewhere high overhead, probably on the tower, I heard the voice of the Count calling in his harsh, metallic whisper. His call seemed to be answered from far and wide by the howling of wolves. Before many minutes had passed a pack of them poured, like a pentup dam when liberated, through the wide entrance into the courtyard. There was no cry from the woman, and the howling of the wolves was but short. Before long they streamed away singly, licking their lips. I could not pity her, for I knew now what had become of her child, and she was better dead. What shall I do? What can I do? How can I escape from this dreadful thrall of night and gloom and fear? 25 June, morning.No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and how dear to his heart and eye the morning can be. When the sun grew so high this morning that it struck the top of the great gateway opposite my window, the high spot which it touched seemed to me as if the dove from the ark had lighted there. My fear fell from me as if it had been a vaporous garment which dissolved in the warmth. I must take action of some sort while the courage of the day is upon me. Last night one of my postdated letters went to post, the first of that fatal series which is to blot out the very traces of my existence from the earth. Let me not think of it. Action! It has always been at nighttime that I have been molested or threatened, or in some way in danger or in fear. I have not yet seen the Count in the daylight. Can it be that he sleeps when others wake, that he may be awake whilst they sleep? If I could only get into his room! But there is no possible way. The door is always locked, no way for me. Yes, there is a way, if one dares to take it. Where his body has gone why may not another body go? I have seen him myself crawl from his window; why should not I imitate him, and go in by his window? The chances are desperate, but my need is more desperate still. I shall risk it. At the worst it can only be death; and a mans death is not a calfs, and the dreaded Hereafter may still be open to me. God help me in my task! Goodbye, Mina, if I fail; goodbye, my faithful friend and second father; goodbye, all, and last of all Mina! Same day, later.I have made the effort, and, God helping me, have come safely back to this room. I must put down every detail in order. I went whilst my courage was fresh straight to the window on the south side, and at once got outside on the narrow ledge of stone which runs round the building on this side. The stones were big and roughly cut, and the mortar had by process of time been washed away between them. I took off my boots, and ventured out on the desperate way. I looked down once, so as to make sure that a sudden glimpse of the awful depth would not overcome me, but after that kept my eyes away from it. I knew pretty well the direction and distance of the Counts window, and made for it as well as I could, having regard to the opportunities available. I did not feel dizzyI suppose I was too excitedand the time seemed ridiculously short till I found myself standing on the windowsill and trying to raise up the sash. I was filled with agitation, however, when I bent down and slid feet foremost in through the window. Then I looked round for the Count, but, with surprise and gladness, made a discovery. The room was empty! It was barely furnished with odd things, which seemed to have never been used; the furniture was something the same style as that in the south rooms, and was covered with dust. I looked for the key, but it was not in the lock, and I could not find it anywhere. The only thing I found was a great heap of gold in one cornergold of all kinds, Roman, and British, and Austrian, and Hungarian, and Greek and Turkish money, covered with a film of dust, as though it had lain long in the ground. None of it that I noticed was less than three hundred years old. There were also chains and ornaments, some jewelled, but all of them old and stained. At one corner of the room was a heavy door. I tried it, for, since I could not find the key of the room or the key of the outer door, which was the main object of my search, I must make further examination, or all my efforts would be in vain. It was open, and led through a stone passage to a circular stairway, which went steeply down. I descended, minding carefully where I went, for the stairs were dark, being only lit by loopholes in the heavy masonry. At the bottom there was a dark, tunnellike passage, through which came a deathly, sickly odour, the odour of old earth newly turned. As I went through the passage the smell grew closer and heavier. At last I pulled open a heavy door which stood ajar, and found myself in an old, ruined chapel, which had evidently been used as a graveyard. The roof was broken, and in two places were steps leading to vaults, but the ground had recently been dug over, and the earth placed in great wooden boxes, manifestly those which had been brought by the Slovaks. There was nobody about, and I made search for any further outlet, but there was none. Then I went over every inch of the ground, so as not to lose a chance. I went down even into the vaults, where the dim light struggled, although to do so was dread to my very soul. Into two of these I went, but saw nothing except fragments of old coffins and piles of dust; in the third, however, I made a discovery. There, in one of the great boxes, of which there were fifty in all, on a pile of newly dug earth, lay the Count! He was either dead or asleep, I could not say whichfor the eyes were open and stony, but without the glassiness of deathand the cheeks had the warmth of life through all their pallor, and the lips were as red as ever. But there was no sign of movement, no pulse, no breath, no beating of the heart. I bent over him, and tried to find any sign of life, but in vain. He could not have lain there long, for the earthy smell would have passed away in a few hours. By the side of the box was its cover, pierced with holes here and there. I thought he might have the keys on him, but when I went to search I saw the dead eyes, and in them, dead though they were, such a look of hate, though unconscious of me or my presence, that I fled from the place, and leaving the Counts room by the window, crawled again up the castle wall. Regaining my own chamber, I threw myself panting upon the bed and tried to think.... 29 June.Today is the date of my last letter, and the Count has taken steps to prove that it was genuine, for again I saw him leave the castle by the same window, and in my clothes. As he went down the wall, lizard fashion, I wished I had a gun or some lethal weapon, that I might destroy him; but I fear that no weapon wrought alone by mans hand would have any effect on him. I dared not wait to see him return, for I feared to see those weird sisters. I came back to the library, and read there till I fell asleep. I was awakened by the Count, who looked at me as grimly as a man can look as he said Tomorrow, my friend, we must part. You return to your beautiful England, I to some work which may have such an end that we may never meet. Your letter home has been despatched; tomorrow I shall not be here, but all shall be ready for your journey. In the morning come the Szgany, who have some labours of their own here, and also come some Slovaks. When they have gone, my carriage shall come for you, and shall bear you to the Borgo Pass to meet the diligence from Bukovina to Bistritz. But I am in hopes that I shall see more of you at Castle Dracula. I suspected him, and determined to test his sincerity. Sincerity! It seems like a profanation of the word to write it in connection with such a monster, so I asked him pointblank Why may I not go tonight? Because, dear sir, my coachman and horses are away on a mission. But I would walk with pleasure. I want to get away at once. He smiled, such a soft, smooth, diabolical smile that I knew there was some trick behind his smoothness. He said And your baggage? I do not care about it. I can send for it some other time. The Count stood up, and said, with a sweet courtesy which made me rub my eyes, it seemed so real You English have a saying which is close to my heart, for its spirit is that which rules our boyars Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest. Come with me, my dear young friend. Not an hour shall you wait in my house against your will, though sad am I at your going, and that you so suddenly desire it. Come! With a stately gravity, he, with the lamp, preceded me down the stairs and along the hall. Suddenly he stopped. Hark! Close at hand came the howling of many wolves. It was almost as if the sound sprang up at the raising of his hand, just as the music of a great orchestra seems to leap under the baton of the conductor. After a pause of a moment, he proceeded in his stately way, to the door, drew back the ponderous bolts, unhooked the heavy chains, and began to draw it open. To my intense astonishment I saw that it was unlocked. Suspiciously I looked all round, but could see no key of any kind. As the door began to open, the howling of the wolves without grew louder and angrier; their red jaws, with champing teeth, and their bluntclawed feet as they leaped, came in through the opening door. I knew that to struggle at the moment against the Count was useless. With such allies as these at his command, I could do nothing. But still the door continued slowly to open, and only the Counts body stood in the gap. Suddenly it struck me that this might be the moment and the means of my doom; I was to be given to the wolves, and at my own instigation. There was a diabolical wickedness in the idea great enough for the Count, and as a last chance I cried out Shut the door; I shall wait till morning! and covered my face with my hands to hide my tears of bitter disappointment. With one sweep of his powerful arm, the Count threw the door shut, and the great bolts clanged and echoed through the hall as they shot back into their places. In silence we returned to the library, and after a minute or two I went to my own room. The last I saw of Count Dracula was his kissing his hand to me; with a red light of triumph in his eyes, and with a smile that Judas in hell might be proud of. When I was in my room and about to lie down, I thought I heard a whispering at my door. I went to it softly and listened. Unless my ears deceived me, I heard the voice of the Count Back, back, to your own place! Your time is not yet come. Wait. Have patience. Tomorrow night, tomorrow night, is yours! There was a low, sweet ripple of laughter, and in a rage I threw open the door, and saw without the three terrible women licking their lips. As I appeared they all joined in a horrible laugh, and ran away. I came back to my room and threw myself on my knees. Is it then so near the end? Tomorrow! tomorrow! Lord, help me, and those to whom I am dear! 30 June, morning.These may be the last words I ever write in this diary. I slept till just before the dawn, and when I woke threw myself on my knees, for I determined that if Death came he should find me ready. At last I felt that subtle change in the air and knew that the morning had come. Then came the welcome cockcrow, and I felt that I was safe. With a glad heart, I opened my door and ran down the hall. I had seen that the door was unlocked and now escape was before me. With hands that trembled with eagerness, I unhooked the chains and drew back the massive bolts. But the door would not move. Despair seized me. I pulled and pulled at the door, and shook it till, massive as it was, it rattled in its casement. I could see the bolt shot. It had been locked after I left the Count. Then a wild desire took me to obtain that key at any risk, and I determined then and there to scale the wall again and gain the Counts room. He might kill me, but death now seemed the happier choice of evils. Without a pause I rushed up to the east window and scrambled down the wall, as before, into the Counts room. It was empty, but that was as I expected. I could not see a key anywhere, but the heap of gold remained. I went through the door in the corner and down the winding stair and along the dark passage to the old chapel. I knew now well enough where to find the monster I sought. The great box was in the same place, close against the wall, but the lid was laid on it, not fastened down, but with the nails ready in their places to be hammered home. I knew I must search the body for the key, so I raised the lid and laid it back against the wall; and then I saw something which filled my very soul with horror. There lay the Count, but looking as if his youth had been halfrenewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark irongrey; the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed rubyred underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion. I shuddered as I bent over to touch him, and every sense in me revolted at the contact; but I had to search, or I was lost. The coming night might see my own body a banquet in a similar way to those horrid three. I felt all over the body, but no sign could I find of the key. Then I stopped and looked at the Count. There was a mocking smile on the bloated face which seemed to drive me mad. This was the being I was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps for centuries to come, he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever widening circle of semidemons to batten on the helpless. The very thought drove me mad. A terrible desire came upon me to rid the world of such a monster. There was no lethal weapon at hand, but I seized a shovel which the workmen had been using to fill the cases, and lifting it high, struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face. But as I did so the head turned, and the eyes fell full upon me, with all their blaze of basilisk horror. The sight seemed to paralyse me, and the shovel turned in my hand and glanced from the face, merely making a deep gash above the forehead. The shovel fell from my hand across the box, and as I pulled it away the flange of the blade caught the edge of the lid, which fell over again, and hid the horrid thing from my sight. The last glimpse I had was of the bloated face, bloodstained and fixed with a grin of malice which would have held its own in the nethermost hell. I thought and thought what should be my next move, but my brain seemed on fire, and I waited with a despairing feeling growing over me. As I waited I heard in the distance a gipsy song sung by merry voices coming closer, and through their song the rolling of heavy wheels and the cracking of whips; the Szgany and the Slovaks of whom the Count had spoken were coming. With a last look round and at the box which contained the vile body, I ran from the place and gained the Counts room, determined to rush out at the moment the door should be opened. With strained ears I listened, and heard downstairs the grinding of the key in the great lock and the falling back of the heavy door. There must have been some other means of entry, or some one had a key for one of the locked doors. Then there came the sound of many feet tramping and dying away in some passage which sent up a clanging echo. I turned to run down again towards the vault, where I might find the new entrance; but at that moment there seemed to come a violent puff of wind, and the door to the winding stair blew to with a shock that set the dust from the lintels flying. When I ran to push it open, I found that it was hopelessly fast. I was again a prisoner, and the net of doom was closing round me more closely. As I write there is in the passage below a sound of many tramping feet and the crash of weights being set down heavily, doubtless the boxes, with their freight of earth. There is a sound of hammering; it is the box being nailed down. Now I can hear the heavy feet tramping again along the hall, with many other idle feet coming behind them. The door is shut, and the chains rattle; there is a grinding of the key in the lock; I can hear the key withdrawn; then another door opens and shuts; I hear the creaking of lock and bolt. Hark! in the courtyard and down the rocky way the roll of heavy wheels, the crack of whips, and the chorus of the Szgany as they pass into the distance. I am alone in the castle with those awful women. Faugh! Mina is a woman, and there is naught in common. They are devils of the Pit! I shall not remain alone with them; I shall try to scale the castle wall farther than I have yet attempted. I shall take some of the gold with me, lest I want it later. I may find a way from this dreadful place. And then away for home! away to the quickest and nearest train! away from this cursed spot, from this cursed land, where the devil and his children still walk with earthly feet! At least Gods mercy is better than that of these monsters, and the precipice is steep and high. At its foot a man may sleepas a man. Goodbye, all! Mina! CHAPTER V. Letter from Miss Mina Murray to Miss Lucy Westenra. 9 May. My dearest Lucy, Forgive my long delay in writing, but I have been simply overwhelmed with work. The life of an assistant schoolmistress is sometimes trying. I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can walk together freely and build our castles in the air. I have been working very hard lately, because I want to keep up with Jonathans studies, and I have been practising shorthand very assiduously. When we are married I shall be able to be useful to Jonathan, and if I can stenograph well enough I can take down what he wants to say in this way and write it out for him on the typewriter, at which I am also practising very hard. He and I sometimes write letters in shorthand, and he is keeping a stenographic journal of his travels abroad. When I am with you I shall keep a diary in the same way. I dont mean one of those twopagestotheweekwithSundaysqueezedinacorner diaries, but a sort of journal which I can write in whenever I feel inclined. I do not suppose there will be much of interest to other people; but it is not intended for them. I may show it to Jonathan some day if there is in it anything worth sharing, but it is really an exercise book. I shall try to do what I see lady journalists do interviewing and writing descriptions and trying to remember conversations. I am told that, with a little practice, one can remember all that goes on or that one hears said during a day. However, we shall see. I shall tell you all my little plans when we meet. I have just had a few hurried lines from Jonathan from Transylvania. He is well, and will be returning in about a week. I am longing to hear all his news. It must be so nice to see strange countries, I wonder if weI mean Jonathan and Ishall ever see them together. There is the ten oclock bell ringing. Goodbye. Your loving MINA. Tell me all the news when you write. You have not told me anything for a long time. I hear rumours, and especially of a tall, handsome, curlyhaired man??? Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray. 17, Chatham Street, Wednesday. My dearest Mina, I must say you tax me very unfairly with being a bad correspondent. I wrote to you twice since we parted, and your last letter was only your second. Besides, I have nothing to tell you. There is really nothing to interest you. Town is very pleasant just now, and we go a good deal to picturegalleries and for walks and rides in the park. As to the tall, curlyhaired man, I suppose it was the one who was with me at the last Pop. Some one has evidently been telling tales. That was Mr. Holmwood. He often comes to see us, and he and mamma get on very well together; they have so many things to talk about in common. We met some time ago a man that would just do for you, if you were not already engaged to Jonathan. He is an excellent parti, being handsome, well off, and of good birth. He is a doctor and really clever. Just fancy! He is only nineandtwenty, and he has an immense lunatic asylum all under his own care. Mr. Holmwood introduced him to me, and he called here to see us, and often comes now. I think he is one of the most resolute men I ever saw, and yet the most calm. He seems absolutely imperturbable. I can fancy what a wonderful power he must have over his patients. He has a curious habit of looking one straight in the face, as if trying to read ones thoughts. He tries this on very much with me, but I flatter myself he has got a tough nut to crack. I know that from my glass. Do you ever try to read your own face? I do, and I can tell you it is not a bad study, and gives you more trouble than you can well fancy if you have never tried it. He says that I afford him a curious psychological study, and I humbly think I do. I do not, as you know, take sufficient interest in dress to be able to describe the new fashions. Dress is a bore. That is slang again, but never mind; Arthur says that every day. There, it is all out. Mina, we have told all our secrets to each other since we were children; we have slept together and eaten together; and laughed and cried together; and now, though I have spoken, I would like to speak more. Oh, Mina, couldnt you guess? I love him. I am blushing as I write, for although I think he loves me, he has not told me so in words. But, oh, Mina, I love him; I love him; I love him! There, that does me good. I wish I were with you, dear, sitting by the fire undressing, as we used to sit; and I would try to tell you what I feel. I do not know how I am writing this even to you. I am afraid to stop, or I should tear up the letter, and I dont want to stop, for I do so want to tell you all. Let me hear from you at once, and tell me all that you think about it. Mina, I must stop. Goodnight. Bless me in your prayers; and, Mina, pray for my happiness. LUCY. P.S.I need not tell you this is a secret. Goodnight again. L. Letter, Lucy Westenra to Mina Murray. 24 May. My dearest Mina, Thanks, and thanks, and thanks again for your sweet letter! It was so nice to be able to tell you and to have your sympathy. My dear, it never rains but it pours. How true the old proverbs are. Here am I, who will be twenty in September, and yet I never had a proposal till today, not a real proposal, and today I have had three. Just fancy! THREE proposals in one day! Isnt it awful! I feel sorry, really and truly sorry, for two of the poor fellows. Oh, Mina, I am so happy that I dont know what to do with myself. And three proposals! But, for goodness sake, dont tell any of the girls, or they would be getting all sorts of extravagant ideas and imagining themselves injured and slighted if in their very first day at home they did not get six at least. Some girls are so vain. You and I, Mina dear, who are engaged and are going to settle down soon soberly into old married women, can despise vanity. Well, I must tell you about the three, but you must keep it a secret, dear, from every one, except, of course, Jonathan. You will tell him, because I would, if I were in your place, certainly tell Arthur. A woman ought to tell her husband everythingdont you think so, dear?and I must be fair. Men like women, certainly their wives, to be quite as fair as they are; and women, I am afraid, are not always quite as fair as they should be. Well, my dear, number one came just before lunch. I told you of him, Dr. John Seward, the lunaticasylum man, with the strong jaw and the good forehead. He was very cool outwardly, but was nervous all the same.