The Birmingham age-herald. [volume] (Birmingham, Ala.) 1902-1950, 1910-07-10

acter. His belief was connected with
what he had limited at before. the infu-
ence of the stones of his fathers house
upon his mental character. He believed
! that even stones and minerals had a
sentence and that this had been fully
proved of them as we'll as of vegetable
organizations in the House of Usher
even the order of the arrangements OF
the stones of which the building was
composed, as we'll as in the fungi which
overspread them and of the decayed trees
| which stood around-above all in the long.
undisturbed endurance of this arrange
ment and its reduplication in the waters
of the tarn. The evidence of this SEN
| tience was to be seen, he said, in the
gradual, yet certain condensation of an
atmosphere of their own about the wa
tiers and walls.
The visitor started, for he remembered
how, when he had paused on the further
side of the causeway upon his arrival and
| looked at the house and the domain he
had fancied he saw peculiar atmosphere
an aura-about them. Roderick went on
| to say that it was this atmosphere which
had for centuries been exerting an in
huence upon his family, and had at length
made him what his friends saw him. 1t
was the sentence of the stones and plants
| which had been exerting itself upon his
family with terrible and portentous in
| luence.
| "a modern physician would probably
say that Roderick's idea was not SO UNI
scientific after all in this latter respect,
and have replied: Yes. pernicious ma
laria exerting itself upon race from
generation to generation" But in the
days when Poe wrote sanitation was
theory had not been evolved. This by
way of digression.)
The books over which Roderick and his
friend pored-books which had for years
formed no small part of the mental ex-
istence of the invalid-were. as might be
character of his fantasies. They were
all weird, all contained more or less of
per-fervid fancy. AS they sat one night
in the studio discussing one of the most
weird and fanciful of these books Rod
erick suddenly announced that his sister
was no more She had died that day, and
he made what appeared at first singular
proposition. but one which. upon refiec-
tion, his friend thought reasonable and
sane enough.
Roderick said that he intended to pre-
serve his sisters body for a fortnight In
one of the subterranean apartments of
tho house previous to it's final interment
He had been led to this resolution, he
said, by a consideration of the unusual
malady of the deceased, because of GER
tain obtrusive and eager inquiries of the
medical man and because of the remote
and exposed position Of the family burial
place.
| When his friend recalled the suspicious
and sinister face of the medical man
when he met him upon the stairs on the
occasion of his arrival at the House oil
Usher he had no desire to oppose the
proposition of Roderick. Usher requested
his friend personally to assist him In
the temporary entombment. The body
having been placed in it's coffin, the two
men bore it to it's resting place. 1t was
d small damp vault, built far below the
house, to which they carried the coffined
body of the Lady Madeline The vault
had been originally constructed in feuda|
times for the worst purpose Of donjon-
keep, and it was evident that in more
modern days 1t had been used for the
storage of gunpowder or something else
of highly combustible nature, for a por-
ton of its floor and the whole exterior