Spiritual vampirism: The history of Etherial Softdown, and her friends of the "New Light"

by Charles W. Webber

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MESMERIC IMPOSITION.

TO BE READ BY PHILOSOPHERS ONLY.[1]

[1] The Story begins at Chapter I.—Ed.

The existence of what may be called the nervous or Odic fluid—the sympathetic element—has been partially known to all ages. The knowledge of this powerful secret, in moving and controlling mankind, has been professionally and almost exclusively confined to the adepts of all sects, religions, and periods; though it has occasionally, in various ways, leaked out of the penetralia, principally through its forms, accompanied with little or no apprehension of their vital meaning. It is in this way that a series of scientific phenomena, the discovery of which probably originated with a remote priestcraft, and had been made to subserve exclusive ends, has gradually been fragmented among the people, and in many imperfect, ignorant, and vitiated forms has now become the common property of science.

When it is understood that this nervous fluid is nothing more nor less than that force—whether electrical, magnetic, odic, or otherwise named—which, lubricating the nervous system in man, produces all vital phenomena—is, in a word, the vital force—the active principle of life—it will not be difficult to comprehend how important a knowledge of its laws may be rendered to even those relations of life not exclusively physical.

Mesmer promulgated, under his own name, as a new and astounding discovery in science, something of the sympathetic laws to which this nervous or Odic fluid is subject, and by

which the vital and spiritual relations of man to the external universe are in a great measure modified, and even controlled. This was no discovery of his, but had been the mainly exclusive secret of the ancient priesthood; employed alike in the ceremonies of the novitiate in the Thibetian temples of Buddha, in the Egyptian Initiation, and in Grecian Pythism. But the particular reason why his announcements caused such prodigious excitement, in 1784, as to run all Paris mad, even including the court of the wary Louis XVI., and still continue to excite and madden mankind, is, that, as the sympathetic ecstacies and furors, superinduced by the mummeries of his famous “vat,” were called by a new name, the people failed to recognise them, although they had been familiarised with, and even acting habitually under their influence, while surrounded by accessories of a more sacred character. The immediate success of Mesmer’s experiments amazed men. He, in fact, little knew what he was doing himself; the effects he understood how to produce, because accident had furnished him with the formulas. Having gone through these, which, though most grotesque and preposterous, later experience has shown, really included all the “passes” and other conditions necessary to establish sympathy through the nervous fluid with the victims of his delusion, he proceeded to produce exhibitions the most extraordinary the world ever saw, except in the hideous and frantic orgies of some wild, barbaric creed, and the parallels to which, in this country, are to be found in the shrieks and bellowings of a fanatic camp-meeting, Miller ascension-tent, Mormon rite, or hard-cider political mass-meeting.

Beginning with the postulate that “Nature abhors a vacuum,” it does not seem difficult to understand something, at least, of the rationale of this sympathetic influence of one man over another. The laws of the distribution of this Odic force seem to bear a somewhat general affinity to those of electricity. The surcharged cloud discharges its superfluous fluid into the cloud more negatively charged. The man holding a superfluous amount of vital or Odic force, can dismiss a portion of this—along the course of its proper lightning-rods, or conveyers, the nerves—into the organisation of a being more negatively charged, or, in other words, of a weaker man. As electricity can only act upon inert matter through its proper media, the elements, so the Odic fluid can only act upon organised matter normally through its proper medium, the nerves of vitality. This communication of the Odic fluid, by which sympathy between the two beings has been established, can be, to a certain degree, regulated and controlled by manipulations which bring the thumbs and fingers of the hand, which are properly Odic poles, in contact with certain great nerves, or centres of nerves, along which the influence can be readily communicated. These manipulations, the vital and original meanings of which these Mesmer agitators have betrayed, may be traced very clearly through the most important ceremonies of religion, and the secret orders of fraternisation in the world. From this point of view, how significant the “laying-on of hands” in ordination, the “joining of hands” in the marriage ceremony, &c.

Here let us remark, that we would no more be understood as accusing a Christian Priesthood, in modern times, of having made an improper use, either inside or out of their profession, of the manipulations mentioned above, than we would think of accusing them of having, as a class, any special knowledge of their significance beyond that of ceremonial forms, set down in the discipline. It has been to the Heathen Priesthood that we have consistently attributed a knowledge of the psychological meaning of these ceremonials, which have descended through the Hebrew and Christian churches as avowedly divested of vital significance, and intended, in their arbitrary exaction, as, to a certain degree, ordained tests of Christian faith and obedience.

But it is by no means indispensable to the exhibition of the Odic phenomena, that the processes of manipulation should have been literally gone through with in all cases—nor, indeed, in the majority even—for some of the most apparently inexplicable and extraordinary of them all are brought about without such intervention. Take, as comparatively “modern instances,” such effects as those produced by the preaching of Peter the Hermit, when not only vast armies of men were moved like flights of locusts toward the Desert, on the breeze of his fiery breath, to disappear, too, as they, within its bosom, and never be heard from again, but even great armies of children rushed in migratory hordes to the sea-ports, to ship for the Holy Land!—and those produced by the crusade of Father Mathew against intemperance, in our time, when all Ireland lay wailing at his feet. These great furors were precisely identical with those already enumerated, so far as the sympathetic or motive power went. So with the story of the rise of Mahomet, Joe Smith, Miller, and all such agitators. They are usually men of prodigious vital power, and of course surcharged with the Odic fluid, who begin these great movements; and they possess, beside, vast patience and endurance. They begin by filling the individuals in immediate contact with them, as Mahomet did his own family, with the superfluity of the Odic force in themselves, and having thus obtained a single medium by this immediate contact—which, although it may not imply the formal manipulations with preconceived design, implies the accidental equivalents—the circle gradually enlarges through each fresh accession, in much the same way that it began, until, after a few patient years of unshaken endurance, the apostle finds himself surrounded by thousands and thousands of human beings, whose volition is swayed through this Odic force—this sympathetic medium—by his own central, resolute, and self-poised will, as if they were but one man. His moveless volition has been, from the beginning, the base and axis of the vast sympathetic movement going on around him, and upon the single strength of the Odic force within him, all depends, until, through a thorough organisation of ceremonial laws and observances, the system of which he was the vital centre assumes a corporate existence, and can stand alone.

This is about the method in which all such organisations, radiating from the one man power or centre, widen their circles to an extreme circumference, until the force of the pebble thrown into the great lake is exhausted. So it is with all sympathetic excitements—from the Dancing Dervishes, the Shaking Quakers, or the Barking Brothers, to the vast Empire of France, led frenzied over the world in the will-o’-the-wisp chase of universal sovereignty, by the fantastic will of a Napoleon. These are some of the general phenomena of sympathy, and there are many quite as extraordinary, if not as broad in what are called atmospheric or epidemic conditions, which go to prove the universality of this sympathetic law.

The distinctions between Od and Heat, Od and Electricity, as well as Od and Magnetism, have been so clearly demonstrated by the investigations of Baron Reichenbach as to leave at present no choice between the terms. Od expresses that force which, differing in many essential properties from the other two, can alone through its phenomena be reconciled with what we know of the Sympathetic or Nervous Fluid. It is therefore used as a synonym of this mysterious agency, and as conveying a far higher definition and significance than either the term Electricity or Mesmerism.

The worst and the best that the agitation begun by Mesmer has accomplished, is, to have stripped old Necromancy of its mysterious spells, by revealing something of the rationale of them, while at the same time, in unveiling its processes to the sharp eyes of modern knaves, they have been enabled to appropriate and practise them again with even more than the old success, under the new christening of “scientific experiment.” It is, I think, easily enough shown, by a minute and circumstantial comparison of the cotemporary history of the dark age of black art ascendancy in Europe, which was literally the dark age of chivalry, with that of Cotton Mather witch-burning enlightenment in New England, that the arts practised by the accused in both these countries, and at all other such periods in all other countries, were nearly identical with each other; and those familiarised to us through the doings of mesmeric manipulation, revelation, clairvoyance, spiritual knockings, &c., &c., are generally the very same, though assuming slight shades of difference, indicating some progressive development. A partial knowledge of psychological laws, which was formerly, and with great plausibility, considered altogether too dangerous pabulum for the vulgar mind, has been sown broadcast by the empiricism of this mesmeric movement, the principal oracles and expounders of which have been clearly as ignorant of the causes with which they agitated, as ever wrinkled crone of peat-smoked hovel was of the true laws of that occult palmistry, through the practice, or vague traditions of which, she finally prophesied herself into the martyrdom of the “red-hot ploughshares,” or the warm resting-place of the pot of boiling pitch. They only know that certain formulas produce certain results, and as they are blundering entirely in the dark, they mix those which have a basis in science with the crude and meaningless forms which ignorance, with its abject cunning, easily supplies. From such amalgamations have arisen the mummeries of conjuration in whatever form, and by the imprudent use of which, the credulous, simple and superstitious, are so easily “frightened from their propriety,” and thus made easy victims of more dangerous arts.

But it is a study of the fearful uses which have been made by the evil-disposed, of this partial knowledge of the laws of relation of soul to the body, that is more interesting now than these olden disguises of the same evil in more helpless forms; as now, through the mesmeric agitation, it has really attained to some gleam of causes—has now something of scientific illumination to steady and give direction to its reckless and deadly aim. In the radius of its hurtful circumference, the vicious power of the witch, fortune-teller or conjuror, was as much more circumscribed than that of the semi-scientific charlatan of clairvoyance, as the vision of the mole is less than that of the viper, which, at least, looks out into the sunshine though every cloud may impede its malignant gaze.

The relative degrees in which the Odic or sympathetic fluid may be found exhibited in the different individuals of our race, have been previously remarked in general terms. In the sexes, we most usually find the positive pole in man, who gives out, and the negative in woman, who receives and absorbs from him, the dispenser. Though this be the general rule so far as the sexes are concerned, it is by no means the universal rule for the race—since there are among men but few positive poles, or fixed centres of Odic radiation; and where such are found, they are observed to possess much of what we commonly call “influence” with or upon others. All the parties, therefore, within the circle of this sympathetic radiation, or “magnetic attraction,” as it is popularly termed, must necessarily be, relatively to this positive pole, negative poles, without regard to sex—while each of these comparatively negative poles may in turn be a positive pole, or Odic centre, to those below or of weaker nature than himself.

Those men who have been known to all humanity as prophets, poets, law-givers, discoverers, reformers, &c., are, and have been, what we mean by positive Odic poles; for while they have seemed to stand in immediate and direct communion with the spiritual source of all wisdom, they have at the same time given out the impulse thus granted, to the people by whom they are surrounded, thus acting as the chosen media of divine revelation, and from the cloudy summits of Sinais handing down the tables of the law to all the tribes.

Now there is a mighty radiation of the Odic force from these men, through which the love, wisdom, or rather will in them—or sent through them—is made operative upon the great masses of mankind; and this same radiation, in the greater or less degrees, is found emanating from a thousand different sources at the same time, affecting man for evil as well as for good; for, when we comprehend that this Odic or sympathetic force is the sole medium of communication with the spiritual and invisible world, as well as with the visible and material world, it can then be easily understood how what are called “evil” and “good spirits” should through it affect mankind. This will be fully illustrated when we observe the common conditions of health and disease. Health is good and disease is evil; and these are the two eternally antagonistic chemical forces in the universe. Health is that normal condition of the body which enables it to resist evil and maintain the proper balance of the spiritual and material elements. Disease is that abnormal condition of the body in which the integrity of the spiritual and organic functions has been destroyed through the sympathetic media by evil, and good overcome.

In either case, the balance is destroyed, and the immediate consequence may be, in the one, sudden paroxysms of fearful insanity, or in the other, sudden death, as in common apoplexy.

Thus the popular fallacy, that all things having a source in the spiritual, or rather the invisible, must of necessity be good, is in a very simple way exposed. We see there may be what are called evil, as well as good spirits, which hold communion with us; and the safest and only true general rule with regard to such matters is, that, while the good spirits are those propitious chemical forces which make themselves known to us in love, and joy, and peace, through the unbounded happiness of the normal conditions of health, the evil spirits are those vicious chemical forces, morbid delusions, and malign revelations, which are made known to us through all other diseased conditions as well as that of Clairvoyance. Remember that no such being has yet been known throughout the whole range of Mesmeric experiment as a healthy Clairvoyant, or a “subject” who has attained to the super-eminence of Clairvoyance, who was not what they fancifully term “delicate”—that is, liable to those diseases which are well known to supervene upon nervous weakness, exhaustion, or emasculation. This condition of nervous exhaustion renders them, of course, the very negation of the negative pole of sympathy, and the first person approaching them, who possesses the ordinary Odic conditions of health, is clutched hold of by their famine-struck vitality, in the agonised plea for life! life!

“Give! give!” is still the insatiable cry. They must have the Odic fluid restored, and that, in taking from your “enough,” they exhaust and undermine the holy purposes of your life to make up that deficit in their own—which loathsome vice has brought about—the “hideous selfishness of weakness” rather rejoices. The sympathetic rapporte being once established, they can at least, through this dangerous medium, live in the integrities of your life, and enjoy, both physically and spiritually, a surreptitious vitality, which, while it reflects the prevailing phenomena of your own mind and spiritual being, has, in addition, some approximation even to the physical exaltation of your higher health.

These human vampires or sponges may be, therefore, as well absorbents of the spiritual as animal vitality. Their parasitical roots may strike into the very centres of life, and their hungry suckers remorselessly draw away the virility of manhood, or the spiritual strength.

They seem to be mainly divided into two classes, one of which, born, seemingly, with but a rudimentary soul, attains to its apparent spiritual though merely mental development, by absorption of the spiritual life in others, through the Odic medium. Another class, born with a predominating spirituality based upon a feeble physique, is ravenous of animal strength, and can only live by its sympathetic absorption of the same from others, through the same pervading medium. Of the two, the first is the evil type; for, born in the gross sphere of the passions, with a vigorous organisation, but faintly illuminated at the beginning with that golden light of love which is spiritual life, the fierce half-monkey being is propelled onwards, and even upwards, by the basest of the purely animal instincts, appetites, and lusts. If such beings strive towards the light of the harmonious and the beautiful, it is not because they yearn for either the holy or the good, but because it lends a lurid charm to appetite and glorifies a lust.

The other character, in whom the spiritual predominates, whether from a natal inequality, as is very frequently the case, or from the sheer exhaustion of the physical powers, through emasculating vices, is yet, in itself, good, so far as its morbid conditions leave it an unaccountable being; but, as its revelations and utterings depend entirely upon the Odic characters and will of those from whom its strength may be derived, it can only be regarded, whether used for evil or good, as a medium. This character is the common Clairvoyant, to whom we are indebted for those strangely-mingled gleams of remote truth, with errors the most grave and injurious, which have so tended to confuse the judgment of mankind in regard to the phenomena of Clairvoyance. Such persons can be made as readily the medium of any falsehood which the knavish passions of their “Mesmerisers” may dictate, as they can be caused to announce, by a will as strong, but soul more pure, the disconnected myths of science and of history, which have so surprised the world in what are called the “Revelations” of Andrew Jackson Davis. This man belongs to our second class, and is purely “a medium” of the sympathetic fluid. His organisation is most sensibly sympathetic and delicately responsive, but is too feeble to balance his spiritual development. His case stands, therefore, as the most remarkable modern instance of what the ancients termed “vaticination;” but, as has been the case with other false prophets, his “gifts” have proved of no value, except to knaves. He was undoubtedly practised upon by a choice set of such characters; and, now that he has found in marriage a sympathetic restoration, through the physical, of its needed balance with the spiritual, he has lost his “lying gift” of prophecy.

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We have examined this man carefully, and are convinced that the whole mystery of his revelations and character may be contained in a nut-shell. He is to the sphere of intellectual and spiritual sympathy, and in a lower sense, precisely an analogous case with that of Mozart in the sphere of the musical and spiritual. When the great soul of humanity has been long—say one generation—in travail with a great thought in art, science, music, or mechanics, there is sure to be somebody born in the succeeding generation who is physically, mentally, and spiritually, the impersonation and embodiment of this thought, of which the age is in labor, and who must of necessity become, solely and singly, the expression and embodiment thereof. Thus Mozart, the infant prodigy in music, who at five years old was the pet of monarchs and the miracle of his age, continued, with no signs of precociousness, a steady and consistent development, which showed him to be indeed the embodiment of the musical inspirations of his age. His revelations in music were just as prodigious as even the rabid worshippers of the Davis revelations would imagine those to be; yet there are some most essential differences between the results of the two.

Davis, born amidst the travail of this new Mesmeric agitation, became the most sensitive organ of the sympathetic fluid in intellect, as the other had been in music; but as, in the case of Mozart, the exciting cause came from Nature, and constituted her purest and most sacred inspirations, so the inspiration of Davis came from man, with all his imperfections and subjective tendencies. The sequel has been, the inspirations of Mozart are considered now by mankind as only second to the Divine, while those of Davis are justly regarded as morbid, fragmentary, incomplete, and worthless.

The organisation of Mozart was equally sympathetic with that of Davis; but it was of that healthy tone which could only respond to nature and the natural; while the organisation of Davis belongs to that much inferior type, which, from its morbid and unbalanced conditions, can respond only to the human as the representative of nature. Such persons receive nothing direct from nature, but only through its representative, man.

It would seem as if the world were absolutely divided into two classes—the radiating and the absorbing; the first receiving from nature, and the second from man. In the first, are the holy brotherhood of prophets and the poets, and in the second, the poor slaves of sympathy—the knaves and fools—the impostors who play upon its well-known laws, and, deceiving themselves as well as others, may well be said to “know not what they do.”

We are convinced that no man, who has kept himself informed of the psychological history and progress of his race, can by any means fail to recognise at once, in the pretended “Revelations” of Davis, the mere disjecta membra of the systems so extensively promulgated by Fourier and Swedenborg. When you come to compare this fact with the additional one, that Davis, during the whole period of his “utterings,” was surrounded by groups, consisting of the disciples of Fourier and Swedenborg; as, for instance, the leading Fourierite of America was, for a time, a constant attendant upon those mysterious meetings, at which the myths of innocent Davis were formally announced from the condition of Clairvoyance, and transcribed by his keeper for the press, while the chief exponent and minister of Swedenborgianism in New York was often seated side by side with him.

Can it be possible that these men failed to comprehend, as thought after thought, principle after principle, was enunciated in their presence, which they had previously supposed to belong exclusively to their own schools, that the “revelation” was merely a sympathetic reflex of their own derived systems? It was no accident; for, as often as Fourierism predominated in “the evening lecture,” it was sure that the prime representative of Fourier was present; and when the peculiar views of Swedenborg prevailed, it was equally certain that he was forcibly represented in the conclave. Sometimes both schools were present; and on that identical occasion we have a composite metaphysics promulgated, which exhibited, most consistently, doctrines of Swedenborg and Fourier, jumbled in liberal and extraordinary confusion. This is, in epitome, about the whole history of such agitations. The weak Clairvoyant falls naturally into the hands of knaves who are superior to him in physical vitality. He becomes, first, the medium of their vague and feeble intellection; and then, as attention is attracted by the notoriety they know well how to produce, the “medium” becomes gradually surrounded by the enthusiasts of every school; and as he is brought into their various Odic spheres, he pronounces the creed of each in his morbidly illuminated language, and it sounds to the mob like inspiration.

There is no greater nonsense; men are inspired through natural laws. But this comparatively innocuous character, which we have thus far stepped aside to indicate, is nothing compared to the first specimen of this Clairvoyant type which we have classified. This, it will be remembered, is the animal born with feeble spirituality, but vigorous physique, which is, at the same time, intensely sympathetic. These, as we have said, are the infernal natures; for, possessing no life outside the lower animal passions, self is to them the close centre of all being, and their Odic sensitiveness a vampire-absorption, the horrible craving of which, not content with the mere exhaustion of the animal life of the victim, by wanton provocations, drinks up soul and mind to fill the beastly void of their own. These worse than ghouls, that live upon the dying rather than the dead, possess some fearfully dangerous and extraordinary powers.

Vampirism, as a superstition, prevailed, not many years ago, like a general pestilence, throughout the countries of Servia and Wallachia. Whole districts, infected by this horrible disease, were desolated; people grew wild with terror, and, in their savage ignorance, committed monstrous sacrilege upon the sanctities of burial. Bodies that had rested quietly in their graves for ten, twenty, and even eighty days, were dragged forth, to have stakes driven through their chests; and if any blood was found, they were burned to ashes.

The belief was, that the deceased, when living, had been bitten by a human vampire, which, coming forth from its grave by night, had sunk its white teeth in his throat, and drunk his blood, thereby causing a lingering death; in which he was also doomed to the hideous fate of becoming a vampire, after his burial.

The bodies of vampires, when dug up, presented a perfectly natural appearance; and, even in those cases where the scarfskin peeled off, a new skin was found underneath, and new nails formed on the fingers. The vital blood was found in the heart, lungs, and viscera, exhibiting the conditions of perfect health. How the vampire got out of his grave, without scratching a hole, does not appear.

Thus we find, in modern vampirism, a strange compound of ancient superstition with well-known scientific truths. The vampire is the counterpart of the ancient ghoul, with the simple transfer of the habits of the vampire-bat to its identity. These are then connected with the fact, well known to the medical profession, that persons have been buried, supposed to be dead, who, in reality, had only fallen into what is called the death-trance; and who, had they been left above ground for a sufficient period, would have probably resuscitated of themselves. That they have done so after burial, is a familiar fact; since bodies exhumed, long after, have been found to have changed their position in the coffin. How long bodies, thus inconsiderately buried, retain a resemblance to the normal conditions of life, has not been fully ascertained.

We have here the historical origin of what is called vampirism; but there are certain phenomena of this fearful infection, closely resembling those which we have attributed to the Spiritual Vampire.

Vampirism is clearly a disease of the nervous system; it being first excited through the imagination of ignorance and superstition. The nerves, then affected through the odic medium, lose their balance, and the mind constantly playing within the circle of the one thought of horror, a rapid and premature decline is the immediate consequence.

The infection of which the victim died remaining still within the odic medium of the sphere it occupied, passes into the nerves of others, who die also; and thus the disease spreads like any other epidemic. But mark—whence the true origin of this superstition of the ghoul and the vampire, so universal in the world? Is it not that mankind, everywhere, has felt, with an unconscious shuddering, the presence of the spiritual vampire? The instincts of the masses have, in their superstitions, foreshadowed all the great discoveries of science. Has it not been, that they have felt the hideous incubus always; but not being able, through any connected series of observations, to discover the real cause of their dread and suffering, have given its nearly identical attributes a “local habitation and a name” among their superstitions?

What we have termed the Spiritual Vampire, is a scientific fact—we believe as much so as the bat-vampire; and that it feeds, not alone upon the living, but upon the spiritually dead; that originally, so far as its spiritual entity is concerned, it too comes forth from its sensual charnal to feed upon the soul-blood of mankind. This may seem a horrible picture, but we cannot consent to withdraw it. These records were made under a sense of duty to mankind; and if they should ever see the light, it must be as they have been written. We dare not reveal all that we know of this thing—we can only venture to say enough to arouse men in amazement, at the realisation of what they have always known and felt to exist, without having expressed it. No mortal mind could have conceived such possibilities, even in hell, much less in actual life.

Amidst the profound securities of the best-ordered households in the world, unless a strict eye be had to such facts and phenomena as we have adverted to and shall describe, the most insidious and fatal corruptions of the bodies and souls of your children, your wives, and your sisters, may creep in, while there is no dream of wrong or danger. If we shock you, it is to put you somewhat upon your guard against the many evils, concealed under the apparent harmless approaches of the viciously-purposed manipulator, or the covert practiser upon the odic or sympathetic vitality of the pure and unsuspecting.—We will abide the issue.

Milton clearly had vampirism in his thought when he wrote—

“Clotted by contagion,

Imbodied and imbruited, till quite lost

The divine property of their first being—

Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp,

Oft seen, in charnal-vaults and sepulchres,

Lingering and sitting by a new-made grave.”

SPIRITUAL VAMPIRISM;
OR,
THE HISTORY OF ETHERIAL SOFTDOWN.

CHAPTER I.
THE GIRLHOOD OF ETHERIAL.

“Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damned?”

In a mean and sterile district of Vermont, which shall be nameless, but which exhibits on every side stretches of bare land, with here and there the variety of clumps of gnarled and stunted oaks, Etherial Softdown was born. If mountains give birth to heroes, what ought to have been the product of a low-lying land like this, on whose dreary basins the summer’s sun wilted the feeble vegetation, and the bleak winds of winter wrestled fiercely with the scrubby oaks, whose crooked and claw-like limbs seemed talons of some hideous, gaunt and reptile growth?

On the edge of one of the most desolate of these stretches, and beneath the shelter of the most ugly of these demonised oaks, were scattered the storm-blackened sheds of a miserable hamlet, in one of which, for there were no degrees in their comfortless dilapidation, the family of our heroine, the Softdowns, resided, and another yet smaller and at some distance apart from the rest, was occupied by her father, who was a shoemaker, as a workshop. This was one of those strange, out-of-the-way, starved and dismal looking places that you sometimes stumble upon in our prosperous land—which ought long since to have been deserted with the vanished cause of the temporary prosperity which had given it birth—but in which the people seem to be petrified into a morbid serenity of endurance, and look as if under the spell of some great Enchanter they awaited his awakening touch.

The child, which was the birth of a coarsely organised mother, was as drolly deformed with its squint eye and stooping shoulders as fancy could depict the elfin genius of such a scene. Dirty, bedraggled and neglected, with unkempt locks tangled and writhing like snakes about her face, and sharp, gray animal eyes gleaming from beneath, the ill-conditioned creature darted impishly hither and yon amidst the hamlet hovels, or peering from some thicket of weird oaks, started the stolid neighbors with the dread that apparitions bring.

Indeed, so wilful, unexpected and eccentric were her movements, that the people, in addition to regarding the oaf-like child with a half feeling of dread, gave her the credit of being half-witted as well. There was a hungry sharpness in her eye that made them shrink; a furious, raging, craving lust for something, they could not understand what, which startled them beyond measure; for, as in their stagnant lives, they had never been much troubled with souls themselves, they could not understand this soul-famine that so whetted those fierce eager eyes.

The father, Softdown, who appears to have been something more developed than the mother, and to have possessed a grotesque and rugged wit, more remarkable for its directness than its delicacy, became the sole instructor and companion of the distraught child, who readily acquired from him an uncouth method of enouncing trite truisms unexpectedly, which was to constitute in after life one of her chief, because most successful weapons.

Etherial early displayed a passion for acquiring not knowledge, but a facility of gibberish, which proved exhausting enough to the shallow receptacles around her, especially as her mode of getting at the names and properties of things so closely resembled the monkey’s method of studying physical laws. She had first to burn her fingers before she could be made to comprehend that fire was hot, but that was enough about fire for this wise child; she remembered it ever after as a physical sensation, and therefore it had ever after a name for her; and so with all other experiences, they were to her sensational, not spiritual or intellectual. The name of a truth could come to her with great vividness through a blow or pain of whatever character that might be purely physical, but through no higher senses, for these she did not yet possess. Of a moral sense she seemed now to develop no more consciousness than any other wild animal, but in her the memory of sensation took the place of mind and soul.

Thus passed the girlhood of our slattern oaf—shy and sullen—avoiding others herself, and gladly avoided by them, with the single exception of her father, from whom her strong imitative or sympathetic faculty was daily acquiring a rough, keen readiness of repartee, in the use of which she found abundant home-practice in defending herself against the smarting malignity of the matron Softdown, who charmingly combined in her person and habits all and singly the cleanly graces of the fishwife.

At sixteen, with no advance in personal loveliness, with passions fiercely developed, a mind nearly utterly blank, a taste for tawdry finery quite as drolly crude as that displayed by the plantation negresses of the South, and manners so fantastically awkward and eccentric as to leave the general impression that she was underwitted, Etherial suddenly married a lusty and good-looking young Quaker, threw off her bedraggled plumes, and became a member of that prim order.

Now her career commences in earnest, for this was the first great step in her life in which she seems to have attained to some gleams of the knowledge of that extraordinary power of Odic irradiation and absorption which was afterwards to be exercised with such remarkable results.

She did not make her great discovery without comprehending its meaning quickly. She first perceived that, day by day, she grew more comely to look upon—that her figure was becoming erect, and losing its harsh angularities—the pitiless obliquity of her features growing more reconciled to harmonious lines—and last, and most astounding, that the immediate result of the contact of marriage had been a rapid increase of her own spiritual and mental illumination, accompanied as well by a corresponding decline on the part of the husband in both these respects.

Here was a secret for you with a vengeance! Like an electric flash, a new light burst upon Etherial; and, as there was only one feeling of which her being was capable towards man, she chuckled over the delicious secret which now opened out before her with a terrible gloating.

Glorious discovery! Hah! the spiritual vampire might feed on his strength—might grow strong on this cannibalism of the soul! and what of him if she dragged him down into idiocy? Served him right! Did Etherial care that his spiritual death must be her life? She laughed and screamed with the joy of unutterable ferocity! Eureka! Eureka! They shall all be my slaves! They taunt me with being born without a soul, with being underwitted! I shall devour souls hereafter by the hundreds! I shall grow fat upon them! We shall see who has the wit! Their thoughts shall be my thoughts, their brains shall work for me, their spirits shall inform my frame! Ah, glorious! glorious! I shall live on souls hereafter! I shall go up and down in the land, seeking whom I may devour! Delicious! Delectable Etherial!

CHAPTER II.
SCENES IN THE GOTHAM CARAVANSARIE.

And all around her, shapes, wizard and brute,

Laughing and wailing, grovelling, serpentine,

Showing tooth, tusk, and venom-bag, and sting!

O, such deformities!

Endymion.

In Barclay Street, New York, years ago, flourished, at No. 63, that famous caravansarie of all the most rabid wild animals on the Continent, who styled themselves Reformers and New-light People, Come-outers, Vegetarians, Abolitionists, Amalgamationists, &c. &c., well known to fame as the “Graham House.” Here, any fine morning, at the breakfast-table, you might meet a dozen or so of the most boisterous of the then existing or embryo Reform notorieties of the day. Mark, we say notorieties, for that is the word.

From the Meglatherium Oracle, whose monstrous head, covered with a mouldy excrescence, answering for hair, which gave it most the seeming of a huge swamp-born fungus of a night—who sat bolting his hard-boiled eggs by the dozen, with bran-bread in proportion, washing them down with pints of diluted parched-corn coffee—even to the most meagre, hungry-eyed, and talon-fingered of the soul-starved World-Reformers, that stooped forward amidst the babble, and, between huge gulps of hot meal mush, croaked forth his orphic words—they were all one and alike—the mutterers of myths made yet more misty by their parrot-mouthings of them!

Here every crude, ungainly crotchet that ever possessed ignorant and presumptuous brains; here every wild and unbroken hobby that ever driveller or madman rode, was urged together, pell-mell, in a loud-voiced gabbling chaos. Here the negro squared his uncouth and musky-ebon personalities beside the fair, frail form of some lean, rectangular-figured spinster-devotee of amalgamation from New England.

Here the hollow-eyed bony spectre of an old bran-bread disciple stared, in the grim ecstacy of anticipation, at the ruddy cheeks of the new convert opposite, whose lymphatic, well-conditioned corporation shivered with affright, as he met those ravin-lit eyes, and a vague sense of their awful meaning first possessed him, as his furtive glance took in the sterile “spread” upon the table, to which he had been ostentatiously summoned for “a feast.”

Here some Come-outer Quaker, with what had been, at best, cropped hair, might be seen with the crop now shaven yet more close to his bullet-head, in sign of his greater accession in spiritual strength beyond the heathen he had left behind, sitting side by side with some New-light or Phalanxterian apostle, with his long, sandy, carroty, or rather golden locks, as he chooses to style them, cultivated down his back in a ludicrously impious emulation of the revered “Christ Head” of the old Italian painters.

Here the blustering peace-man and professed non-resistant, railed with a noisy insolence, rendered more insufferably insulting in the precise ratio of exemption from personal accountability claimed by his pusillanimous doctrines. Here too, a notorious Abolitionist, with his tallow-skinned and generally-disgusting face, roared through gross lips his vulgar anathemas against the South, which had foolishly canonised this soulless and meddlesome non-resistant ruffian, in expressing their readiness to hang him, should he be caught within their territory.

Here the weak and puling sectary of some milk-and-water creed rolled up his rheumy eyes amidst the din, and sighed for horror of a “sad, wicked world.” Here the sharp animal eyes, the cool effrontery and hard-faced impudence of ignoramus Professors of all sorts of occult sciences, ologies, and isms, met you, with hungry glances that seemed searching for “the green” in your eye; and mingled with the whole, a sufficiently spicy sprinkle of feminine “Professors,” of the same class, whose bold looks and sensual faces were quite sufficient offsets to the extreme etherialisation of their spiritualized doctrines.

Here, in a word, the blank and ever-shocking glare of harmless and positive idiocy absolutely would escape notice at all, or be mistaken for the solid repose of common sense, in contrast with the unnatural sultry wildness of the prevailing and predominating expression!

But this menagerie of mad people held caged, in one of its upper rooms, the object of immediate interest. On entering the apartment, which was an ordinary boarding-house bedchamber, a scene at once shocking and startling was presented. A female, seemingly about thirty-three, was stretched upon a low cot-bed, near the middle of the floor, while on the bed and upon the floor were scattered napkins, which appeared deeply saturated with blood, with which the pillow-case and sheet were also stained. A napkin was pressed with a convulsive clutch of the hands to her mouth, into which, with a low, suffocating cough, which now and then broke the silence, she seemed to be throwing up quantities of blood from what appeared an alarming hemorrhage.

A gentleman, whose neat apparel and fresh benevolent face somehow spoke “physician!” leaned over the woman, with an expression of anxiety, which appeared to be subdued by great effort of a trained will. He bent lower, and in an almost whispered voice, said:

“My dear madam, you must restrain yourself. This hemorrhage continues beyond the reach of any remedies, so long as you permit this violent excitement of your maternal feelings to continue. Let me exhort you to patience—to bear the necessary evils of your unfortunate condition with more patience!”

The only answer was a slow despairing shake of the head, accompanied by a deep hysterical groan, which seemed to flood the napkin at her mouth with a fresh effusion of blood, which now trickled between her fingers and down upon her breast. The humane physician turned, with an uncontrollable expression of horrified sympathy and alarm upon his face, and snatching a clean napkin from the table, gently removed the saturated cloth from the clutching pressure of her fingers, and tenderly wiping the blood from her mouth and person, left the clean one in her grasp.

“Be calm! be calm—I pray you! you must some day escape his persecutions. You have friends; they will assist you to obtain a divorce yet, and rescue your child from his clutches. Do, pray now, be calm!” The voice of the good man trembled with emotion while he spoke, and the perspiration started from his forehead.

At this instant the door was suddenly thrown open, and a tall, gaunt man, with a very small round head, leaden eyes, and a wide ungainly mouth, with a projecting under jaw, singularly expressive of animal stolidity, paused on the threshold and coolly looked around the room. The woman sprang forward at the sight, as if to rise, while a fresh gush of blood poured from her mouth, bedabbling her fingers and the sheet. The physician instinctively seized her to prevent her rising, but, resisting the pressure by which he gently strove to restore her head to the pillow, she retained her half-erect position, and with eyes that had suddenly become strangely distorted, or awry in their sockets, she glared towards the intruder for an instant, and then slowly raising her flickering hand, which dripped with her own blood, she pointed at him, and muttered, in a sepulchral voice, that, besides, seemed choking:

“That is he! see him! see him! There stands the monster who would rob me of my babe, as he daily robs me of money.” Here the blood gushed up again, and she was for a moment suffocated into silence, as the object of her denunciation stood perfectly unmoved, while a cold smile half lit his leaden eyes. This seemed to fill the apparently dying woman with renewed and hysterical life. She raised herself yet more erect, and still pointing with her bloody, quivering finger, while her head tossed to and fro, and the distorted eyes glared staringly out before her, she spoke in a gasping, uncertain way, as if communing with herself. “The wretch taunts me! my murderer dares to sneer! O God! must this always continue? must that brute always follow me up and down in the land, to rob me of the money that I earn—to be my tyrant, my jailor! He will not give me money to pay postage even, out of that I earn abundantly, while he is earning nothing. He will not give me clothes to keep me decent, while I earn enough. He will not give my child shoes to wear, though he is trying to take her from me!”

“That is a lie, Etherial! you know I gave the child a new pair yesterday!” gruffly interposed the man at this stage of the deeply tragic soliloquy, while he stepped forward towards the bed. A choking scream followed, and the blood was spattered over the spread as she fell back screaming—

“Take him away! take him away! He is killing me with his brutality!” and then her head sank in sudden collapse upon the pillow, and the face, which had heretofore looked singularly natural in color, for one in such a dreadful strait from hemorrhage, turned livid pale, while the blood continued to pour upon the pillow from the corners of the relaxed mouth.

The poor physician, whose frame had been shivering with intense excitement during this interview, sprang erect, as the form of what he supposed to be a corpse fell heavily from his arms, and with the natural indignation of a feeling man, fully roused at what he considered the murderous brutality of the husband, rushed forward, and seizing him furiously by the collar, shook and choked him in a perfect ecstacy of rage, shouting, at the same time—

“Unnatural beast! monster! You have killed that poor child at last! murdered your own wife, whom you swore to nourish and protect! Infernal villain! you ought to be drawn and quartered—hanging is too good for you! You saw the terrible condition of the poor victim of your brutalities when you came, yet you persisted! In the name of humanity, I send you hence! Death is too light punishment for you!” and he hurled the unresisting wretch—who, by this time, had grown perfectly black in the face under the rough handling of this roused and indeed infuriate humanity—staggering out of the door—and closing it upon him, he proceeded to apply such restoratives as on an examination the real condition of the patient suggested.

A short and anxious investigation proved it to be rather a state of syncope than actual death; and, with a full return of all his professional caution, skill and coolness, he applied himself to the restoration of his patient, with a heart greatly relieved by the discovery that the result he so much dreaded was not yet, and hugging to his kindly breast the consolation “while there is life there is hope!” He paid no attention to clamorous knocks for admission and loud-talking excitement, which the violence of the preceding scene had no doubt caused in alarming the house. In a short time the good doctor cautiously unbolted the door and came forth from the room, treading as though on egg-shells. After leaving careful instructions with the landlady that his patient, who now slept, should under no pretence be disturbed, most especially by the husband, until his return, as her present repose might prove a matter of life and death, he left the house, promising to call again in two hours.

For one hour the woman lay calm and motionless on her gory bed, as if in catalepsy, when to a low, peculiar knock at the door, she sprang up, wide awake, and in the apparent full possession of her faculties.

“Who?” she asked, in a quick, firm tone, as she threw the hair back from her eyes.

To the low response, “I, love!” she stepped quickly from the bed and snatched a shawl from the back of a chair, and by several rapid sideway movements of her feet at the same time, thrust the bloody napkins which strewed the floor beneath the bed, where they would be out of sight, and by a movement almost as swift, threw a clean “spread” over the blood-stained pillows and sheet, then drawing her large shawl closely over the stained dressing-gown in which she had risen, she rushed first to the glass, and smoothed her hair with an activity that was positively amazing, and then to the door, which she unbolted on the inside—showing that she must have risen to bolt it immediately as the doctor passed out—and admitted a man who was in waiting.

“Ah, my soul’s sister! my Heaven-bride! how is thy spiritual strength this evening?” and at the same time, as her yielding form sank into his outspread arms, he pressed her lips with his, adding, “I salute thy chaste spirit!”

“Brother of my soul, I was weary, but now I am at rest. I was wounded and fainting by the way, but the good Samaritan has come!” and she turned her eyes upward to his with a melting expression of confiding abandon.

“Angel!” accompanied by a closer and convulsive clasp, was the response.

“What do they say of poor me again, to-day, those cruel wicked people outside?” she asked, with eyes still reverentially upraised to his, as they moved slowly with clasped arms towards the cot, on the side of which they sat, she still leaning against his bosom.

“My good sister, they say what evil spirits always prompt men to say of the good, who, like the Prophets, are sent to be stoned and persecuted on earth. You should not regard such. There are those who know you in the spirit, to whom it has been revealed through the spiritual sense, that you are good and true, as well as in the right, and through such, you will find strength of the Father.”

“Oh, you are so strong in spiritual mightiness that you do not sympathise with the weaknesses of we humbler mortals! I wonder, indeed, how you can forgive them?” and her downcast eyes were furtively raised to his. The man wore his hair thrown back over his head and behind his ears. He drew himself up slightly at this, and stroked back his locks, then placing his hand with patriarchal solemnity upon her bowed head, proceeded in a somewhat louder tone. “My simple child—my soul-sister, I should say, you are hardly upon the threshold of the true wisdom. Your knowledge of the law of spiritual correspondence is yet too incomplete for you to understand how entirely good has been mistaken for evil, and evil confounded with good in the world. For instance—it is called evil by the ignorant world, for a brother man to caress thee in the spirit as I have caressed thee but now. The imaginations of a world that lieth in evil are impure. ‘Evil to him who evil thinks!’ The great doctrine of correspondence teaches that there are two lives—the spiritual and the animal. The passions of the animal are in the fleshly lusts; those of the spiritual are in no wise such, they are in the Heavenly sphere, they are of love and wisdom. Thus, my caress in this Heavenly sphere is of no sin to thee, for by and through it I convey to you, my spiritual sister, the strength of love and wisdom for which your heart yearns. Thus—”

As he stooped his head to renew the unresisted caress, the door flew open again, and the man with the wide mouth, the hideous chin and the leaden eye, stood again upon the threshold, and as the affrighted pair looked up they saw he was backed by the curious faces of half-a-dozen chambermaids, jealous of the honor of the house, flanked by the indignant landlady and a score of prying, curious, sharp-eyed faces, which might be recognised at a glance as belonging to those pickled seraphs of reform, known as “free-spoken” spinsters in New England.

“There, they are at it!” shouted the man with the gaping mouth. “I told you so! I told you that Professor was always kissing her!”

“Yes!”

“There they are, sure enough!”

“I always thought so!”

“The honor of my house!” bristled the landlady, striding forward. “I did not expect this of you, Professor!”

“Madam!” said the gentleman with his hair behind his ears, striding forward as he released the suddenly collapsed and seemingly lifeless form he had just held within his embrace, and which fell back now heavily upon the pillow-spread, which was instantly discolored by a new gush of blood from the mouth. “I was administering, with all my zeal, spiritual comfort to this poor, sick and dying sister, when you burst in! See her condition now!”

He waved his hand towards the tragic figure. “The Professor” occupied a parlor on the first floor, beside two bed-rooms adjoining this, and being on the palmy heights of his renown and plenitude of purse, it was not convenient for the landlady to quarrel with him at present. “Ah, if that is the case, Professor, I beg you to pardon us. The husband of this woman has misrepresented you and your beneficent motives, and accuses you of all sorts of improprieties. We came up, at his urgency, to see for ourselves, and the shocking condition in which we find her now, proves that the ravings of the husband are, as she has always represented them, insane.”

“I’ve seen you kissing her before!” roared the husband, advancing threateningly upon the Professor, who, however spiritual in creed, did not now appear particularly spirited, as he turned very pale, retreated backwards, and holding up his two trembling hands imploringly, exclaimed—“Hold! hold! my dear brother! It was a spiritual kiss! I meant you no harm, nor that angel who lies there dying! Our kiss was pure and holy as the new snow. Hold him! hold him! Don’t let him hurt me! I am a non-resistant! I am for peace!”

“Your holy kisses! I don’t believe in your holy kisses!” gnashed the enraged husband, still following him up with warlike demonstrations; but here the easily appeased landlady interposed once more, to save the honor of her house in preventing a fight.

“No blows in my house!” she shrieked, as she threw herself between the parties. “The Professor is a man of God, and shall not be abused here; shame on you, Aminadab, with your poor, persecuted wife there, dying before your face! Everybody will believe what she says about your persecutions now!”

“Bah, you don’t know that woman! she’s no more dying than you are!” grunted the fellow, whose wrath fortunately seemed to be of that kind that a straw might turn it aside. All the women rolled up their eyes and lifted their two hands at this speech.

“What a brute!”

“The horrid, murdering wretch! and she bleeding at the mouth, and from the lungs, too!”

“Lord save the poor woman’s soul, with a husband like that!”

And other speeches of like character were ejaculated by all the women present.

At this moment a fresh effusion of blood, accompanied by a low groan, from the mouth of the suffering patient, flooded the clean spread with its purple current, and the horrified females rushed from the room, screaming—

“He’s killed her at last, poor thing!”

“Where’s the doctor?”

“She’s dying of his brutality—run for the doctor!” At this moment, with a hasty and heavy step, that gentleman was heard advancing along the passage, followed by a crowd of pale, frightened-looking women. He strode into the room.

“What now?—what’s to pay?” and his eye fell on the trembling form of the brutal husband, who had by no means forgotten the rough handling he had received, and now skulked and quailed like a whipped cur, as his eye saw the instant thunder darken on the brow of the doughty doctor.

“You here again—you brutal fellow? I shall instantly bind you over to keep the peace toward this unfortunate woman, whose life you are daily endangering by your brutalities. Take yourself off, sir!” Aminadab waited for no second invitation, but availed himself of the open doorway.

Without noticing the spiritual professor, who had drawn himself into as small space as possible in one corner, the good man advanced to the side of his patient with an anxious, flurried manner.

“What can that besotted wretch have been doing to her again?” and he gently placed his fingers upon her pulse, and shook his head gravely as he did so.

“Very low! very low, indeed!—nearly absolute syncope again! This is horrible! How sorry I am that I was compelled to leave her for a moment.”

“Is she really in danger, doctor?” asked the spiritual professor, advancing with recovered assurance.

“Who are you, sir?” he said, looking up sharply. “One of these officious fools, I suppose?” Then glancing his eye around at the crowded doorway, he straightened himself hastily, and exclaimed—

“Leave the room, all of you—she must be quiet—I wish to be alone with my patient! Leave the room, sir, I say!” in a sterner voice, as the spiritual professor hesitated on his backward retreat.

“I—I—I p-pro-test against the impropriety!” he stammered forth, looking back at the women, with a very pale face, as he accelerated his backward movement before the steady stride of the resolute doctor.

“Out with you, sir—I will answer for the proprieties in this case!”

The door was slammed in the ashy face of the spiritual professor, and securely doubled-locked before the doctor returned to the bedside of his patient.

The bleeding from the mouth had now ceased. All the usual remedies in such cases having so far entirely failed, the puzzled doctor had come to the final conclusion that the hemorrhage—be its seat where it might—was only to be subdued by a restoration of the patient to the most perfect repose. Sleep, calm, unbroken sleep, to his sagacious judgment and sensibilities, seemed to offer the sole alternative to death. He had been impressed by his patient that her constitutional tendencies were, by a sad inheritance, towards consumption, and the loss from the lungs, of such quantities of blood as he had witnessed, was well calculated to fill his professional mind with horror and dread. The case had thus appeared to him a fearfully uncertain and delicate one, and this sense may fully account for the stern and unusual procedure of turning even the husband out of the room on the two occasions we have mentioned.

As her physician, he felt himself bound to protect his helpless patient against those moral causes of irritation which he had been led to believe existed, not only from her reluctant disclosures, but from what he had himself witnessed. Believing that her beastly husband was the chief and immediate cause of this fatal irritation, he had felt himself justified in his rough course towards him, and was now fully and resolutely determined to protect what he considered a death-bed—providentially thrown into his charge—inviolate from farther annoyance, from whatever quarter, at least so long as he held the professional responsibility. In this resolute feeling, and as the day was warm, he threw off his coat, raised all the windows, and sat himself quietly down beside his patient to watch for results.

The eyes of the kind man very naturally rested upon the object of his solicitude, and after the first excitement of anxiety was over, and he had settled calmly into a contemplative mood, he first became conscious that there was something strangely fascinating in the position of the nearly inanimate figure. He had never before thought of the being before him as other than a very plain, but much-afflicted woman, by whose evident physical calamities, no less than her private sufferings, he had been strongly interested.

She had told him her own story, and he had believed her, thinking he saw confirmation enough in the conduct of those she accused of ill-treatment; but the idea of regarding her as attractive in any material sense, had never for an instant crossed his pure soul. Now there was an indescribable something in her attitude, so expressive of passion, that, in the pulseless silence, he felt himself blush to have recognised it.

Her arms, which he now remembered to have been bare in all his late interviews with her, were exquisitely rounded and beautifully white, and he could not but wonder that he had not before observed the strange contrast between them and the plain weather-beaten face. They looked startlingly voluptuous now, contrasted with the pallid cheek which rested on them, and the glossy folds of dark hair in which they were entangled. So strikingly indeed was this expression conveyed, that even the purple stains of blood upon the spread beneath would not divest him of the dangerous illusion. The good doctor felt the blood mount to his forehead in the shame of deep humiliation as he recognised in himself this wandering of thought.

What! could it be that one so habitually pure in feeling as he, could permit the intrusion at such an hour of impure associations? Such things were unknown to his life, so disinterested, so spotless, so humane. What could it be that had caused such feelings to possess him thus unusually? It could not be possible she was conscious of the position in which her body was thrown. Was there some strange spell about this woman—some mysterious power of sphere emanating from that still form, that crept into his blood and brain with the evil glow of these unnatural fires?

The poor doctor shuddered as he turned aside from the bed, and, with a soft step, glided to the window, and there seating himself, strove to recover the command of his thoughts by distracting them with other objects in the busy street.

The good man was on grievous terms with himself, as he continued to beat the devil’s tattoo on the window-sill with his heavy fingers. He felt alarmed, nay, even guilty. He knew not why. We shall see!

CHAPTER III.
THE SYREN AND THE MOB.

And after all the raskal many ran,

Heaped together in rude rabblement.

Spenser.

What intricate impeach is this?—

I think you all have drunk of Circe’s cup!

Shakspeare.

The woman continued, with calm, regular breathings, to sleep for several hours. The dusk of evening had now closed in, and yet her patient guardian sat silently watching her motionless figure. A long and serene self-communion had gradually restored the excellent doctor to his ordinary equanimity, and he now, with untiring vigilance, awaited the changes that might supervene in the condition of the patient.

After all his thinking on the subject, he found himself now no nearer comprehending the cause of the late unwonted disturbance of his habitual serenity than at the beginning. He had dealt harshly with himself, in endeavoring to account for it, and never dreamed of reproaching the feeble and wretched being before him, as in any degree the conscious agent of what he considered a weakness unpardonable in himself.

With the natural proclivity of generous souls towards the extremes, he had, in the plenitude of his self-reproach, proceeded to exalt the sleeping woman into an earth-visiting angel with wounded wings, the spotless purity of which the breath of his darkened thought had soiled. The poor, good-hearted doctor!

The silence of the room was now broken by a low exclamation of fright, accompanied by a slight movement of the patient. The doctor sprang forward softly to the bedside.

“Who?—what?—where am I? What has been happening?” asked the woman, with an expression of bewilderment and alarm.

“Nothing! nothing, my dear madam! I am here—you are safe—but you must not talk.”

“Where is he? is he gone?” she persisted in a wild, terrified manner.

“Yes, he is gone. He shall not come back to disturb you again. You must be quiet now, and get well. Please be calm, and trust in me.”

“Trust in thee?” said the patient, in a voice which had instantly lost its vague tone. “Trust in thee, thou minister of light, who hast come to my darkened pillow, to my bloody death-bed, to console me!” and here she clutched his hand. “Trust thee—I would trust thee as I trust God!” and she pressed his hand to her heart.

“You must be silent, madam,” urged the physician, endeavoring to extricate his imprisoned hand, for he felt strange tinglings along his veins, which alarmed his now penitent and vigilant spirit. She only shook her head, and clung with yet greater tenacity to his hand, and then, first raising it to her lips with a reverential kiss, she placed it upon the top of her head, with the palm outstretched, and signified her desire that he should keep it there, with a smile of entire beatitude. The doctor barely knew enough of mesmeric manipulations, to understand that this laying-on of hands was commonly resorted to among the believers in the science, as a remedy for nervous headache. He could see no harm in the innocent formula, if it assisted the imagination in throwing off pain, and he very willingly humored his poor patient, in permitting his hand to remain there.

In a moment or two a singular change came over the face and general physical expression of the woman, and the doctor, who had witnessed something of mesmeric phenomena, instantly recognised this as clearly presenting all the symptoms of such a case. He had mesmerised her by a touch, and it was not without a thrill of vague wonder that he awaited further developments.

There was a perfect silence of ten minutes’ duration, when the mesmerised patient began moving her lips as if in the effort to articulate. The curiosity of the doctor was now fully aroused—his will became concentrated—he desired to hear her speak; in his unconscious eagerness, he willed that she should do so with all the energy of his firm nature; and speak she did.

“Happy! happy! Ah, I am content in this pure sphere! My soul can rest here!” a long pause, then suddenly a shudder vibrated through her frame, and she shrank back as one appalled by some spectral horror.

“Ha! it is all dark now! I see! I see! his hand is red! red! red! red! There is murder on this soul!”

The doctor sprang up and back as if he had been shot. His face grew livid pale, and he trembled in every joint, while with chattering teeth he stammered—

“Woman! Woman, how know you this?”

“I see it there—that huge red hand! Now all is red! There! there! I felt it must be so! The pale and golden light breaks through! It spreads! It fills and covers everything! His heart did no murder—it was his hand! He can be redeemed! This soul is pure!”

The poor doctor sank upon his chair and groaned heavily, while he covered his face with his hands. He spoke, in a few moments, in an almost inaudible tone, to himself, while the woman, who had suddenly opened her eyes, turned her head slightly, and watched him with a sharp attention.

“Alas! alas! how came this strange being in possession of the fatal secret of my life? I believed it buried in the oblivion of thirty years. My life of dedication to humanity, since, I thought might have atoned for that quick sad deed! Yes! I struck him! O, my God—I struck him! but the provocation was most fearful! Woman, who and what are you, that you should know this thing?” and with a vehement gesture he jerked his hands from before his eyes, and turning swiftly upon her, he met the keen, still glance of those watchful eyes, which shone through the subdued light of the room, steadily upon him. The doctor was astounded! He sprang to his feet again, exclaiming angrily—

“What shallow trick is this? You seemed but now in the mesmeric sleep, and mouthed to me concerning my past life, and here you are, wide awake! How came you with the secrets of my life?”

The woman answered feebly, and with a sob that at once touched the gentle-hearted doctor, and turned aside his wrath—

“You took your hand away—you would not let me speak. Place your hand upon my head again, and I will tell you all.”

The troubled doctor re-seated himself with a shuddering reluctance, and renewed the manipulation.

In a few moments she appeared again to have sank into the sleep, and commenced in that slow, fragmentary manner supposed to be peculiar to such conditions:

“I see! The dark shadow is on this soul again! It is of anger and suspicion—they are both evil spirits! They strive to make it wrong the innocent! It is too holy and pure to yield! I see the golden light fill all again! The bloody hand is gone. No stain of crime remains upon this soul. It will be pardoned of God. This soul needs only human love. Through love it can be made free before God! All the past will be forgiven then—the red stains will fade! A sudden anger made it sin. Love can only intercede for this sin. Love will intercede! It will be saved!”

Here her voice became subdued into indistinct mutterings, and the doctor drew a long breath as he withdrew his hand—

“Singular woman! How could all this have been revealed to her? She must commune with spirits in this state. My story is not known to any here. I never saw or heard of her, until sent for as a physician, to visit her in this house. Strange that this fearfully passionate and repented deed should thus rise up in my path, thousands of miles away, amidst strangers, who can know nothing of me! Oh, my God! my God! Thou art indeed vengeful and just!” and the miserable man clasped his hands before his eyes and moaned. “It was my first draught of love and life. He dashed it! I was delirious in my joy, while the beams rained from her eyes into my hungry soul—hungry of beauty and of bliss. He dashed it all, and in the hot blood of my darkened madness I slew him! Oh, I slew him! His shadow, that can never be appeased, though I have given body, and soul, and substance, to relieving the sufferings of my race since that unhappy hour—it rises here again! It haunts me! Yes! yes! I feel that love alone can make me strong once more, to bear such tortures! But have I not denied myself such dreams? Have I not with dedicated heart walked humbly since in self-denying ways? Have I not clothed the orphan, fed the poor and nursed the sick? Have I not ministered amidst pestilence, and held my life as of none account that I might bring good to others? Can I be forgiven? No! no! The Pharisee recounts his holy deeds and thanks God that his life is not sinful as another man! I am not to be forgiven! I shall never know those dreams of love!”

The strong man bowed his frame and shook with agony. Could he but have looked up, a keen, quick gleam from the eyes which had been so steadily fixed upon him during this painful soliloquy, would have struck him as conveying the ecstacy of a sainted spirit over a soul repentant—or of some other feeling quite as exultant.

This curious scene was, however, most unexpectedly interrupted at this moment, by a loud yelling from the street below. The clamor was so sudden, and yet so angrily harsh, that both parties sprang forward in the alarm it caused—the woman, springing up into a sitting posture on the bed, and the doctor to go to the window.

“What is it?” she exclaimed wildly, as she tossed back her hair. “What do these cruel people want to do to me now?”

The doctor, who saw at a glance the meaning of what was going on below, and the necessity of keeping his patient cool, turned to her, with a very quiet expression—

“Do not be alarmed, madam. It is merely some disorderly gathering of rowdies, in the street below. There is no danger to you—only do not get excited, or you will bleed again. I am here to protect you.”

“Then I am safe!” was the fervid response, which, however, was followed by a roar so sullen and portentous, from the infuriated mob underneath, as to leave some doubt of its truth even upon the mind of the doctor.

“Down with the amalgamation den!”

“Down with the saw-dust palace!”

“Tear it down!”

“Let’s lynch the wretches!”

The response to speeches of this sort, from single voices, would be a simultaneous burst of approbation from the great crowd, and a trampling and rush to get nearer the building. It seemed a formidable sight, indeed, to the doctor, as he looked down upon this living mass of men, surging like huge waves tossed against some cliff, while the torches, that many of them bore, glared fitfully upon the upturned, angry faces.

A powerful voice, which rose above all the tumult, exclaimed with a hoarse oath, as the speaker turned for an instant towards the crowd, from the top of the front steps—

“Let us burst open the door and lynch every white person found with a negro. Here goes for the door!” and he threw himself furiously against it, while a perfect thunder-crash of roars attested the approbation of the dangerous mob. The door resisted for a moment, when there was a sudden yell from the outside of the mob, nearly a square distant—

“Here! here’s what’ll do it! pass ’em on!” and the alarmed doctor saw immediately the portentous gleam of fire-axes, which were being passed over the heads of the crowd towards the door, and in another instant the crash of the cutting would commence. The doctor, as we have seen, was a very prompt man. He thrust his head out of the window, and in a loud, commanding voice, shouted—

“Stop!”

The man at the door, who had just received the axe, and was in the act of wielding it, paused for an instant, to look up, while the whole sea of faces was raised toward the window, amidst a moment’s silence, of which the doctor instantly availed himself—

“Gentlemen, do you war upon women? I have a female patient here, in this room, at the point of death! If you proceed, you will kill her!”

“Who is she?” shouted some one, while another voice, in a derisive tone, yelled out amidst screams of laughter—

“Is she Rose? Rose? de coal-brack Rose? I wish I may be shot if I don’t lub Rose!”

Amidst the thunders which followed, some one shouted from a distant part of the mob, to the man with the axe—

“Go on, Jim! It’s all pretence with their sick women!”

“Down with the door—they don’t escape us that way! Look out for your bones, old covey, when we catch you!”

The axe was again swung back, but the doughty doctor still persisted—

“Stop!” he shouted again, in a tone so startling for energy of command, that the axe was again lowered.

“Are you Americans? Have you mothers and sisters?”

“Yes, but they ain’t black gals!” gibed one of the mob, and set the rest into a roar once again.

“I appeal to you as men—as brothers and fathers, do not murder my poor patient!”

“Who is that noisy fellow?” bellowed a brutal voice below.

“I am a physician! I have nothing to do with this house or its principles; I only beg to be permitted to save my patient!”

“What is your name, I say?” bellowed the hoarse man again. “Out with it! We’ll know you—some of us!”

The name was mentioned. There was a momentary pause, and a low murmur ran through the crowd; then shout after shout of applauding huzzas.

“We know you!”

“Just like him!”

“Noble fellow!”

“The good doctor! Huzza! huzza!”

And so the cry went up on all sides, for the doctor’s reputation for benevolence was as wide as that of John Jacob Astor for the opposite trait.

There seemed to be a vehement consultation among what appeared the leaders of the mob, which lasted but for a moment or two, when one who stood upon the top step looked up, and in a firm, respectful voice, said to the doctor—

“It’s all right, sir, about you! We shall let the women pass out! But you must clear the house of them!”

“But it is dangerous to move my patient.”

“We cannot help that, doctor; we do this for your sake, not theirs, for they ought every one of them to be burned, and we are determined to abate the nuisance of this house. So hurry them along here quick, for the boys will not keep quiet long.”

“Yes, hurry them women along; we’ll let them go this time.”

“All but that lecturing lady (?), who says that she would as soon marry a negro as a white man!”

“Yes, all but her; we want to be rid of such creatures; let’s duck her in the Hudson.”

“No, boys, we will make no distinction. We have promised—let the woman go.”

“Down with the lecturing women and their black lovers!”

“Duck the hag! we’ll wash off the scent for her!”

Cries such as these convinced the doctor that indeed no time was to be lost, particularly as the sound of the axe was now heard below in good earnest. Approaching the bed hastily, he took the shivering form of the panic-stricken woman, who had heard distinctly these last ominous cries, into his arms. She clutched him with a desperate grip, while he hurried down the stairs.

On the way, he met the Spiritual Professor in the passage, surrounded by the women of the house, who were clustered about him, in the seemingly vain hope of obtaining from him something of that ethereal consolation and strength, of which he was the so much vaunted Professor. Indeed, he himself now seemed the most woful, of all the whimpering, terrified group, in want of any kind of strength, whether spiritual or otherwise; and his teeth literally chattered, as he clutched at the doctor’s passing arm.

“Wh—wh—what shall we do? They mean to burn the house, don’t they?”

“Do?” said the doctor, sternly, shaking off his grasp. “Try and be a man, if you’ve got it in you! Get these women out of the house, and take yourself off on your spiritual legs as fast as you can, or you may make some ugly acquaintances.”

The Professor still clung to his skirts.

“Oh Lord! the doctrine of correspondences does not sanction—”

“Go to the devil, with your correspondence, or I shall kick you out of my path!” roared the angry doctor, while the snivelling Professor, more alarmed than ever, slunk aside to let him pass. The crash and clatter from below now announced that the mob had effected an entrance from the street, and leaving the women, all screaming at the top of their lungs, around their doughty spiritual guide, he rushed on with his burden towards the front entrance, which had thus been taken by storm, and was now rapidly filling with excited men. Some were seizing the furniture, which they began to demolish, while others hurried forward to intercept him.

“It is the sick woman. Remember your promise; let me pass.”

“Yes, that’s the good doctor; let him pass, boys.”

“No, not yet!” roared a burly-looking ruffian, pressing through the throng. “We must see who it is he has got there. Who is she?” and he roughly dragged aside the shawl that partially covered her face.

“Monster!” shouted the excited doctor, “the woman is dying! Make way! Let me pass!”

“Not so fast!” said the ruffian, resisting his forward rush. “I shall see! I shall see! Boys, here she is! By G—d, this is she, that lecture-woman; she wants to marry a nigger, hah! We won’t let her go.”

“But you will!” said the doctor, releasing one arm, with which he struck the ruffian directly in the mouth, and with a force that sent him reeling backwards.

“Good! good!” shouted twenty voices; “served him right, doctor.”

The fellow had rallied instantly, and was rushing, like a wild bull, headlong upon the doctor, when several powerful men threw themselves between the two, seizing the ruffian at the same time.

“No, Jim, you stand back!” said one of them, brandishing a heavy axe before his eyes. “You touch that gentleman again, and I’ll brain you!”

“It’s a shame!” interposed others. “It’s the good doctor who nurses the poor for nothing. Doubt if he gets a cent for that creature.”

“Yes, if she was the devil’s dam herself, we promised the good man to let her go. Stand back, boys, and let the doctor pass.”

An opening was accordingly formed, through which the doctor hastened to make his way. When he made his appearance at the door, he was greeted with three wild, hearty cheers for himself, and as many groans and hisses for the character of the woman whom he bore, the news of the identification of whom had instantly found its way to the outside.

Regardless of all this, and only congratulating himself upon the prospect of getting his patient off alive, he pressed rapidly through the crowd, with the purpose of bearing her to the shelter of his own bachelor home.

The mob now instantly occupied the building, which was gutted by them, and the shattered contents, along with its occupants, men and women, roughly hurled into the street. Some of the former were very severely handled, and among the rest, the Spiritual Professor had his share of material chastening. The mob found him under a cot-bed, with three or four feminine disciples of his spiritual correspondences piled over him, or clinging distractedly to his nerveless limbs.

They dragged him out by the heels, with his squalling cortege trailing after him, and finding that the occult professor of spiritualities had gone into a state of obliviousness, or rather fainted, they proceeded, in their solicitude for his recovery, to deluge his person with sundry convenient slops, which shall be nameless, and afterwards kicked him headlong into the street below, where the screaming boys pelted him with gutter-mud and rotten eggs, until, finding his spiritual legs, as he had been advised—it is to be supposed—of a sudden, he made himself scarce, down Barclay Street, in an inappreciable twinkle.

In a word, the people, in this instance, as in many others, when they have found it necessary to take the laws of decency and common sense into their own sovereign hands, did the work of ridding themselves of this most detestable nuisance effectually. The Graham House was broken up, and although the pestilent nest of knaves and fools who most delighted there to congregate, have endeavored, in subsequent years, to reassemble, and renew the ancient character of the place as their head-quarters, yet the attempt has only been attended with partial success.

The blow was too decisive on this night; for, although the walls were left standing, the proprietor was given clearly to understand, that the unnatural orgies of amalgamation would not be tolerated again by the community, under the decisive penalty of no one stone left standing upon the other, of the building.

He took the hint, and it was about time! It has been fairly conjectured by this time, from the glimpses we have taken of the interior, that the house was the scene of other vices than those implied in amalgamation merely. It will be seen in yet other words and years how much there was of real danger to the well-being of society, in the doctrines taught and practised within its unhallowed walls. No one lesson could ever prove sufficient for these people; they enjoy a fatal impunity even now, and we shall endeavor that men shall know them as they are!

CHAPTER IV.
BOANERGES PHOSPHER, THE SPIRITUAL PROFESSOR.

He strikes no coin, ’tis true, but coins new phrases,

And vends them forth as knaves vend gilded counters,

Which wise men scorn, and fools accept in payment.

SHAKESPEARE.

None of these rogues and cowards, but Ajax is their fool!

Idem.

That the world has dealt hardly by its heroes, is a truism we need not insist upon at this late day. But whether the world knows who its heroes are, is another question, and one more open to controversy. Now I insist that the world does not know, or else Boanerges Phospher, the Spiritual Professor, would long since have been stoned and persecuted into one of the holy company of saints and martyrs!

There are several kinds of heroism heretofore known among men. There is the fierce, aggressive heroism of the soldier and conqueror—there is the “glib and oily” heroism of the politician—the calm, enduring heroism of the saint—the lofty, death-defying heroism of the patriot; but it remains for modern times to record the brazen heroism of impudence. Impudence, too, has its grades and degrees—its ancient types and its more modern ones—but as they all veil their brassy splendors, merging their separate rays in the central effulgence of our spiritual Colossus, we shall waive their particular enumeration in favor of the individualised impersonation of them all.

Ah, verily—and this is he!—our Spiritual Professor! Born in Yankee-land, of course, the earliest feat of Boanerges Phospher—literally, according to his own account of it—was to pry up a huge stone upon one of the sterile paternal acres: for what purpose, would you suppose? To place his feet upon the soil beneath, because the foot of no other man could have pressed it!

A laudable ambition, truly, but one which, somehow, unluckily, suggests that

“Fools may walk where angels fear to tread!”

It was a necessary sequence to the career of this modern Columbus of untrodden discovery, that we find his “first appearance upon any stage” to have been, while so pitiably ignorant as to be barely able to read his own language by spelling the words, and write his own name execrably, as Professor of Elocution!

Admirable! admirable! Why make two bites of a cherry? Why not step at once where no foot of such man ever trod before?

Shade of Blair! Look ye not askance at this daring intruder upon your classic company! He intends you no harm; he only means to re-fuse his brass back into copper s!

In lecturing on Elocution, our Professor, of necessity, gradually learned to read—with fluency, we mean—that is, he could “talk right eout,” like the head boy in a class, though it was in a nasal sing-song, more remarkable for its pietistic intonation than its rhythm. This was, no doubt, in a great measure owing to the facility of whining he had acquired, in his more juvenile experience, as a preacher of some three or four different liberal sects. We class these as mere experiments, as purely preliminary trials of strength, before he entered the true arena of his professorship.

The professorship, to be sure, was self-instituted—self-ordained—and why not self-asserted? There were professors of hair-invigorating oils, professors of dancing, professors of rat-catching, professors of hair-eradication, professors of cough-candy, professors of commercial book-keeping and running-hand writing, professors of flea-powder and bug-extermination—and why not a professor of elocution? The very gutter-mud germinates professors in this free country! They grow like fungi out of wallowing reptiles’ heads; and who need be surprised, in America, at receiving the card of his boot-black, inscribed Professor Brush; his chimney-sweep, Professor Soot; or be appalled by the bloody apparition of a missive from his butcher, emblazoned, “Professor Keyser, Killer!”

No disrespect, mark you, is intended to be either understood or implied, for the gentlemen of the various professions above enumerated, for they are all respectable in their way, and to be respected, outside of their professorships. But that is rather a serious name, as we understand it—one that the world has been accustomed to look up to with veneration—proportioned, until these “modern instances,” to the vast and profound learning which had made it, in the old world, the synonyme of almost patriarchal inspiration—the grand, firm, and stable bulwark of human progress, and its lofty future; of infinite science, and its clear, glorious myths!

This thing of learning seems so easy, that your starveling Yankee perceives no difficulties in the way, and glides into its penetralia “like a book,”—only that he never reads it! He is at once at home in all topography, as much as if he were in Kamtschatka, or the “Tropic Isles.” Furred cloaks or breadfruit leaves are all the same to him; he was born knowing, and of course could not do less than know a great deal more about Kamtschatka and the “Tropic Isles” than their furred and fig-leaved denizens. Brass is the Yankee’s capital, and no wonder they made the great discoveries of copper on Lake Superior, so extensively patronised by New-light sages. It is the offset to California gold; for, while one promises an infinite supply of the substantial basis of commerce and all trade, the other promises to furnish, in perpetuity, the crude material of impudence.

We mean no insinuation in regard to the Spiritual Professor, however much he may have had to do, by “spherical influence,” in precipitating the discovery of this great mine of the metal so much in favor with the sages above mentioned—and the remainder of the sect to which the Professor belonged—the motto of which is, that, “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings shall ye be confounded.” Yet we can freely venture to assert, that he had no connection whatever with those unfortunate commercial results, which, in the first place, nearly, if not entirely, swamped the great Patron of the enterprise. The mind of our Professor was necessarily not of that vast reach and generalising comprehension, which could lead to the Behemoth stride and wizard calculation of results, which had enabled his master thus confidently to speculate in so subtle a material.

The operations of our Professor were essentially minified; that is, their sphere and scope had been particularly narrow. He was heroic enough, Heaven knows; but then his heroism was of that dashing character which only required a patron to illustrate and make it known.

Having published a book upon this occult (in his hands) science of elocution, which was, of course, written for him by another party, he suddenly felt himself inspired with a new inspiration.

He had already taught men how to talk, and it now became necessary, and indeed spiritually incumbent upon him, to teach them how to live. He accordingly announced himself, forthwith, as Revelator-in-Chief of the spiritual mysteries of the universe. Every reader will probably remember those flaming programmes of lectures which appeared, by the half column, in a New York paper, for a long period, daily, between ’43 and ’45. Mendacious impudence never vaulted higher! Our Spiritual Professor was in his glory now.

An illustrious man lived once in Sweden. He was humble, pure and firm. His astonishing works on scientific subjects left the mind of his period far behind him, utterly confounded by his direct and stringent elucidation of the most subtle of the purely physical laws. It seemed a miracle to them; they found their professional accuracy so far surpassed, that they durst not do more than wonder. Work after work of this amazing intellect came forth, dressed in a language, while handling such themes, common to the world of science.

Then came a sudden change, and this vast mind, which heretofore had dealt in simple demonstration with mankind, threw down its compass and its squares, and, in the language of humility, proclaimed itself a Medium. The God of Jacob and humanity had revealed himself to him, not in the burning bush of mystery, but in the lustrous quiet of a calm repose. He had talked scientific truth before, but now he spoke of spiritual things—a chosen Medium between God and man! His theme was far beyond all science. We have nothing to do with his wide postulate; his name was too sublime and venerable among the patriarchs of mankind, for me to speak of it otherwise in this connection, than in disgust and loathing of the profanation to which it has been subjected, in our country, by monkeyish and parrot-tongued ignoramuses.

Our learned and sagacious Professor of Elocution, happening to stumble upon some of the earlier translations of the works of Swedenborg, seized upon them with great avidity, and, as he had now learned to read without spelling the words out loud, he managed to get them by heart with most surprising facility, and, to the astonishment of Jew and Gentile, suddenly proclaimed himself an apostle of the new church.

To be sure, when one considers this undertaking in the abstract, it was rather a serious one; one indeed that would have appalled most men, as the works of Swedenborg really consisted of some forty-odd huge volumes, written in Latin, not a line of which the Professor could translate; and the hand-books he had fallen upon were merely translations of introductory compends. What though the field was one of the most prodigious in human learning—what though the themes were the highest that could occupy mortal contemplation—what though the patient diligence of an ordinary lifetime would scarce suffice intelligent persons for the studious comprehension of the truths taught by this wonderful man? it was all the same to the Professor; and, indeed, instead of being discouraged, he was rather encouraged, by the magnitude of the undertaking! An exponent of Swedenborg! Well, why not? He could spell words in three syllables!

Big with the prodigious discovery of his own capabilities and the new mine of doctrinal science, the learned Professor rushed precipitately into the ever-extended arms of his Patron saint, the nourisher and cherisher of empirics and empiricism. And why should he not be so, forsooth? It was cheap, not “too much learning,” that had made him “mad” as well! He too had found it to his account to scorn the decencies of a thorough education, and from a printer’s devil, with a mind that had fed upon scraps and paragraphs, had doggedly risen, through the help of the familiar demon of labor, which possessed him, into this position of Patron to all new-comers—provided they bore “new-lights” and coppers!

It mattered little to this self-constituted and unscrupulous dignitary whether the theme was new to the world, or only to himself; the latter was most likely to be the case with one who had probably never read a dozen books consecutively through in his life, and who, from gross physique, dress, habits, and mental idiosyncrasies, was necessarily incapacitated for comprehending the fine and subtle relations of truth; who, even with the sovereign aid of the new-light Panacea, bran-bread, had seemed to be capable of digesting but a fragment of truth at a time, and that fragment, too, gobbled without the slightest regard for its relations to other truths.

Here was a happy appreciation with a vengeance!—was it knave of fool, or fool of knave—which? The question is interesting! At all events, the results were the same, so far as the public were concerned. It was forthwith announced that the Patron Saint, like some patient and watchful astronomer, sweeping the blue abyss of heaven with ever-constant glass, had suddenly discovered a new luminary—it certainly had a fiery tail, but whether it was going to prove a genuine comet or not, let the following announcement bear witness:

“Professor Boanerges Phospher lectures to-night in the Tabernacle, which it is thought may possibly contain some small portion, at least, of the enormous crowd which will of course assemble to hear his profound and luminous exposition of the mysteries of the universe. The doctrine of correspondences, as propounded by the learned Professor, reveals the true solution of all problems which affect the relations of mankind to the spiritual world. Indeed, his enormous research and unappreciable profundity have at length enabled him to solve the problem of the universe, which he, with the most luminous demonstration, will educate even the infant mind to comprehend with sufficient clearness, in five easy lessons, or lectures on every other night, at one dollar each. The whole subject of man, in his eternal relations to God, to the spiritual world, and to the earth, will be mathematically expounded to the full comprehension of all.”

Here follows the programme:

“Professor Boanerges Phospher undertakes to show in the lecture of to-night, That in the universe there are these three things: end, cause, and effect; that infinite things in the infinite are one; that they constitute a triune existence—they are three in one; that the universe is a work cohering from firsts to lasts.

“That Good is from a twofold origin, and thence adscititious. That celestial good is good in essence, and spiritual good is good in form. That the good of the inmost Heaven is called celestial; of the middle Heaven, spiritual; and of the ultimate Heaven, spiritual, natural. That good is called lord, and truth servant, before they are conjoined, but afterwards they are called brethren. That he who is good is in the faculty of seeing truth, which flows from general truths, and this in a continual series. That good is actually spiritual fire, from which spiritual heat, which makes alone, is derived.

“That all Evil has its rise from the sensual principle, and also from the scientific. There is an evil derived from the false, and a false from evil.

“That gold sig. the good of love. When twice mentioned, sig. the good of love, and the good of faith originating in love.

“That influx from the Lord is through the internal into the external. Spiritual influx is founded on the nature of things, which is spirit acting on matter.

“That physical influx, or natural, originates from the fallacy of the senses that the body acts on spirit.

“That harmonious influx is founded on a false conclusion, viz.: that the soul acts jointly and at the same instant with the body. That there is a common influx; and this influx passes into the life of animals, and also into the subjects of the vegetable kingdom. That influx passes from the Lord to man through the forehead—for the forehead corresponds to love, and the face to the interior of the mind.”

To be followed by questions in the correspondences by any of the audience who may choose to ask them, such as, To what does “horse” correspond?—To what does “table,” “chair,” or “soap-stone” correspond?—To what does “hog,” “goose,” “butter-milk,” or “jackass” correspond? &c., &c. To all of which questions the learned lecturer will give edifying answers from the stand. Admittance, one dollar—Children, half-price.

This is a long programme, to be sure, and somewhat overwhelming to we common people, who have been in the habit of regarding certain subjects with the profoundest veneration, and our modest and capable teachers with reverence. But the very length of this programme, and the enormous stretch of the themes, only go, I suppose, to illustrate the hardihood of our “admirable Crichton,” the professor of the occult—and the genial and the generous—to call it by its lightest name—gullibility, of his gaping audience.

Forth went these flaming announcements day by day, on thousand hot-pressed sheets, until New York became all agog, and the great mass conceived that they had found a new prophet. All its spectacled and thin-bearded women forthwith were in arms; the Professor wore his hair behind his ears, and, of course, was the soft and honey-sucking seraph of their dreams.

He could be indeed nothing short of seraphim-revealed, for he discoursed with them in winning tones of mists and mysteries. He told them bald tales of angels with whom he had been on terms of intimacy; for he sagaciously kept his master, Swedenborg, mainly in the background throughout.

Representing himself as the individual recipient of these revelations, from the spherical ladies who wear wings, and who are habitually designated as angels by both the sexes, on our little clod of earth, our champion became, of course, the hero of all such semi-whiskered maidens or matrons, who, though essentially “pard-like spirits,” were yet, to reverse the words of Shelley, more “swift,” alias “fast,” than “beautiful!” It is, of course, to be comprehended that beauty is comparative as well as wit, and we would no more be understood as insinuating that these thinly-hirsute virgins and dames, who at once constituted the principal audience of the mighty Professor, were themselves in any degree deficient in sympathy either with the man and his profound doctrines, or the man per se, than that we would assert they understood one word of what he mouthed to them, with his hair behind his ears.

Boanerges Phospher, the Spiritual Professor, was successful, and never was there anything so professionally brilliant as the crowded houses that he nightly drew. The immense Tabernacle seemed a mere nut-shell; he could have filled half-a-dozen such houses nightly. The mob had grown excited by the novelty. The paper of the Patron Saint, at so many pennies a line, day by day, continued to prostitute its columns to this vulgar trap of silly servant-maids and profound clerks.

The Professor’s lectures were attended by countless swarms of inquirers after truth, who, as they were willing to accept a spoken for a written language of which they knew nothing, permitted him to stumble through propositions, which, in themselves, were so ridiculously absurd as even to disarm contempt in the wise, and make denunciation harmless as superfluous.

CHAPTER V.
BOANERGES AND THE YOUNG MATHEMATICIAN.

Famine is in thy cheeks,

Need and oppression stareth in thy eyes,

Upon thy back hangs ragged misery.

Shakspeare.

There’s no more

Mercy in him than there’s milk in the male tiger.

Idem.

The bowels of Boanerges Phospher, the Spiritual Professor, were possessed of such extraordinary capacity for yearning over the fallen and lost condition of his brothers of mankind, that, not content with saving them by wholesale, and nightly, in those marvellously spiritualized lectures, his indomitable energies took up the trade of “saving” men individually and by detail.

This, let it be understood, was done between times, by way of recreation, just to keep his hand in. Let us follow him on one of these errands of mercy.

In a poor garret of Ann Street, New York, might have been seen, about these days, a young man, seated in a rickety chair, beside a dirty pine table, which was plentifully strewn with manuscripts covered with many a tedious column of figures and mysterious-looking diagrams.

You saw at once, from the disproportionate size of the broad, white, bulging brow, which brooded heavily over large mournful eyes, and thin, emaciated features, that he was a mathematician; possessing one of those precocious and enormous developments of the organs of calculation, which are so apt, when not diverted by other occupations and excitements, to consume rapidly the feeble fuel of life in their consecrated fires.

A wretched cot-bed occupied one corner of the room, which was likewise strewn with papers and books on mathematical subjects, while on the mantel lay scattered little heaps of dried cheese and crusts, which seemed so hardened, that no tooth of predatory mouse had left its mark thereon.

The young man was dressed in entire conformity with the miserable appearance of the room. His thin and silky hair hung in lank, clammy locks about his shockingly pallid features, as he leaned forward on his elbow, his forehead resting heavily on his thin hand, as he pored over the papers before him.

“Ah me,” muttered he, “this horrid poverty!” and he threw down his pen and sank back with a faint, despairing movement.

“My brain is giddy with this dizzy round of figures, figures. My weary calculation is nearly done, but my over-tasked brain sickens. Ah, but for just one good meal, to strengthen me for a few hours, and I could finish it—finish my glorious work!”

At this moment a rapid step was heard ascending the creaking stairs; the door flew open rudely, and, without any announcement, the Spiritual Professor, with his hair all nice behind his ears, came bustling forward toward the table, beside the fainting young student. Rubbing his hands at the same time in prodigious glee of anticipation, he exclaimed—

“Ha! my son! my spiritual child! how is it with you? Have you finished? Is it done?”

The poor student shook his head slightly, and muttered feebly—

“No, no; I cannot finish it.”

The eager face of the Professor turned suddenly very blank and very white at the same time, as, straightening himself, he stammered out—

“Wh-what! c-cannot finish it! You must finish it! you shall finish it!” and then continuing with greater vehemence, without apparently noticing that the weary head of the poor being before him was slowly drooping yet lower—

“Here’s a pretty business, to be sure! This is the reward I am to get for all I have done for you—for all my efforts to advance you in the world—for all the heavy expenses I have incurred in bringing you on from Cincinnati, and supporting you here! The evil spirits must have re-entered the boy! Have I not striven for these six months faithfully, with all my spiritual strength, to drive them forth, that I might save him? The boy must be born again—he must be regenerated once more. Cannot finish it! He must be chastened, to rebuke this evil spirit in him; he must be reduced to bread and water. I must recall my liberal allowance for his food; he has been living too high. The evil demon has probably entered him through a meal of fat pork!” and the spiritually outraged Professor sniffed with an indignant and eager sniffle, that he might detect the presence of the forbidden food.

The poor youth, in the mean time, had been slowly sliding from his chair, and, as the Professor turned aside with the air of an injured cherub, the body lost its balance, and the fainting youth fell to the floor.

“Ha! what now?” shouted our cherub with the hair behind his ears, springing into the air with a nervous agility, as if he in reality wore wings. He placed himself on the opposite side of the room in a twinkling, and then turning his face, ghastly with fright, exclaimed, “I thought the house was coming down!” and seeing the prostrate body, he walked around it as cautiously as a cat crouches, and, with a stealthy inspection, peered into the half-open eyelids, at the upturned eyes, but without touching the body.

“Wh-why, the fellow’s gone and died! There goes my great speculation!” and springing back suddenly, he rushed towards the table, and seizing convulsively the papers, ran his eye eagerly over them, while his hands trembled violently; and his lips turned as ashy blue as those of the poor victim at his feet, while, with an expression of despair, too unutterable for words to paint, he groaned out in frantic exclamations—“No, no, no, it is not finished; nobody else can do it but him! I’m ruined! I’m ruined! Oh, my money’s gone—my money’s gone! To think that he should die, after all I’ve done for him—after all my liberality! O! O! O! booh! booh! hoo!”

At this melting crisis, a slight noise caused him to turn his head; the apparent corpse was drawing up one foot, and making some other feeble movements, which showed that life was not entirely extinct.

At this sight the eyes of Boanerges flew open as wide, in a stare of ecstacy, as they had before been stretched in horror, until their suffusion “with the briny,” as Mr. Richard Swiveller would say, had caused them to momentarily wink.

“Why, he ain’t dead yet! my speculation is safe. Some water! Where’s some water? Get some water!” and he ran peering and dodging around the room with an uncertain air, as if the new influx of joy had bewildered his seraphic mind. After some little delay he found the pitcher, which had been standing all the time in full view, within three feet of him; he wildly dashed more than half the contents into the face of the victim, who instantly drew a long sobbing breath, and in a moment or two opened his eyes.

This so increased the ecstacy of the Professor, that he now ventured to kneel beside him, and, in his eagerness, forgetting to use the tumbler that was standing near, he nearly crushed the poor student’s teeth down his throat, in his awkward endeavors to administer drink to him from the heavy pitcher—exclaiming, during the process, “Drink! drink! my son. Don’t die, for Heaven’s sake! Remember my liberality—my generous sacrifices to advance you in the world. Remember our almanac—your great work, that is to make your fortune. Remember how you have been saved!”

“Starved, you mean,” feebly whispered the young man, whom a few draughts of the precious fluid had rapidly revived.

“St-a-a-r-r-ved! does he say?” yelled Boanerges, shrinking back as if horrified, and nearly dropping the body he was supporting from his arms. Then, suddenly releasing one arm, he smoothed back his hair gently; that radiant, angelic expression of sweet humility, for which it was so famous among the female part of his select and nightly audiences, overcame his face as with a halo, and leaning down, so as to look into the eyes of his victim, he asked, in a liquid voice, “My son, have I—have I—thy spiritual father, starved thee?” and then tenderly he gazed into his eyes. With a look of assured self-satisfaction that those siren tones had done the business, he silently awaited the answer to the gentle and rebukeful question. But no answer came to the sweet, lingering look; the young man only closed his eyes heavily, and shuddered.

“My son, my son!” continued the Professor, in yet more grieved and meek, and dulcet tones. “My spiritual son, have I starved thee? have I not been generous to a fault, and even to wronging the beloved child of my own loins? This room, these writing materials, this tumbler, this pitcher, that delightful bed, are they not all my free-will gifts to thee for thy own advancement, to enable thee to glorify God in thy works? Have I not rather saved thee from starving? You had nothing when I took you up, to patronise your genius, and bring you before the world; and now you have plenty! See, see, your mantel is even now crowded with bread and cheese, that you are wasting here in the midst of such superlative abundance.”

The young man, at the mention of the bread and cheese, turned his head aside with an expression of bitter loathing and disgust.

“Pah!” he muttered; “the very name of it makes me sick; I have tasted nothing else for the last six months. That is what is killing me; my stomach can retain it no longer! Who can keep body and soul together on thirty cents a week?”

“Horror!” exclaimed the Professor, rolling up his eyes meekly. “To think of such frantic extravagance! And besides, my son, your spiritual strength should have sustained you—the success of your great work, the prospect of future glory! A man starve on bread and cheese! Why, who ever heard of such a thing? Why, when I was a boy of ten years of age, I started alone, on foot, to cross the Alleghanies, to make my way to the North to school. My father had moved West when I was very young. I started with only one loaf of white bread in my bundle, when the whole country was wild and full of bears and wolves. The wolves chased me, and I climbed a tree; they surrounded it, barking and gnashing their teeth, to get at me; there were five hundred wolves at least, but I in my faith kept my strength, and remained cool as Daniel in the lion’s den, until at last they kept me there so long, I fell asleep, when the limb broke, and I fell down into the midst of them; the wolves were so frightened, that they all took to their heels and ran away, leaving me safe. There is a specimen of the spiritual strength that faith gives, and should encourage you never to give up and faint by the way. Had you possessed more of such faith, my son, you would never have been stretched here, upon this floor, in such a condition, and talking about starving on bread and cheese. It is the soul, my son, the regenerate soul, that sustains the heroic man on earth, as I have so often endeavored to teach you.”

“Yes,” groaned the poor youth, with a gesture of impatience. “The body must live too, and life cannot be sustained so long upon unvaried food.”

“Listen, my son!” said the patient saint at his head—“listen, and you shall hear what I accomplished on that single loaf of bread. I travelled on with my little bundle on my shoulder, containing the home-spun suit I was to wear when I arrived at school, and my loaf of bread. I travelled on till my clothes were all worn out, and my shoes full of holes, and my feet were so sore and swollen that I was afraid to pull off my shoes, for fear I should not be able to get them on again. So I waded across all the brooks and mountain streams with my clothes on, until, at last, one afternoon, when high up in the mountains, my strength gave out, and I laid me down in the howling wilderness, thinking I must die. The weather was very cold, and my clothes, all wet from crossing the streams, were freezing, and the dreaded sleepiness was coming over me, when a good widow woman, who lived with her children on the mountains, and was out gathering wood, accidentally found me. She took me up in her arms, and carried me to her hut, and laid me on her bed, where I slept all night. In the morning, when I opened my eyes, I saw her breaking the hot Indian-corn bread, and giving it to her children. I told her if she would give me some of her corn bread, I would divide my loaf of white bread with her and her children. She eagerly accepted the offer, for such a luxury as white bread had been long unknown to them, and that was my first speculation! While they ravenously devoured my loaf, I feasted upon her rich hot bread. My soul overflowed with delight as I witnessed their intense enjoyment of the meal I had been thus instrumental in bringing them, and I felt as if the Lord had thus enabled me to fully repay them for their kindness. I rose to depart, and the good woman, filling my bundle with a large piece of her hot bread, sent me, with her blessing, on my way rejoicing. Thus, you see, my dear son, how, through the spiritual strength which faith imparts, and which you so much need, I was enabled to cross the Alleghany mountains alone, at ten years of age, with nothing but my loaf of white bread, and without so much as a bit of cheese, or a cent in my pocket, and attained to the great goal of my ambition, the school; and from whence, by the aid of selling an occasional button from my jacket, I have been able to rise to my present position as professor and patron of struggling genius.”[2]

[2] Incredible as it may seem, we pledge our personal veracity that this bald and silly narration, which appears to be merely a foolish burlesque, is a bona fide, et literatim, et punctuatim, transcript, as close as it is possible for memory to furnish, of stories that were, at least as often as five days out of the seven, related at the dinner-table at which Boanerges presided, to long double lines of gaping women, who, obedient to the irresistible spell he bore, had followed up this maudlin Proteus of Professors, as disciples of water-cure, through his latest metamorphoses, into physician of such an establishment in Boston. It was thus he exhorted them to faith, and encouraged his backsliders.

“Ah!” said the young man, “words, words! Give me to eat—I am starving!” and his head sank back once more.

The Professor again deluged him with water, and, profoundly surprised and alarmed that the honeyed eloquence of his sagacious narrative had proved unavailing in convincing his victim that he could and ought to live upon faith, came to the desperate resolution of being guilty of the extravagance, for once, of a small bowl of soup to resuscitate his victim, and depositing his head upon some books, though the pillow was equally convenient, he hurried off to the nearest eating-house, with his hands upon his pockets, which were overflowing with gold, as he was then in the meridian height of his prosperity.

---

The sequel to this particular story is a short one. The young man revived with the change of a single nutritious meal, and with it returned the courage of even the trodden worm; for he now stoutly told the Spiritual Professor that, unless he furnished him with ample means to support life, he would not touch an another figure of the immense and complicated calculations on which he had been so long engaged.

The Professor, of course, resisted to the last, and quoted the correspondences upon him, with desperate fluency. But when the young man coolly seized the manuscript on the table before him, and held it over the flickering flame of the miserable dip candle, which had now been of necessity lighted, the Professor sprang forward to arrest his hand, shrieking—

“I will! I will! for God’s sake, stop!—how much do you want?”

“Five dollars a week!” was the cold response, as the flame caught the edges of the paper.

“I’ll give it! I’ll give it! What fearful extravagance! My God! put it out!”

“Pay me five dollars at once,” said the other.

“Here it is—here it is!” and he jerked, in his excitement, from his pocket, a dozen gold-pieces of that value, and dashed them upon the table.

“Take your five dollars! put it out!”

The young man quietly swept the pieces within his reach into a drawer, which he at the same moment opened; and, extinguishing the margin of the manuscript, which had burned slowly from its thickness, he replied deliberately to the Professor, who had shrieked out—

“Do you mean to rob me?”

“No, sir! but I mean to keep this money, and if you approach me, I shall destroy this manuscript if it cost me my life. You have starved and outraged me long enough; you expect to make a fortune off my labors, and kill me with famine just as my work is done. But with all my humility, abstraction and patience, this is too much! I am roused at last, in self-defence, and you shall find it so!”

The Professor sank into a chair as if fainting, and for some moments continued to mutter, with more than the magnanimity of a sick kitten—

“To think! Robbed! All my generosity! The ruffian! Here, to my very face! What have I gained by saving him?”

This last expression was gasped out, as if the vital breath of the speaker was passing in the final spasm.

The scene need not be prolonged. The valorous Professor crept away, cowed beneath the cold, firm, lustrous eye of the now aggressive victim, whose enthusiasm for science and earnest self-dedication, had heretofore kept him blinded to a full realisation of all the monstrous iniquity which had so long been practised upon his abstracted, meek, and uncomplaining nature. He now determined to take his life into his own hands, and saw clearly through all the shallow and ridiculous pretence of patronage and “saving,” by which his single-hearted fervor had been beguiled.

In a few days it was announced to the Professor, whose faith and spiritual strength—the same that had scared off the wolves when he fell among them—had in the interval been restored to their equilibrium, that the great work was now completed, and the announcement was accompanied by a proposition on the part of the young mathematician to sell out to him entire his copyright share in the whole enterprise, at a price so comparatively insignificant, when the Professor’s own florid anticipations of future results were considered, that he sprang at the offer eagerly, and thus possessed himself at once of the “golden goose.”

The young mathematician disappeared, and the Professor was left exulting in the sole possession of what seemed to him, in vision, the nearest representative of the gold of Ophir, not to speak of California.

The idea of the young mathematician was, in itself, a practical one, and seemed rationally conceived.

We have used the word almanac, by which it was designated, but in reality it very poorly conveys the subtle and singular combinations which were here brought to bear upon a circular, rotary surface, the aim of which was, to so far simplify the calculations of interest, wages, discounts, and a hundred other tedious and difficult problems occurring in complicated business affairs, that the merchant or banker had only to glance his eye down a line of figures, to ascertain in a moment results which would take him, by all the ordinary aids and processes, a long calculation to arrive at.

It was a brilliant conception, which must prove ultimately a most successful discovery of the young mathematician, and one which had cost him many years of careful analysis and profound observation. But as he handed over the perfected copyright to our astute Professor, who had just enough of button-trading cunning to perceive the immense practical results of the enterprise, without the slightest knowledge of the processes by which it had been perfected, there might have been noticed upon the face of his former victim, as he pocketed his paltry bonus, a slight sneer, which would have alarmed any one less gifted with occasional short-sightedness than our Professor has shown himself to be.

He made off with the documents in an ecstacy of triumph, and forthwith began making round purchases of paper, pasteboard, and other mechanical appliances necessary to his success, to the amount of thousands of his easily-got gains; and then as heavy sums were as rapidly expended upon the costly and difficult copper-plate engraving, which was to set forth in full the triumph, the undivided honors of which he now claimed, to the world.

There are few of the main printing-offices in the country that had not, or have not, that famous circular almanac hanging upon their walls. Unfortunately the Professor had been too eager to promulgate his triumph, and powerfully illustrated in this experiment the truth of the old aphorism, “The greater haste the less speed;” for it turned out, upon a close examination of the long and intricate series of calculations, by scientific men, that the fatal error of a single numeral ran throughout its complex demonstration, and rendered its whole results utterly futile, without the enormous expense of cancelling the costly copper-plate, and the tremendous edition which had been already issued. The incorrigible ignorance of the Spiritual Professor had rendered him incapable of detecting the error himself, and he had thereby swamped effectually not only his magnanimous speculation in this particular case, but thoroughly dissipated the abundant proceeds of his more successful speculation in the spiritual correspondences.

This little accident threw him upon his shifts, but we shall surely find him upon his feet again hereafter.

Had not his starving victim subtly worked out a sublime revenge, in spite of the fact that he had been over and over again so thoroughly saved? So much for Boanerges and the young mathematician.

CHAPTER VI.
THE NEW “SAVING GRACE.”

Thou hast thews

Immortal, for thou art of heavenly race;

But such a love is mine, that here I chase

Eternally away from thee all bloom

Of youth, and destine thee towards a tomb.

Endymion.

Fierce, wan,

And tyrranizing was the lady’s look.

Idem.

A year, in the life of man, is a long time. Alas! what changes may it not bring about to any, the strongest of us, the most secure—those weary, dragging twelve months! Such a period has elapsed in the chronology of our narrative, since the scenes described as occurring at the Graham House.

It is late, on a dark stormy evening, and we will look into the well-stocked half library and half office of a handsome private residence in Beekman Street, New York.

The cushioned appliances of the most fastidious luxury of repose were strewed about the room in the strangest disorder of heaped cushions, fallen chairs, and out-of-place lounges; while books, surgical instruments, vials, dusty, crusty, broken, and corkless, all mingled in the desolate confusion which seemed to have usurped the place.

A shaded lamp stood upon the table in the centre of this chaos, and threw its light upon a large decanter of brandy and a glass beneath. A deep-drawn moaning sigh disturbs the deathlike silence of the room; and a broad, stout figure, which had leaned back within the shadow of a huge cushioned chair beside the table, reached suddenly forward and clutched the brandy-bottle convulsively. He dashed a great gulp into the glass, and then, with trembling hand, attempted to carry it to his lips. After two or three efforts, which proved unavailing from his excessive nervousness, he replaced the glass, muttering, “Curse this nervousness! It will not even let me drink my poison any more!” He shuddered as he turned his head away. “No wonder! how horribly the hell-broth smells!” He fell back into the deep chair again and was silent for some time, when, uttering from the depths of his chest that strange moan, he sprang to his feet.

“I must drink!” he gnashed, as, seizing the decanter again, he filled the tumbler to overflowing, splashing the dark fluid over everything on the table. “I shall die if I do not drink! I shall go crazy! I will not be baffled!”

Without attempting to raise it again to his lips, he bowed them to the brimming glass, and as the beast drinks, so drank he. Oh, fearful degradation! Where now is the strong man? that powerful frame would speak. After leaning the tumbler with his lips and trembling hands in a long, deep draught, he straightened himself with an expression of loathing that distorted his face hideously.

“Paugh! Hell should mix more nectar with its chiefest physic! This stuff is loathsome, and my revolting nerves seem with a separate life to shudder as the new babe does to hear the asp hiss amidst the flowers where it sports! Paugh! infernal! that it should come to me in this short time, even as a second nature, to learn to feed on poisons! It was not so once; nature was sufficient, aye, sufficient, when the skies rained glory out of day, and the stars came down in beamy strength through night! But then! but then! Ah, yes! it had not become necessary then, that I should be s-a-v-e-d by human love!” and his features writhed as he prolonged the word.—“S-a-v-e-d! no! no! no heavenly guise of horrid lust to s-a-v-e me! The chaste and blushing spring came to the early winter of my sterile life that bloomed beneath its radiant warmth, and gladdened to grow green and odor-breathed and soft, and then! oh, horror! horror! I am strong enough to drink again. My nerves are numbed now; they dare not tremble.”

He seized the decanter once more, and then, with unshaking hand, conveyed the brimming glass to his lips, and after a deep draught threw himself upon the chair again, and drawing at the same time a glittering object from his breast, he leaned forward within the circle of the lamp-light to regard it as it lay open upon the table before him. This is the first time we have seen that face clearly—that haggard, pallid face. Ha! can it be? Those sunken, bloated cheeks! Those dimmed, hollow eyes, with leaden, drooping lids! O, can it be? Have we known that face before? God help us! The good Doctor! and only one year!

But see the change! His eye has rested upon that face before him. A miniature, beautifully executed. In it a charmed art has presided at a miracle! an arch seraphic brow all “sunnied o’er” by the golden reflex from its tangled curls, broken in beam and shadow, gracefully glanced a gay defiance in his eyes, from eyes—so lustrous innocent! You dare not say they could be less than all divine, but that the sweet mouth spoke of earth, and every weakness of it, “earthy.”

See how the face of that sad and broken man is changing! those shrunk and heavy features are re-lit with life, as some dead waste with sunshine, suddenly. The bright, the tender past; the mellowed, mournful past, have mounted to the eyes and flushed those massive features once again. He seems as one transfigured for a moment, while he gazes. The glory of old innocence has compassed him about, alas! but for a moment! The tears pour flooding from his eyes, and blot the face whereon he gazes. A sob—that wild and piteous moan again—and the palsied wreck of the strong man falls back once more into his cushioned chair. A horrid, stertorous breathing, most like that of a dying man, fills the gloomy air of that dim room, and with ashy lips and fallen jaw, he sleeps! Ah, that seems a fearful sleep, with the tears, warm tears, still pouring, pouring down the rigid cheek!

The shaded lamp burns on, and fitfully the chaos of that room, here and there, is touched by its faint light. A slight sound, a rustling tread is heard, and in a moment, a woman, dressed in black, with a black veil about her face, and the umbrella which had protected her from the storm in her hand, stood beside the sleeper. She evidently had a pass-key, for she walked forward as one accustomed to use it at all hours and confidently.

“The beast! Drunk, dead drunk again!” she muttered. “I shan’t get the money I wanted to-night, that is plain! Curse his obstinacy! After all my trouble to save him, this is my reward! Worse and worse!”

She sprang forward eagerly as her eye fell upon the jewelled miniature that lay before him on the table, and snatched it up. “Ha! this will save me some trouble!” She turned it eagerly over in her hands, throwing back her veil at the same time, to examine the valuable case with vivid glistening eyes, that did not seem to notice in the least degree the exquisite painting within.

“Ah, yes, this is great! Wonder the fool never let me know of it before! I should have had it in Chatham Street before this! Never mind, ‘never too late,’ I see! It saves me the trouble of exploring his pockets and table-drawers to-night, for what is getting to be a scarce commodity. Bah! what silly school-girl face is this? He is falling back to whine about the past. O, that’s all right. I’ll fill his decanter for him! He has done enough. He has fed me for a year. I’ll let the poor wretch off! Yes, I’ve saved him! I have feasted on him!” And she drew herself erect with a triumphant swelling of the whole frame, which seemed to emit, for the moment, from its outline, a keen quick exhalation most like the heat-lightning of a sultry summer sky.

She fills the decanter rapidly from a demijohn she drags from a closet in the room, and places it by his side. She pushes the water-pitcher far beyond his reach, and then steps forward for a moment into the light.

Have we ever seen that face before? No! no! It might have been—there is some resemblance—but this form and face are too full of arrogant abounding strength to be the same faint bleeding victim of ruthless persecution that we saw at first! No! no! It cannot be she! Ha! as she thrusts that jewelled miniature into her bosom and turns to glide away, I can detect that infernal obliquity of the left eye! O, dainty Etherial!

CHAPTER VII.
THE CONVENTICLE OF THE STRONG-MINDED.

Her strong toils of grace.

Shakspeare.

Take we a glimpse now of another interior scene in the strange, mingled life of the great metropolis. In a bare and meanly-furnished but roomy parlor of a house in Tenth Street, near Tompkins Square, we find assembled, on one summer’s afternoon, a group of females. There are perhaps ten of them in all. The characteristic which first strikes the eye, on glancing around this group, is the strange angularity of lines presented everywhere, in faces, figures, and attitudes, except when contrasted with an uncouth and squabby embonpoint, which seemed equally at variance with the physical harmonies, supposed to be characteristic of the sex. What all this meant, you could not comprehend at first glance; but the impression was, of something “out of joint.” Where, or what, it was impossible to conjecture. Some sat with their bonnets on, which had a Quakerish cut about them, though not strictly orthodox. Some, conscious of fine hair, had tossed their bonnets on the floor or chairs, as the case might be. There was, in a word, a prevailing atmosphere of steadfast and devil-may-care belligerence—a seeming, on brow, in hand, and foot, that, demurely restrained, as it certainly was, unconsciously led you to feel that a slow and simultaneous unbuttoning of the cuffs of sleeves, a deliberate rolling up of the same, and a dazzling development of lean, taut tendons, corrugated muscles, and swollen veins, would be the most natural movement conceivable. Not that this bellicose sentiment, by any means, seemed to have found its proper antagonism in the forms and personalities then and there presented; but that you felt, in the vacant reach and persistent abstraction of the expression, that the foe, at whom they gazed through the infinite of space, was not an Individuality, but an Essence,—a world-devouring element of Evil, with which they warred.

And warriors indeed they seemed—we should say Amazons—wielding, not the weapons of carnal strife, but those mightier arms with which the Spirit doth, at times, endow our race. As for the war they waged, whatever might be the power with whom they were engaged, it seemed to have been a protracted and a desperate one; for, verily, judging from the harsh lines that seamed the faces of those present, one would imagine them to be “rich only in large hurts!”

There were young women present who were clearly under twenty; whose foreheads, when they elevated their eyebrows, were wrinkled and parchment-like as any

“Painful warrior famoused for fight.”

Why this unnatural wilting? would be the certain question of the cool observer. What fearful wrongs have these women suffered? What “contagious blastments?” Is the wicked world arraigned against them for no just cause? Has it combined its respiring masses into one large, simultaneous breath of volcanic cursings, to be wreaked upon their unoffending heads alone? To be sure,

“Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt;”

and can it be that these, too, are “innocents?” It is true, physiology teaches that, when women wither prematurely, acquire an unnatural sharpness of feature, become

“Beated and chapped with tanned antiquity,”

before they have seen years enough for the bloom of the life of true maturity to have freshened on their cheeks and foreheads, there must be some cause for it. Common sense teaches, too, that that cause is most likely to be, originally, rather a physical than a spiritual one—that mental aberration, dogged and sullen moods, one-ideaed abstractions, a general peevishness and fretful discontent, a suspicious unbelief in the warm-blooded genialities, and much enduring sympathies of those around them, whose lives are intact—or, in other words, who have held themselves, in health, through nature, near to God—must have its source in some evil not entirely foreign to themselves.

Ask the wise physician why are these things so? He will answer, God has so ordered this material universe, that, while we live in it, we must conform to its laws; that, however powerful our spiritual entity, our relations to this life must, to be happy, be normal.

But this is prosing. It may, or it may not, account, in part, for the combative and generally corrugated aspect of this conventicle of the “strong-minded,” to which we have been introduced. Now let us listen!

She to whom the place of presiding Pythoness seemed to have been, by general understanding, assigned, now solemnly arose, amidst a sudden pause of shrill-tongued clatter. She was very tall—nearly six feet. Her straight figure would have seemed voluptuously rounded, but that the loose-folded and wilted oval of her face suggested that the plump bust, with its close, manly jacket of black velvet, buttoned down in front, might owe something of its elastic seeming roundness to those conventionalities, à la modiste, and otherwise, against which her principles most vehemently protested. Her flaxen hair emulated the classic tie of any Venus of them all, on the back part of the head; while the effulgence of sunny curls flooded the very crow’s-feet in the corners of her great, cold, dead, grey eyes.

She shook her curls slightly, and spoke:—

“My sisters, we have come together this afternoon, not to talk about abstractions of right and wrong to our sex; for, upon all these elementary subjects, our minds are fully made up—all those inductive processes of which the human intellect is capable, our minds have already passed through. Our opinions are irrevocably formed, our conclusions absolute! Woman is oppressed by man. She is denied her just rights. She is taxed, yet denied the privilege of representation. She is a slave, without the privileges of slavery! for, in the old slave-states, the possession of twenty, or thirty, or forty slaves gives to their master the faintly-representative privilege of an additional vote, while, to our tyrants, though each may hold, in reality, a dozen wives, the law grants nothing! Leaving us, in fact, not even the ‘shadow of a shade’ of a social or civil existence! We are thus reduced to a condition of insignificance, in relation to the active affairs of life and the world, that we have determined to be, both incongruous and insufferable.

“Man, our time-out-of-mind despot, has determined to reduce us to, and hold us within, the sphere of mere wet-nurses to his insolent and bifurcate progeny;—we must, forsooth, spawn for him, and then dedicate our lives to educating his procreative vices into what he calls manhood! We are wearied with the dull, stale, commonplace of nursery-slops, and of the fractious squallings of our embryo tyrants! Man must learn to nurse his own monsters, and we will nurse ours! We have declared our independence of his tyranny; our great object is to displace him from his seat of power! For six thousand years he has been our despot—our ruthless and unscrupulous tyrant! We have therefore a settlement to make with him—a long arrearage of accounts to be rendered.

“But we are weak, while he is strong! He possesses the physical force, and all the guarantees of precedence since time began, while we have only our own weaknesses to fall back upon—what they, in their surfeited rhythm, style ‘witching graces,’ and ‘nameless charms!’

“Well, we must use these against our obese foe as best we may. We must clip the claws and teeth of the lion, at any rate; and, in consideration that the whole World of Past and Present is arraigned against us, we must accept as our motto, that of the only man who ever deserved to be a woman, Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits,

“‘The end justifies the means.’”

A small noise—a scarcely sensible “teetering” of pedal extremities upon the thin carpet, followed this “stern demonstration” of “woman’s rights,” from the accepted Priestess of the conventicle; when various exclamations arose from different parts of the room, such as—

“Right! right! End justifies the means, in dealing with the brutes!”

“They give us no quarter, and we will give them none!”

“Nurse their brats, forsooth!”

“We must circumvent them as we can, to obtain our ‘rights!’”

“Yes! yes! All stratagems are fair in love and war!”

Suddenly sprang to her feet a very emphatic, stout woman, straight and thick-set, with soiled cap, coarse, stubby, grayish hair, sparse, silvery bristles on her chin, gray, savage eyes, and large fists, which she brought down with a crash upon the frail chair-back which constituted the bulwark of her position. In a voice of creaking bass, she exclaimed—

“The sister is right—they are our oppressors; but it is because we have been cowards enough to yield them the supremacy; it is nothing but our own cowardice that is to blame. Man knows, as well as any other animal, on which side his bread is buttered; we have only got to learn him what and where his place is, and he will keep it. When I first married, I had some trouble with my Jonas; but I soon taught him that he had better be back again in the whale’s belly, than employed in trenching upon my ‘woman’s rights!’ (A general disposition to laugh, which was, however, frowned down by the dignified Priestess.)

“It is true, my sisters; we have only to assert our rights, and take them! Man will never dare to rebel, if we are resolute. Overwhelm him with our strength—make him feel his littleness beside us, and he will slink into any hole to hide. I am myself in creed a non-resistant—(suppressed laughter.) I do not believe in pummelling truth into man; forced conversions do not last, and should not. But I will tell you what sort of conversions I do believe in; they are spiritual. Bow, bend, aye, break his spirit to your will, and then he is yours; instead of being slave to him, he is your slave. This is what we want. When he can be reduced to obedience, then he will be happy; for when he has accepted us as his spiritual guides, and no longer dreams of lifting his thoughts in rebellion, then will he always go right. They themselves are for ever confessing, that without us, as mothers, they would never—the greatest of them—arrive at any thing; that they owe it all to us—all their greatness, all their goodness. Let us take the hint, and hold the spiritual birch over them always, and they will ever remain obedient, for their own good.”

This speech was received with very general approbation; though, that all did not recognise it as orthodox, became immediately apparent. A tall, thin, cadaverous-looking lady, with excessively black hair, and eyes that literally glistered as she rose—the huge ear-rings and multifarious trinkets about her person quivering with excitement—exclaimed, in a shrill voice—

“It is false! it is not true that we desire to make slaves of man. We are opposed to slavery—to slavery of all sorts; and, although man deserves, on account of his oppressions of the poor negro, to be made a slave of, if human slavery were to be tolerated, yet we desire rather to return good for evil; and all we ask is equality in the Senate, in the Presidential chair, on the bench of justice, in the counting-house and workshop. We want our rights; our right to marriage as a mere civil contract—our right to choose with whom we shall enter into that contract, whether colored or white man, and our right to annul that contract when it pleases us. What kind of freedom is it, when, if I choose to marry a man of color, no matter how noble he may be, I am to be mobbed and driven out of the society of my race; while, if I am so unfortunate as to marry a white man, who turns out to be a brute and tyrant, as he is most like to do, and attempt to rid myself of the horrid incubus, by leaving him, or by suing him for a divorce, I am equally mobbed by the hue-and-cry, and banished from society as an outlaw? We want our rights in marriage—we want equality. I can—”

Here the speaker was interrupted by a voice marvellously flute-like and lingering in its intonations:

“‘At which, like unbacked colts, they pricked their ears,

Advanced their eyelids, lifted up their noses,

As they smelt music.’”

And cold shoulders were simultaneously turned upon the dark-haired and be-jewelled orator of amalgamation.

The dulcet-toned interrogator, who, to the surprise of all eyes, appeared a squabby, cottony, pale-eyed, thick-lipped, lymphatic-looking personage, who wore a wig clumsily, and had no vestige of hair upon brow or violet eyelids, proceeded, in mellifluous phrase—

“We did not come here to talk about private grievances. The sister who speaks so fiercely of our rights, in regard to marriage, had better have had a little experience on the subject. She is, I should judge, considerably the rise of forty, and has never yet been married; not even to one of the dark-browed children of Ham, towards whom she exhibits so decided a leaning. Now, I have been married six times already—(great sensation,)—and to white men, and gentlemen, at that; and consider myself, therefore, qualified to speak of marriage. Marriage is a great blessing; let her try it when she gets a chance, and she will find it so! (much bristling and fidgeting, the dark-haired woman looking daggers.) It isn’t marriage that is the great evil, against which we have to fight—nor it isn’t the slavery of the colored race, either. It is the slavery of our own race, of our own kith and kin, of our own blood and complexion. It is the emancipation of our own fathers, sons, and brothers, from the barbarous penalties of the penal code. Our erring fathers, sons, and brothers; it is their cause, my sisters, it is their cause we are called upon to vindicate. According to our brutal laws, one little frailty, to which we all may be subject,—one little slip, which any, the purest of us may make—subjects man to solitary incarceration for life, in which he is cut off from all loving communion with our sex; or to the horrible penalty of death by the rope! This, my beloved sisters, is the crying evil of the day; and man, cruel man, is in favor of such inflictions. We must soften his flinty heart, through our charms. It is our duty, it is our mission, to effect amelioration in favor of the erring classes. We are all erring; and in how much are we better than they?—except, that through our cunning, and in our cowardice, we have as yet escaped penalties which, under the same measure of justice, might as well have been visited upon us. I have visited the penitentiaries and prisons of many States, that I might carry consolation to the shorn and manacled children of oppression. I tell you that I have seen among them gods, whose shattered armor gleamed in light! I have seen Apollo, with his winged heel chained to a round-shot! I have witnessed more glorious effulg—”

“Hiss-s-s-s!” “Nonsense!”

“It was Mercury, the god of thieves, you saw with the round-shot at his heels!” said an oily voice; and, as all eyes turned in that direction, the forehead of the speaker flushed crimson while she proceeded—

“It is not man at all; it is we who shut ourselves up in tight frocks, who make hooks-and-eyes our jailors, and ribs of whalebone our strait-jackets! Let us first free ourselves physically, give our lungs and hearts room to play, and then we may talk about open battle with man for our rights. But, as it is, to speak thus, is nonsense. We are weak, while man is strong; we must fight him with other weapons than open force. While he laughs at our pretensions, let us, too, laugh at his foibles, and govern him through them. It was to consult, as to some consistent and uniform system, by which we should be enabled to accomplish this result, that we came together this afternoon. It has been well said, that our motto should be, ‘The end justifies the means.’ To the weak and the determined, this is a sacred creed, and we should go forth with it in our hearts, and act upon it in all our relations towards men. It should be our business to get possession of them, body and soul. We need their influence, to advance our views, to obtain our rights. We should be all things to all men; should believe in the Bible, in Fourier, in Swedenborg, in Joe Smith, or Mahomet, if necessary, so that the influence be gained. We must seek out everywhere men who hold places of power and public influence, and win them—not to our cause, for that would be hopeless—but to ourselves; and through ourselves to our cause. We must not scruple as to the means; for ‘the end justifies the means.’ We must find, by whatever stratagem, art, or intrigue, that may be available, the assailable points in the characters of those who may be of use to us, and secure them, at whatever risk of reputation; for, as we will secretly sustain each other, we will at once dignify ourselves and our cause into the position of martyrdom, and be able to take shelter behind the omnipotent cry of persecution. There we are safe.”

“Good!” “Good!” “Right!” “Right!” “Just the thing!” burst from all sides of the room; while the weather-beaten face,—that is, the forehead,—of the lithe, glib speaker flushed with momentary exultation, while she continued, with still greater emphasis—

“Thus banded, my sisters, if we are firm, faithful, and enduring, we may conquer the world. There is never a period when there is more than a dozen men who wield its destinies. There are nearly a dozen of us here present, and there are other spirits that I know, resolute and strong enough, to be our associates; let us resolve, then, to govern those who govern; and the romantic fragments of the life of a Lola Montes will have been firmly conjoined in the fact of a governing dynasty, the sceptre of which shall be upheld by woman.”

Storms of applause, during which the plain, Quakerish-looking speaker subsided into her seat. As she did so, there might have been observed, under the flush of exultation which mantled her brow, a singular obliquity of the left eye! Ha! Etherial!

CHAPTER VIII.
INTRUSION.

’Tis he! I ken the manner of his gait—

He rises on the toe; that spirit of his

In aspiration lifts him from the earth.

Shakspeare.

A barren-spirited fellow! one that feeds

On objects, arts, and imitations.

Idem.

This is a slight, unmeritable man,

Meet to be sent on errands.

Idem.

We will now enter one of the upper rooms of the notorious Graham House, with the interior of which we have before been familiarised, and which had been reopened, on a modified basis. A single glance at the confused piles of manuscripts, books, and papers, scattered about the room and on the table, mingled with stumps of pens and cigars, and a long-tubed meerschaum, showed that it could be no other than the characteristic den of a literary bachelor, who, with chair and table drawn close to the stove, sat there to show for himself, earnestly engaged in what seemed to be the business of his life—writing.

You saw in a moment that this was not a Northern man, for in addition to the long, black, and wavy hair, the dark, bronzed, and vaulting features indicated clearly a Southern origin. He was evidently young—certainly not more than twenty-seven, judging, as one instinctively does, by contour of person and features, and not by the expression of the face. But that expression, when you saw it, as he lifted his head, at once left you in doubt whether it could possibly belong to so immature a period of life. Although the brow was broad, and mild as that of a child, yet there was a solemn and unnatural fixedness in the whole face, which, united with the cold stillness of the great, gray, hollow eyes, told at once a dreary tale of suffering, which sent an involuntary shudder through your soul. Where the expression rested most, it was impossible for you to tell; but the feeling it conveyed was one of absolute horror. That a face, which seemed so young, should be one that never smiled!—And could the story that it told be true? Could it be that for years that face had never smiled?

A light tap was heard at the door, and, with a momentary frown of vexation at the interruption, he turned his head, and a young man entered the room, with somewhat hesitating step, which showed that he was by no means certain of his ground.

He was slight and thin, something below the average height, with even a darker complexion than that of the face we have just described; his black hair, and preternaturally black and vivid eyes, glittered beneath straight, heavy brows, which nearly met. His nose was prominent and partly arched; and there was, in the whole bowed bearing and cat-like gait of this person, an inexplicably strange and foreign look, which, alike in all countries, characterises that fated race which is yet an outcast among the nations.

His greeting was singularly expressive of eager appreciation, while that of his host to him was cold, distant, and merely polite. Pushing aside his writing materials, as he handed him a chair, Manton—for such was the name of our young writer—turned upon his visitor a frigid look of inquiry, and said, with a formality almost drawling—

“Doctor E. Willamot Weasel, I hope it is well with you this evening?”

His visitor, in rather a confused manner, commenced—“Ye-es, yes—I—I fear I am intruding on your seclusion; but p-pardon me, I cannot bear any longer to see you thus seclude yourself from all the amenities of social life. You need relaxation; your stern isolation here with the pen, and pen alone, is playing wild work with your fine faculties. Pardon me, if I insist upon it, that you must and should accept the sympathies of the men and women around you. In the doctrine of unity in diversity, Fourier demonstrates that there is nothing more fatal to consistent development of both body and mind, than entire pre-occupation in a single object or pursuit.”

Detecting a shade of vexation, at this juncture, crossing the open brow of Manton, Doctor Ebenezer Willamot Weasel hastily reiterated his apologies.

“I beg of you not to mistake my zeal for impertinence. I have already received much good and many valuable truths from conversation with you, and I conceive myself under strong personal obligations of gratitude to you, that I hope may plead for me in extenuation of what you, no doubt, consider an impertinent intrusion. I would, as some measure of acknowledgment for such obligations, beg to be permitted to protest with you against this dangerous and obstinate isolation from all human sympathies, in which your life, dedicated to literary ambition, seems to be here fixed.”

“My good friend, Doctor Weasel, my life is my own, and my purposes are fixed. I need no sympathisers, since I am sufficient unto myself. They would only distract and minify the higher aims of my life. You may call it literary ambition, but I call it a settled and sacred purpose to achieve good in my day and generation. I am content, sir! Do not attempt to disturb that contentment!”

This reply was somewhat curtly delivered, and seemed to discompose the Doctor, who, however, hesitatingly persisted—

“Ah! ah! ah! yes! I expected to hear something of the sort from you, of course, but I beg you to consider that, under the harmonic law of reciprocation or mutual support and benefits, discovered by Fourier, and which lies at the base of all true organisation, you have no more right, as an individual, to hold yourself aloof, intellectually and socially, from the great body of mankind who are working for your benefit as well as for their own, than a rich man has to lock up his hoards of gold, and bury it where future generations may not reach it! The social state can only exist by individual concessions in favour of the whole.”

“Your argument,” was the cold response, “like all generalising postulates aimed at particular cases, overleaps its mark. I consider that I shall effect more earnest good by persisting in this isolation against which you protest. For as I do not ask or require the individual sympathies of my race, but rather choose the still-life of undisturbed sympathy and communion with nature, I feel that I shall accomplish more, far more, for humanity, in thus dedicating myself to her interpretation. Through me, as a medium, my fellow men may thus learn far loftier truths than they themselves might ever impart reciprocally amidst the babble of what you call social intercourse.”

“But you do not exclude women, surely? That would be unnatural; for you know that the life of man cannot be completely balanced, without the ameliorating presence and subduing contact of woman. He becomes a savage without her; his passions are brutalised, and the man is spiritually and socially degraded.”

“An admirable truism, Doctor! I honor and revere woman; in her high place she is to us, emphatically—angel! But this very reverence in which I hold her, prompts me to avoid contacts that may despoil me of my ideal. I am prepared to worship her, but not to degrade or look upon her degraded. There is nothing, in the range of human possibilities, so hideous to me as such contact—for I would hold my mother’s image always uncontaminated. I am a stranger, sir. I make no female acquaintances at present here.”

“Sorry,” said the Doctor, “very sorry, sir; for my special mission in this case was to persuade you to give up your isolation, in favor of an acquaintance with a most noble and charming woman, a friend of mine, who, having met with your papers in the journal you are now editing, is exceedingly anxious for an introduction, which I, in plain terms, have come to request. She is a woman of masculine and daring mind, and is taking the initial in most of the reform movements of the day, and particularly the most important of them all, the science of physiology as applicable to her own sex. She has taken the lead as the first lecturer on such subjects, and is accomplishing a vast amount of good. I am sure you will be much struck with her, and I never met two people whom I was more anxious to see brought together. You will appreciate each other, as physiology is one of your favorite subjects.”

“Bah! a lecture-woman! But I don’t mean to be disrespectful, Doctor. You could have told me nothing that would have more firmly fixed my resolution neither to be introduced to or know the person of whom you speak, on any terms whatever! Your manly-minded women are both my disgust and abhorrence!—as what they choose to call manliness is most usually a coarse and sensual impudence, based on inherent immodesty, which renders them incapable of recognising the delicate unities of propriety, either in thought or deed. I fully concede a woman’s capacity for displaying the great and even loftier processes of intellection; but the moment she unsexes herself, she and her thoughts become vulgarised. Such people are universally adventuresses, and of the most unscrupulous sort. I, as a stranger here, wish to run no risk of becoming entangled in their plausibilities. I am working for a full, free and frank recognition, by the social world, of my right to choose the place, the social circle rather, that I shall enter and become a part of. I do not wish to be dragged into such contacts, but to command them at my will!”

“But, sir,” persisted the Doctor, “she admires your papers so fervently, and pities the cruel and self-inflicted isolation in which you live, with such ardent, disinterested and motherly warmth, that you can scarcely, in your heart, be so obdurate as to reject her genial overture—the sole object of which is, to draw you forth into some participation with the milder humanities—to make you feel that New York is not really the savage, base and flowerless waste which we are led to presume you consider it, from the attitude you have assumed toward its social conditions. You are killing yourself here with tobacco, wine and labour, while she would show that even self-immolated genius may find a warm place to nestle, in distant lands, and near the matronly bosom, in spite of cold and sullen self-reliance!”

“The fact of her being a matron,” frigidly responded Manton, “considerably modifies the general character of the proposition which she has done me the honor, through you, to communicate. But, Doctor, I must finally and definitively state to you that I do not, at present, wish to cultivate any female acquaintance whatever in the city of New York. I propose to wait until I can select instead of being selected.” And rising at the same time with an impatient movement, which might or might not, be mistaken for a desire to be left alone, Mr. Manton politely showed Doctor E. Willamot Weasel, who had now taken the hint, to the door.

---

Almost the same moment after his discomfited visitor left, Manton hastily gathered up the scattered leaves of manuscript on his table, and muttering, as he thrust the roll into his pocket, “Curse the intrusion! this ought to have been in the printers’ hands an hour ago, and yet it is not finished!” and snatching up his cap, he passed from the room, and left the house.

Not long after, there came a sharp ring at the door of the Graham House, and the female servant, who hurriedly hastened to open it, was quite as sharply interrogated by a woman on the outside, who was closely veiled, and wore a sort of Quaker garb—

“Is Mr. Manton in?”

“No, ma’am, he has just gone out.”

“Where is his room? I have a letter for him, which I wish to deposit in a safe place with my own hands. What is the number of his room?” she asked, in an imperative manner.

“Ma’am, the gentleman is out. Can’t you leave the letter with me or the mistress? We will give it to him when he comes.”

“No, I choose to place it myself. What is his number?” And as she spoke, she slightly unveiled herself. The servant seemed to recognise her face even through the dusk, and said, though rather sullenly, as she gave way for her to pass—

“Yes, ma’am, walk in. His room is No. 26, on the third floor.” The female glided rapidly past, and as the servant attempted to follow her, exclaiming, “Ma’am, I will show you the number,” she answered hastily, “Never mind, I know where the room is now!” and darted up the stairs.

The servant muttered some droll commentaries on this procedure, which it is not necessary to repeat, and seeming to be afraid to complain to her superiors, dragged herself surlily back towards her subterranean home.

In the meantime our light-footed and unceremonious caller had reached the third floor, and walked straight forward to the door of the room just left by Manton. She troubled herself with no idle ceremony of knocking, but walked confidently in.

CHAPTER IX.
BESIEGED.

Such forces met not, nor so wide a camp,

When Agrican, with all his northern powers,

Besieged Albracca, as romances tell.

Paradise Regained.

An hour after the last scene, Manton returned to his room, and, seeming greatly hurried, lit his lamp, and throwing himself into a chair, seized his pen, muttering between his teeth, “It must be finished to-night! a man has no right to be tired!” He was drawing his writing materials towards him, to proceed with his work, when a something of strange disorder among his papers caught his quick eye.

“Ah! who has been disturbing my papers?” and as a flash of suspicion shot through him, he sprang to his feet, exclaiming, “my trunks, no doubt, have shared the inquisition!” and stepping quickly to them, he threw up the lids.

“By Heaven, it is so! what accursed carelessness this is of mine, leaving everything unlocked in this fashion!”

His first glance had shown him that the trunks had been disturbed, and a cautious effort been made to replace the contents as they were before. Uttering some energetic expletives of wrath, he knelt beside one to ascertain how far the examination had been carried, when, reaching the packages of letters and papers at the bottom, he saw there, too, unmistakable evidence of a pretty thorough examination having been held of their contents.

If he had been enraged before, this filled him with uncontrollable fury. He stamped his foot heavily upon the floor, and his whole frame shook violently, while with gnashing teeth he called down a fearful imprecation upon the head of this wretched violator, whoever it might be, of the sad and mournful secrets of his past life, which he had held sealed in his own bosom, so sternly, so long, and, alas! so vainly. Those letters revealed all. Some prying reptile had thus slimed the holy penetralia of his proud life!

The very thought was horror—loathing! A shudder of unutterable disgust crept through him; an uncontrollable fury blazed through his soul; his eyes glittered with almost demoniac fire; his face turned deathly white, and his teeth ground and clattered like the clamp of a wild boar’s tusks, and yet he made no tragic start; he stood still, with his arms clutching each other across his breast, and his eyes looking out into the blank distance, through which their concentrated light seemed to pierce to some far object. He at length pronounced slowly—

“Yes, my curse shall follow you; be you man or woman, it shall overtake you in terror! I feel the prophecy in me! The wretch who has thus contaminated those chaste and loved mementoes, shall yet feel my curse! My consciousness is filled with it! I know not how, or when, or where! my curse shall reach and blast the author of this sacrilege!—bah!” and his face writhed into the devilish mockery of a smile; “it is almost sufficient vengeance, one would think, that the wretch found no money!”

Starting suddenly forward, he commenced pacing to and fro with long strides, with knitted brows, compressed lips, and eyes bent upon the floor.—For more than an hour he thus silently communed with himself, without the change of a muscle in expression, when drawing a long sigh, he threw off this frigid look in a degree, merely saying in a low voice, “My curse is good!” and returned to the table to resume his seat and his labors.

As he did so, his eye fell upon a note directed to himself, which, as it had been placed in no very conspicuous position among the objects on the table, had, till now, escaped his attention. He reached it, and the dainty crow-quilled hand of the superscription, the snowy envelope, and the pure white seal, disclosed at once the woman.—He regarded it for a moment, coldly, and without any expression of interest or surprise, and with a slight sneer upon his face, broke the seal, when out slipped a gilt-edged note, which he opened and read aloud with a jeering tone:

Friend—May I not claim to be thy friend in common with the whole world, who have learned to love thee, through thy beautiful thoughts? Stricken, sad, and suicidal child of genius, may I not steal into the tiger’s lair of thy savage isolation, to bring one single ray of blessing, to tell thee how, at least, one human soul has throbbed to the seraphic eloquence of powers, that, alas!—I appeal to your inmost consciousness!—are being rapidly destroyed by your obstinate seclusion in labor, and by the vices of wine and tobacco, which are its necessary attendants. You have it in you to be saved; your soul is tall and strong as an archangel; your vices are the withes of grass that bind you; and love, social love, the calm and genial reciprocation of domestic sympathies, can alone redeem you.

You are proud—I know it! but pride will yield to gentleness, and in a distant land among strangers, the tearless, motherless boy, will not reject a mother’s proffer of a mother’s yearnings. You naughty, haughty child, we must save you from yourself, in spite of yourself!

Yours spiritually,
Marie.

Manton, whose face had, during this reading, writhed with almost every conceivable expression, tossed the letter from him as he finished it, with the exclamation—“Pah! this must be Doctor E. Willamot Weasel’s lecture-woman! Impudent adventuress in every line, as I expected!” And he resumed his pen and his labors, continuing in a low voice as he commenced his writing—“Unfortunate allusion, by the way, to the withes of grass—we cannot help being reminded of a certain Mr. Samson, and a Miss or Mrs. Delilah. Curse her! how came she to speak of my mother?” and grinding his teeth heavily, he proceeded with the work before him, without paying any further attention to the circumstance.

The greater portion of the night was spent in intense labor; but, when, after a very late bath and breakfast, the next morning, Manton went out to the office of the Journal for an hour, and returned, he was not a little surprised to find another missive, as neat and snowy as the first, awaiting him, on the table.

He thought it must surely be the first, that he had, in some unconscious mood, re-enclosed in the envelope; but, glancing around, he saw it lying open, where he had tossed it.

“Gramercy! but she fires fast!” he said, with a droll look passing across his features, as he stooped down, his hands cautiously clasped behind his back, to survey more closely the delicate superscription—Mr. Stewart Manton, Graham House, Present.

“Present! present! but this sounds rather ominous! Can it be that my spiritual correspondent of last night is an inmate too? My correspondent is evidently both in earnest and in a hurry! What shall I do? By my faith, I have a great mind to throw it upon the centre-table of the common parlor below, and let this benevolent lady reclaim her own, or else leave it to the irresistible access of curiosity, common to the sex, and peculiar to this queer house, to explore its unclaimed sweets. The first taste has quite sickened me. I have something other to do than listen to such inane twattle.”

He continued for some moments to gaze upon the letter, while a half-sneering smile played upon his grave and melancholy features. “Well, but this must be a quaint specimen of a feminine, to say the least of it! I have heard of these spiritual ladies before! The character must be worth studying, though it seems to be transparent enough, too. Well! we’ll see what she has to say this time, at any rate! It can hardly be richer than the first! Here it is!”

Friend—I know your heart. That proud heart of yours is at this moment filled with scorn for my poor words and humble proffers. But it does not affect me much, for well I know that this pride is the evil which ever strives in the unregenerate soul, to fence against the approaches of good. As yet this demon possesses thee, and, until conquered and humbled by love, you can never be saved. Thy physical life is poisoned—is poisoned with tobacco—and it is through such poisons that this evil spirit of pride enters into thy soul. Thy spiritual vision is thus obscured, that you may not perceive the truth. I shall pray for you. My spirit shall wrestle with thine when you know it not, and God will help his humble instrument. May He soon move that obdurate heart of thine, proud boy!

Marie

“Well! but this is cool! decidedly refreshing! This pertinacious creature is surely some mad woman confessed, as she certainly is a most raging and impertinent fanatic! Boy, forsooth! patronising. I should almost be provoked, were not the thing so egregiously ludicrous! Well, well! it is consoling, at least, that I have found my good Samaritan at last. I shall preserve these precious epistles, as decidedly curious memoranda of this original type of the Yankee adventuress, for Yankee she must be, who has set out thus boldly on a speculation in the spiritualities. I think I have had enough of this trash now, as I intend to take no notice either of it or of the writer. I should suppose she might get discouraged.”

The letters were thrown carelessly into a drawer, and Manton sat down to his work.

The next morning, when Manton returned from the office, at the usual hour, what should meet his eye, the first thing on entering the room, but a third snowy missive, placed now more conspicuously, on the very centre of the table. The poor man stopped, frowned, then gradually his eyes distended into a wild stare, and lifting his hands at the same moment, he shouted out—

“Good God! What, another?” and then, with a sudden revulsion of feeling, he burst into a loud, unnatural laugh. “This is patience for you! By heaven! she dies game to the last! Well! let’s see what now, for I am beginning to be charmed with the progress of this thing. There’s an absolute fascination in such daring.”

He snatched up the note, and opening it, read it sotto voce, with an indescribable intonation of contempt:—

Friend—Ah, glorious soul, that I might call thee so indeed! I have just read your poem in the Journal. Read it, did I say? My soul has devoured it! Again and again have I returned to the feast unsated. Ah me, that mighty rhythm! It has filled me with new strength and light! On its harmonious flow the universe of beauty, love and life has been brought closer to me—has been revealed in splendor and unutterable music, until I have sobbed for joy thereof, and prayed and wrestled for thee, with my Father above, that thou mightest be saved. It is terrible to think that a soul so god-like as thine should be unregenerate. I bless thee! I bless thee, my son! I pray for thee! I am praying for thee! I shall pray for thee always, until thou art saved!

Marie.

“Good! I am in a fair way for salvation now, one would think! This seems a strange character—such a mixture of fanaticism, cant, and, withal, appreciation! That poem of mine was certainly an extraordinary one. I hardly expected to find any one that would appreciate it at first. But see! she has already caught its subtle reach and meaning. Pooh! what a fool I am! This is perfectly on a par with all the other hysterical cant which I have received from this person. The probability is, if the lines had been written by Mr. Julian Augustus Maximilian Dieaway, upon whose soft sconce she desired to make an impression (in the way of speculation), the same extravagant tropes and metaphors would have found their way to the snowy surface of this gilt-edged paper, through the delicately-handled crow-quill! Curse it! I shall order the chambermaid to stop the nuisance of these missives!”

This letter was impatiently tossed into the drawer with the others, and Manton threw himself into his chair; when, after sitting with his head leaning on his hands, moody and motionless, for some time, he suddenly straightened himself, and drew from the heap of magazines and books before him a fresh-looking copy of the —— Journal. Turning over its leaves eagerly to that which contained his new poem, he perused it and re-perused it over and over again, with an expression of restlessness and intense inquiry in his manner during the time. At last he drew a long breath, and threw the book back upon the table, exclaiming in a firm voice, “No! I am satisfied. This is no namby-pamby die-away rhyming—there is genuine stuff there; that is true poetry, or I have it not in my nature to produce it. That cursed meddlesome woman has made me distrust myself for the moment; by her extravagant praises, has made me doubt the genuineness of my own inspiration. Her letter is so evidently disjointed ranting, that it has shaken my self-reliance to have even read it. Curse her silly and impertinent legends, I shall read no more of them!”

Poor Manton was evidently troubled now, at length; and can the reader conjecture why this last letter had so excited him? Had a subtle arrow found its mark? Was there any thing in the poem really to justify the high-flown and ecstatic panegyrics of missive No. 3, in the snow-white envelope? You shall see—you shall judge. Here is a true copy of the poem:—

NO REST.

O soul, dream not of rest on earth!

On! forth on! It is thy doom!

Too stern for pain, too high for mirth,

On! thou must, through light and gloom.

Would’st thou rest when thou hast strength

Mated with the seraphim?

Time outlasting, all whose length

Fades, within thine ages, dim?

O strong traveller, can’st thou tire,

When, but touching at the grave,

Thy worn feet, re-shod, aspire,

Winged, to cleave as Uriel[3] clave?

Rest! ah, rest then! be alone—

God the Worker, thou the Drone!

Soon yon atom, swiftly driving

Past thee, in the upward race,

Braver for the perfect striving,

Shall assume the higher place.

God, the Worker, knows no rest—

Pause, and be of Him unblest.

Lo! how by thee all is flying!

Even matter outspeeds thee!

Stronger thou, yet thou seem’st dying—

Fading down immensity.

Rouse the quickened life to know!

God works subtly, work thou so!

Thou art subtler than the wind,

Than the waters, than the light,

Than old Chaos, whom these bind,

Beautiful, on axle bright.

Yet thou sleepest, while they speed—

God, of sleepers has no need!

Waiteth cloud, or stream, or flower,

Robing meadows and the wood?

Waiteth swallow past its hour,

Chasing spring beyond the flood?

Yet thou waitest, weak, untrue—

God rebuketh sloth in you!

Sing the stars wearily,

Old though and gray?

Spin they not cheerily

Cycles to-day?

Look they like failing,

Pause they for wailing,

Since none may stay?

Systems are falling—

Autumns have they;

Stars yet are calling

Life from decay.

Dead worlds but gild them

Dusted in light;

Dead times have filled them

Fuller of might.

Brightening, still brightening,

Round, round, they go—

Eternity lightening

The way and the wo!

De Noto.

[3]

“Thither came Uriel, gliding through the even.”

Paradise Lost.

CHAPTER X.
“ONCE MORE TO THE BREACH.”

——Once more to the breach, my friends!

Once more!

Old Play.

Poor Manton was not permitted to remain in peace at his labors long. On the afternoon of the same day, Doctor E. Willamot Weasel, scarcely taking time to announce himself by a sharp knock, bolted into the room, exclaiming—

“Ah! my dear friend, pardon me; but the lady concerning whom I spoke to you, is now in the parlor below, and requests the pleasure of an interview.”

A frown instantly darkened the brow of Manton, and he answered angrily—

“Sir! you will remember that I expressed to you, most distinctly, a disinclination for such an introduction. I told you I did not wish to know this woman, then, and I feel still less inclination to know her now.”

“But, a-ah! my dear sir, you would not surely be unkind enough to refuse to see the lady now, when she waits in the parlor, in momentary expectation of seeing you—for the servant told her you were in? It certainly can do you no harm to be courteous.”

“That’s a strong appeal to make to a Southerner, Doctor Weasel, it must be confessed.”

“Yes,” said he, rubbing his hands, “I thought you could not disregard it. I am so anxious to bring you together! Do come. I shall be delighted. Come! pray come! she is waiting.”

“Doctor Weasel, I do this thing with great reluctance,” said Manton, rising. “I suppose I must go; but rest assured, I do not feel particularly obliged to you for forcing me into this position.”

This was said in a very cold, measured tone; but the Doctor’s delight at the prospect of accomplishing his favorite and benevolent scheme, was so great, that his excitement prevented him from observing it.

“Never mind, come along; you will thank me for it, on the contrary, as long as you live.”

Manton left the room with him, and when they reached the parlor, he was rapidly introduced to Mrs. Orne and her daughter, who sat upon a lounge awaiting him. The Doctor instantly darted out of the room; and Manton was left vis-a-vis with his ecstatic correspondent.

As the woman rose to meet him, the blood mounted to her very plain face, and square, compact, masculine forehead. The child, which was an ugly, impish-looking girl, with a mean forehead, wide mouth and projecting chin, nevertheless arrested the eye of Manton, as he sat down, by a mournful expression of suffering in her light gray eye.

The woman was evidently embarrassed for a moment, by the studied coldness of Manton’s manner, whose eye continued to dwell upon the half-quaker, and half-tawdry dress, rather than upon the face that had at the first glance impressed him so disagreeably.

“I have found you out, at last!” said the lady visitor, in a low, pleasing voice. “Now I have ventured into the tiger’s den, I hope he will not eat me!”

“You are perfectly safe, madam!” was the stiff response to this sally. “But to what may I owe the honor of this visit? Is there anything I can do for you?”

The blood mounted quickly to the woman’s forehead as she answered hastily, “Yes, I wanted to know if you can furnish me with a copy of all your works! I have admired with so much intensity what I have seen—but I am afraid you are very much of a naughty boy—you look so cold and cross! I am almost afraid to ask you!”

“I am very sorry, madam, I have written no works, as you are pleased to call them. What I have done is entirely fragmentary, and I have not collected those fragments even for myself,” was the unbending reply.

“Oh, yes, you have! I have seen many of them, and you need not be ashamed to own them, for there is nothing of the kind in literature to surpass them. Why, there’s ——,” and she ran on with a ready list of what she termed works, not a little to the surprise of Manton, who only listened with a cold stare, and bowed profoundly, as she concluded with a high-wrought panegyric.

“I am sorry I have no such works in my possession, nor can I tell you where they can be obtained!”

The woman grew very red in the face again, and bit her lips in vexation, while Manton remained silent. She soon rallied, however, and commenced a conversation upon the general literature of the day, in which Manton, in spite of himself, was gradually interested, by a certain sharp epigrammatic method of uttering heresies, and bold paradoxes, which seemed to be peculiar to her mind, and which could not but prove refreshing to one, who, like Manton, most heartily detested commonplace.

He, however, did not unbend in the slightest, and the woman, who finally, in despair of “getting at him,” rose to depart, said, yet perseveringly, with winning badinage—

“I find you in a naughty humor to-day. You are as cold as an iceberg and sharp as a nor’wester. When you get to be a good boy, you may come and see me!”

“When I do, madam, I shall surely come!” was the response, accompanied by a very low bow, and delivered in a tone that would have frost-bitten the ear of a polar bear.

The discomfited woman hurried from the parlor with the blood almost bursting from her face, while Manton, turning on his heel, muttered—

“Well! if that does not freeze her off, she ought to be canonised!”

CHAPTER XI.
CARRIED BY STORM.

You call it an ill angel—it may be so;

But sure am I, among the ranks that fell

’Tis the first fiend e’er counselled man to rise!

Anon.

Manton had reckoned without his host, in supposing that his self-constituted patroness had any idea whatever of being frozen off: on the contrary, her benevolent ardor had been only warmed still more, as he had abundant evidence, when, on returning from his office next morning, he found yet another snowy missive crowning the centre of his table.

“Monsieur Tonson, come again!” he exclaimed, as he seized the note, and opened it this time without hesitation, “what can the incredible woman have to say now? Well, here it is!”

My Friend—You heaped ice upon my heart yesterday. To-day, I feel chilled and stiffened, as if my very soul-wings had been frosted through your lips! Why did you do so? It was not magnanimous in you. You are proud, and beautiful, and strong, while I am plain, and weak, and lowly. Was it worthy of a noble soul to treat with such harsh and cutting coldness a poor, feeble, and wayworn daughter of sorrow like myself, who had come merely in the meek and matronly overflow of tenderness and appreciation for a poisoned, sick and erring child of genius, to offer him her sympathy in his dreary and unrelieved immolation of glorious powers at the unholy altar of ambition? Was it not unkind of you? Can you suppose that had you not been poisoned, body and soul, the demon pride would have thus overruled your better and your angel nature to such harsh rejection of the comforter, the Father had sent you in his mercy? What have I asked of you, but that you should unbend this fatal pride, and accept of mortal genialities? That you should spare yourself from yourself, and give something to others. Ah! you will not always thus repulse the sympathies of your race—naughty, naughty boy! hasten to be good and come to see me!

Marie.

“Well! well! by heaven, the audacity of this thing soars to the sublime! and yet there is some truth as well as pathos in it, too! Now, I come to think of it, it was unmanly of me to treat the poor woman so, just as if I expected she carried stilettoes or revolvers under her petticoats, or wore aromatic poison in her bosom, with a foul and treacherous design upon my life! The fact is, I have made a bugbear of this creature in my imagination, when she is nothing, in fact, but fool and fanatic combined, with a little disjointed mother-wit. Curse the whole affair! I wish she and her endless letters were in the bottom of the sea! By these persistent impertinences she disturbs me in my work; these distractions are unendurable! I wish she were only safe in heaven.

It is useless to give all the letters which poor Manton received within the next four or five days, but it is sufficient to say that at last, in a fit of veritable desperation, spleen and humor, he answered one of the last in a tone of hyperbolical exaggeration that would have put to shame, not Mercutio only, but the veritable Bombastes Furioso himself. The effect was coldly studied, and behold the result.

The next morning a servant informed him that a lady desired to see him in the parlor.

Terror-stricken by the announcement, he nevertheless knew, in his conscience, that he had brought down the judgment upon his own head. He therefore felt it to be his duty to abide the consequences of his own imprudence, and went down to wait upon his caller, who, of course, was no other than his correspondent.

She received him with a flushing face, as seemed to be usual to her shrinking nature. She was this time without her daughter. There were other persons in the parlor, and this seemed to disconcert her somewhat, for she had evidently come full of some important disclosure. Although it was the latter part of winter, and a heavy snow had just commenced breaking up, which rendered the streets of New York almost impassable, she nevertheless proposed that they should go out for a long walk. Manton looked through the window into the sloppy street, opened his eyes a little, and assented.

There was something wonderfully rare in the idea of a woman’s proposing a long walk on such a day, and Manton relished the hardiness and originality of the thing.

“Well!” said he to himself, “I like her spunk, anyhow! She has shown herself in every way to be in earnest in what she undertakes. Phew! I shall enjoy it! a woman in long petticoats, wading a mile or two through a cold slush such as this! After this, what is it that Madame won’t do? I’ll lead her something of a round, at any rate, before she gets back.”

These thoughts passed through his mind as he ran up-stairs for his cap. She met him as he came down, in the passage-way, and they passed out at the front door.

“You are a droll person,” said Manton, as they reached the street.

“Why?” asked she, with a covert gleam in her eye.

“Why? Because few women would have thought of choosing such a day as this for a walk.”

“I care nothing for trifles! Misfortune has taught me to disregard them. Suffering makes us hardy.”

Manton looked down at her with surprise; for, of all things on earth, the most disagreeable to him, was that commonplace timidity, and shrinking from trifles, which is so ludicrously characteristic of American women. He did not wish to see woman unsexed, but contemned her puerile and unnecessary cowardice.

His companion now proceeded with great animation to follow up the favorable opening thus effected, with a rapid and pathetic sketch, in outline, of her sad and suffering life.

She had been married by her parents to a sordid lout of a Quaker, in New England, whose horrid barbarities and persecutions had finally compelled the weak and hitherto unresisting woman to seek a separation, the scandal of which had roused against her the relentless animosity of the whole body of New England Quakers, who finally carried their brutal persecution to the extreme of assisting her yet more brutal husband, in robbing her of her dear and only child, under the plea that she was neither a suitable nor capable person to have charge of it. That, after a long period, spent by the distracted mother in roaming up and down the land, in search of aid and comfort, she had at length succeeded in enlisting some noble and benevolent souls in her cause, who finally rescued the child, by strategy or force, and restored it to its weeping mother’s arms.

In addition to this sad tale of suffering connected with her private history, which was most skilfully and artistically worked up, she had another, of public martyrdom, which was, to Manton, far more impressive.

Through obscurity and poverty, this resolute and daring woman had dedicated herself to the amelioration of the physical evils of her helpless sex. She had, with unflagging ardor, studied the books of anatomical science, the diseases of her sex, and the wisest means of cure. And thus, in addition to having been the first woman in New England to publicly assert that there is no true marriage but in love, she had also led the way in announcing to women their sanitary duties to themselves; that they must learn to heal their bodies, and leave the other sex to take care of their own diseases; that delicacy as well as utility prompted this course.

This idea at once met the approbation of Manton, to whom its assertion was comparatively novel, but who had always deeply felt the lamentable helplessness of woman, and the unnatural relation of the male members of the profession to them.

The brave and hearty manner in which this singular woman had evidently breasted alone the popular prejudice, in a cause which he saw, at a glance, to be so just and nobly utilitarian, for the first time moved his sympathies somewhat in her favor, in spite of his contempt and disgust for women who ventured beyond their sphere.

The vocation of a learned nurse to diseased persons of her own sex, was clearly to him not beyond the proper sphere of woman, but a most important, legitimate, and—however little recognised, conventionally—the most honorable and useful. He could not but respect the woman, whatever her eccentricities might be, who could be brave and true enough to assert effectively to her sex, the natural and inevitable mandate, “Know thyself!”

There was something chivalrous in the thought—a generous daring, a martyr spirit, that could not fail to arrest a nature in itself, rashly scornful of all that was merely conventional, and whose untamed, half-savage soul rejoiced in all novelties that expressed to him a higher utility than mere forms conveyed.

The walk was continued for hours; and still further to try her nerves, during this long conversation, Manton turned through many intricacies into the most darkened labyrinths of the vice-profaned metropolis.

The woman never flinched; nothing seemed to appal her, and, as they threaded rapidly the dingy alleys of the “Five Points,” she had an acute theory or a daring speculation for each evil, the external form of which they successively encountered.

There was a vigor and originality in all this, as coming from a woman, that interested Manton in spite of himself. Plain, uncouth, and eccentric as was this scorned “lecture-woman,” he could not but confess to himself, as they returned mud-bedraggled and tired enough from that long walk, that his respect for her had very much increased.

CHAPTER XII.
SPIRITUAL CONFIDENCES.

And under fair pretence of friendly ends,

And well-placed words of glozing courtesy,

Baited with reasons not unplausible,

Wind me into easy-hearted man,

And hug him into snares.

Mask of Comus.

We shall follow the bedraggled heroine of the last chapter, begging leave of the reader to “see her home.”

Mark with what an elate and vigorous step she trips it up Barclay Street into Broadway, after taking leave of Manton at the door of the Graham House. One would think that she should surely be tired, after that tremendous morning’s work, trudging and splashing through the dirtiest mire of three-fourths of the great city. But no—she springs in her gait, and her strange, animal eye, glitters fairly with a devilish obliquity, which has for the moment usurped its expression. She does not mind that people turn and stare after her dragging and bespattered skirts—not she!—her very soul is possessed with the pre-occupation of an ecstatic gloating over some great conquest achieved, or closely perceived already in the prospective future into which she glares.

We shall see what we shall see—only follow, still follow. She has turned up Broadway, and threads the great throng there with rapid glide, as street after street is passed. Ah, now we have it! She crosses—this is Eighth Street! There, in Broadway, near the corner, stands a great house, with wide-open door; the smeared and dirty lintels, the greasy latch, the wide, uncarpeted hall of which, at once reveals it to be one of those miscellaneous and incomprehensible edifices, which are not unfrequently met with on the great thoroughfare, and the uses of which are not generally more specifically known, than that they are fashionable boarding-houses.

Into this ever-gaping entrance she wheeled, and darted up the broad, uncarpeted stairway, which she continued to ascend with almost incredible ease and swiftness to the fifth story. When near the end of a long and narrow passage, she paused before one of the doors, and tapping it slightly, entered without farther ceremony.

A handsome and well-dressed woman, who was engaged in writing at a small escritoire, looked up indifferently as she entered, but the moment she caught the expression of the newcomer’s face, she sprang to her feet, throwing down the pen, and with a strangely shrill and unmusical laugh, screamed out in a most inconceivably voluble style—

“Why, I declare! Marie, what’s the matter? Your eyes are almost bursting out of your head! You look as if you had found a bag of gold, and meant to give me half! Why, bless the woman, how she looks! Have you caught him at last? Well, we’re in luck! I’ve caught my man for sure! He’s been here all the morning, he’s just left! Why, how the woman looks! She keeps staring so! You haven’t gone crazy for joy, have you? Now, do tell! how have you managed to catch that insolent baby, you seemed to have set your heart on so? Why, how muddy the woman is!” she shrieked, looking down at the condition of her dress. “Ha! ha! ha! ha! Do tell, what sort of a game have you been playing? Did you have to hunt him through a pig-sty?”

The woman had been standing motionless, in the meantime, with distended eyes and compressed mouth, stretched in a rigid smile of supernaturally savage exultation. She gazed towards the face of the speaker, but did not seem to listen to her, or see her features. She looked the abstracted embodiment of triumphing evil. Very soon her stiffened lips quivered slightly, while the voluble lady stepping forward, shook her sharply by the shoulder, shrilling out again—

“Do look at the woman! Why, what can be the matter? Can’t you talk? The cat’s got the woman’s tongue surely! I did not think you were so much in earnest about that green boy! Why, I could twist him about my finger like a tow-string! I have achieved something in conquering my man!”

“Y-your man!” said the woman slowly, interrupting her. But these words were accompanied by a look of such strange and taunting significance, that the other turned instantly pale and sprang back, as if she had received an electric shock from those singular eyes, that fell upon her for a moment with their evil obliquity, and then returned instantly to their natural expression. “Wh-why, what do you mean?” stammered the other angrily.

The woman only answered with a pleasant smile—“Now don’t be a jealous fool, Jeannette Shrewell—I shall never interfere with your schemes if you don’t with mine.”

“Yes! but because you knew Edmond long ago,” continued the other in a fierce and shrewish voice, “you dare to insinuate to me that he too has passed through your hands!”

The woman broke out into a loud laugh—“Why, what a child you are! You know what my relations to Edmond are, perfectly. Spiritual—purely and spotlessly spiritual. I should no more think of him than of my grandfather.”

“Spiritual!” shrieked the other, springing forward; “do you dare to use that stupid cant to me? Keep it for the sap-headed boys and senile drivellers that you decoy with such bait, to plunder. You shan’t insult me to my teeth with it.”

The speaker, whose physical energies were far more vehement and overbearing than the other, seemed to have entirely awed her. She sank meekly into a chair, turned very pale, and lifting her eyes with an humble look, she said, in a low imploring voice, “Now, Jeannette, please don’t be so violent. I did not mean to taunt or insult you. You have altogether mistaken me, dear friend. Now, please be calm.”

But the other, whose long black curls still writhed and quivered, like the snakes of the Gorgon head, with rage, stood towering before the suppliant, as if she meant to crush her; and as she thus stood, she really looked superb.

Her profile was delicately chiselled and Roman, with large, dark gray eyes, thin lips, and fine chin; and now that every feature was inspired with anger, the eye ceased to be offended by their habitual expression of selfish, cold, and sharp intellection. She continued, quite as vehemently—

“You have sown the wind, and you must reap. I have heard this vile insinuation before of something between you and Edmond at B.”

“Jeannette! Jeannette! it is false! every word of it. It is a vile slander of my enemies. Ask Edmond himself—he will tell you it is so.”

“Yes! yes! I know it is false. But who gave circulation to these reports? Hey? Your enemies, were they? Your enemies must have a great deal to do, that they keep themselves busy with these manifold stories of your adventures. Who was it aspired to the eclat of any affair with the rich, generous, learned, and travelled Edmond? Who was it dragged him, through his unsuspecting recklessness of conventional usages, into conditions which rendered him liable to such an imputation? Who boasted of it, and attempted to place him in the same category with the dupes and gulls and fools she had already ruined and plundered? Hey? Who was it? Marie ——, I know you,” and she stretched herself to her full height; but, had her vision not been blinded by passion, she might have perceived a cold and scarcely perceptible smile of scornful incredulity pass over the face at which she pointed her sharp finger. “I know you, woman! Beware! beware how you cross my track with Edmond! You had better rouse the sleeping tigress with her young in your arms. He shall be mine! I have sworn it! One year ago, when I heard of his return from Europe, and left everything, mother, sisters, friends, and came on to this city, a thousand miles, alone and unprotected, that I might throw myself in his way, I swore that he should be mine. I had watched his career for years, from a distance, and he had grown to be my ideal. When he became, first the pupil and then the expounder of the new philosophy in France, I too became its student; with unwearied labor I mastered its prodigious science, for I divined the purpose of the man. I knew he must return to his own country, and become its exponent here, and that then my time would come.

“I studied the German, the French, and the Italian; with all which languages I knew him to be familiar. I acquainted myself with the literature of each, that I might be able always to speak with him in the tongues and of the themes of which his long residence in Europe had made the associations most pleasant. Armed thus, cap-a-pie, I have met him at last, as I felt it was my destiny to do.

“I have attracted him; I have all but conquered him. That man shall be my lover! Ay, woman, he shall be my lawful husband! Cross my track in any way, if you d-a-a-r-e! I know your arts; I will render them for ever unavailing to you; I will explain them, and expose them. Cross my track, then, if you d-a-a-r-e!” and, as she hissed out the words between her teeth, she stooped forward and shook her finger in the face of the now actually trembling woman. “Remember! our compact is, you let me alone, and I will let you alone; you help me, I’ll help you; cross me, I destroy you!”

“Is that all?” murmured the woman, in a soft voice, opening her eyes, which had been closed during the greater part of this tirade, while, at the same time, the old obliquity became for a moment apparent.

“Why, Jeannette, I never dreamed of any thing else. I would sooner cut off my right hand than interfere with you, in any respect. Our two courses are entirely different. You have one object and one species of game to hunt down, while I have another. We shall not clash!” and seeing the features of the other relax from exhausted passion, she leaned forward with a pleasing smile.

“Just to think, you stormy child! I had hastened home to tell you of my good fortune, and you so overpower me as to make me forget all I had to tell. You have frightened me sadly, Jeannette, and all about nothing. But I’ve got him—I think he’s booked at last!”

“Pooh!” said the other, sinking into a chair. “Well, I asked you ever so long ago; how did you manage it? You seem to have had a great deal more trouble this time than usual. He does not seem to have been very civil to you heretofore, I should think.”

“No!” said the other, in a low, hoarsened tone, while the blood mounted in crimson flush to her forehead, not to her cheeks. This nice discrimination is very necessary to a true apprehension of such a character. “No, he has acted like a sullen cub, heretofore, a perfect young white bear, with his insolent pride, and clumsy haughtiness! He is the most insulting and impracticable boor I ever took hold of!”

“Ah! I perceive you are splenetic!”

“No! It is simply annoying, that the insufferable fellow should give me so much trouble. Why, only think, he positively refused to be introduced to me—said I was a shallow adventuress, and that he did not wish to know me—even when our Doctor Weasel went to him, with a special request on my part for such an introduction!”

“Oh, yes! but our Doctor is proverbially awkward in such matters. No doubt he spoiled it all in the manner of the request.”

“Well, but you know, if the Doctor is awkward, he’s got money, and as long as he believes in Fourier and Swedenborg as devotedly as he does now, we can use his purse. But to proceed: That sullen Southerner not only refused to be introduced to me, in the most insulting terms, but when I wrote him three or four of my most irresistible billet-doux, that never failed before, he treated them with what I suppose he meant to be silent contempt, for he did not answer one of them, though I had taken the pains to place them all upon his table with my own hands, during his absence, and find out all I could concerning him at the same time.

“I found the key-note, however; the boy loved his mother, and has been playing hyæna with the rest of the world ever since she died, and been endeavoring to imagine himself a misanthrope, with a life dedicated since solely to the ambition of achieving, in her name, good for mankind. This discovery, privately made, put me fully in possession of all I wanted to know of his weakness. I saw he was earnest and chivalrous, as his origin implies, and proudly secretive, so far as the privacies of his life were concerned. So I at once felt that this incrustation of reserve with which he had fenced about his life, could only be broken down by a coup de main.

“I determined to come down upon him, by surprise, in spite of everything. I called on him, and sent our trusty Doctor up to bring him to the parlor per force. The ruse succeeded so far as to effect an introduction; but, to tell you the truth,” and her forehead fairly blazed while she spoke, “I never was treated with such insolent and frozen hauteur in my life before! I went away with my ears tingling and blood on fire, but I cursed him in my very heart, and swore to have a woman’s vengeance! You remember how sick I was that night. Oh, God! such furies as tortured me! I scarcely slept; but a happy thought came to me just about morning.

“He was a poet—his brow revealed that—but with characteristic sternness he had yet published nothing which could be accounted the highest expression of his inmost life. He had made his way in literature rapidly and brilliantly through a novel combination of style, in which the essential elements of prose and poetry were combined; but had never yet ventured to associate his proper name with anything bearing the forms of poetry.

“Now, the Doctor had told me that the poem, under the soubriquet of ‘De Noto,’ in the last number of the Journal, was his, and it at once flashed across me—appreciation! appreciation! The young poet has stolen timidly forth, under disguise, with this myth clear from his soul! He does not expect to be understood at once, and any prompt appreciation will overwhelm him from the very suddenness of the thing; and in his delighted surprise he would yearn towards the acknowledged devil himself.

“I sent him another note expressing that intense appreciation for which I knew he was craving. He treated it with the neglect that he had the others; but I somehow felt that I had made my mark. I called this morning, and as I knew his contempt for mere conventional forms, I ventured upon a dashing ruse de guerre.

“I challenged him, for I knew his own personal hardiness, to take a long walk through all the slop of the thaw. With a stare of surprise he accepted it. I felt even then that my point was half gained. There were people in the parlor, and my object was to get him alone with myself. I felt that I had already touched one weakness, and my object now was to arrest his chivalrous sympathies in behalf of my forlorn and unprotected martyrdom to the cause of woman in her resistance to the brutalities of the marital law, and her right of proclaiming to her sisterhood the sanitary laws of health, in which they have been kept in profound ignorance by the ‘profession.’

“At first, I arrested his attention by the daring of the position which I had assumed, and then aroused his sympathies by a fervent relation of the wrongs inflicted on me by my brutal husband. The story was old, but I managed to throw into it a great deal of feeling, for there is nothing like a tale of persecution to arrest chivalrous minds all over the world. We understand all these propositions as scientific! When I parted with him he smiled upon me, for the first time, genially. I am sure of him now!”

“I should think you might be!”

CHAPTER XIII.
CLAIRVOYANT REVELATIONS.

What see you there,

That has so cowarded and chased your blood

Out of appearance?

Shakspeare.

In a good-sized, neatly-furnished apartment, of a large house in Bond Street, about two weeks after the incidents which were related in the last chapters, a group was assembled, about nine o’clock in the evening, which consisted of Manton, the woman Marie Orne, her daughter, and Dr. E. Willamot Weasel, of whom we have before spoken.

The dark eye of Doctor Weasel glistened with benevolent delight as he gazed upon the group, from which he sat somewhat apart. Manton was seated on a chair near the glowing fire, with the mother on a low stool on one side of him, and the daughter kneeling on the other, while both with upturned reverential eyes drank in eagerly each word that fell from his lips. They seemed to be enchained, enchanted, while he spoke; and the mother, in the almost total speechlessness of her rapt appreciation, could only venture to trust her trembling voice in low, whispered exclamations; while the sad eyes of the impish-looking daughter imitatively stared unutterable things.

The woman’s subtle suggestiveness had roused the brain of Manton, and fully drawn him out on his favorite themes; whatever of natural eloquence he possessed, and he possessed much, flowed smoothly now, for, in spite of himself, his frozen heart had been warmed by the unwearying deference which he met with from these people.

The lamps burned brightly, the hearth glowed, and the eyes of all were bent upon him with genial warmth and admiring earnestness. The north wind howled cold without, to remind him of the long, harsh “winter of his discontent,” which had for ten weary years been unrelieved by any approximation to a scene thus flushed with the sanctities of domestic quiet. Manton always idealised woman—he idealised everything. He was a poet. The very presence of woman was hallowed to his imagination. There was a thrill of sweet fancies and gentle memories conveyed to him, in the very rustle of a silken gown. He adored, he worshipped woman, as she lived in his memory—the holy attributes with which he invested her, penetrated and held him enchained in peaceful awe. He could not, he dare not believe evil of her, if she bore the semblance of good, in thought, or deed, or life.

He had shrunk thus long from contact with her, not because this interval of self-inflicted separation had been other than a weary penance of yearning, but that his fastidious nature dreaded the common contact, which might degrade or mar that ideal of love, which woman personated to him, and in the worship of which he had found the strength for brave deeds.

It was the weakness, the petty flippancy, the commonplaceisms of woman, from which he shrank. He believed that her spiritual strength should equalise her with man’s physical strength in disregarding common fears, paltry conventionalities, and contemptible topics. The miserable skeleton of soul and body, which the world calls “woman of society,” was more horrible to him, by far, than the actual contact with her dry bones in a prepared skeleton would have been—for where one was a comparatively pleasing object to his eye as a philosopher, the other was but the painted, dim-eyed, ghastly spectre of a living death.

There was in this woman, at least so far as he could judge, a total abandon to her natural impulses, which seemed to utterly repudiate those restrictions which are merely commonplace. This was refreshing to him, from its novelty, at any rate, in contrast with the insipidities he so much dreaded, although his taste had from the first been constantly offended.

Yet she seemed so utterly lawless and quietly defiant of what the world, that works in harness, might say, he could not help respecting her for it. It was a new thing in his life, to meet with a woman, sufficiently heroic, to face the martyrdom that she was daring, for so elevated and noble an aim as the emancipation of her own sex from the conditions of utter helplessness, into which their ignorance of the laws of life had sunk them.

Besides, she had shown so much earnest patience with his rude pride, had followed up its aberrations with such a matronly tenderness, exhorting him only, and unceasingly, to be at rest—a rest, the need of which his proud and fainting soul had confessed so often to his inward consciousness. And then this fine appreciation—ah, where is the young poet who can withstand appreciation? And then such delicate deference in trifles!

He had spoken incidentally of his taste in dress; and now the mother and daughter were dressed in the most graceful and faultless simplicity! The heart of Manton was touched. He felt grateful and pleased with these strange Samaritans to him in a strange land.

On a slight pause in the conversation, the woman, still gazing up timidly into the face of Manton, changed the theme suddenly, by asking him,

“What do you think of Clairvoyance?”

“The world is not old enough yet, by twenty years, I think, to answer that question.”

“My reason for asking the question, was, that I have some strange premonitions myself, which I cannot explain. You will, no doubt, be able to explain the mystery at once—”

“Yes!” interrupted Doctor Weasel, eagerly, “do let us have you examine the matter! Facts have come within my own knowledge, concerning revelations which have been made by her, that are the most extraordinary I ever knew. For instance, when she has been brought into clairvoyant rapport with individuals whom she has never seen or heard of before, she has revealed to them the whole history of their lives.”

“This unexpected enunciation of their life-secrets to men, must of course be productive of strange scenes occasionally,” said Manton, in a tone which had suddenly become cold.

“Oh, very curious and interesting! very curious!” exclaimed the Doctor, quickly. “Marie, do relate to him that incident of the bloody hand, that you have so often told me.”

“Well,” said she, “it has been some years since that a number of my friends, who knew of this gift of mine, were in the habit of inviting me to their respective houses, to meet friends of distinction, who were curious to observe the experiments, either upon themselves or upon others.

“On one occasion I was invited to meet a celebrated physician of this city, whose reputation for purity of character and life was very high. There were no parties present but my friend, this physician, and myself. Such an arrangement, I afterwards understood, had been made at the particular request of the physician himself, who desired that there should be no other person present but his host at the interview.

“When the physician placed his hand upon my head, as is the necessary formula to bring me into spiritual communion with my interrogator, I relapsed almost immediately into the syncope of the clairvoyant state, and of course became entirely unconscious of what I uttered in that condition. But our host, who was his most intimate friend, has given me many times the following explanation of the scene:—

“He says that when the physician placed his hand upon my head, I first said from the sleep, ‘I am content! All is pure here—this is a holy soul—one that is regenerate and will be saved!’ and then that while I was recounting his many deeds of kindness to the poor and friendless, and the rich, I suddenly shrank back, exclaiming, ‘Blood! blood! blood! There is blood upon this hand! This soul is darkened now with blood! Here is some fearful crime! Murder has been committed by this hand; everything seems red beneath it!’ My friend says the doctor staggered back as if he had been shot, on hearing this, turned pale as death, and swooned on the floor; and after he recovered, acknowledged that he had committed murder and fled from the consequences; the name by which he was now known was an assumed one, and he implored his host not to expose him to the penalty of the gallows by revealing these terrible facts.

“My friend, of course, did everything he could to relieve him on that point, and assured him that he would never breathe the fact where it could injure him; that the purity of his life for so many years had cancelled the enormity of the crime, so far as society was concerned.

“But in spite of all this, the wretched and guilty man left the house in overwhelming despair, and the last I have heard of him was that he had locked himself in his own house, and was killing himself with the most unheard-of excesses in drinking brandy, to which vice he never before had been addicted.

“When I realised the tragic results of this fearful insight, with which I seem to have been mysteriously endowed, my very soul was shaken with sorrow; and since that time my spirit has wrestled in agonies of prayer with God, that this poor child of crime and headlong vices might be ‘saved!’”

As the woman uttered these last words, Manton recognised, for the first time, and with a shudder, a peculiar obliquity of the left eye. His soul was chilled within him; and for the moment, the light of the glowing room was darkened as if the shadow of drear winter had passed over and through it.

Doctor Weasel exclaimed gaily, “Is not that extraordinary? I assure you, I have myself witnessed things in connection with this power of hers, quite as inexplicable, though happily not so tragic.”

“It sounds strangely enough,” said Manton, shortly.

“I assure you I have no means of accounting for these things,” said the woman in a meek, deprecatory tone.

“Suppose you demonstrate it, madam, in my case;” and a slight sneer, which crossed the face of Manton, whose manner had entirely changed, did not escape the hawk-like quickness of the woman’s eye. “My life, I am willing to submit to the scrutiny of your inscrutable sense.”

“Oh, by all means!” exclaimed Doctor Weasel, springing to his feet in a paroxysm of delight. “Let us have the experiment, by all means! Do please place your hand on the top of her head!”

Manton turned, and with a bow most studiously deferential, seemed to ask of the lady her permission to do so.

“Oh, yes, yes,” and her head was bowed forward to meet his upraised hand; while the daughter, who seemed to understand the thing, either from previous experience, or from some private signal, rose from her clinging position about his knee, and stepped back, leaving the two alone, without other contact.

In a few moments after the hand of Manton had rested upon the meek, submissive head of the woman before him, she commenced exhibiting the common and preliminary attitudes, muscular retchings of the throat, nervous twitchings of the lips and limbs, accompanied by the apparently palpable, organic changes, which are recognised to be symptomatic with well-known conditions of the mesmeric sleep.

Manton watched all these phenomena with the sharpest attention, and then, as the lips began to move as if in inarticulate enunciation, he leant forward over her, and asked—

“What can you tell us of the soul, with which you are now in communication?”

After several preluding and spasmodic efforts to articulate sounds, the Clairvoyant at length said, in a voice only distinct above a whisper—

“I see light! all light!—pure, holy light. It fills the universe with a mild radiance! I can see no blurs, no clouds in the foreground. I can see only angels, seraphs, and seraphim, and all forms of light revolving in the sphere of this mighty soul!”

“Is there no evil there?” said Manton.

“No, I see none; I see only white light.”

“But look close—perhaps you might find something dark. Look long and steadily into the world you visit—see if there be not clouds there.”

There was a pause. The lips moved without articulation again; and again Manton asked—“What do you see now?”

“I see, I see, the light is parting on either side; out in the far distance, between those walls of light, a giant form uprears itself in shadow. Down the long vista stands this darkened giant. He is fierce and stern, and wears a cold, hard front, with flaming eyes, that scare the ministering angels all away. He strikes around him with the imperious sway of his huge, knotted club, and all the bright forms flee. He seems the savage Hercules of pride!”

There is a pause; and after a stillness of some moments, Manton asked again—

“What now is the vision, to your sense?—is the giant gone?”

“No, he is humbled but not subdued; and from afar behind him, down this darkened vista, a light has grown up, like a rising star. It advances slowly, rising over his head. The splendor increases as it comes. Now, the dark and wrathful giant has fallen on his knees—the flood of glory overcomes him. His club is dropped. His eyes, upturned in awe, seem dimmed by the sudden glory of an angel’s presence. Ha! I see! the features of that angel are like his whose soul I see! The giant is subdued! His pride has bowed its forehead in the dust, before the angel radiance of a visiting mother!”

Manton felt his flesh creep as this was spoken, and as the Clairvoyant paused for some moments, he asked: “What does this spirit of the mother say?”

The slow answer was—

“She seems to rebuke this pride even more with her effulgence, and to say, My son, I am with thee in the spirit, but I cannot be with thee through the medium of the flesh which thou hast so poisoned and corrupted, since I passed from thee into this higher sphere. Make thy body clean and purify thy life, and I shall be always with thee present, in the spirit. It is necessary for your usefulness in your present life that you should accept of human sympathies. It is only through such that you can establish a true community with the material world of which you form a part. Accept human love—accept a moral representative of myself—believe in the possibility of its chasteness as well as utility, and you will yet be strong, powerful of good, and happy.”

Here Manton, who had become intensely excited during the progress of this scene, removed his hand with a vehement gesture from the head of the woman, and springing to his feet, seized his cap, and with scarce the ordinary adieus, hastily left the room. He rushed hurriedly through the dark storm, which careered along the street, muttering as he went:—

“Eternal curses on this infernal woman! What can it mean? She dares to speak of my mother again. Hah! does not this account for the inexplicable disturbance of my papers in my trunk? Is it possible that this can be the accursed and despicable wretch who has stolen into the privacies of my life? But think, think! I may have been hasty. This whole subject of Clairvoyance is an impenetrable mystery. That strange story of the bloody hand has impressed me. For all we know, as yet, such things may be within the possibilities of Clairvoyance. That myth she uttered as if she were in a dream, was strangely significant to me—supposing her to be ignorant of all my past life; and then she seemed so patient, so disinterested, so gentle and so kind, so matronly, so tender, and so heroic, too. I cannot altogether distrust her, nor can I believe; I can only wait. I must see more; I must know more; I must comprehend the whole. There is a something here I cannot understand—a something betwixt heaven and hell, which I must bide my time to fathom. Curses on all mysteries!” and, rushing onward through the storm, like one hag-ridden, or pursued by stern, accusing ghosts, the bewildered Manton soon reached his cheerless room, all storm-drenched and depressed.

CHAPTER XIV.
THE PROUD MAN BOWED.

Dim burns the once bright star of Avenel;

There is an influence sorrowful and fearful,

That dogs its downward course.

Scott.

Transparent as is the meaning of the foregoing scene, it conveyed to Manton, who knew none of these things which have been revealed to the reader, a tremendous shock. Mind and soul were thrown into chaotic convulsions; he knew not what to think, or which way to turn for truth.

Had the incident occurred but a short time previous, before his nature had begun to be moved by generous sympathy and honest respect for this loyal, persecuted, and indomitable woman; had it occurred before that eventful walk through the slush of New York, he would have at once turned upon her in freezing wrath, with the deliberate accusation of having entered his room in his absence, and searched his private papers, or else have merely sneered at it, as the accidental hit of a reckless adventuress.

But he had admitted her to his respect as a noble and unprotected devotee. In a word, he had, as was usual with him wherever women were concerned, idealised her into a heroine. Could he suspect her after this? He rejected the weakness of such suspicion almost with terror.

Had he known any thing of New York life; had he formed any relations except those of a strictly business character; had he cultivated acquaintances at all, who belonged to the city, and knew it, a few inquiries might have settled all his doubts. But, alas! pride, pride, that fatal pride! He knew nobody, he cared not for what any one said of another.

He had heard this woman violently abused at the dinner-table below, to be sure; but then the character of the persons who had joined in this cowardly vituperation was, to his mind, evidently such as to prejudice him in her favor; for he had a proud way with him, which never permitted him to judge of the absent by what was said of them, but by who said it. Taking these things together, he would have felt ashamed to have asked any questions concerning the woman, of those whose opinion and opportunities of knowledge he respected.

If she had thrown herself upon him, it had been with perfect frankness, and without any attempt at concealments. She had told him how she was persecuted and slandered by ignorant women, because she had been bold enough to tell them the truth about themselves. He had already heard something of this, and the stories told were of precisely such character as envious, vulgar, and malignant gossip circulates about females who make themselves conspicuous by their virtues or their talents. Besides, had he not, before he knew more of her, been violently prejudiced, too? What more natural than that others should be so, including these ignorant women?

And then this wonderful Clairvoyance! Who can dare to say that he believes nothing of its claims? He held its marvels and miracles in great contempt, and firmly believed, that whatever of truth there was would soon be unveiled of its apparent mystery by the close analysis of science, and shown to proceed from purely natural laws, the exact relations of which had not been heretofore understood.

And then it might have been accident. Ah! and then it might have been—what his thought had long struggled with, as the solution of all such phenomena—it might have been sympathetic! a mere result of the unconscious projection of his stronger vitality through a magnetic or odic medium of sympathy, which had been instantly established through the contact of his hand with the thin and sensitive region on the top of her head.

She might thus have been made to feel him intellectually, if not spiritually; to see, through this sympathetic sense, those images with which his brain was most full, and thus express this startling outline of his life.

Be those things as they may, he was restless and excited; his imagination was aroused, his memory profoundly stirred. He was thus fast hurried past the point where a cool analysis could well avail to rescue him. Tossed to and fro by doubts and dark suspicions, which a generous confidence strove hard to banish with its magnanimous suggestions, backed by self-reliant pride; confounded with the fear of acting with injustice towards a helpless female; with the fear, too, of the soft pluckings at his heart, from those tender memories which she had thus aroused by her offers of maternal sympathy—together with the penetrating light and warmth of that genial and unlucky evening spent with her, amidst the quiet of domestic surroundings—he could form no conclusions, discriminate no clearly definite purpose—could only wander to and fro, restless, in troubled, sad irresolution.

A vague dread of evil in advance afforded apprehension of he knew not what, that always, when the gloaming darkened most, seemed parted to a tremulous, dim light, like summer coming through the morn, and made his pulse go quicker, while those yearning memories faintly glimmered, as if within a shaded reflex of the glowing day.

He kept himself strictly secluded; yet, day by day, those dainty missives crept in upon him by some mysterious agency. At first they were read mechanically, and, amidst his troubled doubts, produced no apparent effect; but, by and by, they grew more chaste, more delicately worded, and more sweetly toned.

Was it that they were really advanced upon the blundering specimens we have seen? or could it be that his fancy had become excited with regard to them—that he was merely idealising unconsciously? or was it that those awkward first attempts at producing imitations of the rhapsodical style peculiar to himself, which had so excited his contempt, as obviously taken from the study of his writings, had now been cunningly improved upon, since personal intercourse had afforded his correspondent a closer insight of his purer and more simple forms of expression?

Had his haughty egotism been touched at last, by a skilful reflex of himself, thrown shrewdly into his eyes, from the dazzling surface of this snowy crow-quilled page?

We shall see, perhaps. Here is the last that he received from her:—

“My poor Friend—My heart yearns over you; I am oppressed with your suffering, for I feel how you suffer yet—how you are struggling, by day and by night, with those twin fiends of Doubt and Pride. I know my letters soothe you, though they cannot heal. Had you not informed me so, in your note, I should yet have been conscious of it. Had you never written to me again, I should yet have known that the great deep of your soul had been stirred at last, and that, though pride had triumphed in the struggle, love, genial, human love, had yet found, beneath the dark shadow of his wing, a warm resting-place once more beside thy heart.

No human aid can save thee now—that stiff neck must be bowed—you must be humbled! Then will come the full influx of the light from heaven. Then you will know joy and peace again—the pure raptures of a holy rest will calm this dark, bewildering struggle. I pray for you without ceasing—weary the throne with supplication that you may be humbled! Your little sister sends you her tearful greetings—she weeps for you with me always—for she dearly loves her tiger-brother. She says that, like all terrible creatures, he is so beautiful—oh, that he were only good!

Marie.”

This letter strangely thrilled upon the already over-wrought sensibilities of Manton, whose nervous organisation had been rendered intensely susceptible by the protracted excitement under which he had been laboring. He read it over and over again, with increasing agitation, until it seemed, while his eyes suffused, as if the accusing angel of his own conscience spoke to him in mild rebuke.

Long he moaned and tossed—the dim moisture struggling all the while to brim over those parched lids, that for years before had never known a freshening. Those tearless lids—how rigid they had been! how bleak! Like some oasis fountain where the hot simoon had drank!—Dry! dry!

Suddenly, with a deep groan, the young man bowed his head upon his hands, while the tears gushed between his fingers in a flood, that seemed the more violent from its long restraint. His body shook and rocked, while he gasped aloud—

“It is true! It is true! This woman tells what is true! This sullen pride has been the cause of all—I feel its crushing judgment on my shoulders now! Great God! deliver us from this thraldom! Let me but know my race once more! let me but weep when others weep, and smile when others smile, and it will be to me for a sign that thou hast received the outcast into the family of thy love, once more! Forgive, oh, forgive me, that have so long held thy goodly gifts of earthly consolation in despite! The worm’s presumptuous arrogance has but moved thy pity, oh, thou Infinite One! Forgive! forgive! oh, let me feel that countenance reconciled once more! Give back to my weary soul the holy communion of thy creatures! Pity! Pity! Pity! Ah, there is a paradise somewhere on the earth, for the most wayworn of her darkened children—a rift in the sunless sky, a glittering point above the darkened waters! Men are not all and totally accursed by their defiant passions. Pity sends star-beams through the port-holes of the dungeon. Mercy comes down on holy light of visions, where stars cannot get in. Oh, love, Infinite Love! Thou art so powerful of penetration—come to me now!”

For a long time he sat thus, while his frame shivered in voiceless throes; when suddenly straightening himself, with a powerful effort, and while the tears yet rained like an April shower, he drew towards him his paper, and wrote—

Woman—I know not what to call you—you have strangely moved me! In my most desperate and sullen pride have I not struggled long with this great blessing, which thou hast brought me! I would have driven the good angel from me in wrath and scorn—but it would not be offended. In patience and long suffering it has abided near, hovering on white wings, until now, at last, the fountain has been troubled. Ah! woman, its depths have been broken up, indeed—and the dark, long, unnatural winter of my life, has felt the glowing breath of spring; and in one mighty crash, the hideous ice-crusts that had gathered, heaping over it, have burst away before the flashing leap of unchained waters. Once more my soul is free—once more I smile back love for love into the sunlight, and weep for joy—that God is good. Once more I feel as if the earth were a holy earth, and its flowers, too, might grow for me. Thou hast conquered! Thou hast conquered, woman! Thy pure and chastened sympathies, thy gentle and unwearied pleadings, thy meek compassion for the harsh and wayward boy, have conquered. The stiff neck is bowed even now before God, and thee, his minister of good. Ah! forgive and pity me! My eyes are raining so, I can scarcely see to write. I am shaken as in a great tempest, body and soul. I could weep at your feet in penitence, and pray to be forgiven and for pity! Ah, that, I know you have! I am blinded with these tears—I know not what I say! Oh, be to me what I have lost! I faint by the wayside; my soul dies within me for that holy rest that I have lost—for the sweet, calm and tender peace, all the holy memories your loving gentleness has thus recalled. Ah, be to me all that you have thus filled me with, anew! Receive me as your adopted child, that I may rest my throbbing head once more in peace and joy, upon a sacred bosom. Be to me, forever, “Marie, mother!”

Manton.

CHAPTER XV.
DELECTABLE GLIMPSES BEHIND THE CURTAIN.

Now, with a bitter smile, whose light did shine

Like a fiend’s hope upon her lips and eyne.

Shelley

Turn we now to that large and mysterious house, to which we have before referred, near the corner of Broadway and Eighth Street. We will pass the greasy lintels, into the wide and dirty entry, climb those five flights of stairs, turn down the long, dark passage, and pause before a door, just one beyond that which we have had occasion to remember in the course of this narrative.

We will take the liberty to enter. The scene presents the woman, Marie, reclining on a lounge, holding a note in her hand, which she seems to have read and re-read with a peculiar look of puzzled inquiry.

The impish-looking daughter, to whom we have before referred, was seated in a chair, behind the woman’s head, and out of her sight. The creature seemed to have much ado to keep from laughing outright, for her face was screwed into all sorts of contortions in the effort to subdue it, as she peeped over her mother’s shoulder, and watched her puzzled looks and bewildered gestures.

“Well!” said the mother, as if speaking to herself, “if one could only comprehend how he came to write this to me—it seems to contain a great deal. Upon my word, it appears a beautiful snatch of rhyme, and to convey quite a confession—only I don’t understand—it reads as if it were an answer to something that had gone before.” She reads—

Angels a subtler name may know,

But not a subtler thought of joy

Could thrilling through a seraph go,

Than that your presence brought to cloy

And weigh my life down into calm,

With an unutterable sense—

Like music perfumed with the balm

Of dews star-shed—all too intense!

“Most too high-strung for my purposes, it must be confessed! He never expresses any flesh and blood in his correspondence. Ah, well, I’ll soon bring him out of that! But this really does puzzle me! This is all the note contains.” She turns the note to examine it. “It is certainly in his hand, yet he makes no explanation.”

Here the child, whose blood seemed ready to burst through her face in the continued effort to restrain her laughter, tittered aloud. The mother sprang erect, and, turning upon her with an expression of rage and surprise upon her face—

“What! Why, what are you laughing about? What business is this of yours, pray?”

The child, although evidently a little frightened, had so entirely lost her self-control as to be unable to restrain the bursts of laughter which now followed each other, peal upon peal, as she danced about the room in a perfect ecstacy of glee.

The mother’s face turned first pale and then red, as she followed the motions of the child with her eye, until at last, with the expression of an infuriate tigress, she sprang to seize her. The child was too quick for her, and with the agility of a monkey, darted from beneath her grasp; and still shrieking with laughter, was pursued around the room—leaping the furniture with an airiness that defied pursuit—which her strange, wild laugh yet taunted.

The woman, after exhausting herself in vain attempts at catching her, sank upon the lounge—and at once, in a whining, fretful voice, commenced to pour upon the head of the child, the most inconceivable and galling epithets. So long as this tone was held, the child held out in defiant spirit, either of sulking obstinacy, or of harsh and irritating laughter, and to every reiterated question from the angry mother—“What are you laughing at? What do you mean?”—she only clapped her hands and danced more wildly to her elfin mirth.

The mother now changed her tone of a sudden, in seeming hopelessness of carrying her point by storm. She began to sob violently, and turning with streaming eyes towards the child—

“You—you tre-treat your poor mother very cruelly to-day; I am dying to know what it is you mean; but you will not tell me! Please, dear, come and tell poor mother why you laugh, what it is you mean, and what you know about this letter?—for I am sure you know something—do tell poor mother, and she will forgive you all! Come, dear child!” and she reached out her hand as if to clasp her to her bosom.

The child, who seemed to have no intellectual comprehension of the meaning of all this, but to have taken a purely impish delight in watching the confusion and puzzle of her mother, in regard to the letter at first, and then instantly, when she flew into a rage, to have answered in a monkeyish and hysterical rage, on her own part; now at once, with equal promptness, and with the common instinct of young animals, responded to the tender inflections of the maternal voice.

Dropping her whole previous manner, she instantly sprang forward and knelt at her mother’s side. The mother did not speak for some moments, but silently caressed her, placing her hand frequently on her head, the top of which she fondly stroked with a tenderness that seemed to linger there. She drew the child’s face to hers too; and although she seemed to kiss it frequently, it might have been observed that she breathed deep and heavy exhalations upon different portions of it, which she only touched with her lips.

The effect was magical beyond any power of expression. The hard, ugly, animal lines of that child’s face, which had been writhed and curled but a few moments before, in every conceivable expression of most ignoble passions, at once subsided into the meek and suppliant confiding of that inexplicable and most tender of all the relations known to the animal world, mother and child!

“Dear, why did you not tell me what you knew about this letter before?” said the mother, in a tone as musically reproachful as if she dallied with her suckling babe. The child buried her head in her mother’s bosom, and after a silence of some time, during which her mother industriously stroked the top of her head, she looked up, and in a sly, bashful tone exclaimed—

“I did it just for fun, to try how writing love-letters went—I copied the verses from a book, in your hand, and sent them to him as yours!”

Scarcely were these words uttered, than the languishing and tender-seeming mother hurled the child from her, backwards, upon the floor, with a violence that left her stunned and prostrate, and springing to her feet, raged round and round the room, as only a feminine demon infuriate could be imagined to do, spurning now and then with her foot, as she passed, the still senseless form of her own child!

Hell might find an equal to this whole scene, but hell has always been too civil! It is enough! This is jealousy! That woman is jealous of her own child! and she only thirteen years old!

How long she might have raged and raved, and to what consequences it might have led, heaven can only judge. Providentially, perhaps, a knock at her door announced the postman. She clutched the letter she received convulsively, and tearing it open, the instant he closed the door, read—what? The letter of Manton, which we saw in the last chapter!

She read it through, standing where she had received it—her eyes dilating, and her whole form changing. She literally screamed with joy as she finished the letter, and clapped her hands like one bewildered with a sudden triumph.

“Ah, ha! I have him! I have him! He is mine henceforth! He cannot escape me now!” and her oblique eyes fell upon the motionless child upon the floor. “The little fool!—she catches my arts too soon—she is not hurt—but I must help her.” She moved towards the child, but the demoniac triumph which possessed her seemed irrepressible. She bounded suddenly into the air, and almost shrieking aloud as she did so—

“I have conquered—I have conquered him at last!” came down like a statuesque Apollyon transfixed in exultation. It was a horrible glimpse of unnatural triumph! It lasted but for a moment; for, with a sudden drooping of the usually stooped shoulders, as she turned towards the letter again, she said, thoughtfully,

“This will not do—he perseveres even here in talking about mother! mother! and chaste! and holy! and all that sort of thing. The foolish boy is too much in earnest. I have used this stuff about long enough. I must find the means of bringing him gradually around. Such a relation as the silly fellow desires won’t do between us—we are both too full of life! Oh, I’ll write him a note at once that will prepare the way—will break up the ice, as he calls it, still more about his life!”

She raised the child, which had been stunned by the fall, and sprinkling some water upon her face, which caused the first long breathing of recovery, she laid her upon the lounge, muttering, as she did so, “The meddlesome little fool! She must do everything she sees me do! She must imagine herself in love with every one whom she sees me pretend to love. She must write love-letters when she sees me write them, and heaven only knows what she won’t do next with her monkeyish imitation! But I can’t be crossed by a child so, if she is my own. Lie there until you get over the sulks—you are not much hurt!”

She turned away from the child and seated herself at the table, exclaiming, as she seized her pen, “Ah! this letter! I feel that I shall need all my skill and wit to word this properly, so as not to alarm him. In his present excited and hysterical mood, the veriest trifle would have the effect of driving him off, at a tangent, forever beyond my reach. And yet it will not do to let things go on in this way; for I see that that idea of the motherly relation, if once permitted to become settled in his mind now, will remain a fixed barrier, which I shall never be able to pass on earth. I must see him to-night, and take advantage of his present over-wrought, ecstatic, and bewildered condition, to break down this boyish dream of his! Bah! to think that he should have taken me to be so much in earnest in all that first twattle about motherly relations, which I found necessary to use in order to get at him at all! Pity my correspondence hasn’t warmed him up a little by this time! I’ve tried hard enough, to be sure, but the queer fellow will persist in etherealising everything!”

During this soliloquy, the child, who had entirely recovered, lay perfectly still, with sharpened attention, catching every word that was spoken. There was an eagerness in her eye which showed her to be, if not an apt scholar of such teachings, at least a very attentive one. The woman wrote:—

“’Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name! thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven!’ My soul is deeply moved for thee in this thy time of trial. The good God chasteneth thee now—now is the hour of thy great tribulation come; now thy life-demons wrestle in thee, with the love, the good the Father has sent to redeem thee. Be strong! Ah, be strong even now, thou child of many sorrows, and thou shalt yet find grace and peace in acceptance with Him. Meanwhile I can but pray for thee and with thee. I weary Heaven with supplications, that out of this travail a great and glorious soul may be born in the humility of love, for light, eternal light.

“Come to me this evening, that I may take that throbbing heart upon my bosom. I may soothe and calm you, but I cannot give you rest—rest comes only from the Father! You ask me to be for you, forever, ‘Marie, mother!’ I can be to you, forever, your friend

Marie.”

“Ah! ha! that will do it!” she said in a low chuckling tone, as she rapidly folded and directed the letter; “though he might take the alarm at this if he were cool, yet there’s no danger now! It will no doubt shock him a little, but he has learned to believe in me, and in his present excited state he has deified me almost into an object of worship; and any suspicion he might feel he would only blame himself for. Ah! this will do! it shall go instantly! Here!” she said, turning sharply to the child, “Here! get up there, put on your bonnet, and take this letter! You know how to deliver it, and where! Come, up with you!”

“But, mother,” said the child, as she slowly lifted herself half-erect, “I don’t feel like it—I’m not well! You hurt me!”

“Nonsense!” said the mother, harshly; “go take a bath, and do it quickly too! You’ll feel well enough! This letter must go, and shall go! Get along, I say, and do what I tell you!”

The child dragged herself slowly out of the room.

“That little wretch will torment me to death!”

The letter was despatched and reached its destination.

Manton, whose excitement had continued, without the slightest diminution, to return upon him, in paroxysm after paroxysm, seized upon this last letter with the famishing eagerness of a man who looks for strength—for spiritual consoling. He read it with suffused and swollen eyes; he scarcely saw what he read, so much had his vision been dizzied and obscured by weeping. But those last words did indeed shock and thrill him. He was strangely startled, and for a moment they seemed to open to him an appalling and terrific gulf of falsehood, more hideous than yawning hell.

We say, it was but for a moment; but in that little space the blackness of darkness overcame his soul. A shuddering of dread, of doubt, of fear, and all that horrid brood, the birth of rayless and unutterable gloom, passed over him convulsively, and then the whole was gone. He had been too intensely wrought upon by the ecstacies of Faith. He shook off, by one great throe, the giant shadow of its natural enemy, this Doubt, which he now conceived had so long made his life accursed; and the rebound, by a necessary law, carried him to a yet greater and more unreasoning extreme of trust, and unquestioning confidence in this woman, as under God the instrument and medium for restoring him once more to life and the world.

He at once determined to visit her, and prove to his own soul the falsehood of these dark suspicions of the being who had thus moved and spoken his inmost life for good.

CHAPTER XVI.
REMORSE.

The evening was closing in when Manton made his way through a heavy, drifting snow-storm, to the number of the new address, near the corner of Broadway and Eighth Street, which had appeared upon the last notes of his correspondent. He was only made aware, thereby, that she had changed her residence from the rooms where he had visited her in Bond Street, and had thought no more about the matter; for it would have somewhat damped his enthusiasm, or rather have made him furiously indignant, to have been told that the woman he was visiting, with such sublimated sentiment, usually found means to adapt her rooms to the purpose and business in hand.

He was too much excited and pre-occupied to notice the significant appearance of the entry, further than to feel its dreariness, as he rang the bell and waited an unreasonable time for admission. The door was wide enough open to be sure, but he was not sufficiently initiated into the mystery of such places to understand the meaning of this exactly, even if it had been possible for it to have excited his attention, in the then absorbed and abstracted condition of his whole faculties.

A negro servant at length made his appearance, and approaching him closely, answered his inquiries in a tone so insolently confidential that under other circumstances he would surely have been in danger of a flooring at the hands of Manton, who, however, only passed on up the stairs with a feeling of annoyance, the cause of which he made no attempt at apprehending. He ascended three steps at a bound, and in a moment tapped lightly at the door.

A soft voice, “Come!” was the response. The door flew open.

“Yes! yes! I come! Ah, Marie, mother, it must be so!” And dropping his cloak and hat upon the floor, he sprang forward to the woman, who, with her pale face beaming with unnatural light, was seated upon a lounge, where she seemed to have been awaiting him.

“My poor friend!” and she stretched forth her arms towards him. He laid his head upon her bosom, while his whole frame shivered violently, and he sobbed forth—

“Ah, blessed mother, let me rest here! My brain is bursting! I am become as a little child again! Ah, I am so weak! A wisp of straw would bind me! My own vaunted strength is gone—all gone! I have no pride, no scorn, no defiance now! My lips are in the dust! Ah, I am humble, humble, humble, now! Do thou, incarnation of that angel mother who has passed from earth, adopt me for thine own! Thine own, poor, lost, bewildered, panting child!”

“My poor friend, be calm!” and she caressed his wet cheek lightly with her fingers. “Only be calm, and God will give you strength to pass through this valley and shadow of trial.”

“God gave me strength!” said he, with a sharp and sudden change of tone, raising his head slightly to look in her face. “Woman, he gave me strength when he gave me life! I have strength enough, as men call it, to move the world, aye, to wield Fate itself. It was not for such strength I came to you. It was not for such strength I would condescend to plead to mortal. It is for that soft and beautiful presence that liveth in immortal freshness, the spring-flower of the heart, beneath the moveless outstretched wing of Faith. Faith in our own kind. Faith in what is true and chaste in the purposes and charities, which, widely separate from the sensuous and the passionate, constitute all the blest amenities of intercourse between the sexes. ’Tis not that I would ask you to be all my mother, for that could not be; but that you should impersonate to me that calm joy, that serenity of repose in which I lived so long, upon a troubled earth, through her. It was she to whom I turned when the world buffeted and baffled me, to renew upon her bosom my faith in my fellows, and it was upon that sacred resting-place that I alone found soothing. She reconciled me to endure. She subdued my rebellious heart. She saved me from actual madness; aye, from the strait-waistcoat and the chain, when my brain was like to burst from throbbings that sounded like a thousand wild steeds thundering frantic over echoing plains; for the conflict was most fearful, when my young soul first arose to grapple with the world and its huge evils. In my impotent wrath I should have dashed myself to atoms against its moveless battlements of wrong, but that a low, sweet voice would quell and hold me back.

“I was the child of much travail, and years of weary and desponding watchfulness. I alone, of all her children, bore her features—she loved me unutterably, and shielded me always; it was not like the common love of mother for her child. In all things concerning me she seemed to be filled with a strange prescience—she read my inmost thought as if it were her own—as if it were a scroll made legible by illuminated letters. She seldom asked me questions, but simply told me what had happened. It was useless to attempt disguises with her; ministering in the flesh, she was my present angel, reconciling me to life; and when she passed from me and the world, I first realised what darkness, death, and separation meant.

I was delirious I know not how long—for they seemed slowly tearing my heart out by the roots, chord by chord, with a heavy drag, until the last one snapped, and then I went into deep oblivion, from which I awoke a man of stone, so far as sensation went; and if stone could walk, with no more heart than it—or rather if you can imagine this walking statue moulded of the red lava, and only cooled upon the surface, you can better conceive the smouldering, heart-devouring chaos in which my life now moved among my fellows. I did not stop to curse and battle with my old foes, I only hated them with a liquid flame of scorn that found its level in me and was still. I would not harm them—no, not I—I wanted them to live for companionship in suffering. I gloried in their perversions—they filled me with ecstasy. I could not but add to them, and in ferocious delight threw myself into all the excesses and extremes that demonise the world.

“But ambition came to rescue my dignity at last, and of its iron despotism you have seen the worst. From its hard and meagre thraldom you have released me for the time, but it remains with you to hold me free. The wings that have borne me thus far on this bold upward flight must feel the soft freshening of the breeze and the glad welcoming of sunlight, to the purer realm they try, or flagging soon of the unwonted effort, they will sink again to seek the old accustomed sullen perch. The strength I need now is a subtler thing than any power of will within myself—purer than the breath of angels, it is chaste and mild as star-beams.

“It is you who have filled me with these yearnings—’tis to you that I look for their realisation, and yet you have not accepted that pure and holy relation conveyed in the ‘Marie, mother,’ I have named you, and plead with you to recognise.”

During all this time the face of the woman had been bowed so close to that of Manton that she seemed almost to touch with her lips, first his temples and then his cheek. A close observer would have perceived, in her long and deep inspirations, her slightly parted lips and the slow creeping movement of the head, that she was steadily breathing upon certain well-known and highly sensitive nerves. The brain of Manton was too full to notice this strange manœuvre; but while he talked, that hot breath had been sending soft thrillings through his frame, which, at first unobserved, had gradually grown more palpably delicious, until, as he ceased to speak, he found his whole frame literally quivering with passion.

He was silent for a moment, that he might fully realise the sensation, and then, with a shudder of horror, sprang away from contact with the woman, exclaiming—

“My God! what is this? What an unnatural monster am I! or”—as a sudden gleam of suspicion shot through his brain—“Woman, is it you who have done this?” His face darkened in an expression of rage and ferocity which was absolutely hideous, as his eye glanced coldly on her.

“I ask you, woman, was it some infernal art of yours? Answer me!—for, by the Eternal God, you shall never thus tamper with the sacrednesses of a true man’s heart again!” and, grinding his teeth, he approached her menacingly, as if, in his blind rage, he would rend her to atoms.

The woman had taken but one glimpse of the terrible face before her, and then shrunk bowed and crouching into the corner of the lounge. Her neck and forehead flushed crimson, spasmodic retchings of the throat commenced, and when Manton stretched forth his hands, as if to clutch her, there was a deep suffocating cough, and the red, warm blood gushed in an appalling current from her mouth, bedabbling his fingers and her clothing.

The man was startled from his rage into immeasurable terror, as he shrank back with upraised hands—

“My God! I have killed—I have killed her by my brutal violence! I am accursed! I am accursed for ever! I have slain the white dove of peace they sent to me from Heaven!” Snatching a towel, he was on his knees by her side in an instant; and placing it within her bloody hands, which were clutched upon her mouth, as if to stay the fatal tide, he burst into an agony of tears, praying in frantic accents to be forgiven; for he could see nothing but immediate death in a hemorrhage so violent as this seemed, and he remembered now, but too vividly, how often she had told him of her melancholy predisposition to such attacks from the lungs, by which she was kept constantly in expectation of being carried off.

Ah, with what fierce remorse, what agonised penitence, all these things came up to him now, as gush after gush of crimson saturated the towel! In answer to his prayers for forgiveness, she at last reached one cold, bloody hand to his, pressing it gently.

And now his self-possession was immediately restored. His only thought, at first, had been forgiveness before she died; now he thought alone how to save her. Strange, he did not once think of giving the alarm, and sending for medical aid; for he instantly felt the case was one beyond the reach of ordinary remedies, and one in which the most perfect restoration of both the moral and physical natures to absolute repose could alone avail.

He reached another towel from the toilet-table, on which he found, by the way, abundant supply, which, innocently enough, seemed to him remarkably apropos; then, seating himself by her side, he endeavored, by the use of all tender epithets which could be applied, to soothe and calm her. She suddenly seized his right hand and placed it upon the top of her head, and from that moment he thought he could faintly perceive an increase of his control over the more violent symptoms of the case.

More than half an hour of harrowing suspense had passed, before the paroxysm of bleeding had so far subsided as to enable him to breathe more freely; but even when the bleeding had at length entirely ceased, a long period of coma, or deathlike sleep, induced by exhaustion, and suspended sensation, supervened, during which he continued to watch her with the most painful anxiety, still holding his right hand upon her head, while, with the other, he clasped the fingers of her left hand as she had requested. As she immediately showed signs of restlessness on his attempting to remove either hand, he felt himself compelled to sit thus, without change of position, for several hours, awaiting whatever might occur.

And, finally, after a slight stirring of the limbs, she suddenly opened her eyes upon his, and smiled with a clear, sweet smile, rather of pity and affection than of forgiveness or reproach. He felt his heart bound within him, and he could only utter, in a low tone, “The good God be blessed! I have not killed you! Oh, I will never be ugly and cruel again! I will be your good boy now, always!”

“Yes, yes,” she said in a clear, firm voice, “you were very naughty; but I am strong again now. You will never speak harshly to me again, will you? Lean here, my beautiful tiger; let me feel that fierce cheek upon my bosom once more. You have suffered, too; I must soothe you.”

Manton, who, by this time, had become thoroughly exhausted, bowed his head lightly towards her, in obedience; but he leaned it rather upon the cushion than her person.

It was now near twelve o’clock, and the man was literally worn out by the long and violent excitements which we have traced. Body, soul, and sense, utterly collapsed, the moment his head found a resting-place, into a deep sleep.

The lamp burnt low; there was not another sound to disturb the dimmed silence of that room, but the heavy breathings of Manton. But even that murky light was sufficient to disclose the figure of the woman stooping, as before, close to the face of the sleeper. Slowly her lips crept over, without touching it, lingering here and there, while her chest heaved with deep inspirations. You could not see, had you been a looker-on, the slight parting of the lips, nor could you have felt the heated furnace of her breath play along the helpless surface of those prostrate nerves; but you might have seen an eager, oblique glitter in her eye, that grew the stronger while the darkness thickened, as ghouls look sharper out of graves they have uncovered. But then, had you been patient, you would have seen, as the hours went by, a gradual twitching of the nerves possess that deathlike frame—a restless motion, a moan, an all-unconscious smile of ecstatic delight; and then, if your sense was not frightened and appalled by the fierce, swift blaze from those still eyes above, a fiend’s triumph would be all familiar to you.

Alas! alas! will that young man wake sane? The owner of those glittering eyes seems to know; for hark! in her exceeding joy she whispers aloud, “He is mine now! See how his nerves vibrate. I was right in choosing this time of great prostration. I am scudding along those nerves like a sea-bird on currents of the sea; all that is animal in him is mine now. He is mine at last—the insolent tyro! I shall drag him down from his vaulting self-esteem; I shall humble him; I shall degrade him. Ah, ha! I shall feed upon him!”

There may be retribution on earth or in heaven. We will let that dark night’s history rest!

CHAPTER XVII.
“TO-MORROW.”

It would be well for sinners were there no to-morrow. At least it would be well for them so far as impunity in the enjoyment of sin was concerned. But it may not be; the inevitable time of reaction must follow that of excess, the wages of which are remorse.

The effect of that to-morrow upon poor Manton was fearfully crushing. At first he dared not think—the horrid realisation would have slain him. He dared not look up, lest he should see the great height from which he had fallen. He dared not hear the voices within him, or above him, lest they should blast his sense. He shrank from the sunlight, as though each ray were a fiery arrow, to cleave hissing through his brain. He dared not look his fellow-man in the face, lest he should see the mark upon his brow, call him accursed, and spit upon him. The innocent eye of childhood was the most dreaded basilisk to him; and the face of a pure woman made him shrink and shudder in affrighted awe. His shadow seemed a spectral mockery to him, for it no longer glided with him, straight and firm, but was bowed, and crept sneaking after.

The burden of a hundred years had fallen upon the young man’s shoulders in one fatal night—a ghastly, loathsome burthen of self-contempt—his face had grown old; his eyes lost their proud fire; his lips, their firm expression; there was no longer any “aspiration in his heel.” The haughty, bounding self-reliance, the unflinching, upward look, were gone! gone! Manton had lost his self-respect.

Ah, fearful, fearful loss, that it is! There was a leaden desperation in the man’s whole air that was shocking, even to those who had never seen him before. There was no bravado in it—it was sultry, slow and self-consuming—shrank from observation, and burned inward.

He neither sought nor found any palliation for himself. He blamed no one else; his pride would not permit him to confess to himself that he had been unduly influenced, or that any unfair advantage had or could have been taken of him. No, it was his own fall. His own grossness had profaned those associations which he had stupidly deluded himself, for years, into supposing to be really sacred things in his life. He had rendered himself, thereby, unfit for Heaven, unworthy Earth, too base for even Hell.

His first sullen recourse was to the wine-cup, that he might numb the unendurable agonies. He drank to monstrous excess; but, no, it would not do; that cold burning, as of an ice-bolt through his heart and brain, lay there still, in the two centres. He sought and found men like himself, with great thoughts and stricken hearts; like himself, brain-workers; and in the fiercest orgies of desperation, hours and hours were spent without attaining to one moment of the coveted oblivion.

The evening had long set in among such scenes, when a note was suddenly thrust into his hand from behind, and as he turned his head, he saw a boy hastily making his way through the thronged room. This movement had not been observed by his noisy companions—he hastily concealed the note.

He had recognised the superscription with a feeling of deathly sickness, for which he could not clearly account. It was as if the fresh wounds were all to be torn open again.

He soon after found an opportunity to withdraw beyond observation, and opened the note, which contained only these words:—

My Friend:—why have you left me all day? come to me—I am dying.

Marie.

The sheet was bespattered with blood. Manton nearly fainted. Recovering himself in a moment, he muttered, “Infernal brute that I am! to have neglected the poor, frail creature thus—after last night, too! May God forgive me, for I shall never forgive myself!” He hurried from the room.

The scene, on reaching her apartment, was, as may by this time be expected, ghastly enough. But as we have seen a little more of these horrid bleeding scenes than Manton has, we will refrain from another description of one, since we have found that they only differed in the intensity of effect and degree in the precise ratio of the results to be attained. In this instance she had not reckoned without her host.

Manton, who never dreamed of suspecting her, and had been fully impressed with the belief that these attacks were fearfully dangerous, and that the magnetism of his touch, whether imaginary or otherwise, could alone suffice to restore her to the calmness necessary for the arrest of the hemorrhage, felt as if an awful responsibility had been suddenly devolved upon him, as he thus apparently held the very life of this singular woman in his own hands.

This impression had been consummately fixed upon the mind of Manton by her obstinate refusal to permit the presence, at their interviews, of any third person, not even that of her own child. She could thus, through his generous humanity, most effectually draw him to her side; and, when once in her reach, he was again in the power of those fearful arts, of which we have seen something.

---

The life of Manton became now a succession of the “to-morrows” of remorse. Each new sun arose upon its succeeding scene of wilful, self-degrading excess, such as we have witnessed. He never permitted himself to grow fully sober, but drank incessantly—morning, noon and night. But that the wines he chose were comparatively light, and less rapidly fatal than the heavier and more dangerous drinks of our country, he must have, undoubtedly, destroyed his life, as he did his business reputation.

He still wrote brilliantly—nay, even with a fierce and poetic dazzle of style that surprised men greatly, and added much to the notoriety, if not to the solidity of his reputation. But everything went wrong with him. His purse was regularly drained by a remorseless hand; his wardrobe fell into neglect, and the marks of excess upon his fine, proud features, were at once rendered conspicuous by their association with almost seedy habiliments.

Before one year had passed he had begun to exhibit himself before men, in the pitiable light of one who had more pride left than self-respect. In a word, he had fallen fully into the toils of the hellish Jezabel.

Remember, in judging of poor Manton, that while he is hoodwinked, through much that is most noble in him, we see this woman through the strong light of day. He looks upon her as a devotee of science, in the holy cause of human progress and social amelioration. A poet and enthusiast, his life is dedicate to both. He regards her as a frail being, whose life hangs by a thread, and that thread held in his own hand—degraded into a false relation to himself—a relation which he loathes, to be sure, and which he feels to be heavily and swiftly dragging him downward, every instant, while it lasts, but which he dare not utterly break, for the fear that that frail thread of life, of which he has so strangely become the holder, should be snapped. He has only seen her, through her representations of herself; and therefore, all that is chivalrous and tender in him has been aroused in her defence, as the white roe, hunted into his strong protection for defence against the demon hounds of New England bigotry, jealousy, and fear. Apart from all other considerations, these were sufficient to compel an utter negation of self, in all that related to her, as well as a hasty dismissal of those suspicions that might thrust themselves upon him.

A house, in the meantime, had been taken for her in Tenth Street, for the rent of which Manton and the benevolent Doctor Weasel were to become jointly responsible. But the woman was far too astute to permit any such entanglements as might lead, prospectively, to mutual explanations between her victims. The Doctor alone ultimately became her endorser for the rent. She had other designs upon the less plethoric purse of Manton.

In entering upon this arrangement, Manton had been induced to believe, by her own representations, that for ten years before the name of Preissnitz had been heard of on this continent, this woman had been practising water-cure among her women patients. Manton had been sufficiently educated in the profession, to understand that its general pretensions were essentially empirical. He was too much an Indian, indeed, and had lived too much among Indians, to regard anything beyond the simplest natural agents as efficiently curative. He therefore recognized what Preissnitz had discovered, as simply confirmatory of his experience of the usages of savage life, and his own observation so far as it went. It contained not to him any more than any other pathy, the essential vis medicatrix of nature; but it seemed good to him, because it was new to the popular sense, and was well worthy to be urged upon its recognition, and thus to find its proper place among the other systems.

He entered upon the project with the fullest enthusiasm, for this woman seemed to him, from her personal habits and untiring energy, to be specially set apart to preach the crusade of physical cleanliness to her sex. The house was therefore occupied by her as proprietress and female physician, while Manton, Doctor Weasel, the fiery Jeannette, and victimised Edmond, of a former scene, occupied respective chambers as boarders, and patrons of the new enterprise.

CHAPTER XVIII.
A DIVERSION.

Never did moon so ebb, or seas so wane,

But they left Hope-seed to fill up again.

Herrick.

But even in the black abysses of the hell down which he had fallen, a flower could grow to the eye of Manton. It was the strange birth of a wizard evil place; yet, as it spread beneath his nourishing eye and hand, it daily grew more beautiful to him. It may have been the unconscious contrast of a something young, living, and blooming in an unnatural sphere like this, where he, with the sudden weight of centuries upon him, breathed with such heavy gasping. He could not tell what it was that thickened this drear air; he only felt the oppression on his lungs, and shuddered when sleep had partly sobered him, and he could realise it for the hour. His sympathies had been first touched for that ugly, impish, persecuted child, to which we have frequently referred, because he saw, at once, that the mother’s querulous jealousy was forever subjecting it to a species of covert torture, which kept it always haggard and wretched. Had it been a sick and neglected kitten on the hearth, he would have felt for it the same kind of sympathy. He accordingly noticed and caressed the child, and endeavoured to rouse its low, ignoble frontal region into activity. The response of a hungry and vivid animality, surprised him with its aptitude of apparent intelligence. He did not understand that marvellous faculty of imitation which, in all the animal tribes approximating man, or which, in other words, are born with embryo souls, assumes the external semblances of intelligent expression. The faculty of music is below man, and common both to bird and beast; and he had yet to learn, to his heavy cost, how a perception and detection of the physical harmonies of sound may be utterly distinct from the spiritual comprehension of their meaning. He had yet to fearfully realise how this insensate aptitude of harmony, which enables the monkey of the organ-grinder to dance in perfect time the most wild and rapid strathspey that ever Highland pibroch rung, or a stupid parrot to whistle the divinest strains of Mozart, could yet bestow upon the combined parrot and monkey of our own race that semblant mockery of the “gift of tongues,” the use of the soul’s higher language. In a word, he would have been greatly shocked to hear the affiliated Poll and Jocko talk down Shelley in his own etherealisms, and appal Byron with the mad bravado of forgotten lines from his own reckless and besotted misanthropy.

Poll and Jocko are easy enough to detect through all the human disguises of their combined powers, if the man of common sense and society meets the impersonation for the first time, when developed, or in most of the latter stages of development. But it was a very different thing with poor Manton, who only saw an undeveloped, abject animal, from which he expected little but the gratitude of the brute for protection, and from which anything like a vivid response was as surprising as it was unconsciously gratifying to his egotism, for the reason that all that was really pleasurable in it was owing to the fact of its constituting a close reflection of his own mind.

Gradually the feeling took possession of him, as he observed in her an excessive sensibility, that could weep at a moment’s warning, and laugh like April through the glistening storm in the next instant, that he would make amends for the great sin of his life, in working upon this sensitive organisation for good. The fine delicate chords of this frail instrument might be made to respond to the divinest notes; and this creature, with developed brain and expanding soul, become a medium of the loftiest intelligence—aye, be even to him the consoler of after years. The idea was a strange one, but it suited the intellectual audacity of Manton for that very reason.

It seemed to his darkened hopelessness, that here, through the innocence of childhood, he might renew that broken chain of living light which held him in communion with the upper world, until its blackened, severed links, falling about him, had left his manacled soul in hopeless bondage. He dreamed that if he guarded it with holy zeal, his prayers might rise upon the first odors that went up from this strange young flower to Heaven, and bring its light down too, in forgiveness, to him.

He did not know—for he had fed on poisons until it had become a kind of second nature to him, as to that old Pontiac king—that the pure light of spheres could never reach him through this lurid glare, which he had now come to think the natural day—that the odor of no flower could rise through its thickened air to meet the keen, grey stars. The man became bewildered with the gorgeous dream he nourished; and, day by day, without knowing why, he threw himself between the child and the baleful shadow of its mother. He spread his hands above her in blessing; he watched that he might shield her.

From the moment when his attention had been first attracted to her, she seemed to become illuminated; her ungainly body appeared assuming the lines of beauty; her mean, harsh features, softened, as the gnarled shrub assumes, in slow unfolding, the graceful mellowed drapery of spring. The coarse, elfin locks, grew tamed and smooth; a dark blue, in soft and gradual displacement, entered the sharp, greenish, animal eyes. The low, ape-like forehead, swelled above meekly-curved brows that had lost their hirsute squareness. Indeed, so rapid was the expansion of the frontal region, that it absolutely startled and affrighted the devout experimenter, when he placed his hand upon it, and felt it almost lifted by the wild throbbings beneath. The work was progressing too fast; he feared that the general health of the subject might fail; but how to check and remedy this powerful reaction, so as to control it from fatal results, now so fully occupied the spiritual subtilty of the man, as to leave him little time to think of himself.

The loathsome contact of the reptile mother daily grew more abhorrent to him; and her characteristic cunning soon discovered that she had no real hold upon him herself, and at once encouraged this growing interest in the daughter, with the same assiduous art that she had before displayed in tormenting her with jealous gibes. Through this help she hoped he might be held within her reach. She had already, by her malapert, silly, malignant interference, so far completed his ruin as to have brought about a desperate, and finally fatal collision, between himself and his business associate in the Journal, which his genius had built up; and now he was thrown again to struggle hap-hazard with the world, he had become more reckless and desperate than before, so that she feared he might, at any time, break away from his bondage, and that, too, while he was still of use to her, and before she had gloated fully upon his ruin. She had studiously taught the child the process of those infernal arts, of which we have seen something; and, although the creature understood nothing of the rationale involved, yet her imitative cunning made her a most sharp pupil and practitioner.

By saying that the child did not understand, we mean to convey, that she could not have explained to herself, or to others, what effect certain manipulations would produce specifically; yet she had a feeling of them, a vicious intuition, that answered with her all the purposes of intellection. To look at her through the eyes of Manton, the uncouth and grotesque girl had become a fond and graceful plaything, that clung about him in soft caresses, that kept his heart warmed towards her, and caused him to regard the mother even with a modified sense of the growing disgust which was possessing him, and of which her shrewd insight made her fully aware.

Her child had become necessary as a bait—and her child let it be—for, in her hideous creed, nothing was sacred. She was filled towards her victim with fierce yearnings, and, had she possessed the actual entity of soul, would have loved him madly—but no, she hated him, as the slave hates the despotic master to whom he hourly cringes for each favor. In a word, she hated him as a man—or in his double capacity of a spiritual being, rather; and, as even her hate was secondary, her appetites towards him were those of the weir-wolf for mankind. She would devour him body and soul, but she meant to feast alone.

Fearing lest the tenderness of his nature might be too strongly moved towards the child, if not diverted in other directions, she at once set her subtle wits to work to furnish her “Tiger,” as she called him, with sufficient toys of the same kind to keep him quiet, and avert the chances of his leaning more towards one than another. Some letters were hastily despatched to New England, and the result was the appearance of a fair and gentle child, about the age of her own.

Elna and the stranger, Moione, sprang into each other’s arms when they met, as if their very heart were one. They were fast friends, it seemed, and a thousand times had Elna said how dearly she loved the gentle Moione; and so jealous were the children of their first meeting, that Manton saw little of either for several days. A glance at the broad, serene brow, great, clear eyes, and delicate mouth of the new-comer, filled him with a strange, inexplicable sense of confidence, and even relief; which he could not well explain, to be sure, because it was too undefined to himself. He could only wonder how that white-browed creature came in such a place. It seemed as though it were a promise, answering to his prayer for the elfish Elna, that this calm spirit should have descended in their midst.

The vehement and headstrong petulance of her nature promised to find here a balance that would sober it within the bounds of reason; and strangely, although he saw hope for her, and for his own yet undefined purpose in her development, he saw nothing definitely in the stranger, but a good angel sent to aid him. His soul went out to greet her, but was it yet his heart?

These children were both dedicate to art; and Manton found it now by far the most pleasing occupation, to watch and give direction to the rapid unfolding of this instinct for the creative. The newly-aroused intellect of Elna here displayed many impish and brilliant characteristics of the imitative faculty, that might easily have been mistaken, by a less partial observer than Manton, for genius. These peculiarities were strikingly contrasted with the placid, but vigorous style of Moione, to a degree that one formed the exact offset to the other, not alone in art, but in all physical and mental, as well as spiritual idiosyncrasies. As these children grew upon him, there seemed something strangely familiar in them to Manton. He often tried to account for this to himself. Had he seen them before in dreams? Had he known them in some different world, and in a previous stage of being? Why was it that the vehement eccentricities of temper, the elfin wildness of motion, and light, mocking spirit of this child Elna, all seemed to him so familiar? Why was it that the coming of the fair-browed Moione had surprised him so little? There was that in her pure, calm face to startle most observers; yet, from the first, he had looked upon it as a matter of course, and as if he had unconsciously waited for her to arrive. Why was it that he had felt comforted since she came? What was it, in that name of hers, that sounded to him so much like a half-forgotten music-note?

So he had questioned himself a thousand times, becoming each day more puzzled than the last, until accident furnished him with the curious solution of this mystery. One day, in looking over a pile of old manuscripts, he found one, upon which he seized, with an unaccountable thrill. In an instant the whole thing flashed upon him—

“I have it! I have it! Here the mystery is solved at last! Strange, that I should so utterly have forgotten this manuscript! Two years ago, before I ever saw these people, this strange foreshadowing of what seems now a reality in my life, came to me in a summer’s day-dream; and I wrote it off, to be thrown aside and forgotten until this moment. It seems the most wonderful coincidence. I am no believer in miracles, but this appears a marvellous reach of the soul into the future; I was conscious of nothing when I wrote, but the pleasure of embodying in words what seemed to me a beautiful thought; strange, it should have been thus thrown aside and so utterly forgotten, until the increasing coincidences of my present relation have gradually forced me back to find it! What blind instinct, struggling in me, sent me here to look through these old manuscripts, with no definite purpose? What vague struggle of consciousness and memory is this, that has been moving me for weeks to understand why it is those children seem so familiar to me? Strange! strange! strange!”

Manton now proceeded to read this curious manuscript, the contents of which we shall also place before you:—