It would seem fit that a cat found amid such uncanny surroundings should be black instead of maltese, but as this is a veracious chronicle it is necessary to adhere to facts.
We spent some time in desultory conversation before I mentioned the ostensible object of my visit.
“Now,” said Wattles, “before I do anything about your horoscope, I want to show some I’ve ben casting,” and he began pulling over some papers on his shelves.
While he was doing this I looked around the strange room.
A row of bottles on one of the shelves contained various small reptiles with filmy orbs that peered out through alcohol. From the end of the shelf a stuffed badger stared fixedly and disdainfully, with dull glass eyes, at a moth eaten coon that returned the gaze from a pedestal in a darkened corner. A dismal and tattered owl occupied a perch above the coon. One of his glass eyes had dropped out, but with the other he regarded the offending badger sadly.
A dried snake skin, with several dangling rattles, was tacked on the wall back of the stove, with a few Indian relics—bows, arrows, and a spear head—that were arranged on each side of it. Some butterflies with broken wings, and beetles, impaled on pins, were scattered through the spaces around the relics. A number of colored botanical prints and astronomical charts were pinned on the walls, and there were cobwebs in the upper corners that appeared to be inhabited.
Some bunches of withered herbs and a broken violin hung above the window. On a table near it was a violet tinted globe of solid glass, about six inches in diameter. It was mounted on a block of wood. Wattles afterwards explained that this was a “magic crystal of marvellous power,” and that it “pictured prophetic visions under certain influences.”
The air in the room had a pungent musty odor, as of dried roots and plants, and I thought that a pile of small sacks back of the stove might contain something of the kind.
Wattles finally produced copies of the horoscopes and I was pleased to find among them those of my friends Tipton Posey, Bill Stiles and “Rat” Hyatt.
As Wattles traded at Posey’s store, his horoscope had probably been exchanged for merchandise.