“Then how comes it that he has not joined us?” I asked, rather foolishly.
There was an awkward silence, upon which Ben Jonson, who chanced to be present with other celebrities already mentioned, broke in with his great laughter.
“It would seem, young man, thou art scarce so heedful of thy company as an honest shade should be,” he said. “Know that we harbour not with such varlets here. They have their proper kennel. Ask Dante about him.”
“The man Gridd now descends upon a locality of purgatorial discomfort, situated beyond the limits of our knowledge, though not of our conjecture,” declared Dr. Johnson.
“In brief, Gridd goes to grid-iron,” flashed a grim shadow in the corner. “Tophet has him, mad-blazing, mad-dancing with flame of unimaginable tints. Basting with pitch and fire. Thunder and bolt above; blackness of Erebus beneath. And so ‘good-night’ to Gridd.”
THE JACKY-TOAD
HE was sitting upon the skull of a dead horse, thinking of nothing in particular, when out of the great nocturnal silence there came the sound of a human footstep. Whereupon he leapt upright and waved his lantern frantically. This he did because the wanderer was evidently night-foundered and lost upon the moorland, and it seemed probable that, observing the light, he or she would approach it. Now that strange blue flicker of flame rose and fell and danced above a quaking-bog—a hideous place where emerald mosses hid the black slime beneath, and where, at the margins of the danger, tussocks and little peat tumuli gave foothold for heather, for cotton grass, and for rushes. “I’m coming!” cried a voice. “I am so glad somebody’s found me at last.”
“You’re nothing but a puff
of phosphuretted hydrogen”
“GORMED IF I DIDN’T THINK I’D GOT ’E!”
Another moment and a small girl felt the sudden uprising of deadly coldness about her feet and heard the devilish hiss and chatter of the quaking-bog as it sucked and shivered and opened its black mouth to swallow her. But she was light as a feather, active as a bird. She struggled back, fell, clutched a stout mound of heather, then another, and so dragged herself out of danger.