Tales of the Chesapeake

by George Alfred Townsend

As if by invocation, the Ancient Mariner rose before me! He stood in the doorway of my office, and held me with his glittering eye. He lifted his skinny hand to his long gray beard, and then gravely tipped his oiled hat. "The reader for Spry, Stromboli, and Smith?"

I had that honor, and handed him a chair. He sat in it after the manner of a flounder, concentrated his eye upon me like a star-fish, and produced a roll of manuscript with the fluttering claws of a lobster. Then he stirred and squirmed, like an elderly eel, looking distrustfully into the vestibule. I closed the door and begged to be informed of his business.

"I have a great work for you," he said mysteriously, proffering his manuscript. As he leaned over to do this, I saw a shining something on the top of his head, but the thick white hair concealed it when he resumed his place. The manuscript smelled as if it had contained mackerel, and looked as if it had come from the bottom of the sea. I found, curiously enough, some fish-scales adhering to it, and its title very oddly confirmed these testimonies—"Five Years in the Great Deep."

I glanced at the author with some surprise. He was the quaintest of mariners, and if I had met him leagues under the sea, I should have thought him in his proper element. His locks were like dry sea-weed; his cheeks were so swollen that they might have contained gills, but this was probably tobacco. When he wiped his nose with a handkerchief like a scoop-net, some shells and pebbles fell from his pocket, and his ears flapped like a pair of ventrals. I remarked as he pursued the lost articles over the floor, that he wore a microscope strapped in a leathern case, and a geological hammer belted to his side. He walked as if habituated to swimming, and when he shrugged his shoulders I expected to see a dorsal fin burst out of the back of his jacket. He might have been sixty years of age, but looked much older, and behaved like a well-born person, though, superficially judged, he might have lived in Billingsgate.

"A good title for a fiction," I said encouragingly.

"I never penned a line of fiction in my life," exclaimed my visitor sternly.

Referring to the copy again, I saw that it purported to be the work of "Rudentia Jones, Fellow of the Palæontologic Society, Entomologist to the Institute for Harmonizing the Universes, and Ruler of Subaqueous Creation, excepting the Finny Mammalia."

"Ah! I see," said I; "a capital title for a satire!"

"Life is too grave, and science too sacred," replied my visitor, "for the indulgence of idle banterings. The work is mine; I am its hero; and it is all true." He wore so earnest a face, and looked so directly and intelligently at me, that I forebore to smile. "I have travelled in strange countries," he said; "Nature has been bountiful in her revelations to me, indeed; my experiences have been so individual, that I sometimes discredit them myself. I do not complain that others ridicule them."

He spoke in the manner of one devoted to his species; and an easy dignity, which some trace to high birth and the consciousness of dominion, became him very naturally. The eldest of the admirals, or old Neptune himself, could not have seemed more kingly; but once or twice he started at a noise from the publishing-house, as if longing to get back to his legitimate brine. I told him to leave the manuscript in my hands for a fortnight, that I might form an opinion as to its claims for publication.