an inscription many a spouse would like to read in their own cases!
"The proposed locality of the fall of woman 'luckily' lay right on the road between their house and Santa Blarneeo. Each thought, 'I may not be able to achieve the exploit upon which I am bent, but one thing is certain, which is, that it shall not fail for want of trying. Once fairly accomplished, freedom comes, and then for a high old time!' So thought the woman; so thought the man.
"Night has various and strange influences, which are altogether unknown to the day. The Magi, on the plains of Chaldea, the astrologers of early Egypt, and the whole ancient world duly acknowledged the power of the astral bodies. The whole interest of Bulwer's 'Zanoni' hinges on the soul-expanding potentiality of a star upon Clarence Glyndon, one of the heroes of that Rosicrucian story. Indeed, the whole august fraternity, from the neophyte of last week to Ross and Henri More, down to Appolonius of Tyanæ, and away through the Ages to Thothmes, and down beyond all the Egyptian dynasties to Zytos, and still away into the very heart of the Pre-Adamite Eras, we know, held strange doctrines concerning stars; and if the historian of the Order, the great Mirandolo, be not mistaken, our Brotherhood possesses the key that reveals the nature of the starry influences, and how they may be gained. Of my own knowledge—for I am but in the fifth degree, therefore do not know all these mysteries—there are Destinies in the stars. Well, on this particular night, the star known as Hesper, she of the pale mild eye, was looking straight into the room where lay the precious pair, and it shone through the little window at the foot of the bed. The night was sultry—a little window—summer was in the ascendant—and the upper sash was down. Remember this, the upper sash was down.
"And now a strange thing occurred, a very strange and mysterious thing. Just as Tom Clark and his wife had been magnetized into a sort of restless sleep from gazing at the star—an uneasy, disturbed, nervous, but dreamless sleep—as if a heavy, thick and murky cloud just floated off a stagnant marsh, there descended upon the house a pestilent, slimy mist, and it gathered over and about the roof; and it entered, rolling heavily, into the chamber, coming through that little window at the foot of the bed.
"It was a thick, dense, iron-greyish mist, approaching blackness, only that there was a sort of turgid redness, not a positive color, but as if it had floated over the depths of hell, and caught a portion of its infernal luminosity. And it was thick and dark, and dense and very heavy; and it swept and rolled, and poured into the room in thick, voluminous masses—into the very room, and about the couch where tossed in uneasy slumber the woman and the man. And it filled the apartment, and hung like a pall about their couch; and its fetor oppressed their senses; and it made their breath come thick, and difficult, and wheezing from their lungs. It was dreadful! And their breath mingled with the strange vapor, apparently endowing it with a kind of horrid life, a sort of semi-sentience; and gave it a very peculiar and fearful movement—orderly, systematic, gyratory, pulsing movement—the quick, sharp breath of the woman, the deep and heavy breath of the man. And it had come through the window at the foot of the bed, for the upper sash was down.
"Slowly, and with regular, spiracular, wavy motion, with gentle undulations, like the measured roll of the calm Pacific Sea, the gentle sea on which I am sailing toward the Pyramids and my Cora—six years old, and so pretty! Pyramids ten thousand years old, and so grand! Like the waves of that sea did the cloud begin to move gyrally around the chamber, hanging to the curtains, clinging to the walls, but as if dreading the moonlight, carefully avoiding the window through which it had come, the little window at the foot of the bed—whose upper sash was down.
"Soon, very soon, the cloud commenced to change the axis of its movement, and to condense into a large globe of iron-hued nebulæ; and it began a contrary revolution; and it floated thus, and swam like a dreadful destiny over the unconscious sleepers on the bed, after which it moved to the western side of the room, and became nearly stationary in an angle of the wall, where for a while it stood or floated, silent, appalling, almost motionless, changeless, still.
"At the end of about six minutes it moved again, and in a very short time assumed the gross but unmistakable outline of a gigantic human form—an outline horrible, black as night—a frowning human form—cut not sharply from the vapor, but still distinctly human in its shapeness—but very imperfect, except the head, which was too frightfully complete to leave even a lingering doubt but that some black and hideous devilry was at work in that little chamber. And the head was infamous, horrible, gorgonic; and its glare was terrible, infernal, blasting, ghastly—perfectly withering in its expression, proportions and aspect.
"The THING, this pestilent thing was bearded with the semblance of a tangled mass of coarse, grey iron wire. Its hair was as a serried coil of thin, long, venom-laden, poison-distilling snakes. The nose, mouth, chin and brows were ghastly, and its sunken cheeks were those of Famine intensified. The face was flat and broad, its lips the lips of incarnate hate and lust combined. Its color was the greenish blue of corpses on a summer battle-field, suffused with the angry redness of a demon's spite, while its eyes—great God!—its eye—for there was but one, and that one in the very centre of its forehead, between the nose and brow—was bloodshot and purple, gleaming with infernal light, and it glamored down with more than fiendish malignance upon the woman and the man.
"Nothing about this Thing was clearly cut or defined, except the head—its hideous, horrible head. Otherwise it was incomplete—a sort of spectral Formlessness. It was unfinished, as was the awful crime-thought that had brought it into being. It was on one side apparently a male, on the other it looked like a female; but, taken as a whole, it was neither man nor woman, it was neither brute nor human, but it was a monster and a ghoul—born on earth of human parents. There are many such things stalking our streets, and invisibly presiding over festal scenes, in dark cellars, by the lamp, in the cabinet and camp; and many such are daily peering down upon the white paper on the desks where sit grave and solemn Ministers of State, who, for Ambition's sake and greed of gold, play with an Empire's destiny as children do with toys, and who, with the stroke of a pen, consign vast armies to bloody graves—brave men, glorious hosts, kept back while victory is possible—kept back till the foeman has dug their graves just in front of his own stone walls and impenetrable ramparts—and then sent forward to glut the ground with human blood. Do you hear me, Ministers of State? I mean you! you who practically regard men's lives as boys regard the minnows of a brook. I mean you who sit in high places, and do murder by the wholesale—you who treat the men as half foes, half friends, tenderly; men whose hands are gripped with the iron grip of death around the Nation's throat—the Nation's throat—do you hear?—and crushing out the life that God and our fathers gave it. Remember Milliken's Bend, Port Hudson, Fort Wagner, and the Black Heroes of the war—Noble men—Black, too, but the bravest of the brave—yet treated not as heroes ought to be. Forget not Fredericksburg! and bear in mind that this gorgon of your own creation will not quit you, day or night—not even on your dying day, when it will hiss into your ears, 'Father, behold, embrace me!'—and its slime will fall upon and choke you, as you have choked our country. And the sheeted ghosts of six hundred thousand heroes, slaughtered by a whim, will mournfully upbraid, and—perhaps—forgive you. Will the weeping widows and the countless orphans—pale, blue-cast women, pale with grief, blue with want; orphans, poor little shrivelled, half-starved orphans—will they forgive you? will your own conscience? will the Eternal God of Heaven? Why did you sacrifice these six hundred thousand men? Why did you not put your guns and swords in the hands of six hundred thousand men—men who had God's best gifts to fight for and maintain—Liberty and their wives? Black men, too—brawny, brave, strong-hearted, Freedom-nerved, God-inspired black men. No black man yet ever sold his country! Why don't you first remove their disabilities here in the North? Why don't you bid them rise and be men? Why grudge freemen the pay of other free men; the bounty, the pension, of other heroes of the same rank? Do this, let the Negro understand that you concede his manhood, and appreciate his prowess; let him once know that you are grateful for all he does for the country, and proclaim it to the world, and Black men will flock to your standard, not only from your own soil, but from every spot on earth where civilized black men exist.