[CHAPTER I.]
SHEPPARD LEE FLIES FROM THE GERMAN DOCTOR, AND FINDS HIMSELF AGAIN IN NEW-JERSEY.
The faster I fled, the faster it seemed to me I was followed by the German doctor, who, I have always believed, was driven crazy by the sudden loss of his beloved mummy, and who, I had therefore the greatest reason to fear, would, if he succeeded in retaking me, be content with nothing short of clapping me again into his glass case, were it even a needful preliminary, as, in truth, it must have been, to kill and embalm me over again. And indeed I think the reader will allow, that the fact of his following me three days and three nights, still calling me a mummy, charging everybody he met to stop me, and persisting to claim me as his property, even after I had got among my own friends, was a proof not only of insanity, but of a desperate determination to rob me of life and liberty.
Of this determination on his part I was myself so strongly persuaded, and, in consequence, so overcome by terror, that I am inclined to think I was for a time nearly as mad as himself; and I fled from before him with a speed which the reader can only conceive when I tell him, that I ran from the scene of my transformation on the banks of the Potomac to my native village in New-Jersey, a distance which I estimate at full one hundred and eighty miles, in the short space of three days and three nights, during which period I rested but once, and that on the second night, when, being very faint and weary, I lay down on the earth and slept two hours.
This may be justly esteemed a truly wonderful exploit, and it exceeds that of the great Daniel Boone of Kentucky, of whom it is related that he ran before a band of wild Indians the same distance, or thereabouts, in four days' time; but it must be remembered that I was fleeing from a raging madman, whose speed was so nearly equal to my own, that if I chanced but to flag a little in my exertions at any time, I was sure to see him make his appearance on the rear, or to hear his voice screaming on the winds to "stop his mummy." Indeed, I ran with such haste, that I took no note of the road upon which I travelled, and to this day I am ignorant how I succeeded in passing the three great rivers, the Potomac, the Chesapeake, and the Delaware, which lay in my route, and which I must have crossed in some way or other. And, for the same reason, I am ignorant in what manner I sustained existence during those three days, having not the slightest recollection of eating a single meal on the whole journey.
All that I can remember of the journey is, that I ran I knew not whither, but with an instinctive turning of my face towards the north; that I was closely followed by the German doctor; and that, about sundown on the third day, I found myself, to my unspeakable joy, rushing through the Owl-roost swamp, across the meadow, and by that identical beech-tree where I had first lost my body, in full view of my own house. The sight of that once happy home of my childhood filled me with rapture. I rushed towards it, hailed by a shout from old Jim Jumble, my negro-man, backed by another from his wife Dinah, that might have waked the dead, they were so loud and uproarious, and found myself in the arms of my dear, but long-neglected sister Prudence, who, with her husband Alderwood, and her three young children, was standing on the porch.
Then, being wholly overcome by exhaustion of body and mind, and having endured such fatigues and sufferings from hunger and thirst, without speaking of terror, as have seldom oppressed a poor feeble human being, I fell into a swoon, from which I awoke only to be assailed by a violent fever and delirium, the direct consequences of my superhuman exertions, that kept me a-bed, in a condition between life and death, for more than two weeks.
During all this period I recollect being tormented by the hateful visage of the German doctor, who, having followed me like a bloodhound, daily forced himself into my chamber, claimed me as his property, and would doubtless have carried me off, had it not been for my sister, my brother-in-law, and the faithful Jim Jumble, the first of whom watched at my bedside like an angel, while the two others opposed themselves to the enemy, and drove him from the room. His persecutions, indeed, affected me to a degree I cannot express, and were the cause that, at the end of the two weeks as above mentioned, I suddenly fell into a lethargy or trance, the crisis of my disease, in which I lay two days, and then awoke in my full senses, free from fever, and convalescent.