You, Squire, may go into a ball-room, where there are two hundred women. One hundred and ninety-nine of them you will pass with as much indifference as one hundred and ninety-nine pullets; but the two hundredth irresistibly draws you to her. There are one hundred handsomer, and ninety-nine cleverer ones present; but she alone has the magnet that attracts you. Now, what is that magnet? Is it her manner that charms? is it her voice that strikes on one of those thousand and one chords of your nervous system, and makes it vibrate, as sound does hollow glass? Or do her eyes affect your gizzard, so that you have no time to chew the cud of reflection, and no opportunity for your head to judge how you can digest the notions they have put into it? Or is it animal magnetism, or what the plague is it?
You are strangely affected; nobody else in the room is, and everybody wonders at you. But so it is. It’s an even chance if you don’t perpetrate matrimony. Well, that’s a thing that sharpens the eyesight, and will remove a cateract quicker than an oculist can, to save his soul alive. It metamorphoses an angel into a woman, and it’s plaguey lucky if the process don’t go on and change her into something else.
After I got so far in my meditations, I lit another cigar, and took out my watch to look at the time. “My eyes,” sais I, “if it tante past one o’clock at night. Howsomever, it ain’t often I get a chance to be alone, and I will finish this here weed, at any rate.” Arter which I turned in. The following morning I did not rise as early as usual, for it’s a great secret for a man never to be in the way, especially in a house like Peter’s, where his daughters had, in course, a good deal to see to themselves. So I thought I’d turn over and take another snoose; and do you know, Squire, that is always a dreamy one, and if your mind ain’t worried, or your digestion askew, it’s more nor probable you will have pleasant ones.
When I went into the keeping-room, I found Jessie and her sister there, the table set, and everything prepared for me.
“Mr Slick,” said the elder one, “your breakfast is ready.”
“But where is your father?” said I, “and Doctor Ovey?”
“Oh, they have gone to the next harbour, Sir, to see a man who is very ill there. The doctor left a message for you, he said he wanted to see you again very much, and hoped to find you here on his return, which will be about four o’clock in the afternoon. He desired me to say, if you sailed before he got back, he hoped you would leave word what port he would find you in, as he would follow you.”
“Oh,” said I, “we shall not go before to-morrow, at the earliest, so he will be in very good time. But who in the world is Doctor Ovey? He is the most singular man I ever met. He is very eccentric; ain’t he?”
“I don’t know who he is,” she replied. “Father agrees with you. He says he talks sometimes as if he was daft, but that, I believe, is only because he is so learned. He has a house a way back in the forest, where he lives occasionally; but the greater part of the year he wanders about the woods, and camps out like—”
She hesitated a moment, and then brought out the reluctant word: “an Indian. He knows the name of every plant and flower in the country, and their uses; and the nature of every root, or bark, or leaf that ever was; and then he knows all the ores, and coal mines, and everything of that kind. He is a great hand for stuffing birds and animals, and has some of every kind there is in the province. As for butterflies, beetles, and those sort of things, he will chase them like a child all day. His house is a regular—. I don’t recollect the word in English; in Gaelic it is ‘tigh neonachais.’”