By midnight the storm cleared. Murky clouds split to show shining, blue-white stars and a fitful moon, that silvered the crests of the spruces and sometimes hid like a gleaming, black-threaded pearl behind the dark branches.
Jones, a plainsman all his days, wonderingly watched the moon-blanched water. He saw it shade and darken under shadowy walls of granite, where it swelled with hollow song and gurgle. He heard again the far-off rumble, faint on the night wind. High cliff banks appeared, walled out the mellow light, and the river suddenly narrowed. Yawning holes, whirlpools of a second, opened with a gurgling suck and raced with the boat.
On the craft flew. Far ahead, a long, declining plane of jumping frosted waves played dark and white with the moonbeams. The Slave plunged to his freedom, down his riven, stone-spiked bed, knowing no patient eddy, and white-wreathed his dark, shiny rocks in spume and spray.
VII
A CASE OF METAPHANTASMIA
By W. D. Howells
From “Between the Dark and the Daylight,” copyright, 1907, by Harper and Brothers. By special permission from the author.
The stranger was a guest of Halson’s, and Halson himself was a comparative stranger, for he was of recent election to our dining-club, and was better known to Minver than to the rest of our little group, though one could not be sure that he was very well known to Minver. The stranger had been dining with Halson, and we had found the two smoking together, with their cups of black coffee at their elbows, before the smoldering fire in the Turkish room when we came in from dinner—my friend Wanhope the psychologist, Rulledge the sentimentalist, Minver the painter, and myself. It struck me for the first time that a fire on the hearth was out of keeping with a Turkish room, but I felt that the cups of black coffee restored the lost balance in some measure.
Before we had settled into our wonted places—in fact, almost as we entered—Halson looked over his shoulder and said: “Mr. Wanhope, I want you to hear this story of my friend’s. Go on, Newton—or, rather, go back and begin again—and I’ll introduce you afterwards.”
The stranger made a becoming show of deprecation. He said he did not think the story would bear immediate repetition, or was even worth telling once, but, if we had nothing better to do, perhaps we might do worse than hear it; the most he could say for it was that the thing really happened. He wore a large drooping, gray mustache, which, with the imperial below it, quite hid his mouth, and gave him, somehow, a martial effect, besides accurately dating him of the period between the latest sixties and earliest seventies, when his beard would have been black; I liked his mustache not being stubbed in the modern manner, but allowed to fall heavily over his lips, and then branch away from the corners of his mouth as far as it would. He lighted the cigar which Halson gave him, and, blowing the bitten-off tip towards the fire, began:
“It was about that time when we first had a ten-o’clock night train from Boston to New York. Train used to start at nine, and lag along around by Springfield, and get into the old Twenty-sixth Street Station here at six in the morning, where they let you sleep as long as you liked. They call you up now at half-past five, and, if you don’t turn out, they haul you back to Mott Haven or New Haven, I’m not sure which. I used to go into Boston and turn in at the old Worcester Depot, as we called it then, just about the time the train began to move, and I usually got a fine night’s rest in the course of the nine or ten hours we were on the way to New York; it didn’t seem quite the same after we began saying Albany Depot: shortened up the run, somehow.