"But the thing is there," he again cried.
"Ay, there's the rub, my dear fellow; the rub is there—let the rub be there; that is, go and rub, and the thing rubbed will not be there after the rubbing."
"Madness, man! It is a true mother's mark."
"Verily, a real noevus maternus" said I, "impressed by an avenging angel on the mother's brain, and transferred by nature's daguerreotype to the back of the child."
"You have said it."
"Nay, it is you who have said it," I continued; "and I will even suppose it is a mother's mark, to please you for a little, though it has no more that character than this sword-prick in my left cheek. But taking it in your own way, I have a theory I could propound to you about these marks. We say that the soul is in the body. It is just as true that the body is in the soul. Every member of the entire physical person is represented in the brain, though we cannot discern the form in these white viscera. Now, see you, if a man loses his finger, his son will not be awanting in that member. But there are cases where the want of a member is hereditary. Why? Because the member was not represented in the cerebral microcosm of the first deficient person. From this small epitome in the brain, the child is an extended copy—extended from a mathematical point, where all the members and lineaments are intended. So, when the fancy of the mother is working in the brain—say, in realizing some external image—it will impress it in the cerebral person (woman) there epitomized; and if she is in a certain way, the image will go to a corresponding part of the foetal point, which is the epitome of the child. A most ingenious, and satisfactory, and simple theory, which will explain the ten-of-diamond naevus, for"——
"Dreadful imbecility!" he exclaimed, as he threw himself on his chair; "most unaccountable and cruel trifling with a notable visitation of retributive justice, indicated by visible signs of terrible import to him who must bear the cross, and be reconciled to an angry Deity."
"Against all that may tend to penitence for a past crime," said I, getting grave, where gravity might avail for good, "I have nothing to say. But Heaven does not work through the mean of man's deceit and stratagem, and the good that comes of fear goes with returning courage."
Conscious of getting into a puling humour, I had no objection to an interruption by the entrance of Rogers, who, having finished his work, was probably intent upon the gratification which generally follows.
"I wish you joy of the boy and the diamonds," he said, as he seized Graeme by the half-palsied hand. "The nurse is reconciled to the omen of a fortune; and surely never was omen more auspicious, for no sooner had the strange indication shown its mute vaticination than it disappeared, that there might be no deduction of beauty from the favourite of the gods." And drawing, with his lumbering hand, the tumbler near him, he filled it two-thirds up of pure wine, and presently his lips grappled with it like a camel at the bucket in the desert, with such effect that the contents changed vessels in a twinkling.