I heard this strange story from its hero, one sunny summer morning as we swept over the meadowy reaches of the Erie Railway, or hung along the cliffside by the wooded windings of the Susquehanna. When he had ended it, he smiled languidly, and, showing me his still-mutilated hand, said that the old doctor’s job had been a sad bungle, after all. In fact, the only physical proof that remained to verify his story, was a curved blue spot where the ingoing current from the magnet had carried particles from the carbon point and lodged them beneath the skin. Psychologically, he was sadly mixed up, he said; for, since that time, he had felt that four lives were joined in him—his own, the remnant of Herr Lebensfunke’s miserable hoard merged in that of poor birdling’s mother, and, last of all, Hans Kraut’s.
He left the cars soon afterward at Binghamton, watchfully followed by a stout, shabby man with a three days’ beard stubbling his chin, who had occupied the seat in front of us, and had turned now and then to listen for a moment to Ronald’s rapid narration.
A week later, and I heard that he was dead—having committed suicide in a fit of delirium soon after his admission to the Binghamton Inebriate Asylum. The attendant who made him ready for burial noticed a singular blue mark on his left breast, that looked, he said, a little like a horseshoe magnet.
OSGOOD’S PREDICAMENT.
By Elizabeth D. B. Stoddard.
⁂ Harper’s Magazine, June, 1863.
Osgood took a cane-bottomed chair whose edges had given way from the application of boot-soles, cane and umbrella ferules, and studied his predicament. He commenced this necessary study early in the morning in his room, which was in a boarding-house situated in this metropolis. The early carts were taking their way down town through a blue haze, which in the country prefigured a golden day. The milkman, the walk-sweeper, and the rag-picker, were the only creatures moving in Osgood’s neighborhood. The time was propitious for meditation and resolve, but Osgood’s head was not ready. The still Champagne that he had drank the night before buzzed in his brain. With a glass of it in his hand, under a side gas-light, in the drawing-room of his Aunt Formica, he had proposed marriage to a handsome dashing girl, and the handsome dashing girl had accepted him. They swallowed the bubbles on the “beaker’s brim,” thinking it was the Cup of Life they were drinking from. Neither supposed that the moment was one of exhilaration or enthusiasm. Osgood never felt so serious, or so determined to face the music, as he called it, which was the short for a philosophical design to march boldly through life, and shoulder its necessities with a brave spirit and a martial air.