第55章

It is difficult to explain the attraction which the uncanny and even the horrible have for most minds.I have seen a delicate woman half fascinated, but wholly disgusted, by one of the most unseemly of reptiles, vulgarly known as the "blowing viper" of the Alleghanies.

She would look at it, and turn away with irresistible shuddering and the utmost loathing, and yet turn to look at it again and again, only to experience the same spasm of disgust.In spite of her aversion, she must have relished the sort of electric mental shock that the sight gave her.

I can no more account for the fascination for us of the stories of ghosts and "appearances," and those weird tales in which the dead are the chief characters; nor tell why we should fall into converse about them when the winter evenings are far spent, the embers are glazing over on the hearth, and the listener begins to hear the eerie noises in the house.At such times one's dreams become of importance, and people like to tell them and dwell upon them, as if they were a link between the known and unknown, and could give us a clew to that ghostly region which in certain states of the mind we feel to be more real than that we see.

Recently, when we were, so to say, sitting around the borders of the supernatural late at night, MANDEVILLE related a dream of his which he assured us was true in every particular, and it interested us so much that we asked him to write it out.In doing so he has curtailed it, and to my mind shorn it of some of its more vivid and picturesque features.He might have worked it up with more art, and given it a finish which the narration now lacks, but I think best to insert it in its simplicity.It seems to me that it may properly be called, A NEW "VISION OF SIN"In the winter of 1850 I was a member of one of the leading colleges of this country.I was in moderate circumstances pecuniarily, though I was perhaps better furnished with less fleeting riches than many others.I was an incessant and indiscriminate reader of books.

For the solid sciences I had no particular fancy, but with mental modes and habits, and especially with the eccentric and fantastic in the intellectual and spiritual operations, I was tolerably familiar.

All the literature of the supernatural was as real to me as the laboratory of the chemist, where I saw the continual struggle of material substances to evolve themselves into more volatile, less palpable and coarse forms.My imagination, naturally vivid, stimulated by such repasts, nearly mastered me.At times I could scarcely tell where the material ceased and the immaterial began (if I may so express it); so that once and again I walked, as it seemed, from the solid earth onward upon an impalpable plain, where I heard the same voices, I think, that Joan of Arc heard call to her in the garden at Domremy.She was inspired, however, while I only lacked exercise.I do not mean this in any literal sense; I only describe a state of mind.I was at this time of spare habit, and nervous, excitable temperament.I was ambitious, proud, and extremely sensitive.I cannot deny that I had seen something of the world, and had contracted about the average bad habits of young men who have the sole care of themselves, and rather bungle the matter.It is necessary to this relation to admit that I had seen a trifle more of what is called life than a young man ought to see, but at this period I was not only sick of my experience, but my habits were as correct as those of any Pharisee in our college, and we had some very favorable specimens of that ancient sect.

Nor can I deny that at this period of my life I was in a peculiar mental condition.I well remember an illustration of it.I sat writing late one night, copying a prize essay,--a merely manual task, leaving my thoughts free.It was in June, a sultry night, and about midnight a wind arose, pouring in through the open windows, full of mournful reminiscence, not of this, but of other summers, --the same wind that De Quincey heard at noonday in midsummer blowing through the room where he stood, a mere boy, by the side of his dead sister,--a wind centuries old.As I wrote on mechanically, I became conscious of a presence in the room, though I did not lift my eyes from the paper on which I wrote.Gradually I came to know that my grandmother--dead so long ago that I laughed at the idea--was in the room.She stood beside her old-fashioned spinning-wheel, and quite near me.She wore a plain muslin cap with a high puff in the crown, a short woolen gown, a white and blue checked apron, and shoes with heels.She did not regard me, but stood facing the wheel, with the left hand near the spindle, holding lightly between the thumb and forefinger the white roll of wool which was being spun and twisted on it.In her right hand she held a small stick.I heard the sharp click of this against the spokes of the wheel, then the hum of the wheel, the buzz of the spindles as the twisting yarn was teased by the whirl of its point, then a step backwards, a pause, a step forward and the running of the yarn upon the spindle, and again a backward step, the drawing out of the roll and the droning and hum of the wheel, most mournfully hopeless sound that ever fell on mortal ear.Since childhood it has haunted me.All this time I wrote, and I could hear distinctly the scratching of the pen upon the paper.

But she stood behind me (why I did not turn my head I never knew), pacing backward and forward by the spinning-wheel, just as I had a hundred times seen her in childhood in the old kitchen on drowsy summer afternoons.And I heard the step, the buzz and whirl of the spindle, and the monotonous and dreary hum of the mournful wheel.