第78章

You will know, perhaps, in the course of half an hour's reading, what has been haunting my hours of sleep and waking for months.Icannot tell, of course, whether you are a nervous person or not.

If, however, you are such a person,--if it is late at night,--if all the rest of the household have gone off to bed,--if the wind is shaking your windows as if a human hand were rattling the sashes,--if your candle or lamp is low and will soon burn out,--let me advise you to take up some good quiet sleepy volume, or attack the "Critical Notices" of the last Quarterly and leave this to be read by daylight, with cheerful voices round, and people near by who would hear you, if you slid from your chair and came down in a lump on the floor.

I do not say that your heart will beat as mine did, I am willing to confess, when I entered the dim chamber.Did I not tell you that Iwas sensitive and imaginative, and that I had lain awake with thinking what were the strange movements and sounds which I heard late at night in my little neighbor's apartment? It had come to that pass that I was truly unable to separate what I had really heard from what I had dreamed in those nightmares to which I have been subject, as before mentioned.So, when I walked into the room, and Bridget, turning back, closed the door and left me alone with its tenant, I do believe you could have grated a nutmeg on my skin, such a "goose-flesh " shiver ran over it.It was not fear, but what I call nervousness,--unreasoning, but irresistible; as when, for instance, one looking at the sun going down says, "I will count fifty before it disappears"; and as he goes on and it becomes doubtful whether he will reach the number, he gets strangely flurried, and his imagination pictures life and death and heaven and hell as the issues depending on the completion or non-completion of the fifty he is counting.Extreme curiosity will excite some people as much as fear, or what resembles fear, acts on some other less impressible natures.

I may find myself in the midst of strange facts in this little conjurer's room.Or, again, there may be nothing in this poor invalid's chamber but some old furniture, such as they say came over in the Mayflower.All this is just what I mean to, find out while I am looking at the Little Gentleman, who has suddenly become my patient.The simplest things turn out to be unfathomable mysteries;the most mysterious appearances prove to be the most commonplace objects in disguise.

I wonder whether the boys who live in Roxbury and Dorchester are ever moved to tears or filled with silent awe as they look upon the rocks and fragments of "puddingstone" abounding in those localities.

I have my suspicions that those boys "heave a stone" or "fire a brickbat," composed of the conglomerate just mentioned, without any more tearful or philosophical contemplations than boys of less favored regions expend on the same performance.Yet a lump of puddingstone is a thing to look at, to think about, to study over, to dream upon, to go crazy with, to beat one's brains out against.

Look at that pebble in it.From what cliff was it broken? On what beach rolled by the waves of what ocean? How and when imbedded in soft ooze, which itself became stone, and by-and-by was lifted into bald summits and steep cliffs, such as you may see on Meetinghouse-Hill any day--yes, and mark the scratches on their faces left when the boulder-carrying glaciers planed the surface of the continent with such rough tools that the storms have not worn the marks out of it with all the polishing of ever so many thousand years?

Or as you pass a roadside ditch or pool in springtime, take from it any bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time.

Some little worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are fastened to the stick: eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish.One of these specks magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an opaque mass in its centre.And while you are looking, the opaque mass begins to stir, and by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like a forming planet,--life beginning in the microcosm, as in the great worlds of the firmament, with the revolution that turns the surface in ceaseless round to the source of life and light.

A pebble and the spawn of a mollusk! Before you have solved their mysteries, this earth where you first saw them may be a vitrified slag, or a vapor diffused through the planetary spaces.Mysteries are common enough, at any rate, whatever the boys in Roxbury and Dorchester think of "brickbats " and the spawn of creatures that live in roadside puddles.

But then a great many seeming mysteries are relatively perfectly plain, when we can get at them so as to turn them over.How many ghosts that "thick men's blood with cold" prove to be shirts hung out to dry! How many mermaids have been made out of seals! How many times have horse-mackerels been taken for the sea-serpent!

--Let me take the whole matter coolly, while I see what is the matter with the patient.That is what I say to myself, as I draw a chair to the bedside.The bed is an old-fashioned, dark mahogany four-poster.It was never that which made the noise of something moving.It is too heavy to be pushed about the room.--The Little Gentleman was sitting, bolstered up by pillows, with his hands clasped and their united palms resting on the back of the head, one of the three or four positions specially affected by persons whose breathing is difficult from disease of the heart or other causes.

Sit down, Sir,--he said,--sit down! I have come to the hill Difficulty, Sir, and am fighting my way up.--His speech was laborious and interrupted.

Don't talk,--I said,--except to answer my questions.--And Iproceeded to "prospect" for the marks of some local mischief, which you know is at the bottom of all these attacks, though we do not always find it.I suppose I go to work pretty much like other professional folks of my temperament.Thus: