A great many circumstances led me to decide on leaving the convenient
boarding-house of Mrs. Silvernail: a house correctly described as
containing several "modern improvements": improperly, as being "in the
immediate vicinity of all the places of public amusement." For, as the
Central Park of New York is a place of public amusement, so likewise is
Barnum's Museum; and these two places being at a distance of about five
miles from each other, how could any one house be in the immediate
vicinity of both? But it was not upon this incompatibility that any of
my objections were founded.
If I have a prejudice, it is against being talked _at_ instead of _to_.
Now Mrs. Silvernail, who, like the katydid of the poplar-tree, if small,
was shrill, had a way of conveying instructions to her boarders by
means of parables ostensibly directed at Catharine, the tall Irish
serving-maid, but in reality meant for the ear of the obnoxious boarder
who had lately transgressed some important statute of the house, made
and provided to meet a case or cases.
A landing-place on the stairs was usually the platform selected for the
delivery of a monologue, in which Catharine was always assumed to be
the person addressed; although I have known instances in which that
"excellent wench" was, at the time of being so conferred with, in the
grocery at the corner, about half a block distant, as I could see from
the window where I sat and viewed her protracting her doorway dalliance
with Jeremiah Tomaters, the grocer's efficient young man.
"Catharine," my landlady would say in a loudish whisper, close by a
malefactor's chamber-door, and probably when Catharine was yet far down
the street,--"Catharine, who let the water in the bathroom run over just
now? If the slippers he left behind him a'n't Mr. Jennings's, I declare!
Boarders must be warned an' watched, elseways we shall hev all in the
house afloat, 'cepting the stoves an' flat-irons, by-'n'-by. Somebody at
Mrs. Moyler's acted so, and the house was like a roarin' sea, with the
baby adrift in his little cradle, and the roaches a-swimmin' round. Oh,
dear!"
Now Mr. Jennings was the serious boarder, who lodged in the room just
over mine: a man who, from general indications, had never had a bath in
his life; certainly he had never troubled the waters in that house. I
was the supposed delinquent, and at me the parable was levelled.
"Catharine, whose pass-key was that you found in the door? It's a mussy
we wasn't all a-murdered and a-plundered in cold blood, by the light
o' the moon! Mr. Jennings's night-key it must have been, to be sure!
Boarders must be warned and watched. When Mrs. Toyler's nephew's
night-key was found in the door of Number Forty-Seven, the boarders all
went off at daylight in an omnibus, takin' away custom and character
from the house forever."
Now Mr. Jennings, the serious boarder, was always in bed and asleep long
before latch-key time came round; and even supposing he ever _had_ let
himself in by means of that mischievous little convenience, he would as
soon have thought of taking the door up to bed with him as of leaving
the key in it. The parable was intended for the hearing of a young man
who occupied the room opposite mine, and who, being connected with
clubs, came home nobody ever knew when or in what condition, but had red
eyes o' mornings and a general odor of the convivial kind.
Then, again, Mrs. Silvernail had a way of being always about the doors
of the rooms, and a faculty, as I thought, of hovering near several of
them at one and the same moment. There are men who will turn the least
promising circumstance to advantage,--even that of being listened at
through a keyhole, while they discourse to themselves about affairs
connected with their most cherished and secret designs. One Captain
Dunnitt, who lived in the house before I came, adroitly made his account
of this eavesdropping propensity of the landlady, by settling his weekly
bill with a silver-mounted pistol, instead of the dollars justly due.
He had been a tragedian as well as a captain, and was saturated with
Shakspeare and other bards to a far greater amount than with money; and
when his week came round, he used to stride up and down his room with
much gnashing of teeth and other stage indications of distress, finally
settling down into a chair before the table, on which he would place and
replace a packet of letters and a wisp of unromantic-looking hair. Then
he would take the little silver pistol from his breast, and, after the
usual soliloquy of "To be or not to be," or something equally to the
purpose, would point it at his temples just as the landlady came
bursting into the room, begging him for all sakes not to "ruin the
character of her second-best room, and the walls newly painted at that!"
Remorse would then double up the manly form of Captain Dunnitt, who
would fall on his knees before the landlady,--"his benefactress! his
better angel!"--and then arrangements would be entered into by which he
was not to commit suicide for the present, but could avail himself of
the landlady's indulgence and wait for "that remittance," which was
always coming, but which never came.
But there were more serious objections, even than a landlady of shrill
parables and an inquiring turn of mind, to my prolonging the delights of
a residence at the first-class boarding-house of Mrs. Silvernail. Not
the least of these was the fact of its _being_ a boarding-house,--a
community. In such communities, from the inevitable intercourse over
the social board, your circle of acquaintance is always liable to be
extended rather than improved. In them there is no escape from the
disinterested offers of those who would be your perpetual friends. I am
still under lasting obligations to a man who, at a boarding-house in
which I sojourned for but three days, forced on me a pipeful of an
extremely choice and luxurious kind of tobacco, to dilate on the
properties of which he came and smoked about a quarter of a pound of it
in my room that very evening, and far on into the morning light. His
goodness is the more impressed upon my memory, because, on the same
occasion, he drank the greater part of the contents of a large
willow-bound bottle of old St. Croix rum, which I had just received
from a friend who had imported it direct. Then, in boarding-house
communities, one's magnetism is as much at fault as that of a ship
sailing up a river whose rock-bound shores are impregnated with iron
elements. I knew a man who was over-magnetized to the extent of
matrimony by the lady of the house,--a widow, and a shrew. He hated, or
at least professed to hate her, and had ridiculous stories about her to
no end; but she married him, and he still lives. Another, of a
rather unsociable turn, rejected the proffered civilities of all his
fellow-boarders who ever came to offer him rations of curious
tobacco or to assist him in performing a libation of old and valuable
Hollands. The only one of the party to whom he ever "cottoned" was the
latest comer, a smoothed-out, blandulose kind of man, who smoked up all
his cunning cigars, made sad havoc among his Hollanders of gin, departed
from that house in an unexpected manner and his friend's best trousers,
in the pockets of which he had bestowed that friend's rarest gems and
gold, and is now serving out a term allotted to him in the State Prison,
in recognition of the remarkable abilities displayed by him in the
character of what the police call a "confidence man."
And yet there are more objectionable boarding-house acquaintances than
people who insist upon sharing with you their friendship, be they
"confidence men" or not. I suppose we may allow, in these advanced
times, that it is something like magnetism which decides the question of
affinity and its reverse. But, in granting this, I will take the liberty
of observing that external and palpable facts have a considerable effect
in directing the currents of magnetism. For example, and to adopt the
language of scientific men, the insignificant circumstance of a person
habituating himself to the partial deglutition of his knife, while
partaking of food, may produce antipathetic emotions on the part of
others, whom prejudice or superstition has led to regard the knife as
an article designed for cutting only. This kind of outrage I allude
to merely for the purpose of illustrating a case. In first-class
boarding-houses, like that of Mrs. Silvernail, such rusticities have
long since become traditional, and of the things that have passed away;
and, indeed, so particular was that lady with regard to her knives,
that, had a boarder swallowed even a part of one, he would undoubtedly
have heard the deed alluded to through the keyhole of his chamber-door
on the following day, in the form of a parable having for its hero the
justified Mr. Jennings, our serious young man.
If external and palpable circumstances, then, are admitted to have a
decided effect upon streams of magnetism, I suppose we may assume that
they have also a certain power of determining impressions by themselves,
without the intervention of any of the more subtile agencies whatever.
The granting of this postulate will put me on quite easy terms with
regard to the very positive objection entertained by me towards
a certain Mr. Désolé Arcubus, who, by provision of an immutable
Medo-Persic edict promulgated by Mrs. Silvernail, occupied the
chair next mine at the first-rate table of that rigid expounder of
boarding-house law.
Mr. Désolé Arcubus, a young man of some three or four and twenty, had no
special nationality about him from which one could guess how he came by
his rather uncommon names. He was reputed to be learned, particularly
in the modern languages; had a profusion of long, wild hair of a
greenish-drab hue, which matched his complexion exactly,--this prevalent
tint being infused also into the _cornea_ or "white" of his eye,--and,
in physical proportions, was of weedy and unwholesome growth. He was not
a young man of cheerful disposition. On the contrary, his deportment at
table, where alone his fellow-boarders had any opportunity of observing
him, was such as to induce a very general belief that his mind must have
been affected by some terrible calamity; and his presence, indeed, was
looked upon as undesirable by many of the guests, whose health had begun
to suffer seriously from the manner in which Arcubus used to groan
between his instalments of food. Sometimes, in the interval between
the soup and the solids, he would lean his elbows upon the table, and,
burying his face in his hands, so that his long, sad hair swept the
board, would abandon himself for a brief space to private despondency,
until the boiled leg of mutton brought with it a necessity for renewed
action.
Nor was the social feeling of distrust of this unhappy young man allayed
when the party learned, through a boarder of detective instincts, that
Mr. Désolé Arcubus was an enthusiast in scientific pursuits, and that
the "romance of a poor young man," as shadowed out by him, was no
romance at all, but an unpleasant reality. Toxicology was the branch of
science to which Mr. Arcubus had for some time past been devoting his
mind. For fourteen hours a day he worked assiduously in the laboratory
of an eminent analytical chemist, whose practice in connection with the
coroner was of a flourishing and increasing kind, owing to the growing
taste for suicide, and the preference given to poisons over any other
means for accomplishing that irrevocable wrong. In this chamber of
horrors,--a court of which the tests were the stern, incorruptible
ordinances of Nature,--he had already gone steadily through a course
which gave him a mastery over the secrets of the relative poisons, with
which he laughed secretly now, and played as securely as a child might
with a dog-rose of whose thorns he had been made aware. But of late, his
haggard features, and the start with which he would wake into life when
a guest haply plucked a flower from the bouquets on the table, or when
the handmaiden came round to him with a dish of leguminous vegetables,
could readily have been traced by a clairvoyant to associations
connected with the ghastly belladonna and with the deadly bean of
St. Ignatius the Martyr. For Mr. Arcubus had now arrived at the
investigation of the positive poisons,--a fact which might have revealed
itself to the man of science by the general narcotico-acrid expression
into which he had settled down bodily; while the most casual observer
might have gathered from his incoherent contributions to the table-talk
that some noxious drug was envenoming the cup of his life.
He had a way of thinking aloud, and, as his thoughts always ran on the
subject of his studies, the expression of them sometimes dovetailed
curiously with the general conversation.
"Miss Rocket will not come down to dinner, poor thing!" said Mrs.
Silvernail, in her choicest table-manner. "She has lost her beautiful
Angola kitten. It slipped into the glass globe, this morning, among the
gold-fishes, and was drowned."
"Digested in water, several of its constituents are dissolved," said Mr.
Arcubus, in a husky voice, looking wildly at the picture on his plate.
"You have a _spécialité_ for puddings, I perceive, Madam," remarked a
smiling old gentleman, a new-comer, addressing himself to the hostess;
"may I ask now of what this very excellent one is composed?"
"Sulphate of lime, potash, oil, resin, extractive matter, gluten, _et
cetera, et cetera_," put in Mr. Arcubus, still following out his train
of thought.
"During the process of evaporation, a black substance is precipitated,"
continued he; and at that very moment, the small colored boy, running
to pour out some water for the wild boarder, who had just arrived in an
excited condition from a rowing match, caught his foot in the carpet,
and came to the floor with a crash.
"Black oxide of Mercury, called _Ethiops per se_," pursued Mr. Arcubus,
grappling with his tangled hair.
"Do just try a drop or two of this Hollands of mine in that iced water;
it is positively dangerous to drink it so," said an attentive boarder to
Mrs. Silvernail, who certainly _did_ look warm.
"Absorbs oxygen readily, when brought to a red heat," said Mr. Arcubus,
abstractedly, as he pulled at his long fingers and made their joints
crack.
"Who is the tall lady who dined here yesterday with Miss Rocket, and
talked so enthusiastically about woman's rights?" inquired the serious
boarder of Mrs. Silvernail.
"Prepared by deflagration in a crucible, one part of nitre with two of
powdered tartar," proceeded Mr. Arcubus.
"What do you think of that sample of mixed tobacco I gave you to try?"
asked the wild boarder of another, whom Mrs. Silvernail used to speak of
with fear and doubt. "When heated, it readily sublimes in the form of
a dense white vapor," said Mr. Arcubus, confidently, "disagreeably
affecting the nose and eyes."
"I hope you are not going to bring another dog into the house, Mr.
Puglock," remonstrated Mrs. Silvernail, addressing the wild boarder, to
whose conversation she had been lending a sharp ear. "Re'lly now, I must
restrict the number of dogs; we have three here already, I believe."
"There is a strong analogy between the virus injected into wounds made
by the teeth of a rabid dog and that found in the poison-apparatus of
venomous snakes," brought in Mr. Arcubus, diving his fork truculently
into a ripe tomato.
This last observation of Mr. Arcubus, together with the fact that the
blade of his knife had manifestly turned black, while all the other
blades at table were as bright as silver, decided me. I packed up my
portmanteau and writing-case that evening, and, having settled with
my wondering landlady, to whom I accounted for my sudden departure
by pleading expediency as to important affairs, took leave of that
estimable widow, and drove away to a distant hotel, from which I sallied
forth early next morning to look for lodgings,--furnished lodgings for
single gentlemen, without board,--for against boarding-houses I had set
my face forever.
A peculiar feature of life in lodgings in New York, as in other large
cities, is the incomparable solitude attainable in that blessed state of
deliverance from promiscuous "board." One may dwell for a twelvemonth
in lodgings for single gentlemen, without incurring the obligation of
knowing by sight, or even by name, the lodger who occupies the very
room opposite to his, on the same landing. Fifty lodgers may have
successively lived in those "apartments" during the twelve months, on
the same terms of perfect isolation from one who would rather mind his
own business than make any inquiries regarding theirs. And so it is,
that, of all the stage-pieces which have achieved popularity in our day,
none is more faithful to the facts than the often-repeated one of "Box
and Cox"; yet, but for the exigencies of the drama, which, of course,
has for its principal object the development of a plot, there would have
been no necessity whatever for bringing Box on a footing of acquaintance
with Cox,--still less for attributing to either of them an idea of his
landlady's name.
For several months I lived contentedly in the house selected by me, up
one pair of stairs, in a room looking out into a busy street,--a street
so narrow, that the trees at one side of it, whenever a reviving breeze
brought with it a subject for greeting and congratulation, shook hands
in quite a friendly manner with those at the other. To illustrate the
isolation of a residence in these lodgings, I may as well state,
that, during all the time of my sojourn there, I never arrived at the
knowledge of my landlady's name. It was not graven upon the house-door,
and, as a knowledge of it was of no immediate consequence to any of my
occupations, nor likely to be, I never asked about it from the old woman
who kept the rooms in order, and to whom I seldom spoke, except upon the
weekly occasion of handing to her the amount due to the landlady, with
whom I never had any interview after the day I agreed with her for the
lodgings. I believe there was a landlord,--if that be the proper term to
apply to a man who is the husband of a landlady, and nothing else. From
my window I once observed a man who might have been the landlord, a man
of subdued appearance, accompanying the lady of the house to church.
Subsequently, as I came in one evening rather earlier than usual, the
same person was leaning against the railings by the hall-door, smoking a
cigar. He greeted me as I passed in, addressing me in an interrogative
manner with one word, the only one I ever heard him utter,--
"Owasyerelthbin?"
To which, as I supposed him to be a foreigner, unacquainted with the
English tongue, I replied at random in the only word of German of which
I happen to be master,--
"Yaw!"
And this was the only communication I ever had with people of the house,
excepting occasional conversations with the dust-colored old woman who
cleaned the windows and swept the floors; while, with regard to a dozen
or two of lodgers who succeeded each other from time to time in the
other disposable rooms of the house, I never saw one of them, nor was
acquainted with them otherwise than by footstep,--and that rather
infelicitously at one time, in the case of something which went either
upon crutches or wooden legs, and which occupied the room immediately
over mine. This was in charming contrast with life at Mrs. Silvernail's,
in its freedom from parables, and from the uncared-for society of Miss
Rocket's guests; likewise from that of the serious and vicious boarders,
and above all of the poisonous young man.
A day came for cleaning my windows, and, as it rained heavily, I could
not give the old woman a clear stage by going out for a couple of hours,
but told her to clean away and be as lively as she could, while I
sat there and wrote. Lodgers, she told me, as she polished up the
brightening panes, came and went week after week, so fast that she
forgot one when another came, and never knew any of their names. She had
an eye for character, though, and told me the peculiarities of some of
them in a quaint way, nailing her sentences, now and then, with odd,
hard words, put in independently of the general text.
"And who lives in the room just under mine? Somebody who raises plants,
I see,--unless the green things on the balcony belong to the house."
"A gentleman as keeps emself quite _to_ emself. Lonesome and friendless,
I reckon, for he looks but poorly. Plants out queer sasses in boxes all
the time, and some of 'em on the balcoany itself. Guess he makes kinder
tea of 'em, or root-drink. Decoctifies."
"And who in the room opposite, on this floor?"
"Empty now. Two dark-featured little gentlemen had it for a fortnight,--
Jews, I reckon,--and as like one another as two spots of dirt on
this 'ere pane of glass. Spoke a hard-biled kind of tongue, and was
furriners, I guess. Polyanders."
The vacant room would just suit De Vonville, who had arrived a few days
before from abroad. I told him of it, and he came in the next day, bag
and baggage, a portion of which latter was curious and uncommon.
De Vonville, with whom I had lived in lodgings two or three years
previously, was a Belgian and a _savant_, and a man of rare
companionable qualities besides. Professionally, I believe, he called
himself a naturalist. He had already roamed over the greater part
of America, North and South, investigating the mysteries of Nature,
especially of the animal kingdom, and contributing, as he went, many
specimens of rare animals to the principal collections of Europe. His
latest adventures took him through Africa and the East, whence he
brought to New York a number of living creatures of many species, all
of which, however, he had shipped for Havre before I met him, with the
exception of two or three of the least disreputable kinds, which he
meant to keep about him as pets. The most valued of these treasures were
a small animal called a Mangouste, and a cage containing a family of
white mice.
These white mice were greatly prized by De Vonville, on account of the
rare manner in which they were marked, their paws and muzzles being of
a perfect jet black. They were quite tame and familiar; but, on the
approach of a cat, or any other cause for alarm, the whole family would
concentrate their energies in a very remarkable way into one piercing
squeak.
The Mangouste, an animal somewhat resembling a ferret, but more nearly
allied to the Nilotic ichneumon of Egypt, was a marvellously lithe and
active little creature, perfectly tame, and coming as readily as a dog
to his name, "Mungo," except when overfed, when he would sleep sometimes
for hours, rolled up at the bottom of his cage, or in some dark corner
of the room. There were personal reminiscences connected with Mungo
which rendered him particularly valuable to De Vonville, whom he had
often saved from the stings of the noxious vermin to be encountered by
those who dwell in tents. His instinct was for creeping things, though
he looked as if he could have dined contentedly on a brace of white
mice. One piece of mischief he committed, during the few days he was
allowed to run about the rooms: he gnawed holes at the bottom of all the
doors, through which he could let himself in and out. He used to lie in
the sun, on my table, as I sat reading; and was generally companionable
and trustworthy, notwithstanding his insidious look.
Seeing the interest I took in his small menagerie, De Vonville begged me
to undertake the superintendence of it, on his being called away for a
brief tour to Baltimore and elsewhere, in pursuance of an engagement to
deliver a course of traveller's tales. Numerous were the directions I
had from him as to the diet and general treatment most congenial to
the constitutions of white mice; and there was implicit confidence
expressed, that, for safety, the Mangouste should be kept strictly
confined to his cage. There were parrots to be looked after, also,
including an extremely vituperative old macaw, any verbal communication
with whom laid the advancing party open to all manner of insult and
objurgation.
The very first day of my menagerial experience, the Mangouste got out of
his cage while I was feeding him, and glided away into dark nooks and
garrets unknown. I failed of recovering him by a stalking process among
the giddy passes of the upper stairs; nor did he return that day to my
often-repeated call; for I vociferated at intervals throughout the
day the word "Mungo!" in a manner that must have led the mysterious
inhabitants of that silent house to the conclusion that I was a
spiritual medium, inviting revelations from the shade of the mighty
Park.
A hot, clammy night. No balmy essences arise from the kennels of this
hollow street in which I live; whatever comes from that quarter must be
malarious, if anything. The windows are thrown open as far as they were
made to be thrown, and I get as far out of one of them as I safely can,
by tilting my chair back, and extending my legs out into that undefined
everywhere called the wide, wide world. The only newspaper within reach
of my hand is one I have already looked over, but I glance at it again,
reading backwards from the end an account of a terrible poisoning case
lately brought to light in England, which I had already read forwards
from the beginning. Throwing it away from me in disgust, I reach out
my other hand for a book. The one I lay hold of is "Laurel-Water,"
the melancholy drama of Sir Theodosius Boughton by insidious poisoner
killed. I dashed it away, backwards, over my head, and, turning off the
gas, abandoned myself to the strange influences that breathed hotly upon
me from the clammy vegetation festering in the ropy night-air.
Why do civic wood-rangers choose the ailantus-tree for a bouquet-holder
to the close-pent inhabitants of towns? Nothing can be more graceful,
certainly, than the ellipses arched by the boughs from its taper stem.
Few contrivances more umbrageous than the combination of its long,
feathery foliations into its perfection of a parasol. But there are
times in the dank, hot nights of midsummer, when the ailantus is but
a diluted upas-antiar of Macassar, tainting, albeit with no deadly
essence, the muggy air that rocks its slumbering branches and rolls
away thence along the parapets and in at the windows of the sleepers.
Dead-horse chestnut it might reasonably be called, because of its heavy,
carrion smell, which, under the influences of a July night, is but too
perceptible to the dwellers of streets where it abides. The tree at
my window was an ailantus, of stately dimensions, and bounteous in a
proportionate enormity of smell; yet it had never before affected me so
much as on this night, when I lay dozing in the ghastly gloom. Sleep
must have overcome me, for I had a troublous dream or vision of which
Poison was the predominant nightmare,--a dream and slumber broken by the
convulsive sensation which roused me up as I endeavored in imagination
to swallow at one draught the contents of a metal tankard of
half-and-half--half laurel-water, and half decoction of henbane--handed
to me on a leaden salver by a demon-waiter, with a sprig of hemlock in
the third buttonhole of his coat. This Lethean influence could hardly
be that of the ailantus-tree alone. What of the plants on the balcony
beneath,--the strange, rooty coilers which the mysterious planter
sedulously fosters at the glooming of dusk, with a weird watering-pot
held forth in a fawn-colored hand?
In a particular condition of the nerves,--say, when a man feels
"shaky,"--it takes but little to convince him that anything which may
possibly not be all right is to a moral certainty all wrong. To sleep
another night in that room, with the windows open,--and who would shut
his windows in July?--directly exposed to the exhalations of a rising
forest of upas-antiars of Macassar, nurtured by the unwholesome hand
of a mysterious vegetarian for purposes unavowed, was no longer to be
thought of. De Vonville's room, which was at the back of the house, and
had no fuming ailantus by its windows on which to browse nightmares
of skunkish flavor, afforded a better climate for a night's rest,
notwithstanding the singular ideas which these travelled men, especially
naturalists, have of comfort, in a civilized sense. He invariably slept
on the floor, converting his room, indeed, into the general semblance
of a tent, by divesting it of all the appliances dear to a Christian
gentleman, and one who loves to repose as such. Yet there was
comparative freshness in that tent-like apartment, as I entered it that
night, shutting the door of mine after me, to prevent ailantus and
upas-antiar from following in my wake. The little beasts were all
sleeping tranquilly in their cages, and the birds on their perches
rested quietly, too,--excepting the old macaw, who cursed me in his
sleep, as I lit up the gas. But the Mangouste had not returned, nor did
I quite regret his absence for the present; because, although highly
approving of the culture of four-footed beasts, be they large or small,
I have a prejudice against having my jugular vein breathed, at midnight,
by small animals of the weasel tribe,--an act of which Mungo, probably,
would have been incapable. His relations _will_ do such things, however,
and newspapers recording appalling instances of it may be found.
Shutting the door, I turned the gas down to a mere spark, and stretched
my weary limbs on the mat which served the travelled man for a bed,
drawing over me a gauze-like fabric, which, I suppose, answers in
tropical countries all the purposes of the more voluminous "bed-clothes"
of ours. Sleep soon came upon me,--a heavy, but unquiet sleep, in which
the same influences haunted me as those I felt when slumbering at the
window. The malaria from the trees was there, and the planter of the
balcony watering henbane and hellebore with boiling aquafortis; likewise
the demon-waiter, with his leaden salver and poisoned tankard, wearing
an ophidian smile on his features and a fresh sprig of hemlock in his
third buttonhole.
How long I slept thus I know not. Once I had a vague sense of the
Mangouste gliding across me, but it was only part of a dream; and it was
still night, black and awful, when I started up in good earnest, at a
piercing shriek from the united family of white mice, whose cage stood
upon a low stand, about two yards to the right of where I lay.
The sound which followed this was one which the man is not likely to
forget who has once heard it,--whether beneath his foot, as he steps
upon the moss-grown log in the rank cedar-swamp, or under his hand,
when about to grasp with it a ledge of the rocks among which he is
clambering, unknowing of the serpent's dens. With clenched teeth, and
hair that rustled like the sedge-grass, I rose and woke up the obedient
gas, which flashed tremulously on the scales of an enormous rattlesnake
coiled round the mice's cage, tightening his folds as he whizzed his
infernal warning, and darting out his lightning tongue with baffled fury
at the trembling group in the middle of the cage. This I saw by the
first flash. Grasping a sword from among the weapons with which the
walls were studded, I made a pass to sever the monster; but the
Mangouste was quicker than I, as he darted upon the coils of the
serpent, which, in a moment, fell heavily to the floor, a writhing,
headless mass.
In the heavy dreams which haunted me during the sleep from which I had
just been roused, I had a vision of the planter of the balcony with
a snake coiled round his naked arm. Who so dull as to require an
interpreter for such plain speakings? Rushing down-stairs, I burst open
the door of that person's room with one kick, and there, in the middle
of the floor, half-dressed and bending over a censer of red-hot
charcoal, knelt Mr. Désolé Arcubus, the poison-man of Mrs. Silvernails
boarding-house. His features were collapsed and livid, and he held his
left arm, which was much swollen and discolored, close over the red-hot
coals, basting it wildly, the while, with ladlefuls of some hot liquid,
while he crammed into his mouth, at intervals, a handful of herb-fodder
of some kind from a salad-bowl on the floor beside him. He was rapidly
growing faint and sinking, but indicated his wishes by signs, and one
of several strangers who now entered the room continued the fomenting
treatment, while another ran for medical assistance.
There was an open letter on the table, which I had no hesitation in
reading, when I saw at a glance that it threw light on the matter. The
following is an exact copy of it:--
"Hollow Rock----County. N. Y. 17 Jewly. 18--
MR. HARKABUS dear Sir.
a cording to promis i send the sneak by Xpress. He is the Largest and
wust Sneak we have ketched In these parts. Bit a cow wich died in 2.40
likeways her calf of fright. Hope the sneak weed growed up strong and
harty. By eting and drinking of that wede the greatest sneak has no
power. Smeling of it a loan will cure a small sneak ader or the like. I
go in upon the dens tomorough and if we find any Pufing Aders will Xpres
them to you per Xpress.