An extraordinary story, some say the recital of a dream, or scenes in
somnambulism, is that of Andrew Waples, of Horntown, Va. He visited
Saratoga twenty years ago, well-to-do, the owner of slaves, sloops,
lands, and fisheries, and visits it now upon an income of $2000 a
year, derived from boiling down fish into phosphates for the midland
markets. He preserves, however, the habit and appearance of old days:
that is to say, his chin is folded away under his lip like a reef in a
mainsail; his cheek-bones hide his ears, so tusky and prominent are
the former, and tipped with a varnish of red, like corns on old folks'
feet; he has a nose which is so long and bony that it seems to have
been constructed in sections, like a tubular bridge, and to
communicate with itself by relays of sensation. A straight, mournful,
twinkling, yet aristocratic man was Andrew Waples, "befo' de waw, sah!
befo' de waw!"
He had no sooner arrived at Saratoga than he met some ancient boon
companions, who took him off to the lake, exploded champagne, filled
his lungs with cigar-smoke, and sent him to bed, the first night, with
a decided thirst and no occasion to say his prayers. For it was
Andrew's intention, being a mournful man of the Eastern Shore, to pray
on every unusual occurrence. Piety is relative as well as real, but
Andrew Waples on this occasion jumped into bed, said hic and amen, and
"times befo' de waw," and went to sleep in the somnorific air of the
Springs.
He awoke with a dry throat, a disposition to faint and surrender his
stomach, and an irresistible propensity to walk abroad and drink of
the waters. He looked at his watch: it was two o'clock, and Saturday
night. "Alas!" said Andrew Waples aloud, "the bars are closed. Even
Morrissey has gone to bed, and the club-house is in darkness, but
perhaps I can climb over the gate of some spring company, or find a
fountain uninclosed. Yes, there is the High Rock Spring!"
He drew on his clothes partly, slipped his feet in slippers, and wrote
on a piece of paper, which he conspicuously posted on the gas bracket:
"Andrew Waples, Gentleman (befo' de waw), departed from the United
States Hotel, at two o'clock A. M., precisely. If any accident happens
to him, seek at the High Rock Spring, or thereabouts."
It was a sad, green, ghostly moonlight streaming through the elms as
Andrew Waples walked up Broadway. The moon appeared to be dredging for
oysters amongst the clouds, circling around there by bars, islets, and
shoals. Bits of spotted and mackerel-back sky swam like hosts of
menhaden through the pearly sheen of the more open aërial main. The
leaves of the tall domes and kissing branches of the elms, that peeped
on either side into open windows of people asleep and told across the
street to each other the secrets there, were now themselves heavy as
if with surfeit of gossip and they drooped and hardly rustled. Not a
tipsy waiter lurked in the shadows, not a skylarking couple of darkey
lovers whispered on doorsteps. No birds, nor even crickets, serenaded
the torpid night. The shuffling feet of Andrew Waples barely made
watch-dogs growl in their dreams, and started his own heart with the
concussions they produced on the arborescent and deeply-shadowed
aisles of the after midnight. He saw the town-hall clock pallidly
illuminated above its tower. The low frame villa of Chancellor
Walworth, cowering amongst the pine-trees, expressed the burden of
parricidal blood that had of late oppressed its memories. There were
no murmurs from the court-room where Judge Barnard had been tried,
but its deep silence seemed from the clock to tick: "Removed!
disqualified!" and "Disqualified! removed!"
Turning from Broadway to lesser streets of cheap hotels and plain
boarding cottages, where weary women and girls had drudged all day
long, and washerwomen moaned and fluting and ruffling were the
amusements of the poor, Andrew Waples became haunted with the idea
that Saratoga was poisoned, that every soul in the village was dead,
and that he was to be the last man of the century to drink of the
Springs. Nature and night were in the swoon of love or death. Parting
their drowsy curtains went Waples through the muffled echoes, impelled
by nothing greater than a human thirst.
He saw his shadow, at length, fall down the steep stairs of the valley
of High Rock Spring, as he stood at the top of the steps uncovered to
the moon. It was a shadow nearly a hundred feet long, a high-cheeked
head without a chin and all nose, like the profile of a mountain. But
what was extraordinary was the total absence of an abdominal part to
Mr. Waples' exaggerated shadow, for he distinctly saw a young
maple-tree, in perfect moonlight, grow through the cavity where his
stomach ought to have been.
"I must be hollow," said Andrew, as he looked,--"the frame of a
stomach removed; for surely my whole figure is in blackness, except my
bread-basket." But his fears were dissipated by the sound of voices,
of glasses clinking and water running, and the evident semblance of
life at the High Rock Spring in the ravine beneath, to which the steep
stairs descended. At the same moment he descried another shadow
propelled alongside his own, as if from some far distance in the rear
a human object was slowly advancing to stand beside him.
There were very old wooden houses around this precipice or promontory
of Saratoga, some of them a hundred years old, and decrepit and in
ruins; for here, at the High Rock, was the original fountain of the
village. As if from the cover of one of these old and decaying
tenements came a person of venerable aspect, with a tray of glasses
fastened to the top of a staff, like a great caster of bottles on a
broomstick. As this person stood by the side of Andrew Waples, and
planted his staff on the top step of the stairs, his prolonged shadow,
falling in the valley, gave him the appearance of a gigantic Neptune,
with a trident in his hand.
"Hallo!" exclaimed Mr. Waples, "are you a town scavenger, to be up at
this time of the clock?"
The man replied, after a very curious and explosive sound of his lips,
like the extraction of a cork from a bottle, "No, sir; I'm only the
Great Dipper."
"Very good," resumed Mr. Waples. "Then, perhaps, you'll explain to me
a very great optical delusion, or tell me that I'm drunk. Do you see
our two shadows as they fall yonder on the ground, and amongst the
tree-tops? Now, if I have any eyes in my head, there is a stomach in
your shadow and no stomach whatever in mine."
"Quite right," answered the Great Dipper. "You are the mere rim of a
former stomach. Abdominally, you are defunct."
Andrew Waples put his hand instinctively where his stomach was
presumed to be, and he saw the hand of his shadow distinctly imitate
the motion, and repeat it through his empty centre.
"This is Sir William Johnson's night," remarked the Great Dipper. "We
have a large company of guests on this anniversary, and no gentleman
is admitted with a stomach, nor any lady with a character. My whole
force of dippers is on to-night, and I must be spry."
As the venerable man spoke, and ceased to speak, exploding before and
after each utterance, it occurred to Mr. Waples that his voice had a
sort of mineral-water gurgle, which was very refreshing to a thirsty
man's ears. He followed, therefore, down the flight of rickety stairs
and stood in the midst of a promenading party of many hundred people,
variously dressed and in the costumes of several generations.
The canopy or pavilion of the spring, which, like a fairy temple,
seemed to have been exhaled from in bubbles, was yet capped, as in the
broad light of day, by a gilded eagle, from whose beak was suspended a
bottle of the water, and no other light was shed upon the scene than
the silver and golden radiance emitted together from this bottle, as
if ten thousand infinitely small goldfish floated there in liquid
quicksilver. The spring itself, flowing over its ancient mound of
lime, iron and clay, like the venerable beard over the Arabian
prophet's yellow breast, shed another light as if through a veil
fluttered the molten fire of some pulsating crater. The whole scene of
the narrow valley, the group of springs, the sandy walks, dark
foliage, and in closing ridges took a pale yellow hue from the
effervescing water and the irradiant bottle in the eagle's beak. The
people walking to and fro and drinking and returning, all carried
their hands upon their stomachs or sides, and sighed amidst their
flirtations. Mr. Waples saw, despite their garments, which represented
a hundred years and more of all kinds, from Continental uniforms and
hunting shirts to brocades, plush velvets, and court suits, that not a
being of all the multitude contained an abdomen. He stopped one large
and portly man, who was carried on a litter, and said:
"Have you a window through you, too, old chap?"
"'Sh!" exclaimed one of the supporters of the litter, who wore the
feathers and attire of an Indian. "'Tis Sir William Johnson--he who
receives to-night."
"Young man," exclaimed that great and first of Indian agents, "this is
the spot where all people come to find their stomachs. Mine was lost
one hundred and ten years ago. The Mohawks, my wards, then brought me
through the forest to this spot. Faith! I was full of gout and humors,
and took a drink from a gourd. One night in the year I walk from
purgatory and quench my thirst at this font. The rest of the year I
limp in the agonies of dyspepsia."
A large and short-set woman was walking in one of the paths, wearing
almost royal robes, and her train was held up by a company of young
gallants, some of whom whistled and trolled stanzas of foreign music.
"Can you tell me her name!" asked Waples, speaking to a bystander.
"It is Madame Rush, the daughter of the banker who rivalled Girard.
She was a patroness of arts and letters in her day, full of
sentiment."
"But disguised in a stomacher!" interrupted our friend. The lady
passed him as he spoke, and, looking regretfully in his face,
murmured:
"Avoid hot joints for supper! Terrapin must crawl again. Drink nothing
but claret. Adieu!"
"Really," thought Andrew Waples, "this is a sort of mass meeting of
human picture-frames. But here is one I know by his portrait--the
god-like head, the oxen eyes, the majestic stalk of Daniel Webster."
He was about to address this massive figure, when it turned and looked
upon him with rolling orbs like diamonds in dark caves.
"Brandy," said the great man, "'tis the drink of a gentleman, and the
stimulus of oratory. But public life requires a thousand stomachs. Who
could have saved the Constitution on only one?"
"Poor ghost!" thought Andrew Waples. "Yet here is a milder man, also
of mighty girth, like the frame of a mastodon, transparent. Your name,
my friend?"
"John Meredith Clayton, of Delaware! I filled my paunch of midnights
with chicken soup. I arose from bed to riot in gravy. Ye who have
livers and intestines, think of my fame and fate!"
The old man sobbed as he receded, and Waples had only time to get a
glimpse of the next trio before they were upon him.
"I agree with Commodore Vanderbilt," said the other, the wearer of a
rubicund face, and great blue eyes. "My _forte_ was oysters and
economy. I grew wondrous fat and conservative, and one day awoke with
a stomach that exclaimed, 'I have become round, so that you can
trundle me for the exercise you deprived me of.' Henceforward, not
even the unequalled advantages of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad gave
me pleasure. I live like a skeleton world, without an inner globe,
without a paunch. Beware?"
"Well," cried Mr. Waples, "it is a singular thing that the
conservative as well as the volatile lose their full habits. How is it
with Colonel Tom Scott, I wonder?"
"No rest," exclaimed a full-necked man, "I eat at figures, and think
in my sleeping car. Go slow, go fast, young man, 'But it is even,
heads I win, stomach you lose!'"
The shaggy iron-gray whiskers and hair of Charles Sumner were well
known to Mr. Waples, as that great Senator strutted down the maple
paths. "You here, also!" shouted Mr. Waples.
"Ay!" answered the champion. "Freedom is not worth enjoying without
the gastric juice. The taste of Château Yquem pursues me through
eternity. There are times when Plymouth Rock is a pennyweight in value
compared to High Rock at Saratoga, and all the acts of Congress
foolish beside a pint of Congress water!"
A tall and elegant man came by and said: "I was the reviver of the
running turf. My stomach was tough as my four-in-hand. 'Twas Angostura
nipped my bud. It was, by Saint Jerome!"
Another passer, with a dark skin and a merry twinkle, said: "Uncle
John's under the weather to-night. But he can lay out another
generation yet. While there's sleep there's hope. Cecil's the word!
Give me me an order."
A tremendous fellow, with a foot a little gouty, gulped down a gallon
of the water, and said: "Rufe Andrews never gives up while on that
high rock he builds his church!"
"The way to eat a sheep's head," exclaimed a florid man, "is with
plain sauce. Clams are not kind after nightfall. Champagne destroyed
the coats of W. Wickham, Mayor of the _bon vivants_. _Sic transit_
overtook my rapid transit. Heigh-ho!"
"Hear me lisp a couplet," said the great poet Saxe. "Oh, how many a
slip 'twixt the couplet and the cup! Abdomen dominates. When Homer had
no paunch, he went blind."
"Halt! 'Sdeath! is't I, that once could put the whole Brazilian court
to bed, who prowls these grounds for midnight water now? I am the
Chevalier Webb. Who says it is dyspepsia? I will spit him upon my
walking-staff."
"Ees! 'tis good drinkin' at the fount when one can naught sleep.
Johnson, of Congress Spring, the resident cherub; that's my name. I
tipped the rosy, and it tripped on me. What measure I used to take
around the bread-basket!"
"The top of the foine midnight to you!" said Richard O'Gorman. "I'm
here, my lords and gentle folk, to find a portion of my appetite. It
was not so when I could lead a revolution in a cabbage garden."
So went past Uncle Dan Sanford and Father Farrell, and arm-in-arm, on
mutual errands of thirst, Judge Hilton and Joseph Seligman.
"Shudge," said Seligman, "when you refushed me a room, it was only
becaush you had no stummicks? Heigh, Shudge?"
"Ay, Joseph, me broth of a darlint," answered Hilton, "when a spalpeen
has no stummick, he speaks without circum--spection. Ye can impty yer
stummick wherever ye loike over the furniture, if ye'll fill this
aching void."
So went the procession. All walking with hands laid heavily on their
paunches, or where they used to be. Lovers had lost the light of
interest from their eyes, wedded people the light of retrospection,
statesmen the pride of intellect, princes and legates the pride of
power. Wealth flashed in a thousand diamonds to contrast with the
heavy eyes that had no vanity in them, and religion wore the
asceticism of everlasting gloom instead of the hope of immortal life.
As Mr. Andrew Waples beheld these things, and felt his thirst impel
him toward the fountain of the High Rock, he became sensible of a
wonderful change in the proportions of that object. It had always been
a mound or cone of sand, clay, magnesia, and lime, well oxidized, and
made rusty-red by the particles of iron in the composition deposited
with the other materials, through ages of overflow. It had never been
above three feet in height, and of little more diameter than a man's
stature. The water, flowing through its middle, sparkled and
discharged diamond showers of bubbles, and ran down the
ochre-besmeared sides, to disappear in the ground, the cavity through
which it came not more than ten inches wide. Such had been the
dimensions of the High Rock Spring.
But it was now a mountain, rising high in the air, and flowing crystal
and gold, like a volcano in an eruption of jewels. The pyrites of
sulphur and motes of iron, that formerly gleamed in the rills that
trickled down its slopes, were now big as cascades, filled with
carbuncles and rocks of amethyst. A mist of soft splendor, like the
light of stars crushed to dust and diffused around the mountain's
head, revealed an immense multitudes of people scaling the slopes, and
drinking; and some were raising their hands to Heaven in praise, and
some were drawing the water from the mountain's base by flumes and
troughs. This extensive prospect fell to a foreground of people, such
as Mr. Waples had been mingling with, and these were clamoring and
supplicating for water faster than a hundred dippers there could pass
it up. The dippers were of all garbs and periods, from Indians and
rustics to boys in cadet uniform. The vessels with which they dipped
were of all shapes and metals, from conch shells and calabashes to
cups of transparent china, and goblets of gold and silver. Amongst the
dippers, conspicuous by his benevolent face and clothing of a
butternut color, was the Great Dipper himself, directing operations.
"Drink freely!" he exclaimed, "for the night is going by. Sir William
Johnson has ordered his litter, and the company is breaking up. Drink
while you may, for the sun is soon to arise, and ye who have no
stomachs will be exposed and disgraced."
"Hark ye! old friend," whispered Andrew Waples to the Great Dipper,
"are there here people alive, as well as dead people, and why do they
fear exposure?"
The Great Dipper replied: "Nobody can be said to live who has lost his
stomach. We make no other distinction here. There are thousands who
have lost them, however, and who deceive mankind. Even these, you
perceive, who drink at the High Rock Spring, flirt while they feel
unutterable gloom, and so are dead women above the ground tied to
living men, and men without a human hope of health mated to joyous
beauty and animation."
It seemed at this point that Mr. Waples shrank away down to the
ground, and the Great Dipper loomed up high as the mountain of High
Rock. His drinking glasses were as large as Mr. Waples' body; he was a
mighty giant, clad in colors like those of the overflowing mountain.
"Old chap," cried Mr. Waples, "methinks your clothing up there is of
much age and tarnish. Tell me its material?"
A voice came down the long ravines of the mountain like rolling
thunder. "It's calcareous tufa I'm a-wearing, wove on me by exudation
and accretion in the past two thousand years."
At this point the head of the Great Dipper was quite invisible in the
clouds, but the tray of glasses he carried, which were now big as
barrels or full-sized casks, was set down on Mr. Waples' toe. As he
sought to get out of the way a torrent of water washed him up and
away, and he was spilled into one of the glasses; and then, as it
appeared, he was raised an inconceivable distance in the air and
plunged down like a bursted balloon from the sky to the sea, and he
found himself immersed in mineral water and rapidly descending,
against the current, toward the centre of the earth!
Before Mr. Waples could get his breath he was landed in a bar or shoal
of mineral salt, which came nearly to the surface of the torrent in
which he found himself, and the current of this torrent was ascending
toward the surface, as full of mineral substances as a freshet is full
of saw-logs. Explosions of gas, loud and rapid as the guns in a naval
battle, took place on every side. The walls of the inclosure made a
large and almost regular cave or tunnel of blue marl, and in the
contrary way from the course of the stream. Mr. Waples sank along the
sides of the cave in the swash or backflow, until he arrived at a
grand archway of limestone, riven from a mass of slate. A voice from
the roof of the archway, whispering like a sigh of pain, articulated
shrilly,
"Who goes back?"
Waples discerned, in the joint or junction of the arch a huge deformed
object, whose hands were caught between the masses of stone, and he
still desperately pulled to divide them, so that the torrent could
escape through. The eyes of this object rolled in pain, but he gave no
sign of relinquishing his hold, and again the painful whisper skipped
through the abyss, "Who goes back from the alluvial?" Mr. Waples got a
breathful of air from an explosion of bubbles, and boldly replied,
"The Great Dipper's assistant."
"Tell him," whispered the hunchback in the roof, "that Priam, the
Fault Finder, is holding the strata back, but wants the relief to come
on three centuries hence, that I may spit upon my hands."
Mr. Waples had no time to reply, for a large bubble of carbonic acid
gas burst at that moment, and blew him through the gap or "fault" of
the rock, into the coldest and clammiest cavern he had ever trodden.
From every part of the walls, ceilings, and floor exuded moisture,
which flowed off in rills and large canals, until they formed the
torrent that disappeared at the Fault Finder's Archway.
"Magnesia, faugh!" exclaimed Mr. Waples, unconscious that he was in
the presence of somebody.
"You don't like Magnesia, then?" rejoined a large, spongy object on
the floor, whose forehead perspired while he looked up through the
chalky-white sockets of sightless eyes. "Why, he's a sixth part of all
that's drunk at the springs. Here, I'll call him up. Come Magnesia!
come Potash! come Lime, Soda, Lithia, and Baryta! Come ye all to the
presence of Prince Saturation."
There glided to the Sponge's feet a number of leather-looking beings,
of broad, circular faces, and to every face a tail was appended on the
other side.
"The gentleman don't like our laboratory," exclaimed the Sponge,
purring the while like a cat. "Apply your suckers to him, ye
percolating angels, and draw him to the forests of Fernandes!"
Mr. Waples felt a hundred little wafers of suction take hold of his
body, and a sense of great compression, as if he was being pulled
through a mortar bed. He opened his eyes on the summit of a stalagmite
in a vast thicket or swamp of overthrown and decaying trees. Birds of
buried ages, whose long, bittern-like cries flopped wofully through
the silence, made ever and anon a call to each other, like the Nemesis
of century calling to century. One of these birds, having authority
and standing on one leg, observed to Mr. Waples, in a very
philosophical manner:
"Stranger, are you of the Fungi family?"
"No, Fernandes," answered our bold adventurer; "I live nearer the
phosphates when at home, and it's a good article."
A mournful chorus of croons from the loons went round the solitude.
"Phosphates! phew! Phosphates! phew!"
"This apartment," exclaimed the one-legged bird, "is exclusively for
fungi of the old families. Here we rot piecemeal and furnish gas to
the nine-thousandth generation after us. By our decay the springs are
fed with bubbles. Here is the world as it fell in the floral period,
and our boughs are budding anew in the Eldorado of the waters above
us."
"Phosphates! phew!" shouted the great birds of this land of Lethe, as
Mr. Waples' stalagmite broke off and dropped him and set him astride
of an ancient pterodactyl bird that flew off with its burden to an
immense height, and swinging him there by the seat of his breeches, as
if he were to be the pendulum of a fundamental and firmamental clock,
the griffin-bird finally let go. Mr. Waples was propelled at least six
miles out of gravity, and tossed into a most deep and silent lake.
Nothing affected its loveliness but an oppressive shadow that came
from above, and seemed to sink every floating object in the scarcely
buoyant waves. No shores were visible, but distant mountains on one
side; nothing lived in the waters but meteoric lights and objects that
ran as if on errands for the spirit above. Broad, submissive,
unevaporating, but sinking down; the great inland lonely pool was
everywhere the creature of an invisible footprint. Mr. Waples knew the
power it obeyed to be that prostrate, cloud-like, overbrooding
presence, far above, with outlines like a mountain range. The silent
sea was the water-trough of Apalachia, the western dyke of the deluge
of Noah. The oppressive spirit, stretching overhead, was Bellydown, or
the thing that brooded over the waters of chaos, known to
schoolmasters as Atmospheric Pressure.
Mr. Waples saw it all now. The spirit overhead, with equal and
eternal pressure, forced down this meteoric water through the slopes
of stone, until it reascended toward the clouds of its origin and was
lost in the forest of the fossils, where every decaying fibre made
bubbles to drive it forward, and hold in solution the mineral
substances it was to receive in the porous magnesian barrier between
it and freedom. Soaking through this, the water escaped by the break
in the strata at the arch of the Fault Finder.
But who had ever passed back against the current of the earth's
barometry, from the spa to the reservoir, like Andrew Waples, of
Horntown, Eastern Shore of Virginia?
He felt a mighty vanity overwhelm him to get recognition of some kind
from Bellydown, who disdained even thunder for a language.
"Thou sprawling spirit, up yonder in the sky!" shouted Mr. Waples,
with much firmness, "if thou art not mere nightmare, mere figment of
the sciences, let me feel thy strength unequally, for once!"
The vast cloud object moved and yawned. Something like a small world,
wearing a boot, smote Andrew Waples in the rear, as if the spirit
above had kicked him on the proper spot. He felt a pain and a flying
sensation, that was like paralysis on wings, and he never seemed to
stop for years, until he fell and struck the ground, and, after an
interval, looked around him.
He was in his room, at the United States Hotel, and had fallen out of
bed. The clock in the Baptist church cupola struck two. On the gas
bracket was pinned a written notice, not yet dry, that Andrew Waples
had just started for the High Rock Spring.
But he knew that his adventure continued to be true, for when he went
to breakfast at daylight, he found he had no stomach.