Page images
PDF
EPUB

the name of the Back-Ward, and, at the time indicated, was untenanted -silent and solitary. A strait-jacket was laced upon him, a fire kindled to warm the place, and, after the administration of certain remedies, he was left, a nurse being appointed to sit by and watch him.

About ten o'clock that night I entered the outer ward. Here I found the nurse sitting beside her sister official, chatting by the fire. He was, consequently, unattended.

Going at once into the Back-Ward, an incident befel me which is one of the very few I have experienced approaching in a degree to the super

natural.

You have remarked, reader, that on going into a room, especially a halfdarkened one, where already there is another individual, you have a vague, indefinable impression that there is somebody there-a perception almost of his presence-before his figure meets your eye, or the sound of his breathing or movement reaches your car. A mesmerist I knew said that this resulted from an equalization of the magnetic fluid between the bodies of yourself and the other individual. Be that as it may, I must confess I have frequently experienced the phenomenon of having an internal feeling of the vicinity of a person to me whom my senses had not yet perceived. I do not say that this presentiment always occurs, but that it sometimes, nay, often happens, though it is possible that only people of peculiar turns of thought may observe it.

Now, on entering this Back-Ward, which was a very extensive, loftyroofed apartment, lighted only by the fire and a single lamp suspended from the centre of the ceiling, I had this unaccountable notion-I felt that there was some third individual there, besides Merrick and myself. So strong was the idea, that I had an angry word on my tongue for whomsoever it might be that was thus allowed, by the negligence of the nurse, to intrude upon my patient. But to my surprise, on the instant that I looked rightly round, there was really no being there save him and myself. Thereupon came over me that peculiar feeling for which there is no word in English, but which the Scotch express by the term "eeriness." This, however, was increased to actual terror when the patient said, quite calmly and unconcernedly,

"You need not go, Lily,-'tis only my friend, young Doctor D, an excellent judge of acting, and gifted with a thorough taste for the beauties of our great favorite of old-"

All this while he was staring into the empty air behind me; then, turning to me he said with a wan smile,

66

Ah, she will go. Poor thing! she was always so shy. Hark!-her little one's tiny mournful cry as she carries it away through that outer place there, but that will not much trouble her-her heart is fixed so firmly on another object. It's a pity she has left, but I shall see her to-night at the Woodlands."

I confess I trembled with awe and superstitious dread-my hair stood up-I felt cold and weak. Nevertheless I proceeded to administer the medicine which had been the occasion of my visit, and which was a preparation of opium applied in a way unintelligible to the general reader. Yet I could not consider myself safe till, emerging hurriedly into the main

ward, I saw the patients slumbering around, with the two crones of nurses murmuring by the fire.

But it was not to end thus. About midnight, one of these women rushed into my apartment in the hospital, and informed me that Merrick had burst from his strait-jacket, and having made his way into the main ward, was there play-acting, to the surprise and affright of the other patients. I hastily donned some clothes, and, going to the place, found the house surgeon, who had been called before me, already there.

He was standing regarding, from a safe distance, our patient, who, attired in the dress of the house, and with his strait-jacket fantastically disposed around him in the manner of a theatrical costume, was moving rapidly, but with tottering, about the floor, reciting a medley of disjointed passages from different plays.

All around the large, dimly-lighted hall, the patients, in their strangelooking white dresses and cowls, sat up in their beds, which most of them were unable to get away from, on account of broken limbs or other injuries, their pallid faces expressing wonder and dismay at the singular and startling scene that was enacting before them.

Merrick appeared very weak; he staggered every now and then, and his voice faltered, but his eye was brilliant with an unnatural fire, as he went on declaiming

"The wounds that pain'd-the wounds that murder'd me,

Were given before. I was already dead.

This only marks my body for the grave.*

Oh, my fair star, I shall be shortly with thee.
What means this deadly dew upon my forehead?
My heart, too, heaves-t

Oh thou, my love, my wife!

Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath,
Hath no power yet upon thy beauty.‡

Soft you a word or two before you go.

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am-nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak

Of one not easily jealous, but whose hand,

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe-of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,

Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees

Their medicinal gum."||

He fell to the floor.

The rest is silence !§

#66 Revenge."

"Alexander the Great." "Othello."

"Romeo and Juliet."

§ "Hamlet."

"Very well acted. Mr. Merrick," said the house-surgeon, as we caught his hands; "having played out your part, you had better go to bed now. Bless me, he is asleep already!”

66

"Yes," said I," he sleeps well after life's fitful fever. He is dead!"

A Pedestrian Excursion.

PART 1. THE WOOD NYMPH.

"I CANNOT conceive a more deluding error," said Bob Whyte, a fellowstudent," than to imagine that a man, because he is devoted to pursuits of science or philosophy (for you must be aware that it is now generally considered desirable to attach different meanings to these two words understanding the first to include all investigation of the properties of matter-using the second to designate all inquiry into mental phenomena), I cannot conceive," he continued, "a more palpable blunder than to fancy that a man, because he is even enthusiastically given to such subjects, must be therefore a cold, grave, abstracted being, unwitting of the creature-comforts of this life-who revels not in the sunburst of woman's eye, nor cares by a luting of lips to inhale into his system her dew-beladen breath, the gaseous sublimate (to indulge in a chemical metaphor) of her gentle being ungifted with an eye to look with Byron's on Mount Jura-unennobled with a mouth to expand withal into a guffaw at Hood's last and brightest.

"The tree of knowledge was surely not a thorn-tree-no, it bloomed in the midst of a garden, and bore fruit so luscious as to tempt to the first and greatest of all rebellions! So is it still-so should it be. To shroud the beauty of the bright goddess, STUDY, under a pall of melancholy gloom-a forbidding curtain of dust and cobwebs-is as bad as to hang the ascetic veil before the sweet smile of the Madonna, Religion.

“For instance,—now here are you and I, Grim, (to me, the Medical Student, briefly and affectionately), to flatter ourselves we are up to a wrinkle or two on some rather abstruse point. Prithee, who broke his collar-bone at football t'other day? Who fished Lord What's-his-name's trout-streams, and he never the wiser? Who was drunk o' Wednesday? Who was caught-"

"No more of that, Bob, if you love me; get on with the affair you are at.'

Now this affair was the manufacture, with a blow-pipe and spirit-lamp, of a curious little bit of glass apparatus, which he intended to use in exhibiting to the Soandsonian Scientific Society, a new method he had hit upon of making the salts of manganese.

We were seated together in the workshop attached to the magnificent apparatus-room in the ancient University of Soandso. Before us was a snug little furnace, surmounted by a sandbath; on one side a turninglathe, on the other a model system of pulleys. Under a table in a corner had been shoved a large plate electrical machine out of repair; while on shelves and racks all around the place bristled every description of tools and utensils, chemical and mechanical. Hard by was the apparatus-room itself, a large elongated apartment, crowded with air-pumps, model steam engines, globes, prisms, telescopes, microscopes, kaleidoscopes, and all other kinds of scopes (the scope of Bacon by Professor Napier, excepted,) magnets, pneumatic troughs, friction-wheels, Leyden jars, and fac-similes of strange machinery for every purpose, from raising a sunk seventy-four to punching the slit of a steel-pen.

Lord of all this domain was Bob Whyte, my fellow-student and chum. He held the office of Conservator of the Scientific Apparatus to the University, and Assistant to the Professor of Natural Philosophy, with a tolerable income considering, and admirable facilities of acquiring knowledge; and certainly he inade the most of both.

Oh, dear old Soandsonian University, dearer apparatus-room, and dearest little workshop-dear in yourselves, but how much more on account of him who was, for a period, the most intimate of my intimates-my mentor, my protector, guide, philosopher and friend-him whose every joke conveyed instruction-whose very fun was philosophical-who loved me with an indulgent and enduring affection-between whom and myself there now flow some thousand miles of salt water!

Bob was, however, studying medicine with a view to the profession, and had been for some years. He had nearly completed his term, but was in no hurry, for his salary came well up to his wants; and, as far as study went, the noble library, apparatus, and all other resources of the university were at his command.

His age was about twenty-four years (my own, at the period I allude to, being seventeen,) and he was of habits at once studious and frolicsome, attentive to everything around, and yet apparently regardless of anything. At one time he would give you a simple and succinct analysis of Adam Smith's celebrated "Theory of Moral Sentiments," which he would tell you he considered the standard of systematic morality; next minute he would be proposing a night of it" at the sign of the Boot. Anon he would explain that the proper and scientific way of compounding punch was to pour in the spirits last of all, as the alcohol materially interfered with the perfect solution of sugar in water.

66

A fellow of most excellent humor was he-the warmest in feeling, and . of a spirit devoted to all sorts of merriment ;

But the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers
Is always the first to be touched by the thorns;

and there were moments when my boyish heart was melting to sorrow as he spoke, with a deep but manly pathos, of bitter disappointments in love and in prospects-of difficulties hard to be surmounted-of hopes long

protracted-poverty-and, of all the most galling, the scorn of the un

worthy.

I have rarely known such a bright genius as Bob's. With the principles of nearly every science he was familiar, especially such as are usually treated of in a course of what is called natural philosophy, or of chemistry. These sciences were his living-by them he earned his bread, and of course he knew them as a workman does his trade. A most retentive memory he possessed, which, like a pool of water, received and retained everything that fell upon its surface, whether of the metallic gravity of philosophic truth, or the snow-flake lightness of mere ornamental elegance.

Whatever treatise he read, his mind at once absorbed, letting no fact escape; whatever process of manufacture he saw, he forthwith remembered, and could explain throughout the complications of each progressive step. In conversation with him, you would think him a walking encyclopedia, were it not for the continual bursts of fun, scintillations of bright wit, or flashes of poetic feeling that irradiated all his presence. The pursuit of knowledge, with him for a companion or a guide, became anything but

Harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose.

Nay, rather as Milton continues.

Musical as is Apollo's lute,

And a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets,
Where no crude surfeit reigns.

He was a most muscular subject, Bob, moreover; and had given not a little attention (amongst other sciences) to the theory of pugilism and single-stick. But his exterior was the worst of him; he was short in stature, and of no particular beauty of countenance save in as far as went a general expression of infinite good humor, and an eye (a splendid hazel onę) actually glistening with glee.

By the by, there was a curious property connected with this eye of Bob's. If he happened to glance or wink it at any young woman passing, she would immediately start into a perfectly erect gait, and brush the soles of her shoes smartly along the pavement for the next half-a-dozen steps or so. I could never account for this most uniform and remarkable result. I asked an explanation from himself once. He said it was a psychological phenomenon.

Such was the companion that sat with me in the little workshop.

Just as we were speaking, the door was opened, and in stepped our most worthy professor of natural philosophy-known among ourselves by the endearing abbreviation of "the Proff." He had come to enjoy in se clusion the quiet luxury of a pipe, and the relaxation of an hour's confab, without restraint, with his assistant and pupil.

We immediately stood up, but, being most affably desired to be on no ceremony, reseated ourselves, and resumed our several proceedings, and a conversation ensued, broken by frequent cachinnations on the part of the professor.

« PreviousContinue »