Chapter V (2)

One night, last Winter, old Mr. Balbriggan, who lives out on Columbia Street, had occasion to make a journey out to the woodshed to get the hatchet. It was very dark, and as there was no lantern about the house, Mr. Balbriggan took a kerosene lamp, and shading it very carefully with a big tin pan, started out to the woodshed. The wind was rather uncertain and gusty, and Mr. Balbriggan had some misgivings about his getting out to the shed without accident; and every time the lamp flared, his mind misgave him. “I’ll bet a dollar that lamp’ll blow out,” he muttered when the first gust came, but he shied the tin pan around with great promptness, and the lamp steadied down. There came another gust and a bigger flare, and the chances for the lamp going out improved so decidedly that the old gentleman promptly raised his first stake. “I’ll bet a dollar and a half,” he muttered, “that lamp blows out.” Then the wind lulled a little, and as he hurried on toward the shed it was so quiet that, while he didn’t quite lose all confidence, he began to hedge a little; “I’ll bet fifty cents,” he said, “it’ll go out before I get back.” Another gust and a flare. “I’ll bet two dollars that lamp blows out,” muttered the old gentleman again, chipping a little higher as the chances seemed to grow better; but again he saved the light by the timely interposition of the tin pan. “I’ll bet three dollars,” he cried with great earnestness, as the next gust came, “this lamp’ll blow out;” but there were no takers and the lamp rallied again. But a still stronger gust fairly lifted the flame out of the top of the smoked chimney; and the old gentleman hissed in a hoarse, suppressed whisper, “I’ll bet five dollars this lamp’ll blow out.” But it settled down to work once more, and did very well until Mr. Balbriggan got very close to the woodshed; when the wind rallied and came at the lamp from two or three directions at once, and the old gentleman fairly shouted, “I’ll bet ten dollars this lamp’ll blow----” and just then the door of the woodshed blew violently open, hitting the lamp and the tin pan, knocking them both out of Mr. Balbriggan’s hands, and striking the old gentleman a terrible blow in the face that made him see more lights dancing in the air, for about a second, than even the lamp could send forth. And while he held his nose with one hand and groped around with the other to find where he was, there came from the house door the voice of the eldest juvenile Balbriggan, falling through the darkness like a falling star: “Raise him out, pa, raise him out; make it a hundred dollars; you’ve got a dead sure thing on it!”

THE LAY OF THE COW.

Switch engine Louisa, “B., C. R. & M.,”
Was slowing up Front Street about three P. M.,
When the stoker looked out of the window to say,
“There’s a cow going ’cross the t-r-a-c-kay.”

Pensively halted the cow on the track,
Burs on her pendent tail, bran on her back;
Dreaming of Summer, she seemed not to see
The approach of the switch e-n-g-i-n-e.

Once more spake the Stoker, “There she is now,”
“Bully,” the engineer quoth, “for the cow.”
And reversing his engine he cried, “Shoo! Oh, shoo!”
Said the stoker, “Oh, shoo’t the see-oh-doubleyou.”

Shrilly the whistle shrieked for its alarm,
And the stoker threw firewood and coals in a swarm;
But the cow never heeded, nor thought that her star
Was setting at four miles an h-o-u-r.

The switch engine struck her about amidships,
And her Summer dreams met with a total eclipse;
It mangled her carcase, most shocking to see,
And threw her down Front s-t-r-double-e-tea.

Sadly the engineer drew in his head,
And “pulled her wide open,” as onward he sped;
But the stoker smiled gayly, “Old fellow,” said he,
“There’s some cheap porterhouse s-t-a-k-e.”[A]

[A] That isn’t the way to spell porterhouse steak, but the right way
wouldn’t rhyme.

YOUNG MR. COFFINBERRY BUYS A DOG.

People lifted their eyes above their mufflers one raw November morning as they walked down Jefferson Street, and smiled and grinned, and laughed even unto hysterical weeping, as they watched the toilsome and uncertain progress of a patient young man who had bought a dog and was leading his property home. It was a nice enough kind of a dog, one of the kind of dogs whose mouth begins back close to the shoulders. It had dreadfully long legs, this dog, with great knobs of knees, and its restless tail had a dejected droop, as though the dog was just heart-broken at the idea of leaving his old home. The young man was leading the dog along with a very long string, one end whereof was tied around the dog’s neck. The only trouble with the dog was that he was young. He had not attained the years of discretion. He couldn’t trot placidly along thinking of things. He couldn’t walk at his master’s heels with a face as solemn as though he expected to be sausage before Thanksgiving Day. He was a nervous, fidgety, inquisitive dog, and he tried to read all the signs, and crawl under all the wagons, and dive between every body’s legs as he went along. And the first thing he knew, he had a contract on hand that was much too big for him, and he was just about crazy over it, for he wasn’t the dog to give up, if he was young, and he stuck to his work like a Trojan. And this was what made people laugh. The young man who was leading him had just lifted his hat to some lady acquaintances who were passing when the dog, looking up, misunderstood the motion and thought his master was going to hit him a diff with that hat. With the natural instinct of self-preservation, the shy, timid young thing dashed between the young man’s legs and ran to the length of his tether; then he gave a terrified howl and darted back in the opposite direction, going outside the young man’s right leg. Then, with a frightened yelp it sprang back between the legs again, circled around and came down outside the left leg. Then it ran rapidly around the young man, dived through his legs again and ran around him once and a half in an opposite direction, and his last maneuver closed the performance, for it wound the dog completely up, with his frightened face laid close against the young man’s knee. Mr. Coffinberry blushed to his ears, and replacing his hat, began the task of extricating himself from the toils that artful dog had cast around him. But the animal’s confidence was not yet entirely restored, for at every movement of Mr. Coffinberry’s hands, he squirmed and writhed and pulled back on the string until he was choked, and coughed and gasped in a manner most terrifying to the people not thoroughly acquainted with the symptoms of hydrophobia, and the young man was naturally as badly frightened, when these paroxysms became very lively, as was the dog itself. It was fifteen minutes before the snarl was disentangled. Then before they had gone half a block further, that dog, after having rushed into and been forcibly, and in some instances rather petulantly, dragged out of every doorway on the line of march, incontinently shot down a cellar grating, where he was immediately clawed and scalped by a cat as big as a soap box, and was also nearly garroted by his master drawing him up out of the cellar by the cord, for all the world as though he was a well bucket. About thirty steps further on, the dog ran between a clergyman’s legs, got frightened and ran around him once and then dived between his master’s legs, then rushed out toward the curb stone, but changing his mind, circled back and scooped in a blushing school teacher, and then gazed upon the mischief he had wrought, with hideous howls. The bystanders thought they never could get out of that entanglement. The minister declared alternatively that “he never did” and moreover that “well he never;” the blushing school teacher remarked “good gracious,” and suggested also, “dear me,” and, furthermore, “well, now;” and the young man said something about the dog being damp, which was highly improbable as the morning was very raw. By dint of a great deal of persuasion and pulling and hauling, however, in which they were greatly assisted by the dog, the unhappy trio were finally separated and went their way, making ineffectual efforts to look unconcerned. Then the dog wrapped himself up around a lamp-post; then he got through the hind wheel of a grocer’s wagon five or six times, back and forth, around a different spoke every time, while his master was talking to the grocer, and the latter drove off before the young man noticed what arrangements his dog had concluded with the wheel, and Jefferson Street was edified by the spectacle of a dog wound up to a wagon wheel and revolving rapidly with it, while a young man of pleasing address ran alongside the wheel and added his agonized appeals to the half-stifled wails of the hanging pup. They got the wagon stopped and got the pup loose, and the young man, wearied with the long struggle, resolutely turned toward the store, and walked rapidly away, the unhappy dog lying prone on his back, gasping and pawing the air, while the boys who witnessed the strange procession made the welkin ring with cries of “Dog’s a chokin! mister, yer dog’s a chokin!” But young Mr. Coffinberry knew that so long as his dog was helplessly sprawled on his back he couldn’t wrap the inhabitants of Burlington up in perspiring, distracted groups, so he kept on the even tenor of his way, and when he finally untied the string from the animal’s neck and turned him loose in the store, there wasn’t so much hair on that dog’s back as would make a tooth brush.

A MODERN GOBLIN.

A dreary, cheerless Christmas Eve. The dead hour of day, when the pale twilight falls over the earth, still and colorless as a shroud. Down the long vistas of deserted streets but here and there the feeble rays of some struggling light gleams through the gray twilight, pale as the glitter of a jewel on the brow of death. Across the dull waste of sky the ghostly clouds fly before a piercing wind, which whirls and tears their edges into fluttering fringes. The gloaming fades slowly and almost imperceptibly into night. Away back from the town, out on the bleak hillsides, the leafless trees toss their bare arms, gaunt shapes against the pallor of the sky, the swaying branches answering their mocking shadows, dancing like specters on the frozen ground; while the withered leaves rustle like very shudders.

The hour, neither light nor darkness, neither day nor night, that, with its weird, indescribable magic, draws you from the cheery grate to press your face against the cold window, and dream out into the gray light, peopled with specters and visions--often grotesque, but never merry--that come trooping from every shadow. Comes a rosy little face, framed in tangled tresses--ah, long, long unfolding years must roll back to take you to the time when the laughing eyes looked into yours; to-night you remember--dear child--the dimpled hands were crossed on the pulseless breast, when you were a boy; and the cheerless winter landscape, the dreary hills of snow, and the leafless forests stretch away, mile after weary mile, between your home and where the Christmas winds sigh plaintive monodies over her little grave. There comes a thoughtful, earnest face, manly and noble; a playmate of your boyhood, a college classmate and friend; the man who stood for your ideal of all that is brave and true, and virtuous and generous. As you look at it, you remember, to-night, that when you saw the real face, so little time ago, it was worn and old and haggard, and stamped with the leprous mark of vice. You shudder at the recollection; but the pleading look of the vision goes to your heart as it fades away; and other faces, long forgotten, crowd before you. One, furrowed with marks of patient suffering and care, with silver bands in the brown hair drawn so smoothly away from the brow, mother-love glistening in the tender eyes, mother-love in the quivering, heart-reaching eloquence of the tremulous lips, mother-love in the caressing gesture of the gentle hands--what wonder that it lingers long, and fades only when you crush the burning tears that blind your eyes and veil the vision from your sight? And comes one sweeter, dearer than all--your heart throbs more quickly as you see a shadow rise in the deepening twilight--a face glowing with blushes and wreathed in smiles; a face that shone into your life like sunshine, in its bright springtime days; a face that has remained constant while everything else has changed--your old heart grows tender and young with dear recollections, and you thank God that although years have set their mark upon this dear vision, it is still yours, loving, faithful, and powerful to bless and charm in every mood and at all times. It is gone; and looming through the deepening shadows another form of familiar presence rises before you. The silvery tones of memory-bells chime like a Christmas choral through the bleak wind shaking so angrily the noisy shutters. It is the milkman, and he jangles all your sweet dreams out of tune, sending the ghosts your retrospect has raised back to the shadowy past. And as your visions disappear, you dismally watch the female vassals of the neighborhood sallying forth in answer to the tinkling summons, bearing all possible manner of squatty tinware and corpulent yellow bowls, in which to receive lawful but attenuated measures of that peculiar aqueous fluid of cerulean hue with which, under the ghastly appellation of “cream,” our best society dilutes its table beverages. And when this amusement ceases to be longer interesting, you leave the draughty window and seek the more congenial companionship of the black, close-shut gas-burner, which out of respect to your conceit and the conventionalities of the Christmas time, we have designated a “cheery fire-place,” with an incipient cold in your otherwise empty head.

For the shadows have beckoned and reached to each other, and joined their giant hands, and danced until the light is frightened away. In heavier volumes rolls the black smoke from every chimney, indicating that the estimable and respectable business men of the city, having left their clerks with orders to save gas and not waste the coal, and to close the store only when the last lingering, possible chance of securing one more belated customer has faded into hopelessness, are now at home, enjoying the unspeakable luxury of heaping the stove with coal their wives have carried in, and driving the other members of the family to madness by monopolizing the privilege of poking the fire. Gas lights twinkle in the streets, for the faithful almanac in the gas company’s office has been mislaid, and they do not know there will be a moon quite late in the morning. A ruddy glow of firelight and lamplight streams out into the gathering darkness when a door is opened, men are hurrying home, their faces averted, and their bodies bowed against the howling wind, or else scudding briskly before it. The city was hurrying home to enjoy its Christmas Eve in the bosom of its several families, and to scold the children and pack them off to bed, if they romped and made too much noise. Everybody knows what city it was, so there is no use wasting time describing it. It was just the same old city, only they had strengthened the little brick house down below the corner where the blacksmith lived, with a coat of whitewash. Just the same old city.

And everybody knows the hill on the street, where it turns to wind up the bluff and go to the rich folks’ houses on top of the long hill that stretches around behind the town like a great horse shoe, and looks down on all the business, and bustle, and noise, and hurry, and work, and fatigue that have made the city so rich and powerful. And just at the time we were speaking about a gentleman was making devious headway up this hill, just as the street leaves the business of the city and goes scrambling up to the quiet and rest on top of the hill. A discouraged looking gentleman, who seemed to have begun his Christmas at the wrong end, and so got nearly through with it before it had really commenced. The gentleman’s Napoleonic head was covered, part of the time, with a glossy silk tile, which art had shaped into the fashionable, uncomfortable cylinder which adorns the caputs of our Best Young Men, but accident, oft recurring, and too many vigorous slappings on and pattings down by the officious but ill-directed zeal of many friends, and too frequent steppings on by the owner as the last means of checking its mad career in a race with the wind, had graced this glossy cylinder with many alternate elevations and depressions, giving it that corrugated effect so attractive, natural, and useful in the washboard and concertina, but very repugnant and ungraceful in the silk hat. The gentleman’s eccentric style of buttoning his overcoat, three holes over the same button, lent an air of abstraction to his general appearance, while his knitted brow told of intense mental conflict and exertion. He made little forays from the sidewalk to the middle of the street, returning to his pathway by devious and angular ways, as though striving to baffle some unseen pursuer. From time to time he made vicious, impulsive, startled clutches at the streaming ends of his necktie, fluttering in the blast, which he regarded with a vague uncertain terror, and, when he had seized them, he laughed in hollow, hysterical accents. The smell of coffee was heard in the distance as he passed, and ever and anon, as the restless earth raised itself in precipitous terraces before him, he lifted his feet high in air and with lofty steps essayed to scale the treacherous mirage. He paused in his circuitous progress to shake hands with the last friendly lamp-post on that thoroughfare, expressing his confidence in that faithful municipal lighthouse as a “goo’role feller,” who was, under any and every possible combination of circumstances, “all ri’.” At times he felt for his hat with both hands, and having secured a firm grip upon its uncertain brim, he removed it from his head with great caution, and swinging it violently in the air, proceeded with great enthusiasm and heartiness to “hurrah for” somebody, but invariably forgot who, when he came to the name, and contented himself with assuring himself that that was “al’ri’,” after which with gravity he felt for his head, found it, and with much deliberation got the hat up on top of it, generally sideways or upside down, and with great physical effort, crushed and pulled it on. At length, having parted company after affectionate and prolonged adieus, with the last friendly lamp-post, the young gentleman loudly announced that he was a “total wr--hic!--creck” and proceeded furthermore to declare that he would not and could not by any means be induced to seek the shelter of his mother’s roof again until smiling morn should hail and deck the hills with gold, and the rosy-fingered hours should herald the coming of the god of day. And singing this true statement in a rich baritone, a kind of a wheelbarrow tone, in fact, possessing more volume and hoarse wheeziness than we would admire in Nilsson’s chest tones, he made a vigorous but ineffectual effort to fall up the hill, and angrily ejaculating, “Ju know who yer pushin’?” he shot over the curbstone with frenzied gestures that seemed to proceed at least from ten pairs of legs, and disappeared in the gloom of the gutter, where he lay, and whence his stertorous breathing startled the nervous passers-by.

Had the fallen man kept on the uneven tenor of his way a little farther he would have encountered a mysterious being that would have transformed his snores into sounds of deeper intonation. The street, where it turned and led up the hill, was not a cheerful one. On the west side the bluff rises abruptly as a wall, and on the opposite side it sinks away into a dark, gloomy ravine, that has an uncanny look at the best of times, and the sidewalk is provided with a wooden railing, to keep careless or belated passengers from plunging down the hillside. A little stream winds along the ravine, endeavoring, in a despairing kind of way, to find its way to the river, which it never does. It starts, but from the time the city was first settled there has been no record that the little stream ever got clear through; nobody knows what becomes of it, where it goes to; but certain it is, that all trace of it is lost before it gets half-way to any where. But we have naught to do with this forlorn little country brook that comes purling through pleasant meadows, and bubbling over white pebbles, and wrangling around great bowlders, to get bewildered and lost in the entangling mazes of the drains and gutters and sewers and culverts of the city.

Seated on the railing of the sidewalk was an apparition of far less cheerful mien than the gentleman who, when we left him, had just wrapped the curbstone about him and laid down to snore the Christmas hours away. This figure wore a snow-white mantle, much too airy and summery for the season and very decidedly out of style, which fell from his angular shoulders in graceful folds, a portion of its light tissue being folded over his osseous head after the most conventional style of his class. As he swung his legs carelessly to and fro, they struck the lower boards of the railing with a strange rattling sound like muffled castanets, and his manner of whistling “Down Among the Dead Men,” under his breath in that weird, ghostly place, with the bluff rising black and abrupt before him, and the ravine lying deep in impenetrable shadow behind him, had that awful touch of the supernatural in it that would make one’s blood run cold to contemplate. A ghostlier ghost never chose a ghostlier time or place for his ghastly recreations.

He ceased his hollow whistling and stilled his nervous legs as he heard approaching footsteps on the sidewalk, and dropped from his easy perch on the railing as a young man and a lovely maiden came toward him, toiling up the slope down which the December zephyr roared and swept into a fury that would make an Ulster overcoat feel sick. The young man’s arm was wound tenderly about his companion’s shrinking seal-skin cloak, while he hoarsely whispered words into her ears, which were rosy with the exhilarating influence of twenty-eight degrees below zero. The ghost stepped in front of them.

“Excuse my hoarseness,” he said, with a winning smile that extended over the entire width of his finely-chiseled face, “but I had the very disagreeable misfortune to have my throat cut in this exceedingly romantic spot about a half a century since, and my voice has since been affected to such an ex----”

The very wind paused in its noisy bluster to listen to the wild shrieks that were piercing the darkness like acoustic arrows, and the rapid patter of two pairs of Arctic over-shoes that were pounding the bosom of the frosty earth far down the hill, away from the shadow of the bluff, away from the dreadful blackness of the ravine, in the direction of the gleaming street lamps of the city.

The ghost leaned upon the railing and sighed as he said:

“This was not the style of responding to an apology when I dwelt among men. Perhaps my voice, which I have not used before for fifty years, has that in its mouldy accents which is disagreeable, startling, and possibly repulsive, to mortal ears. I will modulate my intonation.”

He paused to observe the figure of a portly man, looming vaguely through the night, as, with many asthmatic puffs, the well-fed citizen essayed to beat up the hill against the wind.

“He looks,” said the specter, musingly, “very much like an honest old settler I used to know, who sold whisky to and stole furs from the Indians, the year after I first came to what is now this city.”

The panting citizen came alongside and was passing by, when the ghost dropped his bony hand noiselessly in the hollow of his arm.

“A thousand pardons, my dear sir,” he began, “but I observe a most extraordinary resemblance in----”

“Oh-H-H-H-h, Lord!”

And again the ghost was alone. As the echoes of the excited and grossly misapplied remark of the citizen died away in the mocking echoes of the dreary solitudes, the ghost walked across the street and carefully examined the face of the bluff, in which direction the portly mortal had made his unceremonious and abrupt exit.

“No,” the specter remarked, after a critical inspection, “it is very evident that he did not plunge through the hill; he certainly ran over its summit. The celerity with which he accomplished this undertaking at his time of life, and in his condition of superfluous flesh too, smacks almost as much of the marvelous to me as I did to him. I would be willing to bet my boots, now,” he added, with a ghastly wink at his bare feet, “that the portly old party can not come here to-morrow noon and get over that hill inside of twenty-five minutes.”

“Passenger travel on this street,” he continued, resuming his station on the sidewalk, “is livelier than it was in my time. As I remember, the two gentlemen who performed the surgical operation on my windpipe, which has so disagreeably affected my voice, had to wait here for me five hours in the cheerless gloom before my other business engagements permitted me to come along and make an involuntary and unwilling third in their interesting little surprise party. And I sat on a stump near this very spot, and watched my lifeless remains nearly two days before the coroner found them and gave them the customary inquest with a fearful and wonderful verdict, followed by Christian burial. Yes, yes, the village has been prosperous since then, and now--but soft, a young man--a lover, too, or I’m no ghost. I will befriend him and he will love me.”

A goodly young man he was indeed, as ghost or girl would wish to see. Torture racked his soul when, at every step, his dainty boots, a size and a half too small, touched the ground. And even the snowy expanse of linen cuffs, weighted with moss-agate sleeve buttons, failed to conceal the fact that his flame-colored kids would not button. Though the piercing wind chilled him to the very marrow, his overcoat was opened and thrown back from his throat to display the blue necktie that graced his paper collar. The elaborate and painful costume betrayed his errand. You might wring bergamot out of the air when he passed along, and there was jockey club on his handkerchief, and his breath smelled a little of sozodont, some of trix, and a great deal of something else. The ghost looked after him, as he passed by, with as much friendly admiring interest as he could throw into his rather open countenance, and then gathering his robe about him followed swiftly and silently at the limping heels of the nice young man, who toiled painfully but very patiently and exquisitely properly up the hill until he reached the summit of the grade, and pausing before a mansion of pretentious appearance, proceeded to investigate the ever changing mysteries of a front gate.

Properly constructed, the front gate is more fearfully and wonderfully made than the architect who designs or the carpenter who builds it. No other created or manufactured thing in the whole wide universe can equal or rival it for original perversity and malignant obstinacy. A patient man, whose soul is melting within him from chronic and exaggerated meekness, will fall from grace and relieve his tortured soul in a burst of giant powder profanity after fifteen minutes’ struggle with a front gate, and then he will shower a tempest of abuse upon the unknown man who contrived such a diabolical and outrageous gate, and he will cease to struggle with it and will climb over the fence and disintegrate his raiment on the pickets, and abrade his cuticle all the way down his back as he slides off, and then his soul will be tossed into a very sirocco of passion and mortification when he sees the dog of the mansion come trotting along and open the gate with a simple push of his nose. Or a woman, full of a woman’s love and yearning tenderness, will take hold of a gate and tug at it, and pull and haul and jerk until she nearly drags the solid posts up by the roots, and when all the blood in her system is boiling in the top of her head, and her eyes are starting from their sockets, and she dissolves in tears of utter, abject wretchedness and rage because she is debarred by virtue of her sex from the ecstatic privilege of swearing at the gate and the pirate who made it, a grinning boy will open the barrier by merely pulling it the other way. Men with real, living ideas, and lofty aspirations, and soaring ambitions, and grand, illimitable thoughts, swelling and groaning and throbbing in heart and brain, have stood before an orthodox front gate and manipulated its fastenings, moving that piece this way and this one that, and all of them the other, until the pot-metal securities have assumed the vexed and perplexing varieties and dimensions of a Chinese puzzle with the delirium tremens or a Centennial election table. And then, when at last with a despairing groan he lets go of it, and raises his hands to heaven to call down its righteous judgment upon the unregenerate mocker who made that gate, it slowly swings open by its own weight, and the distressed Christian discovers to his unspeakable amazement that he has had it open twenty times within the last fifteen minutes. And all these troubles are magnified after night. Hook and staple connect the swinging gate and the immovable post where hook and staple there were none before. The most trifling and ordinary bolt has a way of acquiring a double action after dark, so that whatever is loosed at one end is immediately fastened up as tight as a candidate at the other. Nails, too, appear, driven in the post immediately above the latch, and finally, when all other ties are sundered, lo, a strap hugs the whole structure in its binding embrace. It is a work of ten minutes to find the buckle, and when found it is a knot, tied when the strap was wet, and now firmer in its clinging folds and more intricate in its appalling entanglements than the famous knot which Gordius of Phrygia tied in his chariot harness, a knot which baffled even the sublimest efforts of the Chicago divorce lawyers. Even the simplest form of a gate latch known to man, composed of a round hole in a post into which a stick is thrust athwart the gate, is a snare, a vanity, a vexation of the spirit and a mortification of the flesh; for no living man ever opened a strange gate of this genus that the stick did not come out with a jerk, rasping the abraded knuckles along the rude edges of the pickets.

With a gate which presented, or rather concealed, and successively developed, like masked batteries, all the modern combinations of baffling elements and inventions, the young man has all this time been expostulating. A good young man, for while he has been laboring with that remorseless gate with all the intensity of purpose and earnestness that fires the blood of youth, he has only relieved his impatient swelling soul by saying from time to time that “he _would_ be dad binged,” once or twice varying the tense, as the future suddenly seemed to break upon him with all the fullness of time, to declare that he _was_ “dad binged,” and several times, as though conscious of some degree of uncertainty attending the whole matter, devoutly hoping that, at some indefinite time in the vague hereafter, he _might_ be “dad binged.” Once he passed suddenly to the imperative and passive, appealing to some unknown quantity to “dad bing the dad binged old gate,” a confusion of mood, tense and voice that was absurd, and even the ghost, which stood in the porch of the mansion watching his movements with that all-absorbed interest which visitors from another world display in terrestrial matters, shook his head gravely, as if doubting the advisability of a needless waste of power in dad binging that which was already declared dad binged. But the ghastly visage relaxed in a grim smile, as with one last tremendous effort, the adolescent raised the barrier from its fastenings, hinges and all, and fell forward to the gravel walk with the fiendish gate clasped in his arms, reaching the ground in a rattling chorus which roused all the dogs this side of the moon.

Disengaging himself from the chaos into which the gate had fallen, the young man reached the porch with a halting step, and as he stood near the door, brushing gravel off his clothes with his tattered kids, the ghost gathered his bustle and train about him, slid deftly through the key hole, and flattened himself against the door on the inside. The tinkle of the bell had scarcely sounded in the hall when a light footstep was heard in echo to its clamor, and a beautiful young girl hastened to the door. She opened it, but the ghost stepped before her and faced the smiling, blushing, bowing young man, threw his gaunt arms around his neck, and in a hollow whisper began,

“Darling! I have watched so long for----”

A terrific yell rang through the corridors like almost any other yell would ring under similar circumstances. A rush of hasty feet along the gravel walk, a stumble, a crash and a dismal howl at the site of the fallen gate; then the dying echoes of fleet, pattering footsteps in the distance, and then silence, dispossessed of her curtained throne for one brief moment, resumed her noiseless reign, and the smiling ghost, after a vain effort to dig himself in the ribs, chuckled with dismal jollity and hid his shadowy form in the recesses of the porch.

The young girl stood spell-bound, gazing out in the direction of her vanished lover, and shaking her lovely head in mute, astonished negations, in response to the hurried and excited inquiries of the family, who came swarming into the hall in all possible stages and degrees of amazement and terror, propounding with great volubility all the conundrums which would naturally suggest themselves in consequence of such an astounding and unheralded and unprovoked outburst of human voice.

“I cannot imagine what did ail him,” she said at length, when her stern father, in mild reproof, had laid his heavy hand upon her rounded shoulder, and oscillated her lithe form to and fro until her back hair was in her hands, and the floor was strewn with hairpins and samples of curls, thick as autumnal leaves and one thing and another strew the brooks in Vallambrosa and vicinity. “I opened the door, and before I could say ‘Good evening,’ he opened his mouth to its fullest extent, and with a look of horror, fled from my presence, leaving no token save an amount of noise altogether incommensurate with his size. I can’t imagine what he could have seen to affect him so. I was afraid at first that I hadn’t rubbed the pearl powder out of my eyebrows, but I had.”

Every member of the convention offered a suggestion or an explanation of the mysterious affair, but they were all overruled by paterfamilias, who, venturing the gruff opinion that the young man was in the habit of placing himself exterior to sundry and various decoctions dispensed at those retail drug stores which are, by law, closed on Sundays, and had merely incurred that peculiar form of mental distemper in which the patient keeps a private menagerie on exhibition in his boots, drove his wondering family back to the parlor.

But youth is buoyant. Its sorrows are transient and its tears are April rain, flecked with the sunshine even while they fall; its fears are short lived as its sorrows, and die away when the thought or scene that gave them birth is gone. So he who flew from the hideous shadow that had veiled the fairy figure of his love from his fond gaze, blushed in the darkness at his nervous fancy, and re-arranging his wardrobe, retraced his steps with more of that native grace and innate dignity peculiar to the young man of the nineteenth century, than he had displayed while making his presence seldom. Again he passed the wreck of the demolished gate, and once more he rang the bell, and listened for the echoing footfall, while the attentive specter came and stood demurely at his elbow.

“You horrid boy,” murmured a sweet voice through the keyhole, “I have a great mind not to let you in. What made you act so perfectly ridiculous?”

“Dearest,” the young man said, “it was a foolish, horrible fancy; I will never frighten you again.”

“It was perfectly dreadful,” she replied, “horribly, dreadfully awful. How could you be so perfectly horridly dreadful? But you may come in this time.”

And with coquettish deliberation she opened the door, to see the ghost, bending his smiling gaze upon her colorless face and staring eyes.

“Thank you,” he said, in hollow tones, “since you insist upon it, I will come----”

“Oo-oo-_ee_-E-E-E-E!”

And thump! She dropped to the floor with a velocity and abruptness that even astonished her ghost. Dumb with amazement, her lover stood gazing at her form, lying prone upon the new hall carpet, emitting a series of long-drawn shrieks. He recoiled, as again the members of the family came pouring and buzzing out of their rooms, like hornets from their domicile on a swaying apple tree bough, jarred rudely by the unconscious granger’s towering head. The angry father caught a glimpse of the trembling, half-stupefied, and thoroughly mystified youth, standing near the doorway, appealingly and timorously offering his explanations. The parent, with a few hurried words, disappeared up stairs. Quickly he returned, bearing in his hands a ponderous shot-gun, at the sight of which the young man, without pausing to explain, fled quite as precipitately, and with as little ceremony, as he had sauntered away from the embrace of the ghost.

“Because,” he remarked to the wind, which was vainly trying to keep pace with his flying movements as he cleared the fallen gate with a bound, and waltzed airily down the road, as though tight boots were a vision and an unreal dream, “because the old man appears to be a trifle impatient to-night, and I would not cross him in his sadder moods. He might do that to-night for which to-morrow I might mourn.”

And deftly passing from twelve to fifteen linear feet of solid earth beneath each foot, oft as he raised it from the ground, with swift evasion he transferred himself to healthier climes and more congenial scenes.

The indignant father, meanwhile, had stepped out on the porch, and holding his warlike weapon a-port, peered angrily into the gloom for a glimpse of the flying figure, whose distant, echoing footsteps he could faintly hear.

“Thou art so dear,” he said, “and yet so far.”

To him the silent ghost approached. Standing by his unconscious side, the specter leaned his bony elbow upon the mortal shoulder, resting his hollow cheek upon his attenuated hand. Then, with a graceful motion and an easy gesture, of which a ballet dancer might be proud, he drew aside the lower portion of his drapery, disclosing to view a pair of emaciated shins of which a ballet dancer would most certainly be ashamed. Crossing one of these specimens of anatomical curiosities in front of the other, he rested the bended limb upon the toes, and stood thus for a moment, in that elegant and charming pose so much affected by our best young men at the opera and theater, who place themselves on exhibition for the untaught multitude upon every possible occasion.

For a few brief moments he stood thus, wrapped in admiration of his refined and elegant appearance, then dropping his face and turning it until his breath, if he had any, would have swept the cheek of his unconscious companion, he said:

“Let me entreat you, dear sir, to do nothing rash. Let me implore you to put by your murderous weap----”

Bang! bang! Two loads of death-dealing buckshot perforated the roof of the porch, and the howl of an elderly voice mingled with the crashing, discordant echoes that rose clattering through the darkness. The slam of a door, and the rush and scramble of many feet succeeded, followed by the clanging of locks and bolts; the subdued hubbub of many voices could be heard, detailing in many exaggerated phrases, extravagant narratives, and with a smile of grim amusement playing across his expressive features, like a telegraphic line from one ear to the other, the specter learned, as he listened at the keyhole, that while the master of the house had been standing on the porch, a pale blue light suddenly clove the night, accompanied by a sulphurous smell, in the midst of which appeared, rising out of the ground, a colossal body with five heads, and with hideous gashes yawning in its throats, from which the welling blood flowed down, and splotched and streaked the long white robe with horrible carmine stains. Its many eyes, the patrician said, glared like burning coals, and its hair twined and wreathed itself in fantastic shapes, like living serpents.

The specter assumed a thoughtful look as he listened to these terrible revelations.

“It is barely possible,” he said, “that I am a maligned apparition. From his vivid powers of imagination, and a slight tendency to exaggerated word coloring in narration, one would take this elderly party for one of the gifted prevaricators who deal in political prophecies in the presidential year. I may not be a very handsome ghost, but I do most profoundly believe that this portly Ananias who, I see, is just now leaving the room to learn how his daughter is coming on, has most foully traduced my personal appearance. And while there is no one in this apartment save that comfortable-looking old lady, who has been terrified and mystified into motionless silence, I will quietly step in and settle this vexed question by consulting the pier glass.”

With that graceful, easy manner which is characteristic of a well-bred ghost, he slid through the keyhole, and a moment later, stood singeing his bloodless shins before the blazing grate, while he made a critical inspection of his visage in the mirror. After studying the picture for some moments in silence, he stroked his chin with a complacent air while a smirk of self satisfaction played over his features.

“Any mortal,” he murmured, “who would flee in terror from such a face as that; any man who could detect any thing like an unearthly glare in those hollow eyes; any creature who can find it in his heart to announce the discovery of hair on that head, or find a trace of blood about that figure, from throat to heels, is a lunatic, and should be looked after. Be looked after,” he added, in an absent way, “Looked after. Looked after.”

“And,” he continued, after a few moments’ deliberation, “I should like to be appointed to look after him. He would then have a more faithful conservator than was ever appointed by a county court. I would interest and amuse him, and strive to divert his mind from the troubles which appear to have so disordered his imagination and distorted his vision and faculties of observation. I would keep him in a state of constant mental activity. I would help him around, and I would make myself useful to this family in a variety of ways. For instance, I would make this old gentleman so distrustful of that long walk up the hill after dark that he never would stay down town late at night, and could not be induced to attend lodge, or ‘just step down to the post-office’ after supper. I would imbue his very nature with such an utter abhorrence for dark places that he would never kiss the hired girl behind the cellar door. Never again; ne-ver, ne-ver. I would reform this man, and make this family happy, and this house should resound with manifestations of excitement and exclamations of astonishment, and indications of very dubious merriment, as it were. I see much good in this virtuous and happy project, and I will cultivate the acquaintance of this excellent lady of the mansion, convince her of the necessity of a protector for herself and her family, and carry my plans into operation. I have a conviction that this would be a most comfortable house to haunt.”

He stepped to the side of the matron, and laying his icy fingers against her cheek to arouse her attention, and holding his throat shut with the other hand to prevent his voice escaping prematurely at the aperture which has been previously referred to, said, in a louder voice:

“You will pardon the abruptness of my speech, my dear madam, but I deem it my duty to inform you that it is my firm belief this part of town is haunted. Yes, ma’am, haunted. I shouldn’t be surprised, indeed, if there was a ghost somewhere in this house this very minute. In fact I have every reason for believing----”

Thus far his auditor had preserved such a respectful silence that the speaker believed she was listening with rapt attention, and he fondly hoped that he had at last found a friendly, appreciative gossip who would not interrupt his remarks with ill-timed applause before he was half through. Looking at her face, however, at this moment, the expression of her countenance was such as chilled him with disappointment. She was not splitting the night air with blood-curdling, discordant shrieks, it is true, but it evidently wasn’t her fault. Her eyes had left their sockets and were standing out on her cheek-bones with nothing particular to do except to stare at each other across the top of her nose, each with an expression of blank amazement at seeing the other there. Her mouth was alternately closing with sudden jerks and distending with spasmodic gasps; noiseless, but all the more provoking on that very account. She appeared to be making strenuous efforts to rise, but as every attempt to assume an erect posture brought her closer to the ghost, she sank back helplessly in her chair after every effort, and resumed her dreadful staring and noiseless gasping.

“You had better scream, madame,” said the disgusted ghost. “Pray, do not restrain yourself on my account. It is really painful for me to witness your suffering. If my presence here is distasteful to you, pray have the goodness to intimate the fact in the abrupt and startling manner so much affected by this family. You had better express your emotions, if you have any. If you have through any little passing thrill of excitement, temporarily lost the use of your voice, and find some difficulty in recovering it, perhaps I can assist you.”

With a horrible leer he withdrew the drapery from his neck, and leaning back his head disclosed the gaping incision in his respiratory and swallowing apparatus which had compelled him to go into the ghost business. As he had shrewdly conjectured, that startling display developed the full action of the old lady’s dormant vocal powers, and, for the next five minutes, Bedlam was a quiet, sequestered cloister in comparison with that house. For an instant the author of all the uproar paused to smile at the vociferous woman screaming till the chandelier trembled, and pounding a vigorous tattoo on the floor with her aged heels, and then he left the house, merely stopping as he went to look in on the kitchen, and by one genial wink at the servants establish a first-class English opera chorus in that department of the household.

He then passed out into the chill air, and gliding slowly along the gravel walk, paused to contemplate the ruins of the front gate and speculate on the whereabouts of the handsome youth who had so lately enacted the part of a modern Samson, and had torn down the gates to Gaza little on the loved face which parental tyranny would thereafter conceal from his ardent gaze forever.

“It is ever thus,” moralized the ghost; “at once the mightiest and the weakest being in created life, God’s noblest work is the toy of bodiless phantoms. We tear down and we build up; we purpose and we prevent; we do and we undo; we overcome every real difficulty, and surmount every actual obstacle, and at last, when our object is all but accomplished--lo, a shadow terrifies us, and the courage and labor of an hour, a year, or a lifetime, are swept into ruins. At least, _we_ used to do thus. I have left the firm, but the surviving partners carry on the business of life in pretty much the same old style. The world invents a great deal, but it doesn’t improve very much. It is the same old world, after all. It has the locomotive and the telegraph, true; but the men who invented the locomotive and the telegraph loved, feared, hoped and lived pretty much as Cæsar’s couriers and Dido’s sailors used to. Men declaim against the remotest possibility of the spirits of the dead revisiting the glimpses of the moon, and yet my presence affects in the same unpleasant and turbulent manner alike the most skeptical and the most credulous and superstitious. I believe, speaking of spirits, I will go down town to a certain house I wot of, where parties of my friends, the Spiritualists, hold frequent seances, at which they converse familiarly, though ungrammatically, with the spirits of their own deceased friends, and of the illustrious dead. They will be glad to see me, I know, because I am intimately acquainted with some of the parties whom they occasionally summon back to earth, and they will be glad too, because I can correct some of the erroneous ideas they entertain in regard to the present condition of some of these spirits who are constantly writing back, in such execrable English as would make a cultured, intelligent ghost blush, how happy they are, and how glad they are that they died, and how much they know. I am as contented a ghost as one can find under the republic, and I never was glad that I died, and I never write to any of my relatives, and never visit any of them, except,” he added thoughtfully, “my dear haunt.” And he chuckled grimly over his ghastly little joke.

In another moment he was seated comfortably beneath a table which was surrounded by a party of seekers after truth, who were patiently sitting up for the latest returns from the spirit world. The ghost was much touched by the anxiety displayed by a young man in very long hair and green spectacles to hear from his departed uncle. The spirit mails were snowed in, or intercepted by guerrillas, or held for postage, or suffering from some other cause of detention that Christmas Eve; for it seemed as though the young man never would receive so much as a postal card from his deceased relative. The ghost pitied him, and just as the medium, a beautiful young girl of forty-nine summers, was passing into another trance, he crawled out from under the table and bowed pleasantly to the anxious inquirer.

“I think I can allay any anxiety you may feel on account of your departed avuncular relative,” he said; “I have met him several times, and although the peculiar and pressing nature of his engagements elsewhere prevents his attending in person social assemblies on this side of the ground, he is----”