[figure description] Page 058.[end figure description]

Merry's next visit was into a mansion of
greater importance than any yet entered. It
was a royal palace, the court of a pre-Adamitic
sovereign; where, among the ruins of
his world, his kingdom, his house, sat the
piece of hardened clay that had held itself
superior to other clay, which it had worried
and agonized, trampled, racked, decapitated,
according to its sublime will and pleasure,
and been allowed to do so by the other clay,
the millions of pieces that owned its rule, because,
of all, there was not one shrewd enough
to conceive the superior convenience of
freedom, or having conceived it, who was
not willing to sell his thought, and his
liberty, for a piece of money. Here sat the
monarch surrounded by his court; his generals

[figure description] Page 059.[end figure description]

who ravaged foreign countries to increase
his grandeur, his ministers who plied the besom
at home for a similar purpose. Here
were his buffoons and parasites, the soft
slaves of his pleasure and the instruments of
his wrath; his sellers and buyers of office; his
corruption-mongers and their customers; his
keepers of conscience without conscience, his
sages without wisdom, his saints without religion,
his friends without love, his servants
without faith, prostituted geniuses, bought patriots,
rogues, slaves—a mighty herd of servility
and corruption. Ay, here they all sat
or stood, glorious in the pomp of their golden
trappings, which the incrusting waters had
not yet hidden entirely from the eye.

Merry the Miner was too good a democrat
to be greatly daunted at the sight of a king
and court. In truth, he saw nothing so impressive
and interesting in king or courtier,
as the golden ornaments on their persons.—
Thus it must be with the glorious, when the
unsophisticated make their acquaintance in
the grave. The tomb-rat loves your great
man only for his tenderer flesh; and the Arab
of the Egyptian catacombs sees nothing in a
mummied Pharaoh, but an inflammable backlog
for his kitchen fire.

[figure description] Page 060.[end figure description]

Merry lighted a new pine-knot, and then
with eyes that gloated in joy over the sepulchral
yet gorgeous assemblage, fell to work
in his vocation of plunder. He yielded
royalty so much respectful observance as to
commence operations on the monarch's person,
knocking from his anointed head the
golden crown that none remained to honour or
envy, and from his jewelled hand the sceptre
that was no longer the talisman of authority.
To these the insatiate Merry added the
chains of gold and diamonds around his majestic
neck; when, having despoiled the flinty
monarch of every valuable, he turned to his
royal consort and progeny, and to his ministers
and flatterers, all of whom he in like
manner disencumbered of their jewelled trappings.

And now, after an hour or two of labour
hard and unremitting—for it was no easy
task to detach the precious relics from their
crusts of stone—Merry the Miner paused to
congratulate himself upon his success. He
looked at his piles with joy: there were
enough of them to occupy him a day—nay,
many days—in removing them from the cave.
He clapped his hands, he laughed, he almost
danced; he was a happy man, he was a rich

[figure description] Page 061.[end figure description]

one; “Ay,” quoth he, with exultation, “I am
the richest man in the world!”

With that, he sat down to rest his weary
bones—for, truly, his labour had well nigh
exhausted his strength—and to enjoy in prospect
the happiness which such store of wealth
seemed to assure him. The delight of revery
was added to the languor of fatigue; and
while his imagination took the airiest flights,
a pleasant lassitude stole over every limb.
It was a strange spectacle he presented, as
he sat in that damp charnel-house, where objects,
dimly revealed by his torch, put on a
double ghastliness—the living man rejoicing
over the treasures and hopes, of which the
dead around him spoke the hollow vanity.
But Merry thought not of the dead; how
could he, whose dreams were of lands and
houses—glorious domains spreading around
him, with palaces on them, and flocks and
herds, and hamlets and villages—nay, towns
and cities; for Merry the Miner was already
laying his lands out in town-lots, and calculating
the profits of the speculation: how could
he think of the dead, or of death?

No—Merry the Miner troubled himself not
at all with the monumental statues around
him; but by and by, having at length rested

[figure description] Page 062.[end figure description]

his bones, and settled his plan for doubling
his money at the expense of his neighbours,
he bethought him of rising, and removing his
treasures forthwith from the cave.

He bethought him of rising, and attempted
to do so—but in vain. A sudden palsy had
seized upon his body; there was a numbness
or stiffness in every joint, and it was increasing
every moment. A terrible idea entered
his mind; his heart leaped with perturbation—
it seemed almost the only muscle capable
of motion. He looked down upon his limbs:
they were already thickly crusted over with
spar, which the humid atmosphere of the
cave was depositing around them with fearful
rapidity. He felt the cold stone stiffening
on his fingers and freezing on his cheeks—
He, also, was becoming a petrifaction—a man
of stone, like all around him! His treasures,
his darling treasures, attacked by the subtle
vapour, had already vanished from his eyes.

But what cared Merry for treasure now?
Terror and anguish seized upon his spirit; he
gathered all his energies into an effort, and
struggled furiously to burst his bonds of
stone. As well might the wild-goat struggle
in the embrace of an anaconda, a fly in the
meshes of a spider. The incrustation crackled

[figure description] Page 063.[end figure description]

around him, and then was firmer than ever:
he could neither move hand nor foot: he was
a rock, and part and parcel of the rock on
which he sat.

Thus a prisoner, a breathing corse, a living
fossil, Merry gave himself up to despair, and
raved and shrieked, until affrighted at the
echoes of his own voice. It seemed, indeed,
as they reverberated among the ruined walls
of the palace, and through the distant streets,
as if all the inhabitants of this petrified world
had found their voices, and replied to him
with yells as wild as his own. But shrieks
and struggles were alike vain; and by and by
he found himself deprived of the power even
of uttering a cry. The stony concretion was
gathering round his throat and jaws, and
mounting to his lips; where, though his warm
breath had as yet repelled the insidious vapour,
it threatened soon to attack him with
suffocation. In a few moments, and what
would remain of Merry the Miner?

In those few moments, how deep was the
agony, how wild the terror, how distracting
the thoughts of the unhappy Merry, who now
cursed his fate, and now the fatal avarice that
provoked it, now thought bitterly of his approaching
death, and now still more bitterly

[figure description] Page 064.[end figure description]

of the long life miserably wasted—wasted in
a pursuit which had brought him nothing but
wo and ruin. Nothing that was agonizing,
nothing that was maddening, but Merry the
Miner had it passing through his mind in
those moments of imprisonment so strange
and fearful.

But the stone still grew around him; and
by and by, as the incrusting matter thickened
at his mouth and nostrils, he felt that he had
but another breath to draw, and then perish.

At that moment, the sound of a trumpet, a
single, tremendous note, burst through the
cave, and Merry's blood froze with fear.
That dreadful note seemed to thrill the dead
as well as the living. To Merry's eyes, dim
and filming, but not yet darkened, it seemed
as if each statue started with fear; he heard,
or fancied he heard, the rattling of their
sparry garments, and a dull sad moan issuing
from their marble lips.

Then there flashed into the cave the appearance
of a moving fire, in which approached
a figure as of a fallen angel,
majestic in mien, terrible yet mournful in aspect,
and on his brow the name of the Inexorable,
holding in his hand a flaming sword,
with which he touched the stony corses one

[figure description] Page 065.[end figure description]

by one, pronouncing the words of condemnation;
and wheresoever he touched, a flame
seemed to spring up within the statue, a
lurid, tormenting fire, that shone through it
as a lamp hidden within an alabaster vase.

“Thou,”—he cried, with a voice as dreadful
and mournful as his visage, touching at
the same time the monarch, in whose body
the fires immediately appeared—“Thou, because
thou didst hold thyself as the Lord of
them thou was sent to serve:—Ye”—touching
the ministers—“because ye were the
tools of his passions, who should have been
counsellors of wisdom and goodness; Ye”—
to the courtiers—“because ye were idolaters
and man-worshippers;” and so on, until he
had reached, in his course, the unhappy
Merry, who, beholding the sword of the Inexorable
thus stretched above his head, at
last betook himself for aid to a means which,
in his distraction, he had not yet thought of—
he muttered a prayer, not audibly, for his
lips were now sealed, but in the deep recesses
of his spirit.

The sword was turned aside; and with the
sad and solemn utterance—“He that hath
time left to pray, hath yet time to escape the
judgment”—the apparition glided away to

[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]

resume his judgment of others. The rocky
covering at the same moment melted from
Merry's body; and he, forgetting his gold, his
implements, his torches—forgetting every
thing but the terror that infused strength into
his liberated limbs, fled from the scene
amain. He fled, lighted at a distance by the
fires kindled by the Inexorable; whose voice
Merry could long hear pronouncing in the
street, the prison, and the city, and upon the
battle field, the words of doom; “Thou, for
thy blood guiltiness! Thou, for thy perjury!
Thou, for thy covetousness! Thou, for thy
ambition!” at every word setting some enclosed
spirit in flames, until the whole cavern
gleamed with the lights of hell.

These lights pursued the flying Merry
until he had almost reached the outlet of the
cavern; when the howlings of his faithful dog
directed him to the passage. Dashing
through the orifice, and scarcely pausing
even to catch up his gun, he fled down the
ravine and the course of the brook, running
like a madman until he reached at length his
own deserted home. He entered it a poorer
man than he had left it in the morning; his
sack and all the implements of his pursuit
having been abandoned in the cave, along

[figure description] Page 067.[end figure description]

with the fragments of gold he had picked up
in the brook, not to speak of the more magnificent
treasures gathered in the cave itself.

But if Merry the Miner was now a poorer
man, he was also, or at least he thought himself,
a much wiser and better one than he
had ever been before. Gold-hunting he immediately
forswore, as a soul-endangering
occupation; he became, moreover, exceedingly
devout, and somewhat industrious, having
resolved, as he said, to be content with honest
poverty for the remainder of his days.

His story, as might be expected, produced
no common sensation among his neighbours,
some of whom, to Merry's astonishment and
grief, (for he told his story for the purpose,
and with the expectation, of deterring them
from all covetousness,) proposed to him to
conduct them to his wondrous cave; where,
for such a prize as he had abandoned, many
of them swore they were willing to face not
only his devil, for so they contemptuously
called the condemning spirit, but all the
devils that were ever heard of. This Merry
very resolutely refused to do: he had taken a
vow never to go nigh the place again, putting
himself in the way of temptation; it was as
much as his soul was worth. They then

[figure description] Page 068.[end figure description]

bade him instruct them where to find it.
This, also, Merry positively declined. Strong
in his newborn virtue, he was determined no
unlucky sinner should, through his means,
be put in the way of perdition; he would save
the souls of his friends, he declared, as well
as his own.

Upon this, his neighbours instituted a
search through the mountains, in hopes of
discovering the cave; but after several weeks
of fruitless exploration, gave up the attempt
in despair, some of them revenging their
failure on Merry by pronouncing him a lunatic
and dreamer, and declaring that his
whole story, his account of the cave, the
treasures, the petrified bodies, the adjudging
angel, was a mere fiction of a distempered
brain.

As for Merry himself, he little regarded the
imputation, but remained at home, practising
those virtues of industry and devotion that
seemed to prove him an altered man, until—
sorry I am to say it, but so the legend reports
of him—he grew tired of them. Whether
it was that he found honest poverty by no
means so agreeable or profitable as he hoped
to prove it—that the devotion begot by fear
is not in reality of the most perdurable

[figure description] Page 069.[end figure description]

species, or that the impression of his terrible
adventure was naturally lessened by time, it
seemed that he, by and by, began to neglect
his cornfield, to be an irregular and unfrequent
visiter at the religious meetings, which
he had for a while faithfully attended, and
was again, after a time, seen on his solitary
rambles among the mountains.

Yes, Merry the Miner was once more seen
with dog and gun bending his way towards
the hills; Merry the Miner had forgotten his
religion and his vow, and returned to his
original love and ancient passion. He had
thought upon the matter, and he thought a
happy thought. The cave was accursed and
forbidden ground, to be sure, with all its mysterious
treasures; but the brook that rolled
from it, bearing coins and jewels, to be scattered
unregarded on its bed—there was
nothing unholy, nothing perilous in the brook:
why should not Merry the Miner lay claim
to its unforbidden riches?

At this thought, Merry the Miner was conquered;
he snatched his gun, he called his
dog, and set out in quest of the brook. That
brook, however, to his surprise and consternation,
was no where to be found. There
were a thousand brooks rolling down the

[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]

mountain, but in none could Merry discover
the singular runnel of the cave. In the agitation
of his mind both while going and returning
from the cavern, he had forgotten to
take any note of the path by which he had
reached it; and now the place of the brook,
and the features that distinguished it from
others, were alike forgotten. Had he lost it
then? was he to be denied even the possession
of its little treasures?

Merry the Miner waxed wroth with his
hard fortune, and took another vow; he swore
he would find that brook again, if he sought it
to his dying day.

And this vow, it is believed, he religiously
kept. Year after year, he was seen wending
his solitary way up the mountains, exploring
every little stream, every foamy torrent, every
dried up channel, with an eager, hopeful eye.
Year after year, the search was continued,
with the same eagerness, the same hope, the
same ill fortune. His dog died with old age;
Merry himself grew palsied with years; but
still, day by day, his thin gray hairs were
seen fluttering in the breeze, as he tottered
along the mountain paths with zeal, as in his
better years, in quest of the golden brook and
perilous cavern.

[figure description] Page 071.[end figure description]

How long the quest continued, and when
or how it ended, no one ever knew. Merry
at last vanished from men's eyes, and was
seen no more stealing like a ghost among
the woods and hills: but what had been his
fate could be only conjectured. Some few
years after he disappeared, a skeleton was
found by a party of hunters in a desolate
place among the mountains. It was generally
believed to be that of the poor gold-hunter,
who had perished in some unknown
way in his unfriended rambles.

Others there were who rejected the common
belief. According to them, Merry the
Miner had again lighted on his long sought
rivulet, had again entered his mystic cave;
and would there, perhaps, be discovered by
some future adventurer, a man of stone like
the shapes around him.

p018-073

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