p472-126 THE DAY OF MY DEATH. *

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Alison was sitting on a bandbox. She had generally
been sitting on a bandbox for three weeks, — or
on a bushel-basket, or a cupboard shelf, or a pile of
old newspapers, or the baby's bath-tub. On one occasion
it was the baby himself. She mistook him for the
rag-bag.

If ever we had to move again, — which all the
beneficence of the Penates forbid! — my wife should
be locked into the parlor, and a cargo of Irishwomen
turned loose about the premises to “attend to things.”
What it is that women find to do with themselves in
this world I have never yet discovered. They are
always “attending to things.” Whatever that may
mean, I have long ago received it as the only solution
at my command of their superfluous wear and tear,
and worry and flurry, and tears and nerves and headaches.
A fellow may suggest Jane, and obtrude

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Bridget, and hire Peggy, and run in debt for Mehetable,
and offer to take the baby on 'Change with him,
but has he by a feather's weight lightened Madam's
mysterious burden? My dear sir, don't presume to
expect it. She has just as much to do as she ever
had. In fact, she has a little more. “Strange, you
don't appreciate it! Follow her about one day, and
see for yourself!”

What I started to say, however, was that I thought
it over often, — I mean about that invoice of Irishwomen, —
coming home from the office at night, while
we were moving out of Artichoke Street into Nemo's
Avenue. It is not pleasant to find one's wife always
sitting on a bandbox. I have seen her crawl to her
feet when she heard me coming, and hold on by a
chair, and try her poor little best to look as if she
could stand twenty-four hours longer; she so disliked
that I should find a “used-up looking house” under
any circumstances. But I believe that was worse
than the bandbox.

On this particular night she was too tired even to
crawl. I found her all in a heap in the corner, two
dusters and a wash-cloth in one blue-veined hand, and
a broom in the other; an old corn-colored silk handkerchief
knotted over her hair, — her hair is black,
and the effect was good, — and her little brown calico
aprong-string literally tied to the baby, who was
shrieking at the end of his tether because he could
just not reach the kitten and throw her into the fire.

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On Alison's lap, between a pile of shirts and two piles
of magazines, lay a freshly opened letter. I noticed
that she put it into her pocket before she dropped her
dusters and stood up to lift her face for my kiss. She
forgot about the apron-strings, and the baby tipped up
the wrong way, and hung dangling in mid-air.

After we had taken tea, — that is to say, after we
had drawn around the ironing-board put on two chairs
in the front entry, made the cocoa in a tin dipper,
stirred it with a fork, and cut the bread with a jackknife, —
after the baby was fairly off to bed in a
champagne-basket, and Tip disposed of, his mother
only knew where, we coaxed a consumptive fire into
the parlor grate, and sat down before it in the carpetless,
pictureless, curtainless, blank, bare, soapy room.

“Thank fortune, this is the last night of it!” I
growled, putting my booted feet against the wall,
(my slippers had gone over to the avenue in a water-pail
that morning,) and tipping my chair back drearily, —
my wife “so objects” to the habit!

Allis made no reply, but sat looking thoughtfully,
and with a slightly perplexed and displeased air, into
the sizzling wet wood that snapped and flared and
smoked and hissed and blackened, and did everything
but burn.

“I really don't know what to do about it,” she
broke silence at last.

“I 'm inclined to think there 's nothing better to do
than to look at it.”

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“No; not the fire. O, I forgot, — I have n't
shown it to you.”

She drew from her pocket the letter which I had
noticed in the afternoon, and laid it upon my knee.
With my hands in my pockets — the room was too
cold to take them out — I read: —

“Dear Cousin Alison: —

“I have been so lonely since mother died, that my
health, never of the strongest, as you know, has suffered
seriously. My physician tells me that something
is wrong with the periphrastic action, if you know
what that is,” [I suppose Miss Fellows meant the
peristaltic action,] “and prophesies something dreadful,
(I 've forgotten whether it was to be in the head,
or the heart, or the stomach,) if I cannot have change
of air and scene this winter. I should dearly love to
spend some time with you in your new home, (I fancy
it will be drier than the old one,) if convenient to
you. If inconvenient, don't hesitate to say so, of
course. I hope to hear from you soon.

“Hum-m. Insipid sort of letter.”

“Exactly. That 's Gertrude. No more flavor than
a frozen pear. If she had one distinguishing

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peculiarity, good or bad, I believe I should like her better.
But I 'm sorry for the woman.”

“Sorry enough to stand a winter of her?”

“If we had n't just been through this moving! A
new house and all, — nobody knows how the flues are
yet, or whether we can heat a spare room. She has
n't had a home, though, since Cousin Dorothy died.
But I was thinking about you, you see.”

“O, she can't hurt me. She won't want the library,
I suppose; nor my slippers, and the small bootjack.
Let her come.”

My wife sighed a small sigh of relief out from the
depths of her hospitable heart, and the little matter
was settled and dismissed as lightly as are most little
matters out of which grow the great ones.

I had just begun to dream that night that Gertrude
Fellows, in the shape of a large wilted pear, had
walked in and sat down on a dessert plate, when Allis
gave me a little pinch and woke me.

“My dear, Gertrude has one peculiarity. I never
thought of it till this minute.”

“Confound Gertrude's peculiarities! I want to go
to sleep. Well, let 's have it.”

“Why, you see, she took up with some Spiritualistic
notions after her mother's death; thought she held
communications with her, and all that, Aunt Solomon
says.”

“Stuff and nonsense!”

“Of course. But, Fred, dear, I 'm inclined to

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think she must have made her sewing-table walk into
the front entry; and Aunt Solomon says the spirits
rapped out the whole of Cousin Dorothy's history on
the mantel-piece, behind those blue china vases, —
you must have noticed them at the funeral, — and not
a human hand within six feet.”

“Alison Hotchkiss!” I said, waking thoroughly, and
sitting up in bed to emphasize the opinion, “when I
hear a spirit rap on my mantel-piece, and see my tables
walk about the front entry, I 'll believe that, — not
before!”

“O, I know it! I 'm not a Spiritualist, I 'm sure,
and nothing would tempt me to be. But still that
sort of reasoning has a flaw in it, has n't it, dear?
The King of Siam, you know —”

I had heard of the King of Siam before, and I
politely informed my wife that I did not care to hear
of him again. Spiritualism was a system of refined
jugglery. Just another phase of the same thing
which brings the doves out of Mr. Hermann's empty
hat. It might be entertaining if it had not become
such an abominable imposition. There would always
be nervous women and hypochondriac men enough for
its dupes. I thanked Heaven that I was neither, and
went to sleep.

Our new house was light and dry; the flues worked
well, and the spare chamber heated admirably. The
baby exchanged the champagne-basket for his dainty
pink-curtained crib; Tip began to recover from the

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perpetual cold with which three weeks' sitting in
draughts, and tumbling into water-pails, and playing in
the sink, had sweetened his temper; Allis forsook her
bandboxes for the crimson easy-chair (very becoming,
that chair), or tripped about on her own rested feet;
we returned to table-cloths, civilized life, and a fork
apiece.

In short, nothing at all worth mentioning happened,
till that one night, — I think it was our first Sunday,—
when Allis waked me at twelve o'clock with the
announcement that some one was knocking at the
door. Supposing it to be Bridget with the baby, —
croup, probably, or a fit, — I unlocked and unlatched
it promptly. No one was there, however; and telling
my wife, in no very gentle tone, if I remember correctly,
that it would be a convenience, on such cold
nights, if she could keep her dreams to herself, I shut
the door distinctly and returned to my own.

In the morning I observed a little white circle about
each of Allis's blue eyes, and after some urging she
confessed to me that her sleep had been much broken
by a singular disturbance in the room. I might laugh
at her if I chose, and she had not meant to tell me,
but somebody had rapped in that room all night long.

“On the door?”

“On the door, on the mantel, on the foot of the
bed, on the head-board, — Fred, right on the headboard!
I listened till I grew cold listening, but it
rapped and it rapped, and by and by it was morning,
and it stopped.”

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“Rats!” said I.

“Then rats have knuckles,” said she.

“Mice!” said I, “wind! broken plaster! crickets!
imagination! dreams! fancies! blind headache! nonsense!
Next time wake me up, and fire pillows at
me till I 'm pleasant to you. Now I 'll have a kiss
and a cup of coffee. Any sugar in it?”

Tip fell down the cellar stairs that day, and the
baby swallowed a needle and two gutta-percha buttons,
which I had been waiting a week to have sewed
on my vest, so that Alison had enough else to think
about, and the little incident of the raps was forgotten.
I believe it was not recalled by either of us till after
Gertrude Fellows came.

It was on a Monday and in a drizzly storm that I
brought her from the station. She was a thin, cold,
phantom-like woman, shrouded in water-proofs and
green barège veils. Why is it that homely women
always wear green barège veils? She did not improve
in appearance when her wraps were off, and
she was seated by my parlor grate. Her large green
eyes had no speculation in them. Her mouth — an
honest mouth, that was one mercy — quivered and
shrank when she was addressed suddenly, as if she felt
herself to be a sort of foot-ball that the world was
kicking about at pleasure, — your gentlest smile might
prove a blow. She seldom spoke unless she were
spoken to, and fell into long reveries, with her eyes
on the window or the coals. She wore a horrible sort

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of ruff, — “illusion,” I think Allis called it, — which,
of all contrivances that she could have chosen to
encircle her sallow neck, was exactly the most unbecoming.
She was always knitting blue stockings,—
I never discovered for what or whom; and she
wore her lifeless hair in the shape of a small toy cartwheel,
on the back of her head.

However, she brightened a little in the course of the
first week, helped Alison about the baby, kept herself
out of my way, read her Bible and the “Banner of
Light” in about equal proportion, and became a mild,
inoffensive, and, on the whole, not unpleasant addition
to the family.

She had been in the house about ten days, I think,
when Alison, with a disturbed face, confided to me
that she had spent another wakeful night with those
“rats” behind the head-board; I had been down with
a sick-headache the day before, and she had not
wakened me. I promised to set a trap and buy a cat
before evening, and was closing the door upon the
subject, being already rather late at the office, when
the expression of Gertrude Fellows's face detained
me.

“If I were you, I — would n't — really buy a very
expensive trap, Mr. Hotchkiss. It will be a waste of
money, I am afraid. I heard the noise that disturbed
Cousin Alison”; and she sighed.

I shut the door with a snap, and begged her to be
so good as to explain herself.

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“It 's of no use,” she said, doggedly. “You know
you won't believe me. But that makes no difference.
They come all the same.”

“They?” asked Allis, smiling. “Do you mean
some of your spirits?”

The cold little woman flushed. “These are not my
spirits. I know nothing about them. I did not mean
to obtrude a subject so disagreeable to you while I was
in your family; but I have seldom been in a house in
which the Influences were so strong. I don't know
what they mean, nor anything about them, but just
that they 're here. They wake me up, twitching my
elbows, nearly every night.”

“Wake you up how?”

“Twitching my elbows,” she repeated, gravely.

I broke into a laugh, from which neither my politeness
nor the woman's heightened color could save
me, bought the cat and ordered the rat-trap without
delay.

That night, when Miss Fellows had “retired,” —
she never “went to bed” in simple English like other
people, — I stole softly out in my stockings and screwed
a little brass button outside of her door. I had made
a gimlet-hole for it in the morning when our guest
was out shopping; it fitted into place without noise.
Without noise I turned it, and went back to my own
room.

“You suspect her, then?” said Alison.

“One is always justified in suspecting a Spiritualistic
medium.”

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“I don't know about that,” Allis said, decidedly.
“It may have been mice that I heard last night, or
the wind in a bottle, or any of the other proper and
natural causes that explain away the ghost stories
in the children's papers; but it was not Gertrude.
Women know something about one another, my dear;
and I tell you it was not Gertrude.”

“I don't assert that it was; but with the bolt on
Gertrude's door, the cat in the kitchen, and the rattrap
on the garret stairs, I am strongly inclined to
anticipate a peaceful night. I will watch for a while,
however, and you can go to sleep.”

She went to sleep, and I watched. I lay till half
past eleven with my eyes staring at the dark, wide
awake and undisturbed and triumphant.

At half past eleven I must confess that I heard a
singular sound.

Something whistled at the keyhole. It could not
have been the wind, by the way, for there was no
wind that night. Something else than the wind
whistled in at the keyhole, sighed through into the
room as much like a long-drawn breath as anything,
and fell with a slight clink upon the floor.

I lighted my candle and got up. I searched the
floor of the room, and opened the door and searched
the entry. Nothing was visible or audible, and I
went back to bed. For about ten minutes I heard no
further disturbance, and was concluding myself to be
in some undefined manner the victim of my own

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imagination, when there suddenly fell upon the headboard
of my bed a blow so distinct and loud that I involuntarily
sprang at the sound of it. It wakened
Alison, and I had the satisfaction of hearing her sleepily
inquire if I had caught that rat yet? By way of
reply I relighted the candle, and gave the bed a shove
which sent it rolling half across the room. I examined
the wall; I examined the floor; I examined the headboard;
I made Alison get up, so that I could shake
the mattresses. Meantime the pounding had recommenced,
in rapid, irregular blows, like the blows of a
man's fist. The room adjoining ours was the nursery.
I went in with my light. It was empty and silent.
Bridget, with Tip and the baby, slept soundly in the
large chamber across the hall. While I was searching
the room my wife called loudly to me, and I ran back.

“It is on the mantel now,” she said. “It struck
the mantel just after you left; then the ceiling, three
times, very loud; then the mantel again, — don't you
hear?”

I heard distinctly; moreover, the mantel shook a
little with the concussion. I took out the fire-board
and looked up the chimney; I took out the register
and looked down the furnace-pipe; I ransacked the
garret and the halls; finally, I examined Miss Fellows's
door, — it was locked as I had left it, upon the
outside; and that locked door was the only means of
egress from the room, unless the occupant fancied that
of jumping from a two-story window upon a broad
flight of stone steps.

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I came thoughtfully back across the hall; an invisible
trip-hammer appeared to hit the floor beside
me at every step; I attempted to step aside from it,
over it, away from it; but it followed me, pounding
into my room.

“Wind?” suggested Allis. “Plaster cracking?
Fancies? Dreams? Blind headaches? — I should
like to know which you have decided upon?”

Quiet fell upon the house after that for an hour,
and I was dropping into my first nap, when there
came a light tap upon the door. Before I could reach
it, it had grown into a thundering blow.

“Whatever it is I 'll have it now!” I whispered,
turned the latch without noise, and flung the door
wide into the hall. It was silent, dark, and cold. A
little glimmer of moonlight fell in and showed me the
figures upon the carpet, outlined in a frosty bar. No
hand or hammer, human or superhuman, was there.

Determined to investigate matters a little more
thoroughly, I asked my wife to stand upon the inside
of the doorway while I kept watch upon the outside.
We took our position, and I closed the door
between us. Instantly a series of furious blows struck
the door; the sound was such as would be made by a
stick of oaken wood. The solid door quivered under
it.

“It 's on your side!” said I.

“No, it 's on yours!” said she.

“You 're pounding yourself to fool me,” cried I.

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“You 're pounding yourself to frighten me,” sobbed
she.

And we nearly had a quarrel. The sound continued
with more or less intermission till daybreak.
Allis fell asleep, but I spent the time in appropriate
reflections.

Early in the morning I removed the button from
Miss Fellows's door. She never knew anything about
it.

I believe, however, that I had the fairness to exculpate
her in my secret heart from any trickish connection
with the disturbances of that night.

“Just keep quiet about this little affair,” I said to
my wife; “we shall come across an explanation in
time, and may never have any more of it.”

We kept quiet, and for five days so did “the spirits,”
as Miss Fellows was pleased to pronounce the trip-hammers.

The fifth day I came home early, as it chanced,
from the office. Miss Fellows was writing letters
in the parlor. Allis, upstairs, was sorting and putting
away the weekly wash. I came into the room and sat
down by the register to watch her. I always liked to
watch her sitting there on the floor with the little
heaps of linen and cotton stuff piled like blocks of
snow about her, and her pink hands darting in and out
of the uncertain sleeves that were just ready to give
way in the gathers, trying the stockings' heels briskly,
and testing the buttons with a little jerk.

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She laid aside some under-clothing presently from
the rest. “It will not be needed again this winter,”
she observed, “and had better go into the cedar closet.”
The garments, by the way, were marked and
numbered in indelible ink. I heard her run over the
figures in a busy, housekeeper's undertone, before carrying
them into the closet. She locked the closet
door, I think, for I remember the click of the key. If
I remember accurately, I stepped into the hall after
that to light a cigar, and Alison flitted to and fro
with her clothes, dropping the baby's little white stockings
every step or two, and anathematizing them daintily—
within orthodox bounds, of course. In about
five minutes she called me; her voice was sharp and
alarmed.

“Come quick! O Fred, look here! All those
clothes that I locked into the cedar closet are out here
on the bed!”

“My dear wife,” I blandly observed, as I sauntered
into the room, “too much of Gertrude Fellows hath
made thee mad. Let me see the clothes!”

She pointed to the bed. Some white clothing lay
upon it, folded in an ugly way, to represent a corpse,
with crossed hands.

“Is it meant for a joke, Alison? You did it yourself,
I suppose!”

“Fred! I have not touched it with the tip of my
little finger!”

“Gertrude, then?”

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“Gertrude is in the parlor writing.”

So she was. I called her up. She looked surprised
and troubled.

“It must have been Bridget,” I proceeded, authoritatively,
“or Tip.”

“Bridget is out walking with Tip and the baby.
Jane is in the kitchen making pies.”

“At any rate these are not the clothes which you
locked into the closet, however they came here.”

“The very same, Fred. See, I noticed the numbers:
6 upon the stockings, 2 on the night-caps, and —”

“Give me the key,” I interrupted.

She gave me the key. I went to the cedar closet
and tried the door. It was locked. I unlocked it,
and opened the drawer in which my wife assured me
that the clothes had lain. Nothing was to be seen in
it but the linen towel which neatly covered the bottom.
I lifted it and shook it. The drawer was empty.

“Give me those clothes, if you please.”

She brought them to me. I made in my diary a
careful memorandum of their naming and numbering;
placed the articles myself in the drawer, — an upper
drawer, so that there could be no mistake in identifying
it; locked the drawer, put the key in my pocket;
locked the door of the closet, put the key in my pocket;
locked the door of the room in which the closet
was, and put that key in my pocket.

We sat down then in the hall, all of us; Allis and
Gertrude to fill the mending-basket, I to smoke and

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consider. I saw Tip coming home with his nurse
presently, and started to go down and let him in, when
a faint scream from my wife arrested me. I ran past
Miss Fellows, who was sitting on the stairs, and into
my room. Allis, going in to put away Tip's little plaid
aprons, had stopped, rather pale, upon the threshold.
Upon the bed lay some clothing, folded, as before, in
rude, hideous imitation of the dead.

I took each article in turn, and compared the name
and number with the names and numbers in my diary.
They were identical throughout. I took the clothes,
took the three keys from my pocket, unlocked the
“cedar-room” door, unlocked the closet door, unlocked
the upper drawer, and looked in. The drawer
was empty.

To say that from this time I failed to own — to
myself, if not to other people — that some mysterious
influence, inexplicable by common or scientific causes,
was at work in my house, would be to accuse myself
of more obstinacy than even I am capable of. I propounded
theory after theory, and gave it up. I arrived
at conclusion upon conclusion, and threw them
aside. Finally, I held my peace, ceased to talk of
“rats,” kept my mind in a state of passive vacancy,
and narrowly and quietly watched the progress of
affairs.

From the date of that escapade with the underclothes
confusion reigned in our corner of Nemo's
Avenue. That night neither my wife nor myself closed

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an eye, the house so resounded and re-echoed with
the blows of unseen hammers, fists, logs, and knuckles.

Miss Fellows, too, was pale with her vigils, looked
troubled, and proposed going home. This I peremptorily
vetoed, determined if the woman had any connection,
honest or otherwise, with the mystery, to
ferret it out.

The following day, just after dinner, I was writing
in the library, when a child's cry of fright and pain
startled me. It seemed to come from the little yard
behind the house, and I hurried thither to behold a
singular sight. There was one apple-tree in the yard,—
an old, stunted, crooked thing; and in that tree I
found my son and heir, Tip, tied fast with a small
stout rope. “Tied” does not express it; he was
gagged, manacled, twisted, contorted, wound about,
crossed and recrossed, held without a chance of motion,
scarcely of breath.

“You never tied yourself up here, child?” I asked,
as I cut the knots.

The question certainly was unnecessary. No juggler
could have bound himself in such a fashion;
scarcely, then, a four-years' child. To my continued,
clear, and gentle inquiries, the boy replied, persistently
and consistently, that nobody tied him there, — “not
Cousin Gertrude, nor Bridget, nor the baby, nor
mamma, nor Jane, nor papa, nor the black kitty”; he
was “just tooken up all at once into the tree, and that
was all there was about it.” He “s'posed it must
have been God, or something like that, did it.”

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Poor Tip had a hard time of it. Two days after
that, while his mother and I sat discussing the incident,
and the child was at play upon the floor, he
suddenly threw himself at full length, writhing with
pain, and begging to “have them pulled out quick!”

“Have what pulled out?” exclaimed his terrified
mother. She took the child into her lap, and found
that he was stuck over from head to foot with large
white pins.

“We have n't so many large pins in all the house,”
she said as soon as he was relieved.

As she spoke the words thirty or forty small pins
pierced the boy. Where they came from no one could
see. How they came there no one knew. We looked,
and there they were, and Tip was crying and writhing
as before.

For the remainder of that winter we had scarcely a
day of quiet. The rumor that “the Hotchkisses had
rented a haunted house” leaked out and spread
abroad. The frightened servants gave warning, and
other frightened servants took their place, to leave in
turn. My wife was her own cook and nursery-maid
a quarter of the time. The disturbances varied in
character with every week, assuming, as time went
on, an importunity which, had we not quietly settled
it in our own minds “not to be beaten by a noise,”
would have driven us from the house.

Night after night the mysterious fingers rapped at
the windows, the doors, the floors, the walls. Day

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after day uncomfortable tricks were sprung upon us
by invisible agencies. We became used to the noises,
so that we slept through them easily; but many of the
phenomena were so strikingly unpleasant, and so singularly
unsuited to the ordinary conditions of human
happiness and housekeeping, that we scarcely became—
as one of our excellent deacons had a cheerful habit
of exhorting us to become — “resigned.”

Upon one occasion we had invited a small and select
number of friends to dine. It was to be rather a
recherché affair for Nemo's Avenue, and my wife had
spared no painstaking to suit herself with her table.
We had had a comparatively quiet house the night
before, so that our cook, who had been with us three
days, consented to remain till our guests had been provided
for. The soup was good, the pigeons better,
the bread was not sour, and Allis looked hopeful, and
inclined to trust Providence for the gravies and dessert.

It was just as I had begun to carve the beef that I
observed my wife suddenly pale, and a telegram from
her eyes turned mine in the direction of General Popgun,
who sat at her right hand. My sensations “can
better be imagined than described” when I saw General
Popgun's fork, untouched by any human hand,
dancing a jig on his plate. He grasped it and laid it
firmly down. As soon as he released his hold it
leaped from the table.

“Really — aw — very singular phenomena,” began

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the General; “very singular! I was not prepared to
credit the extraordinary accounts of spiritual manifestations
in this house, but — aw — Well, I must
say —”

Instantly it was Pandemonium at that dinner-table.
Dr. Jump's knife, Mrs. M'Ready's plate, and Colonel
Hope's tumbler sprang from their places. The pigeons
flew from the platter, the caster rattled and rolled, the
salt-cellars bounded to and fro, and the gravies, moved
by some invisible disturber, spattered all over Mrs.
Elias P. Critique's moire antique.

Mortified and angered beyond endurance, I for the
first time addressed the spirits, — wrenched for the
moment into a profound belief that they must be
spirits indeed.

“Whatever you are, and wherever you are,” I
shouted, bringing my hand down hard upon the table,
“go out of this room and let us alone!”

The only reply was a furious mazourka of all the
dishes on the table. A gentleman present, who had,
as he afterward told us, studied the subject of spiritualism
somewhat, very sceptically and with unsatisfactory
results, observed the performance keenly, and suggested
that I should try a gentler method of appeal.
Whatever the agent was, — and what it was he had
not yet discovered, — he had noticed repeatedly that
the quiet modes of meeting it were most effective.

Rather amused, I spoke more softly, addressing the
caster, and intimating in my blandest manner that I

[figure description] Page 134.[end figure description]

and my guests would feel under obligations if we could
have the room to ourselves till after we had dined.
The disturbance gradually ceased, and we had no
more of it that day.

A morning or two after Alison chanced to leave
half a dozen teaspoons upon the sideboard in the
breakfast-room; they were of solid silver, and quite
thick. She was going to rub them herself, I believe,
and went into the china-closet, which opens from the
room, for the silver-soap. The breakfast-room was
left vacant, and it was vacant when she returned to
it, and she insists, with a quiet conviction which it is
hardly reasonable to doubt, that no human being did
or could have entered the room without her knowledge.
When she came back to the sideboard every
one of those spoons lay there bent double. She showed
them to me when I came home at noon. Had they
been pewter toys they could not have been more completely
twisted out of shape than they were. I took
them without any remarks (I began to feel as if this
mystery were assuming uncomfortable proportions),
put them away, just as I found them, into a small
cupboard in the wall of the breakfast-room, locked the
cupboard door with the only key in the house which
fitted it, put the key in my inner vest pocket, and
meditatively ate my dinner.

About half an hour afterward a neighbor dropped
in to groan over the weather and see the baby, and
Allis chanced to mention the incident of the spoons.

[figure description] Page 135.[end figure description]

“Really, Mrs. Hotchkiss!” said the lady, with a
slight smile, and that indefinite, quickly smothered
change of eye which signifies, “I don't believe a word
of it!” “Are you sure that there is not a mistake
somewhere, or a little mental hallucination? The story
is very entertaining, but — I beg your pardon — I
should be interested to see those spoons.”

“Your curiosity shall be gratified, madam,” I said,
a little testily; and taking the key from my pocket, I
led her to the cupboard and unlocked the door. I
found those spoons as straight, smooth, and fair as
ever spoons had been; — not a dent, not a wrinkle,
not a bend nor untrue line could we discover anywhere
upon them.

“Oh!” said our visitor, significantly.

That lady, be it recorded, then and thenceforward
spared no pains to found and strengthen throughout
Nemo's Avenue the theory that “the Hotchkisses
were getting up all that spiritual nonsense to force
their landlord into lower rents. And such respectable
people too! It did seem a pity, did n't it?”

One night I was alone in the library. It was late;
about half-past eleven, I think. The brightest gas
jet was lighted, so that I could see to every portion
of the small room. The door was shut. There was
no furniture but the book-cases, my table, and chair;
no sliding doors or concealed corners; no nook or
cranny in which any human creature could lurk unseen
by me; and I say that I was alone.

[figure description] Page 136.[end figure description]

I had been writing to a confidential friend a somewhat
minute account of the disturbances in my house,
which were now of about six weeks' duration. I had
begged him to come and observe them for himself,
and help me out with a solution, — I myself was at a
loss for a reasonable one. There certainly seemed to
be evidence of superhuman agency; but I was hardly
ready yet to commit myself thoroughly to that view
of the matter, and —

In the middle of that sentence I laid down my pen.
A consciousness, sudden and distinct, came to me that
I was not alone in that bright little silent room. Yet
to mortal eyes alone I was. I pushed away my writing
and looked about. The warm air was empty of
outline; the curtains were undisturbed; the little recess
under the library table held nothing but my own
feet; there was no sound but the ordinary rap-rapping
on the floor, to which I had by this time become so
accustomed that often it passed unnoticed. I rose and
examined the room thoroughly, until quite satisfied
that I was its only visible occupant; then sat down
again. The rappings had meantime become loud and
impatient.

I had learned that very week from Miss Fellows the
spiritual alphabet with which she was in the habit of
“communicating with her dead mother. I had never
asked her, nor had she proposed, to use it herself for
my benefit. I had meant to try all other means of
investigation before resorting to it. Now, however,

[figure description] Page 137.[end figure description]

being alone, and being perplexed and annoyed by my
sense of having invisible company, I turned and spelled
out upon the table, so many raps to a letter till the
question was complete: —

“What do you want of me?”

Instantly the answer came rapping back: —

“Stretch down your hand.”

I put my fingers under the table, and I felt, as indubitably
as I ever felt a touch in my life, the grasp
of a warm, human hand.

I added to the broken paragraph in the letter to my
friend a brief account of the occurrence, and reiterated
my entreaties that he would come at his earliest convenience
to my house. He was an Episcopal clergyman,
by the way, and I considered that his testimony would
uphold my fast-sinking character for veracity among
my townspeople. I began to have an impression that
this dilemma in which I found myself was a pretty
serious one for a man of peaceable disposition and
honest intentions to be in.

About this time I undertook to come to a little
better understanding with Miss Fellows. I took her
away alone, and having tried my best not to frighten
the life out of her by my grave face, asked her seriously
and kindly to tell me whether she supposed herself to
have any connection with the phenomena in my house.
To my surprise she answered promptly that she
thought she had. I repressed a whistle, and “asked
for information.”

[figure description] Page 138.[end figure description]

“The presence of a medium renders easy what
would otherwise be impossible,” she replied. “I
offered to go away, Mr. Hotchkiss, in the beginning.”

I assured her that I had no desire to have her go
away at present, and begged her to proceed.

“The Influences in the house are strong, as I have
said before,” she continued, looking through me and
beyond me with her vacant eyes. “Something is
wrong. They are never at rest. I hear them. I
feel them. I see them. They go up and down the
stairs with me. I find them in my room. I see them
gliding about. I see them standing now, with their
hands almost upon your shoulders.”

I confess to a kind of chill that crept down my
backbone at these words, and to having turned my
head and stared hard at the book-cases behind me.

“But they — I mean something — rapped one night
before you came,” I suggested.

“Yes, and they might rap after I was gone. The
simple noises are not uncommon in places where there
are no better means of communication. The extreme
methods of expression, such as you have witnessed
this winter, are, I doubt not, practicable only when
the system of a medium is accessible. They write
all sorts of messages for you. You would ridicule
them. I do not repeat them. You and Cousin
Alison do not see, hear, feel as I do. We are differently
made. There are lying spirits and true, good
spirits and bad. Sometimes the bad deceive and

[figure description] Page 139.[end figure description]

distress me, but sometimes — sometimes my mother
comes.”

She lowered her voice reverently, and I was fain to
hush the laugh upon my lips. Whatever the thing
might prove to be to me, it was daily comfort to the
nervous, unstrung, lonely woman, whom to suspect
of trickery I began to think was worse than stupidity.

From the time of my midnight experience in the
library I allowed myself to look a little further into
the subject of “communications.” Miss Fellows wrote
them out at my request whenever they “came” to her.
Writers on Spiritualism have described the process so
frequently, that it is unnecessary for me to dwell upon
it at length. The influences took her unawares in the
usual manner. In the usual manner her arm — to all
appearance the passive instrument of some unseen,
powerful agency — jerked and glided over the paper,
writing in curious, scrawly characters, never in her
own neat little old-fashioned hand, messages of which,
on coming out from the “trance” state, she would
have no memory; of many of which at any time
she could have had no comprehension. These messages
assumed every variety of character from the
tragic to the ridiculous, and a large portion of them
had no point whatever.

One day Benjamin West desired to give me lessons
in oil-painting. The next, my brother Joseph, dead
now for ten years, asked forgiveness for his share in a
little quarrel of ours which had embittered a portion

[figure description] Page 140.[end figure description]

of his last days, — of which, by the way, I am confident
that Miss Fellows knew nothing. At one time I
received a long discourse enlightening me on the arrangement
of the “spheres” in the disembodied state
of existence. At another, Alison's dead grandfather
pathetically reminded her of a certain Sunday afternoon
at “meetin”' long ago, when the child Allis
hooked his wig off in the long prayer with a bent pin
and a piece of fish-line.

One day we were saddened by the confused wail
of a lost spirit, who represented his agonies as greater
than soul could bear, and clamored for relief. Moved
to pity, I inquired: —

“What can we do for you?”

Unseen knuckles rapped back the touching answer: —

“Give me a piece of squash pie!”

I remarked to Miss Fellows that I supposed this to
be a modern and improved version of the ancient drop
of water which was to cool the tongue of Dives. She
replied that it was the work of a mischievous spirit
who had nothing better to do; they would not infrequently
take in that way the reply from the lips of
another. I am not sure whether we are to have lips
in the spiritual world, but I think that was her expression.

Through all the nonsense and confusion of these
daily messages, however, one restless, indefinite purpose
ran; a struggle for expression that we could not

[figure description] Page 141.[end figure description]

grasp; a sense of something unperformed which was
tormenting somebody.

One week we had been so much more than usually
annoyed by the dancing of tables, shaking of doors,
and breaking of crockery, that I lost all patience, and
at length vehemently dared our unseen tormentors to
show themselves.

“Who and what are you?” I cried, “destroying
the peace of my family in this unendurable fashion.
If you are mortal man, I will meet you as mortal
man. Whatever you are, in the name of all fairness,
let me see you!”

“If you see me it will be death to you,” tapped
the Invisible.

“Then let it be death to me! Come on! When
shall I have the pleasure of an interview?”

“To-morrow night at six o'clock.”

“To-morrow at six, then, be it.”

And to-morrow at six it was. Allis had a headache,
and was lying down upstairs. Miss Fellows and I
were with her, busy with cologne and tea, and one
thing and another. I had, in fact, forgotten all about
my superhuman appointment, when, just as the clock
struck six, a low cry from Miss Fellows arrested my
attention.

“I see it!” she said.

“See what?”

“A tall man wrapped in a sheet.”

“Your eyes are the only ones so favored, it happens,”

[figure description] Page 142.[end figure description]

I said, with a superior smile. But while I spoke
Allis started from the pillows with a look of fear.

“I see it, Fred!” she exclaimed, under her breath.

“Women's imagination!” for I saw nothing.

I saw nothing for a moment; then I must depose
and say that I did see a tall figure, covered from head
to foot with a sheet, standing still in the middle of the
room. I sprang upon it with raised arm; my wife
states that I was within a foot of it when the sheet
dropped. It dropped at my feet, — nothing but a
sheet. I picked it up and shook it; only a sheet.

“It is one of those old linen ones of grandmother's,”
said Allis, examining it; there are only six, marked
in pink with the boar's-head in the corner. It came
from the blue chest up garret. They have not been
taken out for years.”

I took the sheet back to the blue chest myself, —
having first observed the number, as I had done bebefore
with the underclothes; and locked it in. I
came back to my room and sat down by Allis. In
about three minutes we saw the figure standing still
as before, in the middle of the room. As before, I
sprang at it, and as before the drapery dropped, and
there was nothing there. I picked up the sheet and
turned to the numbered corner. It was the same that
I had locked into the blue chest.

Miss Fellows was inclined to fear that I had really
endangered my life by this ghostly rendezvous. I can
testify, however, that it was by no means “death to

[figure description] Page 143.[end figure description]

me,” nor did I experience any ill effects from the
event.

My friend, the clergyman, made me the desired visit
in January. For a week after his arrival, as if my
tormentors were bent on convincing my almost only
friend that I was a fool or a juggler, we had no disturbance
at all beyond the ordinary rappings. These, the
reverend gentleman confessed were of a singular nature,
but expressed a polite desire to see some of the
extraordinary manifestations of which I had written him.

But one day he had risen with some formality to
usher a formal caller to the door, when, to his slight
amazement and my secret delight, his chair — an easy-chair
of good proportions — deliberately jumped up and
hopped after him across the room. From this period
the mystery “manifested” itself to his heart's content.
Not only did the rocking-chairs, and the cane-seat
chairs, and the round-backed chairs, and Tip's little
chairs, and the affghans chase him about, and the heavy
tête-à-tête in the corner evince symptoms of agitation
at his approach, but the piano trundled a solemn
minuet at him; the heavy walnut centre-table rose
half-way to the ceiling under his eyes; the marbletopped
stand, on which he sat to keep it still, lifted
itself and him a foot from the ground; his coffee-cup
spilled over when he tried to drink, shaken by an unseen
elbow; his dressing-cases disappeared from his
bureau and hid themselves, none knew how or when,
in his closets and under his bed; mysterious uncanny

[figure description] Page 144.[end figure description]

figures, dressed in his best clothes and stuffed with
straw, stood in his room when he came to it at night;
his candlesticks walked, untouched by hands, from the
mantel into space; keys and chains fell from the air
at his feet; and raw turnips dropped from the solid
ceiling into his soup-plate.

“Well, Garth,” said I one day, confidentially,
“how are things? Begin to have a `realizing sense'
of it, eh?”

“Let me think awhile,” he answered.

I left him to his reflections, and devoted my attention
for a day or two to Gertrude Fellows. She
seemed to have been of late receiving less ridiculous,
less indefinite, and more important messages from her
spiritual acquaintances. The burden of them was
directed at me. They were sometimes confused, but
never contradictory, and the sum of them, as I cast it
up, was this: —

A former occupant of the house, one Mr. Timothy
Jabbers, had been in early life connected in the drygoods
business with my wife's father, and had, unknown
to any but himself, defrauded his partner of a
considerable sum for a young swindler, — some five
hundred dollars, I think. This fact, kept in the
knowledge only of God and the guilty man, had been
his agony since his death. In the parlance of Spiritualism,
he could never “purify” his soul and rise to
a higher “sphere” till he had made restitution, —
though to that part of the communications I paid

[figure description] Page 145.[end figure description]

little attention. This money my wife, as her father's
sole living heir, was entitled to, and this money I was
desired to claim for her from Mr. Jabbers's estate,
then in the hands of some wealthy nephews.

I made some inquiries which led to the discovery
that there had been a Mr. Timothy Jabbers once the
occupant of our house, that he had at one period been
in business with my wife's father, that he was now many
years dead, and that his nephews in New York were his
heirs. We never attempted to bring any claim upon
them, for three reasons: in the first place, because we
knew we should n't get the money; in the second,
because such a procedure would give so palpable an
“object” in people's eyes for the disturbances at the
house that we should, in all probability, lose the entire
confidence of the entire non-spiritualistic community;
thirdly, because I thought it problematical whether
any constable of ordinary size and courage could be
found who would undertake to summon the witness
to testify in the county court at Atkinsville.

I mention the matter only because, on the theories
of Spiritualism, it appeared to give some point and
occasion to the phenomena, and their infesting that
particular house.

Whether poor Mr. Timothy Jabbers felt relieved by
having unburdened himself of his confession, I cannot
state; but after he found that I paid some attention
to his messages, he gradually ceased to express himself
through turnips and cold keys; the rappings grew less

[figure description] Page 146.[end figure description]

violent and frequent, and finally ceased altogether.
Shortly after that Miss Fellows went home.

Garth and I talked matters over the day after she
left. He had brought his “thinking” to a close, whittled
his opinions to a point, and was quite ready to stick
them into their places for my benefit, and leave them
there, as George Garth left all his opinions, immovable
as the everlasting hills.

“How much had she to do with it now, — the
Fellows?”

“Precisely what she said she had, no more. She
was a medium, but not a juggler.”

“No trickery about the affair, then?”

“No trickery could have sent that turnip into my
soup-plate, or that candlestick walking into the air.
There is a great deal of trickery mixed with such
phenomena. The next case you come across may be
a regular cheat; but you will find it out, — you 'll
find it out. You 've had three months to find this
out, and you could n't. Whatever may be the explanation
of the mystery, the man who can witness
what you and I have witnessed, and pronounce it the
trick of that incapable, washed-out woman, is either a
liar or a fool.

“You understand yourself and your wife, and
you 've tested your servants faithfully; so we 're
somewhat narrowed in our conclusions.”

“Well, then, what 's the matter?”

I was, I confess, a little startled by the vehemence

[figure description] Page 147.[end figure description]

with which my friend brought his clerical fist down
upon the table, and exclaimed: —

“The Devil?”

“Dear me, Garth, don't swear; you in search of a
pulpit just at this time, too!”

“I tell you I never spoke more solemnly. I cannot,
in the face of facts, ascribe all these phenomena
to human agency. Something that comes we know
not whence, and goes we know not whither, is at work
there in the dark. I am driven to grant to it an
extra-human power. Yet when that flabby Miss Fellows,
in the trance state, undertakes to bring me messages
from my dead wife, and when she attempts to
recall the most tender memories of our life together,
I cannot,” — he paused and turned his face a little
away, — “it would be pleasant to think I had a word
from Mary, but I cannot think she is there. I don't
believe good spirits concern themselves with this
thing. It has in its fair developments too much nonsense
and too much positive sin; read a few numbers
of the `Banner,' or attend a convention or two, if you
want to be convinced of that. If they 're not good
spirits they 're bad ones, that 's all. I 've dipped into
the subject in various ways since I have been here;
consulted the mediums, talked with the prophets; I 'm
convinced that there is no dependence to be placed on
the thing. You never learn anything from it that it
is worth while to learn; above all, you never can
trust its prophecies. It is evil, — evil at the root; and

[figure description] Page 148.[end figure description]

except by physicians and scientific men it had better
be let alone. They may yet throw light on it; you
and I cannot. I propose for myself to drop it henceforth.
In fact, it looks too much toward putting one's
self on terms of intimacy with the Prince of the
Powers of the Air to please me.”

“You 're rather positive, considering the difficulty
of the subject,” I said.

The truth is, and it may be about time to own to it,
that the three months' siege against the mystery, which
I had held so pertinaciously that winter, had driven
me to broad terms of capitulation. I assented to
most of my friend's conclusions, but where he stopped
I began a race for further light. I understood then,
for the first time, the peculiar charm which I had
often seen work so fatally with dabblers in Spiritualism.
The fascination of the thing was upon me. I
ransacked the papers for advertisements of mediums.
I went from city to city at their mysterious calls. I
held séances in my parlor, and frightened my wife
with messages — some of them ghastly enough —
from her dead relatives. I ran the usual gauntlet of
strange seers in strange places, who told me my name,
the names of all my friends, dead or alive, my secret
aspirations and peculiar characteristics, my past history
and future prospects.

For a long time they never made a failure. Absolute
strangers told me facts about myself which not
even my own wife knew: whether they spoke with

[figure description] Page 149.[end figure description]

the tongues of devils, or whether, by some unknown
laws of magnetism, they simply read my thoughts,
I am not even now prepared to say. I think if they
had made a miss I should have been spared some
suffering. Their communications had sometimes a
ridiculous aimlessness, and occasionally a subtle deviltry
coated about with religion, like a pill with sugar,
but often a significant and fearful accuracy.

Once, I remember, they foretold an indefinite calamity
to be brought upon me before sunset on the following
Saturday. Before sunset on that Saturday I
lost a thousand dollars in mining stock which had
stood in all Eastern eyes as solid as its own gold. At
another time I was warned by a medium in Philadelphia
that my wife, then visiting in Boston, was taken
suddenly ill. I had left her in perfect health; but
feeling nevertheless uneasy, I took the night train and
went directly to her. I found her in the agonies of a
severe attack of pleurisy, just preparing to send a telegram
to me.

“Their prophecies are unreliable, notwithstanding
coincidences,” wrote George Garth. “Let them
alone, Fred, I beg of you. You will regret it if
you don't.”

“Once let me be fairly taken in and cheated to my
face,” I made reply, “and I may compress my views to
your platform. Until then I must gang my own gait.”

I now come to the remarkable portion of my story,

[figure description] Page 150.[end figure description]

— at least it seems to me the remarkable portion
under my present conditions of vision.

In August of the summer following Miss Fellows's
visit, and the manifestations in my house at Atkinsville,
I was startled one pleasant morning, while sitting
in the office of a medium in Washington Street
in Boston, by a singularly unpleasant communication.

“The second day of next May,” wrote the medium,—
she wrote with the forefinger of one hand upon the
palm of the other, — “the second of May, at one
o'clock in the afternoon, you will be summoned into a
spiritual state of existence.”

“I suppose, in good English, that means I 'm going
to die,” I replied, carelessly. “Would you be so good
as to write it with a pen and ink, that there may be
no mistake?”

She wrote it distinctly: “The second of May, at
one o'clock in the afternoon.”

I pocketed the slip of paper for further use, and
sat reflecting.

“How do you know it?”

“I don't know it. I am told.”

“Who tells you?”

“Jerusha Babcock and George Washington.”

Jerusha Babcock was the name of my maternal
grandmother. What could the woman know of my
maternal grandmother? It did not occur to me, I
believe, to wonder what occasion George Washington
could find to concern himself about my dying or my

[figure description] Page 151.[end figure description]

living. There stood the uncanny Jerusha as pledge
that my informant knew what she was talking about.
I left the office with an uneasy sinking at the heart.
There was a coffin-store near by, and I remember the
peculiar interest with which I studied the quilting of
the satin lining, and the peculiar crawling sensation
which crept to my fingers' ends.

Determined not to be unnecessarily alarmed, I spent
the next three weeks in testing the communication.
I visited one more medium in Boston, two in New
York, one in New Haven, one in Philadelphia, and
one in a little out-of-the-way Connecticut village,
where I spent a night, and did not know a soul.
None of these people, I am confident, had ever seen
my face or heard my name before.

It was a circumstance calculated at least to arrest
attention, that these seven people, each unknown to
the others, and without concert with the others, repeated
the ugly message which had sought me out
through the happy summer morning in Washington
Street. There was no hesitation, no doubt, no contradiction.
I could not trip them or cross-question
them out of it. Unerring, assured, and consistent,
the fiat went forth: —

“On the second of May, at one o'clock in the afternoon,
you will pass out of the body.”

I would not have believed them if I could have
helped myself. I sighed for the calm days when I
had laughed at medium and prophet, and sneered at

[figure description] Page 152.[end figure description]

ghost and rapping. I took lodgings in Philadelphia,
locked my doors, and paced my rooms all day and
half the night, tortured by my thoughts, and consulting
books of medicine to discover what evidence I
could by any possibility give of unsuspected disease.
I was at that time absolutely well and strong; absolutely
well and strong I was forced to confess myself,
after having waded through Latin adjectives and anatomical
illustrations enough to make a ghost of Hercules.
I devoted two days to researches in genealogical
pathology, and was rewarded for my pains by
discovering myself to be the possessor of one great-aunt
who had died of heart disease at the advanced
age of two months.

Heart disease, then, I settled upon. The alternative
was accident. “Which will it be?” I asked in
vain. Upon this point my friends the mediums held
a delicate reserve. “The Influences were confusing,
and they were not prepared to state with exactness.”

“Why don't you come home?” my wife wrote in
distress and perplexity. “You promised to come ten
days ago, and they need you at the office, and I need
you more than anybody.”

“I need you more than anybody!” When the
little clinging needs of three weeks grew into the
great want of a lifetime, — O, how could I tell her
what was coming?

I did not tell her. When I had hurried home,
when she came bounding through the hall to meet

[figure description] Page 153.[end figure description]

me, when she held up her face, half laughing, half
crying, and flushing and paling, to mine, — the poor
little face that by and by would never watch and glow
at my coming, — I could not tell her.

When the children were in bed and we were alone
after tea, she climbed gravely up into my lap from the
little cricket on which she had been sitting, and put
her hands upon my shoulders.

“You 're sober, Fred, and pale. Something ails you,
you know, and you are going to tell me all about it.”

Her pretty, mischievous face swam suddenly before
my eyes. I kissed it, put her gently down as I would
a child, and went away alone till I felt more like myself.

The winter set in gloomily enough. It may have
been the snow-storms, of which we had an average of
one every other day, or it may have been the storm in
my own heart which I was weathering alone.

Whether to believe those people, or whether to
laugh at their predictions; whether to tell my wife,
or whether to continue silent, — these questions
tormented me through many wakeful nights and
dreary days. My fears were in nowise allayed by a
letter which I received one day in January from
Gertrude Fellows.

“Why don't you read it aloud? What 's the
news?” asked Alison. But at one glance over the
opening page I folded the sheet, and did not read
it till I could lock myself into the library alone. The
letter ran: —

[figure description] Page 154.[end figure description]

“I have been much disturbed lately on your behalf.
My mother and your brother Joseph appear
to me nearly every day, and charge me with some
message to you which I cannot distinctly grasp. It
seems to be clear, however, as far as this: that some
calamity is to befall you in the spring, — in May, I
should say. It seems to me to be of the nature of
death. I do not learn that you can avoid it, but that
they desire you to be prepared for it.”

After receiving this last warning, certain uncomfortable
words filed through my brain for days together: —

“Set thine house in order, for thou shalt surely
die.”

“Never knew you read your Bible so much in all
your life,” said Alison, with a pretty pout. “You 'll
grow so good that I can't begin to keep up with
you. When I try to read my polyglot, the baby
comes and bites the corners, and squeals till I put it
away and take him up.”

As the winter wore away I arrived at this conclusion:
If I were in fact destined to death in the
spring, my wife could not help herself or me by the
knowledge of it. If events proved that I was deluded
in the dread, and I had shared it with her, she would
have had all her pain and anxiety to no purpose. In
either case I would insure her happiness for these few
months; they might be her last happy months. At
any rate happiness was a good thing, and she could

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not have too much of it. To say that I myself felt no
uneasiness as to the event would be affectation. The
old sword of Damocles hung over me. The hair
might hold, but it was a hair.

As the winter passed, — it seemed to me as if
winter had never passed so rapidly before, — I found
it natural to watch my health with the most careful
scrutiny; to avoid improper food and undue excitement;
to refrain from long and perilous journeys; to
consider whether each new cook who entered the
family might have occasion to poison me. It was an
anomaly which I did not observe at the time, that
while in my heart of hearts I expected to breathe my
last upon the second of May, I yet cherished a distinct
plan of fighting, cheating, persuading, or overmatching
death.

I closed a large speculation on which I had been
inclined, in the summer, to “fly”; Alison could never
manage petroleum ventures. I wound up my business
in a safe and systematic manner. “Hotchkiss must
mean to retire,” people said. I revised my will, and
held one long and necessary conversation with my
wife about her future, should “anything happen” to
me. She listened and planned without tears or exclamations;
but after we had finished the talk, she
crept up to me with a quiet, puzzled sadness that I
could not bear.

“You are growing so blue lately, Fred! Why,
what can `happen' to you? I don't believe God

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can mean to leave me here after you are gone; I
don't believe he can mean to!”

All through the sweet spring days we were much
together. I went late to the office. I came home
early. I spent the beautiful twilights at home. I
followed her about the house. I made her read to
me, sing to me, sit by me, touch me with her little,
soft hand. I watched her face till the sight choked
me. How soon before she would know? How
soon?

“I feel as if we 'd just been married over again,”
she said one day, pinching my cheek with a low laugh.
“You are so good! I 'd no idea you cared so much
about me. By and by, when you get over this lazy
fit and go about as you used to, I shall feel so deserted,—
you 've no idea! I believe I will order a little
widow's cap, and put it on, and wear it about, — now,
what do you mean by getting up and stalking off to
look out of the window? Fine prospect you must
have, with the curtain down!”

It is, to say the least, an uncomfortable state of
affairs when you find yourself drawing within a fortnight
of the day on which seven people have assured
you that you are going to shuffle off this mortal coil.
It is not agreeable to have no more idea than the dead
(probably not as much) of the manner in which your
demise is to be effected. It is not in all respects a
cheerful mode of existence to dress yourself in the
morning with the reflection that you are never to half

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wear out your new mottled coat, and that this striped
neck-tie will be laid away by and by in a little box,
and cried over by your wife; to hear your immediate
acquaintances all wondering why you don't get yourself
some new boots; to know that your partner has
been heard to say that you are growing dull at trade;
to find the children complaining that you have engaged
no rooms yet at the beach; to look into their upturned
eyes and wonder how long it is going to take for them
to forget you; to go out after breakfast and wonder
how many more times you will shut that front door;
to come home in the perfumed dusk and see the faces
pressed against the window to watch for you, and feel
warm arms about your neck, and wonder how soon
they will shrink from the chill of you; to feel the glow
of the budding world, and think how blossom and fruit
will crimson and drop without you, and wonder how
the blossom and fruit of life can slip from you in the
time of violet smells and orioles.

April, spattered with showers and dripped upon a
little with ineffectual suns, slid restlessly away from
me, and I locked my office door one night, reflecting
that it was the night of the first of May, and that tomorrow
was the second.

I spent the evening alone with my wife. I have
spent more agreeable evenings. She came and nestled
at my feet, and the fire-light painted her cheeks
and hair, and her eyes followed me, and her hand was
in mine; but I have spent more agreeable evenings.

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The morning of the second broke without a cloud.
Blue jays flashed past my window; a bed of royal
pansies opened to the sun, and the smell of the fresh,
moist earth came up where Tip was digging in his
little garden.

“Not feeling exactly like work to-day,” as I told
my wife, I did not go to the office. I asked her to
come into the library and sit with me. I remember
that she had a pudding to bake, and refused at first;
then yielded, laughing, and said that I must go without
my dessert. I thought it highly probable that I
should go without my dessert.

I remember precisely how pretty she was that morning.
She wore a bright dress, — blue, I think, — and
a white crocus in her hair; she had a dainty white
apron tied on, “to cook in,” she said, and her pink
nails were powdered with flour. Her eyes laughed
and twinkled at me. I remember thinking how
young she looked, and how unready for suffering. I
remember that she brought the baby in after a while,
and that Tip came all muddy from the garden, dragging
his tiny hoe over the carpet; that the window
was open, and that, while we all sat there together, a
little brown bird brought some twine and built a nest
on an apple-bough just in sight.

I find it difficult to explain the anxiety which I
felt, as the morning wore on, that dinner should be
punctually upon the table at half past twelve. But I
now understand perfectly, as I did not once, the old

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philosophy: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow
we die.”

It was ironing-day, and our dinners were apt to be
late upon ironing-days. I concluded that, if the soup
were punctual, and not too hot, I could leave myself
ten or perhaps fifteen unoccupied minutes before one
o'clock. It strikes me as curious now, the gravity
with which this thought underran the fever and pain
and dread of the morning.

I fell to reading my hymn-book about twelve
o'clock, and when Alison called me to dinner I
did not remember to consult my watch.

The soup was good, though hot. A grim Epicurean
stolidity crept over me as I sat down before it. A man
had better make the most of his last chance at mockturtle.
Fifteen minutes were enough to die in.

I am confident that I ate more rapidly than is consistent
with consummate elegance. I remember that
Tip imitated me, and that Allis opened her eyes at
me. I recall distinctly the fact that I had passed my
plate a second time.

I had passed my plate a second time, I say, and
had just raised the spoon to my lips, when it fell from
my palsied hand; for the little bronze clock upon the
mantel struck one.

I sat with drawn breath and glared at it; at the
relentless silver hands; at the fierce, and, as it seemed
to me, living face of the Time on its top, who stooped
and swung his scythe at me.

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“I would like a very big white potato,” said Tip,
breaking the solemn silence.

You may or may not believe me, but it is a fact
that that is all which happened.

I slowly turned my head. I resumed my spoon.

“The kitchen clock is nearly half an hour too
slow,” observed Alison. “I told Jane that you
would have it fixed this week.”

I finished my soup in silence.

It may interest the reader to learn that up to the
date of this article “I still live.”