The Priest and The Goat

Once, there lived a pious Priest in a small village.  He was very innocent and
simple minded person, used to perform religious rituals.  On one occasion, he
was rewarded with the goat for his services by a wealthy man.  The Priest was
happy to get a goat as the reward.  He happily slung the goat over his shoulder
and began the journey towards his home.  On the way, three cheats (Thugs) saw
the Priest taking the goat.

All of them were lazy and wanted to cheat the Priest so that they could take away
the goat.  They said, “This goat will make a delicious meal for all of us. Let’s
somehow get it”.  They discussed the matter amongst themselves and devised a
plan to get the goat by fooling the Priest.  After deciding the plan, they got
separated from one another and took different hiding positions at three different
places on the way of the Priest.
As soon as, the Priest arrived at a lonely place, one of the cheats came out of his
hiding place and asked Priest in a shocking manner, “Sir, what are you doing?  I
don’t understand why a pious man like you needs to carry a dog on his
shoulders?”  The Priest was surprised to hear such words.  He screamed, “Can’t
you see? It’s not a dog but a goat, you stupid fool”.  The cheat replied, “Sir, I beg
your pardon.  I told you what I saw.  I am sorry if you don’t believe it”.  The
Priest was annoyed at the discrepancy but started his journey once again.

The Priest had barely walked a distance, when another cheat came out of his
hiding place and asked the Priest, “Sir, why do you carry a dead calf on your
shoulders?  You seem to be a wise person. Such an act is pure stupidity on your
part”.  The Priest yelled, “What? How can you mistake a living goat for a dead
calf?”  The second cheat replied, “Sir, you seem to be highly mistaken in this
regard.  Either you don’t know how does goat look like or you are doing it
knowingly.  I just told you what I saw. Thank you”.  The second cheat went away
smiling.  The Priest got confused but continued to walk further.

Again the Priest had covered a little distance when the third cheat met him.  The
third cheat asked laughingly, “Sir, why do you carry a donkey on your shoulders?
It makes you a laughing stock”.  Hearing the words of the third thug, the Priest
became really worried.  He started thinking, “Is it really not a goat? Is it some
kind of a ghost?”

He thought that the animal he was carrying on his shoulders might really be some
sort of ghost, because it transformed itself from the goat into a dog, from a dog
into a dead calf and from dead calf into a donkey.  The Priest got frightened to
such an extent that he hurled the goat on the roadside and ran away.  The three
tricksters laughed at the gullible Priest.  They caught the goat and were happy to
feast on it.

Moral: One should not be carried away by what others say. Don’t be fooled by
those who wants to take advantage of you.

The Lion and a Clever Fox

Long ago, there lived a lion in a dense forest. One morning his wife told him that
his breath was bad and unpleasant. The lion became embarrassed and angry upon
hearing it. He wanted to check this fact with others. So he called three others
outside his cave.

First came the sheep. The Lion opening his mouth wide said, “Sheep, tell me if
my mouth smells bad?” The sheep thought that the lion wanted an honest answer,
so the sheep said, “Yes, Friend. There seems to be something wrong with your
breath”. This plain speak did not go well with the lion. He pounced on the sheep,
killing it.

Then the lion called the wolf and said, “What do you think? Do I have a bad
breath?” The wolf saw what happened to the sheep. He wanted to be very
cautious in answering a question. So, the wolf said, “Who says that Your breath
is unpleasant. It’s as sweet as the smell of roses”. When the lion heard the reply,
he roared in an anger and immediately attacked the wolf and killed it. “The
flatterer!” growled the lion.

Finally, came the turn of the fox. The lion asked him the same question. The fox
was well aware of the fate of the sheep and the wolf. So he coughed and cleared
his throat again and again and then said, “Oh Dear Friend, for the last few days, I
have been having a very bad cold. Due to this, I can’t smell anything, pleasant or
unpleasant”.

The lion spared the fox’s life.

Moral:  Do not involve yourself in a bad company or a bad situation else you
may end up getting punished for no fault of yours.  Sometimes, It’s wise to
stay away from certain situations.

The Ant and The Dove

One a hot day of summer, an ant was searching for some water. After walking
around for some time, she came near the river. To drink the water, she climbed
up on a small rock. While trying to drink a water, she slipped and fell into the
river.

There was a dove sitting on a branch of a tree who saw an ant falling into the
river. The dove quickly plucked a leaf and dropped it into the river near the
struggling ant. The ant moved towards the leaf and climbed up onto it. Soon, the
leaf drifted to dry ground, and the ant jumped out. She looked up to the tree and
thanked the dove.

Later, the same day, a bird catcher nearby was about to throw his net over the
dove, hoping to trap it. An ant saw him and guessed what he was about to do.
The dove was resting and he had no idea about the bird catcher. An ant quickly
bit him on the foot. Feeling the pain, the bird catcher dropped his net and let out a
light scream. The dove noticed it and quickly to flew away.

Moral:  If you do good, good will come to you.  One good turn deserves another.
Farmer’s Well & Witty Birbal

Once a man sold his well to a farmer. Next day when a farmer went to draw the
water from that well, the man did not allow him to draw the water from it. He
said, “I have sold you the well, not the water, so you cannot draw the water from
the well.”

The farmer became very sad and came to the Emperor’s court. He described
everything to the Emperor and asked for the justice.

The Emperor called Birbal and handed over this case to him. Birbal called the
man who sold the well to the farmer. Birbal asked, “Why don’t you let him use
the water of the well. You have sold the well to the farmer.” The man replied,
“Birbal, I have sold the well to the farmer, not the water. He has no right to draw
the water from the well.”

Then Birbal smiled and said to him, “Good, but look, since you have sold the
well to this farmer, and you claim that water is yours, then you have no right to
keep your water in the farmer’s well. Either you pay rent to the farmer to keep
your water in his well, or you take that out of his well immediately.”

The man understood, that his trick has failed. Birbal has outwitted him.

Moral: Don’t Try to Cheat. You will end up paying for it regardless of how smart
you think you are.

Tenali Rama and the Brinjal Curry

Sri Krishna Devaraya was the emperor of Vizayanagra. He had eight advisors.
Tenali Rama was one among them.  He was very clever and spontaneous.  Sri
Krishna Devaraya had some special kind of brinjal plants in his garden.  The
brinjal was very rare kind and curry made out of it was very tasty which was
loved by the emperor.  As it was a rare kind, the garden was very guarded and no
one was allowed to view the plants without the emperor’s permission.
Once the emperor had arranged dinner for his advisors and the brinjal curry was
served.  Tenali Rama had enjoyed the brinjal curry very much and went home.
But he was unable to forget the taste.  He told his wife about the taste of curry.
Tenali Rama’s wife also liked brinjal curry, she asked Tenali Rama to bring few
brinjals so that she can prepare a curry.  But Tenali Rama knew that the emperor
was taking extreme care about the Brinjal plants and he can easily detect a
missing of even one brinjal from his garden. And, the emperor will punish such
thief if caught stealing a brinjal from his garden.

But Tenali’s wife pleaded him to bring a brinjal from the garden without telling
anybody.  Tenali Rama had no choice other than stealing a brinjal from the
emperor’s garden. One night he went to the garden, jumped the wall and plucked
few brinjals from the garden.  By the god’s grace, no one had seen him.  His wife
cooked the brinjals and the curry was very tasty. Like all the mothers, she too
loved her son very much and wanted to serve a brinjal curry him. But Tenali
Rama asked her not to do such thing because if their son reveals to anybody that
he had a rare brinjal curry, then they may get caught and get punished for stealing
a brinjal from the garden.

But his wife did not agree.  She wanted to serve the curry to her son.  She was
unable to eat the curry alone without serving her little kid who was sleeping after
doing his homework on the roof of their house.  She asked Tenali Rama to find a
way so that their son can also taste the brinjal curry.  Tenali Rama also loved his
son, so he thought of an idea and with a lot of hesitation went on to the roof to
wake up his child with a bucket of water and poured the water on the child.
When the child woke up he said “It is raining.  Let’s go inside the house and have
a dinner”.  After going inside the room he changed the clothes of his son and
gave him the rice and brinjal curry for the dinner. Tenali Rama told his wife
loudly that “it was raining outside, and let the boy sleep in the room”.

And the next day, the emperor came to know that few brinjals were missing in
his garden.  The Gardener who kept the count of each vegetable and flower found
that the three brinjals were missing. It became a challenging issue for the
emperor and took it very seriously.  He declared a reward for the person who can
catch the thief.  Chief advisor Appaji suspected that only Tenali Rama was
capable of doing such things. And they told the emperor about it.  The emperor
sent his courtiers and asked Tenali Rama to come immediately. Once Tenali
Rama came he asked him about the missing brinjals. Then Tenali Rama told, “I
was not aware of the missing brinjals”.  Then the chief advisor told “Tenali Rama
was lying. Let’s enquire his son”.

The king sent his courtiers to bring Tenali Rama’s son. Once his son came, He
was asked what vegetable he had in the dinner last night. The child replied, “The
brinjal curry and it was very tasty”.  Then the advisor told Tenali Rama that He
needs to accept his crime.  But Tenali Rama said his son had slept very early and
he might be saying something which he got in his dream.

So the emperor asked the little kid that “can you please explain clearly what had
you done yesterday after coming from the school?”

Tenali Rama’s son replied that “yesterday after coming from the school, I played
for some time and after that, I went on to the roof, did my homework, and slept
on the roof.  But when the rain started, my father came and woke me up.  By that
time my dress was fully wet, then we went inside, had the dinner and slept
again”.

The chief advisor Appaji was shocked because there was no rain at all yesterday.
And the atmosphere was fully dry. So they thought the kid had a dream and freed
Tenali Rama without any punishment.  However, later Tenali Raman told the
truth to the emperor and was pardoned by the emperor for his clever witty idea.

Moral:  To start with – Stealing is not a good thing!  You can always use your
brain and ease out of the difficult situations.

Fox and The Goat

Once a fox was roaming around in the dark. Unfortunately, he fell into a well. He
tried his level best to come out but all in vain. So, he had no other alternative but
to remain there until the next morning. The next day, a goat came that way. She
peeped into the well and saw the fox there. The goat asked, “what are you doing
there, Mr. Fox?”
The sly fox replied, “I came here to drink water. It is the best I have ever tasted.
Come and see for yourself.” Without thinking even for a while, the goat jumped
into the well, quenched her thirst and looked for a way to get out. But just like
the fox, she also found herself helpless to come out.

Then the fox said, “I have an idea. You stand on your hind legs. I’ll climb on
your head and get out. Then I shall help you come out too.” The goat was
innocent enough to understand the shrewdness of the fox and did as the fox said
and helped him get out of the well.

While walking away, the fox said, “Had you been intelligent enough, you would
never have got in without seeing how to get out.”

Moral: Look before you leap.  Do not just blindly walk in to anything without
thinking.

The Golden Egg

Once upon a time, there lived a cloth merchant in a village with his wife and two
children. They were indeed quite well-off. They had a beautiful hen which laid
an egg every day. It was not an ordinary egg, rather, a golden egg. But the man
was not satisfied with what he used to get daily. He was a get rich-trice kind of a
person.

The man wanted to get all the golden eggs from his hen at one single go. So, one
day he thought hard and at last clicked upon a plan. He decided to kill the hen
and get all the eggs together.

So, the next day when the hen laid a golden egg, the man caught hold of it, took a
sharp knife, chopped off its neck and cut its body open.  There was nothing but
blood all around & no trace of any egg at all. He was highly grieved because now
he would not get even one single egg.

His life was going on smoothly with one egg a day but now, he himself made his
life miserable. The outcome of his greed was that he started becoming poorer &
poorer day by day and ultimately became a pauper. How jinxed and how much
foolish he was.

Moral: One who desires more, loses all. One should remain satisfied with what
one gets.

The Bear and The Two Friends

Once two friends were walking through the forest. They knew that anything
dangerous can happen to them at any time in the forest. So they promised each
other that they would remain united in any case of danger.

Suddenly, they saw a large bear approaching them. One of the friends at once
climbed a nearby tree. But the other one did not know how to climb. So being led
by his common sense, he lay down on the ground breathless, pretending to be a
dead man.

The bear came near the man lying on the ground. It smelt in his ears, and slowly
left the place. Because the bears do not touch the dead creatures.Now the friend
on the tree came down and asked his friend on the ground, “Friend, what did the
bear tell you into your ears?” The other friend replied, “The bear advised me not
to believe a false friend.”

Moral: True Friend is the one who always supports and stands by you in any
situation.
The Three Questions

King Akbar was very fond of Birbal. This made a certain courtier very jealous.
Now this courtier always wanted to be chief minister, but this was not possible as
Birbal filled that position.  One day Akbar praised Birbal in front of the courtier.
This made the courtier very angry and he said that the king praised Birbal
unjustly and if Birbal could answer three of his questions, he would accept the
fact that Birbal was intelligent. Akbar always wanting to test Birbals wit readily
agreed.

The three questions were

1. How many stars are there in the sky

2. Where is the centre of the Earth and

3. How many men and how many women are there in the world.
Immediately Akbar asked Birbal the three questions and informed him that if he
could not answer them, he would have to resign as chief minister.

To answer the first question, Birbal brought a hairy sheep and said, “There are as
many stars in the sky as there is hair on the sheep’s body. My friend the courtier
is welcome to count them if he likes.”

To answer the second question, Birbal drew a couple of lines on the floor and
bore an iron rod in it and said, “this is the center of the Earth, the courtier may
measure it himself if he has any doubts.”

In answer to the third question, Birbal said, “Counting the exact number of men
and women in the world would be a problem as there are some specimens like
our courtier friend here who cannot easily be classified as either. Therefore if all
people like him are killed, then and only then can one count the exact number.”

Moral: There is Always a Way.

The Monkey and The Crocodile

Once upon a time, a clever monkey lived in a tree that bore juicy, red rose apples.
He was very happy. One fine day, a crocodile swam up to that tree and told the
monkey that he had traveled a long distance and was in search of food as he was
very hungry. The kind monkey offered him a few rose apples. The crocodile
enjoyed them very much and asked the monkey whether he could come again for
some more fruit. The generous monkey happily agreed.

The crocodile returned the next day. And the next. And the next one after that.
Soon the two became very good friends. They discussed their lives, their friends
and family, like all friends do. The crocodile told the monkey that he had a wife
and that they lived on the other side of the river. So the kind monkey offered him
some extra rose apples to take home to his wife. The crocodile’s wife loved the
rose apples and made her husband promise to get her some every day.

Meanwhile, the friendship between the monkey and the crocodile deepened as
they spent more and more time together. The crocodile’s wife started getting
jealous. She wanted to put an end to this friendship. So she pretended that she
could not believe that her husband could be friends with a monkey. Her husband
tried to convince her that he and the monkey shared a true friendship. The
crocodile’s wife thought to herself that if the monkey lived on a diet of rose
monkeys, his flesh would be very sweet. So she asked the crocodile to invite the
monkey to their house.

The crocodile was not happy about this. He tried to make the excuse that it would
be difficult to get the monkey across the river. But his wife was determined to eat
the monkey’s flesh. So she thought of a plan. One day, she pretended to be very
ill and told the crocodile that the doctor said that she would only recover if she
ate a monkey’s heart. If her husband wanted to save her life, he must bring her
his friend’s heart.

The crocodile was aghast. He was in a dilemma. On the one hand, he loved his
friend. On the other, he could not possibly let his wife die. The crocodile’s wife
threatened him saying that if he did not get her the monkey’s heart, she would
surely die.

So the crocodile went to the rose apple tree and invited the monkey to come
home to meet his wife. He told the monkey that he could ride across the river on
the crocodile’s back. The monkey happily agreed. As they reached the middle of
the river, the crocodile began to sink. The frightened monkey asked him why he
was doing that. The crocodile explained that he would have to kill the monkey to
save his wife’s life. The clever monkey told him that he would gladly give up his
heart to save the life of the crocodile’s wife, but he had left his heart behind in
the rose apple tree. He asked the crocodile to make haste and turn back so that
the monkey could go get his heart from the apple tree.

The silly crocodile quickly swam back to the rose apple tree. The monkey
scampered up the tree to safety. He told the crocodile to tell his wicked wife that
she had married the biggest fool in the world.

Moral: Don’t underestimate yourself. There are bigger fools in this world.

Unity is Strength

Once upon a time, there was a flock of doves that flew in search of food led by
their king. One day, they had flown a long distance and were very tired. The dove
king encouraged them to fly a little further. The smallest dove picked up speed
and found some rice scattered beneath a banyan tree. So all the doves landed and
began to eat.
Suddenly a net fell over them and they were all trapped. They saw a hunter
approaching carrying a huge club. The doves desperately fluttered their wings
trying to get out, but to no avail. The king had an idea. He advised all the doves
to fly up together carrying the net with them. He said that there was strength in
unity.

Each dove picked up a portion of the net and together they flew off carrying the
net with them. The hunter looked up in astonishment. He tried to follow them,
but they were flying high over hills and valleys. They flew to a hill near a city of
temples where there lived a mouse who could help them. He was a faithful friend
of the dove king.

When the mouse heard the loud noise of their approach, he went into hiding. The
dove king gently called out to him and then the mouse was happy to see him. The
dove king explained that they had been caught in a trap and needed the mouse’s
help to gnaw at the net with his teeth and set them free.

The mouse agreed saying that he would set the king free first. The king insisted
that he first free his subjects and the king last. The mouse understood the king’s
feelings and complied with his wishes. He began to cut the net and one by one all
the doves were freed including the dove king.

They all thanked the mouse and flew away together, united in their strength.

Moral: When you work together, you are stronger.

The Little Mouse

Once upon a time, there was a Baby Mouse and Mother Mouse. They lived in
a hole in the skirting board in a big, warm house with lots of cheese to eat,  where
they wanted for nothing. Then, one day, Mother Mouse decided to take
Baby Mouse outside of their home. Waiting outside for them was a huge ginger
tomcat, licking its lips and waiting to eat them both up.

“Mother, Mother! What should we do?” Cried Baby Mouse, clinging to

his mother’s tail. Mother Mouse paused, staring up into the beady eyes of the
hungry cat. But she wasn’t scared because she knew exactly how to deal with
big, scary cats. She opened her mouth and took in a deep breath.

“Woof! Woof! Bark bark bark!” She shouted, and the cat ran away as fast as
he could.

“Wow, Mother! That was amazing!” Baby Mouse said to his mother,
smiling happily.

“And that, my child, is why it is always best to have a second language.”

Moral: It’s always good to have a second language.

Birbal caught the Thief

Once a rich merchant’s house was robbed. The merchant suspected that the thief
was one of his servants. So he went to Birbal and mentioned the incident. Birbal
went to his house and assembled all of his servants and asked that who stole the
merchant’s things. Everybody denied.

Birbal thought for a moment, then gave a stick of equal length to all the servants
of the merchant and said to them that the stick of the real thief will be longer by
two inches tomorrow. All the servants should be present here again tomorrow
with their sticks.
All the servants went to their homes and gathered again at the same place the
next day. Birbal asked them to show him their sticks. One of the servants had his
stick shorter by two inches. Birbal said, “This is your thief, merchant.”

Later the merchant asked Birbal, “How did you catch him?” Birbal said, “The
thief had already cut his stick short by two inches in the night fearing that his
stick will be longer by two inches by morning.”

Moral: Truth will always Prevail.

http://www.moralstories.org/birbal-caught-the-thief/

The Tell-Tale Heart

by Edgar Allan Poe

Illustrations for The Tell-Tale Heart were drawn by Harry Clarke, from Edgar Allan Poe's
collection, Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1919). It is featured in our collection
of Halloween Stories and Short Stories for Middle School II

TRUE!-NERVOUS--very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am! but

why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses--
not destroyed--not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.
I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in
hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily--how
calmly I can tell you the whole story.
It is impossible to tell how first the idea entered my brain; but once
conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion
there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had
never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye!
Yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture--a pale blue
eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and
so by degrees--very gradually--I made up my mind to take the life of the
old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.

Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you
should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded--
with what caution--with what foresight--with what dissimulation I went to
work!

I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I
killed him. And every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door
and opened it--oh, so gently! And then, when I had made an opening
sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed, so that no
light shone out, and then I thrust in my head. Oh, you would have laughed
to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowly--very, very slowly, so
that I might not disturb the old man's sleep. It took me an hour to place
my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay
upon his bed. Ha!--would a madman have been so wise as this? And
then, when my head was well in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously--
oh, so cautiously--cautiously (for the hinges creaked)--I undid it just so
much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye. And this I did for
seven long nights--every night just at midnight--but I found the eye always
closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man
who vexed me, but his Evil Eye. And every morning, when the day broke,
I went boldly into the chamber, and spoke courageously to him, calling
him by name in a hearty tone, and inquiring how he had passed the night.
So you see he would have been a very profound old man, indeed, to
suspect that every night, just at twelve, I looked in upon him while he
slept.

Upon the eighth night I was more than usually cautious in opening the
door. A watch's minute hand moves more quickly than did mine. Never
before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers--of my sagacity. I
could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph. To think that there I was,
opening the door, little by little, and he not even to dream of my secret
deeds or thoughts. I fairly chuckled at the idea; and perhaps he heard me;
for he moved on the bed suddenly, as if startled. Now you may think that I
drew back--but no. His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness
(for the shutters were close fastened, through fear of robbers), and so I
knew that he could not see the opening of the door, and I kept pushing it
on steadily, steadily.

I had my head in, and was about to open the lantern, when my thumb
slipped upon the tin fastening, and the old man sprang up in bed, crying
out: "Who's there?"

I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move a
muscle, and in the meantime I did not hear him lie down. He was still
sitting up in the bed listening;--just as I have done, night after night,
hearkening to the death watches in the wall.

Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal
terror. It was not a groan of pain or grief--oh no!--it was the low stifled
sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with
awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the
world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its
dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well. I knew
what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart. I knew
that he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise, when he
had turned in the bed. His fears had been ever since growing upon him.
He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. He had been
saying to himself: "It is nothing but the wind in the chimney--it is only a
mouse crossing the floor," or "it is merely a cricket which has made a
single chirp." Yes, he had been trying to comfort himself with these
suppositions; but he had found all in vain. All in vain; because Death, in
approaching him. had stalked with his black shadow before him, and
enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful influence of the
unperceived shadow that caused him to feel--although he neither saw nor
heard--to feel the presence of my head within the room.

When I had waited a long time, very patiently, without hearing him lie
down, I resolved to open a little--a very, very little crevice in the lantern.
So I opened it--you cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily--until, at
length, a single dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot from out the
crevice and full upon the vulture eye.

It was open--wide, wide open--and I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw
it with perfect distinctness--all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that
chilled the very marrow in my bones; but I could see nothing else of the
old man's face or person: for I had directed the ray, as if by instinct,
precisely upon the damned spot.

And now--have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but
over-acuteness of the senses?--now, I say, there came to my ears a low,
dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I
knew that sound well too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It
increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into
courage.

But even yet I refrained and kept still. I scarcely breathed. I held the
lantern motionless. I tried how steadily I could maintain the ray upon the
eye. Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker
and quicker' and louder and louder every instant. The old man's terror
must have been extreme! It grew louder, I say, louder every moment!--do
you mark me well? I have told you that I am nervous: so I am. And now at
the dead hour of night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so
strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror. Yet, for some
minutes longer I refrained and stood still. But the beating grew louder,
louder! I thought the heart must burst. And now a new anxiety seized
me--the sound would be heard by a neighbor! The old man's hour had
come! With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped into the room.
He shrieked once--once only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and
pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far
done. But, for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound.
This, however, did not vex me; it would not be heard through the wall. At
length it ceased. The old man was dead. I removed the bed and
examined the corpse. Yes, he was stone, stone dead. I placed my hand
upon the heart and held it there many minutes. There was no pulsation.
He was stone dead. His eye would trouble me no more.

If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the
wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned,
and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse.
I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.

I then took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, and
deposited all between the scantlings. I then replaced the boards so
cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye--not even his--could have
detected anything wrong. There was nothing to wash out--no stain of any
kind--no blood-spot whatever. I had been too wary for that. A tub had
caught all--ha! ha!

When I had made an end of these labors, it was four o'clock--still dark as
midnight. As the bell sounded the hour, there came a knocking at the
street door. I went down to open it with a light heart--for what had I now to
fear? There entered three men, who introduced themselves, with perfect
suavity, as officers of the police. A shriek had been heard by a neighbor
during the night: suspicion of foul play had been aroused; information had
been lodged at the police office, and they (the officers) had been deputed
to search the premises.

I smiled--for what had I to fear? I bade the gentlemen welcome. The

shriek, I said, was my own in a dream. The old man, I mentioned, was
absent in the country. I took my visitors all over the house. I bade them
search--search well. I led them, at length, to his chamber. I showed them
his treasures, secure, undisturbed. In the enthusiasm of my confidence, I
brought chairs into the room, and desired them here to rest from their
fatigues, while I myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph, placed
my own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the
victim.
The officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them. I was
singularly at ease. They sat, and while I answered cheerily, they chatted
familiar things. But, ere long, I felt myself getting pale and wished them
gone. My head ached, and I fancied a ringing in my ears: but still they sat
and still chatted. The ringing became more distinct:--it continued and
became more distinct: I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling: but it
continued and gained definiteness--until, at length, I found that the noise
was not within my ears.

No doubt I now grew very pale,--but I talked more fluently, and with a
heightened voice. Yet the sound increased--and what could I do? It was a
low, dull, quick sound--much such a sound as a watch makes when
enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath--and yet the officers heard it not.
I talked more quickly--more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased.
Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy
strides, as if excited to fury by the observation of the men--but the noise
steadily increased. Oh, God; what could I do? I foamed--I raved--I swore!
I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the
boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew
louder--louder --louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled.
Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God!--no, no! They heard!--they
suspected--they knew!--they were making a mockery of my horror!--this I
thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony!
Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those
hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die!--and now--
again!--hark! louder! louder! louder!

"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed!--tear up the

planks!--here, here!--it is the beating of his hideous heart!"
The Pit and the Pendulum
by Edgar Allan Poe

The Pit and The Pendumlum and the accompanying illustration by Harry Clarke
were published in 1919 in Edgar Allan Poe'sTales of Mystery and Imagination.

Impia tortorum longas hic turba furores Sanguinis innocui non satiata,
aluit. Sospite nunc patria, fracto nunc funeris antro, Mors ubi dira fuit vita
salusque patent.

[Quatrain composed for the gates of a market to be erected upon the site
of the Jacobin Club House in Paris.]

I WAS sick, sick unto death, with that long agony, and when they at
length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were
leaving me. The sentence, the dread sentence of death, was the last of
distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the
inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It
conveyed to my soul the idea of REVOLUTION, perhaps from its
association in fancy with the burr of a mill-wheel. This only for a brief
period, for presently I heard no more. Yet, for a while, I saw, but with how
terrible an exaggeration! I saw the lips of the black-robed judges. They
appeared to me white--whiter than the sheet upon which I trace these
words--and thin even to grotesqueness; thin with the intensity of their
expression of firmness, of immovable resolution, of stern contempt of
human torture. I saw that the decrees of what to me was fate were still
issuing from those lips. I saw them writhe with a deadly locution. I saw
them fashion the syllables of my name, and I shuddered, because no
sound succeeded. I saw, too, for a few moments of delirious horror, the
soft and nearly imperceptible waving of the sable draperies which
enwrapped the walls of the apartment; and then my vision fell upon the
seven tall candles upon the table. At first they wore the aspect of charity,
and seemed white slender angels who would save me: but then all at
once there came a most deadly nausea over my spirit, and I felt every
fibre in my frame thrill, as if I had touched the wire of a galvanic battery,
while the angel forms became meaningless spectres, with heads of flame,
and I saw that from them there would be no help. And then there stole
into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest
there must be in the grave. The thought came gently and stealthily, and it
seemed long before it attained full appreciation; but just as my spirit came
at length properly to feel and entertain it, the figures of the judges
vanished, as if magically, from before me; the tall candles sank into
nothingness; their flames went out utterly; the blackness of darkness
superened; all sensations appeared swallowed up in a mad rushing
descent as of the soul into Hades. Then silence, and stillness, and night
were the universe.

I had swooned; but still will not say that all of consciousness was lost.
What of it there remained I will not attempt to define, or even to describe;
yet all was not lost. In the deepest slumber--no! In delirium--no! In a
swoon--no! In death--no! Even in the grave all was not lost. Else there is
no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound of slumbers, we
break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterwards (so
frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed.
In the return to life from the swoon there are two stages; first, that of the
sense of mental or spiritual; secondly, that of the sense of physical
existence. It seems probable that if, upon reaching the second stage, we
could recall the impressions of the first, we should find these impressions
eloquent in memories of the gulf beyond. And that gulf is, what? How at
least shall we distinguish its shadows from those of the tomb? But if the
impressions of what I have termed the first stage are not at will recalled,
yet, after long interval, do they not come unbidden, while we marvel
whence they come? He who has never swooned is not he who finds
strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who
beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view; is
not he who ponders over the perfume of some novel flower; is not he
whose brain grows bewildered with the meaning of some musical
cadence which has never before arrested his attention.

Amid frequent and thoughtful endeavours to remember, amid earnest

struggles to regather some token of the state of seeming nothingness into
which my soul had lapsed, there have been moments when I have
dreamed of success; there have been brief, very brief periods when I
have conjured up remembrances which the lucid reason of a later epoch
assures me could have had reference only to that condition of seeming
unconsciousness. These shadows of memory tell indistinctly of tall figures
that lifted and bore me in silence down--down--still down--till a hideous
dizziness oppressed me at the mere idea of the interminableness of the
descent. They tell also of a vague horror at my heart on account of that
heart's unnatural stillness. Then comes a sense of sudden
motionlessness throughout all things; as if those who bore me (a ghastly
train!) had outrun, in their descent, the limits of the limitless, and paused
from the wearisomeness of their toil. After this I call to mind flatness and
dampness; and then all is MADNESS--the madness of a memory which
busies itself among forbidden things.

Very suddenly there came back to my soul motion and sound--the

tumultuous motion of the heart, and in my ears the sound of its beating.
Then a pause in which all is blank. Then again sound, and motion, and
touch, a tingling sensation pervading my frame. Then the mere
consciousness of existence, without thought, a condition which lasted
long. Then, very suddenly, THOUGHT, and shuddering terror, and
earnest endeavour to comprehend my true state. Then a strong desire to
lapse into insensibility. Then a rushing revival of soul and a successful
effort to move. And now a full memory of the trial, of the judges, of the
sable draperies, of the sentence, of the sickness, of the swoon. Then
entire forgetfulness of all that followed; of all that a later day and much
earnestness of endeavour have enabled me vaguely to recall.

So far I had not opened my eyes. I felt that I lay upon my back unbound. I
reached out my hand, and it fell heavily upon something damp and hard.
There I suffered it to remain for many minutes, while I strove to imagine
where and what I could be. I longed, yet dared not, to employ my vision. I
dreaded the first glance at objects around me. It was not that I feared to
look upon things horrible, but that I grew aghast lest there should be
NOTHING to see. At length, with a wild desperation at heart, I quickly
unclosed my eyes. My worst thoughts, then, were confirmed. The
blackness of eternal night encompassed me. I struggled for breath. The
intensity of the darkness seemed to oppress and stifle me. The
atmosphere was intolerably close. I still lay quietly, and made effort to
exercise my reason. I brought to mind the inquisitorial proceedings, and
attempted from that point to deduce my real condition. The sentence had
passed, and it appeared to me that a very long interval of time had since
elapsed. Yet not for a moment did I suppose myself actually dead. Such a
supposition, notwithstanding what we read in fiction, is altogether
inconsistent with real existence;--but where and in what state was I? The
condemned to death, I knew, perished usually at the auto-da-fes, and one
of these had been held on the very night of the day of my trial. Had I been
remanded to my dungeon, to await the next sacrifice, which would not
take place for many months? This I at once saw could not be. Victims had
been in immediate demand. Moreover my dungeon, as well as all the
condemned cells at Toledo, had stone floors, and light was not altogether
excluded.

A fearful idea now suddenly drove the blood in torrents upon my heart,
and for a brief period I once more relapsed into insensibility. Upon
recovering, I at once started to my feet, trembling convulsively in every
fibre. I thrust my arms wildly above and around me in all directions. I felt
nothing; yet dreaded to move a step, lest I should be impeded by the
walls of a TOMB. Perspiration burst from every pore, and stood in cold
big beads upon my forehead. The agony of suspense grew at length
intolerable, and I cautiously moved forward, with my arms extended, and
my eyes straining from their sockets, in the hope of catching some faint
ray of light. I proceeded for many paces, but still all was blackness and
vacancy. I breathed more freely. It seemed evident that mine was not, at
least, the most hideous of fates.

And now, as I still continued to step cautiously onward, there came

thronging upon my recollection a thousand vague rumours of the horrors
of Toledo. Of the dungeons there had been strange things narrated--
fables I had always deemed them--but yet strange, and too ghastly to
repeat, save in a whisper. Was I left to perish of starvation in this
subterranean world of darkness; or what fate perhaps even more fearful
awaited me? That the result would be death, and a death of more than
customary bitterness, I knew too well the character of my judges to doubt.
The mode and the hour were all that occupied or distracted me.

My outstretched hands at length encountered some solid obstruction. It

was a wall, seemingly of stone masonry--very smooth, slimy, and cold. I
followed it up; stepping with all the careful distrust with which certain
antique narratives had inspired me. This process, however, afforded me
no means of ascertaining the dimensions of my dungeon; as I might make
its circuit, and return to the point whence I set out, without being aware of
the fact, so perfectly uniform seemed the wall. I therefore sought the knife
which had been in my pocket when led into the inquisitorial chamber, but
it was gone; my clothes had been exchanged for a wrapper of coarse
serge. I had thought of forcing the blade in some minute crevice of the
masonry, so as to identify my point of departure. The difficulty,
nevertheless, was but trivial, although, in the disorder of my fancy, it
seemed at first insuperable. I tore a part of the hem from the robe, and
placed the fragment at full length, and at right angles to the wall. In
groping my way around the prison, I could not fail to encounter this rag
upon completing the circuit. So, at least, I thought, but I had not counted
upon the extent of the dungeon, or upon my own weakness. The ground
was moist and slippery. I staggered onward for some time, when I
stumbled and fell. My excessive fatigue induced me to remain prostrate,
and sleep soon overtook me as I lay.
Upon awaking, and stretching forth an arm, I found beside me a loaf and
a pitcher with water. I was too much exhausted to reflect upon this
circumstance, but ate and drank with avidity. Shortly afterwards I
resumed my tour around the prison, and with much toil came at last upon
the fragment of the serge. Up to the period when I fell I had counted fifty-
two paces, and upon resuming my walk I had counted forty-eight more,
when I arrived at the rag. There were in all, then, a hundred paces; and,
admitting two paces to the yard, I presumed the dungeon to be fifty yards
in circuit. I had met, however, with many angles in the wall, and thus I
could form no guess at the shape of the vault, for vault I could not help
supposing it to be.

I had little object--certainly no hope--in these researches, but a vague

curiosity prompted me to continue them. Quitting the wall, I resolved to
cross the area of the enclosure. At first I proceeded with extreme caution,
for the floor although seemingly of solid material was treacherous with
slime. At length, however, I took courage and did not hesitate to step
firmly--endeavouring to cross in as direct a line as possible. I had
advanced some ten or twelve paces in this manner, when the remnant of
the torn hem of my robe became entangled between my legs. I stepped
on it, and fell violently on my face.

In the confusion attending my fall, I did not immediately apprehend a

somewhat startling circumstance, which yet, in a few seconds afterward,
and while I still lay prostrate, arrested my attention. It was this: my chin
rested upon the floor of the prison, but my lips, and the upper portion of
my head, although seemingly at a less elevation than the chin, touched
nothing. At the same time, my forehead seemed bathed in a clammy
vapour, and the peculiar smell of decayed fungus arose to my nostrils. I
put forward my arm, and shuddered to find that I had fallen at the very
brink of a circular pit, whose extent of course I had no means of
ascertaining at the moment. Groping about the masonry just below the
margin, I succeeded in dislodging a small fragment, and let it fall into the
abyss. For many seconds I hearkened to its reverberations as it dashed
against the sides of the chasm in its descent; at length there was a sullen
plunge into water, succeeded by loud echoes. At the same moment there
came a sound resembling the quick opening, and as rapid closing of a
door overhead, while a faint gleam of light flashed suddenly through the
gloom, and as suddenly faded away.

I saw clearly the doom which had been prepared for me, and
congratulated myself upon the timely accident by which I had escaped.
Another step before my fall, and the world had seen me no more and the
death just avoided was of that very character which I had regarded as
fabulous and frivolous in the tales respecting the Inquisition. To the
victims of its tyranny, there was the choice of death with its direst physical
agonies, or death with its most hideous moral horrors. I had been
reserved for the latter. By long suffering my nerves had been unstrung,
until I trembled at the sound of my own voice, and had become in every
respect a fitting subject for the species of torture which awaited me.

Shaking in every limb, I groped my way back to the wall--resolving there

to perish rather than risk the terrors of the wells, of which my imagination
now pictured many in various positions about the dungeon. In other
conditions of mind I might have had courage to end my misery at once by
a plunge into one of these abysses; but now I was the veriest of cowards.
Neither could I forget what I had read of these pits--that the SUDDEN
extinction of life formed no part of their most horrible plan.
Agitation of spirit kept me awake for many long hours; but at length I
again slumbered. Upon arousing, I found by my side, as before, a loaf
and a pitcher of water. A burning thirst consumed me, and I emptied the
vessel at a draught. It must have been drugged, for scarcely had I drunk
before I became irresistibly drowsy. A deep sleep fell upon me--a sleep
like that of death. How long it lasted of course I know not; but when once
again I unclosed my eyes the objects around me were visible. By a wild
sulphurous lustre, the origin of which I could not at first determine, I was
enabled to see the extent and aspect of the prison.

In its size I had been greatly mistaken. The whole circuit of its walls did
not exceed twenty-five yards. For some minutes this fact occasioned me
a world of vain trouble; vain indeed--for what could be of less importance,
under the terrible circumstances which environed me than the mere
dimensions of my dungeon? But my soul took a wild interest in trifles, and
I busied myself in endeavours to account for the error I had committed in
my measurement. The truth at length flashed upon me. In my first attempt
at exploration I had counted fifty-two paces up to the period when I fell; I
must then have been within a pace or two of the fragment of serge; in fact
I had nearly performed the circuit of the vault. I then slept, and upon
awaking, I must have returned upon my steps, thus supposing the circuit
nearly double what it actually was. My confusion of mind prevented me
from observing that I began my tour with the wall to the left, and ended it
with the wall to the right.

I had been deceived too in respect to the shape of the enclosure. In

feeling my way I had found many angles, and thus deduced an idea of
great irregularity, so potent is the effect of total darkness upon one
arousing from lethargy or sleep! The angles were simply those of a few
slight depressions or niches at odd intervals. The general shape of the
prison was square. What I had taken for masonry seemed now to be iron,
or some other metal in huge plates, whose sutures or joints occasioned
the depression. The entire surface of this metallic enclosure was rudely
daubed in all the hideous and repulsive devices to which the charnel
superstition of the monks has given rise. The figures of fiends in aspects
of menace, with skeleton forms and other more really fearful images,
overspread and disfigured the walls. I observed that the outlines of these
monstrosities were sufficiently distinct, but that the colours seemed faded
and blurred, as if from the effects of a damp atmosphere. I now noticed
the floor, too, which was of stone. In the centre yawned the circular pit
from whose jaws I had escaped; but it was the only one in the dungeon.

All this I saw indistinctly and by much effort, for my personal condition had
been greatly changed during slumber. I now lay upon my back, and at full
length, on a species of low framework of wood. To this I was securely
bound by a long strap resembling a surcingle. It passed in many
convolutions about my limbs and body, leaving at liberty only my head,
and my left arm to such extent that I could by dint of much exertion supply
myself with food from an earthen dish which lay by my side on the floor. I
saw to my horror that the pitcher had been removed. I say to my horror,
for I was consumed with intolerable thirst. This thirst it appeared to be the
design of my persecutors to stimulate, for the food in the dish was meat
pungently seasoned.

Looking upward, I surveyed the ceiling of my prison. It was some thirty or

forty feet overhead, and constructed much as the side walls. In one of its
panels a very singular figure riveted my whole attention. It was the
painted figure of Time as he is commonly represented, save that in lieu of
a scythe he held what at a casual glance I supposed to be the pictured
image of a huge pendulum, such as we see on antique clocks. There was
something, however, in the appearance of this machine which caused me
to regard it more attentively. While I gazed directly upward at it (for its
position was immediately over my own), I fancied that I saw it in motion.
In an instant afterward the fancy was confirmed. Its sweep was brief, and
of course slow. I watched it for some minutes, somewhat in fear but more
in wonder. Wearied at length with observing its dull movement, I turned
my eyes upon the other objects in the cell.

A slight noise attracted my notice, and looking to the floor, I saw several
enormous rats traversing it. They had issued from the well which lay just
within view to my right. Even then while I gazed, they came up in troops
hurriedly, with ravenous eyes, allured by the scent of the meat. From this
it required much effort and attention to scare them away.

It might have been half-an-hour, perhaps even an hour (for I could take
but imperfect note of time) before I again cast my eyes upward. What I
then saw confounded and amazed me. The sweep of the pendulum had
increased in extent by nearly a yard. As a natural consequence, its
velocity was also much greater. But what mainly disturbed me was the
idea that it had perceptibly DESCENDED. I now observed, with what
horror it is needless to say, that its nether extremity was formed of a
crescent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the
horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor.
Like a razor also it seemed massy and heavy, tapering from the edge into
a solid and broad structure above. It was appended to a weighty rod of
brass, and the whole HISSED as it swung through the air.
I could no longer doubt the doom prepared for me by monkish ingenuity in
torture. My cognisance of the pit had become known to the inquisitorial
agents--THE PIT, whose horrors had been destined for so bold a
recusant as myself, THE PIT, typical of hell, and regarded by rumour as
the Ultima Thule of all their punishments. The plunge into this pit I had
avoided by the merest of accidents, and I knew that surprise or
entrapment into torment formed an important portion of all the
grotesquerie of these dungeon deaths. Having failed to fall, it was no part
of the demon plan to hurl me into the abyss, and thus (there being no
alternative) a different and a milder destruction awaited me. Milder! I half
smiled in my agony as I thought of such application of such a term.

What boots it to tell of the long, long hours of horror more than mortal,
during which I counted the rushing oscillations of the steel! Inch by inch--
line by line--with a descent only appreciable at intervals that seemed
ages--down and still down it came! Days passed--it might have been that
many days passed--ere it swept so closely over me as to fan me with its
acrid breath. The odour of the sharp steel forced itself into my nostrils. I
prayed--I wearied heaven with my prayer for its more speedy descent. I
grew frantically mad, and struggled to force myself upward against the
sweep of the fearful scimitar. And then I fell suddenly calm and lay smiling
at the glittering death as a child at some rare bauble.

There was another interval of utter insensibility; it was brief, for upon
again lapsing into life there had been no perceptible descent in the
pendulum. But it might have been long--for I knew there were demons
who took note of my swoon, and who could have arrested the vibration at
pleasure. Upon my recovery, too, I felt very--oh! inexpressibly--sick and
weak, as if through long inanition. Even amid the agonies of that period
the human nature craved food. With painful effort I outstretched my left
arm as far as my bonds permitted, and took possession of the small
remnant which had been spared me by the rats. As I put a portion of it
within my lips there rushed to my mind a half-formed thought of joy--of
hope. Yet what business had I with hope? It was, as I say, a half-formed
thought--man has many such, which are never completed. I felt that it was
of joy--of hope; but I felt also that it had perished in its formation. In vain I
struggled to perfect--to regain it. Long suffering had nearly annihilated all
my ordinary powers of mind. I was an imbecile--an idiot.

The vibration of the pendulum was at right angles to my length. I saw that
the crescent was designed to cross the region of the heart. It would fray
the serge of my robe; it would return and repeat its operations--again--
and again. Notwithstanding its terrifically wide sweep (some thirty feet or
more) and the hissing vigour of its descent, sufficient to sunder these very
walls of iron, still the fraying of my robe would be all that, for several
minutes, it would accomplish; and at this thought I paused. I dared not go
farther than this reflection. I dwelt upon it with a pertinacity of attention--as
if, in so dwelling, I could arrest HERE the descent of the steel. I forced
myself to ponder upon the sound of the crescent as it should pass across
the garment--upon the peculiar thrilling sensation which the friction of
cloth produces on the nerves. I pondered upon all this frivolity until my
teeth were on edge.

Down--steadily down it crept. I took a frenzied pleasure in contrasting its

downward with its lateral velocity. To the right--to the left--far and wide--
with the shriek of a damned spirit! to my heart with the stealthy pace of
the tiger! I alternately laughed and howled, as the one or the other idea
grew predominant.
Down--certainly, relentlessly down! It vibrated within three inches of my
bosom! I struggled violently--furiously--to free my left arm. This was free
only from the elbow to the hand. I could reach the latter, from the platter
beside me to my mouth with great effort, but no farther. Could I have
broken the fastenings above the elbow, I would have seized and
attempted to arrest the pendulum. I might as well have attempted to
arrest an avalanche!

Down--still unceasingly--still inevitably down! I gasped and struggled at

each vibration. I shrunk convulsively at its very sweep. My eyes followed
its outward or upward whirls with the eagerness of the most unmeaning
despair; they closed themselves spasmodically at the descent, although
death would have been a relief, O, how unspeakable! Still I quivered in
every nerve to think how slight a sinking of the machinery would
precipitate that keen glistening axe upon my bosom. It was hope that
prompted the nerve to quiver--the frame to shrink. It was HOPE--the hope
that triumphs on the rack--that whispers to the death-condemned even in
the dungeons of the Inquisition.

I saw that some ten or twelve vibrations would bring the steel in actual
contact with my robe, and with this observation there suddenly came over
my spirit all the keen, collected calmness of despair. For the first time
during many hours, or perhaps days, I THOUGHT. It now occurred to me
that the bandage or surcingle which enveloped me was UNIQUE. I was
tied by no separate cord. The first stroke of the razor-like crescent athwart
any portion of the band would so detach it that it might be unwound from
my person by means of my left hand. But how fearful, in that case, the
proximity of the steel! The result of the slightest struggle, how deadly!
Was it likely, moreover, that the minions of the torturer had not foreseen
and provided for this possibility! Was it probable that the bandage
crossed my bosom in the track of the pendulum? Dreading to find my
faint, and, as it seemed, my last hope frustrated, I so far elevated my
head as to obtain a distinct view of my breast. The surcingle enveloped
my limbs and body close in all directions save SAVE IN THE PATH OF
THE DESTROYING CRESCENT.

Scarcely had I dropped my head back into its original position when there
flashed upon my mind what I cannot better describe than as the unformed
half of that idea of deliverance to which I have previously alluded, and of
which a moiety only floated indeterminately through my brain when I
raised food to my burning lips. The whole thought was now present--
feeble, scarcely sane, scarcely definite, but still entire. I proceeded at
once, with the nervous energy of despair, to attempt its execution.

For many hours the immediate vicinity of the low framework upon which I
lay had been literally swarming with rats. They were wild, bold, ravenous,
their red eyes glaring upon me as if they waited but for motionlessness on
my part to make me their prey. "To what food," I thought, "have they been
accustomed in the well?"

They had devoured, in spite of all my efforts to prevent them, all but a
small remnant of the contents of the dish. I had fallen into an habitual
see-saw or wave of the hand about the platter; and at length the
unconscious uniformity of the movement deprived it of effect. In their
voracity the vermin frequently fastened their sharp fangs in my fingers.
With the particles of the oily and spicy viand which now remained, I
thoroughly rubbed the bandage wherever I could reach it; then, raising my
hand from the floor, I lay breathlessly still.
At first the ravenous animals were startled and terrified at the change--at
the cessation of movement. They shrank alarmedly back; many sought
the well. But this was only for a moment. I had not counted in vain upon
their voracity. Observing that I remained without motion, one or two of the
boldest leaped upon the frame-work and smelt at the surcingle. This
seemed the signal for a general rush. Forth from the well they hurried in
fresh troops. They clung to the wood, they overran it, and leaped in
hundreds upon my person. The measured movement of the pendulum
disturbed them not at all. Avoiding its strokes, they busied themselves
with the annointed bandage. They pressed, they swarmed upon me in
ever accumulating heaps. They writhed upon my throat; their cold lips
sought my own; I was half stifled by their thronging pressure; disgust, for
which the world has no name, swelled my bosom, and chilled with heavy
clamminess my heart. Yet one minute and I felt that the struggle would be
over. Plainly I perceived the loosening of the bandage. I knew that in
more than one place it must be already severed. With a more than human
resolution I lay STILL.

Nor had I erred in my calculations, nor had I endured in vain. I at length

felt that I was FREE. The surcingle hung in ribands from my body. But the
stroke of the pendulum already pressed upon my bosom. It had divided
the serge of the robe. It had cut through the linen beneath. Twice again it
swung, and a sharp sense of pain shot through every nerve. But the
moment of escape had arrived. At a wave of my hand my deliverers
hurried tumultously away. With a steady movement, cautious, sidelong,
shrinking, and slow, I slid from the embrace of the bandage and beyond
the reach of the scimitar. For the moment, at least I WAS FREE.
Free! and in the grasp of the Inquisition! I had scarcely stepped from my
wooden bed of horror upon the stone floor of the prison, when the motion
of the hellish machine ceased and I beheld it drawn up by some invisible
force through the ceiling. This was a lesson which I took desperately to
heart. My every motion was undoubtedly watched. Free! I had but
escaped death in one form of agony to be delivered unto worse than
death in some other. With that thought I rolled my eyes nervously around
on the barriers of iron that hemmed me in. Something unusual--some
change which at first I could not appreciate distinctly--it was obvious had
taken place in the apartment. For many minutes of a dreamy and
trembling abstraction I busied myself in vain, unconnected conjecture.
During this period I became aware, for the first time, of the origin of the
sulphurous light which illumined the cell. It proceeded from a fissure
about half-an-inch in width extending entirely around the prison at the
base of the walls which thus appeared, and were completely separated
from the floor. I endeavoured, but of course in vain, to look through the
aperture. As I arose from the attempt, the mystery of the alteration in the
chamber broke at once upon my understanding. I have observed that
although the outlines of the figures upon the walls were sufficiently
distinct, yet the colours seemed blurred and indefinite. These colours had
now assumed, and were momentarily assuming, a startling and most
intense brilliancy, that give to the spectral and fiendish portraitures an
aspect that might have thrilled even firmer nerves than my own. Demon
eyes, of a wild and ghastly vivacity, glared upon me in a thousand
directions where none had been visible before, and gleamed with the lurid
lustre of a fire that I could not force my imagination to regard as unreal.

UNREAL!--Even while I breathed there came to my nostrils the breath of

the vapour of heated iron! A suffocating odour pervaded the prison! A
deeper glow settled each moment in the eyes that glared at my agonies!
A richer tint of crimson diffused itself over the pictured horrors of blood. I
panted ' I gasped for breath! There could be no doubt of the design of my
tormentors--oh most unrelenting! oh, most demoniac of men! I shrank
from the glowing metal to the centre of the cell. Amid the thought of the
fiery destruction that impended, the idea of the coolness of the well came
over my soul like balm. I rushed to its deadly brink. I threw my straining
vision below. The glare from the enkindled roof illumined its inmost
recesses. Yet, for a wild moment, did my spirit refuse to comprehend the
meaning of what I saw. At length it forced --it wrestled its way into my
soul--it burned itself in upon my shuddering reason. O for a voice to
speak!--oh, horror!--oh, any horror but this! With a shriek I rushed from
the margin and buried my face in my hands--weeping bitterly.

The heat rapidly increased, and once again I looked up, shuddering as if
with a fit of the ague. There had been a second change in the cell--and
now the change was obviously in the FORM. As before, it was in vain that
I at first endeavoured to appreciate or understand what was taking place.
But not long was I left in doubt. The inquisitorial vengeance had been
hurried by my two-fold escape, and there was to be no more dallying with
the King of Terrors. The room had been square. I saw that two of its iron
angles were now acute--two consequently, obtuse. The fearful difference
quickly increased with a low rumbling or moaning sound. In an instant the
apartment had shifted its form into that of a lozenge. But the alteration
stopped not here--I neither hoped nor desired it to stop. I could have
clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace.
"Death," I said "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I not have
known that INTO THE PIT it was the object of the burning iron to urge
me? Could I resist its glow? or if even that, could I withstand its pressure?
And now, flatter and flatter grew the lozenge, with a rapidity that left me
no time for contemplation. Its centre, and of course, its greatest width,
came just over the yawning gulf. I shrank back--but the closing walls
pressed me resistlessly onward. At length for my seared and writhing
body there was no longer an inch of foothold on the firm floor of the
prison. I struggled no more, but the agony of my soul found vent in one
loud, long, and final scream of despair. I felt that I tottered upon the
brink--I averted my eyes--

There was a discordant hum of human voices! There was a loud blast as
of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders!
The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell
fainting into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army
had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.

The Masque of the Red Death

by Edgar Allan Poe

Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Masque of the Red Death" by Harry
Clarke (1889-1931), published in 1919.

The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever
been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal--the
madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden
dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The
scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim,
were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy
of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the
disease, were incidents of half an hour.

But Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his
dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a
thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and
dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of
his crenellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure,
the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and
lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having
entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts.

They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden
impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply
provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to
contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it
was folly to grieve or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances
of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were
ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine.
All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death."

It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion that the
Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the
most unusual magnificence.

It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the
rooms in which it was held. There were seven--an imperial suite, In many
palaces, however, such suites form a long and straight vista, while the
folding doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the
view of the whole extant is scarcely impeded. Here the case was very
different; as might have been expected from the duke's love of the
"bizarre." The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision
embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at the
right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window
looked out upon a closed corridor of which pursued the windings of the
suite. These windows were of stained glass whose color varied in
accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into
which it opened. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in
blue--and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple
in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The
third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was
furnished and lighted with orange--the fifth with white--the sixth with violet.
The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries
that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds
upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the
color of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes
were scarlet--a deep blood color. Now in no one of any of the seven
apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum, amid the profusion of
golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro and depended from the
roof. There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle within
the suite of chambers. But in the corridors that followed the suite, there
stood, opposite each window, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire,
that projected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly lit the
room. And thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic
appearances. But in the western or back chamber the effect of the fire-
light that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted
panes was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the
countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the company
bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all. It was within this
apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic
clock of ebony. It pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy,
monotonous clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the
face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs
of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly
musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an
hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause,
momentarily, in their performance, to hearken to the sound; and thus the
waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief
disconcert of the whole gay company; and while the chimes of the clock
yet rang. it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged
and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused revery
or meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter at
once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked at each other and
smiled as if at their own nervousness and folly, and made whispering
vows, each to the other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce
in them no similar emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes
(which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of Time that
flies), there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the
same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before. But, in
spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent revel. The tastes of the
duke were peculiar. He had a fine eye for color and effects. He
disregarded the "decora" of mere fashion. His plans were bold and fiery,
and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre. There are some who
would have thought him mad. His followers felt that he was not. It was
necessary to hear and see and touch him to be _sure_ he was not.

He had directed, in great part, the movable embellishments of the seven

chambers, upon occasion of this great fete; and it was his own guiding
taste which had given character to the masqueraders. Be sure they were
grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and
phantasm--much of what has been seen in "Hernani." There were
arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were
delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There were much of the
beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the
terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and
fro in the seven chambers stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And
these the dreams--writhed in and about, taking hue from the rooms, and
causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their
steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of
the velvet. And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the
voice of the clock. The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand. But the
echoes of the chime die away--they have endured but an instant--and a
light half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And now the
music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than
ever, taking hue from the many-tinted windows through which stream the
rays of the tripods. But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the
seven there are now none of the maskers who venture, for the night is
waning away; and there flows a ruddier light through the blood-colored
panes; and the blackness of the sable drapery appalls; and to him whose
foot falls on the sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a
muffled peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches _their_
ears who indulge in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments.
But these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat
feverishly the heart of life. And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length
there commenced the sounding of midnight upon the clock. And then the
music ceased, as I have told; and the evolutions of the waltzers were
quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But
now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and
thus it happened, perhaps that more of thought crept, with more of time
into the meditations of the thoughtful among those who revelled. And thus
too, it happened, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly
sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had
found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which
had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumor of
this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose
at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, of horror, and of
disgust.

In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be

supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such
sensation. In truth the masquerade license of the night was nearly
unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone
beyond the bounds of even the prince's indefinite decorum. There are
chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched
without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are
equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. The whole
company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and
bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was
tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the
grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to
resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny
must have difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have
been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the
mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His
vesture was dabbled in _blood_--and his broad brow, with all the features
of his face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.

When the eyes of Prince Prospero fell on this spectral image (which, with
a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role, stalked
to and fro among the waltzers) he was seen to be convulsed, in the first
moment with a strong shudder either of terror or distaste; but in the next,
his brow reddened with rage.

"Who dares"--he demanded hoarsely of the courtiers who stood near

him--"who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and
unmask him--that we may know whom we have to hang, at sunrise, from
the battlements!"

It was in the eastern or blue chamber in which stood Prince Prospero as

he uttered these words. They rang throughout the seven rooms loudly
and clearly, for the prince was a bold and robust man, and the music had
become hushed at the waving of his hand.

It was in the blue room where stood the prince, with a group of pale
courtiers by his side. At first, as he spoke, there was a slight rushing
movement of this group in the direction of the intruder, who, at the
moment was also near at hand, and now, with deliberate and stately step,
made closer approach to the speaker. But from a certain nameless awe
with which the mad assumptions of the mummer had inspired the whole
party, there were found none who put forth a hand to seize him; so that,
unimpeded, he passed within a yard of the prince's person; and while the
vast assembly, as with one impulse, shrank from the centers of the rooms
to the walls, he made his way uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn
and measured step which had distinguished him from the first, through
the blue chamber to the purple--to the purple to the green--through the
green to the orange--through this again to the white--and even thence to
the violet, ere a decided movement had been made to arrest him. It was
then, however, that the Prince Prospero, maddened with rage and the
shame of his own momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the six
chambers, while none followed him on account of a deadly terror that had
seized upon all. He bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached, in
rapid impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when
the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned
suddenly and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry--and the
dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which most
instantly afterward, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. Then
summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once
threw themselves into the black apartment, and seizing the mummer
whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the
ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements
and corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness,
untenanted by any tangible form.

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had
come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the
blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing
posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the
last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and
Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
The Cask of Amontillado
by Edgar Allan Poe

This story was included in Poe's collection, Tales of Mystery and Imagination, illustrated by
Harry Clarke (1919). The story was first published in Godey's Lady Book in the November
1846 edition -- the most popular periodical in America. It is often read by students in middle
and high school. Readers: note that a "pipe" in the text below is a unit of measurement,
equivalent to about 130 gallons. This story is featured in our collection of Halloween Stories

THE thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when
he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the
nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that gave utterance to a
threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely, settled
--but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea
of risk. I must not only punish but punish with impunity. A wrong is
unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally
unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him
who has done the wrong.

It must be understood that neither by word nor deed had I given Fortunato
cause to doubt my good will. I continued, as was my in to smile in his
face, and he did not perceive that my to smile now was at the thought of
his immolation.

He had a weak point --this Fortunato --although in other regards he was a

man to be respected and even feared. He prided himself on his
connoisseurship in wine. Few Italians have the true virtuoso spirit. For the
most part their enthusiasm is adopted to suit the time and opportunity, to
practise imposture upon the British and Austrian millionaires. In painting
and gemmary, Fortunato, like his countrymen, was a quack, but in the
matter of old wines he was sincere. In this respect I did not differ from him
materially; --I was skilful in the Italian vintages myself, and bought largely
whenever I could.

It was about dusk, one evening during the supreme madness of the
carnival season, that I encountered my friend. He accosted me with
excessive warmth, for he had been drinking much. The man wore motley.
He had on a tight-fitting parti-striped dress, and his head was surmounted
by the conical cap and bells. I was so pleased to see him that I thought I
should never have done wringing his hand.

I said to him --"My dear Fortunato, you are luckily met. How remarkably
well you are looking to-day. But I have received a pipe of what passes for
Amontillado, and I have my doubts."

"How?" said he. "Amontillado, A pipe? Impossible! And in the middle of

the carnival!"

"I have my doubts," I replied; "and I was silly enough to pay the full
Amontillado price without consulting you in the matter. You were not to be
found, and I was fearful of losing a bargain."

"Amontillado!"

"I have my doubts."

"Amontillado!"
"And I must satisfy them."

"Amontillado!"

"As you are engaged, I am on my way to Luchresi. If any one has a

critical turn it is he. He will tell me --"

"Luchresi cannot tell Amontillado from Sherry."

"And yet some fools will have it that his taste is a match for your own.

"Come, let us go."

"Whither?"

"To your vaults."

"My friend, no; I will not impose upon your good nature. I perceive you
have an engagement. Luchresi--"

"I have no engagement; --come."

"My friend, no. It is not the engagement, but the severe cold with which I
perceive you are afflicted. The vaults are insufferably damp. They are
encrusted with nitre."

"Let us go, nevertheless. The cold is merely nothing. Amontillado! You

have been imposed upon. And as for Luchresi, he cannot distinguish
Sherry from Amontillado."

Thus speaking, Fortunato possessed himself of my arm; and putting on a

mask of black silk and drawing a roquelaire closely about my person, I
suffered him to hurry me to my palazzo.
There were no attendants at home; they had absconded to make merry in
honour of the time. I had told them that I should not return until the
morning, and had given them explicit orders not to stir from the house.
These orders were sufficient, I well knew, to insure their immediate
disappearance, one and all, as soon as my back was turned.

I took from their sconces two flambeaux, and giving one to Fortunato,
bowed him through several suites of rooms to the archway that led into
the vaults. I passed down a long and winding staircase, requesting him to
be cautious as he followed. We came at length to the foot of the descent,
and stood together upon the damp ground of the catacombs of the
Montresors.

The gait of my friend was unsteady, and the bells upon his cap jingled as
he strode.

"The pipe," he said.

"It is farther on," said I; "but observe the white web-work which gleams
from these cavern walls."

He turned towards me, and looked into my eves with two filmy orbs that
distilled the rheum of intoxication.

"Nitre?" he asked, at length.

"Nitre," I replied. "How long have you had that cough?"

"Ugh! ugh! ugh! --ugh! ugh! ugh! --ugh! ugh! ugh! --ugh! ugh! ugh! --ugh!
ugh! ugh!"

My poor friend found it impossible to reply for many minutes.

"It is nothing," he said, at last.

"Come," I said, with decision, "we will go back; your health is precious.
You are rich, respected, admired, beloved; you are happy, as once I was.
You are a man to be missed. For me it is no matter. We will go back; you
will be ill, and I cannot be responsible. Besides, there is Luchresi --"

"Enough," he said; "the cough's a mere nothing; it will not kill me. I shall
not die of a cough."

"True --true," I replied; "and, indeed, I had no intention of alarming you

unnecessarily --but you should use all proper caution. A draught of this
Medoc will defend us from the damps.

Here I knocked off the neck of a bottle which I drew from a long row of its
fellows that lay upon the mould.

"Drink," I said, presenting him the wine. He raised it to his lips with a leer.
He paused and nodded to me familiarly, while his bells jingled.

"I drink," he said, "to the buried that repose around us."

"And I to your long life."

He again took my arm, and we proceeded.

"These vaults," he said, "are extensive."

"The Montresors," I replied, "were a great and numerous family."

"I forget your arms."

"A huge human foot d'or, in a field azure; the foot crushes a serpent
rampant whose fangs are imbedded in the heel."
"And the motto?"

"Nemo me impune lacessit."

"Good!" he said.

The wine sparkled in his eyes and the bells jingled. My own fancy grew
warm with the Medoc. We had passed through long walls of piled
skeletons, with casks and puncheons intermingling, into the inmost
recesses of the catacombs. I paused again, and this time I made bold to
seize Fortunato by an arm above the elbow.

"The nitre!" I said; "see, it increases. It hangs like moss upon the vaults.
We are below the river's bed. The drops of moisture trickle among the
bones. Come, we will go back ere it is too late. Your cough --"

"It is nothing," he said; "let us go on. But first, another draught of the
Medoc."

I broke and reached him a flagon of De Grave. He emptied it at a breath.

His eyes flashed with a fierce light. He laughed and threw the bottle
upwards with a gesticulation I did not understand.

I looked at him in surprise. He repeated the movement --a grotesque one.

"You do not comprehend?" he said.

"Not I," I replied.

"Then you are not of the brotherhood."

"How?"

"You are not of the masons."

"Yes, yes," I said; "yes, yes."

"You? Impossible! A mason?"

"A mason," I replied.

"A sign," he said, "a sign."

"It is this," I answered, producing from beneath the folds of my roquelaire

a trowel.

"You jest," he exclaimed, recoiling a few paces. "But let us proceed to the
Amontillado."

"Be it so," I said, replacing the tool beneath the cloak and again offering
him my arm. He leaned upon it heavily. We continued our route in search
of the Amontillado. We passed through a range of low arches,
descended, passed on, and descending again, arrived at a deep crypt, in
which the foulness of the air caused our flambeaux rather to glow than
flame.

At the most remote end of the crypt there appeared another less
spacious. Its walls had been lined with human remains, piled to the vault
overhead, in the fashion of the great catacombs of Paris. Three sides of
this interior crypt were still ornamented in this manner. From the fourth
side the bones had been thrown down, and lay promiscuously upon the
earth, forming at one point a mound of some size. Within the wall thus
exposed by the displacing of the bones, we perceived a still interior crypt
or recess, in depth about four feet, in width three, in height six or seven. It
seemed to have been constructed for no especial use within itself, but
formed merely the interval between two of the colossal supports of the
roof of the catacombs, and was backed by one of their circumscribing
walls of solid granite.

It was in vain that Fortunato, uplifting his dull torch, endeavoured to pry
into the depth of the recess. Its termination the feeble light did not enable
us to see.

"Proceed," I said; "herein is the Amontillado. As for Luchresi --"

"He is an ignoramus," interrupted my friend, as he stepped unsteadily

forward, while I followed immediately at his heels. In niche, and finding an
instant he had reached the extremity of the niche, and finding his
progress arrested by the rock, stood stupidly bewildered. A moment more
and I had fettered him to the granite. In its surface were two iron staples,
distant from each other about two feet, horizontally. From one of these
depended a short chain, from the other a padlock. Throwing the links
about his waist, it was but the work of a few seconds to secure it. He was
too much astounded to resist. Withdrawing the key I stepped back from
the recess.

"Pass your hand," I said, "over the wall; you cannot help feeling the nitre.
Indeed, it is very damp. Once more let me implore you to return. No?
Then I must positively leave you. But I must first render you all the little
attentions in my power."

"The Amontillado!" ejaculated my friend, not yet recovered from his

astonishment.

"True," I replied; "the Amontillado."

As I said these words I busied myself among the pile of bones of which I
have before spoken. Throwing them aside, I soon uncovered a quantity of
building stone and mortar. With these materials and with the aid of my
trowel, I began vigorously to wall up the entrance of the niche.

I had scarcely laid the first tier of the masonry when I discovered that the
intoxication of Fortunato had in a great measure worn off. The earliest
indication I had of this was a low moaning cry from the depth of the
recess. It was not the cry of a drunken man. There was then a long and
obstinate silence. I laid the second tier, and the third, and the fourth; and
then I heard the furious vibrations of the chain. The noise lasted for
several minutes, during which, that I might hearken to it with the more
satisfaction, I ceased my labours and sat down upon the bones. When at
last the clanking subsided, I resumed the trowel, and finished without
interruption the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh tier. The wall was now
nearly upon a level with my breast. I again paused, and holding the
flambeaux over the mason-work, threw a few feeble rays upon the figure
within.

A succession of loud and shrill screams, bursting suddenly from the throat
of the chained form, seemed to thrust me violently back. For a brief
moment I hesitated, I trembled. Unsheathing my rapier, I began to grope
with it about the recess; but the thought of an instant reassured me. I
placed my hand upon the solid fabric of the catacombs, and felt satisfied.
I reapproached the wall; I replied to the yells of him who clamoured. I re-
echoed, I aided, I surpassed them in volume and in strength. I did this,
and the clamourer grew still.

It was now midnight, and my task was drawing to a close. I had

completed the eighth, the ninth and the tenth tier. I had finished a portion
of the last and the eleventh; there remained but a single stone to be fitted
and plastered in. I struggled with its weight; I placed it partially in its
destined position. But now there came from out the niche a low laugh that
erected the hairs upon my head. It was succeeded by a sad voice, which I
had difficulty in recognizing as that of the noble Fortunato. The voice
said--

"Ha! ha! ha! --he! he! he! --a very good joke, indeed --an excellent jest.
We will have many a rich laugh about it at the palazzo --he! he! he! --over
our wine --he! he! he!"

"The Amontillado!" I said.

"He! he! he! --he! he! he! --yes, the Amontillado. But is it not getting late?
Will not they be awaiting us at the palazzo, the Lady Fortunato and the
rest? Let us be gone."

"Yes," I said, "let us be gone."

"For the love of God, Montresor!"

"Yes," I said, "for the love of God!"

But to these words I hearkened in vain for a reply. I grew impatient. I

called aloud --

"Fortunato!"

No answer. I called again --

"Fortunato!"

No answer still. I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it
fall within. There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells. My heart
grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so. I
hastened to make an end of my labour. I forced the last stone into its
position; I plastered it up. Against the new masonry I re-erected the old
rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them.
In pace requiescat!

THE END

Berenice
by Edgar Allan Poe

Illustration for "Berenice" by Harry Clarke, from Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of
Mystery and Imagination, 1919.

Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas

aliquantulum forelevatas. 

- Ebn Zaiat .

MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform.

Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as
the hues of that arch - as distinct too, yet as intimately blended.
Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty
I have derived a type of unloveliness? - from the covenant of peace, a
simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in
fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the
anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the
ecstasies which might have been .
My baptismal name is Egaeus; that of my family I will not mention. Yet
there are no towers in the land more time-honored than my gloomy, gray,
hereditary halls. Our line has been called a race of visionaries; and in
many striking particulars - in the character of the family mansion - in the
frescos of the chief saloon - in the tapestries of the dormitories - in the
chiselling of some buttresses in the armory - but more especially in the
gallery of antique paintings - in the fashion of the library chamber - and,
lastly, in the very peculiar nature of the library's contents - there is more
than sufficient evidence to warrant the belief.

The recollections of my earliest years are connected with that chamber,

and with its volumes - of which latter I will say no more. Here died my
mother. Herein was I born. But it is mere idleness to say that I had not
lived before - that the soul has no previous existence. You deny it? - let
us not argue the matter. Convinced myself, I seek not to convince. There
is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms - of spiritual and meaning
eyes - of sounds, musical yet sad - a remembrance which will not be
excluded; a memory like a shadow - vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady;
and like a shadow, too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it while the
sunlight of my reason shall exist.

In that chamber was I born. Thus awaking from the long night of what
seemed, but was not, nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairy land
- into a palace of imagination - into the wild dominions of monastic
thought and erudition - it is not singular that I gazed around me with a
startled and ardent eye - that I loitered away my boyhood in books, and
dissipated my youth in reverie; but it is singular that as years rolled away,
and the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my fathers - it
is wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life -
wonderful how total an inversion took place in the character of my
commonest thought. The realities of the world affected me as visions, and
as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in
turn, not the material of my every-day existence, but in very deed that
existence utterly and solely in itself.

*******

Berenice and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my paternal

halls. Yet differently we grew - I, ill of health, and buried in gloom - she,
agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy; hers, the ramble on the hill-
side - mine the studies of the cloister; I, living within my own heart, and
addicted, body and soul, to the most intense and painful meditation - she,
roaming carelessly through life, with no thought of the shadows in her
path, or the silent flight of the raven-winged hours. Berenice! -I call upon
her name - Berenice! - and from the gray ruins of memory a thousand
tumultuous recollections are startled at the sound! Ah, vividly is her image
before me now, as in the early days of her light-heartedness and joy! Oh,
gorgeous yet fantastic beauty! Oh, sylph amid the shrubberies of
Arnheim! Oh, Naiad among its fountains! And then - then all is mystery
and terror, and a tale which should not be told. Disease - a fatal disease,
fell like the simoon upon her frame; and, even while I gazed upon her, the
spirit of change swept over her, pervading her mind, her habits, and her
character, and, in a manner the most subtle and terrible, disturbing even
the identity of her person! Alas! the destroyer came and went! - and the
victim -where is she? I knew her not - or knew her no longer as Berenice.

Among the numerous train of maladies superinduced by that fatal and

primary one which effected a revolution of so horrible a kind in the moral
and physical being of my cousin, may be mentioned as the most
distressing and obstinate in its nature, a species of epilepsy not
unfrequently terminating in trance itself - trance very nearly resembling
positive dissolution, and from which her manner of recovery was in most
instances, startlingly abrupt. In the mean time my own disease - for I have
been told that I should call it by no other appellation - my own disease,
then, grew rapidly upon me, and assumed finally a monomaniac
character of a novel and extraordinary form - hourly and momently
gaining vigor - and at length obtaining over me the most
incomprehensible ascendancy. This monomania, if I must so term it,
consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in
metaphysical science termed the attentive. It is more than probable that I
am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to
convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that
nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of
meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the
contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.

To muse for long unwearied hours, with my attention riveted to some

frivolous device on the margin, or in the typography of a book; to become
absorbed, for the better part of a summer's day, in a quaint shadow falling
aslant upon the tapestry or upon the floor; to lose myself, for an entire
night, in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire; to
dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower; to repeat,
monotonously, some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent
repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind; to lose all
sense of motion or physical existence, by means of absolute bodily
quiescence long and obstinately persevered in: such were a few of the
most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the
mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding
defiance to anything like analysis or explanation.

Yet let me not be misapprehended. The undue, earnest, and morbid

attention thus excited by objects in their own nature frivolous, must not be
confounded in character with that ruminating propensity common to all
mankind, and more especially indulged in by persons of ardent
imagination. It was not even, as might be at first supposed, an extreme
condition, or exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily and
essentially distinct and different. In the one instance, the dreamer, or
enthusiast, being interested by an object usually not frivolous,
imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and
suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a day dream
often replete with luxury , he finds the incitamentum, or first cause of his
musings, entirely vanished and forgotten. In my case, the primary object
was invariably frivolous , although assuming, through the medium of my
distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance. Few deductions, if
any, were made; and those few pertinaciously returning in upon the
original object as a centre. The meditations were never pleasurable; and,
at the termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from being out of
sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the
prevailing feature of the disease. In a word, the powers of mind more
particularly exercised were, with me, as I have said before, the attentive,
and are, with the day-dreamer, the speculative.

My books, at this epoch, if they did not actually serve to irritate the
disorder, partook, it will be perceived, largely, in their imaginative and
inconsequential nature, of the characteristic qualities of the disorder itself.
I well remember, among others, the treatise of the noble Italian, Coelius
Secundus Curio, " De Amplitudine Beati Regni Dei; " St. Austin's great
work, the "City of God;" and Tertullian's "De Carne Christi ," in which the
paradoxical sentence " Mortuus est Dei filius; credible est quia ineptum
est: et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est, " occupied my
undivided time, for many weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation.

Thus it will appear that, shaken from its balance only by trivial things, my
reason bore resemblance to that ocean-crag spoken of by Ptolemy
Hephestion, which steadily resisting the attacks of human violence, and
the fiercer fury of the waters and the winds, trembled only to the touch of
the flower called Asphodel. And although, to a careless thinker, it might
appear a matter beyond doubt, that the alteration produced by her
unhappy malady, in the moral condition of Berenice, would afford me
many objects for the exercise of that intense and abnormal meditation
whose nature I have been at some trouble in explaining, yet such was not
in any degree the case. In the lucid intervals of my infirmity, her calamity,
indeed, gave me pain, and, taking deeply to heart that total wreck of her
fair and gentle life, I did not fall to ponder, frequently and bitterly, upon the
wonder-working means by which so strange a revolution had been so
suddenly brought to pass. But these reflections partook not of the
idiosyncrasy of my disease, and were such as would have occurred,
under similar circumstances, to the ordinary mass of mankind. True to its
own character, my disorder revelled in the less important but more
startling changes wrought in the physical frame of Berenice - in the
singular and most appalling distortion of her personal identity.

During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had
never loved her. In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with
me, had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the
mind. Through the gray of the early morning - among the trellised
shadows of the forest at noonday - and in the silence of my library at night
- she had flitted by my eyes, and I had seen her - not as the living and
breathing Berenice, but as the Berenice of a dream; not as a being of the
earth, earthy, but as the abstraction of such a being; not as a thing to
admire, but to analyze; not as an object of love, but as the theme of the
most abstruse although desultory speculation. And now - now I
shuddered in her presence, and grew pale at her approach; yet, bitterly
lamenting her fallen and desolate condition, I called to mind that she had
loved me long, and, in an evil moment, I spoke to her of marriage.

And at length the period of our nuptials was approaching, when, upon an
afternoon in the winter of the year - one of those unseasonably warm,
calm, and misty days which are the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon , - I sat,
(and sat, as I thought, alone,) in the inner apartment of the library. But,
uplifting my eyes, I saw that Berenice stood before me.

Was it my own excited imagination - or the misty influence of the

atmosphere - or the uncertain twilight of the chamber - or the gray
draperies which fell around her figure - that caused in it so vacillating and
indistinct an outline? I could not tell. She spoke no word; and I - not for
worlds could I have uttered a syllable. An icy chill ran through my frame; a
sense of insufferable anxiety oppressed me; a consuming curiosity
pervaded my soul; and sinking back upon the chair, I remained for some
time breathless and motionless, with my eyes riveted upon her person.
Alas! its emaciation was excessive, and not one vestige of the former
being lurked in any single line of the contour. My burning glances at
length fell upon the face.
The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the once
jetty hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with
innumerable ringlets, now of a vivid yellow, and jarring discordantly, in
their fantastic character, with the reigning melancholy of the countenance.
The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless, and seemingly pupilless, and I
shrank involuntarily from their glassy stare to he contemplation of the thin
and shrunken lips. They parted; and in a smile of peculiar meaning, the
teeth of the changed Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view.
Would to God that I had never beheld them, or that, having done so, I had
died!

*******

The shutting of a door disturbed me, and, looking up, I found that my
cousin had departed from the chamber. But from the disordered chamber
of my brain, had not, alas! departed, and would not be driven away, the
white and ghastly spectrum of the teeth. Not a speck on their surface - not
a shade on their enamel - not an indenture in their edges - but what that
period of her smile had sufficed to brand in upon my memory. I saw them
now even more unequivocally than I beheld them then. The teeth! - the
teeth! - they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and
palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale
lips writhing about them, as in the very moment of their first terrible
development. Then came the full fury of my monomania, and I struggled
in vain against its strange and irresistible influence. In the multiplied
objects of the external world I had no thoughts but for the teeth. For these
I longed with a phrenzied desire. All other matters and all different
interests became absorbed in their single contemplation. They - they
alone were present to the mental eye, and they, in their sole individuality,
became the essence of my mental life. I held them in every light. I turned
them in every attitude. I surveyed their characteristics. I dwelt upon their
peculiarities. I pondered upon their conformation. I mused upon the
alteration in their nature. I shuddered as I assigned to them in imagination
a sensitive and sentient power, and even when unassisted by the lips, a
capability of moral expression. Of Mademoiselle Salle it has been well
said, " Que tous ses pas etaient des sentiments ," and of Berenice I more
seriously believed que toutes ses dents etaient des idees . Des idees! -
ah here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me! Des idees! - ah
therefore it was that I coveted them so madly! I felt that their possession
could alone ever restore me to peace, in giving me back to reason.

And the evening closed in upon me thus - and then the darkness came,
and tarried, and went - and the day again dawned - and the mists of a
second night were now gathering around - and still I sat motionless in that
solitary room - and still I sat buried in meditation - and still the phantasma
of the teeth maintained its terrible ascendancy, as, with the most vivid
hideous distinctness, it floated about amid the changing lights and
shadows of the chamber. At length there broke in upon my dreams a cry
as of horror and dismay; and thereunto, after a pause, succeeded the
sound of troubled voices, intermingled with many low moanings of sorrow
or of pain. I arose from my seat, and throwing open one of the doors of
the library, saw standing out in the ante-chamber a servant maiden, all in
tears, who told me that Berenice was - no more! She had been seized
with epilepsy in the early morning, and now, at the closing in of the night,
the grave was ready for its tenant, and all the preparations for the burial
were completed.

*******
I found myself sitting in the library, and again sitting there alone. It
seemed that I had newly awakened from a confused and exciting dream. I
knew that it was now midnight, and I was well aware, that since the
setting of the sun, Berenice had been interred. But of that dreary period
which intervened I had no positive, at least no definite comprehension.
Yet its memory was replete with horror - horror more horrible from being
vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity. It was a fearful page in the
record my existence, written all over with dim, and hideous, and
unintelligible recollections. I strived to decypher them, but in vain; while
ever and anon, like the spirit of a departed sound, the shrill and piercing
shriek of a female voice seemed to be ringing in my ears. I had done a
deed - what was it? I asked myself the question aloud, and the whispering
echoes of the chamber answered me, - " what was it? "

On the table beside me burned a lamp, and near it lay a little box. It was
of no remarkable character, and I had seen it frequently before, for it was
the property of the family physician; but how came it there, upon my table,
and why did I shudder in regarding it? These things were in no manner to
be accounted for, and my eyes at length dropped to the open pages of a
book, and to a sentence underscored therein. The words were the
singular but simple ones of the poet Ebn Zaiat: - " Dicebant mihi sodales
si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas ."
Why then, as I perused them, did the hairs of my head erect themselves
on end, and the blood of my body become congealed within my veins?

There came a light tap at the library door - and, pale as the tenant of a
tomb, a menial entered upon tiptoe. His looks were wild with terror, and
he spoke to me in a voice tremulous, husky, and very low. What said he?
- some broken sentences I heard. He told of a wild cry disturbing the
silence of the night - of the gathering together of the household - of a
search in the direction of the sound; and then his tones grew thrillingly
distinct as he whispered me of a violated grave - of a disfigured body
enshrouded, yet still breathing - still palpitating - still alive !

He pointed to garments; - they were muddy and clotted with gore. I spoke
not, and he took me gently by the hand: it was indented with the impress
of human nails. He directed my attention to some object against the wall. I
looked at it for some minutes: it was a spade. With a shriek I bounded to
the table, and grasped the box that lay upon it. But I could not force it
open; and in my tremor, it slipped from my hands, and fell heavily, and
burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out some
instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white and
ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.

Pigs Is Pigs
by Ellis Parker Butler

Mike Flannery, the Westcote agent of the Interurban Express Company,

leaned over the counter of the express office and shook his fist. Mr.
Morehouse, angry and red, stood on the other side of the counter,
trembling with rage. The argument had been long and heated, and at last
Mr. Morehouse had talked himself speechless. The cause of the trouble
stood on the counter between the two men. It was a soap box across the
top of which were nailed a number of strips, forming a rough but
serviceable cage. In it two spotted guinea-pigs were greedily eating
lettuce leaves.
"Do as you loike, then!" shouted Flannery, "pay for thim an' take thim, or
don't pay for thim and leave thim be. Rules is rules, Misther Morehouse,
an' Mike Flannery's not goin' to be called down fer breakin' of thim."

"But, you everlastingly stupid idiot!" shouted Mr. Morehouse, madly

shaking a flimsy printed book beneath the agent's nose, "can't you read it
here-in your own plain printed rates? 'Pets, domestic, Franklin to
Westcote, if properly boxed, twenty-five cents each.'" He threw the book
on the counter in disgust. "What more do you want? Aren't they pets?
Aren't they domestic? Aren't they properly boxed? What?"

He turned and walked back and forth rapidly; frowning ferociously.

Suddenly he turned to Flannery, and forcing his voice to an artificial

calmness spoke slowly but with intense sarcasm.

"Pets," he said "P-e-t-s! Twenty-five cents each. There are two of them.
One! Two! Two times twenty-five are fifty! Can you understand that? I
offer you fifty cents."

Flannery reached for the book. He ran his hand through the pages and
stopped at page sixty four.

"An' I don't take fifty cints," he whispered in mockery. "Here's the rule for
ut. 'Whin the agint be in anny doubt regardin' which of two rates applies to
a shipment, he shall charge the larger. The con-sign-ey may file a claim
for the overcharge.' In this case, Misther Morehouse, I be in doubt. Pets
thim animals may be, an' domestic they be, but pigs I'm blame sure they
do be, an' me rules says plain as the nose on yer face, 'Pigs Franklin to
Westcote, thirty cints each.' An' Mister Morehouse, by me arithmetical
knowledge two times thurty comes to sixty cints."
Mr. Morehouse shook his head savagely. "Nonsense!" he shouted,
"confounded nonsense, I tell you! Why, you poor ignorant foreigner, that
rule means common pigs, domestic pigs, not guinea pigs!"

Flannery was stubborn.

"Pigs is pigs," he declared firmly. "Guinea-pigs, or dago pigs or Irish pigs

is all the same to the Interurban Express Company an' to Mike Flannery.
Th' nationality of the pig creates no differentiality in the rate, Misther
Morehouse! 'Twould be the same was they Dutch pigs or Rooshun pigs.
Mike Flannery," he added, "is here to tind to the expriss business and not
to hould conversation wid dago pigs in sivinteen languages fer to discover
be they Chinese or Tipperary by birth an' nativity."

Mr. Morehouse hesitated. He bit his lip and then flung out his arms wildly.

"Very well!" he shouted, "you shall hear of this! Your president shall hear
of this! It is an outrage! I have offered you fifty cents. You refuse it! Keep
the pigs until you are ready to take the fifty cents, but, by George, sir, if
one hair of those pigs' heads is harmed I will have the law on you!"

He turned and stalked out, slamming the door. Flannery carefully lifted
the soap box from the counter and placed it in a corner. He was not
worried. He felt the peace that comes to a faithful servant who has done
his duty and done it well.

Mr. Morehouse went home raging. His boy, who had been awaiting the
guinea-pigs, knew better than to ask him for them. He was a normal boy
and therefore always had a guilty conscience when his father was angry.
So the boy slipped quietly around the house. There is nothing so soothing
to a guilty conscience as to be out of the path of the avenger. Mr.
Morehouse stormed into the house. "Where's the ink?" he shouted at his
wife as soon as his foot was across the doorsill.

Mrs. Morehouse jumped, guiltily. She never used ink. She had not seen
the ink., nor moved the ink, nor thought of the ink, but her husband's tone
convicted her of the guilt of having borne and reared a boy, and she knew
that whenever her husband wanted anything in a loud voice the boy had
been at it.

"I'll find Sammy," she said meekly.

When the ink was found Mr. Morehouse wrote rapidly, and he read the
completed letter and smiled a triumphant smile.

"That will settle that crazy Irishman!" he exclaimed. "When they get that
letter he will hunt another job, all right!"

A week later Mr. Morehouse received a long official envelope with the
card of the Interurban Express Company in the upper left corner. He tore
it open eagerly and drew out a sheet of paper. At the top it bore the
number A6754. The letter was short. "Subject--Rate on guinea-pigs," it
said, "Dr. Sir--We are in receipt of your letter regarding rate on guinea-
pigs between Franklin and Westcote addressed to the president of this
company. All claims for overcharge should be addressed to the Claims
Department."

Mr. Morehouse wrote to the Claims Department. He wrote six pages of

choice sarcasm, vituperation and argument, and sent them to the Claims
Department.

A few weeks later he received a reply from the Claims Department.

Attached to it was his last letter.
"Dr. Sir," said the reply. "Your letter of the 16th inst., addressed to this
Department, subject rate on guinea- pigs from Franklin to Westcote,
ree'd. We have taken up the matter with our agent at Westcote, and his
reply is attached herewith. He informs us that you refused to receive the
consignment or to pay the charges. You have therefore no claim against
this company, and your letter regarding the proper rate on the
consignment should be addressed to our Tariff Department."

Mr. Morehouse wrote to the Tariff Department. He stated his case clearly,
and gave his arguments in full, quoting a page or two from the
encyclopedia to prove that guinea-pigs were not common pigs.

With the care that characterizes corporations when they are

systematically conducted, Mr. Morehouse's letter was numbered, O.K'd,
and started through the regular channels. Duplicate copies of the bill of
lading, manifest, Flannery's receipt for the package and several other
pertinent papers were pinned to the letter, and they were passed to the
head of the Tariff Department.

The head of the Tariff Department put his feet on his desk and yawned.
He looked through the papers carelessly.

"Miss Kane," he said to his stenographer, "take this letter. 'Agent,

Westcote, N. J. Please advise why consignment referred to in attached
papers was refused domestic pet rates."'

Miss Kane made a series of curves and angles on her note book and
waited with pencil poised. The head of the department looked at the
papers again.
"Huh! guinea-pigs!" he said. "Probably starved to death by this time! Add
this to that letter: 'Give condition of consignment at present.'"

He tossed the papers on to the stenographer's desk, took his feet from his
own desk and went out to lunch.

When Mike Flannery received the letter he scratched his head.

"Give prisint condition," he repeated thoughtfully. "Now what do thim

clerks be wantin' to know, I wonder! 'Prisint condition, 'is ut? Thim pigs,
praise St. Patrick, do be in good health, so far as I know, but I niver was
no veternairy surgeon to dago pigs. Mebby thim clerks wants me to call in
the pig docther an' have their pulses took. Wan thing I do know, howiver,
which is they've glorious appytites for pigs of their soize. Ate? They'd ate
the brass padlocks off of a barn door I If the paddy pig, by the same
token, ate as hearty as these dago pigs do, there'd be a famine in
Ireland."

To assure himself that his report would be up to date, Flannery went to

the rear of the office and looked into the cage. The pigs had been
transferred to a larger box--a dry goods box.

"Wan, -- two, -- t'ree, -- four, -- five, -- six, -- sivin, -- eight!" he counted.

"Sivin spotted an' wan all black. All well an' hearty an' all eatin' loike ragin'
hippypottymusses. He went back to his desk and wrote.

"Mr. Morgan, Head of Tariff Department," he wrote. "Why do I say dago

pigs is pigs because they is pigs and will be til you say they ain't which is
what the rule book says stop your jollying me you know it as well as I do.
As to health they are all well and hoping you are the same. P. S. There
are eight now the family increased all good eaters. P. S. I paid out so far
two dollars for cabbage which they like shall I put in bill for same what?"

Morgan, head of the Tariff Department, when he received this letter,

laughed. He read it again and became serious.

"By George!" he said, "Flannery is right, 'pigs is pigs.' I'll have to get
authority on this thing. Meanwhile, Miss Kane, take this letter: Agent,
Westcote, N. J. Regarding shipment guinea-pigs, File No. A6754. Rule
83, Gen. eral Instruction to Agents, clearly states that agents shall collect
from consignee all costs of provender, etc., etc., required for live stock
while in transit or storage. You will proceed to collect same from
consignee."

Flannery received this letter next morning, and when he read it he

grinned.

"Proceed to collect," he said softly. "How thim clerks do loike to be talkin'!

Me proceed to col- lect two dollars and twinty-foive cints off Misther
Morehouse! I wonder do thim clerks know Misther Morehouse? I'll git it!
Oh, yes! 'Misther Morehouse, two an' a quarter, plaze.' 'Cert'nly, me dear
frind Flannery. Delighted!' Not!"

Flannery drove the express wagon to Mr. Morehouse's door. Mr.

Morehouse answered the bell.

"Ah, ha!" he cried as soon as he saw it was Flannery. "So you've come to
your senses at last, have you? I thought you would! Bring the box in."

"I hev no box," said Flannery coldly. "I hev a bill agin Misther John C.
Morehouse for two dollars and twinty-foive cints for kebbages aten by his
dago pigs. Wud you wish to pay ut?"
"Pay-- Cabbages-- !" gasped Mr. Morehouse. "Do you mean to say that
two little guinea-pigs--"

"Eight!" said Flannery. "Papa an' mamma an' the six childer. Eight!"

For answer Mr. Morehouse slammed the door in Flannery's face.

Flannery looked at the door reproachfully.

"I take ut the con-sign-y don't want to pay for thim kebbages," he said. "If I
know signs of refusal, the con-sign-y refuses to pay for wan dang
kebbage leaf an' be hanged to me!"

Mr. Morgan, the head of the Tariff Department, consulted the president of
the Interurban Express Company regarding guinea-pigs, as to whether
they were pigs or not pigs. The president was inclined to treat the matter
lightly.

"What is the rate on pigs and on pets?" he asked.

"Pigs thirty cents, pets twenty-five," said Morgan.

"Then of course guinea-pigs are pigs," said the president.

"Yes," agreed Morgan, "I look at it that way, too. A thing that can come
under two rates is naturally due to be classed as the higher. But are
guinea-pigs, pigs? Aren't they rabbits?"

"Come to think of it," said the president, "I believe they are more like
rabbits. Sort of half-way station between pig and rabbit. I think the
question is this--are guinea-pigs of the domestic pig family? I'll ask
professor Gordon. He is authority on such things. Leave the papers with
me."
The president put the papers on his desk and wrote a letter to Professor
Gordon. Unfortunately the Professor was in South America collecting
zoological specimens, and the letter was forwarded to him by his wife. As
the Professor was in the highest Andes, where no white man had ever
penetrated, the letter was many months in reaching him. The president
forgot the guinea-pigs, Morgan forgot them, Mr. Morehouse forgot them,
but Flannery did not. One- half of his time he gave to the duties of his
agency; the other half was devoted to the guinea-pigs. Long before
Professor Gordon received the president's letter Morgan received one
from Flannery.

"About them dago pigs," it said, "what shall I do they are great in family
life, no race suicide for them, there are thirty-two now shall I sell them do
you take this express office for a menagerie, answer quick."

Morgan reached for a telegraph blank and wrote:

"Agent, Westcote. Don't sell pigs."

He then wrote Flannery a letter calling his attention to the fact that the
pigs were not the property of the company but were merely being held
during a settlement of a dispute regarding rates. He advised Flannery to
take the best possible care of them.

Flannery, letter in hand, looked at the pigs and sighed. The dry-goods box
cage had become too small. He boarded up twenty feet of the rear of the
express office to make a large and airy home for them, and went about
his business. He worked with feverish intensity when out on his rounds,
for the pigs required attention and took most of his time. Some months
later, in desperation, he seized a sheet of paper and wrote "160" across it
and mailed it to Morgan. Morgan returned it asking for explanation.
Flannery replied:

"There be now one hundred sixty of them dago pigs, for heavens sake let
me sell off some, do you want me to go crazy, what."

"Sell no pigs," Morgan wired.

Not long after this the president of the express company received a letter
from Professor Gordon. It was a long and scholarly letter, but the point
was that the guinea-pig was the Cava aparoea while the common pig was
the genius Sus of the family Suidae. He remarked that they were prolific
and multiplied rapidly.

"They are not pigs," said the president, decidedly, to Morgan. "The
twenty-five cent rate applies."

Morgan made the proper notation on the papers that had accumulated in
File A6754, and turned them over to the Audit Department. The Audit
Department took some time to look the matter up, and after the usual
delay wrote Flannery that as he had on hand one hundred and sixty
guinea-pigs, the property of consignee, he should deliver them and collect
charges at the rate of twenty-five cents each.

Flannery spent a day herding his charges through a narrow opening in

their cage so that he might count them.

"Audit Dept." he wrote, when he had finished the count, "you are way off
there may be was one hundred and sixty dago pigs once, but wake up
don't be a back number. I've got even eight hundred, now shall I collect
for eight hundred or what, how about sixty-four dollars I paid out for
cabbages."
It required a great many letters back and forth before the Audit
Department was able to understand why the error had been made of
billing one hundred and sixty instead of eight hundred, and still more time
for it to get the meaning of the "cabbages."

Flannery was crowded into a few feet at the extreme front of the office.
The pigs had all the rest of the room and two boys were employed
constantly attending to them. The day after Flannery had counted the
guinea- pigs there were eight more added to his drove, and by the time
the Audit Department gave him authority to collect for eight hundred
Flannery had given up all attempts to attend to the receipt or the delivery
of goods. He was hastily building galleries around the express office, tier
above tier. He had four thousand and sixty-four guinea-pigs to care for!
More were arriving daily.

Immediately following its authorization the Audit Department sent another

letter, but Flannery was too busy to open it. They wrote another and then
they telegraphed:

"Error in guinea-pig bill. Collect for two guinea-pigs, fifty cents. Deliver all
to consignee."

Flannery read the telegram and cheered up. He wrote out a bill as rapidly
as his pencil could travel over paper and ran all the way to the Morehouse
home. At the gate he stopped suddenly. The house stared at him with
vacant eyes. The windows were bare of curtains and he could see into
the empty rooms. A sign on the porch said, "To Let." Mr. Morehouse had
moved! Flannery ran all the way back to the express office. Sixty-nine
guinea-pigs had been born during his absence. He ran out again and
made feverish inquiries in the village. Mr. Morehouse had not only moved,
but he had left Westcote. Flannery returned to the express office and
found that two hundred and six guinea-pigs had entered the world since
he left it. He wrote a telegram to the Audit Department.

"Can't collect fifty cents for two dago pigs consignee has left town address
unknown what shall I do? Flannery."

The telegram was handed to one of the clerks in the Audit Department,
and as he read it he laughed.

"Flannery must be crazy. He ought to know that the thing to do is to return

the consignment here," said the clerk. He telegraphed Flannery to send
the pigs to the main office of the company at Franklin.

When Flannery received the telegram he set to work. The six boys be had
engaged to help him also set to work. They worked with the haste of
desperate men, making cages out of soap boxes, cracker boxes, and all
kinds of boxes, and as fast as the cages were completed they filled them
with guinea-pigs and expressed them to Franklin. Day after day the cages
of guineapigs flowed in a steady stream from Westcote to Franklin, and
still Flannery and his six helpers ripped and nailed and packed--
relentlessly and feverishly. At the end of the week they had shipped two
hundred and eighty cases of guinea-pigs, and there were in the express
office seven hundred and four more pigs than when they began packing
them.

"Stop sending pigs. Warehouse full," came a telegram to Flannery. He

stopped packing only long enough to wire back, "Can't stop," and kept on
sending them. On the next train up from Franklin came one of the
company's inspectors. He had instructions to stop the stream of guinea-
pigs at all hazards. As his train drew up at Westcote station he saw a
cattle car standing on the express company's siding. When he reached
the express office he saw the express wagon backed up to the door. Six
boys were carrying bushel baskets full of guinea- pigs from the office and
dumping them into the wagon. Inside the room Flannery, with' his coat
and vest off, was shoveling guinea-pigs into bushel baskets with a coal
scoop. He was winding up the guinea-pig episode.

He looked up at the inspector with a snort of anger.

"Wan wagonload more an, I'll be quit of thim, an' niver will ye catch
Flannery wid no more foreign pigs on his hands. No, sur! They near was
the death o' me. Nixt toime I'll know that pigs of whaiver nationality is
domistic pets--an' go at the lowest rate. "

He began shoveling again rapidly, speaking quickly between breaths.

"Rules may be rules, but you can't fool Mike Flannery twice wid the same
thrick--whin ut comes to live stock, dang the rules. So long as Flannery
runs this expriss office--pigs is pets--an' cows is pets--an' horses is pets--
an' lions an' tigers an' Rocky Mountain goats is pets--an' the rate on thim
is twinty-foive cints."

He paused long enough to let one of the boys put an empty basket in the
place of the one he had just filled. There were only a few guinea-pigs left.
As he noted their limited number his natural habit of looking on the bright
side returned.

"Well, annyhow," he said cheerfully, "'tis not so bad as ut might be. What
if thim dago pigs had been elephants!"

Mark Twain: A Child's Biography

by Mark Twain

This biography of Mark Twain (whose given name was Samuel Clemens) for children was
excerpted from Mary Stoyell Stimpson's book, A Child's Book of American
Biography (1915). Add over one hundred years to Ms. Stimpson's time reference when you
read it with your own children.

Before he was Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens as a boy

John Clemens, Samuel's father, was a farmer, merchant, and postmaster

in a Missouri town, called Florida. His wife, Jane Clemens, was a stirring,
busy woman, who liked to get her work out of the way and then have a
real frolic. Her husband did not know what it meant to frolic. He was not
very well to begin with, and when he had any spare time, he sat by
himself figuring away on an invention, year after year. He spent a good
deal of time, too, thinking what fine things he would do for his family when
he sold a great tract of land in Tennessee. He had bought seventy-five
thousand acres of land when he was much younger, for just a few cents
an acre, and when that land went up in price, he expected to be pointed
out as a millionaire, at least. John Clemens was a good man and
something of a scholar, but he was not the least bit merry. His children
never saw him laugh once in his whole life! Think of it!

Mrs. Clemens did not like to have any one around when she was bustling
through the housework, so the six children spent the days roaming
through the country, picking nuts and berries. When it came night and
they had had their supper, they would crowd around the open fire and
coax Jennie, a slave girl, or Uncle Ned, a colored farm-hand, to tell them
stories.

Uncle Ned was a famous story-teller. When he described witches and

goblins, the children would look over their shoulders as if they half
expected to see the queer creatures in the room. All these stories began
"Once 'pon a time," but each one ended differently. One of the children,
Sam Clemens, admired Uncle Ned's stories so that he could hardly wait
for evening to come.

Sam was a delicate child. The neighbors used to shake their heads and
declare he would never live to be a man, and every one always spoke of
him as "little Sam."

When Mr. Clemens moved to another town some distance away, the
mother said instantly: "Well, Hannibal may be all right for your business,
but Florida agrees so well with little Sam, that I shall spend every summer
here with the children, on the Quarles farm."

The children were glad she held to this plan, for Mr. Quarles laughed and
joked with them, built them high swings, let them ride in ox-teams and go
on horseback, and tumble in the hayfields all they wished. They had so
much fun and exercise that they were even willing to go to bed without
any stories. Sam grew plump.

A funny thing happened the first summer they went to nice Mr. Quarles's.
Mrs. Clemens, with the older children, the new baby, and Jennie, went on
ahead in a large wagon. Sam was asleep. Mr. Clemens was to wait until
he woke up and then was to carry him on horseback, to join the rest.
Well, as Mr. Clemens was waiting for Sam to finish his nap, he got to
thinking of his invention, or his Tennessee land, and presently he saddled
and bridled the horse and rode away[184] without him. He never thought
of Sam again until his wife said, as he reached the Quarles's dooryard:
"Where is little Sam?"

"Why—why—" he stammered, "I must have forgotten him." Of course he

was ashamed of himself and hurried a man off to Hannibal, on a swift
horse, where Sam was found hungry and frightened, wandering through
the locked house.

Sam was sent to school when he was five. He certainly did not like to
study very well but did learn to be a fine reader and speller.

At the age of nine, Sam was a good swimmer (although he came very
near being drowned three different times, while he was learning) and
loved the river so that he was to be found on its shore almost any hour of
the day. He longed to travel by steamer. Once he ran away and hid on
board one until it was well down the river. As soon as he showed himself
to the captain, he was put ashore, his father was sent for, and he
received a whipping that he remembered a long time.

At nine he had a head rather too large for his body, and it looked even
bigger because[185] he had such a lot of waving, sandy hair. He had fine
gray eyes, a slow, drawling voice, and said such droll things that the boys
listened to everything he said. His two best chums were Will Bowen and
John Briggs. These three friends could run like deer, and what time they
were not fishing or swimming they usually spent in a cave which they had
found.

At twelve he was just a careless, happy, barefoot boy, often in mischief,

and only excelling in two things at school. He won the weekly medal for
spelling, and his compositions were so funny that the teachers and pupils
used to laugh till the tears came, when they were read aloud. His
teachers said he ought to train himself for a writer, but it did not seem to
him that there was anything so noble or desirable in this world as being a
pilot. And he loved the great Mississippi River better than any place he
had known or could imagine.

Sam's father died, whispering: "Don't sell the Tennessee land! Hold on to
it, and you will all be rich!"

After his death Sam learned the printer's[186] trade. He was very quick in
setting type and accurate, so that he soon helped his older brother start a
newspaper. He worked with his brother until he was eighteen, and then
he told his mother that he wanted to start out for himself in the world.
Jane Clemens loved him dearly and hated to part with him, but when she
saw his heart was set on going, she took up a testament and said: "Well,
Sam, you may try it, but I want you to take hold of this book and make me
a promise. I want you to repeat after me these words—'I do solemnly
swear that I will not throw a card or drink a drop of liquor while I am
gone!'"

He repeated these words after her, bade her good-by, and went to St.
Louis. He meant to travel, and as he earned enough by newspaper work,
he visited New York, Philadelphia, and was on his way to South America
when he got a chance to be a pilot on the Mississippi River. While he was
learning this trade, he was happier than he had ever been in his life. If
you want to know what happened to him at this time you must read a
book he wrote, Life on the Mississippi River. He wrote a great many
books and signed whatever he wrote with a queer name—MARK TWAIN.
This was an old term used by pilots to show how deep the water is where
they throw the lead. His writings, like his boyish compositions, made
people laugh. So that now, although he has been dead several years,
whenever the name of Mark Twain is mentioned, a smile goes around. If
you want to know more about the actual doings of Sam and his chums,
Will Bowen and John Briggs, read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, for
in those books Sam has set down a pretty fair account of their
escapades.

Mr. Clemens had a wife and children of whom he was very fond. As he
made much money from his books and lectures, they were all able to
travel in foreign countries, and his best book of travel is Innocents
Abroad. It seems to me that even his father would have laughed over that
book. Speaking of his father again reminds me to tell you that the
Tennessee land never brought any luxuries to the Clemens family. It was
sold for less than the taxes had amounted to.

Jim Baker's Blue-Jay Yarn

by Mark Twain

One of Mark Twain's most famous short stories, Jim Baker's Blue-jay Yarn,
was adapted from a campfire story told by Jim Gillis while Twain and Gillis were
prospecting for gold during the winter of 1864-65. It must have been an
interesting story in those circumstances; a story about Jays futilely filling a hole,
told to men who were fruitlessly digging one. Twain transforms the original into
a biting satire about human behavior and persistence.

Animals talk to each other, of course. There can be no question about

that; but I suppose there are very few people who can understand them. I
never knew but one man who could. I knew he could, however, because
he told me so himself. He was a middle-aged, simple-hearted miner who
had lived in a lonely corner of California, among the woods and
mountains, a good many years, and had studied the ways of his only
neighbors, the beasts and the birds, until he believed he could accurately
translate any remark which they made. This was Jim Baker. According to
Jim Baker, some animals have only a limited education, and use only
very simple words, and scarcely ever a comparison or a flowery figure;
whereas, certain other animals have a large vocabulary, a fine command
of language and a ready and fluent delivery; consequently these latter talk
a great deal; they like it; they are conscious of their talent, and they enjoy
“showing off.” Baker said, that after long and careful observation, he had
come to the conclusion that the blue-jays were the best talkers he had
found among birds and beasts. Said he:—

“There’s more to a blue-jay than any other creature. He has got more
moods, and more different kinds of feelings than other creature; and mind
you, whatever a blue-jay feels, he can put into language. And no mere
commonplace language, either, but rattling, out-and-out book-talk—and
bristling with metaphor, too—just bristling! And as for command of
language—why you never see a blue-jay get stuck for a word. No man
ever did. They just boil out of him! And another thing: I’ve noticed a good
deal, and there’s no bird, or cow, or anything that uses as good grammar
as a blue-jay. You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does—
but you let a cat get excited, once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with
another cat on a shed, nights, and you’ll hear grammar that will give you
the lockjaw. Ignorant people think it’s the noise which fighting cats make
that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it’s the sickening grammar they use.
Now I’ve never heard a jay use bad grammar but very seldom; and when
they do, they are as ashamed as a human; they shut right down and
leave.

“You may call a jay a bird. Well, so he is, in a measure—because he’s got
feathers on him, and don’t belong to no church, perhaps; but otherwise he
is just as much a human as you be. And I’ll tell you for why. A jay’s gifts,
and instincts, and feelings, and interests, cover the whole ground. A jay
hasn’t got any more principle than a Congressman. A jay will lie, a jay will
steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay
will go back on his solemnest promise. The sacredness of an obligation is
a thing which you can’t cram into no blue-jay’s head. Now on top of all
this, there’s another thing: a jay can out-swear any gentleman in the
mines. You think a cat can swear. Well, a cat can; but you give a blue-jay
a subject that calls for his reserve-powers, and where is your cat? Don’t
talk to me—I know too much about this thing. And there’s yet another
thing: in the one little particular of scolding—just good, clean, out-and-out
scolding—a blue-jay can lay over anything, human or divine. Yes, sir, a
jay is everything that a man is. A jay can cry, a jay can laugh, a jay can
feel shame, a jay can reason and plan and discuss, a jay likes gossip and
scandal, a jay has got a sense of humor, a jay knows when he is an ass
just as well as you do—maybe better. If a jay ain’t human, he better take
in his sign, that’s all. Now I’m going to tell you a perfectly true fact about
some blue-jays.”

“When I first begun to understand jay language correctly, there was a little
incident happened here. Seven years ago, the last man in this region but
me, moved away. There stands his house,—been empty ever since; a log
house, with a plank roof—just one big room, and no more; no ceiling—
nothing between the rafters and the floor. Well, one Sunday morning I
was sitting out here in front of my cabin, with my cat, taking the sun, and
looking at the blue hills, and listening to the leaves rustling so lonely in the
trees, and thinking of the home away yonder in the States, that I hadn’t
heard from in thirteen years, when a blue jay lit on that house, with an
acorn in his mouth, and says, ‘Hello, I reckon I’ve struck something.’
When he spoke, the acorn dropped out of his month and rolled down the
roof, of course, but he didn’t care; his mind was all on the thing he had
struck. It was a knot-hole in the roof. He cocked his head to one side,
shut one eye and put the other one to the hole, like a ’possum looking
down a jug; then he glanced up with his bright eyes, gave a wink or two
with his wings—which signifies gratification, you understand,—and says,
‘It looks like a hole, it’s located like a hole,—blamed if I don’t believe it is a
hole!’

details—walked round and round the hole and spied into it from every
point of the compass. No use. Now he took a thinking attitude on the
comb of the roof and scratched the back of his head with his right foot a
minute, and finally says, ‘Well, it’s too many for me, that’s certain; must be
a mighty long hole; however, I ain’t got no time to fool around here, I got
to ’tend to business; I reckon it’s all right—chance it, anyway.’

“So he flew off and fetched another acorn and dropped it in, and tried to
flirt his eye to the hole quick enough to see what become of it, but he was
too late. He held his eye there as much as a minute; then he raised up
and sighed, and says, ‘Consound it, I don’t seem to understand this thing,
no way; however, I’ll tackle her again.’ He fetched another acorn, and
done his level best to see what become of it, but he couldn’t. He says,
‘Well, I never struck no such a hole as this, before; I’m of the opinion it’s a
totally new kind of a hole.’ Then he begun to get mad. He held in for a
spell, walking up and down the comb of the roof and shaking his head
and muttering to himself; but his feelings got the upper hand of him,
presently, and he broke loose and cussed himself black in the face. I
never see a bird take on so about a little thing. When he got through he
walks to the hole and looks in again for half a minute; then he says, ‘Well,
you’re a long hole, and a deep hole, and a mighty singular hole altogether
—but I’ve started in to fill you, and I’m d—d if I don’t fill you, if it takes a
hundred years!’

“And with that, away he went. You never see a bird work so since you
was born. He laid into his work like a nigger, and the way he hove acorns
into that hole for about two hours and a half was one of the most exciting
and astonishing spectacles I ever struck. He never stopped to take a look
any more—he just hove ’em in and went for more. Well at last he could
hardly flop his wings, he was so tuckered out. He comes a-drooping
down, once more, sweating like an ice-pitcher, drops his acorn in and
says, ‘Now I guess I’ve got the bulge on you by this time!’ So he bent
down for a look. If you’ll believe me, when his head come up again he
was just pale with rage. He says, ‘I’ve shoveled acorns enough in there to
keep the family thirty years, and if I can see a sign of one of ’em I wish I
may land in a museum with a belly full of sawdust in two minutes!’ “He
just had strength enough to crawl up on to the comb and lean his back
agin the chimbly, and then he collected his impressions and begun to free
his mind. I see in a second that what I had mistook for profanity in the
mines was only just the rudiments, as you may say.

“Another jay was going by, and heard him doing his devotions, and stops
to inquire what was up. The sufferer told him the whole circumstance, and
says, ‘Now yonder’s the hole, and if you don’t believe me, go and look for
yourself.’ So this fellow went and looked, and comes back and says, ‘How
many did you say you put in there?’ ‘Not any less than two tons,’ says the
sufferer. The other jay went and looked again. He couldn’t seem to make
it out, so he raised a yell, and three more jays come. They all examined
the hole, they all made the sufferer tell it over again, then they all
discussed it, and got off as many leather-headed opinions about it as an
average crowd of humans could have done.

“They called in more jays; then more and more, till pretty soon this whole
region ’peared to have a blue flush about it. There must have been five
thousand of them; and such another jawing and disputing and ripping and
cussing, you never heard. Every jay in the whole lot put his eye to the
hole and delivered a more chuckle-headed opinion about the mystery
than the jay that went there before him. They examined the house all
over, too. The door was standing half open, and at last one old jay
happened to go and light on it and look in. Of course that knocked the
mystery galley-west in a second. There lay the acorns, scattered all over
the floor. He flopped his wings and raised a whoop. ‘Come here!’ he says,
‘Come here, everybody; hang’d if this fool hasn’t been trying to fill up a
house with acorns!’ They all came a-swooping down like a blue cloud,
and as each fellow lit on the door and took a glance, the whole absurdity
of the contract that that first jay had tackled hit him home and he fell over
backwards suffocating with laughter, and the next jay took his place and
done the same.

“Well, sir, they roosted around here on the house-top and the trees for an
hour, and guffawed over that thing like human beings. It ain’t any use to
tell me a blue-jay hasn’t got a sense of humor, because I know better.
And memory, too. They brought jays here from all over the United States
to look down that hole, every summer for three years. Other birds too.
And they could all see the point, except an owl that come from Nova
Scotia to visit the Yo Semite, and he took this thing in on his way back.
He said he couldn’t see anything funny in it. But then he was a good deal
disappointed about Yo Semite, too.”

A True Story, Repeated Word for

Word As I Heard It
by Mark Twain

"Aunt Rachel, how is it that you 've lived sixty years and never had any trouble?" She stopped
quaking. She paused, and there was a moment of silence. She turned her face over her
shoulder toward me, and said, without even a smile in her voice:—

"Misto C—, is you in 'arnest?" ...

She faced fairly around, now, and was full of earnestness.

"Has I had any trouble? Misto C—, I's gwyne to tell you, den I leave it to you . . . .

It was summer time, and twilight. We were sitting on the porch of the
farm-house, on the summit of the hill, and "Aunt Rachel" was sitting
respectfully below our level, on the steps, -- for she was our servant, and
colored. She was of mighty frame and stature; she was sixty years old,
but her eye was undimmed and her strength unabated. She was a
cheerful, hearty soul, and it was no more trouble for her to laugh than it is
for a bird to sing. She was under fire, now, as usual when the day was
done. That is to say, she was being chaffed without mercy, and was
enjoying it. She would let off peal after peal of laughter, and then sit with
her face in her hands and shake with throes of enjoyment which she
could no longer get breath enough to express. At such a moment as this
a thought occurred to me, and I said: --

"Aunt Rachel, how is it that you 've lived sixty years and never had any
trouble?" She stopped quaking. She paused, and there was a moment of
silence. She turned her face over her shoulder toward me, and said,
without even a smile in her voice: --

"Misto C -- , is you in 'arnest?"

It surprised me a good deal; and it sobered my manner and my speech,

too. I said: --

"Why, I thought -- that is, I meant -- why, you can't have had any trouble.
I've never heard you sigh, and never seen your eye when there wasn't a
laugh in it."

She faced fairly around, now, and was full of earnestness.

"Has I had any trouble? Misto C -- , I's gwyne to tell you, den I leave it to
you. I was bawn down 'mongst de slaves; I knows all 'bout slavery, 'case I
ben one of 'em my own se'f. Well, sah, my ole man -- dat's my husban' --
he was lovin' an' kind to me, jist as kind as you is to yo' own wife. An' we
had children -- seven chil'en -- an' we loved dem chil'en jist de same as
you loves yo' chil'en. Dey was black, but de Lord can't make no chil'en so
black but what dey mother loves 'em an' would n't give 'em up, no, not for
anything dat's in dis whole world.
"Well, sah, I was raised in Ole Fo' -- ginny, but my mother she was raised
in Maryland; an' my souls! she was turrible when she'd git started! My
lan'! but she'd make de fur fly! When she'd git into dem tantrums, she
always had one word dat she said. She'd straighten herse'f up an' put her
fists in her hips an' say, 'I want you to understan' dat I wa' n't bawn in de
mash to be fool' by trash! I's one o' de ole Blue Hen's Chickens, I is!'
'Ca'se, you see, dat's what folks dat's bawn in Maryland calls deyselves,
an' dey's proud of it. Well, dat was her word. I don't ever forgit it, beca'se
she said it so much, an' beca'se she said it one day when my little Henry
tore his wris' awful, an' most busted his head, right up at de top of his
forehead, an' de niggers did n't fly aroun' fas' enough to 'tend to him. An'
when dey talk' back at her, she up an' she says, 'Look-a-heah!' I she
says, 'I want you niggers to understan' dat I wa'n't bawn in de mash to be
fool' by trash! I's one o' de ole Blue Hen's Chickens, I is!' an' den she clar'
dat kitchen an' bandage' up de chile herse'f. So I says dat word, too,
when I's riled.

"Well, bymeby my ole mistis say she's broke, an' she got to sell all de
niggers on de place. An' when I heah dat dey gwyne to sell us all off at
action in Richmon', oh de good gracious! I know what dat mean!"

Aunt Rachel had gradually risen, while she warmed to her subject, and
now she towered above us, black against the stars.

"Dey put chains on us an' put us on a stan' as high as dis po'ch, -- twenty
foot high, -- an' all de people stood aroun', crowds an' crowds. An' dey'd
come up dah an' look at us all roun', an' squeeze our arm, an' make us git
up an' walk, an' den say, 'Dis one don't 'mount to much.' An' dey sole my
ole man, an' took him away, an' dey begin to sell my chil'en an' take dem
away, an' I begin to cry; an' de man say, 'Shet up yo' dam blubberin',' an'
hit me on de mouf wid his han'. An' when de las' one was gone but my
little Henry, I grab' him clost up to my breas' so, an' I ris up an' says, 'You
shan't take him away,' I says; I'll kill de man dat tetches him!' I says. But
my little Henry whisper an' say, 'I gwyne to run away', an' den I work an'
buy yo' freedom.' Oh, bless de chile, he always so good! But dey got him
-- dey got him, de men did; but I took and tear de clo'es mos' off of 'em,
an' beat 'em over de head wid my chain; an' dey give it to me, too, but I
did n't mine dat.

"Well, dah was my ole man gone, 'an all my chil'en, all my seven chil'en --
an' six of 'em I hain't set eyes on ag'in to dis day, an' dat's twenty-two
year ago las' Easter. De man dat bought me b'long' in Newbern, an' he
took me dah. Well, bymeby de years roll on an' de waw come. My marster
he was a Confedrit colonel, an' I was his family's cook. So when de
Unions took dat town, dey all run away an' lef' me all by myse'f wid de
other niggers in dat mons'us big house. So de big Union officers move in
dah, an' dey ask would I cook for dem. 'Lord bless you,' says I, 'dat's what
I's for.'

"Dey wa' n't no small-fry officers, mine you, dey was de biggest dey is; an'
de way dey made dem sojers mosey roun'! De Gen'l he tole me to boss
dat kitchen; an' he say, 'If anybody come meddlin' wid you, you jist
make'em walk chalk; don't you be afeard,' he say; 'you's 'mong frens,
now.'

"Well, I thinks to myse'f, if my little Henry ever got a chance to run away,
he 'd make to de Norf, o'course. So one day I comes in dah whah de big
officers was, in de parlor, an' I drops a kurtchy, so, an' I up an, tole 'em
'bout my Henry, dey a-listenin' to my troubles jist de same as if I was
white folks; an' I says, 'What I come for is beca'se if he got away and got
up Norf whah you gemmen comes from, you might 'a' seen him, maybe,
an' could tell me so as I could fine him ag'in; he was very little, an' he had
a sk-yar on his lef' wris', an' at de top of his forehead.' Den dey mournful,
an' de Gen'l say, 'How long sence you los' him?' an' I say, 'Thirteen year.'
Den de Gen'l say, 'He would n't be little no mo', now -- he's a man!'

"I never thought o' dat befo'! He was only dat little feller to me, yit. I never
thought 'bout him growin' up an' bein' big. But I see it den. None o' de
gemmen had run acrost him, so dey could n't do nothin' for me. But all dat
time, do' I did n't know it, my Henry wasrun off to de Norf, years an' years,
'an he was a barber, too, an' worked for hisse'f. An' bymeby, when de
waw come, he ups an' he says, 'I's done barberin',' he says; 'I's gwyne to
fine my ole mammy, less'n she's dead.' So he sole out an' went to whah
dey was recruitin', an' hired hisse'f out to de colonel for his servant; an'
den he went froo de battles everywhah, huntin' his ole mammy; yes
indeedy, he'd hire to fust one officer an' den another, tell he 'd ransacked
de whole Souf; but you see I did n't know nuffin 'bout dis. How was I
gwyne to know it?

"Well, one night we had a big sojer ball; de sojers dah at Newbern was
always havin' balls an' carryin' on. Dey had 'em in my kitchen, heaps o'
times, 'ca'se it was so big. Mine you, I was down on sich doin's; beca'se
my place was wid de officers, an' it rasp' me to have dem common sojers
cavortin' roun' my kitchen like dat. But I alway' stood aroun' an' kep' things
straight, I did; an' sometimes dey'd git my dander up, 'an den I'd make
'em clar dat kitchen, mine I tell you!

"Well, one night -- it was a Friday night -- dey comes a whole plattoon f'm
a nigger ridgment dat was on guard at de house, -- de house was head-
quarters, you know, -- an' den I was jist a-bilin'! Mad? I was jist a-boomin'!
I swelled aroun', an, swelled aroun'; I jist was a-itchin' for 'em to do
somefin for to start me. 'An dey was a-waltzin' an a-dancin'! my! but dey
was havin' a time! 'an I jist a-swellin' an' a-swellin' up! Pooty soon, 'long
comes sich a spruce young nigger a-sailin' down de room wid a yaller
wench roun' de wais'; an' roun' an' roun' an' roun' dey went, enough to
make a body drunk to look at 'em; an' when dey got abreas' o' me, dey
went to kin' o' balancin' aroun', fust on one leg, an' den on t'other, an'
smilin' at my big red turban, an' makin' fun, an' I ups an' says, 'Git along
wid you! -- rubbage!' De young man's face kin' o' changed, all of a
sudden, for 'bout a second, but den he went to smilin' ag'in, same as he
was befo'. Well, 'bout dis time, in comes some niggers dat played music
an' b'long' to de ban', an' dey never could git along widout puttin' on airs.
An' de very fust air dey put on dat night, I lit into 'em! Dey laughed, an' dat
made me wuss. De res' o' de niggers got to laughin', an' den my soul alive
but I was hot! My eye was jist a-blazin'! I jist straightened myself up, so, --
jist as I is now, plum to de ceilin', mos', -- an' I digs my fists into my hips,
an' I says, 'Look-a-heah!' I says, 'I want you niggers to understan' dat I
wa' n't bawn in de mash to be fool' by trash! I's one o' de ole Blue Hen's
Chickens, I is!' an' den I see dat young man stan' a-starin' an' stiff, lookin'
kin' o' up at de ceilin' like he fo'got somefin, an' could n't 'member it no
mo'. Well, I jist march' on dem niggers, -- so, lookin' like a gen'l, -- an' dey
jist cave' away befo' me an' out at de do'. An' as dis young man was a-
goin' out, I heah him say to another nigger, 'Jim,' he says, 'you go 'long
an' tell de cap'n I be on han' 'bout eight o'clock in de mawnin'; dey's
somefin on my mine,' he says; 'I don't sleep no mo' dis night. You go
'long,' he says, 'an' leave me by my own se'f.'

"Dis was 'bout one o'clock in de mawnin'. Well, 'bout seven, I was up an'
on han', gittin' de officers' breakfast. I was a-stoopin' down by de stove, --
jist so, same as if yo' foot was de stove, -- an' I'd opened de stove do wid
my right han', -- so, pushin' it back, jist as I pushes yo' foot, -- an' I'd jist
got de pan o' hot biscuits in my han' an' was 'bout to raise up, when I see
a black face come aroun' under mine, an' de eyes a-lookin' up into mine,
jist as I's a-lookin' up clost under yo' face now; an' I jist stopped right dah,
an' never budged! jist gazed, an' gazed, so; an' de pan begin to tremble,
an' all of a sudden I knowed! De pan drop' on de flo' an' I grab his lef' han'
an' shove back his sleeve, -- jist so, as I's doin' to you, -- an' den I goes
for his forehead an' push de hair back, so, an' 'Boy!' I says, 'if you an't my
Henry, what is you doin' wid dis welt on yo' wris' an' dat sk-yar on yo'
forehead? De Lord God ob heaven be praise', I got my own ag'in!

"Oh, no, Misto C -- , I hain't had no trouble. An' no joy!"

How I Edited an Agricultural Paper

by Mark Twain

I did not take temporary editorship of an agricultural paper without

misgivings. Neither would a landsman take command of a ship without
misgivings. But I was in circumstances that made the salary an object.
The regular editor of the paper was going off for a holiday, and I accepted
the terms he offered, and took his place.

The sensation of being at work again was luxurious, and I wrought all the
week with unflagging pleasure. We went to press, and I waited a day with
some solicitude to see whether my effort was going to attract any notice.
As I left the office, towards sundown, a group of men and boys at the foot
of the stairs dispersed with one impulse, and gave me passageway, and I
heard one or two of them say, "That's him!" I was naturally pleased by this
incident. The next morning I found a similar group at the foot of the stairs,
and scattering couples and individuals standing here and there in the
street, and over the way, watching me with interest. The group separated
and fell back as I approached, and I heard a man say, "Look at his eye!" I
pretended not to observe the notice I was attracting, but secretly I was
pleased with it, and was purposing to write an account of it to my aunt. I
went up the short flight of stairs, and heard cheery voices and a ringing
laugh as I drew near the door, which I opened, and caught a glimpse of
two young rural-looking men, whose faces blanched and lengthened
when they saw me, and then they both plunged through the window with
a great crash. I was surprised.

In about half an hour an old gentleman, with a flowing beard and a fine
but rather austere face, entered, and sat down at my invitation. He
seemed to have something on his mind. He took off his hat and set it on
the floor, and got out of it a red silk handkerchief and a copy of our paper.

He put the paper on his lap, and while he polished his spectacles with his
handkerchief, he said, "Are you the new editor?"

I said I was.

"Have you ever edited an agricultural paper before?"

"No," I said; "this is my first attempt."

"Very likely. Have you had any experience in agriculture practically?"

"No; I believe I have not."

"Some instinct told me so," said the old gentleman, putting on his
spectacles, and looking over them at me with asperity, while he folded his
paper into a convenient shape. "I wish to read you what must have made
me have that instinct. It was this editorial. Listen, and see if it was you
that wrote it:

"Turnips should never be pulled, it injures them. It is much better to

send a boy up and let him shake the tree."

"Now, what do you think of that—for I really suppose you wrote it?"

"Think of it? Why, I think it is good. I think it is sense. I have no doubt that
every year millions and millions of bushels of turnips are spoiled in this
township alone by being pulled in a half-ripe condition, when, if they had
sent a boy up to shake the tree—"

"Shake your grandmother! Turnips don't grow on trees!"

"Oh, they don't, don't they! Well, who said they did? The language was
intended to be figurative, wholly figurative. Anybody that knows anything
will know that I meant that the boy should shake the vine."

Then this old person got up and tore his paper all into small shreds, and
stamped on them, and broke several things with his cane, and said I did
not know as much as a cow; and then went out and banged the door after
him, and, in short, acted in such a way that I fancied he was displeased
about something. But not knowing what the trouble was, I could not be
any help to him.

Pretty soon after this a long cadaverous creature, with lanky locks
hanging down to his shoulders, and a week's stubble bristling from the
hills and valleys of his face, darted within the door, and halted,
motionless, with finger on lip, and head and body bent in listening
attitude. No sound was heard. Still he listened. No sound. Then he turned
the key in the door, and came elaborately tiptoeing towards me till he was
within long reaching distance of me, when he stopped and, after scanning
my face with intense interest for a while, drew a folded copy of our paper

from his bosom, and said:

"There, you wrote that. Read it to me—quick! Relieve me. I suffer."

I read as follows; and as the sentences fell from my lips I could see the
relief come, I could see the drawn muscles relax, and the anxiety go out
of the face, and rest and peace steal over the features like the merciful
moonlight over a desolate landscape:

"The guano is a fine bird, but great care is necessary in rearing it. It
should not be imported earlier than June or later than September. In the
winter it should be kept in a warm place, where it can hatch out its young.

"It is evident that we are to have a backward season for grain. Therefore it
will be well for the farmer to begin setting out his corn-stalks and planting
his buckwheat-cakes in July instead of August.

"Concerning the pumpkin.—This berry is a favorite with the natives of the

interior of New England, who prefer it to the gooseberry for the making of
fruit-cake, and who likewise give it the preference over the raspberry for
feeding cows, as being more filling and fully as satisfying. The pumpkin is
the only esculent of the orange family that will thrive in the North, except
the gourd and one or two varieties of the squash. But the custom of
planting it in the front yard with the shrubbery is fast going out of vogue,
for it is now generally conceded that the pumpkin as a shade tree is a
failure.

"Now, as the warm weather approaches, and the ganders begin to

spawn"—

The excited listener sprang towards me to shake hands, and said:

"There, there—that will do. I know I am all right now, because you have
read it just as I did, word for word. But, stranger, when I first read it this
morning, I said to myself, I never, never believed it before,
notwithstanding my friends kept me under watch so strict, but now I
believe I am crazy; and with that I fetched a howl that you might have
heard two miles, and started out to kill somebody—because, you know, I
knew it would come to that sooner or later, and so I might as well begin. I
read one of them paragraphs over again, so as to be certain, and then I
burned my house down and started. I have crippled several people, and
have got one fellow up a tree, where I can get him if I want him. But I
thought I would call in here as I passed along and make the thing
perfectly certain; and now it is certain, and I tell you it is lucky for the chap
that is in the tree. I should have killed him sure, as I went back. Good-
bye, sir, good-bye; you have taken a great load off my mind. My reason
has stood the strain of one of your agricultural articles, and I know that
nothing can ever unseat it now. Good-bye, sir."

I felt a little uncomfortable about the cripplings and arsons this person had
been entertaining himself with, for I could not help feeling remotely
accessory to them. But these thoughts were quickly banished, for the
regular editor walked in! [I thought to myself, Now if you had gone to
Egypt, as I recommended you to, I might have had a chance to get my
hand in; but you wouldn't do it, and here you are. I sort of expected you.]

The editor was looking sad and perplexed and dejected.

He surveyed the wreck which that old rioter and these two young farmers
had made, and then said: "This is a sad business—a very sad business.
There is the mucilage-bottle broken, and six panes of glass, and a
spittoon, and two candlesticks. But that is not the worst. The reputation of
the paper is injured—and permanently, I fear. True, there never was such
a call for the paper before, and it never sold such a large edition or
soared to such celebrity; but does one want to be famous for lunacy, and
prosper upon the infirmities of his mind? My friend, as I am an honest
man, the street out here is full of people, and others are roosting on the
fences, waiting to get a glimpse of you, because they think you are crazy.
And well they might after reading your editorials. They are a disgrace to
journalism. Why, what put it into your head that you could edit a paper of
this nature? You do not seem to know the first rudiments of agriculture.
You speak of a furrow and a harrow as being the same thing; you talk of
the moulting season for cows; and you recommend the domestication of
the polecat on account of its playfulness and its excellence as a ratter!
Your remark that clams will lie quiet if music be played to them was
superfluous—entirely superfluous. Nothing disturbs clams. Clams always
lie quiet. Clams care nothing whatever about music. Ah, heavens and
earth, friend! if you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your
life, you could not have graduated with higher honor than you could to-
day. I never saw anything like it. Your observation that the horse-chestnut
as an article of commerce is steadily gaining in favor, is simply calculated
to destroy this journal. I want you to throw up your situation and go. I want
no more holiday—I could not enjoy it if I had it. Certainly not with you in
my chair. I would always stand in dread of what you might be going to
recommend next. It makes me lose all patience every time I think of your
discussing oyster-beds under the head of 'Landscape Gardening.' I want
you to go. Nothing on earth could persuade me to take another holiday.
Oh! why didn't you tell me you didn't know anything about agriculture?"

"Tell you, you cornstalk, you cabbage, you son of a cauliflower? It's the
first time I ever heard such an unfeeling remark. I tell you I have been in
the editorial business going on fourteen years, and it is the first time I ever
heard of a man's having to know anything in order to edit a newspaper.
You turnip! Who write the dramatic critiques for the second-rate papers?
Why, a parcel of promoted shoemakers and apprentice apothecaries,
who know just as much about good acting as I do about good farming and
no more. Who review the books? People who never wrote one. Who do
up the heavy leaders on finance? Parties who have had the largest
opportunities for knowing nothing about it. Who criticise the Indian
campaigns? Gentlemen who do not know a warwhoop from a wigwam,
and who never have had to run a foot-race with a tomahawk, or pluck
arrows out of the several members of their families to build the evening
campfire with. Who write the temperance appeals, and clamor about the
flowing bowl? Folks who will never draw another sober breath till they do
it in the grave. Who edit the agricultural papers, you—yam? Men, as a
general thing, who fail in the poetry line, yellow-colored novel line,
sensation-drama line, city-editor line, and finally fall back on agriculture as
a temporary reprieve from the poor-house. You try to tell me anything
about the newspaper business! Sir, I have been through it from Alpha to
Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows the bigger the noise he
makes and the higher the salary he commands. Heaven knows if I had
but been ignorant instead of cultivated, and impudent instead of diffident,
I could have made a name for myself in this cold selfish world. I take my
leave, sir. Since I have been treated as you have treated me, I am
perfectly willing to go. But I have done my duty. I have fulfilled my
contract as far as I was permitted to do it. I said I could make your paper
of interest to all classes—and I have. I said I could run your circulation up
to twenty thousand copies, and if I had had two more weeks I'd have
done it. And I'd have given you the best class of readers that ever an
agricultural paper had—not a farmer in it, nor a solitary individual who
could tell a watermelon-tree from a peach-vine to save his life. You are
the loser by this rupture, not me, Pie-plant. Adios."

I then left.

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of

Calaveras County
by Mark Twain

From The Saturday Press, Nov. 18, 1865. Republished in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of
Calaveras County, and Other Sketches (1867), by Mark Twain and published by Harper &
Brothers

In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the
East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and
inquired after my friend's friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as requested to do,
and I hereunto append the result. I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas
W. Smiley is a myth; and that my friend never knew such a personage;
and that he only conjectured that if I asked old Wheeler about him, it
would remind him of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work
and bore me to death with some exasperating reminiscence of him as
long and as tedious as it should be useless to me. If that was the design,
it succeeded.

I found Simon Wheeler dozing comfortably by the barroom stove of the

dilapidated tavern in the decayed mining camp of Angel's, and I noticed
that he was fat and bald-headed, and had an expression of winning
gentleness and simplicity upon his tranquil countenance. He roused up,
and gave me good-day. I told him a friend had commissioned me to make
some inquiries about a cherished companion of his boyhood
named Leonidas W. Smiley--Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, a young minister
of the Gospel, who he had heard was at one time a resident of Angel's
Camp. I added that if Mr. Wheeler could tell me anything about this Rev.
Leonidas W. Smiley, I would feel under many obligations to him.

Simon Wheeler backed me into a corner and blockaded me there with his
chair, and then sat down and reeled off the monotonous narrative which
follows this paragraph. He never smiled, he never frowned, he never
changed his voice from the gentle-flowing key to which he tuned his initial
sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasm; but all
through the interminable narrative there ran a vein of impressive
earnestness and sincerity, which showed me plainly that, so far from his
imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story, he
regarded it as a really important matter, and admired its two heroes as
men of transcendent genius in finesse. I let him go on in his own way, and
never interrupted him once.

"Rev. Leonidas W. H'm, Reverend Le--well, there was a feller here once
by the name of Jim Smiley, in the winter of '49--or may be it was the
spring of '50--I don't recollect exactly, somehow, though what makes me
think it was one or the other is because I remember the big flume warn't
finished when he first came to the camp; but any way, he was the
curiousest man about always betting on anything that turned up you ever
see, if he could get anybody to bet on the other side; and if he couldn't
he'd change sides. Any way that suited the other man would suit him--any
way just so's he got a bet, he was satisfied. But still he was lucky,
uncommon lucky; he most always come out winner. He was always ready
and laying for a chance; there couldn't be no solit'ry thing mentioned but
that feller'd offer to bet on it, and take any side you please, as I was just
telling you. If there was a horse-race, you'd find him flush or you'd find
him busted at the end of it; if there was a dog-fight, he'd bet on it; if there
was a cat-fight, he'd bet on it; if there was a chicken-fight, he'd bet on it;
why, if there was two birds setting on a fence, he would bet you which
one would fly first; or if there was a camp-meeting, he would be there
reg'lar to bet on Parson Walker, which he judged to be the best exhorter
about here, and he was, too, and a good man. If he even see a straddle-
bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him
to get to--to wherever he was going to, and if you took him up, he would
foller that straddle-bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he

was bound for and how long he was on the road. Lots of the boys
here has seen that Smiley and can tell you about him. Why, it never made
no difference to him--he'd bet on any thing--the dangest feller. Parson
Walker's wife laid very sick once, for a good while, and it seemed as if
they warn't going to save her; but one morning he come in, and Smiley up
and asked him how she was, and he said she was considerable better--
thank the Lord for his inf'nit' mercy--and coming on so smart that with the
blessing of Prov'dence she'd get well yet; and Smiley, before he thought,
says, Well, I'll risk two-and-a-half she don't anyway.'"

Thish-yer Smiley had a mare--the boys called her the fifteen-minute nag,
but that was only in fun, you know, because, of course, she was faster
than that--and he used to win money on that horse, for all she was so
slow and always had the asthma, or the distemper, or the consumption,
or something of that kind. They used to give her two or three hundred
yards start, and then pass her under way; but always at the fag-end of the
race she'd get excited and desperate-like, and come cavorting and
straddling up, and scattering her legs around limber, sometimes in the air,
and sometimes out to one side amongst the fences, and kicking up m-o-r-
e dust and raising m-o-r-e racket with her coughing and sneezing and
blowing her nose--and always fetch up at the stand just about a neck
ahead, as near as you could cipher it down.

And he had a little small bull-pup, that to look at him you'd think he
warn't worth a cent but to set around and look ornery and lay for a chance
to steal something. But as soon as money was up on him he was a
different dog; his under-jaw'd begin to stick out like the fo'-castle of a
steamboat, and his teeth would uncover and shine like the furnaces. And
a dog might tackle him and bully-rag him, and bite him, and throw him
over his shoulder two or three times, and Andrew Jackson--which was the
name of the pup--Andrew Jackson would never let on but what he was
satisfied, and hadn't expected nothing else--and the bets being doubled
and doubled on the other side all the time, till the money was all up; and
then all of a sudden he would grab that other dog jest by the j'int of his
hind leg and freeze to it--not chaw, you understand, but only just grip and
hang on till they throwed up the sponge, if it was a year. Smiley always
come out winner on that pup, till he harnessed a dog once that didn't have
no hind legs, because they'd been sawed off in a circular saw, and when
the thing had gone along far enough, and the money was all up, and he
come to make a snatch for his pet holt, he see in a minute how he'd been
imposed on, and how the other dog had him in the door, so to speak, and
he 'peared surprised, and then he looked sorter discouraged-like, and
didn't try no more to win the fight, and so he got shucked out bad. He
gave Smiley a look, as much as to say his heart was broke, and it
was his fault, for putting up a dog that hadn't no hind legs for him to take
holt of, which was his main dependence in a fight, and then he limped off
a piece and laid down and died. It was a good pup, was that Andrew
Jackson, and would have made a name for hisself if he'd lived, for the
stuff was in him and he had genius--I know it, because he hadn't no
opportunities to speak of, and it don't stand to reason that a dog could
make such a fight as he could under them circumstances if he hadn't no
talent. It always makes me feel sorry when I think of that last fight of his'n,
and the way it turned out.

Well, thish-yer Smiley had rat-tarriers, and chicken cocks, and tom-cats
and all of them kind of things, till you couldn't rest, and you couldn't fetch
nothing for him to bet on but he'd match you. He ketched a frog one day,
and took him home, and said he cal'lated to educate him; and so he never
done nothing for three months but set in his back yard and learn that frog
to jump. And you bet you hedid learn him, too. He'd give him a little punch
behind, and the next minute you'd see that frog whirling in the air like a
doughnut--see him turn one summerset, or may be a couple, if he got a
good start, and come down flat-footed and all right, like a cat.

He got him up so in the matter of ketching flies, and kep' him in practice
so constant, that he'd nail a fly every time as fur as he could see him.
Smiley said all a frog wanted was education, and he could do 'most
anything--and I believe him. Why, I've seen him set Dan'l Webster down
here on this floor--Dan'l Webster was the name of the frog--and sing out,
"Flies, Dan'l, flies!" and quicker'n you could wink he'd spring straight up
and snake a fly off'n the counter there, and flop down on the floor ag'in as
solid as a gob of mud, and fall to scratching the side of his head with his
hind foot as indifferent as if he hadn't no idea he'd been doin' any more'n
any frog might do. You never see a frog so modest and straightfor'ard as
he was, for all he was so gifted. And when it come to fair and square
jumping on a dead level, he could get over more ground at one straddle
than any animal of his breed you ever see. Jumping on a dead level was
his strong suit, you understand; and when it come to that, Smiley would
ante up money on him as long as he had a red. Smiley was monstrous
proud of his frog, and well he might be, for fellers that had traveled and
been everywheres, all said he laid over any frog that ever they see.

Well, Smiley kep' the beast in a little lattice box, and he used to
fetch him downtown sometimes and lay for a bet. One day a feller--a
stranger in the camp, he was--come acrost him with his box, and says:

"What might be that you've got in the box?"

And Smiley says, sorter indifferent-like, "It might be a parrot, or it might be
a canary, maybe, but it ain't--it's only just a frog."

And the feller took it, and looked at it careful, and turned it round this way
and that, and says, "H'm--so 'tis. Well, what's he good for?"

"Well," Smiley says, easy and careless, "he's good enough for one thing, I
should judge--he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county."

The feller took the box again, and took another long, particular look, and
give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate, "Well," he says, "I don't
see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."

"Maybe you don't," Smiley says. "Maybe you understand frogs and maybe
you don't understand 'em; maybe you've had experience, and maybe you
ain't only a amature, as it were. Anyways, I've got my opinion and I'll risk
forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras County."

And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad like, "Well, I'm
only a stranger here, and I ain't got no frog; but if I had a frog, I'd bet you."

And then Smiley says, "That's all right--that's all right--if you'll hold my box
a minute, I'll go and get you a frog." And so the feller took the box, and
put up his forty dollars along with Smiley's, and set down to wait.

So he set there a good while thinking and thinking to his-self, and then he
got the frog out and prized his mouth open and took a teaspoon and filled
him full of quail shot--filled! him pretty near up to his chin--and set him on
the floor. Smiley he went to the swamp and slopped around in the mud for
a long time, and finally he ketched a frog, and fetched him in, and give
him to this feller, and says:
"Now, if you're ready, set him alongside of Dan'l, with his forepaws just
even with Dan'l's, and I'll give the word." Then he says, "One--two--three--
git!" and him and the feller touched up the frogs from behind, and the new
frog hopped off lively, but Dan'l give a heave, and hysted up his
shoulders--so--like a Frenchman, but it warn't no use--he couldn't budge;
he was planted as solid as a church, and he couldn't no more stir than if
he was anchored out. Smiley was a good deal surprised, and he was
disgusted too, but he didn't have no idea what the matter was, of course.

The feller took the money and started away; and when he was going out
at the door, he sorter jerked his thumb over his shoulder--so--at Dan'l,
and says again, very deliberate, "Well," he says, "I don't see no p'ints
about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."

Smiley he stood scratching his head and looking down at Dan'l a

long time, and at last says, "I do wonder what in the nation that frog
throwed off for--I wonder if there ain't something the matter with him--he
'pears to look mighty baggy, somehow." And he ketched Dan'l up by the
nap of the neck, and hefted him, and says, "Why blame my cats if he
don't weigh five pounds!" and turned him upside down and he belched out
a double handful of shot. And then he see how it was, and he was the
maddest man--he set the frog down and took out after that feller, but he
never ketched him. And----

(Here Simon Wheeler heard his name called from the front yard, and got
up to see what was wanted.) And turning to me as he moved away, he
said: "Just set where you are, stranger, and rest easy--I ain't going to be
gone a second."
But, by your leave, I did not think that a continuation of the history of the
enterprising vagabond Jim Smiley would be likely to afford me much
information concerning the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and so I started
away.

At the door I met the sociable Wheeler returning, and he buttonholed me

and recommenced:

"Well, thish-yer Smiley had a yaller, one-eyed cow that didn't have no tail,
only jest a short stump like a bannanner, and----"

However, lacking both time and inclination, I did not wait to hear about the
afflicted cow, but took my leave.

What Christmas Is As We Grow

Older
by Charles Dickens

Dickens wrote this Christmas vignette for his twopenny magazine, Household Words in 1851.
He published reader interest stories and essays on a weekly basis between 1850-1859, but his
Christmas stories were always a highlight. In this story, Dickens intertwines his disillusionment
with his return to a youthful optimism-- it's really quite personal and heartfelt, coming after the
deaths of his father and daughter. I think we benefit from its plea to stop complaining, accept
and understand the past, and savor Christmas as a time for reconciliation.

Time was, with most of us, when Christmas Day encircling all our limited
world like a magic ring, left nothing out for us to miss or seek; bound
together all our home enjoyments, affections, and hopes; grouped
everything and every one around the Christmas fire; and made the little
picture shining in our bright young eyes, complete.

Time came, perhaps, all so soon, when our thoughts over-leaped that
narrow boundary; when there was some one (very dear, we thought then,
very beautiful, and absolutely perfect) wanting to the fulness of our
happiness; when we were wanting too (or we thought so, which did just
as well) at the Christmas hearth by which that some one sat; and when
we intertwined with every wreath and garland of our life that some one's
name.

That was the time for the bright visionary Christmases which have long
arisen from us to show faintly, after summer rain, in the palest edges of
the rainbow! That was the time for the beatified enjoyment of the things
that were to be, and never were, and yet the things that were so real in
our resolute hope that it would be hard to say, now, what realities
achieved since, have been stronger!

What! Did that Christmas never really come when we and the priceless
pearl who was our young choice were received, after the happiest of
totally impossible marriages, by the two united families previously at
daggers--drawn on our account? When brothers and sisters-in-law who
had always been rather cool to us before our relationship was effected,
perfectly doted on us, and when fathers and mothers overwhelmed us
with unlimited incomes? Was that Christmas dinner never really eaten,
after which we arose, and generously and eloquently rendered honour to
our late rival, present in the company, then and there exchanging
friendship and forgiveness, and founding an attachment, not to be
surpassed in Greek or Roman story, which subsisted until death? Has
that same rival long ceased to care for that same priceless pearl, and
married for money, and become usurious? Above all, do we really know,
now, that we should probably have been miserable if we had won and
worn the pearl, and that we are better without her?

That Christmas when we had recently achieved so much fame; when we

had been carried in triumph somewhere, for doing something great and
good; when we had won an honoured and ennobled name, and arrived
and were received at home in a shower of tears of joy; is it possible that
THAT Christmas has not come yet?

And is our life here, at the best, so constituted that, pausing as we

advance at such a noticeable mile-stone in the track as this great
birthday, we look back on the things that never were, as naturally and full
as gravely as on the things that have been and are gone, or have been
and still are? If it be so, and so it seems to be, must we come to the
conclusion that life is little better than a dream, and little worth the loves
and strivings that we crowd into it?

No! Far be such miscalled philosophy from us, dear Reader, on

Christmas Day! Nearer and closer to our hearts be the Christmas spirit,
which is the spirit of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge
of duty, kindness and forbearance! It is in the last virtues especially, that
we are, or should be, strengthened by the unaccomplished visions of our
youth; for, who shall say that they are not our teachers to deal gently
even with the impalpable nothings of the earth!

Therefore, as we grow older, let us be more thankful that the circle of our
Christmas associations and of the lessons that they bring, expands! Let
us welcome every one of them, and summon them to take their places by
the Christmas hearth.

Welcome, old aspirations, glittering creatures of an ardent fancy, to your

shelter underneath the holly! We know you, and have not outlived you
yet. Welcome, old projects and old loves, however fleeting, to your nooks
among the steadier lights that burn around us. Welcome, all that was ever
real to our hearts; and for the earnestness that made you real, thanks to
Heaven! Do we build no Christmas castles in the clouds now? Let our
thoughts, fluttering like butterflies among these flowers of children, bear
witness! Before this boy, there stretches out a Future, brighter than we
ever looked on in our old romantic time, but bright with honour and with
truth. Around this little head on which the sunny curls lie heaped, the
graces sport, as prettily, as airily, as when there was no scythe within the
reach of Time to shear away the curls of our first-love. Upon another girl's
face near it--placider but smiling bright--a quiet and contented little face,
we see Home fairly written. Shining from the word, as rays shine from a
star, we see how, when our graves are old, other hopes than ours are
young, other hearts than ours are moved; how other ways are smoothed;
how other happiness blooms, ripens, and decays--no, not decays, for
other homes and other bands of children, not yet in being nor for ages yet
to be, arise, and bloom and ripen to the end of all!

Welcome, everything! Welcome, alike what has been, and what never
was, and what we hope may be, to your shelter underneath the holly, to
your places round the Christmas fire, where what is sits open-hearted! In
yonder shadow, do we see obtruding furtively upon the blaze, an enemy's
face? By Christmas Day we do forgive him! If the injury he has done us
may admit of such companionship, let him come here and take his place.
If otherwise, unhappily, let him go hence, assured that we will never injure
nor accuse him.

On this day we shut out Nothing!

"Pause," says a low voice. "Nothing? Think!"

"On Christmas Day, we will shut out from our fireside, Nothing."

"Not the shadow of a vast City where the withered leaves are lying deep?"
the voice replies. "Not the shadow that darkens the whole globe? Not the
shadow of the City of the Dead?"

Not even that. Of all days in the year, we will turn our faces towards that
City upon Christmas Day, and from its silent hosts bring those we loved,
among us. City of the Dead, in the blessed name wherein we are
gathered together at this time, and in the Presence that is here among us
according to the promise, we will receive, and not dismiss, thy people
who are dear to us!

Yes. We can look upon these children angels that alight, so solemnly, so
beautifully among the living children by the fire, and can bear to think how
they departed from us. Entertaining angels unawares, as the Patriarchs
did, the playful children are unconscious of their guests; but we can see
them--can see a radiant arm around one favourite neck, as if there were a
tempting of that child away. Among the celestial figures there is one, a
poor misshapen boy on earth, of a glorious beauty now, of whom his
dying mother said it grieved her much to leave him here, alone, for so
many years as it was likely would elapse before he came to her-- being
such a little child. But he went quickly, and was laid upon her breast, and
in her hand she leads him.
There was a gallant boy, who fell, far away, upon a burning sand beneath
a burning sun, and said, "Tell them at home, with my last love, how much
I could have wished to kiss them once, but that I died contented and had
done my duty!" Or there was another, over whom they read the words,
"Therefore we commit his body to the deep," and so consigned him to the
lonely ocean and sailed on. Or there was another, who lay down to his
rest in the dark shadow of great forests, and, on earth, awoke no more. O
shall they not, from sand and sea and forest, be brought home at such a
time!

There was a dear girl--almost a woman--never to be one--who made a

mourning Christmas in a house of joy, and went her trackless way to the
silent City. Do we recollect her, worn out, faintly whispering what could
not be heard, and falling into that last sleep for weariness? O look upon
her now! O look upon her beauty, her serenity, her changeless youth, her
happiness! The daughter of Jairus was recalled to life, to die; but she,
more blest, has heard the same voice, saying unto her, "Arise for ever!"

We had a friend who was our friend from early days, with whom we often
pictured the changes that were to come upon our lives, and merrily
imagined how we would speak, and walk, and think, and talk, when we
came to be old. His destined habitation in the City of the Dead received
him in his prime. Shall he be shut out from our Christmas remembrance?
Would his love have so excluded us? Lost friend, lost child, lost parent,
sister, brother, husband, wife, we will not so discard you! You shall hold
your cherished places in our Christmas hearts, and by our Christmas
fires; and in the season of immortal hope, and on the birthday of immortal
mercy, we will shut out Nothing!
The winter sun goes down over town and village; on the sea it makes a
rosy path, as if the Sacred tread were fresh upon the water. A few more
moments, and it sinks, and night comes on, and lights begin to sparkle in
the prospect. On the hill-side beyond the shapelessly-diffused town, and
in the quiet keeping of the trees that gird the village-steeple,
remembrances are cut in stone, planted in common flowers, growing in
grass, entwined with lowly brambles around many a mound of earth. In
town and village, there are doors and windows closed against the
weather, there are flaming logs heaped high, there are joyful faces, there
is healthy music of voices. Be all ungentleness and harm excluded from
the temples of the Household Gods, but be those remembrances
admitted with tender encouragement! They are of the time and all its
comforting and peaceful reassurances; and of the history that re-united
even upon earth the living and the dead; and of the broad beneficence
and goodness that too many men have tried to tear to narrow shreds.