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Whatever in its origin is objective, is likewise as such necessarily finite. Therefore, since the spirit is not originally an object, and as the subject exists in antithesis to an object, the spirit cannot originally be finite. But neither can it be a subject without becoming an object, and as it is originally the identity of both, it can be conceived neither as infinite or finite exclusively, but as the most original union of both. In the existence, in the reconciling, and the recurrence of this contradiction consists the process and mystery of production and life.

This principium commune essendi et cognoscendi, as subsisting in a, or primary of self-duplication, is the mediate or indirect principle of every science; but it is the immediate and direct principle of the ultimate science alone, i.e. of transcendental philosophy alone. For it must be remembered, that all these Theses refer solely to one of the two Polar Sciences, namely, to that which commences with and rigidly confines itself within the subjective, leaving the objective (as far as it is exclusively objective) to natural philosophy, which is its opposite pole. In its very idea therefore as a systematic knowledge of our collective, (scientia scientiæ) it in-


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 volves the necessity of some one highest principle of knowing, as at once the source and accompanying form in all particular acts of intellect and perception. This, it has been shown, can be found only in the act and evolution of self-consciousness. We are not investigating an absolute principium essendi; for then, I admit, many valid objections might be started against our theory; but an absolute principium cognoscendi. The result of both the sciences, or their equatorial point, would be the principle of a total and undivided philosophy, as for prudential reasons, I have chosen to anticipate in the Scholium to Thesis VI. and the note subjoined. In other words, philosophy would pass into religion, and religion become inclusive of philosophy. We begin with the, in order to end with the absolute. We proceed from the, in order to lose and find all self in.

The transcendental philosopher does not enquire, what ultimate ground of our knowledge there may lie out of our knowing, but what is the last in our knowing itself, beyond which we cannot pass. The principle of our knowing is sought within the sphere of our knowing. It must be something therefore, which can itself be known. It is asserted only,

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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 that the act of self-consciousness is for us the source and principle of all our possible knowledge. Whether abstracted from us there exists any thing higher and beyond this primary self-knowing, which is for us the form of all our knowing, must be decided by the result.

That the self-consciousness is the fixt point, to which for us all is morticed and annexed, needs no further proof. But that the self-consciousness may be the modification of a higher form of being, perhaps of a higher consciousness, and this again of a yet higher, and so on in an infinite regressus; in short, that self-consciousness may be itself something explicable into something, which must lie beyond the possibility of our knowledge, because the whole synthesis of our intelligence is first formed in and through the self-consciousness, does not at all concern us as transcendental philosophers. For to us the self-consciousness is not a kind of being, but a kind of knowing, and that too the highest and farthest that exists for us. It may however be shown, and has in part already been shown in pages 115-116, that even when the Objective is assumed as the first, we yet can never pass beyond the principle of self-consciousness. Should we attempt it, we must be driven back from ground to ground, each of which would cease to be a Ground the moment we pressed on it. We must be whirl'd down


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 the gulph of an infinite series. But this would make our reason baffle the end and purpose of all reason, namely, unity and system. Or we must break off the series arbitrarily, and affirm an absolute something that is in and of itself at once cause and effect (causa sui) subject and object, or rather the absolute identity of both. But as this is inconceivable, except in a selfsciousness, it follows, that even as natural philosophers we must arrive at the same principle from which as transcendental philosophers we set out; that is, in a self-consciousness in which the principium essendi does not stand to the principium cognoscendi in the relation of cause to effect, but both the one and the other are co-inherent and identical. Thus the true system of natural philosophy places the sole reality of things in an, which is at once causa sui et effectus, —in the absolute identity of subject and object, which it calls nature, and which in its highest power is nothing else but self-conscious will or intelligence. In this sense the position of Malbranche, that we see all things in God, is a strict philosophical truth; and equally true is the assertion of Hobbes, of Hartley, and of their masters in ancient Greece, that all real knowledge supposes a prior sensation. For sensation itself is but vision nascent, not the cause of intelligence, but intelligence itself re-


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 want to dance to-night?’ and then she’ll say, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Suppose we just drive around a while? ’ Will she say that at this point? Well, should she not Lets see, what would she say?”

Mr. Talliaferro strode on, musing swiftly. Well, anyway, if she says that, if she does say that, then I'll say ‘No, let’s dance.’ Yes, yes, something like that. Though perhaps I’d better kiss her again, not so coldly, perhaps? But should she say something else But then, I shall be prepared for any contingency, eh? Half the battle Yes, something like that, delicately but firmly done, so as not to alarm the quarry. Some walls are carried by storm, but all walls are reduced by siege. There is also the fable of the wind and the sun and the man in a cloak. “We’ll change the gender, by Jove,” Mr. Talliaferro said aloud, breaking suddenly from his revery to discover that he had passed Fairchild’s door. He retraced his steps and craned his neck to see the dark window.

“Fairchild!”

No reply.

“Oh, Fairchild!”

The two dark windows were inscrutable as two fates. He pressed the bell, then stepped back to complete his aria. Beside the door was another entrance. Light streamed across a half length lattice blind like a saloon door; beyond it a typewriter was being thumped viciously. Mr. Talliaferro knocked diffidently upon the blind.

“Hello,” a voice boomed above the clattering machine, though the machine itself did not falter. Mr. Talliaferro pondered briefly, then he knocked again.

“Come in, damn you.” The voice drowned the typewriter temporarily. “Come in: do you think this is a bathroom?” Mr. Talliaferro opened the blind and the huge collarless man

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 and cast my eyes over them. One of the subjects struck me from its singularity. It represented the great hall of the castle of Lindenberg. A door conducting to a narrow stair-case stood half open. In the foreground appeared a group of figures, placed in the most grotesque attitudes; terror was expressed upon every countenance. Here was one upon his knees, with his eyes cast up to heaven, and praying most devoutly; there, another was creeping away upon all fours. Some hid their faces in their cloaks, or the laps of their companions; some had concealed themselves beneath a table, on which the remnants of a feast were visible; while others, with gaping mouths and eyes wide-stretched, pointed to a figure supposed to have created this disturbance. It represented a female of more than human stature, clothed in the habit of some religious order. Her face was veiled; on her arm hung a chaplet of beads; her dress was in several places stained with the blood which


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 at the typewriter raised his sweating leonine head, and regarded Mr. Talliaferro fretfully. “Well?”

“Pardon me, I’m looking for Fairchild.”

“Next floor,” the other snapped, poising his hands. “Good night.”

“But he doesn’t answer. Do you happen to know if he is in to-night?”

“I do not.”

Mr. Talliaferro pondered again, diffidently. “I wonder how I might ascertain? I’m pressed for time—”

“How in hell do I know? Go up and see, or stand out there and call him.”

“Thanks, I’ll go up, if you’ve no objection.”

“Well, go up, then,” the big man answered, leaping again upon his typewriter. Mr. Talliaferro watched him for a time.

“May I go through this way?” he ventured at last, mildly and politely.

“Yes, yes. Go anywhere. But for God’s sake, don’t bother me any longer.”

Mr. Talliaferro murmured Thanks and sidled past the large frenzied man. The whole small room trembled to the man’s heavy hands and the typewriter leaped and chattered like a mad thing.

He went on and into a dark corridor filled with a thin vicious humming, and mounted lightless stairs into an acrid region scented with pennyroyal. Fairchild heard him stumble in the darkness, and groaned. I’ll have your blood for this! he swore at the thundering oblivious typewriter beneath him. After a time his door opened and the caller hissed Fairchild! into the room. Fairchild swore again under his breath. The couch complained to his movement, and he said:

“Wait there until I turn up the light. You'll break everything I’ve got, blundering around in the dark.”

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 trickled from a wound upon her bosom. In one hand she held a lamp, in the other a large knife, and she seemed advancing towards the iron gates of the hall.

"What does this mean, Agnes?" said I: "Is this some invention of your own?"

She cast her eyes upon the drawing.

"Oh! no," she replied; tis the invention of much wiser heads than mine. But can you possibly have lived at Lindenberg for three whole months without hearing of the bleeding nun?"

"You are the first who ever mentioned the name to me. Pray, who may the lady be?"

"That is more than I can pretend to tell you. All my knowledge of her history comes from an old tradition in this family, which has been handed down from father to son, and is firmly credited throughout the baron's domains. Nay, the baron believes it himself; and as for my aunt, who has a natural turn for the marvellous, she would


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 sooner doubt the veracity of the Bible than of the bleeding nun. Shall I tell you this history?"

I answered, that she would oblige me much by relating it: she resumed her drawing, and then proceeded as follows in a tone of burlesqued gravity:

"It is surprising that in all the chronicles of past times this remarkable personage is never once mentioned. Fain would I recount to you her life; but unluckily till after her death she was never known to have existed. Then first did she think it necessary to make some noise in the world, and with that intention she made bold to seize upon the castle of Lindenberg. Having a good taste, she took up her abode in the best room of the house; and once established there, she began to amuse herself by knocking about the tables and chairs in the middle of the night. Perhaps she was a bad sleeper, but this I have never been able to ascertain. According to the tradi•ion, this entertainment commenced about


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 a century ago. It was accompanied with shrieking, howling, groaning, swearing, and many other agreeable noises of the same kind. But though one particular room was more especially honoured with her visits, she did not entirely confine herself to it. She occasionally ventured into the old galleries, paced up and down the spacious halls; or, sometimes stopping at the doors of the chambers, she wept and wailed there to the universal terror of the inhabitants. In these nocturnal excursions she was seen by different people, who all describe her appearance as you behold it here traced by the hand of her unworthy historian."

The singularity of this account insensibly engaged my attention.

"Did she never speak to those who met her?" said I.

"Not she. The specimens indeed which she gave nightly of her talents for conversation, were by no means inviting. Sometimes the castle rung with oaths and execra-


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 Mr. Talliaferro sighed with relief. “Well, well, I had just about given you up and gone away when that man beneath you kindly let me come through his place.” The light came on under Fairchild’s hand. “Oh, you were asleep, weren’t you? So sorry to have disturbed you. But I want your advice, as I failed to see you this morning You got home all right?” he asked with thoughtful tact.

Fairchild answered “Yes” shortly, and Mr. Talliaferro laid his hat and stick on a table, knocking therefrom a vase of late summer flowers. With amazing agility he caught the vase before it crashed, though not before its contents had liberally splashed him. “Ah, the devil!” he ejaculated. He replaced the vase and quickly fell to mopping at his sleeves and coat front with his handkerchief. “And this suit fresh from the presser, too!” he added with exasperation.

Fairchild watched him with ill-suppressed vindictive glee. “Too bad,” he commiserated insincerely, lying again on the couch. “But she won’t notice it: she’ll be too interested in what you’re saying to her.”

Mr. Talliaferro looked up quickly, a trifle dubiously. He spread his handkerchief across the corner of the table to dry. Then he smoothed his hands over his neat pale hair.

“Do you think so? Really? That’s what I stopped in to discuss with you.” For a while Mr. Talliaferro sat neatly and gazed at his host from beyond a barrier of a polite and hopeless despair. Fairchild remarked his expression with sudden curiosity, but before he could speak Mr. Talliaferro reassimilated himself and became again his familiar articulated mild alarm.

“What’s the matter?” Fairchild asked.

“I? Nothing. Nothing at all, my dear fellow. Why do you ask?”

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 ''silver, keen and plump as death, steal out to gnaw the crust held loosely by the beggar beneath the stone gate. Unreproved they swarm about his still recumbent shape, exploring his clothing in an obscene silence, dragging their hot bellies over his lean and agechilled body, sniffing his intimate parts.'' I love three things.

(He drew Fairchild onward, babbling in an ecstasy.) A voice, a touch, a sound: life going on about you unseen in the close dark, beyond these walls, these bricks—(Fairchild stopped, laying his hand against the heatdrunken wall beside him, staring at his friend in the starlight. Gordon strode on ahead)—in this dark room or that dark room. You want to go into all the streets of all the cities men live in. To look into all the darkened rooms in the world. Not with curiosity, not with dread nor doubt nor disapproval. But humbly, gently, as you would steal in to look at a sleeping child, not to disturb it.

''Then as one rat they flash away, and, secure again and still, they become as a row of cigarettes unwinking at a single level. The beggar, whose hand yet shapes his stolen crust, sleeps beneath the stone gate.''

(Fairchild babbled on. Gordon striding on ahead turned and passed through a door. The door swung open, letting a sheet of light fall outward across the pavement, then the door swung to, snatching the sheet of light again. The Semitic man grasped Fairchild’s arm, and he halted. About him the city swooned in a voluption of dark and heat, a sleep which was not sleep; and dark and heat lapped his burly short body about with the hidden eternal pulse of the world. Above him, above the shallow serrated canyon of the street, huge hot stars burned at the heart of things.)

Three more priests, barefoot, in robes the color of silence,

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Talk:The Necromancer (Kahlert)

Translator
This shows the translator as Peter Will but the original scan says Peter Teuthold. Is one a pseudonym ? Do we have a source for that ? -- Beardo (talk) 17:51, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:The Necromancer (Kahlert)


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''Three gray, softfooted priests had passed on, but in an interval hushed by windowless old walls there lingers yet a thin celibate despair. Beneath a high stone gate with a crest and a device in carven stone, a beggar lies, nursing in his hand a crust of bread.''

(Gordon, Fairchild and the Semitic man walked in the dark city. Above them, the sky: a heavy, voluptuous night and huge, hot stars like wilting gardenias. About them, streets: narrow, shallow canyons of shadow rich with decay and laced with delicate ironwork, scarcely seen.)

''Spring is in the world somewhere, like a blown keen reed, high and fiery cold—he does not yet see it; a shape which he will know—he does not yet see it. The three priests pass on: the walls have hushed their gray and unshod feet.''

(In a doorway slightly ajar were women, their faces in the starlight flat and pallid and rife, odorous and exciting and unchaste. Gordon hello dempsey loomed hatless above his two companions. He strode on, paying the women no heed. Fairchild lagged, the Semitic man perforce also. A woman laughed, rife and hushed and rich in the odorous dark come in boys lots of girls cool you off come in boys. The Semitic man drew Fairchild onward, babbling excitedly.)

That’s it, that’s it! You walk along a dark street, in the dark. The dark is close and intimate about you, holding all things, anything—you need only put out your hand to touch life, to feel the beating heart of life. Beauty: a thing unseen, suggested: natural and fecund and foul—you don’t stop for it; you pass on.

(The Semitic man drew him onward after Gordon’s tall striding.) I love three things. Rats like dull and cunning

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 tions: a moment after she repeated her paternoster: now she howled out the most horrible blasphemies, and then chaunted De profundis as orderly as if still in the choir. In short, she seemed a mighty capricious being: but whether she prayed or cursed, whether she was impious or devout, she always contrived to terrify her auditors out of their senses. The castle became scarcely habitable; and its lord was so frightened by these midnight revels, that one fine morning he was found dead in his bed. This success seemed to please the nun mightily, for now she made more noise than ever. But the next baron proved too cunning for her. He made his appearance with a celebrated exorciser in his hand, who feared not to shut himself up for a night, in the haunted chamber. There it seems that he had a hard battle with the ghost before she would promise to be quiet. She was obstinate, but he was more so; and at length she consented to let the inhabitants of the castle take a good night's rest.


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. Of course it is chance, but the same thing has happened two years in succession. As I was beginning to win, I saw you. It is the first time that anything has come my way this season. Did you run down from Paris?

. Jaunting around.

. When did you arrive? I always look over the lists.

. Since my hit in the pantomime "The Queen of Sheba," at the Olympia last winter, I have changed my name. You were in Italy at the time; it was a popular departure, fully equal to your sensation in "Le Bain de la Parisienne," only mine was more fully undress, especially at the end before Solomon. That rascally Flo-Flo invented a light effect__

. I should have returned from Italy if I had known it. How were the notices?

. Wonderful! Lorraine wrote me two columns of insults; I can never thank him enough. Since then nobody thinks of me but as the Queen of Sheba.

. I seem to recall the name; I wondered who that new one could be.

. Well, it was I; only it was nothing new.

. Are you alone? 41


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 “You looked like you had something on your mind, just then.”

The guest laughed artificially. “Not at all. You imagined it, really.” His hidden dark thing lurked behind his eyes yet, but he vanquished it temporarily. “I will ask a favor, however, before I before I ask your advice. That you don’t mention our—conversation. The general trend of it, you know.” Fairchild watched him with curiosity. “To any of our mutual women friends,” he added further, meeting his host’s curious gaze.

“All right,” Fairchild agreed. “I never mention any of the conversations we have on this subject. I don’t reckon I'll start now.”

“Thank you.” Mr. Talliaferro was again his polite smug self. “I have a particular reason, this time, which I'll divulge to you as soon as I consider myself You will be the first to know.”

“Sure,” said Fairchild again. “What is it to be this time?”

“Ah, yes,” said the guest with swift optimism, “I really believe that I have discovered the secret of success with them: create the proper setting beforehand, indifference to pique them, then boldness—that is what I have always overlooked. Listen: to-night I shall turn the trick. But I want your advice.” Fairchild groaned and lay back. Mr. Talliaferro picked his handkerchief from the table and whipped it about his ankles. He continued:

“Now, I shall make her jealous to begin with, by speaking of another woman in—ah—quite intimate terms. She will doubtless wish to dance, but I shall pretend indifference, and when she begs me to take her to dance, perhaps I'll kiss her, suddenly but with detachment—you see?”

“Yes?” murmured the other, cradling his head on his arms and closing his eyes.

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. Yes, this is a pleasure trip. How are you getting on? Are you still with the Comte? What million is he in now? In Paris, the report is that he is down to his last.

. Very likely, at the rate he is going. If he spent it on himself, it would not be so bad; but the trouble is he likes to see it spent.

. As blasé as ever, I suppose?

. He has reached the limit. Nothing excites or stirs his interest in the least. Everybody here lives off him, including his secretary, Chantel.

. I remember that fellow. He is clever.

. No more than the rest. The Comte buys carriages and automobiles which he never even sees; his friends and his friends' friends ride in them and show themselves off. He deals out thousand-franc notes by the handful, so that others can play, who lose, naturally. He never goes near a table himself. If you tell him that a play is good, he sends his friends, and then forbids them to mention it afterward. At one time dress was his hobby, but now he leaves all that sort of thing to his secretary.

. Has he slipped you along, too, to the secretary?

. No, he still loves me. I am the only person who can do anything with him, as you will discover when we return to Paris; I shall be Comtesse de Tournerelles. I should like to see more of you here, very naturally, but my friends are rather select; I cannot afford to take any chances.

. Who are your friends?

. My dear, with art and religion a woman enters any society. Christians and artists will receive anybody, and thank you for the opportunity. Although one must be a little discreet, and careful to keep up appearances.

. So you have gone in for religion?

. No, I am reserving that for my old age; for the


text: Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Cross, Charles Robert


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 “Yes. So we'll go and dance, and I’ll pet her a bit, still impersonally, as if I were thinking of some one else. She'll naturally be intrigued and she’ll say, ‘What are you thinking of?’ and I’ll say, ‘Why do you want to know?’ She'll plead with me, perhaps dancing quite close to me, cajoling; but I’ll say, ‘I’d rather tell you what you are thinking of,’ and she will say ‘What?’ immediately, and I’ll say, ‘You are thinking of me.’ Now, what do you think of that? What will she say then?”

“Probably tell you you’ve got a swelled head.”

Mr. Talliaferro’s face fell. “Do you think she’ll say that?”

“Don’t know. You'll find out soon enough.”

“No,” Mr. Talliaferro said after a while, “I don’t believe she will. I rather fancied she’d think I knew a lot about women.” He mused deeply for a time. Then he burst out again: “If she does, I’ll say “Perhaps so. But I am tired of this place. Lets go.” She’ll not want to leave, but I’ll be firm. And then—” Mr. Talliaferro became smug, bursting with something he withheld. “No, no: I shan’t tell you—it’s too excruciatingly simple. Why some one else has not ” He sat gloating.

“Scared I’ll run out and use it myself before you have a chance?” Fairchild asked.

“No, really; not at all. I—” He considered a moment, then he leaned to the other. “It’s not that at all, really; I only feel that Being the discoverer, that sort of thing, eh? I trust you, my dear fellow,” he added swiftly in a burst of confidence. “Merely my own scruples— You see?”

“Sure,” said Fairchild drily. “I understand.”

“You will have so many opportunities, while I” Again that dark thing came up behind Mr. Talliaferro’s eyes and peered forth a moment. He drove it back. “And you really think it will work?”

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 present I get on with art. I belong to a musical coterie; we adore music—Wilf's music. What music! I suppose you never heard of Wilf? He is scarcely in your line. He was an extraordinary genius who died in a madhouse, raving, because nobody appreciated his music. After his death, his widow, Mme. Clemencia Wilf, and his son Gottfried

. What a horrible name!

. The title of a symphonic poem by his father. The son and widow, together with a little group of enthusiasts, made up their minds that Wilf's music should be admired and appreciated by everybody, so they organized a company and began giving concerts, some of them conducted by Wulf—have you never heard of Wulf?—others by Gottfried Wilf. Nobody paid any attention at first; some even went so far as to throw potatoes; but, little by little, a change for the better set in, and soon all fell at the feet of Mme. Wilf. People lost their heads, the number of admirers increased

. And you lost yours, too—I can see it.

. Nonsense! Nobody was fooled, except a few earnest admirers, who are necessary in any business. However, the widow, the son and the conductor, not to speak of the musicians, understand perfectly how to take advantage of persons who are perfectly willing to be taken advantage of, so long as they appear superior to others who do not understand and appreciate the music of Wilf. Some very distinguished names occurred on the list, so I exerted my influence with the Comte de Tournerelles to have him take stock in the Wilf and Wulf Concerts Company. The other shareholders welcomed me with open arms. Much was forgiven, because I had loved much—the music of Wilf, their idol. Now I belong to the smart set, I associate with people who are chic, with princesses, the nobility, with great artists. I am preparing my entrée to the fashionable circles of Paris this


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 “Sure. Provided that final coup is as deadly as you claim. And provided she acts like she ought to. It might be a good idea to outline the plot to her, though, so she won’t slip up herself.”

“You are pulling my leg now,” Mr. Talliaferro bridled slightly. “But don’t you think this plan is good?”

“Airtight. You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”

“Surely. That’s the only way to win battles, you know. Napoleon taught us that.”

“Napoleon said something about the heaviest artillery, too,” the other said wickedly. Mr. Talliaferro smiled with deprecatory complacence.

“I am as I am,” he murmured.

“Especially when it hasn’t been used in some time,” Fairchild added. Mr. Talliaferro looked like a struck beast and the other said quickly: “But are you going to try this scheme to-night, or are you just describing a hypothetical case?”

Mr. Talliaferro produced his watch and glanced at it in consternation. “Good gracious, I must run!” He sprang to his feet and thrust his handkerchief into his pocket. “Thanks for advising me. I really think I have the system at last, don’t you?”

“Sure,” the other agreed. At the door Mr. Talliaferro turned and rushed back to shake hands. “Wish me luck,” he said turning again. He paused once more. “Our little talk: you'll not mention it?”

“Sure, sure,” repeated Fairchild. The door closed upon the caller and his descending feet sounded on the stairs. He stumbled again, then the street door closed behind him, and Fairchild rose and stood on the balcony and watched him out of sight.

Fairchild returned to the couch and reclined again, laughing. Abruptly he ceased chuckling and lay for a time in

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 For some time after no news was heard of her. But at the end of five years the exorciser died, and then the nun ventured to peep abroad again. However, she was now grown much more tractable and well-behaved. She walked about in silence, and never made her appearance above once in five years. This custom, if you will believe the baron, she still continues. He is fully persuaded, that on the fifth of May of every fifth year, as soon as the clock strikes one, the door of the haunted chamber opens. [Observe, that this room has been shut up for near a century.] Then out walks the ghostly nun with her lamp and dagger: she descends the stair-case of the eastern tower, and crosses the great hall. On that night the porter always leaves the gates of the castle open, out of respect to the apparition: not that this is thought by any means necessary, since she could easily whip through the key-hole if she chose it; but merely out of politeness, and to prevent her from making her exit in a way so


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 alarmed concern. Then he groaned again, and rose and took his hat.

As he stepped into the alley, the Semitic man pausing at the entrance spoke to him. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Fairchild replied. “Somewhere. The Great Illusion has just called,” he explained. “He has an entirely new scheme to-night.”

“Oh. Slipping out, are you?” the other asked, lowering his voice.

“No, he just dashed away. But I don’t dare stay in this evening. He’ll be back inside of two hours to tell me why this one didn’t work. We’ll have to go somewhere else.” The Semitic man mopped his handkerchief across his bald head. Beyond the lattice blind beside them the typewriter still chattered. Fairchild chuckled again. Then he sighed. “I wish Talliaferro could find him a woman. I’m tired of being seduced Let’s go over to Gordon’s.”

The niece had already yawned elaborately several times at the lone guest: she was prepared, and recognized the preliminary symptoms indicating that her brother was on the point of his customary abrupt and muttered departure from the table. She rose also, with alacrity.

“Well,” she said briskly, “I’ve enjoyed knowing you a lot, Mark. Next summer maybe we'll be back here, and we'll have to do it again, won’t we?”

“Patricia,” her aunt said, “sit down.”

“I’m sorry, Aunt Pat. But Josh wants me to sit with him to-night. He’s going away to-morrow,” she explained to the guest.

“Aren’t you going, too?” Mark Frost asked.

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 derogatory to the dignity of her ghost-ship."

"And whither does she go on quitting the castle?"

"To heaven, I hope; but if she does, the place certainly is not to her taste, for she always returns after an hour's absence. The lady then retires to her chamber, and is quiet for another five years."

"And you believe this, Agnes?"

"How can you ask such a question? No, no, Alphonso! I have too much reason to lament superstition's influence to be its victim myself. However, I must not avow my incredulity to the baroness: she entertains not a doubt of the truth of this history. As to dame Cunegonda, my governess, she protests that fifteen years ago she saw the spectre with her own eyes. She related to me one evening, how she and several other domestics had been terrified while at supper by the appearance of the bleeding nun, as the ghost is called in the castle: 'tis from her account that I drew this sketch, and


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 “Yes, but this is our last night here, and Gus wants me to—”

“Not me,” her brother denied quickly. “You needn’t come away on my account.”

“Well, I think I’d better, anyway.”

Her aunt repeated “Patricia.”

But the niece ignored her. She circled the table and shook the guest’s hand briskly, before he could rise. “Good-by,” she repeated. “Until next summer.” Her aunt said “Patricia” again, firmly. She turned again at the door and said politely: “Good night, Aunt Pat.”

Her brother had gone on up the stairs. She hurried after him, leaving her aunt to call “Patricia!” from the dining room, and reached the head of the stairs in time to see his door close behind him. When she tried the knob, the door was locked, so she came away and went quietly to her room.

She stripped off her clothes in the darkness and lay on her bed, and after a while she heard him banging and splashing in the connecting bathroom. When these sounds had ceased she rose and entered the bathroom quietly from her side, and quietly she tried his door. Unlocked.

She snapped on the light and spun the tap of the shower until needles of water drummed viciously into the bath. She thrust her hand beneath it at intervals: soon it was stinging and cold; and she drew her breath as for a dive and sprang beneath it, clutching a cake of soap, and cringed shuddering and squealing while the water needled her hard simple body in its startling bathing suit of white skin, matting her coarse hair, stinging and blinding her.

She whirled the tap again and the water ceased its antiseptic miniature thunder, and after toweling herself vigorously she found that she was hot as ever, though not sticky any longer; so moving more slowly she returned to her room

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 and donned fresh pajamas. This suit had as yet its original cord. Then she went on her bare silent feet and stood again at the door of her brother’s room, listening.

“Look out, Josh,” she called suddenly, flinging open the door, “I’m coming in.”

His room was dark, but she could discern the shape of him on the bed and she sped across the room and plumped jouncing onto the bed beside him. He jerked himself up sharply.

“Here,” he exclaimed. “What do you want to come in here worrying me, for?” He raised himself still further: a brief violent struggle, and the niece thudded solidly on the floor. She said Ow in a muffled surprised tone. “Now, get out and stay out,” her brother added. “I want to go to sleep.”

“Aw, lemme stay a while. I’m not going to bother you.”

“Haven’t you been staying under my feet for a week, without coming in here where I’m trying to go to sleep? Get out, now.”

“Just a little while,” she begged. “I’ll lie still if you want to go to sleep.”

“You won’t keep still. You go on, now.”

“Please, Gus. I swear I will.”

“Well,” he agreed at last, grudgingly. “But if you start flopping around—”

“I’ll be still,” she promised. She slid quickly onto the bed and lay rigidly on her back. Outside, in the hot darkness, insects scraped and rattled and droned. The room, however, was a spacious quiet coolness, and the curtains at the windows stirred in a ghost of a breeze.

“Josh.” She lay flat, perfectly still.

“Huh.”

“Didn’t you do something to that boat?”

After a while he said: “What boat?” She was silent, taut

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 winter upon the arm of the Comte de Tournerelles and the wings of Wilf's music. You cannot tell me anything about art, my old partner.

. It takes my breath away. If you had been a man, you could have gone anywhere.

. The one thing I have never wanted to be is a man. Pardon, some friends of my group… We shall see more of each other again.

. You have not told me who is here yet.

. It is awfully dull. No one does anything any more; everybody comes for some purpose. I never saw it so stupid before carnival. La Zaragoza, the Spanish dancer, is the only woman who is enjoying herself; it is the same with her everywhere.

. Is that wild beast in town? I should not have come if I had known it. We had a fight at Trouville last summer, right out in the middle of the Casino. They called the bets off on both sides when they stopped us.

. I might be interested later. Good luck, until next time.

. Au revoir, Comtesse.

. Is the opera over?

. We were able to endure only the first two acts, out of sympathy for the artists. Opera? Imagine calling such a thing opera!

. Mankind has suffered a long time under the imposition.

. Yet there are persons who sit there and actually listen to it as if it were music.

. The Comtesse displayed rare taste in declining to accompany us.


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 with listening. He said: “Why? What would I want to do anything to the boat for? What makes you think I did?”

“Didn’t you, now? Honest?”

“You're crazy. I never hurt—I never was down there except when you came tagging down there, that morning. What would I want to do anything to it, for?” They lay motionless, a kind of tenseness. He said, suddenly: “Did you tell her I did something to it?”

“Aw, don’t be a goof. I’m not going to tell on you.”

“You're damn right you won’t. I never did anything to it.”

“All right, all right: I’m not going to tell if you haven’t got guts to. You're yellow, Josh,” she told him calmly.

“Look here, I told you that if you wanted to stay in here, you’d have to keep quiet, didn’t I? Shut up, then. Or get out.”

“Didn’t you break that boat, honest?”

“No, I told you. Now, you shut up or get out of here.”

They lay quiet for a time. After a while she moved carefully, turning onto her belly by degrees. She lay still again for a time, then she raised her head. He seemed to be asleep, so she lowered her head and relaxed her muscles, spreading her arms and legs to where the sheet was still cool.

“I’m glad we're going to-morrow,” she murmured, as though to herself. “I’ll like to ride on the train. And mountains again. I love mountains, all blue and blue We’ll be seeing mountains day after to-morrow. Little towns on ’em that don’t smell like people eating all the time and mountains”

“No mountains between here and Chicago,” her brother said gruffly. “Shut up.”

“Yes, there are.” She raised herself to her elbow. “There are some. I saw some coming down here.”

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. Although I should not have hesitated if it had not been for the music. I met an old school friend on my way to the opera-house; we could not resist stopping and recalling old times. Does the Prince join us this evening?

. The Prince had the bad taste to sit out the opera.

. Well, is there any news? Has the concert been arranged? Has the Casino accepted our proposition.?

. It has in the abstract; we have only to discuss the details. We anticipate a great sensation.

. I am charmed with your programme.

. As the audience will be intelligent, we need scarcely give that feature consideration.

. It comes fully prepared.

. It is no longer a question of initiating a brood of neophytes, but of appealing to a chosen circle of the élite, who are already believers.

. You will realize that you have never before listened to music. We shall play the three great symphonic poems: "The Slumber Poem," "The Poem of the Idea," and "The Poem of Silence."

. On the whole I consider the last the greatest work of Wilf.

. Nobody has been able to understand it as yet.

. It ceases to be what it is the moment that it is understood.

. It had only one performance in London, but five ladies fainted. Two of the first violins committed suicide a week after taking part in the concert.

. I never conduct the work without—shall I say religious?—preparation. I confine myself to my rooms during the week preceding the concert; I speak to no one—I bury myself in the rare, the divine pages bequeathed to us by the Master. I receive whatever food is necessary in order to


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 you may be certain that Cunegonda was not omitted. There she is! I shall never forget what a passion she was in, and how ugly she looked while she scolded me for having made her picture so like herself!"

Here she pointed to a burlesque figure of an old woman in an attitude of terror.

In spite of the melancholy which oppressed me, I could not help smiling at the playful imagination of Agnes: she had perfectly preserved dame Cunegonda's resemblance, but had so much exaggerated every fault, and rendered every feature so irresistibly laughable, that I could easily conceive the duenna's anger.

"The figure is admirable, my dear Agnes! I knew not that you possessed such talents for the ridiculous."

"Stay a moment," she replied; "I will shew you a figure still more ridiculous than dame Cunegonda's. If it pleases you, you may dispose of it as seems best to yourself."

She rose, and went to a cabinet at some


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 “That was in Virginia and Tennessee. We don’t go through Virginia to Chicago, dumbbell.”

“We go through Tennessee, though.”

“Not that part of Tennessee. Shut up, I tell you. Here, you get up and go back to your room.”

“No. Please, just a little while longer. I’ll lie still. Come on, Gus, don’t be so crummy.”

“Get out, now,” he repeated implacably.

“I’ll be still: I won’t say a w—”

“No. Outside, now. Go on. Go on, Gus, like I tell you.”

She heaved herself over nearer. “Please, Josh. Then I’ll go.”

“Well. Be quick about it.” He turned his face away and she leaned down and took his ear between her teeth, biting it just a little, making a kind of meaningless maternal sound against his ear. “That’s enough,” he said presently, turning his head and his moistened ear. “Get out, now.”

She rose obediently and returned to her room. It seemed to be hotter in here than in his room, so she got up and removed her pajamas and got back in bed and lay on her back, cradling her dark grave head in her arms and gazing into the darkness; and after a while it wasn’t so hot and it was like she was on a high place looking away out where mountains faded dreaming and blue and on and on into a purple haze under the slanting and solemn music of the sun. She’d see ’em day after to-morrow. Mountains

Fairchild went directly to the marble and stood before it, clasping his hands at his burly back. The Semitic man sat immediately on entering the room, preëmpting the single chair. The host was busy beyond the rep curtain which constituted his bedroom, from where he presently reappeared with a bottle

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text:
Author:Peter Will

As translator

 * (tr.) The Necromancer, or, the Tale of the Black Forest (1794), by Karl Friedrich Kahlert
 * (tr.) Horrid Mysteries (1796) by Carl Grosse
 * in 4 volumes - Vol. 3

title: Author:Peter Will


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 support the ordeal, and at last rise to a state of mystic exaltation, without which it is idle to aspire to a proper interpretation of the sublime masterpiece. After the concert is over, Mme. Wilf will tell you the condition I am in.

. Unfortunately. We apply a cold compress, and bring him to with a strong punch, reinforced with rum. It is a work which can be performed safely only now and then. My son is not able to conduct it as yet.

. Although I have studied since the age of six. My interpretation differs radically from that of Herr Wulf.

. But you are not able to justify your readings. For example, why should the second movement of "The Poem of the Idea" be lento, while you take "Silence" vivace? The ideal interpretation would be one in which "Silence" was not heard at all, while the "Idea" should be passed over as rapidly as possible, with the swiftness of thought. I hope and pray to find an orchestra some day which is capable of catching the idea.

. Fascinating, is it not? What does Your Highness think? What do you think, Comtesse? And you, too, Duchessa?

. [Reviving] Ah! I beg your pardon…

. The Duchessa is still at the Italian opera.

. No, it is difficult to acquire new tastes at my age. Nothing appeals to me so much as "La Sonnambula." As a concert number, give me "La Mandolinata."

. Oh, Duchessa!

. [Aside to ] Nonsense! I know good music when I hear it—and good society.

. Dissimulate.

. Yes, if we are to continue good friends.

. Hush! They may hear us.

. What if they do? They are no better than we


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 of whisky. He had removed both shirt and undershirt now, and beneath a faint reddish fuzz his chest gleamed with heat, like an oiled gladiator’s.

“I see,” Fairchild remarked as the host entered, “that you too have been caught by this modern day fetich of virginity. But you have this advantage over us: yours will remain inviolate without your having to shut your eyes to its goings-on. You don’t have to make any effort to keep yours from being otherwise. Very satisfactory. And very unusual. The greatest part of man’s immolation of virginity is, I think, composed of an alarm and a suspicion that some one else may be, as the term is, getting it.”

“Perhaps Gordon’s alarm regarding his own particular illusion of it is, that some one else may not get it,” the Semitic man suggested.

“No, I guess not,” Fairchild said. “He don’t expect to sell this to anybody, you know. Who would pay out good money for a virginity he couldn’t later violate, if only to assure himself it was the genuine thing?”

“Leda clasping her duck between her thighs could yet be carved out of it, however,” the other pointed out; “it is large enough for that. Or—”

“Swan,” corrected Fairchild.

“No. Duck,” the Semitic man insisted. “Americans would prefer a duck. Or udders and a fig leaf might be added to the thing as it stands. Isn’t that possible, Gordon?”

“Yes. It might be restored,” Gordon admitted drily. He disappeared again beyond the curtain and returned with two heavy tumblers and a shaving mug bearing a name in Gothic lettering of faded gilt. He drew up the bench on which his enamel water pitcher rested, and Fairchild came and sat upon it. Gordon took the shaving mug and went to lean his tall body against the wall. His intolerant hawk’s face was

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 little distance: unlocking a drawer, she took out a small case, which she opened, and presented to me.

"Do you know the resemblance?" said she, smiling.

It was her own.

Transported at the gift, I pressed the portrait to my lips with passion: I threw myself at her feet, and declared my gratitude in the warmest and most affectionate terms. She listened to me with complaisance, and assured me that she shared my sentiments; when suddenly she uttered a loud shriek, disengaged the hand which I held, and flew from the room by a door which opened to the garden. Amazed at this abrupt departure, I rose hastily from my knees. I beheld with confusion the baroness standing near me, glowing with jealousy, and almost choaked with rage. On recovering from her swoon, she had tortured her imagination to discover her concealed rival. No one appeared to deserve her suspicions more than Agnes. She


text:
Author:Friedrich Maria Albrecht Wilhelm Karl of Austria

Works

 * , translated from original of 26 November 1914
 * The Order of the Day to the Austrian Army of the Carpathians of 28th April 1915


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 like bronze in the unshaded glare of the light. The Semitic man puffed at his cigar. Fairchild raised his glass, squinting through it.

“Udders, and a fig leaf,” he repeated. He drank, and set his tumbler down to light a cigarette. “After all, that is the end of art. I mean—”

“We do get something out of art,” the Semitic man agreed. “We all admit that.”

“Yes,” said Fairchild. “Art reminds us of our youth, of that age when life don’t need to have her face lifted every so often for you to consider her beautiful. That’s about all the virtue there is in art: it’s a kind of Battle Creek, Michigan, for the spirit. And when it reminds us of youth, we remember grief and forget time. That’s something.”

“Something, if all a man has to do is forget time,” the Semitic man rejoined. “But one who spends his days trying to forget time is like one who spends his time forgetting death or digestion. That’s another instance of your unshakable faith in words. It’s like morphine, language is. A fearful habit to form: you become a bore to all who would otherwise cherish you. Of course, there is the chance that you may be hailed as a genius after you are dead long years, but what is that to you? There will still be high endeavor that ends, as always, with kissing in the dark, but where are you? Time? Time? Why worry about something that takes care of itself so well? You were born with the habit of consuming time. Be satisfied with that. Tom-o’-Bedlam had the only genius for consuming time: that is, to be utterly unaware of it.

“But you speak for the artists. I am thinking of the majority of us who are not artists and who need protection from artists, whose time the artists insist on passing for us. We get along quite well with our sleeping and eating and procreating, if you artists only let us alone. But you accursed

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 are; we are all playing a part. This Princess is not a princess, you are not a countess, and I am not a duchess. The widow of that musician is probably not a widow, if you care to look into it, nor is her husband's music music if it comes to be heard. We all know what we are doing here, and the best thing that others can do is to seem not to know anything.

. Duchessa! You surprise me.

. Not much. We both of us know a good time when we see one, and we have seen our good times, too, but not this season.

. We were young and thoughtless then; we have had leisure since to meditate.

. It is beyond me how you can put up with that Princess, who only two months ago was singing in operetta. I have heard all she knows on a hand-organ. Now it appears she is not only an artist, she is a great lady.

. I shall give myself away if you make me laugh. [Aloud] The Duchessa confesses the superiority of the new music. At bottom, it is the only music.

. It is at bottom. I feel it; I understand it. Although— [''Humming. A pause''] Undeniably that is beautiful; it always makes me cry.

. Why, Duchessa!

. However, when we complete our temple, our Bayreuth

. Ah! Our Bayreuth? Bayreuth is another tradition which is doomed presently to disappear.

. Although we must concede Wagner some merit. He was a timid precursor.

. Who had his successes; but compared with our temple, our vast concert-hall, upon a mountain-top, beside the sea—it should be on an island, if possible


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 who are not satisfied with the world as it is and so must try to rebuild the very floor you are standing on, you keep on talking and shouting and gesturing at us until you get us all fidgety and alarmed. So I believe that if art served any purpose at all, it would at least keep the artists themselves occupied,”

Fairchild raised his glass again. “It’s more than that. It’s getting into life, getting into it and wrapping it around you, becoming a part of it. Women can do it without art—old biology takes care of that. But men, men A woman conceives: does she care afterward whose seed it was? Not she. And bears, and all the rest of her life—her young troubling years, that is—is filled. Of course the father can look at it occasionally. But in art, a man can create without any assistance at all: what he does is his. A perversion, I grant you, but a perversion that builds Chartres and invents Lear is a pretty good thing.” He drank, and set his tumbler down.

“Creation, reproduction from within Is the dominating impulse in the world feminine, after all, as aboriginal peoples believe? There is a kind of spider or something. The female is the larger, and when the male goes to her he goes to death: she devours him during the act of conception. And that’s man: a kind of voraciousness that makes an artist stand beside himself with a notebook in his hand always, putting down all the charming things that ever happen to him, killing them for the sake of some problematical something he might or he might not ever use. Listen,” he said, “love, youth, sorrow and hope and despair—they were nothing at all to me until I found later some need of a particular reaction to put in the mouth of some character of whom I wasn’t at that time certain, and that I don’t yet consider very admirable. But maybe it was because I had to work all the time to earn a living, when I was a young man.”

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 “Perhaps so,” the Semitic man agreed. “People still believe they have to work to live.”

“Sure you have to work to live,” Fairchild said quickly.

“You'd naturally say that. If a man has had to deny himself any pleasures during his pleasuring years, he always likes to believe it was necessary. That’s where you get your Puritans from. We don’t like to see any one violate laws we observed, and get away with it. God knows, heaven is a dry reward for abnegation.”

Fairchild rose and went to stand again before the fluid, passionate fixity of the marble. “The end of art,” he repeated. “I mean, to the consumer, not to us: we have to do it, they don’t. They can take it or leave it. Probably Gordon feels the same way about stories that I do about sculpture, but for me” He mused upon the marble for a time. “When the statue is completely nude, it has only a coldly formal significance, you know. But when some foreign matter like a leaf or a fold of drapery (kept there in defiance of gravity by God only knows what) draws the imagination to where the organs of reproduction are concealed, it lends the statue a warmer, a—a—more—”’

“Speculative significance,” supplied the Semitic man.

“—speculative significance which I must admit I require in my sculpture.”

“Certainly the moralists agree with you.”

“Why shouldn’t they? The same food nourishes everybody’s convictions alike. And a man that earns his bread in a glue factory must get some sort of pleasure from smelling cattle hooves, or he’d change his job. There’s your perversion, I think.”

“And,” the Semitic man said, “if you spend your life worrying over sex, it’s an added satisfaction to get paid for your time.”

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 “Yes. But if I earned my bread by means of sex, at least I’d have enough pride about it to be a good honest whore.” Gordon came over and filled the glasses again. Fairchild returned and got his, and prowled aimlessly about the room, examining things. The Semitic man sat with his handkerchief spread over his bald head. He regarded Gordon’s naked torso with envious wonder. “They don’t seem to bother you at all,” he stated fretfully.

“Took here,” Fairchild called suddenly. He had unswaddled a damp cloth from something and he now bent over his find. “Come here, Julius.” The Semitic man rose and joined him.

It was clay, yet damp, and from out its dull, dead grayness Mrs. Maurier looked at them. Her chins, harshly, and her flaccid jaw muscles with savage verisimilitude. Her eyes were caverns thumbed with two motions into the dead familiar astonishment of her face; and yet, behind them, somewhere within those empty sockets, behind all her familiar surprise, there was something else—something that exposed her face for the mask it was, and still more, a mask unaware. “Well, I’m damned,” Fairchild said slowly, staring at it. “I’ve known her for a year, and Gordon comes along after four days Well, I’ll be damned,” he said again.

“I could have told you,” the Semitic man said. “But I wanted you to get it by yourself. I don’t see how you missed it; I don’t see how any one with your faith in your fellow man could believe that any one could be as silly as she, without reason.”

“An explanation for silliness?” Fairchild repeated. “Does her sort of silliness require explanation?”

“It shouts it,” the other answered. “Look how Gordon got it, right away.”

“That’s so,” Fairchild admitted. He gazed at the face again,

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 then he looked at Gordon with envious admiration. “And you got it right away, didn’t you?”

Gordon was replenishing the glasses again. “He couldn’t have missed it,” the Semitic man repeated. “I don’t see how you missed it. You are reasonably keen about people—sooner or later.”

“Well, I guess I missed her,” Fairchild returned, and extended his tumbler. “But it’s the usual thing, ain’t it? plantations and things? First family, and all that?”

“Something like that,” the Semitic man agreed. He returned to his chair and Fairchild sat again beside the water pitcher. “She’s a northerner, herself. Married it. Her husband must have been pretty old when they married. That’s what explains her, I think.”

“What does? Being a northerner, or marriage? Marriage starts and explains lots of things about us, just like singleness or widowhood does. And I guess the Ohio river can affect your destiny, too. But how does it explain her?”

“The story is, that her people forced her to marry old Maurier. He had been overseer on a big place before the Civil War. He disappeared in ’63, and when the war was over he turned up again riding a horse with a Union Army cavalry saddle and a hundred thousand dollars in uncut Federal notes for a saddle blanket. Lord knows what the amount really was, or how he got it, but it was enough to establish him. Money. You can’t argue against money: you only protest.

“Everybody expected him to splurge about with his money: show up the penniless aristocracy, that sort of thing; work out some of the inhibitions he must have developed during his overseer days. But he didn’t. Perhaps he’d got rid of his inhibitions during his sojourn at the war. Anyway, he failed to live up to character, so people decided that he was

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text: Index:Houghton Mifflin v. Stackpole Sons (41 U.S.P.Q. 404).pdf


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do go so contrary like with me. I wanted to hit upon an especially novel, out-of-the-way subject for one of these articles. "I will write one paper about something altogether new," I said to myself; "something that nobody else has ever written or talked about before; and then I can have it all my own way." And I went about for days, trying to think of something of this kind; and I couldn't. And Mrs Cutting, our charwoman, came yesterday—I don't mind mentioning her name, because I know she will not see this book. She would not look at such a frivolous publication. She never reads anything but the Bible and Lloyd's Weekly News. All other literature she considers unnecessary and sinful.

She said: "Lor', sir, you do look worried."

I said: "Mrs Cutting, I am trying to think of a subject, the discussion of which will come upon the world in the nature of a startler—some subject upon which no previous human being has ever said a word—some subject that will attract by its novelty, invigorate by its surprising freshness."


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 a moral coward, that he was off somewhere in a hole with his money, like a rat. And this was the general opinion until a rumor got out about several rather raw land deals in which he was assisted by a Jew named Julius Kauffman who was acquiring a fortune and an unsavory name during those years immediately following General Butler’s assumption of the local purple.

“And when the smoke finally cleared somewhat, he had more money than ever rumor could compute and he was the proprietor of that plantation on which he had once been a head servant, and within a decade he was landed gentry. I don’t doubt but that he had dug up some blueblood émigré ancestry. He was a small shrewd man, a cold and violent man; just the sort to have an unimpeachable genealogy. Humorless and shrewd, but I don’t doubt that he sat at times in the halls of his newly adopted fathers, and laughed.

“The story is that her father came to New Orleans on a business trip, with a blessing from Washington. She was young, then; probably a background of an exclusive school, and a social future, the taken-for-granted capital letter kind, but all somehow rather precarious—cabbage, and a footman to serve it; a salon in which they sat politely, surrounded by objects, and spoke good French; and bailiff’s men on the veranda and the butcher’s bill in the kitchen—gentility: evening clothes without fresh linen underneath. I imagine he—her father—was pretty near at the end of his rope. Some government appointment, I imagine, brought him south: hijacking privileges with official sanction, you know.

“The whole family seemed to have found our climate salubrious, though, what with hibiscus and mimosa on the lawn instead of bailiffs, and our dulcet airs after the rigors of New England; and she cut quite a figure among the jeunesse dorée of the nineties; fell in love with a young chap, penniless but

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 real people, who led cotillions and went without gloves to send her flowers and glacé trifles from the rue Vendôme and sang to a guitar among the hibiscus and mimosa when stars were wont to rise. Old Maurier had made a bid, himself, in the meantime. Maurier was not yet accepted by the noblesse. But you can’t ignore money, you know: you can only protest. And tremble. It took my people to teach the world that And so—” the Semitic man drained his glass. He continued:

“You know how it is, how there comes a certain moment in the course of human events during which everything—public attention, circumstance, even destiny itself—is caught at the single possible instant, and the actions of certain people, for no reason at all, become of paramount interest and importance to the rest of the world? That’s how it was with these people. There were wagers laid; a famous gambler even made a book on it. And all the time she went about her affairs, her parties and routs and balls, behind that cold Dresden china mask of hers. She was quite beautiful then, they say. People always painting her, you know. Her face in every exhibition, her name a byword in the street and a toast at Antoine’s or the St. Charles But then, perhaps nothing went on behind that mask at all.”

“Of course there was,” said Fairchild quickly. “For the sake of the story, if nothing else.”

“Pride, anyway, I guess. She had that.” The Semitic man reached for the bottle. Gordon came and refilled his mug. “It must have been pretty hard for her, even if there was only pride to suffer. But women can stand anything—”

“And enjoy it,” Fairchild put in. “But go on.”

“That’s all. They were married in the Cathedral. She wasn’t a Catholic—Ireland had yet to migrate in any sizable quantities when her people established themselves in New England. That was another thing, mind you. And her horse-

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Page:The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, a Book for an Idle Holiday - Jerome (1886).djvu/78

 She laughed, and said I was a funny gentleman.

That's my luck again. When I make serious observations, people chuckle; when I attempt a joke, nobody sees it. I had a beautiful one last week. I thought it so good, and I worked it up, and brought it in artfully at a dinner-party. I forget how exactly, but we had been talking about the attitude of Shakespeare towards the Reformation, and I said something, and immediately added, "Ah, that reminds me; such a funny thing happened the other day in Whitechapel." "Oh," said they; "what was that?" "Oh, 'twas awfully funny," I replied, beginning to giggle myself; "it will make you roar;" and I told it them.

There was dead silence when I finished—it was one of those long jokes, too—and then, at last, somebody said: "And that was the joke?"

I assured them that it was, and they were very polite, and took my word for it. All but one old gentleman, at the other end of the table, who wanted to know which was the joke—what he said to her, or what she said to him; and we argued it out.

Some people are too much the other way. I knew a fellow once, whose natural tendency to laugh at everything was so strong that, if you wanted to talk seriously to him, you had to explain beforehand that what you were going to say would not be amusing. Unless you got him to clearly understand this, he would go off into fits of merriment over every word


text:
Page:Journal of the Optical Society of America, volume 30, number 12.pdf/1

Published monthly

at

by the

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y.


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 less Lochinvar was present. Bets had been made that if he stayed away or passed the word, no one would attend at all. Maurier was still regarded— Well, imagine for yourself a situation like that: a tradition of ease unassailable and unshakable gone to pieces right under you, and out of the wreckage rising a man who once held your stirrup while you mounted. Thirty years is barely the adolescence of bitterness, you know.

“I’d like to have seen her, coming out of the church afterward. They would have had a canopy leading from the door to the carriage: there must have been a canopy, and flowers, heavy ones—Lochinvar would have sent gardenias; and she, decked out in all the pagan trappings of innocence and her beautiful secret face beside that cold, violent man, graying now, but you have remarked how it takes the harlequinade of aristocracy to really reveal peasant blood, haven’t you? And her Lochinvar to wish her godspeed, watching her ankles as she got into the carriage.

“They never had any children. Maurier may have been too old; she herself may have been barren. Often that type is. But I don’t think so. I believe But who knows? I don’t. Anyway, that explains her, to me. At first you think it’s just silliness, lack of occupation—a tub of washing, to be exact. But I see something thwarted back of it all, something stifled, yet which won’t quite die.”

“A virgin,” Fairchild said immediately. “That’s what it is, exactly. Fooling with sex, kind of dabbing at it, like a kitten at a ball of string. She missed something: her body told her so, insisted, forced her to try to remedy it and fill the vacuum. But now her body is old; it no longer remembers that it missed anything, and all she has left is a habit, the ghost of a need to rectify something the lack of which her body has long since forgotten about.”

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 The Semitic man lit his cold cigar again. Fairchild gazed at his glass, turning it this way and that slowly in his hand. Gordon stood yet against the wall, looking beyond them and watching something not in this room. The Semitic man slapped his other wrist, then wiped his palm on his handkerchief. Fairchild spoke.

“And I missed it, missed it clean,” he mused. “And then Gordon Say,” he looked up suddenly, “how did you happen to learn all this?”

“Julius Kauffman was my grandfather,” the Semitic man replied.

“Oh Well, its a good thing you told me about it. I guess I won’t have another chance to get anything from her at first hand.” He chuckled without mirth.

“Oh, yes, you will,” the other told him. “She won’t hold this boat party against us. People are far more tolerant of artists than artists are of people.” He puffed at his cigar for a time. “The trouble with you,” he said, “is that you don’t act right at all. You are the most disappointing artist I know. Mark Frost is much nearer the genuine thing than you are. But then, he’s got more time to be a genius than you have: you spend too much time writing. And that’s where Gordon is going to fall down. You and he typify genius décolleté. And people who own motor cars and food draw the line just at negligé—somewhere about the collarbone. And remind me to give that to Mark to-morrow: it struck me several times these last few days that he needs a new one.”

“Speaking of décolleté—” Fairchild mopped his face again. “What is it that makes a man drink whisky on a night like this, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” the other answered. “Perhaps it’s a scheme of nature’s to provide for our Italian immigrants. Or of

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text: Author:František Drtina

title: Author:František Drtina


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 Providence. Prohibition: for the Latin, politics for the Irish, invented He them.”

Fairchild filled his glass again, unsteadily. “Might as well make a good job of it,” he said. Gordon yet leaned against the wall, motionless and remote. Fairchild continued: “Italians and Irish. Where do we homegrown Nordics come in? What has He invented for us?”

“Nothing,” the Semitic man answered. “You invented Providence.” Fairchild raised his tumbler, gulping, and a part of the liquor ran over thinly and trickled from both corners of his mouth down his chin. Then he set the glass down and stared at the other with a mild astonishment.

“I am afraid,” he enunciated carefully, “that that one is going to do the business for me.” He wiped his chin unsteadily, and moving he struck his empty glass to the floor. The Semitic man groaned.

“Now we'll have to move again, just when I had become inured to them. Or perhaps you’d like to lie down for a while?”

Fairchild sat and mused a moment. “No, I don’t,” he stated thickly. “If I lie down, I wouldn’t get up again. Little air, fresh air. I’ll go outside.” The Semitic man rose and helped him to his feet. Fairchild pulled himself together. “Come along, Gordon. I’ve got to get outside for a while.”

Gordon came out of his dream. He came and raised the bottle to the light, and divided it between his mug and the Semitic man’s tumbler, and supporting Fairchild between them they drank. Then Fairchild must examine the marble again.

“I think it’s kind of nice.” He stood before it, swaying, swallowing the hot salty liquid that continued to fill his throat. “You kind of wish she could talk, don’t you? It would be sort of like wind through trees No... not talk: you’d like to watch her from a distance on a May morning, bathing

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 in a pool where there were a lot of poplar trees. Now, this is the way to forget your grief.”

“She is not blonde,” Gordon said harshly, holding the empty bottle in his hand. “She is dark, darker than fire. She is more terrible and beautiful than fire.” He ceased and stared at them. Then he raised the bottle and hurled it crashing into the huge littered fireplace.

“Not—?” murmured Fairchild, trying to focus his eyes.

“Marble, purity,” Gordon said in his harsh, intolerant voice. “Pure because they have yet to discover some way to make it unpure. They would if they could, God damn them!” He stared at them for a moment from beneath his caverned bronze brows. His eyes were pale as two bits of steel. “Forget grief,” he repeated harshly. “Only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?”

He took the thin coat from behind the door and put it on over his naked torso, and they helped Fairchild from the room and down the dark stairs, abruptly subdued and quiet.

Mark Frost stood on the corner, frankly exasperated. The street light sprayed his tall ghostly figure with shadows of bitten late August leaves, and he stood in indecision, musing fretfully. His evening was spoiled: too late to instigate anything on his own hook or to join any one else’s party, too soon to go home. Mark Frost depended utterly upon other people to get his time passed.

He was annoyed principally with Mrs. Maurier. Annoyed and unpleasantly shocked and puzzled. At her strange not coldness: rather, detachment, aloofness callousness. If you were at all artistic, if you had any taint of art in your blood, dining with her filled the evening. But now, to-

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Template talk:No license

Improving this template
I'm noting some issues below. I think they're pretty easily resolved, I hope this does not come across as controversial. I'm not proposing solutions here, but first trying to establish the problems to be solved. Hopefully others can consider whether or not these seem like real problems. If there's agreement on that, I think it should be pretty easy to come up with solutions, and I'd invite others to propose some. -Pete (talk) 19:06, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Use of word 'license'
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Fit to purpose
In some cases, this template is applied where a Wikisource user has already put some effort in, and identified a genuine difficulty in tracking down the information necessary to determine whether it complies with Wikisource's copyright policy. In this case, where there's an established question about the specific page, the "emergency" tone (red color, exclamation point, placement at top of page) may be sensible, and alert the user to something pressing about the page they're looking at.

In others (and recently), it's applied very broadly to all files that lack an assertion of the content's license or public domain status. In these cases, while it's reasonable to call the overall state of affairs (many untagged pages across the site) an emergency, it's an emergency that may very well not apply to the page it's on. If the page clearly establishes that the work was published centuries ago, or establishes in prose that it was released under a CC license, etc., there is no emergency on this specific page, but rather a clerical error that needs fixing. There's no need to distract the end user.

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title: Template talk:No license


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 night Never saw the old girl so bloodless in the presence of genius, he told himself. Didn’t seem to give a damn whether I stayed or not. But perhaps she doesn’t feel well, after the recent excitement, he added generously. Being a woman, too. He had completely forgotten about the niece: the sepulchral moth of his heart had completely forgotten that temporary flame.

His car (owned and operated by the city) came along presently, and instinct got him aboard. Instinct also took the proper transfer for him, but a crumb of precaution (or laziness) at the transfer point haled him amid automobiles bearing the young enchanted of various ages swiftly toward nowhere or less, to and within a corner drug store where was a telephone. His number cost him a nickel.

“Hello It’s me  Thought you were going out tonight  Yes, I did. Very stupid party, though. I couldn’t stick it So you decided to stay in, did you? No, I just thought I’d call you up you’re welcome. I have another button off Thanks. I’ll bring it next time I am out that way To-night? We—ll huh? all right. I’ll come on out. G’bye.”

His very ghostliness seemed to annihilate space: he invariably arrived after you had forgotten about him and before you expected him. But she had known him for a long time and ere he could ring she appeared in a window overhead and dropped the latchkey, and he retrieved its forlorn clink and let himself into the dark hall. A light gleamed dimly from the stairhead where she leaned to watch the thin evaporation of his hair as he mounted.

“I’m all alone to-night,” she remarked. “The folks are gone for the weekend. They didn’t expect me back until Sunday.”

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 “That’s good,” he answered. “I don’t feel up to talking to your mother to-night.”

“Neither do I. Not to anybody, after these last four days. Come in.”

It was a vaguely bookish room, in the middle of which a heavy, hotlooking champagne shaded piano lamp cast an oasis of light upon a dull blue brocaded divan. Mark Frost went immediately to the divan and lay at full length upon it. Then he moved again and extracted a package of cigarettes from his jacket. Miss Jameson accepted one and he relaxed again and groaned with hollow relief.

“I’m too comfortable,” he said. “I’m really ashamed to be so comfortable.”

Miss Jameson drew up a chair, just without the oasis of light. “Help yourself,” she replied. “There’s nobody here but us. The family won’t be back until Sunday night.”

“Elegant,” Mark Frost murmured. He laid his arm across his face, shading his eyes. “Whole house to yourself. You're lucky. Lord, I’m glad to be off that boat. Never again for me.”

“Don’t mention that boat,” Miss Jameson shuddered. “I think it’ll be never again for any of that party. From the way Mrs. Maurier talked this morning. Not for Dawson and Julius, anyway.”

“Did she send a car back for them?”

“No. After yesterday, they could have fallen overboard and she wouldn’t even have notified the police But let’s don’t talk about that trip any more,” she said wearily. She sat just beyond the radius of light: a vague humorless fragility. Mark Frost lay on his back, smoking his cigarette. She said: “While I think of it: Will you be sure to lock the door after your I’ll be here alone, to-night.”

“All right,” he promised from beneath his arm. His pale,

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 prehensile mouth released the cigarette and his arm swung it outward to where he hoped there was an ash tray. The ash tray wasn’t there and his hand made a series of futile dabbing motions until Miss Jameson leaned forward and moved the ash tray into the automatic ellipsis of his hand. After a while she leaned forward again and crushed out her cigarette.

A clock somewhere behind him tapped monotonously at silence and she moved restlessly in her chair, and presently she leaned and took another cigarette from his pack. Mark Frost removed his arm long enough to raise the pack to his vision and count the remaining cigarettes. Then he replaced his arm.

“You're quiet to-night,” she remarked. He grunted and once more she leaned forward and ground out her halfsmoked cigarette with decision. She rose. “I’m going to take off some clothes and get into something cooler. Nobody here to object. Excuse me a moment.”

He grunted again beneath his arm, and she went away from the oasis of light. She opened the door of her room and stood in the darkness just within the door a moment. Then she closed the door audibly, stood for a moment, then opened it again slightly and pressed the light switch.

She went to her dressing table and switched on two small, shaded electric candles there, and returned and switched off the ceiling light. She considered for a while; then she returned to the door and stood with the knob in her hand, then without closing it she went back to the dressing table and turned off one of the lights there. This left the room filled with a soft, pinkish glow in which a hushed gleaming of crystal on the dressing-table was the only distinguishable feature. She removed her dress hastily and stood in her underthings with a kind of cringing, passive courage, but there was still

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 no sound of movement beyond the door, and she switched on the other light again and examined herself in the mirror.

She mused again, examining her frail body in its intimate garment. Then she ran swiftly and silently to a chest of drawers and in a locked drawer she sought feverishly among a delicate neat mass of sheer fabric, coming at last upon an embroidered night dress, neatly folded and unworn and scented faintly. Then, standing where the door, should it be opened, would conceal her for a moment, she slipped the gown over her head and from beneath it she removed the undergarment. Then she took her reckless troubled heart and the fragile and humorless calmness in which it beat, back to the dressing table; and sitting before the mirror she assumed a studied pose, combing and combing out her long, uninteresting hair.

Mark Frost lay at length on the divan, as was his habit, shading his eyes with his arm. At intervals he roused himself to light a fresh cigarette, at each time counting the diminishing few that remained, with static alarm. A clock ticked regularly somewhere in the room. The soft light from the lamp bathed him in a champagne colored and motionless sea He raised a fresh cigarette: his pale, prehensile mouth wrapped about it as though his mouth were a separate organism.

But after a while there were no more cigarettes. And roused temporarily, he remarked his hostess’ prolonged absence. But he lay back again, luxuriating in quiet and the suave surface on which he rested. But before long he raised the empty cigarette package and groaned dismally and rose and prowled quietly about the room, hoping perhaps to find one cigarette some one had forgotten. But there was none.

The couch drew him and he returned to the oasis of light, where he discovered and captured the practically whole cigarette which Miss Jameson had discarded. “Snipe,” he mur-

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 mured with sepulchral humorlessness and he fired it, averting his head lest he lose his eyelashes in doing so, and he lay once more, shading his eyes with his arm. The clock ticked on in the silence. It seemed to be directly behind him: if he could just roll his eyes a bit further back into his skull He’d better look, anyhow, after a while. After midnight only one trolley to the hour. If he missed the twelve o’clock car

So, after a while he did look, having to move to do so, and he immediately rose from the divan in a mad, jointless haste. Fortunately he remembered where he had left his hat and he caught it up and plunged down the stairs and on through the dark hall. He blundered into a thing or so, but the pale rectangle of the glass door guided him and after a violent struggle he opened it, and leaping forth he crashed it behind him. It failed to catch and in midflight down the steps he glanced wildly back at the growing darkness of its gap that revealed at the top edge a vague gleam from the light at the head of the stairs.

The corner was not far, and as he ran loosely and frantically toward it there came among the grave gesturing of tall palms a worn and bloodless rumor of the dying moon, and the rising hum of the street car crashed among the trees. He saw its lighted windows halt, heard its hum cease, saw the windows move again and heard its hum rise swelling, drowning his hoarse reiterated cries. But the conductor saw him at last and pulled the cord again and the car halted once more, humming impatiently; and Mark Frost plunged his long ungovernable legs across the soft slumbrous glare of polished asphalt and clawed his panting, ghostly body through the opened doors out of which the conductor leaned, calling to him:

“Come on, come on: this ain’t a taxi.”

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Page:Houghton Mifflin v. Stackpole Sons (41 U.S.P.Q. 404).pdf/1

404

On motion for preliminary injunction.

Reversed at 42 USPQ 96.

, District Judge.—I do not think that this case is sufficiently clear to warrant the issuance of a preliminary injunction. The defendants have raised questions of title and validity [of the copyright] which are not free from doubt; the facts are in dispute; and the issues cannot properly be determined on affidavits. It may be that the plaintiff will succeed at the trial, but on the present showing I cannot say that it will do so with the degree of certainty required for the issuance of a preliminary injunction.

The motion of the plaintiff for a preliminary injunction is denied.

On motion for summary judgment.

, District Judge.—This is a motion for summary judgment, under Rule 56 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Plaintiff, a citizen and resident of New York, moved for summary judgment with respect to the first cause of action and for a partial summary judgment on the second cause of action, pleaded in the bill of complaint. Both


text: Houghton Mifflin Company v. Stackpole Sons (41 U.S.P.Q. 404)


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Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 2.djvu/200

since the commencement of our marvelous journey, I had experienced many surprises, had suffered from many illusions. I thought that I was case-hardened against all surprises and could neither see nor hear anything to amaze me again. When, however, I saw these two letters, which had been engraven three hundred years before, I stood fixed in an attitude of mute surprise.

Not only was there the signature of the learned and enterprising alchemist written in the rock, but I held in my hand the identical instrument with which he had laboriously engraved it. It was impossible, without showing an amount of incredulity scarcely becoming a sane man, to deny the existence of the traveler, and the reality of that voyage which I believed all along to have been a myth—the mystification of some fertile brain.

While these reflections were passing through my mind, my uncle, the Professor, gave way to an access of feverish and poetical excitement. "Wonderful and glorious Genius, great Saknussemm," he cried, "you have left no resource omitted to show to other mortals the way into the interior of our mighty globe, and your fellow-creatures can find the trail left by your illustrious footsteps, three hundred years ago. You have been careful to secure for others the contemplation of these wonders and marvels of creation. Your name engraved at every important stage of your glorious journey, leads the hopeful traveler direct to the mighty discovery to which you devoted such energy and courage. The audacious traveler, who shall follow your footsteps to the last, will doubtless find your initials engraved with your own hand upon the center of the earth. I will be that audacious traveler—I, too, will sign my name upon the very same spot, upon the central granite stone of this wondrous work of the Creator. But in justice to your devotion, and to your being the first to indicate the road, let this Cape, seen by you upon the shores of this sea discovered by you, be called of all time, Cape Saknussemm."

This is what I heard, and I began to be roused to the pitch of enthusiasm indicated by those words. A fierce excitement roused me. I forgot everything. The dangers of the voyage, and the perils of the return journey, were


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 and see a Fountain which was in the Midst of the Town, and which the Pythagoreans had often strove in vain to stop up. It was remarkable for the Purity of its Water, and for not suffering any Dirt to settle in it. The more the Pythagoreans labour'd to suppress it, the more it over-flow'd, and grew daily more famous, to their Shame and Confusion. The Reason of their Hatred to it was, that it had so much Virtue, that an hearty Draught of its Water wou'd make the ablest Pythagorean renounce his Principles, if Obstinacy and Prejudice had not usurp'd the Seat of his Understanding. It had restor'd many to their Human Shape, and prov'd an infallible Remedy again the Griping of the Guts; where the Pain was so great, that it made People look as if they were possess'd. It was under the King's immediate Care, who, upon his Coronation, had oblig'd himself to protect it, and well did it deserve to have a Royal Patron, since it was the greatest Blessing that ever had been bestow'd upon the Kingdom. It brought Peace and Plenty wheresoever it flow'd, and guided the People in the true Road of Happiness. It had a Guard continually surrounding it, which was made firm to its Interests by drinking of it. Many times did the Pythagoreans hazard their Lives and Fortunes to a Man, in Hopes of destroying it, and often caus'd such an Effusion of Blood upon its Banks, that it chang'd its Colour for a Time, tho' it never cou'd be corrupted. The Bodies of those that died in the Defence of it, were gently carried down the Stream that issued from it into a remote Country, where they receiv'd new Life, and enjoy'd endless Happiness.

Many had desir'd to draw off its Water into their own Grounds; and to that End, had secretly dug Passages under the Earth, thinking that the Fountain wou'd pour its Water into them, and by that


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 now as nothing! What another man had done in ages past, could I felt be done again; I was determined to do it myself, and now nothing that man had accomplished appeared to me impossible. "Forward—forward," I cried in a burst of genuine and hearty enthusiasm.

I had already started in the direction of the somber and gloomy gallery, when the Professor stopped me; he, the man so rash and hasty, he, the man so easily roused to the highest pitch of enthusiasm, checked me, and asked me to be patient and show more calm. "Let us return to our good friend, Hans," he said; "we will then bring the raft down to this place."

I must say that though I at once yielded to my uncle's request, it was not without dissatisfaction, and I hastened along the rocks of that wonderful coast. "Do you know, my dear uncle," I said, as we walked along, "that we have been singularly helped by a concurrence of circumstances, right up to this very moment."

"So you begin to see it, do you, Harry?" said the Professor, with a smile.

"Doubtless," I responded, "and strangely enough, even the tempest has been the means of putting us on the right road. Blessings on the tempest! It brought us safely back to the very spot from which fine weather would have driven us forever. Supposing we had succeeded in reaching the southern and distant shores of this extraordinary sea, what would have become of us? The name of Saknussemm would never have appeared to us, and at this moment we should have been cast away upon an inhospitable coast, probably without an outlet."

"Yes, Harry, my boy, there is certainly something providential in that wandering at the mercy of wind and waves towards the south: we have come back exactly north; and what is better still, we fall upon this great discovery. There is something in it which is far beyond my comprehension. The coincidence is unheard-of, marvelous!"

"What matter! It is not our duty to explain facts, but to make the best possible use of them."

"Doubtless, my boy; but if you will allow me will allow me" said the really-delighted Professor.

"Excuse me, sir, but I see exactly how it will be; we shall take the northern route; we shall pass under the north-


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 ern regions of Europe, under Sweden, under Russia, under Siberia, and who knows where—instead of burying ourselves under the burning plains and deserts of Africa, or beneath the mighty waves of the ocean; and that is all, at this stage of our journey, that I care to know. Let us advance, and Heaven will be our guide!"

"Yes, Harry, you are right, quite right; all is for the best. Let us abandon this horizontal sea, which could. never have led to anything satisfactory. We shall descend, descend, and everlastingly descend. Do you know, my dear boy, that to reach the interior of the earth we have only five thousand miles to travel!"

"Bah!" I cried, carried away by a burst of enthusiasm, "the distance is scarcely worth speaking about. The thing is to make a start."

My wild, mad, and incoherent speeches continued until we rejoined our patient and phlegmatic guide. All was, we found, prepared for an immediate departure. There was not a single parcel but what was in its proper place. We all took up our posts on the raft, and the sail being hoisted, Hans received his directions, and guided the frail barque towards Cape Saknussemm, as we had definitely named it.

The wind was very unfavorable to a craft that was unable to sail close to the wind. We were continually reduced to pushing ourselves forward by means of poles. On several occasions the rocks ran far out into deep water and we were compelled to make a long round. At last, after three long and weary hours of navigation, that is to say, about six o'clock in the evening, we found a place at which we could land.

I jumped on shore first. In my present state of excitement and enthusiasm, I was always first. My uncle and the Icelander followed. The voyage from the port to this point of the sea had by no means calmed me. It had rather produced the opposite effect. I even proposed to burn our vessel, that is to destroy our raft, in order to completely cut off our retreat. But my uncle sternly opposed this wild project. I began to think him particularly lukewarm and unenthusiastic. "At any rate, my dear uncle," I said, "let us start without delay."

"Yes, my boy, I am quite as eager to do so as you can


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 be. But, in the first place, let us examine this mysterious gallery, in order to find if we shall need to prepare and mend our ladders."

My uncle now began to see to the efficiency of our Ruhmkorff's coil, which would doubtless soon be needed; the raft, securely fastened to a rock, was left alone. The opening into the new gallery was not twenty paces distant from the spot. Our little troop, with myself at the head, advanced.

The orifice, which was almost circular, presented a diameter of about five feet; the somber tunnel was cut in the living rock, and coated on the inside by the different material which had once passed through it in a state of fusion. The lower part was about level with the water, so that we were able to penetrate to the interior without difficulty. We followed an almost horizontal direction; when, at the end of about a dozen paces, our further advance was checked by the interposition of an enormous block of granite rock.

"Accursed stone!" I cried, furiously, on perceiving that we were stopped by what seemed an insurmountable obstacle.

In vain we looked to the right, in vain we looked to the left; in vain examined it above and below. There existed no passage, no sign of any other tunnel. I experienced the most bitter and painful disappointment. So enraged was I that I would not admit the reality of any obstacle. I stooped to my knees; I looked under the mass of stone. No hole, no interstice. I then looked above. The same barrier of granite! Hans, with the lamp, examined the sides of the tunnel in every direction. But all in vain! It was necessary to renounce all hope of passing through.

I had seated myself upon the ground. My uncle walked angrily and hopelessly up and down. He was evidently desperate. "But," I cried, after some moments' thought, "what about Arne Saknussemm?"

"You are right," replied my uncle, "he can never have been checked by a lump of rock."

"No—ten thousand times no," I cried, with extreme vivacity. "This huge lump of rock, in consequence of some concussion, has in some unexpected way closed up