A Strange Discovery | Page 6

fellow,
even for eight; and I saw my chance. I ran my head in between his
knees and twisted my body and neck so as to look right up into his face,
as he looked down to see what rubbed against him. He looked kind of
funny when he saw my face down there, but not a bit mad; and he
could easy have hurt me, but he didn't. I drew back my head so quick
that nobody else saw me. I often wonder if the Prince remembers me;
and I wish you'd ask him when you go home. Since I grew up, I've
often felt ashamed to think I did it. If you think of it, and it ain't too
much trouble, please tell him that we know better in the United States
than to do such things, but that I was little then, and I must have been
ignorant of ettiket, my father bein' dead, and I havin' to stay out of
school to help make money. If you will, say I hope there's no feelin';
and when you think of it, drop me a line, please."

The SECOND

Chapter
A week had elapsed since my arrival in Bellevue. I had been introduced
to Doctor Castleton, and had exchanged a few words with him. I had
also listened to several of his street-corner talks, and my interest in him
from day to day had increased. This interest must have been reciprocal,
for he seemed to look for my coming; but then, in whom was he not
interested? I liked him for his real goodness, was entertained by his
erratic ways, and admired his intellectual brightness. Never before had
I come in contact with a mind at once so spontaneous and so versatile.
It was perhaps his most striking peculiarity, that he seemed always to
be looking for something startling to occur; and in a dearth of the new
and sensational from without, he produced excitement for the
community from within. The weather, for instance, was growing
warmer, and the summer was apparently to be a sultry one: hence,
before the season was ended we were to look for the most sweeping
epidemics of disease; a comet had been sighted by one of our
comet-hunters, and we were all to say later whether or not it would
have been better if we'd never been born, and so on, and so on. His
mind teemed with a prescience of the plans and plots of statesmen, of
bureaucrats, and of "plutocrats": Germany was going to overshadow
Europe, and "grind all beneath it like a glacier"; "France was about to
strike back at Prussia, and the blow would be felt in the trembling of
the earth from Pole to Pole." Yet this, I thought, was to the man himself
all fiction--the froth on the limpid and sparkling depths beneath--the
overflow of a bright, undisciplined mind amid the stagnation of a
country town. This strange man would not intentionally have brought
actual injury upon even an enemy--if he ever had a real enemy; he was
at heart, and generally in practice, as kind as a gentle woman. But he
seemed unable to exist without mental super-activity; and the sympathy
of his fellows in his mental gyrations was to him a constant necessity.
Few of the persons whom he habitually met and who had leisure were
able to discuss with him the books he read, and not many of them cared
even to hear him talk of his fresh literary accessions. He had, long ago,
and many times, described for the benefit of the habitués of the corners,
the career of Alexander and of Napoleon, explaining what they had
done, and how they had done it, and _why_; with instances in which
the execution of their plans had met with failure, the reasons for that

failure, and the methods by which, if he had been them, success might
easily have been attained. An ancient-looking apothecary, with an old
"Rebel bushwhacker" and a painter out of work who "loafed" of
evenings in, or in front of, the corner apothecary shop, had stood
gap-mouthed at these recitations until the mine of wonders had been to
the last grain exhausted. Still, excitement must be procured for them.
The doctor could better have dispensed for a day with food for the body,
than to have foregone excitement for the mind; and if a majority of his
auditors were also to be gratified, the subject-matter must be strong and
novel, must be boldly produced, and, by preference, should be of local
interest. As the doctor himself delighted in surprises of a terrifying or
horrifying nature, it was unlikely that his inventions in that direction
would be characterized by tameness. He would not, when hard pressed
on a dull day, allow