Isaac Bickerstaff | Page 7

so puzzled as myself when I came first to view his brain; half of it was worn out, and filled up with mere expletives that had nothing to do with any other parts of the texture; therefore, when he called for his clothes in a morning, he would cry, 'John!' John does not answer. 'What a plague! nobody there? What the devil, and rot me, John, for a lazy dog as you are!' I knew no way to cure him but by writing down all he said one morning as he was dressing, and laying it before him on the toilet when he came to pick his teeth. The last recital I gave him of what he said for half an hour before was, 'What, the devil! where is the washball? call the chairmen! d--n them, I warrant they are at the alehouse already! zounds! and confound them!' When he came to the glass he takes up my note--'Ha! this fellow is worse than me: what, does he swear with pen and ink?' But, reading on, he found them to be his own words. The stratagem had so good an effect upon him that he grew immediately a new man, and is learning to speak without an oath; which makes him extremely short in his phrases; for, as I observed before, a common swearer has a brain without any idea on the swearing side; therefore my ward has yet mighty little to say, and is forced to substitute some other vehicle of nonsense to supply the defect of his usual expletives. When I left him, he made use of 'Odsbodikins! Oh me! and Never stir alive!' and so forth; which gave me hopes of his recovery. So I went to the next I told you of, the gamester. When we first take our place about a man, the receptacles of the pericranium are immediately searched. In his I found no one ordinary trace of thinking; but strong passion, violent desires, and a continued series of different changes had torn it to pieces. There appeared no middle condition; the triumph of a prince, or the misery of a beggar, were his alternate states. I was with him no longer than one day, which was yesterday. In the morning at twelve we were worth four thousand pounds; at three, we were arrived at six thousand; half an hour after, we were reduced to one thousand; at four of the clock, we were down to two hundred; at five, to fifty; at six, to five; at seven, to one guinea; the next bet to nothing. This morning he borrowed half a crown of the maid who cleans his shoes, and is now gaming in Lincoln's Inn Fields among the boys for farthings and oranges, till he has made up three pieces, and then he returns to White's into the best company in town."
Thus ended our first discourse; and it is hoped that you will forgive me that I have picked so little out of my companion at our first interview. In the next it is possible he may tell me more pleasing incidents; for though he is a familiar, he is not an evil, spirit.

III.--PACOLET'S STORY.
From my own Apartment, May 12.
I have taken a resolution hereafter, on any want of intelligence, to carry my Familiar abroad with me, who has promised to give me very proper and just notices of persons and things, to make up the history of the passing day. He is wonderfully skilful in the knowledge of men and manners, which has made me more than ordinarily curious to know how he came to that perfection, and I communicated to him that doubt. "Mr. Pacolet," said I, "I am mightily surprised to see you so good a judge of our nature and circumstances, since you are a mere spirit, and have no knowledge of the bodily part of us." He answered, smiling, "You are mistaken; I have been one of you, and lived a month amongst you, which gives me an exact sense of your condition. You are to know that all who enter into human life have a certain date or stamen given to their being which they only who die of age may be said to have arrived at; but it is ordered sometimes by fate, that such as die infants are, after death, to attend mankind to the end of that stamen of being in themselves which was broken off by sickness or any other disaster. These are proper guardians to men, as being sensible of the infirmity of their State. You are philosopher enough to know that the difference of men's understandings proceeds only from the various dispositions of their organs; so that he who dies at a month old is in the next life as