The Crocodile

The Crocodile
by Gouverneur Morris
1905

The first locality of which I have any recollection was my father's
library a tall, melancholy room devoted to books and illusions. Three
sides were of books, somberly bound, reaching from the floor to within
three feet of the ceiling. Along the shelf, which was erroneously
supposed to protect the tops of the top row of books from the dust with
which our house abounded, were stationed, at precise intervals, busts
done in plaster after the antique and death masks. Beginning on the left
was the fury-haunted face of Orestes; next to him the lachrymose
features of Niobe; following her Medusa, crowned with serpents The
rest were death masks -- Napoleon, Washington, Voltaire, and my
father's father. The prevailing dust, settled thick upon the heads of these
grim images, lent them the venerable illusion of gray hair. The three
walls of books were each pierced by a long, narrow window, for the
room was an extension from the main block of the house, but over two
of these the shutters were opaquely closed in winter and summer. The
third window, however, was allowed to extend whatever beneficence of
light it could to the dismal and musty interior. A person of sharp sight,
sitting at the black oak table in the middle of the room, might, on a fine
day, have seen clearly enough to write on very white paper with very
black ink, or to read out of a large-typed book. Through the fourth wall
a door, nearly always closed, led into the main hall, which, like the
library itself, was a tall and melancholy place of twilight and illusions.
When my poor mother died, in giving me birth, she was laid out in the
library and buried from the hall. Consequently, according to
old-fashioned custom, these apartments were held sacred to her
memory rather than other portions of the house in which she had
enjoyed the more fortunate phases of life and happiness. The room in

which my mother had actually died was never entered by any one save
my father. Its door was double locked, like that of our family vault in
the damp hollow among the sycamores.
The first thing that I remember was that I had had a mother who had
died and been buried. The second, that I had a father with a white face
and black clothes and noiseless feet, whose duty in life was to shut
doors, pull down window shades, and mourn for my mother. The third
was a carved wooden box, situated in the exact center of the oak table
in the library, which contained a scroll of stained paper covered with
curious characters, and a small but miraculously preserved crocodile. I
was never allowed to touch the scroll or the crocodile, but in his lenient
moods, which were few and touched with heartrending melancholy, my
father would set the box open upon a convenient chair and allow me to
peer my heart out at its mysterious contents. The crocodile, my father
sometimes told me, was an Egyptian charm which was supposed to
bring misfortune upon its possessor. "But I let it stay on my table," he
would say, "because in the first place I am without superstition, and in
the second because I am far distant from the longest and wildest reach
of misfortune. When I lost your mother I lost all. Ay! but 't she was
bonny, my boy -- bonny!" It was very sad to hear him run on about the
bonniness of my mother, and old Ann, my quondam nurse, has told me
how at the funeral he stood for a long time by the casket, saying over
and over, "Wasn't she bonny? Wasn't she bonny?" and followed her to
the vault among the sycamores with the same iteration upon his lips.
It was not until I was near eight years old that my father could bear the
sight of me, so much had we been divided by the innocent share which
I had had in my mother's death. But I was not allowed to pass those
eight years in ignorance of the results of my being, or of the constant
mourning to which my father had devoted the balance of his days. I
was brought up, so to speak, on my mother's death and burial. Another
child might have been nurtured thus into a vivid contrast, but I ran
fluidly into the mold sober, and came very near to solidifying. Death
and its ancientry have a horrible fascination for children. And for me,
wherever I turned, there was a plenitude of morbid suggestion. Indeed,
our plantation -- held by the family from the earliest colonization of

Georgia, spread along the low shore by mismanagement and partly by
the nonsuccess of the