The Facts Concerning The Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut | Page 4

was handed in. The first superscription I

glanced at was in a handwriting that sent a thrill of pleasure through
and through me. It was Aunt Mary's; and she was the person I loved
and honored most in all the world, outside of my own household. She
had been my boyhood's idol; maturity, which is fatal to so many
enchantments, had not been able to dislodge her from her pedestal; no,
it had only justified her right to be there, and placed her dethronement
permanently among the impossibilities. To show how strong her
influence over me was, I will observe that long after everybody else's
"do-stop-smoking" had ceased to affect me in the slightest degree, Aunt
Mary could still stir my torpid conscience into faint signs of life when
she touched upon the matter. But all things have their limit in this
world. A happy day came at last, when even Aunt Mary's words could
no longer move me. I was not merely glad to see that day arrive; I was
more than glad--I was grateful; for when its sun had set, the one alloy
that was able to mar my enjoyment of my aunt's society was gone. The
remainder of her stay with us that winter was in every way a delight. Of
course she pleaded with me just as earnestly as ever, after that blessed
day, to quit my pernicious habit, but to no purpose whatever; the
moment she opened the subject I at once became calmly, peacefully,
contentedly indifferent--absolutely, adamantinely indifferent.
Consequently the closing weeks of that memorable visit melted away
as pleasantly as a dream, they were so freighted for me with tranquil
satisfaction. I could not have enjoyed my pet vice more if my gentle
tormentor had been a smoker herself, and an advocate of the practice.
Well, the sight of her handwriting reminded me that I way getting very
hungry to see her again. I easily guessed what I should find in her letter.
I opened it. Good! just as I expected; she was coming! Coming this
very day, too, and by the morning train; I might expect her any
moment.
I said to myself, "I am thoroughly happy and content now. If my most
pitiless enemy could appear before me at this moment, I would freely
right any wrong I may have done him."
Straightway the door opened, and a shriveled, shabby dwarf entered.
He was not more than two feet high. He seemed to be about forty years
old. Every feature and every inch of him was a trifle out of shape; and
so, while one could not put his finger upon any particular part and say,
"This is a conspicuous deformity," the spectator perceived that this

little person was a deformity as a whole--a vague, general, evenly
blended, nicely adjusted deformity. There was a fox-like cunning in the
face and the sharp little eyes, and also alertness and malice. And yet,
this vile bit of human rubbish seemed to bear a sort of remote and
ill-defined resemblance to me! It was dully perceptible in the mean
form, the countenance, and even the clothes, gestures, manner, and
attitudes of the creature. He was a farfetched, dim suggestion of a
burlesque upon me, a caricature of me in little. One thing about him
struck me forcibly and most unpleasantly: he was covered all over with
a fuzzy, greenish mold, such as one sometimes sees upon mildewed
bread. The sight of it was nauseating.
He stepped along with a chipper air, and flung himself into a doll's
chair in a very free-and-easy way, without waiting to be asked. He
tossed his hat into the waste-basket. He picked up my old chalk pipe
from the floor, gave the stem a wipe or two on his knee, filled the bowl
from the tobacco-box at his side, and said to me in a tone of pert
command:
"Gimme a match!"
I blushed to the roots of my hair; partly with indignation, but mainly
because it somehow seemed to me that this whole performance was
very like an exaggeration of conduct which I myself had sometimes
been guilty of in my intercourse with familiar friends--but never, never
with strangers, I observed to myself. I wanted to kick the pygmy into
the fire, but some incomprehensible sense of being legally and
legitimately under his authority forced me to obey his order. He applied
the match to the pipe, took a contemplative whiff or two, and remarked,
in an irritatingly familiar way:
"Seems to me it's devilish odd weather for this time of year."
I flushed again, and in anger and humiliation as before; for the
language was hardly an exaggeration of some that I have uttered in my
day, and moreover was delivered in a tone of voice and with an