The Spectre In The Cart

The Spectre In The Cart, by
Thomas Nelson Page

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Title: The Spectre In The Cart 1908
Author: Thomas Nelson Page
Release Date: November 16, 2007 [EBook #23515]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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SPECTRE IN THE CART ***

Produced by David Widger

THE SPECTRE IN THE CART
By Thomas Nelson Page
Charles Scribner's Sons New York, 1908

Copyright, 1891, 1904, 1906
I had not seen my friend Stokeman since we were at college together,
and now naturally we fell to talking of old times. I remembered him as
a hard-headed man without a particle of superstition, if such a thing be
possible in a land where we are brought up on superstition, from the
bottle. He was at that time full of life and of enjoyment of whatever it
brought. I found now that his wild and almost reckless spirits had been
tempered by the years which had passed as I should not have believed
possible, and that gravity had taken place of the gaiety for which he
was then noted.
He used to maintain, I remember, that there was no apparition or
supernatural manifestation, or series of circumstances pointing to such
a manifestation, however strongly substantiated they appeared to be,
that could not be explained on purely natural grounds.
During our stay at college a somewhat notable instance of what was by
many supposed to be a supernatural manifestation occurred in a
deserted house on a remote plantation in an adjoining county.
It baffled all investigation, and got into the newspapers, recalling the
Cock Lane ghost, and many more less celebrated apparitions. Parties
were organized to investigate it, but were baffled. Stokeman, on a bet
of a box of cigars, volunteered to go out alone and explode the fraud;
and did so, not only putting the restless spirit to flight, but capturing it
and dragging it into town as the physical and indisputable witness both
of the truth of his theory and of his personal courage. The exploit gave
him immense notoriety in our little world.
I was, therefore, no little surprised to hear him say seriously now that
he had come to understand how people saw apparitions.
"I have seen them myself," he added, gravely.
"You do not mean it!" I sat bolt upright in my chair in my astonishment.
I had myself, largely through his influence, become a sceptic in matters
relating to the supernatural.

"Yes, I have seen ghosts. They not only have appeared to me, but were
as real to my ocular vision as any other external physical object which I
saw with my eyes.
"Of course, it was an hallucination. Tell me; I can explain it."
"I explained it myself," he said, dryly. "But it left me with a little less
conceit and a little more sympathy with the hallucinations of others not
so gifted."
It was a fair hit.
"In the year--," he went on, after a brief period of reflection, "I was the
State's Attorney for my native county, to which office I had been
elected a few years after I left college, and the year we emancipated
ourselves from carpet-bag rule, and I so remained until I was appointed
to the bench. I had a personal acquaintance, pleasant or otherwise, with
every man in the county. The district was a close one, and I could
almost have given the census of the population. I knew every man who
was for me and almost every one who was against me. There were few
neutrals. In those times much hung on the elections. There was no
borderland. Men were either warmly for you or hotly against you.
"We thought we were getting into smooth water, where the sailing was
clear, when the storm suddenly appeared about to rise again. In the
canvass of that year the election was closer than ever and the contest
hotter.
"Among those who went over when the lines were thus sharply drawn
was an old darky named Joel Turnell, who had been a slave of one of
my nearest neighbors, Mr. Eaton, and whom I had known all my life as
an easygoing, palavering old fellow with not much principle, but with
kindly manners and a likable way. He had always claimed to be a
supporter of mine, being one of the two or three negroes in the county
who professed to vote with the whites.
"He had a besetting vice