"I see through your case," continued the determined doctor, "all that it requires is faith. As I used to ask my patients here, I now ask you, have you faith in me?"

"It requires no exertion of credulity to believe that Doctor Geode is all that is noble and excellent," and then she placed her hands in his. The lover took it respectfully, and evidently at a loss what he ought to do next, mechanically laid his finger upon her pulse as if he expected to find thoughts of love and vows of truth throbbing in the arterial system.

I suppose I laughed, for they both turned towards me.

"Ah, Charles! what, eavesdropping? Well, no matter-let me introduce you to Mrs. Jeremy Geode that is to be. We shall be married tomorrow, and the next day bid adieu to the frontier."

The wedding took place accordingly; and I need scarcely inform the intelligent reader that my friend is now one of the best and happiest of husbands, and is enjoying in the meridian of life the rich harvest of prosperity and honor which crowns a youth of virtue, industry, and self-denial.

I

THE LUNATIC'S SKATE

BY NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS (1806-1867)

HAVE only, in my life, known one lunatic - properly so called. In the days when I carried a satchel on the banks of the Shawsheen (a river whose half-lovely, half-wild scenery is tied like a silver thread about my heart), Larry Wynn and myself were the farthest boarders from school, in a solitary farmhouse on the edge of a lake of some miles square, called by the undignified title of Pomp's Pond. An old negro, who was believed by the boys to have come over with Christopher Columbus, was the only other human being within anything like a neighborhood of the lake (it took its name from him); and the only approaches to its waters, girded in as it was by an almost impenetrable forest, were the path through old Pomp's clearing and that by our own door. Out of school, Larry and I were inseparable. He was a pale, sad-faced boy; and in the first days of our intimacy he had confided a secret to me which, from its uncommon nature, and the excessive caution with which he kept it from every one else, bound me to him with more than the common ties of schoolfellow attachment. We built wigwams together in the woods, had our tomahawks made of the same fashion, united our property in fox-traps, and played Indians with perfect contentment in each other's approbation.

I had found out, soon after my arrival at school, that Larry never slept on a moonlight night. With the first slender horn that dropped its silver and graceful shape behind the hills, his uneasiness commenced; and by the time its full and perfect orb poured a flood of radiance over vale and mountain, he was like one haunted by a pursuing demon. At carly twilight he closed the shutters, stuffing every crevice that could admit a ray; and then lighting as many candles as he could beg or steal from our thrifty landlord, he sat down with his book in moody silence, or paced the room with an uneven step, and a solemn melancholy in his fine countenance, of which, with all my familiarity with him, I was almost afraid. Violent exercise seemed the only relief; and when the candles burnt low after midnight, and the stillness around the lone farmhouse became too absolute to endure, he would throw up the window, and, leaping desperately out into the moonlight, rush up the hill into the depths of the wild forest, and walk on with,

From The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal (London), November, 1834, as No. II of My Hobby Rather Nos. I and II. No. I was published in the October number. That was the first publication of the story in its present form. It was first published in brief outline, however, in Incidents in the Life of a Quiet Man, by Willis, in the October, 1830, number of The American Monthly Magazine (pp. 472-74), edited by Willis. It was republished in Willis's Inklings of Adventure (1836) as No. III of Scenes of Fear.

supernatural excitement till the day dawned. Faint and pale he would then creep into his bed, and, begging me to make his very common and always credited excuse of illness, sleep soundly till I returned from school. I soon became used to his way; ceased to follow him, as I had once or twice endeavored to do, into the forest; and never attempted to break in on the fixed and rapt silence which seemed to transform his lips to marble. And for all this Larry loved me.

Our preparatory studies were completed; and, to our mutual despair, we were destined to different universities. Larry's father was a disciple of the great Channing, and mine a Trinitarian of uncommon zeal; and the two institutions of Yale and Harvard were in the hands of most eminent men of either persuasion, and few are the minds that could resist a four years' ordeal in either. A student was as certain to come forth a Unitarian from one as a Calvinist from the other; and in the New England States these two sects are bitterly hostile. So, to the glittering atmosphere of Channing and Everett went poor Larry, lonely and dispirited; and I was committed to the sincere zealots of Connecticut, some two hundred miles off, to learn Latin and Greek if it pleased Heaven, but the mysteries of "election and free grace" whether or no.

Time crept, ambled, and galloped, by turns, as we were in love or out, moping in term-time or reveling in vacation; and gradually, I know not why, our correspondence had dropped, and the four years had come to their successive deaths, and we had never met. I grieved over it; for in those days I believed with a schoolboy's fatuity,

That two, or one, are almost what they seem;

and I loved Larry Wynn, as I hope I may never love man or woman again with a pain at my heart. I wrote one or two reproachful letters in my senior year, but his answers were overstrained, and too full of protestations by half; and, seeing that absence had done its usual work on him, I gave it up, and wrote an epitaph on a departed friendship. I do not know, by the way, why I am detaining you with all this, for it has nothing to do with my story; but let it pass as an evidence that it is a true one. The climax of things in real life has not the regular procession of incidents in a tragedy. Some two or three years after we had taken "the irrevocable yoke" of upon us (not matrimony, but money-making), a winter occurred of uncommonly fine sleighing - sledging, you call it in England. At such times the American world is all abroad, either for business or pleasure. The roads. are passable at any rate of velocity of which a horse is capable; smooth as montagnes russes, and hard as is good for hoofs; and a hundred miles is diminished to ten in facility of locomotion. The hunter brings down his venison to the cities, the Western trader takes his family a hundred leagues to buy calicoes and tracts, and parties of all kinds scour the country, drinking mulled wine and "flip," and shaking the very nests out of the fir-trees with the ringing of their horses' bells. You would think death and sorrow were buried in the snow with the leaves at the last autumn.

I do not know why I undertook, at this time, a journey to the West; certainly not for scenery, for it was a world of waste, desolate, and dazzling

whiteness, for a thousand unbroken miles. The trees were weighed down with snow, and the houses were thatched and half-buried in it, and the mountains and valleys were like the vast waves of an illimitable sea, congealed with its yeasty foam in the wildest hour of the tempest. The eye lost its powers in gazing on it. The "spirit bird" that spread his refreshing green wings before the pained eyes of Thalaba would have been an inestimable fellow traveler. The worth of the eyesight lay in the purchase of a pair of green goggles.

In the course of a week or two, after skimming over the buried scenery of half a dozen States, each as large as Great Britain (more or less), I found myself in a small town on the border of one of our Western lakes. It was some twenty years since the bears had found it thinly settled enough for their purposes, and now it contained perhaps twenty thousand souls. The oldest inhabitant, born in the town, was a youth in his minority. With the usual precocity of new settlements, it had already most of the peculiarities of an old metropolis. The burnt stumps still stood about among the houses; but there was a fashionable circle, at the head of which were the lawyer's wife and the member of Congress's daughter; and people ate their peas with silver forks, and drank their tea with scandal, and forgave men's many sins, and refused to forgive woman's one, very much as in towns whose history is written in black letter. I dare say there were not more than one or two offenses against the moral and Levitical law, fashionable on this side the water, which had not been committed, with the authentic aggravations, in the town of -: I would mention the name if this were not a true story.

Larry Wynn (now Lawrence Wynn, Esq.) lived here. He had, as they say in the United States, "hung out a shingle" (Londonicé, put up a sign) as attorney-at-law; and to all the twenty thousand innocent inhabitants of the place, he was the oracle and the squire. He was, besides, colonel of militia, church-warden, and canal commissioner; appointments which speak volumes for the prospects of "rising young men" in our flourishing Republic.

Larry was glad to see me very. I was more glad to see him. I have a soft heart, and forgive a wrong generally, if it touches neither my vanity nor my purse. I forgot his neglect, and called him "Larry." By the same token, he did not call me "Phil." (There are very few that love me, patient reader; but those who do thus abbreviate my pleasant name of Philip. I was called after the Indian sachem of that name, whose blood runs in this tawny hand.) Larry looked upon me as a man. I looked on him, with all his dignities and changes, through the sweet vista of memory, as a boy. His mouth had acquired the pinched corners of caution and mistrust common to those who know their fellowmen; but I never saw it unless when speculating as I am now. He was to me the pale-faced and melancholy friend of my boyhood; and I could have slept, as I used to do, with my arm around his neck, and feared to stir lest I should wake him. Had my last earthly hope lain in the palm of my hand, I could have given it to him, had he needed it, but to make him sleep; and yet he thought of me but as a stranger under his roof, and added, in his warmest moments, a "Mr."

to my name! There is but one circumstance in my life that has wounded me more. Memory avaunt!

Why should there be no unchangeableness in the world? why no friendship? or why am I, and you, gentle reader (for, by your continuing to pore over these idle musings, you have a heart too), gifted with this useless and restless organ beating in our bosoms, if its thirst for love is never to be slaked, and its aching self-fulness never to find flow or utterance? I would positively sell my whole stock of affections for three farthings. Will you say "two"?

66

"You are come in good time," said Larry one morning, with a halfsmile, "and shall be groomsman to me. I am going to be married."

66 'Married?"

"Married."

I repeated the word after him, for I was surprised. He had never opened his lips about his unhappy lunacy since my arrival; and I had felt hurt at this apparent unwillingness to renew our ancient confidence, but had felt a repugnance to any forcing of the topic upon him, and could only hope that he had outgrown or overcome it. I argued, immediately on this information of his intended marriage, that it must be so. No man in his senses, I thought, would link an impending madness to the fate of a confiding and lovely woman.

He took me into his sleigh, and we drove to her father's house. She was a flower in the wilderness. Of a delicate form, as all my countrywomen are, and lovely, as quite all certainly are not, large-eyed, soft in her manners and yet less timid than confiding and sisterlike, with a shade of melancholy in her smile, caught, perhaps, with the "trick of sadness" from himself, and a patrician slightness of reserve, or pride, which nature sometimes, in very mockery of high birth, teaches her most secluded child - the bride elect was, as I said before, a flower in the wilderness. She was one of those women we sigh to look upon as they pass by, as if there went a fragment of the wreck of some blessed dream.

The day arrived for the wedding, and the sleigh-bells jingled merrily into the village. The morning was as soft and genial as June, and the light snow on the surface of the lake melted, and lay on the breast of the solid ice beneath, giving it the effect of one white silver mirror stretching to the edge of the horizon. It was exquisitely beautiful; and I was standing at the window in the afternoon, looking off upon the shining expanse, when Larry approached, and laid his hand familiarly on my shoulder.

'What glorious skating we shall have," said I, "if this smooth water freezes tonight!"

I turned the next moment to look at him; for we had not skated together since I went out, at his earnest entreaty, at midnight, to skim the little lake where we had passed our boyhood, and drive away the fever from his brain, under the light of a full moon.

He remembered it, and so did I; and I put my arm behind him, for the color fled from his face, and I thought he would have sunk to the floor. "The moon is full tonight," said he, recovering instantly to a cold selfpossession.